"Thinness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to airy thinness beat. If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two; Thy soul, the fixt foot, makes no show To move, but doth if the other do. And though it in the centre sit, Yet when the other far doth roam, It leans ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... criminal nonsense about being a soldier—sabers and spurs, and dashing around behind a flag, the wrong flag, too—" She caught her breath in an unusual betrayal of emotion. And now she studied Drew with some deliberation, noting his thinness, itemizing his shabbiness. ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... an eye for the relative appearance of him who was her plaything and her god. It was left for Irene herself to beg him to eat more, to rest in the hot part of the day, to take a tonic, and so forth. But she did not tell him that she was the a cause of his thinness—for one cannot see the havoc oneself is working. A man of eighty-five has no passions, but the Beauty which produces passion works on in the old way, till death closes the eyes which crave the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the wind—and that's negligible in this atmosphere—and the cracks caused by changing temperature. And one other agent—meteorites. They must crash down occasionally on the city, judging from the thinness of the air, and the fact that we've seen four strike ground right here near ...
— Valley of Dreams • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... inspection. Her skin, her white throat, her arms and hands and fingernails, her waist and ankles and her pretty feet, were all absolute perfection. The illusion that veiled her slender arms stood at crisp angles; the silk stockings showed a warm skin tint through their thinness; her lower eyelids had been skillfully darkened, her cheeks delicately rouged, and her lips touched with carmine; her brows had been clipped and trained and pencilled, her lashes brushed with liquid dye, and what fragrant powders and perfumes could add, had been added ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... is like running the gauntlet before Eternity. Till one has seen it, one does not realise the amazing thinness of that little damp trickle of life that steals along undefeated through the jaws of established death. A rifle-shot would cover the widest limits of cultivation, a bow-shot would reach the narrower. Once beyond ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... in the Malay language gunong-api, or more correctly, gunong ber-api. Lava has been seen to flow from a considerable one near Priamang; but I have never heard of its causing any other damage than the burning of woods. This however may be owing to the thinness of population, which does not render it necessary for the inhabitants to settle in a situation that exposes them to danger of this kind. The only volcano I had an opportunity of observing opened in the side of a mountain, about twenty ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... well as to a most studied finish in composition, every part of the ornamentation tenderly harmonizing with the rest. So far as their power over certain tones of religious mind is owing to a palpable degree of non-naturalism in them, I do not praise it—the exaggerated thinness of body and stiffness of attitude are faults; but they are noble faults, and give the statues a strange look of forming part of the very building itself, and sustaining it—not like the Greek caryatid, without effort—nor like the Renaissance caryatid, by painful or impossible effort—but as ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... the fork, the chop was of a thinness to have enabled one to read through it without ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... in outline and give it different qualities of expression by altering the quality and consistency of our outline, and we may obtain very different kinds of decorative effect by the use of lines of various degrees of thickness or thinness; but if we want to give it force and colour, and to distinguish it from its background more emphatically, we ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... last error, the French are seldom guilty, because the thinness of their Plots prevents them from it: but few Englishmen, except BEN. JOHNSON, have ever made a Plot, with variety of Design in it, included in twenty-four hours; which was altogether natural. For ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... and Shelley and Wordsworth and Coleridge, in that truth to observance and experience of nature and the joyous expression of it, which are the dominant characteristics of his art. It is imaginable that the thinness of the social life in the Middle West threw the poet upon the communion with the fields and woods, the days and nights, the changing seasons, in which another great nature poet of ours declares they "speak in various language." ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... beautiful Madam Whitworth was much worse than I had thought that it would be, though also it was of a very interesting excitement. She had made armaments for the encounter in the shape of a very lovely tea apparel of an increditable thinness to be used for covering, a little low fire in the golden grate, and curtains of rose to throw somewhat of glow over the situation. Immediately I was seated beside her on a small divan upon which there was room for only one and a half persons, ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... longer warm. The darkness, too, made Gertrude restless and they searched the storage closets vainly for candles. When they sat down again they could hear the panting of the engine. The exhaust had the thinness of extreme cold. They were winding on heavy grades among the Buttes of the Castle Creek country, and when the engineer whistled for Castle station the big chime of the engine had shrunk to a baby's treble; it was growing ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... sprung up. The disorder of her fair hair, her white cheeks, and the ghostly thinness of her small, black-robed form drew the curious eyes of Sir Richard. And the oddness of her manner as she greeted them only confirmed the old man's ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... listen here, as M. Bruneau has observed, to "a magic orchestra"—an orchestra of indescribable richness, delicacy, and suppleness—an orchestra that melts and shimmers with opalescent hues—an orchestra that has substance without density, sonority without blatancy, refinement without thinness. ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... bandied. Now I think on it, 'twere possible his legs were cushioned thus to hide a senile thinness! 'Tis human nature when badgered by excess of limit to flounder into limitless excess. Look upon the Burgomaster at thy feet with a surfeit of good round legs, he is unfortunate for being in excess, he cannot whittle down. 'Tis a queer being with whom he dances,—here ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... to form. It looked heavy, and yet it was nearly without weight. Not a twig was bent down under its load, yet with its halo of frost it measured fully two inches across. The crystals were large, formed like spearheads, flat, slablike, yet of infinite thinness and delicacy, so thin and light that, when by misadventure my whip touched the boughs, the flakes seemed to float down rather than to fall. And every one of these flat and angular slabs was fringed with hairlike needles, or with featherlike ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... was of middle age and of very ordinary appearance; so ordinary, in fact, that he was difficult to describe—his only peculiarity being his extreme thinness. Pleasant—that is, good—vibrations issued from his atmosphere and met Dr. Silence as he advanced to greet him, yet vibrations alive with currents and discharges betraying the perturbed and disordered condition of his mind and brain. There was evidently something wholly out of ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... brain had absorbed the lips to such thinness that the depressions between the teeth were clearly revealed. From the first dose to the last breath this was a case of dying, and the most persistent fight for life against immense odds I have ever become aware of in an acute case. In this case the stomach had become so seared ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... one, that's flat," muttered the widow; and she drew out the old one and began to fold it up. But though she had made much of its thinness and insufficiency to the Baroness, she was so powerfully affected at parting with it, that all its good qualities came strongly to ...
