"Brittle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which iron is used—cast iron, wrought iron, and steel. Cast iron is crystalline and brittle. The product as it comes from the blast furnace is called pig-iron. In making such commodities as stoves, and articles that do not require great strength, the pig-iron is again melted and cast into moulds which give them the required shape. Cast iron ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... footsteps had died away, Maya began to widen the chink through which she had peeped into the hall. It was easy to bite away the brittle stuff of the partition, though it took some time before the opening was large enough to admit her body. At length, in the full knowledge that discovery would cost her her life, she squeezed through ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... that previous to use, all gut should be soaked, and the longer the better. It is a good plan to let it soak over night, and make up your cast in the morning. When gut is thus thoroughly wet, it is wonderful how easy it is of manipulation. On the other hand, dry gut is very brittle, and will break on the slightest provocation. Fix the cast and silk-and-hair line together, having previously made a single knot on the end of the latter, as ...
— Scotch Loch-Fishing • AKA Black Palmer, William Senior
... birches rose up against the sky, and the white wilderness was very still and the frost intense when they floundered into the gloom of the bluff at the hour that man's vitality sinks to its lowest. Every crackle of a brittle branch rang with horrible distinctness, and now and then a man turned in his saddle and glanced at his neighbour when from the shadowy hollow beneath them rose the sound of rending ice. The stream ran fast just there, and there had been but ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... animal unfledged, A monkey with his tail abridged; A thing that walks on spindle legs, With bones as brittle, sir, as eggs; His body, flexible and limber, And headed with a knob of timber; A being frantic and unquiet, And very fond of beef and riot; Rapacious, lustful, rough, and martial, To lies and lying scoundrels partial! By nature form'd with splendid parts To rise in science—shine ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... century; and the same judgment may be pronounced upon almost every article of hardware. The razors, knives, scissors, hatchets, swords, and other edge-utensils, prepared for exportation, are generally ill-tempered, half finished, flawed, or brittle; and the muskets, which are sold for seven or eight shillings a-piece to the exporter, so carelessly and unconscientiously prepared, that they cannot be used without imminent danger of mutilation: accordingly, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... is my fate, Both void of state; And yet the threshold of my door Is worn by the poor, Who hither come, and freely get Good words or meat. Like as my parlour, so my hall, And kitchen small; A little buttery, and therein A little bin, Which keeps my little loaf of bread Unchipt, unflead. Some brittle sticks of thorn or brier Make me a fire, Close by whose living coal I sit, And glow like it. Lord, I confess, too, when I dine The pulse is Thine, And all those other bits that be There placed by Thee. ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... fondness for sitting in a certain secluded summer-house was due to her desire to read Lord Byron's poetry unobserved. Miss Lydia's forehead was severely cut; and Elinor, though bitterly remorseful, not only refused to beg pardon for her fault, but shattered every brittle article in the room to which she was confined for her contumacy. The vicar, on being consulted, recommended that she should be well whipped. This counsel was repugnant to Hardy McQuinch, but he gave his wife leave to use her discretion ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... often when the brown leaves Were brittle on the ground, And the wind in the chimney ...
— Renascence and Other Poems • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... court plaster. It is pliable, and never breaks, which is far from being the case with many of the spurious articles which are sold under that name. Indeed, this commodity is very frequently adulterated. A kind of plaster, with a very thick and brittle covering, is often sold for it. The manufacturers of this, instead of isinglass, use common glue, which is much cheaper; and cover the whole with spirit varnish, instead of balsam of Peru. This plaster cracks, and has none of the balsamic smell by which the genuine court plaster is distinguished. ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... occasionally of economic importance as a pest of filberts in Oregon and has been of some concern recently in New York. It attacks the leaf and flower buds and catkins. Infested catkins become distorted, rigid, and brittle, and yield no pollen. In Oregon this pest has been controlled with 3 gallons of a dormant oil emulsion or 6-1/2 to 8 gallons of liquid lime-sulfur in water to make 100 gallons of spray just as the buds are opening. Related species of similar habits that attack walnuts have been controlled with ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... the ice was in awful upheaval around us; we heard, as our eyelids sweetly closed, the slow booming of distant guns, and brittle cracklings of artillery. This may have been a result of the tempest stirring up the ocean beneath the ice. Whatever it was, we did not care: we ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... allowed too early. In childhood, the bones still contain a larger percentage of animal matter than in more advanced life, and are therefore more liable to bend than to break; while in old age, they contain a greater percentage of mineral matter, and are brittle ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... than is necessary in making the Paris experiment. We shall let the old dear rooms, and make money by them, and keep them to fall back upon, in case we fail at Paris. 'But we'll not fail.' Well, I hope not, though I am very brittle still and susceptible to climate. Dearest Sarianna, it will do you infinite good to come over to us every now and then—you want change, absolute change of scene and air and climate, I am confident; and you never ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... the maid with the key to the wall safe in her husband's room. "Why isn't there?" she demanded. "Rodney won't look at young girls. They bore him to death—and no wonder, because he freezes them perfectly brittle with fright. But Hermione's really pretty intelligent. She can understand fully half the things he talks about and she's clever enough to pretend about the rest. She's got lots of tact and skill, she's good-looking ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... and if either he or you brittle a syllable of this to Father Pether, I'll read you both oat—do you hear that now? ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... as in ships and brittle barks Into the seas descend, Their merchandise through fearful floods To compass and to end; There men are forced to behold The Lord's works what they be; And in the dreadful deep the same, Most ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... than three or four inches in width. The phosphor bronze wire is more difficult to wind satisfactorily, for it is harder to bend than the copper wire, and it has the further disadvantage of being more brittle. But when once placed properly, it forms a far more lasting and satisfactory interrupted circuit for such experiments as those to be described than does copper wire. In the case of the electric-boxes under ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... always matter so much whether you use a square, pointed, or a round-nosed bit, provided it is properly ground and set in the tool holder. As a rule, the more brittle the metal the less the top rake or angle ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... composed of a very delicate thin reed, perfectly smooth inside and out, which is encased in a stouter one. The arrows are from nine to ten inches long, formed of the leaf of a species of palm, hard and brittle, and pointed as sharp as a needle. At the butt-end some wild cotton is twisted round, to fit the tube. About an inch of the pointed end is poisoned. Quivers are made to hold five or six hundred of these darts. The slightest wound causes ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... good pay at the end of it, but I couldn't see the sense of tempting Providence just for the sheer fun of the thing. Of course, if we did spill, it would be all right with Bryce—he was so fat that he'd just bounce—but I was slimmer, and I knew from experience that I had very brittle bones. Once in the Solomons, when a wild boar charged me, I lay for weeks in a trader's hut waiting for an obdurate fracture to knit up again. Some idea of the furious pace at which Bryce pushed the ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... abandoned hole. About her comfort he seems shamefully unconcerned. Intent only on his own, he drills a perfectly round hole, usually on the underside of a limb where neither snow nor wind can harm him, and digs out a horizontal tunnel in the dry, brittle wood in the very heart of the tree, before turning downward into the deep, pear-shaped chamber, where he lives in selfish solitude. But when the nesting season comes, how devoted he is temporarily to the mate he has neglected and even abused through the winter! Will she ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... this had ever before visited our country. Houses that stood unmoved through many fierce convulsions went down like brittle reeds, and old Corporations which were thought to be as immovable as the hills tottered and fell, crushing hundreds ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... steel—this idea became for them a sort of obsession. Forward, if it were only a yard; if it were only a foot. Forward over the heart-breaking, rubble ice; forward against the biting, shrieking wind; forward in the face of the blinding snow; forward through the brittle crusts and icy water; forward, although every step was an agony, though the haul-rope cut like a dull knife, though their clothes were sheets of ice. Blinded, panting, bruised, bleeding, and exhausted, dogs and men, animals all, ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... decisive, disguised gradually as it rises by the rounding of the surface and the successive furrows caused by the descent of streams. But the exquisite drawing of the foreground is especially worthy of notice. No huge concave sweeps of the brush, no daubing or splashing here. Every inch of it is brittle and splintery, and the fissures are explained to the eye by the most perfect, speaking light and shade,—we can stumble over the edges of them. The East Cliff, Hastings, is another very fine example, from the exquisite irregularity with which its squareness ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... shepherd had an unseemly rent in it,—but I only laughed at the disaster, and would not scold her for her awkwardness. China had a knack of slipping through Jill's fingers; she had a loose uncertain grasp of things that were brittle and delicate; she had not learned to control her muscles or restrain her strength. She had a way of lifting me up when I teased her that turns me giddy to remember: I was quite a child in her hands. She was always ashamed of herself when she had done ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... life, are relative in their value to the comparative solidity of the characters on which they act—a truism which ought to be the foundation of social charity, but is not. Reanda could not be blamed for his brittle sensitivenesses, nor Gloria for a certain coarse-grained streak of cruelty, which she had inherited from her father, and which had combined strangely with the rare gifts and great faults of her dead mother—the love of emotion ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... very crooked, and full of Knots, its Wood is tender and brittle, and the Branches are easily broke off into Slips: There are several and different Colours, some more forward and fruitful than others. Commonly they are pluck'd up in a Year or thereabouts; and there is found ...
— The Natural History of Chocolate • D. de Quelus
... back my heart, fair child; To you as yet 't is worth but little. Half beguiler, half beguiled, Be you warned: your own is brittle. I know it by your redd'ning cheeks,— I know it by those two black streaks Arching up your pearly brows In a momentary laughter, Stretched in long and dark repose With ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... I finally discovered a narrow crevice, into which I shoved the shell. The edge of it was sharp, and across the sharp edge I proceeded to saw the rope that bound my wrists. The edge of the shell was also brittle, and I broke it by bearing too heavily upon it. Then I rolled back to the heap and returned with as many shells as I could carry in both hands. I broke many shells, cut my hands a number of times, and got cramps in my legs from my ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... religion in the schools than is acknowledged by those outside and than those within care to boast of, and though the standard of conduct is not ignoble, there is too little fusion; both components are brittle, they cannot stand the strain of sudden temptation, they lack enduring power. No one will forget how in those first months of war, consolation was offered even from pulpits for all the horrors and the sadness and the waste of conflict in the thought that as a nation we should be purged of ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... Mr. Pelz to attempt to articulate into words this porcelain-thin pillar of emotions was to shatter it into brittle bits. ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... aware of the creeping fret, the poisons and obstructions of decay. It was as if she had parted with her own light, elastic body, and succeeded to somebody else's that was all bone, heavy, stiff, irresponsive to her will. Her brain felt swollen and brittle, she had a feeling of tiredness in her face, of infirmity about her mouth. Her looking-glass showed her the fallen yellow skin, the ...
— Life and Death of Harriett Frean • May Sinclair
... Rome; and, from under his fierce, fuzzy, grey eyebrows, a pair of sentinel eyes, that were keen, clear, and bold as an eagle's, looked out with a watchful steadiness—steadiness that like the sharp edge of a diamond, seemed warranted to cut through the brittle glass of a lie. Judging by his outward appearance, his age might have been guessed at as between fifty-eight and sixty, but he was, in truth, seventy-two, and more strong, active, and daring than many another man whose years are not counted past the thirties. He was curiously attired, after something ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... (solidification of the tissues), and this is due to the constant deposition in the system of earthy substances. The result of these deposits being retained in the system is: that there is an excess of mineral matter in the bone tissue, which renders it brittle, and accounts for the susceptibility to fracture in advanced life; it causes a change in the structure of all the blood vessels, great and small, thickening their walls and thus reducing their calibre and also rendering them ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... closer, and a wisp of brittle grass in her hands crackled in a double grasp. She glanced up at him swiftly, as she felt his touch, and this time there was a nearing of the white frock to the suit of blue. "Well,—if—if—you've got t'," ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... first tumble immediately after dinner, when, being well filled, you will not be so brittle and ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... hand. When you do not have a graduate at hand, a half egg-shell with a small hole pricked in the end will serve better than a funnel. Place the shell in an oven to brown the surface slightly and it will be less brittle and last much longer. —Contributed by Maurice Baudier, New ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... the best theatre of natures, where they are truly acted, not played, and the business as in the rest of the world up and down, to wit, from the bottom of the cellar to the great chamber. A melancholy man would find here matter to work upon, to see heads as brittle as glasses, and often broken; men come hither to quarrel, and come hither to be made friends: and if Plutarch will lend me his simile, it is even Telephus's sword that makes wounds and cures them. It is the common consumption of the afternoon, and the murderer or maker-away of a rainy ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... promised Roger to take care of her," Mr. Farraday gasped, and without so much as a glance at Miss Hawtry, both men departed with all the rapidity possible. There must be some reason that all bonds without-the-law are so brittle, and those of friendship and honor and love so strong ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... the satin was yellowed, but the string of pearls was there—yellowed, too, by the slow passage of the years. One or two of them were black. A slip of paper fluttered out as she opened the case, and she caught it as it fell. The paper was yellow and brittle and the ink had faded, but the words were still there, written in Anthony Dexter's clear, bold hand; "First from the depths of the sea, and then from the ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... a job in the weavin' room of his mill. Do you know what that's like, Henry?" Henry shook his head. He had never been inside a linen-mill. "The linen has to be woven in a moist atmosphere, or else it'd become brittle an' so it wouldn't be fine," Mr. Quinn went on; "an' the atmosphere is kept moist by lettin' steam escape from pipes into the room where the linen is bein' woven—a damp, muggy, steamy atmosphere, Henry ... an' Lizzie McCamley left this village ... left work in the fields there to ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... make some corrections with a pencil. "This," said he, turning to his companion, "is an amusement with which I sometimes pass idle hours at an inn. These are quotations from those humble poets, who trust their fame to the brittle tenure of windows and drinking-glasses." "From our inn," returned the gentleman, "a stranger might imagine that we were a nation of poets; machines, at least, containing poetry, which the motion of a journey emptied of ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... father, for, God knows, they have many peculiar cares. I cannot describe to you the anxious, sleepless hours these ties frequently give me. I see a train of helpless little folks; me and my exertions all their stay; and on what a brittle thread does the life of man hang! If I am nipt off at the command of Fate, even in all the vigour of manhood, as I am—such things happen every day—Gracious God! what would become of my little flock? ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... down in the wheel well," he said in a brittle tone. "It looks to me like a grenade. There's a string tied to it. At a guess, that sandy-haired guy set it up like that saboteur sergeant down in Brazil. Only—it rolled a little. And this one goes off when the wheels go down. I think, ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... vain and doubtful good, A shining gloss, that fadeth suddenly; A flower that dies, when first it 'gins to bud; A brittle glass, that's broken presently; A doubtful good, a gloss, a glass, a flower, Lost, faded, broken, dead within an hour. And as good lost is seld or never found, As fading gloss no rubbing will refresh, As flowers dead lie wither'd on the ground, ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... in the pine wood ahead of me were parted, as brittle reeds are parted by a man thrusting through them; they were snapped off and driven headlong, and a second huge tripod appeared, rushing, as it seemed, headlong towards me. And I was galloping hard to meet it! At the sight of the second monster my nerve went altogether. ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... good steel. Among these impurities one of the most important is phosphorus. This is owing to the fact that even a very small percentage of phosphoric acid in steel has the effect of rendering it brittle. The extraction of the phosphorus from the raw material was formerly, however, attended with very serious difficulties, and had the effect naturally of rendering steel a costly article, inasmuch as only the purer kinds of pig-iron could be used ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... brittle from the snow in my dank and cheerless garden. A crust of bread gathers timid pheasants round me. The robins, I see, have made the coal-house their home. Waster Lunny's dog never barks without rousing ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... of this ogress and child-queller was in a steep by-street at Brighton; where the soil was more than usually chalky, flinty, and sterile, and the houses were more than usually brittle and thin; where the small front-gardens had the unaccountable property of producing nothing but marigolds, whatever was sown in them; and where snails were constantly discovered holding on to the street doors, and other ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... of an eye—for there is a peculiar sensation which a person experiences in sitting upon, or rather into a hat; ages are condensed into moments, and between the first yielding of the brittle top and the final crush and jam, as between the top of a steeple and the bottom, there is room for a life's reflection to flash through the mind—in the twinkling of an eye H. agonizingly felt that she was sitting ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... made of shoots of the sarvis berry wood, which was straight, very heavy, and not brittle. They were smoothed and straightened by a stone implement. The grooves were made by pushing the shafts through a rib or other flat bone in which had been made a hole, circular except for one or two projections on the inside. These ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... Ray grinned. "The important thing is that it did. It was all-metal, of course, tested and guaranteed. The guarantee isn't worth much here. A flaw in the forging, perhaps, that escaped detection. And this low temperature. Makes metal as brittle as glass. And the thing may have ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... 181.).—Cordially do I agree with every word of your correspondent LAUDATOR TEMPORIS ACTI, and especially as to the prayer-books for churches and chapels, printed by the Universities. Experto crede, no solicitude can preserve their "flimsy, brittle, and cottony" leaves, as he justly entitles them, from rapid destruction. Might not the delegates of the University presses be persuaded to give us an edition with the morning and evening services printed on vellum, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851 • Various
... green foliage, is more important than vigor as indicated by the length of current season's growth. In Morgantown this has been one of the driest seasons on record. Cuttings from trees with pale or brown foliage, or with foliage tending to be brittle from lack of water soon lost their leaves. Whether this was caused by the condition of the parent tree or of the individual cutting is not apparent. It is too early to determine whether or not the drought will cause a general lowering ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... which we have spoken as being close to the sycamore walk, at the foot of a wall against which it flowed, forming a rather deep excavation, the current had found a vein of soft, brittle stone which, by its incessant force, it had ended in wearing away. It was a natural grotto formed by water, but which earth, in its turn, had undertaken to embellish. An enormous willow had taken root in a few inches of soil in a fissure ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... The earth itself, this flat surface which lay spread out beneath me; the whole earthly globe, with its populations, multitudinous, feeble, crushed by want, grief and diseases, bound to a clod of pitiful dust; this brittle, rough crust, this shell over the fiery sands of our planet, overspread with the mildew we call the organic, vegetable kingdom; these human flies, a thousand times paltrier than flies; their dwellings glued together with filth, the ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... panes are not made of a brittle substance like glass, but resemble mica, except that they are more tough and durable. These Moonites are wiser than we in roofing their houses. They have discovered a mineral composition which in its plastic ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... conformation to the dictates of an unthinking world. The list could be multiplied. But to sum it up, here was epitomized, beautifully, concretely, the main and minor vices of a generation for which Adrian found little pity in his heart; a generation brittle as ice; a generation of secret diplomacy; a generation that in its youth had covered a lack of bathing by a vast amount of perfume. That was it—! That expressed it perfectly! The just summation! Camellias, and double intentions in speech, and unnecessary reticences, and refusals to ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... Mrs. Riley occupied the exact centre of the small, wide-eared, brittle-looking sofa, where she filled in the silent moments that followed by pulling down the skirts of the infant's apparel, oppressed with the necessity of keeping up a conversation and with the want of subject-matter. ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... much care, that the brass rings might not clatter on the oval plates under them, and disturb Miss Deborah. The drawer was sweet with lavender and sweet clover, and, as she lifted from its wrappings of silvered paper a fine black lace shawl, some pale, brittle rose-leaves fell out upon the floor. That shawl, thrown about her shoulders, subdued her dress, she thought; and the wide-brimmed black hat of fine Neapolitan straw, tied with soft black ribbons beneath her little round chin, completed the look ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... large pieces as he thought he could conveniently handle. The ice was exceedingly hard and brittle. It had frozen centuries before, under the extremely low temperatures of the Arctic regions. It had its beginning, perhaps, in snow deposited in some far-off Greenland valley. Other snows had come upon it, and still other snows, until a tremendous weight of snow pressed ...
— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... got to the house-boat we lowered the skiff and rowed across to Catskill and mailed the letters. Then we went up the street for a couple of sodas. Bert bought some peanut brittle, too—I'm crazy about that. Then we went to another store and got some post cards. Some of them had pictures of Temple Camp on them. I sent home about six. All the while it was getting dark and pretty soon it began to rain, so I said, "Let's go and get ...
— Roy Blakeley's Adventures in Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... destruction to the brittle ware that may chance to travel through our roads. Lucky, indeed, are we if, through the superior carefulness of the person who packs them, more than one-half happens to arrive in safety. For such mishaps we have no redress. The storekeeper lays ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... at the thing in his hands; the cup of chilled steel, thin as paper and brittle as glass, had been smashed to pieces, presumably; at all events, it ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... shattered and seeded, One brittle leaf scrapes against another, Fiddling echoes of a rush of petals. Now only you and ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... the oxydasion of the iron it contains gives it that appearance, and colors the soil a reddish hue in its immediate vicinity. Wherever this rock abounds, the soil is durable and the crops are usually heavy. It is sometimes met with having a fine grain, and so very hard as to be almost brittle, though generally very difficult to break, and when broken strongly resembling cast-iron, and will sometimes ring, on being struck, almost as clearly. It was used very much formerly for making journals to run mill-gudgeons upon. When found on the surface, ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... such snares, as I see will be laid for her. And, after all, I see not when men are so frail without importunity, that so much should be expected from women, daughters of the same fathers and mothers, and made up of the same brittle compounds, (education all the difference,) nor where the triumph is in ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... hopping; and so that leads on to climbing up into the loft and handling the golden scales. The man with the hoe dips his brown fist in the heap and gathers up a handful, noting as he does so how the crisp, brittle, leaf-life substance of the hops crackles, and yet does not exactly break in his palm. They must be dry, yet not too dry to go to powder. They cling a little to the fingers, adhering to the skin, sticky. He looks for rust and finds none, ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... commonly about 13 inches square, with a thickness of three inches. The best quality of baked brick is of a yellowish-white tint, and very much resembles our Stourbridge or fire brick; another kind, extremely hard, but brittle, is of a blackish blue; a third, the coarsest of all, is slack-dried, and of a pale red. The earliest baked bricks are of this last color. The sun-dried bricks have even more variety of size than the baked ones. They are sometimes as large as 16 inches ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... infinitely thin, transparent substance, somewhat resembling the thinnest shreds of isinglass, only it is almost as flexible and soft as satin; that is, previous to being dried, when it not only contracts and thickens, but becomes rather hard and brittle. I have several such dried bits, which I use for marks in my whale-books. It is transparent, as I said before; and being laid upon the printed page, I have sometimes pleased myself with fancying it exerted a magnifying influence. At any rate, it is ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... 1500-pound 3-year-old colt with small brittle feet that has side bone coming on left front foot caused by driving him barefoot on the road two or ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... in a sense, the creature of man, the drudge of kitchen and factory, the humble slave of the lamp, engaged in his most servile employment, appearing as a little point of flame, or perhaps a feeble spark, suddenly snaps his brittle chain, breaks from his prison, and leaps with destructive fury, as if from the very bosom of Hell, upon the doomed dwellings of fifty thousand human beings, each of whom, but a moment before, conceived himself his master. And those ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... syrup for fifteen minutes, then add the soda. Cook until a little snaps brittle when dropped in cold water. Add the vinegar when this stage is reached and pour into oiled pans. When cool enough to handle, pull until white; make into inch-thick rolls and clip off into neat mouthfuls with ...
— Foods That Will Win The War And How To Cook Them (1918) • C. Houston Goudiss and Alberta M. Goudiss
... and wreaths of withered flowers. The leaves had fallen from most of them, and were now lying scattered about the floor. Leaves that had once been green had turned brown; the grasses and mosses were in shreds, the twigs were dry and brittle. Many of the bouquets had had ribbons attached to them; these, once red or blue, were now faded. Others had been bound with gold tinsel; this had rusted. The slanting rays of the sun fell on others, and lighted them as it had shone on the copper engraving in the ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... your clothes are a pickle of sweat, And, for all that, the sweat on your salty skin Shall dry and crack, in the breathing of a wind That's like a draught come through an open'd furnace. The leafage of the trees shall brown and faint, All sappy growth turning to brittle rubbish As the near heat of the star strokes the green earth; And time shall brush the fields as visibly As a rough hand brushes against the nap Of gleaming cloth—killing the season's colour, Each ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle silence. "Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?" Then she moved around the desk to stand behind him ...
— The Plague • Teddy Keller
... have made most exquisite and wonderful carvings of the coral of the Mediterranean, and there is such a thing as black coral, also known as brain coral, but it is too brittle to be worked upon. ...
— Lord Dolphin • Harriet A. Cheever
... with haste, they betook themselves to their swords, each guarding the opposite attack warily with his shield. That of Sir Tarquin was framed of a bull's hide, stoutly held together with thongs, and, in truth, seemed well-nigh impenetrable; whilst the shield of his opponent, being of more brittle stuff, did seem as though it would have cloven asunder with the desperate strokes of Sir Tarquin's sword. Nothing daunted, Sir Lancelot brake ofttimes through his adversary's guard, and smote him once until the blood trickled down amain. At this sight, Sir Tarquin waxed ten times ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... bodies of the unfortunate crew had been broken into fragments. Their limbs had not been twisted off as a freak of the fall but had been cleanly broken off, as though the bodies had suddenly become brittle and had shattered on their impact with the ground. Not only the bodies, but the ship itself had been broken up. Even the clothing of the men was in pieces or had long splits in the fabric whose edges were as clean as though they had been ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... in operating environment or configuration, or by any minor tweak to the software itself. Also, any system that responds inappropriately and disastrously to abnormal but expected external stimuli; e.g., a file system that is usually totally scrambled by a power failure is said to be brittle. This term is often used to describe the results of a research effort that were never intended to be robust, but it can be applied to commercially developed software, which displays the quality far more often than ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... years stood the Test, and found to be the best one made for breaking all kinds of hard and brittle substances, such as Ores, Quartz, Emery, etc., etc. Mr. S. L. Marsden, for the past twenty years connected with the manufacture of this ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... that is dry and brittle really requires some oleaginous preparation, used in moderation. Yellow vaselin is good. Part the hair and rub it into the scalp with the tips of the fingers. A sufficient amount will find its way to the hair itself to relieve ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... Early Mohawk, Davis Wax, Pencil Pod Black Wax, Golden-Eyed Wax, Golden Refugee, Maule's Butter Wax, Keeney's Rustless Golden Wax, White Wax, Longfellow Bush, Round Pod Kidney Wax, Round Pod Refugee, Brittle Wax, Yosemite Mammoth Wax, Extra Early Refugee, Challenger Black Wax, Flageolet Wax, Keeney's Stringless Refugee Wax Peas.—Abundance, Admiral, Advancer, Alaska, Ameer, American Champion, American Wonder, British Wonder, Champion of England, Claudit, Duke of Albany, Duke of ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... fire, a tiger roared near by. The elephants trumpeted and the mahouts rose in terror. Kathlyn ran for her rifle, but the trumpeting of the elephants was sufficient to send the striped cat to other hunting-grounds. Wild ape and pig abounded, and occasionally a caha wriggled out of the sun into the brittle grasses. Very few beasts or reptiles are aggressive; it is only when they feel cornered that they turn. Even the black panther, the most savage of all cats, will rarely ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... was duplicated by an untouched one a few inches away—it too went; the fine tentacles on top of the mound reached upward, shimmering like the air on a hot summer's day, and near my feet hundreds of runners crept ever closer, the pale stolons shiny and brittle, supporting the ominously ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... hill, and presently stepped on to the pavement; but at the edge of the asphalt, where tufted grass should grow, something crackled and hissed under my feet. Under the torchlight the unnatural grass was white and brittle with rime, fanciful as a stage fairy scene, and the ...
— A Diary Without Dates • Enid Bagnold
... Campagna were brown and brittle, the trees sere and yellow in the Autumn, when they came to the Eternal City, the center of the world then as now. The saintly General Francis Borgia, busy as he was with the cares of the widespread Society, found time to welcome the three travelers, ...
— For Greater Things: The story of Saint Stanislaus Kostka • William T. Kane, S.J.
... There were other company horses in the field, but most of them were busy grazing. Each was disabled in some way. One was half foundered, one had a leg-sprain, another swollen joints; but hoof complaints, such as toe-cracks, quarter-cracks, brittle feet, and the like, were the most frequent ills. They were not a cheerful ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... almost the quick result of the working of some machine; and those closest to the grave's brink crouched down, and, intent as they were upon the progress of events, heeded not the damp earth that fell upon them, nor the frail brittle and humid remains of humanity that occasionally ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... I flouted him in my youth; I wrestled with him and flung him from me. I laughed at his cold eyes across a naked sword, and spurned him on the heather; but now in my age, when my bones are brittle and my arms shrunk, he creeps behind me again, sure, sure o' his prey," and as he spoke he crouched like a stealthy enemy, one groping hand outstretched. Then he flung himself upright, his eyes flashing, dauntless ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... let the captive loose. Conqueror I might be of the house; but the inmate would escape to heaven before I could call myself possessor of its clay dwelling-place. And it is you, spirit—with will and energy, and virtue and purity—that I want: not alone your brittle frame. Of yourself you could come with soft flight and nestle against my heart, if you would: seized against your will, you will elude the grasp like an essence—you will vanish ere I inhale your ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... moisten well. Place on stove to boil. While this is boiling beat eggs to a stiff froth, then add the two ounces of sugar, a little at a time. Now try the boiling syrup in cold water, as for taffy, and when brittle pour in a fine stream into the eggs previously prepared, beating hard all the time. Beat awhile and while cooling add vanilla and citric acid. When nearly cold spread ...
— The Community Cook Book • Anonymous
... pianists I have heard with a beautiful tone—Thalberg, Henselt, Liszt, Tausig, Heller—yes, Stephen of the pretty studies—Rubinstein, Joseffy, Paderewski, Pachmann and Essipoff, sat low before the keyboard. When you sit high and the wrists dip downward your tone will be dry, brittle, hard. Doubtless a few pianists with abnormal muscles have escaped this, for there was a time when octaves were played with stiff wrists and rapid tempo. Both things are an abomination, and the exception here does not prove the rule. Pianists ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... whitewashed. The wooden roof is peaked, with many cross-beams. High up on the walls are several small square lattices of wood. The floor is of discolored stone. Everywhere one sees wood wrought into lattices, crumbling carpets that look almost as frail and brittle and fatigued as wrappings of mummies, and worn-out matting that would surely become as the dust if one set his feet hard upon it. The structure of the building is basilican, and it contains some strange carvings of the Last Supper, the Nativity, and St. Demetrius. ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... to three inches in diameter, covered with a thick spongy incrustation of lime, white or yellowish toward the base: sporangia convolute, the walls membranous, brittle, charged throughout with round white granules of lime, 1.5-2 mu in diameter: columella none: capillitium of delicate, colorless, anastomosing tubules, bearing toward the center large, white, branching calcareous nodules; spores spherical, or somewhat oval, dark purple-brown, rough-tuberculate, ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... glaucous-green, the cushions few and scattered; spines white, flattened, of various lengths. Flowers tawny yellow, small for the size of the plant. A native of Cuba, and requiring stove treatment. Being very brittle, this plant should ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... open space in front of the station and he knew that before long he would be seeing flame instead of smoke. The fire fighters had been working ceaselessly, fighting gallantly, but the elements were against them. The air was almost as dry and brittle as the wood which the flames lapped up and there was a steady wind that drove the ...
— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman
... Then the shop-windows are decorated. Behind the panes of clear glass the gilt of presentation-books rises like a glittering wave under the gaslight, the stuffs of various and tempting colours display their brittle and heavy folds, while the young ladies behind the counter, with their hair dressed tapering to a point and with a ribbon beneath their collar, tie up the article, little finger in the air, or fill bags of moire ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... gold and glass," are here all combined; though their natural properties and chemical elements are so different. Glass is clear, transparent, but brittle; gold is solid and shining, but opaque. In heaven, the saints shall know more than we can now imagine. The glass will be all gold. As the eye sees an object through glass at a glance, so the saints in heaven will perceive truth without the tedious process of comparison ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... things are beautiful, beautiful as day! And I shan't stand waiting for love or scorn When the feast is laid for a day new-born . . . Oh, better let the little things I loved when little Return when the heart finds the great things brittle; And better is a temple made of bark and thong Than a tall stone temple that may ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... my brother's daughter, Or else my kingdom stands on brittle glass:— Murder her brothers, and then marry her! Uncertain way of gain! But I am in So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin: Tear-falling pity dwells not ...
— The Life and Death of King Richard III • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... sunk into the night. How many mighty warriors have made the earth tremble, filling the mouths of men with words of fear or praise! They have passed away, and the only record of their lives is a chance carving on a stone, a brief line written by some curt historian. The glass of the years was brittle wherein they gazed for a span; the glass is broken and all is gone. In the wastes of Asia we find mighty ruins that even now are like symbols of power—vast walls that impose on the imagination by their bulk, enormous statues, temples that seem to mock at time and destruction. ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... gathering force and we have still some hours to ride. But," he continued, stepping close to Cameron and looking him in the eyes, "there must be no more nonsense. You can see my man is somewhat short in temper; and indeed mine is rather brittle at times." ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... a polished skeleton—very clean, but very brittle: a little breeze, and whole houses would tumble to bits. I started painting, one day, a little picture from the hall of the College for Young Ladies. When I went the next day I found my point of view had been raised several ...
— An Onlooker in France 1917-1919 • William Orpen
... the glow subsided, and poor Septimius spent the rest of the day, as was his wont, poring over his books, in which all the meanings seemed dead and mouldy, and like pressed leaves (some of which dropped out of the books as he opened them), brown, brittle, sapless; so even the thoughts, which when the writers had gathered them seemed to them so brightly colored and full of life. Then he began to see that there must have been some principle of life left out of the book, so that these gathered thoughts lacked something that ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... seemed the night before, to casual examination, to differ from other cloth, had begun to crumble away in a very curious manner. The texture seemed strangely brittle and strengthless. It fell apart at a touch, and was reduced to a fine powder under the pressure of the fingers. She could not possibly have worn ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... Mawley," said the vicar, "the truth is not so brittle that we should be afraid of handling it; if religion were more openly discussed and brought into our daily life, I believe we should be ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... variety of lap-dog, and among them the tiniest little Italian greyhound,—not more than eight inches long. This last was like a porcelain toy dog, and looked brittle, as if its thin legs would snap if much handled. I did not think it a pretty pet; it seemed ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... dough of flour in a muslin bag under a small current of water; the starch, or fecula, and the gum, are carried away by the water, and the gluten in an impure form remains as an elastic viscous substance, which on drying becomes hard and brittle. It is to the gluten of flour that its property of panification, or bread-making, is due. On the addition of a ferment, a portion of the starch is converted into sugar and carbonic acid gas, and the latter causes the gluten to expand into the little cells, or vesicles, which confer upon ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... turned upon the others. This was sport. He was reveling in the joy of battle and the lust of blood. As though it had been but a brittle shell, to break at the least rough usage, the thin veneer of his civilization fell from him, and the ten burly villains found themselves penned in a small room with a wild and savage beast, against whose steel muscles their puny strength was ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... proposed To an Earthen Pot a journey. The latter was opposed, Expressing the concern he Had felt about the danger Of going out a ranger. He thought the kitchen hearth The safest place on earth For one so very brittle. "For thee, who art a kettle, And hast a tougher skin, There's nought to keep thee in." "I'll be thy bodyguard," Replied the Iron Pot; "If anything that's hard Should threaten thee a jot, Between you I will go, And save thee from the blow." This offer ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... ourselves, means the best happiness we can have Avoid the position that enforces publishing Beautiful women in her position provoke an intemperateness Beauty is rare; luckily is it rare Between love grown old and indifference ageing to love Beware the silent one of an assembly! Brittle is foredoomed But they were a hopeless couple, they were so friendly By resisting, I made him a tyrant Capacity for thinking should precede the act of writing Capricious potentate whom they worship Carry explosives and must particularly guard against sparks ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... at a cup-racing clip along a road that first wound like a coiling snake and then straightened like a striking snake, and that always we traveled through dust so thick it made a fog. In this chalky land of northern France the brittle soil dries out after a rain very quickly, and turns into a white powder where there are wheels to churn it up and grit it fine. Here surely there was an abundance of wheels. We passed many marching men and many lumbering supply trains which were going our ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... back, promises to be a full night. These men have waited a whole year for a drink, and now the lids can't come off quick enough. "Come, hurry up, Flynn, we're all as dry as wooden gods, we're so dry that we're brittle—we'd break if you hit us." "Well, I'm hurrying; I'm as much in a rush as any of you; I'm so warped the ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... with water and sand seems to be this: that rocks, like all other bodies, are composed of the four elements. Those which contain a larger proportion of air, are soft; of water, are tough from the moisture; of earth, hard; and of fire, more brittle. Therefore, if limestone, without being burned, is merely pounded up small and then mixed with sand and so put into the work, the mass does not solidify nor can it hold together. But if the stone is first thrown into the kiln, it loses its former property of solidity by ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... And sunk tail, and horrible heave of the flank, 35 As down on her haunches she shuddered and sank. So we were left galloping, Joris and I, Past Looz and past Tongres, no cloud in the sky; The broad sun above laughed a pitiless laugh, 'Neath our feet broke the brittle bright stubble like chaff; 40 Till over by Dalhem a dome-spire sprang white, And "Gallop," gasped Joris, "for Aix ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... al- Masabih (Lane 2, 54) Mohammed said, 'The best horses are black (dark brown?) with white blazes (Arab. "Ghurrah") and upper lips; next, black with blaze and three white legs (bad, because white- hoofs are brittle):next, bay with white blaze and white fore and hind legs." He also said, "Prosperity is with sorrel horses;" and praised a sorrel with white forehead and legs; but he dispraised the "Shikal," which has white stockings (Arab. "Muhajjil") on alternate ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... clustered round thy edge in Spring. The liverleaf put forth her sister blooms Of faintest blue. Here the quick-footed wolf, Passing to lap thy waters, crushed the flower Of sanguinaria, from whose brittle stem The red drops fell like blood. The deer, too, left Her delicate foot-print in the soft moist mould, And on the fallen leaves. The slow-paced bear, In such a sultry summer noon as this, Stopped at thy stream, ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... shown in Fig. 3, a striking change takes place. The mixture begins to glow at some point, the glow rapidly extending throughout the whole mass. If the test tube is now broken and the product examined, it will be found to be a hard, black, brittle substance, in no way recalling the iron or the sulphur. The magnet no longer attracts it; carbon disulphide will not dissolve sulphur from it. It is a new substance with new properties, resulting from the chemical union of iron and sulphur, and is called iron sulphide. Such substances ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... one that can hold those two cubs. And the leash will be of no avail unless it be plucked from his beard while he is alive, and twitched out with wooden tweezers. While he lives he will not suffer this to be done to him, and the leash will be of no use should he be dead, because it will be brittle." ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... illuminated. I realized him as a young man, I began to see him as a boy. I found a little half-bound botanical book with stencil-tinted illustrations, a good-conduct prize my father had won at his preparatory school; a rolled-up sheet of paper, carbonized and dry and brittle, revealed itself as a piece of specimen writing, stiff with boyish effort, decorated in ambitious and faltering flourishes and still betraying the pencil rulings his rubber should have erased. Already your writing is better than that. And I found a daguerreotype ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... process often very necessary; professional repairers will tell you "it tears the wood too much." The glues mostly in favour among upper class repairers are those known as Russian, Cologne and Isinglass, all good; they are light in colour, very firm, not too brittle, and transparent. There are other varieties to be had of excellent quality and which conform to the conditions required. Thick cakes of a dark brown colour with an unpleasant odour should be avoided; they are ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... these I would have a long, slim loaf of wheaten bread that hath been baked upon the hearth; it should be warm from the fire, with glossy brown crust, the color of the hair of mine own Maid Marian, and this same crust should be as crisp and brittle as the thin white ice that lies across the furrows in the early winter's morning. These will do for the more solid things; but with these I must have three potties, fat and round, one full of Malmsey, one of Canary, and one brimming full of mine own dear lusty sack." Thus spoke Robin ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle |
