"Flake" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mural inscriptions. How long are these expected to remain legible? They employ the same material for their buildings, and I observe that the older monuments last, on the whole, better than the new ones, which flake away rapidly—exfoliate or crack, according to the direction from which the grain of the rock has been attacked by the chisel. It may well be that Florentines of past centuries left the hewn blocks in their shady caverns for a certain length of time, as do the ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... nothing. There was another cracking sound, louder, and unmistakably beneath the bed of the machine. And at the same instant a flake of grimy plaster detached itself from the opposite wall and dropped into pale dust on the floor. And still Darius religiously did not move, and Big James would not move. They might have been under a spell. The journeyman jumped down ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... whole body of a slender, emaciated little girl wriggled dexterously, though with much difficulty, through the narrow aperture, and the child dropped down upon the floor as lightly and noiselessly as a feather, a snow-flake, or a waft of thistle-down. She had been deceived by Isabelle's remaining so long perfectly quiet, and believed her asleep; but when she softly approached the bed, to make sure that her victim's slumber had not been ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... about for some means of describing and explaining it. A slight illustration may suggest the natural law in accordance with which they set about their task of explanation. A child, of between two and three years old, was watching his first snow-storm, gazing very intently at the flying snow-flake, and evidently trying to think out what they were. At last he hit it; they were "little birds." It is so that the mind, infant or adult, is apt to work—explaining the new and unknown by reference to the familiar. Snow-flakes are not little birds; they ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... The Foam Flake was the name with which Judah had rechristened the old horse. The animal's name up to the time of the rechristening had been Pet, but this, Mr. Cahoon explained, he ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... than the sound of seas, more soft than falling flake, Amidst the hush of wing and ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... dome of red granite,* [This granite is highly crystalline, and does not scale or flake, nor is its surface polished.] accessible from the north and east, but almost perpendicular to the southward, where the slope is 80 degrees for 600 feet. The elevation is 400 feet above the mean level ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... propagated from "spawn," the commercial name applied to the mycelium; the term "spawn" includes both the mycelium and the medium in which it is carried and preserved. Spawn may be procured in the market in two forms, flake spawn and brick spawn. In both forms the mycelium growth is started on a prepared medium mainly consisting of manure and then arrested and dried. The flake spawn is short-lived by reason of its loose form, in which the mycelium is easily accessible to the air and ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... always in the low, grassy places where there would be no tracks left to tell of their passing that way. Behind them a yellow-brown cloud drifted sullenly with the wind. Now and then a black flake settled past them to the ground. A peculiar, tangy smell was in the air—the ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... weeks on Monadnock, he found that the Snow-Bird built its nest on the top of the mountain, and probably never came down through the season. That was its Arctic; and it would probably yet be found, he predicted, on Wachusett and other Massachusetts peaks. It is known that the Snow-Bird, or "Snow-Flake," as it is called in England, was reported by Audubon as having only once been proved to build in the United States, namely, among the White Mountains, though Wilson found its nests among the Alleghanies; and in New England it used to be the rural belief that the Snow-Bird ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... glimmer of merriment still linger in the eyes? When would the hoarse, mirthless laugh rise to the lips, that awful laugh that proclaims madness? Oh! she could have screamed now with the awfulness of this haunting terror. Ghouls seemed to be mocking her out of the darkness, every flake of snow that fell silently on the window-sill became a grinning face that taunted and derided; every cry in the silence of the night, every footstep on the quay below turned to hideous jeers hurled ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... Flake cold boiled white fleshed fish, dust it with salt and pepper and sprinkle it with lemon juice. Butter thin slices of brown bread; do not trim off the crusts. Put on one slice a layer of thin crisp cucumber, cover ...
