"Thinness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... adjoining the corona, or they may be in the loose folds in the neighborhood of the frenum, the retention of the virus seemingly being assisted by the topographical condition and relation of the parts, and its absorption facilitated by the thinness of the mucous membrane, as well as by the active circulation and moisture and heat of the parts. It must be evident that but for these favoring conditions the inoculation or infection would and could not be either as sure or as frequent. Any protecting mechanical ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... in his labour. His few common tools and various scraps of leather were at his feet and on his bench. He had a white beard, raggedly cut, but not very long, a hollow face, and exceedingly bright eyes. The hollowness and thinness of his face would have caused them to look large, under his yet dark eyebrows and his confused white hair, though they had been really otherwise; but, they were naturally large, and looked unnaturally so. His yellow ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... "There!"—yet at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious stage. As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... being so bandied. Now I think on it, 'twere possible his legs were cushioned thus to hide a senile thinness! 'Tis human nature when badgered by excess of limit to flounder into limitless excess. Look upon the Burgomaster at thy feet with a surfeit of good round legs, he is unfortunate for being in excess, he cannot whittle down. 'Tis a queer being with whom he dances,—here comes a queen, see, ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... reached the shore of the lake; I walked on as far as the pigeon-shooting ground. The idea of perfection which I had within me I had bestowed, in that other time, upon the height of a victoria, upon the raking thinness of those horses, frenzied and light as wasps upon the wing, with bloodshot eyes like the cruel steeds of Diomed, which now, smitten by a desire to sea again what I had once loved, as ardent as the desire that had driven me, many years before, along the same paths, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... pylorus becomes indurated and forms a scirrhus, of which the patient dies. Well, I have reached that point, my dear friend. The induration is proceeding and nothing checks it. Just look at my yellow skin, my feverish eyes, my excessive thinness. I am withering away. But what is to be done? I brought the seeds of the disease home with me from the emigration; heaven knows what I suffered then! My marriage, which might have repaired the wrong, far from soothing my ulcerated mind increased the wound. What did I find? ceaseless fears for the ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... day without water or moist meat, you shall see him took so thin in many places as in the musculous parts, that you will hardly believe it to be the same Horse, especially if he be (as the Phrase is among Horse-masters) a Nash or Wash-Horse. The cause of which thinness will easily be granted to be only an exhaustion of Juice, expended out of the Blood, which did stuff out these Vessels. And whoever, that is used to ride hard, shall observe, how thick this foul Horse breaths, and at what a rate he will reek and sweat, will not much ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... isn't guilty!" said Alston with violence, and did not even remember to be glad no legal brother was present to hear so irrational an explosion. He hurried on lest she should call satiric attention to its thinness. "And as for Madame Beattie, she'll get nothing out of it. For the necklace being lost, she ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... all four of those last surplus pounds and two more in three days. Those two extra pounds might be construed to prove love, but exactly on whom I was utterly unprepared to say. I didn't even enjoy the thinness, but took a kind of already-married look in my glass and tried to slip the egg past my bored lips and get myself to chew it down. It was work; and then I took up the judge's letter, which also was work and more ...
— The Melting of Molly • Maria Thompson Daviess
... look, and was conscious of that in it which corresponded to his own brutality. She had become suddenly a much older woman; her cheeks were tight drawn into thinness, her lips were bloodlessly hard, there was an unknown furrow along her forehead, and she glared like the animal that defends itself with ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... on the one hand, the thickness and stiffness of the petioles, and, on the other hand, the thinness and softness of fine cotton thread, and what an extremely small weight one-sixteenth of a grain (4.05 mg.) is, these facts are remarkable. But I have reason to believe that even a less weight excites curvature when pressing over a broader surface than that acted on by a thread. Having noticed ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... while some leathers seem to be generally good until about 1860, after which date nearly all leathers seem to get worse. The deterioration of calf bindings at the latter end of the 19th century may be attributed as much to the excessive thinness as to the poor quality of ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell
... no longer warm. The darkness, too, made Gertrude restless and they searched the storage closets vainly for candles. When they sat down again they could hear the panting of the engine. The exhaust had the thinness of extreme cold. They were winding on heavy grades among the Buttes of the Castle Creek country, and when the engineer whistled for Castle station the big chime of the engine had shrunk to a baby's treble; it was growing ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... made in this way, are very apt to crack and break into fragments, it is better to employ marine glue as the cementing material. By the use of this substance, slices of considerable size and of extreme thinness and transparency ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Madras City, among an equally poor urban population, we found that 78 per cent. of our pupils were reported, after a medical inspection, to be suffering from malnutrition. And the spareness of frame, the thinness of arms and legs, the pitiably weak grip on life, speak without words to the seeing eye. It needs an extraordinary lack of imagination not to suffer while these things are ...
— The Case For India • Annie Besant
... orchestra of indescribable richness, delicacy, and suppleness—an orchestra that melts and shimmers with opalescent hues—an orchestra that has substance without density, sonority without blatancy, refinement without thinness. ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... they stood, they were able to locate the clearing by means of a thinness of the trees, a few more rays of daylight penetrating from that direction. Hay-uta happened to be looking toward that point, when he caught the outline of a figure stealing along the ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... burning, else the smoke would not have caught the eye of the Indian youth; but it must have been smoldering for hours, judging from the thinness of the vapor, and the fact that little more than a pile of ashes and decaying embers ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... some attention to the prejudices of mankind. The sternness of age and the austerity of censoriousness are now silent. Now pleasure wears a freer garb; and the manners of enjoyment are more frank and unrestrained. The thinness of indiscretion and the airy forms of inadvertence are lost and annihilated amid ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... been rolled out to the requisite thinness, he took Reuben's hand and pressed the thumb lightly but firmly on to the inked plate; then, transferring the thumb to one of the cards, which he directed me to hold steady on the table, he repeated the pressure, when there was left on the card a beautifully sharp and clear impression ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... a straight line. In some places for one reason or another, the thickness or thinness of the grass, the slope of the land, or the varying strength of the wind, the fire gained or lost ground. In some places great patches of land were cut off as islands by the joining of advanced columns ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... Catholic chapel; and on shore a fat padre was waiting in his wagon for the inevitable priest we always set ashore at such a place. The missionary we landed was the young father from Arichat, and in appearance the pleasing historical Jesuit. Slender is too corpulent a word to describe his thinness, and his stature was primeval. Enveloped in a black coat, the skirts of which reached his heels, and surmounted by a black hat with an enormous brim, he had the form of an elegant toadstool. The traveler is always grateful for such figures, and is not disposed to quarrel with the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... a sofa, her face emaciated to a surprising thinness for the comparatively short interval since her attack. 'Come in, sir,' she said, as soon as she saw him, holding out her hand. ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... of the change; for being naturally fair and high-coloured, he was a person on whom the traces of illness were particularly visible. The colour was totally gone, even from his lips; his cheeks were sunken, his brow looked broader and more massive from the thinness of his face and the loss of his hair, and his eyes themselves appeared unlike what they used to be in the hollows round them. He seemed tranquil, and comfortable, but so wan, weak, and subdued, and so different from himself, that ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with a subject discussed by Humboldt. (1/7. "Personal Narrative" volume 5 part 1 page 18.) At the cataracts of the great rivers Orinoco, Nile, and Congo, the syenitic rocks are coated by a black substance, appearing as if they had been polished with plumbago. The layer is of extreme thinness; and on analysis by Berzelius it was found to consist of the oxides of manganese and iron. In the Orinoco it occurs on the rocks periodically washed by the floods, and in those parts alone where the stream is rapid; or, as the Indians say, "the rocks are black where the waters are white." Here ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... drapery, is not its being made of silk or worsted or flax, for things are made of all these which are not drapery, but the ideas peculiar to drapery; the properties which, when inherent in a thing, make it drapery, are extension, non-elastic flexibility, unity and comparative thinness. Everything which has these properties, a waterfall, for instance, if united and extended, or a net of weeds over a wall, is drapery, as much as silk or woollen stuff is. So that these ideas separate drapery in our minds from everything else; they are peculiarly characteristic ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... Against such blasts the solid wall was necessary, while the many intersecting partitions inside gave additional strength. It was a very solid structure as against winds, notwithstanding the comparative thinness of the walls,—0.63 m.—2 ft.—being their greatest width, and ...