— Old-Fashioned Fairy Tales • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... shining like the raven's wing, her delicate mouth, the whole effect of this beautiful face on the mind of those who beheld her was that of a deep melancholy and sweetness, impressing itself once and for ever. Tall and slender, but without the excessive thinness of some young girls, her movements had that careless supple grace that recall the waving of a flower stalk in the breeze. But in spite of all these smiling and innocent graces one could yet discern in Robert's heiress a will firm and resolute to brave every obstacle, ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... occupied by the insulation is, in this sense, waste space. An ideally perfect winding may be conceived as one in which the space is all occupied by wire; and this would necessarily involve the conception of wire of square cross-section and insulation of infinite thinness. In such a winding there would be no waste of space and a maximum amount of metal employed as a conductor. Of course, such a condition is not possible to attain and in practice some insulating material must be introduced between the ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... golden light streamed in through the narrow opening above my head, and, striking on the opposite wall, gleamed there for a few minutes in radiant and dazzling beauty, passing obliquely upward the while until it grew narrower and more narrow, dwindled down to the thinness of a thread, and finally vanished. I had witnessed the last gleam of earthly sunlight I was ever ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... nose, too, was elongated and thin, and a long drooping moustache concealed his mouth. On the whole his appearance was redeemed from the grotesque by an extraordinary pair of black eyes, which were round and large as those of a Persian cat. Despite the man's exceeding thinness, he conveyed a certain suggestion of strength. At that moment he had a handkerchief between his fingers, and Gurdon could see that his wrists were supple and pliable as if they had been made of india rubber. Gurdon had heard ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... employed about the Army, made it a Maxim, That good Wigs, delicate Linen, and a chearful Air, were to a poor Dependent the same that working Tools are to a poor Artificer. It was no small Entertainment to me, who knew his Circumstances, to see him, who had fasted two Days, attribute the Thinness they told him of to the Violence of some Gallantries he had lately been guilty of. The skilful Dissembler carried this on with the utmost Address; and if any suspected his Affairs were narrow, it was attributed to indulging himself in some fashionable ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... clumps like an otter, his head crouched down and his long bow pointed before him as though it were a spear. Half a minute more, and he was before them—a very strange man to see. His years were not so many, thirty perhaps, and yet his face looked quite old because of its lack of colouring, its thinness, and the hard lines that marked where the muscles ran down to the tight, straight mouth and up to the big forehead, over which hung hair so light that at a little distance he seemed ashen-grey. Only in this cold, rocky face, ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... corresponding vibrance and sonority, while tones produced in the adjustment of the head register are apt to be too thin. The middle register, however, produces in the alto voice a tone that is rich without being too heavy, so that it avoids undue heaviness on the one hand and on the other a thinness that is in no way comparable with the light tones of soprano, but simply a thin and unsatisfactory alto. Alto tone in the middle register therefore gives the standard tone-quality for alto voice; and when singing in chest or head register, an alto should endeavor to relieve the chest ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... of my coffee now!" said Mr. Prohack, surrendering his cup. "Is it thin, or isn't it? I pride myself on living the higher life; my stomach is not my inexorable deity; but even on the mountain top which I inhabit there must be a limit to the thinness ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... his eyes he showed no emotion. John noticed that his features were cast in the antique mold. The pallor and thinness of his face accentuated his powerful features, and once more John was reminded of the portraits of the young Napoleon. Could there be such a thing as reincarnation? But he remembered that while a new mind like Napoleon's might be possible a new career ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... certain plumpness, in other words, a superabundance of the vegetative function, plasticity.... Hence excessive thinness strikingly repels us.... The last consideration that influences us is a beautiful face. Here, too, the bone parts are taken into account before everything else. So that almost everything depends on a beautiful nose, while a short retrousse one will mar all. A slight upward ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... of the air cells are of extreme thinness, consisting of delicate elastic and connective tissue, and lined inside by a single layer of thin epithelial cells. In the connective tissue run capillary vessels belonging to the pulmonary artery and veins. ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... slight description. They have no compasses, but the means by which they discover the cardinal points is curious. If an Indian happens to become confused with regard to this, he lays down his burden, and, taking his axe, cuts through the bark of a tree; from the thickness or thinness of which he can tell the north point at once, the bark ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... by the abnormal length, thinness and disjointedness of their limbs, and by the long, well-chiselled faces, with handsome aquiline noses, broad and high foreheads, well-defined eyebrows in a straight line across the brow, piercing eyes well protected by the brow and drooping at the outer corners, ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... to the sun. The passing years had drawn some crows'-feet round the eyes, but his step was firm, his back straight, and he walked his ancestral acres every inch the master. The defect of his features was the thinness of the lips, and a want of character in a nose which did not accord with a good forehead. His hands, too, were very large and puffy; his finger-nails (scrupulously clean) were correspondingly large, and cut to a sharp point, that seemed to project beyond ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... irrepressible Sam, "unless it is that it is in my blood; for one of the last things I heard my mother say, ere I left home, was that, to judge by the thinness of the milk furnished by the farmer who supplied us, he much reminded her of