— Sandwiches • Sarah Tyson Heston Rorer
... judged that passion's power— Passion so strong and pure. Might mock the snow-flake's wildering shower, Proud that it could endure, As woman oft in times before Had peril borne as ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... in his. He looked down at it as though something had startled him. In fact, her touch was like a flake of snow. ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... telephone message would eventually bring to her aid. Now it was nearly four o'clock. She had been hungry, but was hungry no longer. The bitter cold made her forehead ache, and though every moment the blue and mauve shades thickened upon the sky no flake of ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... here is, indeed, a projected escalade of heaven; here are, indeed, labours for a Hercules in a dress coat, armed with a pen and a dictionary to depict the passions, armed with a tube of superior flake-white to paint the portrait of the insufferable sun. No art is true in this sense: none can "compete with life": not even history, built indeed of indisputable facts, but these facts robbed of their vivacity and sting; ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... one hundred or more feet deep lay, on the level, and on the mountain slopes or in precipitous cirques twice, thrice, or ten times those depths. Snow thus packed together soon changes its character. From the light airy flake, it becomes, in masses, what the geologists term neve. This is a granular snow, intermediate between snow and ice. A little lower down this neve is converted into true glacial ice-beds, which grow longer, broader, deeper and thicker as the ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... puzzled, while she gained his strong interest. True, Addie and Mr. Harcourt were walking before them, but seemed so absorbed in each other as not to notice them. He felt a curious thrill when a little hand lighted, like a snow-flake, upon his arm, but soon increased its pressure with a sort of cousinly confidence. He looked inquiringly into the face turned up to him as they passed under the lamp, and thought, "In its guileless beauty it reminds ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... "While the snow-flake is reminding Homer of that hard, worrying, slinging work of battle. He must have ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... ranges and peaks far away fade into cloudlike shadows. The depths below us seem to sink unfathomably. Nablus is buried in the gulf. On the summit of Gerizim, a Mohammedan weli, shining like a flake of mica, marks the plateau where the Samaritan Temple stood. Hilltop towns, Asiret, Talluza, Yasid, emerge like islands from the misty sea. In that great shadowy hollow to the west lie the ruins of the city of Samaria, which Caesar Augustus renamed Sebaste, in honour of ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... observation, Johnson; but, in my opinion, the greatest part of the snow or rain which we receive in the polar regions is formed from the water of the seas in the temperate zones. One flake arose into the air under the form of vapor from some river in Europe, it helped make a cloud, and finally came here to be condensed; it is not impossible that we who drink it may be quenching our thirst at the rivers ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... so beautiful. No, not always, for it's a grand storm to-day. Just see how it comes down. It is getting dusk already. And every flake of it is just so lovely and wonderful. Mr. Richmond shewed me some on his hat once. I am so glad to know that God made it, and there is no end to the beautiful things he can make. It's covering your walk up ...
— The House in Town • Susan Warner
... probably another explanation of what we see here. Apart from the mechanical weathering of the rocks as a result of the arid climate, wherein rapid and often extreme changes of temperature take place, causing the surface of the rocks to flake or scale off, there has doubtless been unusual chemical weathering, and this has been largely brought about by the element of iron that all these rocks possess. Their many brilliant colors are imparted ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... blows very strong, then slip in the Currants, and give them a quick Boil, then take them from the Fire and let them settle a little; then give them another Boil, and put in a Pint of Currant-Jelly, drawn as directed in p. 33; boil all well together, till you see the Jelly will flake from the Scummer; then remove it from the Fire, and let it settle a little; then scum them, and put them into your Glasses; but as they cool, take Care to ...
— The Art of Confectionary • Edward Lambert
... as the work was wrought, the lengths were trimmed wi' the fore-teeth, 315 While to their thin, dry lips stuck wool-flecks severed by biting, Which at the first outstood from yarn-hanks evenly fine-drawn. Still at their feet in front soft fleece-flecks white as the snow-flake Lay in the trusty guard of wickers woven in withies. Always a-carding the wool, with clear-toned voices resounding 320 Told they such lots as these in song divinely directed, Chaunts which ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... every flake of falling snow, Before it touched the ground, There came a dove, and a ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... MANNA. L. E. D.—There are several sorts of Manna in the shops. The larger pieces, called Flake Manna, are usually preferred; though the smaller grains are equally as good, provided they are white, or of a pale yellow colour, very light, of a sweet not unpleasant taste, and free from any ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... these sharp flakes broke straight across the masses of mountain, when once the fissure took place, all hold would be lost between flake and flake, it is ordered (and herein is the most notable thing in the whole matter) that they shall not break straight, but in curves, round the body of the aiguilles, somewhat in the manner of the coats of an onion; so that, even ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... open my sleeve, it matters not. I have more dresses with me at my lodging." This my magister does immediately, and draws forth the beautiful arm white as a snow-flake, throws the sleeve back upon the shoulder, and places Diliana with her face turned towards the window, on a seat which his Highness, the Duke, laid for her himself, while he exclaimed earnestly, "Now, Diliana, guard thy soul ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... storm