— Historical Introduction to Studies Among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico; Report on the Ruins of the Pueblo of Pecos • Adolphus Bandelier
... two souls therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to airy thinness beat. ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... you would indeed say so. She has now and then a beautiful little pink flush, that lights up her eyes as well as her cheeks; and when she smiles and talks about those old times with papa, she does really look just like the miniature, all but her thinness." ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... arms and hands and fingernails, her waist and ankles and her pretty feet, were all absolute perfection. The illusion that veiled her slender arms stood at crisp angles; the silk stockings showed a warm skin tint through their thinness; her lower eyelids had been skillfully darkened, her cheeks delicately rouged, and her lips touched with carmine; her brows had been clipped and trained and pencilled, her lashes brushed with liquid dye, and what fragrant powders and perfumes ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... —with that charm of Italian vegetation that comes to us as its confession of having scenically served, to weariness at last, for some pastoral these many centuries a classic. In a certain cheapness and thinness of substance—as compared with the English stoutness, never left athirst—it reminds me of our own, and it is relatively dry enough and pale enough to explain the contempt of many unimaginative Britons. But it has an idle abundance ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... gasping, staggering, stammering tom-fool" is not an amiable one! Or take his account of Wordsworth- -how instead of a hand-shake, the poet intrusted him with "a handful of numb unresponsive fingers," and how his speech "for prolixity, thinness, endless dilution" excelled all the other speech that Carlyle had ever heard from mortals. He admitted that Wordsworth was "a genuine man, but intrinsically and extrinsically a small one, let them sing or say what they will." In fact, Carlyle despised his trade: one of the most vivid ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... First it had alarmed the girl in Mouquin's, and now this stranger in the curio-shop. I was confident that the latter had lied in regard to his explanations. The card had startled him, but his reasons were altogether of transparent thinness. A man never likes to confess that he is unlucky at cards; there is a certain pride in lying about the enormous stakes you have won and the wonderful draws you have made. I frowned. It was not possible for me to figure out what his interest in the card was. ...
— Hearts and Masks • Harold MacGrath
... thin, but men, at least, could not think merely of her thinness, unless, when walking with her, they became fascinated by its shadow on the ground. She was tall, and had a very clear, pale complexion and light-brown hair. Light brown, too, were her heavy eyelashes, which were famous for being black-tipped, as if a brush had touched them, though it had ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... right eye, which had retained its sight longer than the other. He says: "It is interesting to notice that those parts of the cortex which, according to the current view, were associated with the defective sense organs were also particularly thin. The cause of this thinness was found to be due, at least in part, to the small size of the nerve cells there present. Not only were the large and medium-sized cells smaller, but the impression made on the observer was that they were also less numerous than in the ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... of logical accretion was this slight "personality," the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl, to find itself endowed with the high attributes of a Subject?—and indeed by what thinness, at the best, would such a subject not be vitiated? Millions of presumptuous girls, intelligent or not intelligent, daily affront their destiny, and what is it open to their destiny to be, at the most, that we should make an ado about it? The novel is of its very nature an "ado," an ado about ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... ever had, with all the wealth of love his clean young heart had in its power to give, now that he thought her unattainable and with all her own affection given to another man. And this same heart that loved her so ached and ached over Arethusa's paleness and thinness; but he accepted Miss Eliza's explanation as the literal one, that the winter in Lewisburg had been too much for her, and that all she needed was a tonic. Had Timothy talked a little to Miss Asenath, as in the old and far happier days, he might have formed very different conclusions. Yet ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... big, appealing eyes, with their trick of following people about. She looked a little pale and pathetic, which somehow gave her a specious air of being pretty, which she really was not at all. The swaying young thinness of those very slight girls whose soft summer muslins make them look like delicate bags tied in the middle with fluttering ribbons, has almost invariably a foolish attraction for burly young men whose characters are chiefly marked by lack of ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... she said. "They could n't, you know. They are not the kind of bones to do it. Just think of her dreadful elbows and her fearful shoulder-blades! You couldn't look like her. I don't mean that sort of thinness at all. But you seem so light and so little. And look here," and she held up the painfully small hand, the poor little hand without the ring. "There