Pharaoh's daughter, as he took a profit out ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... care we had taken to prevent the galleon from passing us unobserved, we had not been inattentive to the means of engaging her to advantage, when we came up with her: For, considering the thinness of our hands, and the vaunting accounts given by the Spaniards of her size, her guns, and her strength, this was a consideration not to be neglected. As we supposed that none of our ships but the Centurion and the Gloucester were capable of lying alongside of her, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... was also quartered a carrier whose bed was placed a little beyond our Don Quixote's, and, though only made of the pack-saddles and cloths of his mules, had much the advantage of it, as Don Quixote's consisted simply of four rough boards on two not very even trestles, a mattress, that for thinness might have passed for a quilt, full of pellets which, were they not seen through the rents to be wool, would to the touch have seemed pebbles in hardness, two sheets made of buckler leather, and a coverlet the threads of which anyone that chose ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... he was able to conquer the temptation to imitate, yet we cannot forego a regret that he did not turn to Violet Scully that was and look into the married life of the Marchioness of Kilcamey—her grey intense eyes shining through a grey veil, and her delightful thinness—her epicene bosom and long thighs are the outward signs of a temper, constant perhaps, but not narrow. He would have been able to discover an intrigue of an engaging kind in her, and the thinking out of the predestined male would have been as agreeable a task as falls to the lot of a man ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... thought of her rendezvous with him that lighted her eyes when she talked to Murray. But Murray did not know. So he swayed up on his toes and glanced in the glass and was glad of his thinness ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... was well that, having made the round of the garden, they came suddenly upon Mr. Hale, whose whereabouts had been quite forgotten by them. He had not yet finished the pear, which he had delicately peeled in one long strip of silver-paper thinness, and which he was enjoying in a deliberate manner. It was like the story of the eastern king, who dipped his head into a basin of water, at the magician's command, and ere he instantly took it out went through the experience of a lifetime. I Margaret felt stunned, and unable to recover ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... to be presenting it with the freedom of the city. For up to this time she has seemed like a stranger at Rome, and has not put herself in the way of our conversation; and that, too, chiefly because of a certain highly polished thinness of things and words. For I am aware that there are some men who are able to philosophise in any language, but who still employ no divisions and no definitions; and who say themselves that they approve of those things alone to which nature silently assents. Therefore, they discuss, ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... latter species can be readily known, by the close proximity in the scuta of the occludent margin, and the ridge extending from the umbo to the apex; by its carina being very narrow above the fork; by the prongs of the fork diverging at an angle of from 135 deg. to 180 deg.; by the thinness of its valves; by the coarseness of the furrows on them; and lastly, by there being at most in L. pectinata only one filamentary appendage ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... found to nurse the child it must die a much worse death than that to which he had put it. As a similar circumstance occurred a short time after, we have every reason to suppose the custom always prevails among them; and this may in some degree account for the thinness of population which has been observed among the ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... boa-constrictors, shuddering all the while because the barriers between them are so weak. Although the little old man's back was bent like a day-laborer's, it was easy to see that he must formerly have been of medium height. His excessive thinness, the slenderness of his limbs, proved that he had always been of slight build. He wore black silk breeches which hung about his fleshless thighs in folds, like a lowered veil. An anatomist would instinctively have recognized the ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... her wiles, for after my experiences at Grenoble she would have found it a hard task to arouse my desires if she had been as pretty as she was ugly. Her thinness and her tawny skin could not divert my attention from other still less pleasing features about her. I admired her confidence in spite of her disadvantages. She must have credited me with a diabolic appetite, but these women ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... or they could not be steered between the rocks of the swirling cataracts. They are pointed at both ends like a gondola, but it is not the narrowness and length that strike terror into the heart of a stranger, but rather the thinness of the wood of which they are built. The boat is made of the planks of well-grown trees, which planks, though over a foot wide, are sawn down to three-quarters of an inch thick, so that in the strongest part only three-quarters of an inch divides passengers and crew from the water, that water ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... as music, and the workmanship is skilful. If one can get over the thinness of the part-writing, especially in the slow movements, there is much to enjoy in them. The style of movement—Tempo di Menuetto—in No. 2 recalls Emanuel ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... move downwards, they project into distinct vesicles or cavities, smaller and more numerous behind, fewer in number and larger in front; and each of them not a simple cavity, but more or less convoluted, while the long walls of those cells are of gossamer thinness, and as porous as gauze. They even communicate, and are lined, and externally wrapped together, by the same membrane; the whole assuming a pear-like form, attached by its base or greater extremity, ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... Von Rosen. He had not the least idea of the thinness of the ice. Annie trembled. Her truthfulness was as her life. She hated even evasions. Luckily Von Rosen was so far from suspicion that he did not ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... cedar-bush, higher than a couple of feet at most. Against such blasts the solid wall was necessary, while the many intersecting partitions inside gave additional strength. It was a very solid structure as against winds, notwithstanding the comparative thinness of the walls,—0.63 m.—2 ft.—being their greatest width, and 0.33 ...