breaks till the last flake has fallen, the sweepers are run unceasingly over the tracks of the railroads, each in its own division, which it is its business to keep clear. The track is all the companies have to mind. There was a law, or a rule, or an understanding, nobody seems to know exactly which, that they were to ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... proud success, And patience and love in a chastened heart Are pearls more precious than happiness; And in that morning when she shall wake To the spring-time freshness of youth again, All trouble will seem but a flying flake, And lifelong sorrow a ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... else why star-shape the dew For the unbreathing, shy, heart-hiding rose? And when earth darkens, and the North wind blows, Why into stars, flake every cloud's black brew? What fitter forms for longings high and true, Man's hopes, ideals, than bright orbs like those Asbine from Nature's dawn to Nature's close, In ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... dispersed the night's uncheerful damp, Do ye awake; and, with fresh lusty-hed, Go to the bower of my beloved love, My truest turtle dove; Bid her awake; for Hymen is awake, And long since ready forth his mask to move, With his bright Tead that flames with many a flake, And many a bachelor to wait on him, In their fresh garments trim. Bid her awake therefore, and soon her dight, For lo! the wished day is come at last, That shall, for all the pains and sorrows ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... glen, after it twists out of view, a manse and half a dozen thatched cottages that are there may still show a candle light, and the crumbling gravestones keep cold vigil round the grey old kirk. Heavy shadows fade into the sky to the north. A flake trembles against the window; but it is too cold for much snow to-night. The shutter bars the outer world from ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... moments, slightly breathless, among the first of the trees. They were small and their branches cut in sharp, intricate tracery against the sky; farther back, the rows of slender trunks ran together in a hazy mass, though they failed to keep out the wind, and once or twice a fine flake touched the old man's face with a cold that stung. He pulled his fur cap lower down and set about the search. For half an hour he scrambled among thick nut bushes, kicking aside the snow beneath them here and there; and then he plunged knee-deep into the withered ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... the expressive horror and dignity of it. Don't think I mean to flatter you; all I would say is, that now the two latter are dead, you must of necessity be Gray's painter. In order to keep your talent alive, I shall next week send you flake white, brushes, oil, and the enclosed directions from Mr. Muntz, who is still at the Vine, and whom, for want of you, we labour hard to form. I shall put up in the parcel two or three prints of my eagle, which, as you never ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... gentler, subtler strain awake, And sing of fights with Jackson on the Gulf And Perry's hard-fought battle on the Lake! Of fights in fen and moor and hoary brake, On Lookout Mountain and the rolling main— Through searing blasts of bleak December's flake, And drenching torrents of fair April's rain: Their valiant deeds are springing ...
— The Sylvan Cabin - A Centenary Ode on the Birth of Lincoln and Other Verse • Edward Smyth Jones
... fell, his choicest tool a flake of stone; His best of ornaments tattood skin and holes to hang his bits ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... the snow-flake, and sprinkles down every drop of rain," said Fabens. "God teaches the squirrels to prepare for winter, and instructs the ant, and beaver, and bee; and why would it be stooping for him to teach as, by signs in nature, ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... represents the fetich of the many-colored Wild Cat (Te-pi su-pa-no-pa), of the Upper regions, which is made of basaltic clay, stained black with pitch and pigment, and furnished with a flake of flint and a small fragment of chrysocolla, both of which are attached to the back of the figure with ...
— Zuni Fetiches • Frank Hamilton Cushing
... shone small but brilliant on the very sill. I ran forward on tip-toe. A white flake fluttered to my feet. I secured it and waited for one word; none came; but the window was ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... spoke of? Excuse the mistake! Look close,—you will see not a sign of a flake; We want some new garlands for those we have shed,— And these are white roses in ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... happened, Sue as yet scarcely knew. But in effect it had been like an avalanche—an avalanche that is built up, flake by flake, over a long period, and then gives way through even so light a touch as the springing to flight of a mountain bird. The Milo avalanche—it was made up of countless small tyrannies and scarcely noticeable acts of selfishness adroitly disguised. But touched into motion ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates
... mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet more curious; for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of, barbaric majesty, the noble negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously rolled his fine form. On his broad back, flaxen-haired Flask seemed a snow-flake. The bearer looked nobler than the rider. Though truly vivacious, tumultuous, ostentatious little Flask would now and then stamp with impatience; but not one added heave did he thereby give to the negro's lordly chest. So have I seen Passion and ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... moments of profound, imaginative power, in which the outward object appears to take colour and expression, a new nature almost, from the prompting of the observant mind, the actual world would, as it were, dissolve and detach itself, flake by flake, and he himself seemed to be the creator, and when he would the destroyer, of the world in which he lived—that old isolating thought of many a brain-sick mystic of ancient ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... German bullets removed from equipment found on Christmas Day, and a collection of bullets which I had picked out with my pocket knife from the walls of our house in St. Yvon. The only additional luggage to this inventory I have given was my usual copious supply of Gold Flake cigarettes, of which, during my life in France, I must ...