are no dimples here ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... round of the garden, they came suddenly upon Mr. Hale, whose whereabouts had been quite forgotten by them. He had not yet finished the pear, which he had delicately peeled in one long strip of silver-paper thinness, and which he was enjoying in a deliberate manner. It was like the story of the eastern king, who dipped his head into a basin of water, at the magician's command, and ere he instantly took it out went through the experience of a lifetime. I Margaret felt stunned, and unable to ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... of middle age and of very ordinary appearance; so ordinary, in fact, that he was difficult to describe—his only peculiarity being his extreme thinness. Pleasant—that is, good—vibrations issued from his atmosphere and met Dr. Silence as he advanced to greet him, yet vibrations alive with currents and discharges betraying the perturbed and disordered condition of his mind ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... fineness of the luster of a pearl, or as is said in the trade, the orient, depends upon the number of layers that take part in the reflection, and this number in turn depends upon the translucency of the material and the thinness of the layers. Very fine pearls usually have very many, very thin layers taking part in the reflection. The degree of translucency, considered apart, is sometimes called ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... clerks were not wrong when they prophesied the death of their employer at no distant day. Since the flight of Cecily, the notary was hardly to be recognized. Although his visage was of a frightful thinness, and of a cadaverous hue, a hectic flush colored his hollow cheeks; a nervous shivering, except when interrupted by convulsive spasms, agitated his frame continually; his bony hands were dry and burning; his large green spectacles concealed his bloodshot eyes, ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... poet which he could not understand or any alien form of human aspiration; even the parish notices and the publication of banns he received with earnest attention. His intensity of interest as he listened to the sermon sometimes flattered the mild vicar, and at other times—when thinness of argument pricked his conscience—alarmed him considerably. But Sypher would not have dared enter into theological disputation. He took the sermon as he took the hymns, in which he joined lustily. Cousin Jane, whom he invariably ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... mid-century, but Hugo is not to be presented as a torso. In the tale Les Travailleurs de la Mer (1866) the choral voices of the sea cover the thinness and strain of the human voices; if the writer's genius is present in L'Homme qui Rit (1869), it often chooses to display its most preposterous attitudes; the better scenes of Quatre-vingt Treize (1874) beguile our judgment into the generous ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... spare man with a face that even in the wrinkles and thinness of age, and perhaps a little asceticism, was sweet and calm, and the brown eyes were soft, entreating. Clean shaven, the chin showed narrow, but the mouth redeemed it. He wore the black cassock of the Recollets, the waist girded ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... she even presented herself, all of a sudden, in full ball-dress. These surprises might have perilous consequences. He reproached her for her lack of prudence. Nevertheless, he was not taken with her appearance. The low body of her dress exposed her thinness too freely. ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... she sees me. She always used to look nice as a new pin, and she liked me to look so too; so I'd better put my best foot foremost when she hasn't laid eyes on me for such an age. I'm fright enough, anyway, goodness knows, with my thinness, and my old lame leg; so—" sticking his head out of the window, and using his lungs with astonishing vigor—"Driver! streak like lightning, will you, to the 'Merchants'? and ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... before. She stood in a pose that was habitual to her—her hands linked behind her, the head leaned on one side, the little black eyes—but not ugly eyes— fixed in a sweet subtle and enquiring look. The thinness, and, indeed, the angularity of her figure was almost powerfully indicated with broad lines of paint and charcoal. It was Frank's most successful effort. He knew this, and he said to himself, "Not half bad, very like her, quite the character; the drawing is right, if I could ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... no part of our Union is more exposed to invasion by the numerous avenues leading to it, or more defenseless by the thinness of the neighboring population, or offers a greater temptation to invasion, either as a permanent acquisition or as a prize to the cupidity of grasping invaders from the immense amount of produce deposited ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 2: James Monroe • James D. Richardson
... unexpected departure had prevented you from speaking before, but that it was at his entire command, only that, after Ducie, all you could hope was, that the extent of the land might make up for the thinness of the game. He was greatly pleased. Adieu! All good angels guard over you. I will write every day to the post-office, Bath. Think of me very much. ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... saw the shocking thinness of the little face, made into a wolf's face by hunger; the mingled horror and desperation of the eyes; the big man would not have believed a child's face could express emotions of such magnitude. He ...