— Historical Introduction to Studies Among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico; Report on the Ruins of the Pueblo of Pecos • Adolphus Bandelier
... eternal image of the woman and the child; and in that instant everything within him was changed and renewed. His eyes were still absorbing her, finding again the familiar curves of her light body, noting the thinness of the lifted arm that upheld the little boy, the droop of the shoulder he weighed on, the brooding way in which her cheek leaned to his even while she looked away; then she drew back, the door closed, and the ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... that the shameful fact of Kalora's thinness was being whispered among the young men of Morovenia. When the daughters were out for their daily carriage-ride both wore flowing robes. In the case of Kalora, this augmented costume was intended to conceal ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... that our literature as a whole sadly needs this richness of local atmosphere. A nation of restless immigrants, here today and "moved on" tomorrow, has the fibres of its imagination uprooted, and its artists in their eager quest of "local color" purchase brilliancy at the cost of thinness of tone, poverty of association. Philadelphia and Boston, almost alone among the larger American cities, yield the sense of intimacy, or what the Autocrat would call "the ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... hot valley of San Joaquin, beyond the Sierra Madre range. The best Malaga raisins, which have the reputation of being the best in the world, may never come to our market, but I have never eaten a better raisin for size, flavor, and thinness of skin than those raised in the El Cajon Valley, which is watered by the great flume which taps a reservoir in the Cuyamaca Mountains, and supplies San Diego. But the quality of the raisin in California will be improved by ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... is thinner in those regions that are most constantly used in the mental habits of the individual. The illumination of the skulls of these two youths (here Professor Windsor inserted a lighted taper in each) discloses a nearly uniform thinness of the entire skull, showing that they exercised all the faculties of the mind. The skull of this old warrior, however, presents a different appearance under the same test. You will notice that the illumination is confined to that portion ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... friend, lifted him in his powerful arms and carried him upstairs. The exertion made him breathe a little heavily for a moment, but that was all. Leaver was not a light burden, in spite of his thinness, for his frame was that of a man who should carry many pounds more ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... mentioned the opal. The opal probably owes its peculiar beauty to the very fact that it is filled with minute cracks or cavities, each of which contributes some tint of color by reason of its extreme thinness, just as the colors of the soap bubble are due to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various
... was once struck with the largeness of a pumpkin and the thinness of the stem upon which it grew. "What could the Almighty have been thinking about?" he cried. "He has certainly chosen a bad place for a pumpkin to grow. Eh zounds! Now I would have hung it on one of these oaks. That would have been just as it should be. Like fruit, ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... still burning, else the smoke would not have caught the eye of the Indian youth; but it must have been smoldering for hours, judging from the thinness of the vapor, and the fact that little more than a pile of ashes and decaying embers ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... seem that the clerks were not wrong when they prophesied the death of their employer at no distant day. Since the flight of Cecily, the notary was hardly to be recognized. Although his visage was of a frightful thinness, and of a cadaverous hue, a hectic flush colored his hollow cheeks; a nervous shivering, except when interrupted by convulsive spasms, agitated his frame continually; his bony hands were dry and burning; his large green spectacles concealed ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... affected a charming frankness and abruptness in his speech, but who was in reality the most specious flatterer of the entire party. Mr. Jenks rejoiced in the following personal advantages: red hair, a blue nose, goggle eyes, and jaws of transparent thinness. ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... better to make an alloy with eight or nine parts of silver to one of gold, and attack it with acid without previous flattening, rather than accept the risk and labour of beating out a less easily attacked alloy to the necessary thinness with a hammer. It is only after a sense of security in gold parting has been acquired, that the attack of an ore can be profitably accomplished, and even then simple and easy ores should be first taken, passing on to others more difficult, either ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... Belgium—I bought an old mediaeval painting of a Madonna. That Madonna had a stiffness, a deadly pallor, a thinness of face incompatible with strict beauty. But on the thin lips there was a smile for which no word is lovely enough; and in the eyes was a pure and far-seeing look, hardly to be imagined except by one who painted (like Fra Angelico) upon his knees. The background ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... irritation in his complicated artistic soul and a sort of disinterested disappointment. She was so happy that it was almost stupid—a disproof of the extraordinary intelligence he had formerly found in her. Didn't she know how bad St. George could be, hadn't she recognised the awful thinness—? If she didn't she was nothing, and if she did why such an insolence of serenity? This question expired as our young man's eyes settled at last on the genius who had advised him in a great crisis. St. George was still before the chimney-piece, but now he ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... her raised lids sat the heaviness of mourning; she seemed to strain her sight to something very far off, something which withdrew itself from her desire, upon which her soul called and called in vain. Her cheeks showed their thinness, her brow foretold the lines which would mark it when she grew old. It was a sob in her throat which called her back to consciousness, a sob which her lips, well-trained warders, would ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... of dropping an uninvited head on a boy's shoulder. Now, though she was still impetuous, still unconscious of self, she was glowing with womanhood, and ready to be loved. She was not beautiful, except in so far as she was young, for youth is always beautiful; she was tall, of a sweet and delicate thinness, and with the faint coloring of a blush-rose; her dimple was exquisite; her brows were straight and fine, shading eyes wonderfully star-like, but often stormy—eyes of clear, dark amber, which, now that David had come home, ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... to be thirty. The charm of her transparent face and large bright brown eyes was, not that they were passively resigned, but that they were actively and thoroughly cheerful. Even her busy hands, which of their own thinness alone might have besought compassion, plied their task with a gay courage that made mere compassion an unjustifiable assumption of superiority, and ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... covered with a white cloth, and a china bowl set thereon with a silver spoon beside it; a delicate goblet and china pitcher also, both carefully covered with a napkin. Did Mrs. Roberts know how homely Sallie gloried in the thinness of that china and the fineness of that napkin? How does it happen that some of the very poor seem born with such aesthetic tastes? Mrs. Roberts had intuitions, and was given to certain acts, concerning which she could not give to others satisfactory explanations. Therefore, she ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... grouse, quail, or pigeons, contributed by the sportsmen. The artists mostly dined a la fourchette, in their workshop,—something in a pail being carried out to them at noon by our Infant Phenomenon. He was a skeleton of thinness, and an incredibly gaunt mustang was the one which invariably carried the lunch; so we used to call the boy, when we saw him coming, "Death on the Pail-Horse." At evening, when the artists returned, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... had exaggerated the change absurdly. Nevertheless, that a change had taken place was palpable. The arresting radiance, the vivid physical perfection of her, had gone. She was thin, and with the thinness had come lines—lines of fatigue, and other, more lasting lines born of endurance and self-control. The pliant symmetry of her figure, too, was marred. She stooped a little; the gay, free carriage of her shoulders was gone. The heavy manual work at the sisterhood, of which, in common with the ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... personage. He held his head so bent upon his breast, that nothing was to be seen of his face thus thrown into shadow, except the tip of his nose, upon which fell a ray of light, and which must have been long. From the thinness of his wrinkled hand, one divined that he was an old man. It was Louis XI. At some distance behind them, two men dressed in garments of Flemish style were conversing, who were not sufficiently lost in the shadow to prevent any one who had been present ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... still on his arm, until the last sound died away. And while she thus held him, Mallalieu, who had often observed Miss Pett in her peregrinations through the Market Place, and had been accustomed to speaking of her as a thread-paper, or as Mother Skin-and-Bones, because of her phenomenal thinness, wondered how it was that a woman of such extraordinary attenuation should possess such powerful fingers—her grip on his wrist was like that of a vice. And somehow, in a fashion for which he could not account, especially in the disturbed and anxious ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... have at hand a large coarse pen of little flexibility and smooth point for drawing heavy lines of even width. In using water-color in place of ink such a pen will be found more satisfactory than the Gillot 303, as the thinness of the fluid causes the line to spread whenever pressure is applied to a limber and finely pointed pen, with the result that the line is not only broadened, but when dry shows darker than was intended, as more ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown
... said: "My son, I feared that I should never see you again." Then she noticed the thinness of his clothing and its dampness. "Why, you are cold and wet," ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... for thinness of skins in different animals, human, or brute [he once said]. Mine, I believe to be more tender than many infants of a month old. Indeed I have remarked in myself, from my earliest recollection, a delicacy or effeminacy of complexion, which but for a spice of the devil in my temper would ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... yellow robe, of a hue almost identical with that of his smooth, hairless countenance. His hands were large, long and bony, and he held them knuckles upward, and rested his pointed chin upon their thinness. He had a great, high brow, crowned with sparse, ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... question on account of coarseness, the deepest waves of the record being less than one-thousandth of an inch in depth, and many of them probably ten to one hundred times as shallow. Edison finally decided to apply a preliminary metallic coating of infinitesimal thinness, and accomplished this object by a remarkable process known as the vacuous deposit. With this he applied to the original record a film of gold probably no thicker than one three-hundred-thousandth of an inch, or several hundred times less than the depth of an average wave. Three hundred ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... have done either, and we have bought experience and paid for it. Never mind! experience is nearly always worth its price. And I have nearly lost my cough, and Robert is dosing me indefatigably with cod's liver oil to do away with my thinness.... ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... very kind," she said, with a penetrating glance at Susan. What a pretty girl Susan must have been, so soft and pale and appealing, a little human wood-anemone! She would be very pretty again when she had got over the scared look and the thinness which was almost emaciation. And how well that print suited her! Lady O'Gara had sent down a bundle of things to the South lodge, so that Susan might not appear as a scarecrow to the people. The print had pale green leaves sprinkled over a white surface. It suggested a snowdrop, ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... or more strictly speaking, his brow, which he plunged into my waistcoat. He was clad in a long black overcoat, and a boy's knee-pants, and under the peak of his cap twinkled the merriest black eyes that ever lighted up a smiling face of olive hue. Thereafter, he was more and more, with the thinness of his small black legs, and his habit of hopping up and down, and dancing threateningly about, with mischief latent in every motion, like a crow which in being tamed has acquired one of the worst traits of civilization. ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... like a gentleman—but Danglar's face was not appealing. The little round black eyes were shifty, they seemed to possess no pupils whatever, and they roved constantly; there was a hard, unyielding thinness about the lips, and the face itself was thin, almost gaunt, as though the skin had had to accommodate itself to more than was expected of it, and was ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... sacred Mandakini and shaking the deodar leaves." These left me pining to taste the beauties of the whole. When, later, a Pandit explained to me that in the next two lines the breeze went on "splitting the feathers of the peacock plume on the head of the eager deer-hunter," the thinness of this last conceit disappointed me. I was much better off when I had relied only upon my imagination to complete ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... officers who have had experience, and within the last ten years of the nineteenth century, of the difficulty, and sometimes of the impossibility, of getting sufficient supplies for a large number of ships in rather out-of-the-way places. In 1588 the comparative thinness of population and insufficiency of communications and means of transport must have constituted obstacles, far greater than any encountered in our own day, to the collection of supplies locally and to their timely importation ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... moments of waiting the Overlanders were gratified to see the cabin door open and a woman step out, shading her eyes with a hand. She was tall, thin and angular, the thinness of her face accentuated by a pair of big horn-rimmed spectacles through which she ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders in the Great North Woods • Jessie Graham Flower