— Bullets & Billets • Bruce Bairnsfather
... to the vulgar eye is but a drop of water, loses anything in the eye of the physicist who knows that its elements are held together by a force which, if suddenly liberated, would produce a flash of lightning? Think you that what is carelessly looked upon by the uninitiated as a mere snow-flake, does not suggest higher associations to one who had seen through a microscope the wondrously-varied and elegant forms of snow-crystals? Think you that the rounded rock marked with parallel scratches, calls up as much poetry in an ignorant mind as in the mind of a geologist, ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... Associated Words: pluviography, flurry, sleet, spoondrift, drift, flake, igloo, slush, avalanche, hyetology, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... these excited feelings, the ballet; drawing its magic net about the soul. And soon, from the tangled yet harmonious mazes of the dance, came forth a sylph-like form, her scarf floating behind her, as if she were fanning the air with gauze-like wings. Noiseless as a feather or a snow-flake falls, did her feet touch the earth. She seemed to floatin the air, and the floor to bend and wave under her, as a branch, when a bird alights upon it, and takes wing again. Loud and rapturous applause followed each wonderful step, each voluptuous ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... writes in answer to SNOW-FLAKE that the way to make almond rock is to cut in small slices three-quarters of a pound of sweet almonds, half a pound of candied peel, and two ounces of citron; add one pound and a half of sugar, a quarter of a pound of flour, and the whites of six eggs. Roll the mixture ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... discouraged the joy of life. He scolded, he begged, he protested that he was ailing, and so behaved in the cleverest fashion; but nothing availed him until after hours of toil he achieved a woeful picture of a little lad at work on the flake at the close of day. It was Terry Lute himself, no doubt of it at all, but a sad, worn child, with a lame back, eyes of woe, gigantic tears—a tender young spirit oppressed, and, that there might be no mistake about the delicacy of his general ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... skies are dark and the coast is bleak, And the storm is wild and fierce, Its frozen flake on the upturned cheek Of the Pilgrim melts in tears, And the dawn that springs from the darkness there Is the morning light of ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... three hunters unable to fire for an instant. Gholab ducked behind a huge tree, and the infuriated brute crashed full into it, knocking off a great flake of the bark and wood. Stunned for an instant, it stood glaring around, and in that instant ...
— The Rogue Elephant - The Boys' Big Game Series • Elliott Whitney
... snow spaces and the gigantic shadows of the thinly timbered verge of the forest as they were and were not. Then there was a moment of alarm. An old birch, loosely clad with dry, ragged bark stood near to the house. A flake of falling fire fell on it. Instantly the whole trunk-cover blazed up with a roar like that of a great beast in pain. It was sudden and for the instant terrible, but the snow-laden leaves still left on it failed to take fire, and what in summer ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... waterspout, which advances on the ocean, threatening to annihilate everything, but which is dispersed by a stone thrown from the hand of a sailor; or an avalanche, which threatens to swallow towns, and fill up valleys, because a bird in its flight has detached a flake of snow on the summit ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... which whisper of humility. He finds them easily. In the first place literature is but a very insignificant flake on the foam of the wave of the world. As Mr. Pepys reminds us, most people please themselves "with easy delights of the world, eating, drinking, dancing, hunting, fencing," and not with book learning. Easy he calls them! I wish ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... looked was very wild and strange. The snow had now almost ceased; only a belated flake passed now and again across the picture. But the broad stretch of level before them was a ghastly white, broken only by gigantic masses and moving shapes and lengthy strips of impenetrable darkness, vast ungainly Titans of ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... a quarter of a Peck of Flower, and one Egg, yolk and white, half a Pound of Butter broke in little Bits, mix them together with so much cold Milk as will make it up, do not break your Butter too small, for then they will not flake; make them up like Rouls of Butter, and when your water boils, put them in, and do not boil them too much, then ...
— The Queen-like Closet or Rich Cabinet • Hannah Wolley
... hear the timber wolves howling in the blackness of the night, though several that got wind of him flitted across the ravine after the fire burned low, and, when at length he awakened, it was with the fall of a wet flake upon his face, and he saw the dim dawn breaking through a haze of sliding snow. It seemed a little warmer, and, as a matter of fact, it was so, for the cold snaps seldom last very long near the coast; but the raw damp struck through him ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... filtered through yon flutterer's folded mail, Clings the cooled wax, and hardens to a scale. Swift, at the well known call, the ready train, (For not a buz boon Nature breathes in vain,) Spring to each falling flake, and bear along Their glossy burdens to the builder throng. These with sharp sickle or with sharper tooth, Pare each excrescence, and each angle smooth, Till now, in finish'd pride, two radiant ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... kneeling on the hearth, and pressing the magnum opus, that was to shake Drumtochty, into the heart of the red fire, and he saw, half-smiling and half-weeping, the impressive words, "Semitic environment," shrivel up and disappear. As the last black flake fluttered out of sight, the face looked at him again, but this time the sweet brown ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... the same is generally damp from the beginning of the disease; severe sweats are observed on the head; with progressing disease the skin becomes dry, brittle, comes off in flake-like scales and only when the death-predicting increase of the pulse sets in, there appears a profuse sweat, the ...
— Prof. Koch's Method to Cure Tuberculosis Popularly Treated • Max Birnbaum
... so it chanced, one gentle day, While softly wept the rain, And sadly sighed the mourning breeze, The flowers to see again; A silvery snow-flake fell to earth, ...
— Small Means and Great Ends • Edited by Mrs. M. H. Adams
... fell like a snow-flake upon Hilda's mood and was swallowed up. "You are very preposterous," she said. "Go on. You always amuse one." Then as if Hilda's going on were precisely the thing she could not quite endure, she said quickly, "The Coromandel is telegraphed ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... fires, but now she looked at the grey sky and hoped the snow would come. She imagined the first flake hissing on the fire, and more flakes, and more and more, until there was no smoke to veil the god, only a thick wet blanket for his burial. She had loved his moor, yet he had forsaken her; she had been afraid to hope, she had gone humbly and she had prayed, but now ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... fled; all that they were able to say was, that on arriving at the prison, there was no Claquesous. Either the fairies or the police had had a hand in it. Had Claquesous melted into the shadows like a snow-flake in water? Had there been unavowed connivance of the police agents? Did this man belong to the double enigma of order and disorder? Was he concentric with infraction and repression? Had this sphinx his fore paws in crime and his hind paws in authority? Javert did not accept such comminations, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... forward to assist. While the wheel was being lifted over the curbstone, it was necessary that she should hold his arm; and for a moment her thin hand rested there, light and cold as a snowflake, and then, as it seemed to him, like a snow-flake melted away. Then there was a pause, and then conversation, the lady ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... was repeated, and pussy was induced to dance after a string dangled before her, to roll over and play in apparent ecstasy with a flake of wool, as if it were a mouse, and Watch joined in the game in full amity. Mother Dolly, busy with her distaff, looked on, not displeased, except when she had to guard her spindle from the kitten's pranks, but she was less happy when the children ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a chair that I had dusted," she replied, "one of the feet touched the sofa lightly, when off dropped that veneer like a loose flake. I've been examining the sofa since, and find that it is a very bad piece of work. ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... gave the psychometrist a minute piece of the enamel of the tooth of a mastodon, which had been found thirty feet below the surface of the earth. The psychometrist had not the slightest knowledge of the character of the tiny flake of enamel handed her, but nevertheless reported: "My impression is that it is a part of some monstrous animal, probably part of a tooth. I feel like a perfect monster, with heavy legs, unwieldy head, and very large body. I go down to a shallow stream to drink. I can hardly speak, ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... smooth black canal between two steep white banks; and the glassy water seems momentarily stiffening into the solider blackness of ice. Here and there thin films are already formed over it, and are being constantly broken apart by the treacherous current; a flake a foot square is jerked away and goes sliding beneath the slight transparent surface till it reappears below. The same thing, on a larger scale, helps to form the mighty ice-pack of the Northern seas. Nothing except ice is capable of combining, on the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... came up about the puzzled young aviators as might a snowdrift or it heap of hay. Dave dashed a filmy, flake-like substance resembling sawdust from eyes, ears and mouth. Hiram tried to disentangle himself from strips and curls of some light, fluffy ...
— Dave Dashaway and his Hydroplane • Roy Rockwood
... contrition and self-abasement she thought thus, a ray of brightness penetrated into the dismal abyss—a ray more vivid and glorious than the sunbeams which thaw the snow figures that the children make in their gardens. And this ray, more quickly than the snow-flake that falls upon a child's warm mouth can be melted into a drop of water, caused Inger's petrified figure to evaporate, and a little bird arose, following the zigzag course of the ray, up towards the world that mankind inhabit. But it seemed afraid and shy of everything around it; it felt ashamed ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... fast, O'er night's brim, day boils at last; Boils, pure gold, o'er the cloud-cup's brim Where spurting and suppressed it lay, 5 For not a froth-flake touched the rim Of yonder gap in the solid gray Of the eastern cloud, an hour away; But forth one wavelet, then another, curled, Till the whole sunrise, not to be suppressed, 10 Rose, reddened, and its ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... same busy, noisy, cheery body. One day I saw a robin dart like a meteor from the top of a high ridge over the cliffs to the valley below, where he alighted on a cultivated field almost as lightly as a flake of snow. He—probably she (what a trouble these pronouns are, anyway!)—gathered a mouthful of worms for his nestlings, then dashed up to the top of the ridge again, which he did, not by flying out into the air, but by keeping close up to the steep, cliffy wall, striking ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... grit forced to the surface, might have chosen to face the brute, hoping to despatch it with a well-aimed kick. But with two dogs, both intent on "getting" him, young Benson knew that he would stand the fabled chance of a snow-flake on ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies - The Prize Detail at Annapolis • Victor G. Durham
... saw a little flake of snow Fall down towards the land; 'Twas such a tender little thing, It rested on my hand. But after, when I went abroad, And looked on field and hill, The snow had covered everything, And all ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... her hands for ever moving—their touch as warm as sunbeams. Then, no longer Sarelli this, and that! The little house close to the ramparts! Two arms, two eyes, and nothing here," he tapped his breast, "but flames that made ashes quickly—in her, like this ash—!" he flicked the white flake off his cigar. "It's droll! You agree, hein? Some day I shall go back and kill her. In ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... jackknife, three hair-pins, the remains of an old brush or broom, are all the implements necessary. If you have a box of paints, so much the better. In the first place, cut the body of the spider out of a cork, as represented in Fig. 1; then paint it all over with flake-white; when that is perfectly dry, paint it as bright a yellow as you can; and after that, paint black stripes on it with lamp-black or Indian ink. Then get the hairs from an old brush, a few sticks of broom-corn will answer as well, and stick ...
— Harper's Young People, May 18, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... clanged, a vibration tingled underfoot, and then, soft as a flake of snow, the great ship began to rise, its movement perceptible only by the sudden drop and vanishing of the spire of rock at which Percy still stared. Slowly the snowfield too began to flit downwards, a black cleft, whisked smoothly ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... is the chamber containing the Standing Rock behind which Mr. Johnstone made his famous discovery of the concealed pin-head. It is an immense great fallen rock on whose dark surface are scattered transparent flake-like crystals of satin spar, resembling the congealed drops of a summer shower. The mind-reader entered the chamber by the ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... to her work once more, but for a quarter of an hour she felt her heart leaping in her bosom like a big snow-flake. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... — N. layer, stratum, strata, course, bed, zone, substratum, substrata, floor, flag, stage, story, tier, slab, escarpment; table, tablet; dess^; flagstone; board, plank; trencher, platter. plate; lamina, lamella; sheet, foil; wafer; scale, flake, peel; coat, pellicle; membrane, film; leaf; slice, shive^, cut, rasher, shaving, integument &c (covering) 223; eschar^. stratification, scaliness, nest of boxes, coats of an onion. monolayer; bilayer; trilayer [Bioch.]. V. slice, shave, pare, peel; delaminate; plate, coat, veneer; cover &c 223. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... "is a collection of icy crystals. If you could look at one under the microscope, Anton, you'd see that every little projection that goes to make up the shape of the flake, is a six-sided crystal. You've eaten barley-sugar from a string some time, ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... Athos lack the wonderful colour and the clean surface of this one. Looks as if it had been done with a knife, doesn't it? Alpine crags seem vertical but are nearly always inclined; their primary rock, you know, cannot flake off abruptly like this tufa. This is a genuine ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... have not seen a cloud, nor a drop of rain nor a flake of snow, nor a flash of lightning, nor ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... our snow-storms, why Not view them with poet's or artist's eye? Watch each pearly flake as it falls from above, Like snowy plumes from some spotless dove, Clothing all objects in ermine rare, More sure than the ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... spoke, every man, as by a set ritual, took from a little skin wallet at his side a sharp flake of coral-stone, and, drawing it deliberately across his breast in a deep red gash, caused the blood to flow out freely over his chest and long grass waistband. Then, having done so, they never strove for a moment to stanch the wound, but let the red ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... from the obscurity; one of them was accompanied by what seemed a flight of small startled birds crossing the road ahead of them. A second larger and more sustained flight showed his astonished eyes that they were white, and each bird an enormous flake of SNOW! For an instant the air was filled with these disks, shreds, patches,—two or three clinging together,—like the downfall shaken from a tree, striking the leather roof and sides with a dull thud, spattering the road into which they descended with large rosettes ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... fled. And where the flowers had been, the violets and the wind-flowers and the clematis and the columbine and all the ferns and flowering shrubs, there lay the snow. Everywhere the snow, pure, white, and myriad-gemmed, but every flake a flower's shroud. ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... motions of vibrating air? Julian's words passed by the warped nature of Hazlet like the idle wind, and left no more trace upon him than the snow-flake when it has melted into the purpling sea. As the weeks went on, his ill-regulated passions grew more and more free from the control of reason or manliness, and he sank downwards, downwards, downwards, into the most shameful ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... Cereals: All the toasted-flake foods; toasted and not too fresh bread, including both graham and bran; hominy; corn meal; oatmeal; farina; ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... terrible errand. Who may predict the precise moment when the earthquake shall rock, the tornado sweep, the red lightning scathe, or the lava flood desolate? And who shall tell the day or the hour when the people, in their majesty and might, shall rise to avenge their wrongs? The snow-flake falls fleecily on the mountain's top through many a long and silent night; a land green as Eden smiles over the volcano; through many a calm and sunny day the electric flame gathers in the firmament! At length, when least expected, the avalanche sweeps, the ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... whitened the crown of her red cap and clung to her shoulders. Have you ever seen snow-crystals gleam, break, dissolve in fair, soft, storm-blown hair? Do you know how a man will pledge his soul that a particular flake will never fade, never cease to rest upon a certain flying strand over a girlish temple? And he loses—his heart and his wager—in a breath! If you fail to understand these things, and are furthermore unfamiliar with the fact that the color in the cheeks of a girl who ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... present he was settling affairs to that end. This afternoon he expected a visit from Mr. Cartwright, who had been serving him in several ways of late, and who had promised to come and talk business for an hour. The day was anything but cheerful; at times a stray flake of snow hissed upon the fire; already, at three o'clock, ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... Mother protested, though her cheek had been cut by a flying flake of flint, and was bleeding. "But look ... over there!" She pointed over the veld to the prostrate brown figure, and a cry of ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... cried Hagan, "stand close against the wall; Let not the burning ashes on your helm-laces fall. Into the blood yet deeper tread every fiery flake. In sooth, this feast ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock
... I, with a half look at him, for I believed he was joking. For my part, it was all ice to me—one dense, yelling atmosphere of snow; every flake barbed, and the cold of a bitterness beyond words. He fell a-sniffing again, quickly and vehemently, and stepped to the side, sending a thirsty look into the white blindness ahead, whilst I heard him mutter, "There 's ice close ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... and flicker and fly away, Trailing light as you flutter far, Are you a lamp for the fairies, say? Or a flake of fire ...
— Child Songs of Cheer • Evaleen Stein
... You may have the bitterest northeast winds here in London throughout the winter without a single flake of snow. Cold must have the fitting object to operate upon, and this object—the aqueous vapor of the air—is the direct product of heat. Let us put this glacier question in another form: the latent ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... days! Notice it —every stone is laid horizontally; that is to say, just as nature laid it originally in the quarry not set up edgewise; in our day some people set them on edge, and then wonder why they split and flake. Architects cannot teach nature anything. Let me remove this matting—it is put here to preserve the pavement; now there is a bit of pavement that is seven hundred years old; you can see by these scattering clusters of colored mosaics how beautiful it was before ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of the sea, which, though it takes its ease, is forbidden absolute rest, transformed it until imagination created similitude to a serpent in its natural element. Its half-concealed, formless head was verified by a flake of rust just where a watchful eye might have been, and the sun ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... me spake, "But the Lamb did bless it when He planned To suffer there sorely for man's sake. That is the old city we understand, And there the bonds of old guilt did break; But the new, alighted from God's hand, The Apostle John for his theme did take. The Lamb Who is white with never a flake Of black, did thither His fair folk draw; For His flock no fenced fold need He make, Nor moat for ...
— The Pearl • Sophie Jewett
... not of aught save song; Beauty can do no wrong. Let but th' inviolable music shake Golden on golden flake, Down to the human throng, And one, one surely, will look ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... girls paid no attention to his gibes and shuffled on into the woods. Helen suddenly saw a snow flake upon her jacket sleeve. She called Ruth's attention ...
— Ruth Fielding at Snow Camp • Alice Emerson
... The snaw-flake is pure frae the clud when it 's shaken, And melts into dew ere it fa's on the bracken, Oh sae pure is the heart I hae won to my keepin'! But warm as the sun-blink that thaw'd it ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... over by the bony tissue. A bone of some bovine animal with an arrow deeply imbedded in it has been taken from a bed of peat in the island of Moen, celebrated for its tumuli and the number of objects found in them. At Eyzies, a flint flake has been found firmly fixed in one of the lumbar vertebrae of a young reindeer, and M. de Baye mentions an arrow with a tranverse edge stuck in the bone of a badger.[67] The Abbe Ducrost found a flint arrow-head sticking in a vertebra ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... long night until the silver break Of day the little gray feet know no rest, Through the lone night until the last snow-flake Has dropped from heaven upon the earth's white breast, The dusky, half-clad girls of tired feet Are trudging, thinly ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... towards the quadrangle, I saw that, in spite of the mildness of the weather, it was covered with snow. What a delicate attention on the part of Jesus! Gratifying the least wish of His little Spouse, He even sent her this. Where is the creature so mighty that he can make one flake of it fall to please ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... Charley," said his mother. "That snow fell in tiny bits, flake by flake, but you see what a great pile it ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... of griefe and anguish vehement, He lowdly brayd, that like was never heard, And from his wide devouring oven[*] sent A flake of fire, that, flashing in his beard, Him all amazd, and almost made affeard: 230 The scorching flame sore swinged all his face, And through his armour all his body seard, That he could not endure so cruell cace, But ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... bright The stars of the night Than the eyes of the radiant girl! And never a flake That the vapor can make 10 With the moon-tints of purple and pearl Can vie with the modest Eulalie's most unregarded curl, Can compare with the bright-eyed Eulalie's most humble ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... been largely dependent upon importations from Ceylon for crucible graphite. Domestic supplies are large and capable of further development, but for the most part the flake is of such quality that it is not desired for crucible manufacture without large admixture of the Ceylon material. Restrictions during the war required crucible makers to use at least 20 per cent of domestic or Canadian graphite in their mixtures, with 80 per cent of foreign graphite. This ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... a woman, but belongs to us and the woods and the waters and the midnight. A child singing wonderful songs in the starlight, serenading with tender, passionate love-songs the old man who waves his hand and breathes down a kiss which is chilled by the night air, and falls like a snow-flake into her hot bosom, not as a star upon ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... drapery could entirely conceal, heaved tumultuously with gushing joy, and holy happiness, and pure passion, and maidenly fear. Her small, exquisite hand, on whose taper fore-finger glittered a magnificent diamond ring, (her husband's gift,) rested upon the gorgeous counterpane, like a snow-flake upon a ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... inward morn, Irradiate hearts that are yet unborn; A youthful race call our earth their own, And gaze on its wonders from thought's high throne; Embraced by fair Nature, the youth will embrace. The maid beside him, his queen of the race; When thou and I shall have passed away Like the foam-flake thou ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... walked on in silence, twisting a lock of her front hair, and looking up at the sky. A few soft snow-flakes were dropping out of the clouds. Every flake seemed to fall on her heart. Winter was coming. It was a gray, miserable world, and she was left out in the cold. She remembered she had been happy once, but that was ages ago. It wasn't likely she should ever smile again; and as for laughter, she knew that was ...
— Dotty Dimple at Play • Sophie May
... wherewith, in distances beyond the ken of lads, it melted; and upon the thirty wee white houses of our folk, scattered haphazard about the harbour water, each in its own little cove and each with its own little stage and great flake; and over the barren, swelling rock beyond, to the blue ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... 1456. The snow fell over Paris with rigorous, relentless persistence; sometimes the wind made a sally and scattered it in flying vortices; sometimes there was a lull, and flake after flake descended out of the black night air, silent, circuitous, interminable. To poor people, looking up under moist eyebrows, it seemed a wonder where it all came from. Master Francis Villon had propounded ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... medicine-bottle banged and bumped in her pocket as she gripped the iron bars hand over hand and toiled aloft. "It is for the sake of a life," she panted to herself. "It is a good work. He might die if I did not come. Ah! it is terrible." A flake of rust from the long disused irons had fallen on her nose. The rungs were chafing her hands, and the minutes were flying. The round, red face of the caretaker's wife grew smaller and smaller below her, and there was a rumbling of wheels in the avenue. An idle coachman, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... and the hind feet are broad plates without indications of toes, a characteristic of these golden frogs. The framework or foundation is of copper, apparently nearly pure, and the surface is plated with thin sheet gold, which tends to flake off as the copper ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... converse with life's wintry gales, Should man learn how to clasp with tougher roots The inspiring earth;—how otherwise avails The leaf-creating sap that sunward shoots? So every year that falls with noiseless flake Should fill old scars up on the stormward side, And make hoar age revered for age's sake, Not for traditions of youth's ...
— Arbor Day Leaves • N.H. Egleston |