— The Mascot of Sweet Briar Gulch • Henry Wallace Phillips
... said, with a penetrating glance at Susan. What a pretty girl Susan must have been, so soft and pale and appealing, a little human wood-anemone! She would be very pretty again when she had got over the scared look and the thinness which was almost emaciation. And how well that print suited her! Lady O'Gara had sent down a bundle of things to the South lodge, so that Susan might not appear as a scarecrow to the people. The print had pale green leaves sprinkled over a white surface. It suggested a snowdrop, perished ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... of preparation pervaded the kitchen. Mrs. Binney, enormous, good-natured, capable, was opening crabs at one end of the table, her sleeves rolled up, and her gingham dress, in the last stage of age and thinness, protected by a new stiff white apron; Celia, Mrs. Carew's cook, was sitting opposite her, dismembering two cold roasted fowls; Lizzie Binney, as trim and pretty as her mother was shapeless and plain, was filling ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... the air cells are of extreme thinness, consisting of delicate elastic and connective tissue, and lined inside by a single layer of thin epithelial cells. In the connective tissue run capillary vessels belonging to the pulmonary artery and veins. Now these delicate vessels running in the connective tissue are ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... the new one, that's flat," muttered the widow; and she drew out the old one and began to fold it up. But though she had made much of its thinness and insufficiency to the Baroness, she was so powerfully affected at parting with it, that all its good qualities came strongly to ...
— Old-Fashioned Fairy Tales • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... reflection of the sunlight on the white buildings in the streets; for Angouleme, being set upon a hill, is exposed to the full glare of the sun. Tall Cointet was really scarcely above middle height; he looked much taller than he actually was by reason of the thinness, which told of overwork and a brain in continual ferment. His lank, sleek gray hair, cut in somewhat ecclesiastical fashion; the black trousers, black stockings, black waistcoat, and long puce-colored greatcoat (styled a levite ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... oven. The dough can be kept for days by putting it in the flour barrel under the flour, and bake a few at a time The more flour that can be worked in and the smoother they can be rolled, the better and more brittle they will be. Should be rolled out to wafer-like thinness. Bake quickly without burning. They should become ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... cloisters, an entanglement of stairways, galleries, and arches falling to the precipices below: all this in miniature; built up in a tiny space; all this encompassed with formidable ramparts, and hooked on to the flanks of gigantic Sinai! From the sharpness and thinness of the air, we know that we are at an excessive height, and yet we seem to be at the bottom of a well. On every side the extreme peaks of Sinai enclose us, as they mount and scale the sky; their titanic walls, all of blood-red granite without stain or shadow, are so vertical ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... about the matter) is evident from the rich store of technical expressions in the Greek language, for every gradation of the age, and character of masks. See the Onomasticon of Jul. Pollux. In the marble masks, however, we can neither see the thinness of the mass from which the real masks were executed, the more delicate colouring, nor the exquisite mechanism of the fittings. The abundance of excellent workmen possessed by Athens, in everything which had ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... the men to embark in cases of this kind would have been out of place, as it is not only discomfort, or even the risk of the loss of a limb, but life itself that becomes the question. The boats, notwithstanding the thinness of our ranks, left the vessel at half-past five. The rough weather of yesterday having proved but a summer's gale, the wind came to-day in gentle breezes; yet, the atmosphere being cloudy, it had not a very favourable appearance. The boats reached the rock at six a.m., and the eight ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thought he, "evidently is the result of other peculiarities which nullify the harmony of the more important features; in the first place the thinness of the cheeks and their hue of old wood dotted here and there with freckles, calm stains of the colour of stale bran; then the flat braids of white hair drawn smooth under a frilled cap, and finally the modest dress, a black dress clumsily made, dragging across the bosom, ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... rob me of my coffee now!" said Mr. Prohack, surrendering his cup. "Is it thin, or isn't it? I pride myself on living the higher life; my stomach is not my inexorable deity; but even on the mountain top which I inhabit there must be a limit to the thinness of ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... a tine of the fork, the chop was of a thinness to have enabled one to read through ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... form in the thin, gray fog that filled the huge station from the platform to the glass roof. The latter had vanished, indistinguishable from sky invisible, and from the brooding darkness, in which the lamps innumerable served only to make spots of thinness. It was a mist, not a November fog, properly so called; but every breath breathed by every porter, as he ran along by the side of the slowly halting train, was adding to its mass, which seemed to Mary to grow in bulk and density ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... counter eagerly reading an Atlanta paper while he stood looking over her shoulder. She had passed well into spinsterhood, as was shown by the inward sinking of her cheeks, the downward tendency of the lines about her mouth, the traces of gray in her brown hair, and a general thinness and stiffness ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... FACTORY.—In the first department, sheets of steel received from Sheffield are passed through rolling mills driven by steam, under charge of men and boys, until they are reduced to the thinness of a steel pen, to the length of about thirty inches, and the breadth of about three inches. These steel slips are conveyed to a large roomy workshop, with windows at both sides, scrupulously clean, where are seated in double rows an army of women and girls, from fourteen to forty years ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... gave a little smiling sigh, as if he had been a long sum in addition. And, indeed, he was very long, Basil Ransom, and he even looked a little hard and discouraging, like a column of figures, in spite of the friendly face which he bent upon his hostess's deputy, and which, in its thinness, had a deep dry line, a sort of premature wrinkle, on either side of the mouth. He was tall and lean, and dressed throughout in black; his shirt-collar was low and wide, and the triangle of linen, ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... plateau which crowned the barren hill there stood a single giant boulder, and against this boulder there lay a tall man, long-bearded and hard-featured, but of an excessive thinness. His placid face and regular breathing showed that he was fast asleep. Beside him lay a little child, with her round white arms encircling his brown sinewy neck, and her golden haired head resting upon the breast of his velveteen tunic. Her rosy lips were parted, showing the regular ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... me hardest was the thin little children. Elisabeth hadn't come to us yet," Roger went on, referring to a Belgian baby that had been sent to the Club to take care of, "and I wasn't so accustomed to thinness as I've grown to be since, and it made me—well, ...
— Ethel Morton at Rose House • Mabell S. C. Smith
... if furtively, not really aware of what she was seeing. There was a great physical attractiveness in him—a curious hidden richness, that came through his thinness and his pallor like another voice, conveying another knowledge of him. It was in the curves of his brows and his chin, rich, fine, exquisite curves, the powerful beauty of life itself. She could not say what it was. But there was a sense of richness ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... Bobichel appeared. Was this the poor clown? No; there were no smiles on his lips, no quips and cranks on his tongue. His thinness had ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... with Boone to hunt Bruin in his lair, while Joe and the remainder of the company were despatched to the passes among the hills. There was a narrow-featured Vermonter in this party, termed, by his comrades, the Hatchet-face, and, in truth, the extreme thinness of his chest and the slenderness of his limbs might as aptly have been called the hatchet-handle. But, so far from being unfit for the hardy pursuits of a hunter, he was gifted with the activity of a greyhound, and the swiftness and bottom of a race-horse. His name was Sneak Punk, which ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... had grown thinner than ever, or rather that her thinness, which had formerly had a healthy reed-like strength, now suggested fatigue and languor. And her face was spent, extinguished—the very eyes were lifeless. All her vitality seemed to have withdrawn itself into the arch of dense black hair which still ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... adds much to the fun of swimming. The boards are generally made so that the plank will bend, being dressed down thin at one end and fastened. The thinness of the plank, or an insecure fastening, causes many a plank to snap in two or come loose from its ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... carrying four insides, whose extreme thinness enabled them to travel thus economically without experiencing the slightest inconvenience. These four personages were, two very profound critics, Mr Gall and Mr Treacle, who followed the trade of reviewers, but occasionally indulged ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... her friend, leaning against a pillow as if for support, "if you knew that all my suffering for the last few years had been for you, that this change, and pallor, and thinness, were all occasioned by the fear that the time might never come when I could tell you that I love you, you would pardon such a hasty declaration of my feelings toward you. You were but a child when first we met," he continued, placing his hand upon her head as he had then been wont to do, "but ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... the question on account of coarseness, the deepest waves of the record being less than one-thousandth of an inch in depth, and many of them probably ten to one hundred times as shallow. Edison finally decided to apply a preliminary metallic coating of infinitesimal thinness, and accomplished this object by a remarkable process known as the vacuous deposit. With this he applied to the original record a film of gold probably no thicker than one three-hundred-thousandth of an inch, or several ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... golden light streamed in through the narrow opening above my head, and, striking on the opposite wall, gleamed there for a few minutes in radiant and dazzling beauty, passing obliquely upward the while until it grew narrower and more narrow, dwindled down to the thinness of a thread, and finally vanished. I had witnessed the last gleam of earthly sunlight ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... that the most successful composers in the new genre were those who were actually innocent of any musical training whatsoever. Monsigny (1729-1817) is a particularly striking instance of natural genius triumphing in spite of a defective education. Nothing can exceed the thinness and poverty of his scores, or their lack of all real musical interest; yet, by the sureness of his natural instinct for the stage, he succeeded in writing music which still moves us as much by its brilliant gaiety as by its tender pathos. 'Le Deserteur,' his most famous work, is ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... Toots with a chuckle, 'I know I'm wasting away. You needn't at all mind alluding to that. I—I should like it. Burgess and Co. have altered my measure, I'm in that state of thinness. It's a gratification to me. I—I'm glad of it. I—I'd a great deal rather go into a decline, if I could. I'm a mere brute you know, grazing upon the surface ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... in public whenever she feels like it. She is really no more advanced than the girl of the period of the eighties, and not any more astonishing. It's the same old girl! And the young men who discovered Swinburne and Rossetti, and who were rather bored by the thinness of their aftermath, the aesthetic poets, really got more colour and amazement and delight out of the flashing of the meteors than the youth of to-day seem to get. It was the fashion then to be blas['e] and cynical and bored with life; ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... best were probing deeply both their conscience and their conduct. Had he sat aloof, quiet in the sunshine, his dogs sleeping at his feet, his eyes half closed, his hands, waxen, almost transparent, and bird's claws for thinness, spread out to the heat, those about him would have gone their rounds with a light heart. At such times his schemes were thoughts afar off, dreams of some new, subtle stroke of policy, and none within touch had cause ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... companions at table, and almost as new as I was. I was quite happy with this. They had seemed to me to be nice children, which, in fact, they were. But I was taken aback when I saw the smallness of my bed, the thinness of the mattress, and what displeased me most, the iron bed-stead. I had never seen anything like it. However everything was very clean, and in spite of my dismay I slept soundly, worn out by the shocks to my system which I had ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... English is termed an "exercise-book," I tried to acquire a certain style, and was very near falling into mannerism, from sheer inexperience, when a sarcastic master, to my distress, reminded me one day of Heiberg's words: "The unguent of expression, smeared thickly over the thinness of thoughts." ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... which is selected with the aid of a microscope. A flux of borax and a blowpipe secure it to its place. The point is then ground on a copper wheel of emery. The pen-blank is next rolled to the requisite thinness by the means of rollers especially adapted for the purpose, and tempered by blows from a hammer. It is then trimmed around the edges, stamped, and formed in a press. The slit is next cut through the solid iridium point by means of a thin ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... be found of great use for a variety of purposes other than the one being referred to; they can be used not only for pressing against, but for the opposite, as when a rib or portion of it has from some cause—perhaps fracture or thinness—bulged outwardly. It will be perceptible at once that for direct pressure against a part of the ribs, situated near the upper block, that the little joist will slip unless a nick is made for its reception in the large ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... he stirred, an hour in which Ellen's eyes had silently noted that which had escaped them hitherto, a curious change in his colour as he lay with closed eyes, a thinness of the flesh over the cheek bones, dark shadows beneath the eyes. Whether he slept she could not be sure. But when he sat up again these signs of wear and tear seemed to vanish at the magic of his smile, ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... was not set off by the severity of her toilet; there was no touch of spring or brightness anywhere, no look or note which should belong to one so young, unless it was the extreme thinness of her figure. ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... clothes, always too large, hung about him loose and ungraceful. His tie was grimy; his shirt frayed; his trousers turned up, but still falling over his heels; his hat, too large for him, came almost to his ears. In the increased pallor and thinness of his face, his dark eyes seemed to have come nearer together. He would have been a ludicrous object but for the intense earnestness of his expression. He came towards them with rapidly blinking eyes. He took ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... eleven miles arrived at the hill which I saw from Ashburton range. It turned out to be the banks of what was once a fresh-water lake; the water-wash is quite distinct. It had small iron and limestone gravel, with sand and a great number of shells worn by the sun and atmosphere to the thinness of paper, plainly indicating that it is many years since the water had left them. Judging from the water-marks, the lake must have been about twelve feet deep in the plain. The eucalyptus is growing here. We then proceeded over another open part of ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... the last ten years of the nineteenth century, of the difficulty, and sometimes of the impossibility, of getting sufficient supplies for a large number of ships in rather out-of-the-way places. In 1588 the comparative thinness of population and insufficiency of communications and means of transport must have constituted obstacles, far greater than any encountered in our own day, to the collection of supplies locally and to their ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... woman, who was called Maritornes, assisted the daughter, and the two made up a bed for Don Quixote in a garret which had served for many years as a straw-loft. The bed on which they placed him was made of four roughly planed boards on two unequal trestles; a mattress which, in thinness, might have been a quilt, so full of pellets that if they had not through the holes shown themselves to be wool, they would to the touch seem to be pebbles. There was a pair of sheets made of target leather; and as for the coverlet, if any one had chosen to count the ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... in which we can judge of the wonderful tenuity or thinness of comets—that is, that the smallest stars can be seen through their tails, even though those tails must be many thousands of miles in thickness. Now, if the tails were anything approaching the density of our own ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... abruptly changed the quality of my courage. I gave the lid of the manhole half a turn and made a hasty explanation to Cavor; but now he was the more sanguine. He answered me in a voice that seemed extraordinarily small and remote, because of the thinness of the air that carried the sound. He recommended a nip of brandy, and set me the example, and presently I felt better. I turned the manhole stopper back again. The throbbing in my ears grew louder, and then I remarked that the piping note of ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... thinness,' she said, 'but I had carried about with me the bright daring open face of my own boy. I shall learn to like ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... startled him. He had a momentary twinge, gone almost before he had realised it, a sudden clear conception of his great loneliness. The satisfaction he strove to extract from improving his estate for the benefit of his brother Gustav appeared to him at that moment to bear a singular resemblance, in its thinness, to Frau Dellwig's charitable soup. He got off his horse to speak to her, and rested his eyes, tired by looking at the hideous passions on the brawler's face, on hers. "To-day is the important day, is it not?" he asked, glancing from her ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... the thin atmosphere from the void of space and the three cadets imagined that they could hear the shriek of the ship as it cut through the thin air. Tom figured his speed rapidly, and counting on the thinness of the atmosphere, he estimated that it would take eleven seconds for the ship to crash. ...
— Stand by for Mars! • Carey Rockwell
... irrepressible Sam, "unless it is that it is in my blood; for one of the last things I heard my mother say, ere I left home, was that, to judge by the thinness of the milk furnished by the farmer who supplied us, he much reminded her of Pharaoh's daughter, as he took a ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... presence of worms is indicated by irritation of the membrane of the nose, causing the child to thrust its finger into the nostrils; by irritation of the lower part of the body; by thinness, excessive appetite and restlessness in sleep. Children suffering from worms should eat meat freely and not take so much bread, vegetables, and farinaceous food as children generally do. They should have as much exercise as possible in the open ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... veterinary surgeon, and the harness-maker. In addition, he regularly sold Pompier's oats in order to obtain liquor, and in fact the poor animal was so nearly starved that he could scarcely stand on his legs. The jockey ascribed the horse's extreme thinness to a system of rigorous training; and the owners did not question the statement in the least. He had made them believe, and they in turn had made many others believe, that Pompier de Nanterre would certainly win such and such a race; and, trusting in this fallacious promise, they ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... not to be at his best, technically. Is there any other instance in our literature of a perfection of technique so unerring, so uniform, that it becomes actually fatiguing? It has often foolishly been said that the dazzling brilliance of Swinburne's form is apt to disguise a certain thinness or poverty of substance. It seems to me, on the contrary, that we are often in danger of overlooking the imaginative subtlety of phrases and epithets which are presented to us and withdrawn from us in a flash, on the turn ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... a Greek and kept an open-all-night chop-house, a mean hole in the wall two doors from the corner, where Cake's surpassing thinness made her invaluable at the sink. Also the scraps she carried home in her red, water-puckered hands helped out materially. Then her mother took a boarder and rested in her endeavours, feeling she had performed ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various |