... the ground, much less bear the external atmospheric pressure when the internal air was removed. Lana himself noticed this objection, but he thought that the spherical form of the copper shell would, notwithstanding its extreme thinness, enable it, after the exhaustion was effected, to sustain the enormous pressure, which, acting equally on every point of the surface, would tend to consolidate rather than to break the metal. His proposal to exhaust the air from the globes by attaching to ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... mournful silence, and regarded his son, who now approached, leaning on one of the courtiers. When he looked at the girl, he recoiled with disgust; for she was so gaunt and tall that the clothes of Desiree scarcely covered her knees, and her extreme thinness, her red, hooked nose, her black and ill-shaped teeth, made her as ugly as Desiree was beautiful. Prince Warrior, who for months had thought of nothing but his lovely bride, stood petrified. "King," said he to his father, "I am betrayed! this is not the lady whose portrait was sent ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... very foolish plan, also, to starve one's self, or "bant," for a graceful thinness; women only grow wrinkled, show crow's-feet under the eyes, and look less young than those ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... accuse Miss Cassandra of flirtatious intent, and yet at her glance and words Archie blushed a beautiful scarlet. I tried not to look at him, as I knew that he was inwardly swearing at the thinness of his skin, or whatever it is that makes people blush. I couldn't see Lydia without turning around and staring at her; but Walter, who enjoyed the whole scene from his coign of vantage beside Francois, told me afterwards that "Lydia never turned a hair, and so you see, ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... microscope, the true nature and mode of formation of chalk can be determined with the greatest ease. In the case of the harder varieties, the examination can be conducted by means of slices ground down to a thinness sufficient to render them transparent; but in the softer kinds the rock must be disintegrated under water, and the debris examined microscopically. When investigated by either of these methods, chalk is found to be a genuine organic rock, being composed of the shells or hard parts of ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... of Rome, and the thinness of its population, left many of the streets utterly deserted. The principal nobles were thus enabled to possess themselves of a wide range of buildings, which they fortified, partly against each other, partly against the people; their numerous relatives and clients ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... a portion of the metal beaten out to so great a degree of thinness, as to allow a greenish-blue light to be transmitted through its pores. About 400 square inches of this are sold, in the form of a small book containing 25 leaves of gold, for 1s. 6d. In this case, the raw material, or gold, is worth rather less than two-thirds of the manufactured article. ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... flow, aside from actual local disease, is brought about by excessive muscular exercise during menstruation; by the use of all stimulants, whether alcoholic beverages or quinin; as well as by the thinness of ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... is of such a nature as to induce over-abundance of fat, the child will be born too fat. This does not mean a healthy child by any means, and it may mean considerable extra pain for the mother. A mother inclined to thinness need not fear that this diet will reduce her. The taking of cream, eggs, bacon and other fat foods often has the opposite effect from that desired. A thin person adopting the above light diet will generally get ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... on her portfolio with the same gold pencil presumably the same thoughts. If her softly drooping curls were faded and cast lighter shadows over thinner cheeks, one could more easily attribute the dimness and thinness to the lack of one's own memory than to change ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... fair and high-coloured, he was a person on whom the traces of illness were particularly visible. The colour was totally gone, even from his lips; his cheeks were sunken, his brow looked broader and more massive from the thinness of his face and the loss of his hair, and his eyes themselves appeared unlike what they used to be in the hollows round them. He seemed tranquil, and comfortable, but so wan, weak, and subdued, and so different from himself, ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... there's an end of it. There is something exceedingly winning, to us, in that sturdy sense, that thirst for mathematical precision, that impatience of theory, that positive and self-reliant—we don't mind saying, somewhat dogmatical—air, that sternness of feature, thinness of lip, and coldness of eye, which belong to the best examples. We respect even the humbler ones; for they at least hate sentiment, they do not comprehend or approve of humor, and they never relish wit. What does a taste for these qualities indicate, but an idle and frivolous mind, devoted ...
— Punchinello Vol. 1, No. 21, August 20, 1870 • Various
... the thinness," as he put it) she caught a heavy cold, he took the matter in dispute wholly out of ...
— If You Touch Them They Vanish • Gouverneur Morris
... Venus flashed into the thin atmosphere from the void of space and the three cadets imagined that they could hear the shriek of the ship as it cut through the thin air. Tom figured his speed rapidly, and counting on the thinness of the atmosphere, he estimated that it would take eleven seconds for the ship to crash. He ...
— Stand by for Mars! • Carey Rockwell
... climbing moorland road the next morning and paid a long visit to his patient. He was not portentous in manner and he did not confine his conversation to the subject of symptoms. He however included something of subtle cross examination in his friendly talk. The girl's thinness, her sometimes panting breath and the hollow eyes made larger by the black ring of her lashes startled him on first sight of her. He found that the smallness of her appetite presented to Dowie a ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... stairways, galleries, and arches falling to the precipices below: all this in miniature; built up in a tiny space; all this encompassed with formidable ramparts, and hooked on to the flanks of gigantic Sinai! From the sharpness and thinness of the air, we know that we are at an excessive height, and yet we seem to be at the bottom of a well. On every side the extreme peaks of Sinai enclose us, as they mount and scale the sky; their titanic walls, all of blood-red granite without stain or shadow, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... or they may be in the loose folds in the neighborhood of the frenum, the retention of the virus seemingly being assisted by the topographical condition and relation of the parts, and its absorption facilitated by the thinness of the mucous membrane, as well as by the active circulation and moisture and heat of the parts. It must be evident that but for these favoring conditions the inoculation or infection would and could not be either as sure or as frequent. Any protecting ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... hope, ours is pinned to the possible effect of a continuance of easterly wind. Again the call is for patience and again patience. Here at least we seem to enjoy full security. The ice is so thin that it could not hurt by pressure—there are no bergs within reasonable distance—indeed the thinness of the ice is one of the most tantalising conditions. In spite of the unpropitious prospect everyone on board is cheerful and one ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... was something rather pleasant in the thought after all, if Alix didn't mind his ugliness and thinness. Cherry thought about it all day. She had had no thought of money a year or two ago; but she was more experienced now. And Peter ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... scarcely two inches apart, and about half as deep, and held perhaps half a million extremely small books. Each comprised many hundreds of pages, made of a perfectly opaque, bluish-white material of such incredible thinness that ordinary India-paper resembled ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... to talk of big game while she waited for him. Flushed, excited, he stood there on the white bearskin rug midway between the bed and the wood-fire, while she felt his charm stealing like a drug over her senses. Though she had begun to realize the thinness of his mental qualities, she was still as completely in the power of his physical charm as she had been on the day of her wedding. In the flickering light of the fire he appeared to diffuse the glamour of romance, of adventure; and she felt that this single day in New York had left ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... could detect that nature had marked him for recognition: there showed beneath his mustache three of the broad front middle teeth whereof two are the common portion. For the remainder, a slight beard veiled the character of his chin and jaw and a little disguised the thinness of his throat. Above a large forehead his dark hair rose on end in a bristling bank, like that of most Italian men at the time. He looked solitary, unsociable, critical, but not altogether ungentle. His forehead was full ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... to during the march hither on the 18th ultimo, is still visible. Considerable as is the cultivation, it bears a very small proportion to the great extent of waste, and probably untillable land, untillable from the extreme thinness of the soil and its superabundant stones. Cratoegus occurred near Mahmoud's tomb, also ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... of mid- summer —with that charm of Italian vegetation that comes to us as its confession of having scenically served, to weariness at last, for some pastoral these many centuries a classic. In a certain cheapness and thinness of substance—as compared with the English stoutness, never left athirst—it reminds me of our own, and it is relatively dry enough and pale enough to explain the contempt of many unimaginative Britons. ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... lead, Pl. II. Fig. 13. and 15. or capsules of glass, porcellain, or stone ware, Pl. II. A, Fig. 1. and 2. Pl. III. Fig. 3 and 4. The best utensils for this purpose are made of the bottoms of glass retorts and matrasses, as their equal thinness renders them more fit than any other kind of glass vessel for bearing a brisk fire and sudden alterations of heat and ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... tree are here in jars numbered to correspond with the trees from which they were gathered and may be compared for variation in size, shape, thinness of shell and flavor. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Fourth Annual Meeting - Washington D.C. November 18 and 19, 1913 • Various
... hand somewhere into the loose folds of his Oriental garment and brought out a roll of thin vellum like onion-skin, painted in Chinese characters. It was of immense length, but on account of the thinness of the vellum, the roll wound on a tiny cylinder of wood was not ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... that she was about thirty years of age, and that she wished to be married. She was a little dilapidated—like a house—with having been so long to let; yet had, as I have said, an appearance of good looks. Her thinness seemed to be the effect of some wasting fire within her, which found a vent ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... mention the principal character, Ivanhoe himself, played by Mr. BEN DAVIES, who would be quite an ideal Ivanhoe if he were not such a very real Ivanhoe—only, of course, we must not forget that he "doubles" the part. There is no thinness about "Ben Mio," whether considered as a man, or as a good all-round tenor. I did not envy Ivanhoe's marvellous power of sleep while Miss MACINTYRE was singing her best, her sweetest, and her loudest. For my part ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... above-mentioned type refers with the north-east of France and the Jura Mountains adjoining. In that country, distant above 400 geographical miles, the analogy to the accepted English type, notwithstanding the thinness or occasional absence of the clays, is more perfect than in ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... in the greys of coming rain, yet the thinness of the cloud threw a silvery light on the sea, and an unusual depth of blue ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... her friend, leaning against a pillow as if for support, "if you knew that all my suffering for the last few years had been for you, that this change, and pallor, and thinness, were all occasioned by the fear that the time might never come when I could tell you that I love you, you would pardon such a hasty declaration of my feelings toward you. You were but a child when first we ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... once more towards his host—whose side-face, revealed above the skylight, was now turned towards him—he was struck by the profile, whose clearness of cut was refined by the thinness, incident to ill-health, as well as ennobled about the chin by the beard. Away with suspicion. He was a true off-shoot of a ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... same time he saw the shocking thinness of the little face, made into a wolf's face by hunger; the mingled horror and desperation of the eyes; the big man would not have believed a child's face could express emotions of such magnitude. He was wonder-stricken ...
— The Mascot of Sweet Briar Gulch • Henry Wallace Phillips
... the rich store of technical expressions in the Greek language, for every gradation of the age, and character of masks. See the Onomasticon of Jul. Pollux. In the marble masks, however, we can neither see the thinness of the mass from which the real masks were executed, the more delicate colouring, nor the exquisite mechanism of the fittings. The abundance of excellent workmen possessed by Athens, in everything which ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... see a immense mirror turnin' round and round seemin'ly invitin' folks to look. But as I glanced in, I tell the truth when I say, I wuzn't much bigger round than a match, and the thinness made me look as tall as three ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... and sensual is to appear to mitigate the latter evil with at least a pretence at good humor; to be thin and sensual is to be a devil. This man was evil, not with the grossness of a debauchee but with the thinness of the devotee. And he was an old man, too. Sixty odd years of vicious life, glossed over in the last two decades by an assumption of respectability, had swept over the gray ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... un vieux classique. The edges of the vermilion hat are lightened where it receives the glare of the foot-lights; and the face does not suffer from the red. It is as light, as pretty, as suggestive as may be. The thinness of the hand and wrist is well insisted upon, and the trip of the legs, just before she turns, realises, and in a manner I have not seen elsewhere, the enigma of the ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... her as she was, without bringing together all the extremes of feminine nature? In a word, the Duchess was anything that she wished to be or to seem. Her face was slightly too long. There was a grace in it, and a certain thinness and fineness that recalled the portraits of the Middle Ages. Her skin was white, with a faint rose tint. Everything about her erred, as it were, ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... longer than the other. He says: "It is interesting to notice that those parts of the cortex which, according to the current view, were associated with the defective sense organs were also particularly thin. The cause of this thinness was found to be due, at least in part, to the small size of the nerve cells there present. Not only were the large and medium-sized cells smaller, but the impression made on the observer was that they were also less numerous than ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... feather-bed, had not yet done rising to their normal level where indented by the pressure of her husband's receding footsteps. It reminded her that she had been struck with the change in his aspect; the extremely intellectual look that had always been in his face was wrought to a finer phase by thinness, and a care-worn dignity had been superadded. She returned to Winterborne's side, and during her meditations another tread drew near the door, entered the outer room, and halted at the entrance of the ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... as it had been with Joyce. She had the look of one on the threshold of big happenings. Her pale beauty had a new glow. The thinness of girlhood had given place to a slender womanhood, all ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... her body showed themselves with the effect of headlands and rocky promontories. She had a sallow complexion and a nose that was retrousse, with a prompt outward and upward thrust about the lower half of it, accompanied by a tendency to thinness as it approached its termination, quite out of agreement with the prominent cheek-bones. The whole face had a certain air of tough endurance, of determination, of resolute go-forwardness untempered ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... him to believe in the existence of an open sea. In a second trip he actually saw this sea with its drifting ice, and came back convinced of the impossibility of going further in a sledge on account of the thinness ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... the casket. He drew out first a quantity of paper of extreme thinness and lightness on which, embossed and emblazoned, was the coat of arms of the Hollands—a sheaf of wheat and an unicorn's head—and this was ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... the parish notices and the publication of banns he received with earnest attention. His intensity of interest as he listened to the sermon sometimes flattered the mild vicar, and at other times—when thinness of argument pricked his conscience—alarmed him considerably. But Sypher would not have dared enter into theological disputation. He took the sermon as he took the hymns, in which he joined lustily. Cousin Jane, whom he invariably met with ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... obviously back up their own people through everything, therefore women are blind and do not see anything. They can hardly have known any women. The same women who are ready to defend their men through thick and thin are (in their personal intercourse with the man) almost morbidly lucid about the thinness of his excuses or the thickness of his head. A man's friend likes him but leaves him as he is: his wife loves him and is always trying to turn him into somebody else. Women who are utter mystics in their creed ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... arrival in England, and his brother's clothes, always too large, hung about him loose and ungraceful. His tie was grimy; his shirt frayed; his trousers turned up, but still falling over his heels; his hat, too large for him, came almost to his ears. In the increased pallor and thinness of his face, his dark eyes seemed to have come nearer together. He would have been a ludicrous object but for the intense earnestness of his expression. He came towards them with rapidly blinking eyes. He took no notice of Heneage, but he ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... strained. My fame had become annoying for my enemies, and a little trying, I confess, for my friends. But at that time all this stir and noise amused me vastly. I did nothing to attract attention. My somewhat fantastic tastes, my paleness and thinness, my peculiar way of dressing, my scorn of fashion, my general freedom in all respects, made me a being quite apart from all others. I did ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... through a low door, all three of them having to bow their heads as they entered, and there they saw a gigantic machine at work between whose revolving cylinders depended the long gold ingots which were gradually reduced to the proper thinness ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... represented by seed which has had somewhat better fate, inasmuch as it has sunk some way in, and begun to sprout. The field, like many a one in hilly country, had places where the hard pan of underlying rock had only a thin skin of earth over it. Its very thinness helped quick germination, for the rock was near enough to the surface to get heated by the sun. So, with undesirable rapidity, growth began, and shoots appeared above ground before there was root enough made below to nourish them. There was only one possible end for such ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... was tired and lay stretched on the ground. He looked bloodless and wan, the grizzled beard not able to hide the thinness of his face. The healthful vigor he had found on the prairie had left him, each day's march claiming a dole from his hoarded store of strength. He knew—no one else—that he had never recovered the vitality expended at the time of ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... regretted his unexpected departure had prevented you from speaking before, but that it was at his entire command, only that, after Ducie, all you could hope was, that the extent of the land might make up for the thinness of the game. He was greatly pleased. Adieu! All good angels guard over you. I will write every day to the post-office, Bath. Think of me ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... characteristic entrances about the place—a gate which was never, and could never be, closed, flanked by lamp-standards carrying no lamp. Rust was the only active agent to be seen there at this time of the day and year. The palings along the front were rusted away at their base to the thinness of wires, and the successive coats of paint, with which they were overlaid in bygone days, had been completely undermined by the same insidious canker, which lifted off the paint in flakes, leaving the raw surface of the iron on palings, standards, ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... dreamed he was a very skeleton for thinness—not an unusual vision of fat men—and also a Tyrolean yodler, displaying himself before a huge audience of gigantic human beings, who laughed so loudly that he could not open his lips to frame the familiar words of his song. In the despair of a frantic nightmare, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... was a man whose age Philip could not guess. It might have been forty. Probably it was close to that. He was bareheaded, and his long coarse hair, black as an Indian's, was shot with gray. At first it would have been difficult to name the blood that ran strongest in his veins. His hair, the thinness of his face and body, his eyes, and the tense position in which he had paused, were all Indian. Then, above these things, Philip saw the French. Swiftly it became the dominant part of the man before him, ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... and became aware of a curious change in it, no immediate change indeed, but one, I think, that had come upon him gradually, although I only fully appreciated it now, after our short separation. In addition to the thinness of which I have spoken, his handsome countenance had grown more ethereal; his eyes were full of the shadows of things ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... true of the greatness and smallness of the fingers? Can sight adequately perceive them? and is no difference made by the circumstance that one of the fingers is in the middle and another at the extremity? And in like manner does the touch adequately perceive the qualities of thickness or thinness, of softness or hardness? And so of the other senses; do they give perfect intimations of such matters? Is not their mode of operation on this wise—the sense which is concerned with the quality of hardness is necessarily concerned also with the quality of softness, and only intimates ...
— The Republic • Plato
... 1794 the position was somewhat as follows. The British had secured all the French colonies in the West Indies, excepting Guadeloupe. In Hayti they held nearly all the coast towns, and maintained an intermittent blockade over the others; but their position was precarious owing to the thinness of their garrisons, the untrustworthiness of their mulatto auxiliaries, and the ravages of disease. It seems probable that, with ordinary precautions and some reinforcements, the garrisons might have held out in the towns then occupied, provided ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose |
