"Thinning" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were thinning down. A light snow was falling. The girl lifted her pet and kissed his ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... include walruses and whales; fragile ecosystem slow to change and slow to recover from disruptions or damage; thinning polar icepack ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... that rose up richly from the Baked Meats Came thinning amid the boughs, And much that greedy Thief who snuffed the night air- ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... The houses were thinning out rapidly; one side of the road was already only a succession of fields, and along a tiny worn path through one of these Caroline was hurrying nervously. She crossed the widening brook, almost a little river now, and kept along its farther bank for ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... rob him, and I often thought how cunningly, for he took no more than about half his gold, well knowing, I'm now sure, neither he nor my lord, your father, kept any count; and there was a bundle of notes in his pocket-book, which Mr. Archer was thinning swiftly, when all of a sudden, like a ghost rising, up sits Mr. Beauclerc, an unlucky rising it was for him, and taking him by the collar—he was a powerful strong man—"You've robbed me, Archer," says he. I was behind Mr. Archer, and I could not see what happened, but Mr. Beauclerc ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... in its expression that filled him with disgust and loathing. Good heavens! it was Dorian Gray's own face that he was looking at! The horror, whatever it was, had not yet entirely spoiled that marvellous beauty. There was still some gold in the thinning hair and some scarlet on the sensual mouth. The sodden eyes had kept something of the loveliness of their blue, the noble curves had not yet completely passed away from chiselled nostrils and from plastic throat. Yes, it was Dorian himself. But who had done it? He seemed ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... Pilgrim bears us swiftly past the long line of steamers at the wharf, past Newport and Covington, and the insignificant Licking,[A] and out under great railway bridges which cobweb the sky. Soon Cincinnati, shrouded in smoke, has disappeared around the bend, and we are in the fast-thinning suburbs—homes of beer-gardens and excursion barges, havens for freight-flats, and villas of low ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... Hooker, and his divisions pressed rapidly through the cornfield, up to the very edge of the wood, while the welkin rang with their cheers. Here, the fleeing foe, reinforced by fresh troops, made a determined stand. Terrific volleys poured from the woods, thinning out the Union ranks at a fearful rate. Unable to sustain the deadly fire, they fell back—this time the rebels following with yells and shouts; but before the cornfield was crossed, our troops made another stand, and the swarthy foe was brought to bay; yet the thinned line seemed hardly able ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... glance wandered through the thinning crowd, it was met suddenly and squarely by two brown eyes set in a fresh pink face framed by dark hair lightly sprinkled with gray. The second that he looked into that woman's eyes taught him her character, absolutely, ...
— In The Valley Of The Shadow • Josephine Daskam
... already arrived at a stage of intimacy. King lifted Gloria into her saddle; Gloria's little laugh had in it a flutter of excitement as her cavalier's strength took her by delighted surprise and off her feet. They rode away through the thinning shadows. Mrs. Gaynor, despite the earliness of the hour, went straight to her husband, awoke him mercilessly, and ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... town was thinning fast. Parliament still lingered, but only for technical purposes; the political struggle of the session having terminated at the end of July. One social event was yet to be consummated—the marriages of ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... dog; I called him 'Loeva' (Lion). He was such a confiding, gentle animal, and so affectionate. Only yesterday he was jumping and playing about and rubbing himself against me, and to-day he is dead. Our ranks are thinning, and the worst of it is we try in vain to make out what it is that ails them. This one was apparently quite in his normal condition and as cheerful as ever until his breakfast was given him; then he began to cry and tear round, yelping and barking ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... flock to the devil; and, instead of being an instrument for saving souls, I was made the innocent means of destroying them. Oh, gentlemen, it was a shocking thing to tug away at the rope till the sweat ran down one, for four shillings a week; and to see all the time that one was thinning one's own congregation and emptying one's ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... curtained all with white, Greeted them, at their shadowy window low, With quiet smile; for two things made her glad: One that she saw the glory of the sun; For while the earth lay all athirst for light, She drank the fountain-waves. The other joy; Sprung from herself: she fought the darkness well, Thinning the great cone-shadow of the earth, Paling its ebon hue with radiant showers Upon its sloping side. The woman said, With hopeful look: "To-morrow will be bright With sunshine for our holiday—to-morrow— Think! we shall see ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... for long periods. But for Jim to do this.... Her brain reeled at the sight. The significance of it dawned upon her. He was afraid of the future. He knew the food could not last out, and was saving his rations for the time of emergency. That was the meaning of those thinning cheeks and the dead eyes. ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... She wanted to be back in her house by herself. She had pushed open the French windows of the study to breathe the air of the garden and see the tall sycamore growing deep into the thick blue night. Half the room, reflected on the long pane, was thrown out into the garden. She saw it thinning away, going off from the garden into another space, existing there with an unearthly reality of its own. She had sat down at last, too tired to go upstairs, and had found herself crying, incredibly crying; all the misery, all the fear, all the ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... fallen into step beside him, her hooded head bowed against the thinning rain. As usual ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... understood George well enough not to speak to him of Eugene or Lucy. Nowadays Fanny almost never saw either of them and seldom thought of them—so sly is the way of time with life. She was passing middle age, when old intensities and longings grow thin and flatten out, as Fanny herself was thinning and flattening out; and she was settling down contentedly to her apartment house intimacies. She was precisely suited by the table-d'hote life, with its bridge, its variable alliances and shifting feuds, and the long whisperings of elderly ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... The flags flutter, the crowds cheer, the legislatures meet. Yet it seems to me indeed at times that all this present commercial civilisation is no more than my poor uncle's career writ large, a swelling, thinning bubble of assurances; that its arithmetic is just as unsound, its dividends as ill-advised, its ultimate aim as vague and forgotten; that it all drifts on perhaps to some tremendous parallel to his ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... little clearing: the stump of a felled tree, with the lichen-covered trunk itself near it, and a patch of grassy turf. The eye cannot penetrate far through the riotously growing underbrush, but as one looks upwards, to the left, a thinning of foliage, allowing a glimpse of the sky, gives evidence of the near proximity of some ...
— The Noble Lord - A Comedy in One Act • Percival Wilde
... Squirrels, black and gray, were still abundant where the oak and hickory were; the ruffled grouse still fed in families upon beech-nuts on the ridges and the thorn-apples of the lowlands. The wild turkey still strutted about in flocks rapidly thinning, and occasionally a deer fell to the lot of the shrewd hunter. John liked to hunt and fish. He wasted time that way, his neighbors said, and his wife was of the same opinion. It is true, he possessed certain qualities ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... had begun to lessen, its downfall thinning into a soft patter among the leaves. The young man took off his hat and let the damp air play over his hair. It was thick hair, black and straight, already longer than city fashions dictated, and a first stubble of black beard was hiding the lines of a chin perhaps ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... bade her cry out and bid those thoughtless hands to cease their work and let this letter drop. But her discretion still held, and, subduing the mad impulse, she watched with dilating eyes and heaving breast the slow passage of this fatal note through the now rapidly thinning crowd, its delay as it reached the open space between the last row of seats and the judge's bench and its final delivery by some officious hand, who thrust it upon his notice just as he was rising ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... her friend. Her black mourning garments certainly made her look pale, but Margaret was not a sufficiently keen observer to note the additional depth of expression in Janetta's dark eyes, or the slightly pathetic look given to her features by the thinning of her cheeks and the droop of her finely curved mouth. Lady Caroline, however, noticed all these points, and was quite aware that these changes, slight though they were, gave force and refinement to the girl's face. Secretly, she was embittered against Janetta, ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... me is thinning out, Dawson. At its best it is second-hand; at its worst, the mere conjecture of a rather careless draughtsman. I have two things to do: first to find out the real seducer, who is probably also the despatcher of the parcels to the late lieutenant ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... Finally the whole mass disappeared, to loom up larger than reality to the eyes of one approaching from the city. As night came on, the lights from the windows cut lurid pathways into the surrounding obscurity. A gradual chill crept along the ground, thinning the fog and disclosing at intervals ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... which Peterkin had cut was full twelve feet long, being a very strong but light and tough young tree, which merely required thinning at the butt to be a ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... Indian scouts were ranging. Once we were forced to remain flat on our stomachs while a group of warriors passed within a dozen feet of us, driving to their camp some strayed beeves from the high rolling bottom-lands to the east. When the last of them had passed I observed with great alarm a thinning out of the darkness along the ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... either by sea or rail; which, with every expense figured out, might yield, so he calculated, a profit of a million two hundred thousand francs for a part area, and would still leave the estate well wooded after thinning out the trees. The thing was a gold-mine for him and his family if a banker could be induced to take it up. Alas! his brother-in-law was obliged to pour cold water on the project, proving to him that the expenses, contrary ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... thin ones of patent leather, and, stuffing the former into the hedge by the gatepost where she might readily find them again, descended the hill; the freshness of colour she had derived from the keen air thinning away in spite of her as ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... were indeed getting ready to cross the ford when the mist should have risen; and on the bank it was thinning already and melting away; for a little air of wind was beginning to breathe from the north-east and the sunrise, which was just at hand; and the bank, moreover, was stonier and higher than the meadow's face, which fell away from it as a shallow dish from its rim: thereon yet lay the mist like ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris
... may have a yellow or mahogany tinge. Often a fluctuating, pendulous swelling may appear on the lower lip, point of elbow, sheath, legs, under the belly, or on some other pendent portion, especially late in the disease, which is indicative of poor circulation, thinning of the blood, and consequent ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... Then, by further thinning out Thomas's line, which was well entrenched, I drew another division of Palmer's corps (Baird's) around to the right, to further strengthen that flank. I was impatient to hear from the cavalry raid, then four days out, and was watching for ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... just about the delay that he had expected, and Robert's hand sprang to the trigger at the very moment the man pulled his own. The bullet hummed by his cheek. His finger contracted and then it loosened. A sudden acuteness of vision, or a chance thinning of the fog at that point, enabled him to see the man's face, and he recognized the French partisan, Charles Langlade, known also to the Indians as the Owl, who, with his wife, the Dove, had once held him in a captivity by no ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... some water and a small saucer. From a vase of flowers and leaves and ferns which Mrs. Morton contributed to the game each selected what he wanted to draw. Then, holding his leaf so that the light threw a sharp shadow upon his pad, he quickly painted the shadow with the ink, thinning it with water upon the saucer so that the finished painting showed several shades ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... portals of the haven were the venerable sea-wagons—the coasters known as the "Apple-treers." Their weatherwise skippers, old sea-dogs who could smell weather as bloodhounds sniff trails, had their noses in the air in good season that day, and knew that they must depend on a thinning wind to cuff them into port. One after the other, barnacled anchors splashed from catheads, dragging rusty chains from hawse-holes, and old, patched sails came sprawling down with chuckle of sheaves and lisp ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... in the starship's side was closing, and still Bart had not seen the tall, slim, flame-haired figure of his father. The port on the other side of the ship, he knew, was for loading passengers. Bart moved carefully through the thinning crowd, almost to the foot of the stairs. One of the Lhari checking papers stopped and fixed him with an inscrutable gray stare, but ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... that the bulk of each horseman could be seen as they moved forward together. But there was no thinning of the obscurity on either side of them. Nevertheless the profile of the horseman with the pleasant voice seemed to be occasionally turned backward, and ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... longer any doubt but that the rain was starting in. The breeze had increased imperceptibly, so that it was now blowing quite stiffly. Looking out over the water, they found that the fog was quickly thinning out. Already could they see several times as far as before, and ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson
... cured from the Middlesex Hospital, but three months after the reception of the injury he was taken ill and died. A postmortem examination showed that the right ventricle had been penetrated in a slanting direction; the cause of death was apoplexy, produced by the weakening and thinning of the heart's walls, the effect of the wound. Tillaux reports the case of a man of sixty-five, the victim of general paralysis, who passed into his chest a blade 16 cm. long and 2 mm. broad. The wound of puncture was 5 cm. below the ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... well beyond the station, just the faintest suggestion of gaunt rigor against the troubled sky, and skirted them, moving more rapidly in the confidence of assured direction. A very gradual, diffused alleviation of the darkness began to be felt. The clouds were thinning. Something ahead of them hissed in a soft, full, insistent monosonance. Banneker threw up a shadowy arm. They dismounted on the crest of a tiny desert clifflet, now become the bank of a black current which nuzzled and nibbled into ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... himself did not sleep. He sat by their dead fire and watched the gradual thinning of the darkness about him as the vague light filtered in from the awakening outside world. He looked at Betty sleeping, only to look away with a frown darkening his eyes. She would sleep heavily and long; she would awake refreshed and—hungry. He ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... others who, hearing, did not laugh, or if they did, it was with a mere strained thinning of the lips that had no element of mirth in it. Temper and tolerance were short ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... store that daily lessens 'neath their eyes; A little dole of light and fire and food:— While Night upon them like a vampyre lies Bleaching the frame and thinning out the blood; And through the ships the frost-bit timbers groan, And the Guloine prowls round, with ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... the wet grass and bushes, along the dark, damp glades with their yellow carpets, under the thinning arches of the trees, down the gentle slopes of the ridges, rich with green moss, the bordermen glided like gray shadows. The forest was yet asleep. A squirrel frisked up an oak and barked quarrelsomely at these strange, noiseless visitors. ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... an hour after we had passed the circular city when, far ahead, I could see the pale, unhealthy forest thinning out. A half dozen of our searchlight beams played upon the denuded area, and as I brought the television disc to bear I saw that we were approaching a vast swamp, in which little pools of black water reflected the dazzling light of our ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... August and much of September these schools of tuna, thousands of them, ranted up and down the coast of Catalina, thinning out the amber patches of anchovies, and affording the most magnificent sport ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... of course, was more or less Greek to the boys who stood watching the thinning party, as one bidarka after another was skilfully run out through the surf and as skilfully put under way in the long swell of the sea. At last a well-known figure detached itself from a group where he ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough
... with her, and go for good. But the renunciation of love was terrible. The day had been soft and beautiful. It was falling asleep and yawning now, with a drowsy breeze that shook the yellow leaves as they hung withered and closed on the thinning boughs like the fingers of an old maid's hand. She was sitting at the desk by the window, trying to write a letter. More than once she tore up the sheet, dried her eyes, and began again. What she wrote last ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... time to write them is the wonder. You would like him for his love of trees; a great part of his time out of doors is taken up in pruning his trees. I have within this hour heard a gentleman say to him, "You have had a good deal of experience in planting, Sir Walter; do you advise much thinning, or not?"—"I should advise much thinning, but little at a time. If you thin much at a time, you let in the wind, ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... the next morning and found the Cap'n thinning beets in his garden. The expression on the visitor's face did not harmonize with the brightness ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... Was it possible that American prejudices against colour had some root here? Did these ladies shrink from accepting my aid because my blood flowed beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs? Tears streamed down my foolish cheeks, as I stood in the fast thinning streets; tears of grief that any should doubt my motives—that Heaven should deny me the opportunity that I sought. Then I stood still, and looking upward through and through the dark clouds that shadowed London, prayed aloud for help. I dare say that ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... had come to be mine; it made none now. He turned his old bright fatherly look upon me, laid his hand on my hand in his old way, and said again, "She will succeed, my dear. Nevertheless, Bleak House is thinning fast, O ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... visitors, and the heavy timbers that were heaved against the oak made little impression, while von Wiethoff roared defiance from the top of the wall that surrounded the castle and what was more to the purpose, showered down stones and arrows on the besiegers, grievously thinning their ranks. The Baron, with creditable ingenuity, had constructed above the inside of the gate a scaffolding, on the top of which was piled a mountain of huge stones. This scaffold was arranged in such a way that a man pulling a lever caused ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... new-fashioned paints was called 'Petrifying Liquid', and was used for first-coating decaying stone or plaster work. It was also supposed to be used for thinning up a certain kind of patent distemper, but when Misery found out that it was possible to thin the latter with water, the use of 'Petrifying Liquid' for that purpose was discontinued. This 'Petrifying Liquid' ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... directly in front of her and did not reply. The wind of a keen clear winter morning had put colour into her cheeks. Overhead, the creamy- yellow smoke-clouds were thinning away one by one against a pale-blue sky, and the improvident sparrows broke off from water-spout committees and cab-rank cabals to clamour of the coming ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... Empty—everybody gone! That is, everybody except one body—the slave-master's. It lay there all battered to pulp; and all about were the evidences of a terrific fight. There was a rude board coffin on a cart at the door, and workmen, assisted by the police, were thinning a road through the gaping crowd in order that they might bring ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... they have once been ill, especially of blood-thinning diseases (as rheumatism), sometimes say they would rather go without food than coal. ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... that lash the waves, or smite The woods, the autumnal foliage thinning— "Hold!" said the Squire, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... The enclosure was thinning fast now, as we walked toward the gateway by which we had entered, where a strong body of soldiers had been on guard over the barricades, in case of an attempt being made by the pirates' friends to rescue them, and we saw plainly enough that had we ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... lurking a wrinkling smile and its break—the laugh—is hearty and contagious with a timbre of peculiar huskiness. His face is a trifle thin through the cheeks, which accentuates a breadth of head, now crowning with silvery—and let me whisper this—slowly thinning hair. Stubby white mustaches for facial adornment, and cloth of varying brown shades to encompass the physical man, ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... her two oldest sons frolicking about her like excited puppies, came up to Carolan Hall one exquisite morning a month later. Brush fires were burning in the thinning woods, and the blue, fragrant smoke drifted in thin veils across ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... the letter. He read it through absently. The houses were thinning along the road. The prairie stretched ahead of them in solitary sweeps of tender green, dappled with flowers. Jane reached ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... dry-eyed one, women in spite of themselves with lips whitening, men grim with pride and an innermost bleeding, sagged suddenly, thinning and trickling back into the great, impersonal maw of the city. Apart from the rush of the exodus, a youth remained at the rail, gazing out and quivering for the smell of war. Finally, ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... last year's growths. Fruit-buds are usually thicker, or "fatter," than leaf-buds, and often fuzzy. Heading-back the tree of course tends to concentrate the fruit-buds and to keep them nearer the center of the tree-top; but heading-back must be combined with intelligent saving and thinning of the interior shoots. Heading-back of pears and peaches and plums is usually a very ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... His system of thinning himself, which he had begun before he left England, was continued abroad. While at Athens, where he stayed at the Franciscan Convent, he took a Turkish bath three times a week, his usual drink being vinegar and water, and his food seldom more than a little rice. The result ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... look, and most certainly was not courting trouble, purposeless curiosity impelled him higher and higher into the hitherto unexplored fastnesses. Now the timberlands lay beneath him, for, although the hardy laurel continued in profusion, albeit somewhat dried and withered, the trees were thinning out and becoming more scraggly, and more frequently the naked rocks, split and seamed, thrust themselves up through the baked soil, "like vertebrae in the backbone of the mountain," thought Donald. Now they were toned and softened ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... bounding over the knoll before spoken of, the Indians began to see the delusion under which they had been laboring, and at once turned to fly, but not in time to escape, for the soldiers were soon among them and with their revolvers and small arms were fast thinning their ranks and sending many a brave to his final home. A running fight ensued, which was continued up the valley for about eight miles, when a majority of the Indians gained the mountains and made good their escape. The chase was a splendid affair to behold, and many feats of horsemanship ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... growing up in certain districts "entirely neglected," and that the number of such children "increases beyond the power of philanthropic and religious bodies to cope properly with their needs." In the Tompkins Square Lodging House the evening classes were thinning out, and the keeper wailed, "Those with whom we have dealt of late have not been inclined to accept this privilege; how to make night school attractive to shiftless, indifferent street boys is a difficult ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... passengers scurried after their own beams of silver light down the boulevards. At first a continuous line of speeding cars; then thinning with long gaps between; then longer gaps with only an occasional car; then the quiet, lasting for minutes unbroken, so that the wind could be heard in the eucalyptus trees that here and there lined ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... appearance. This chunky aspect, with her sharp face and strained back hair, made her seem fairly hideous to herself. But she remained firm. Her firmness, in reality, was one cause of the tightening and thinning of her lips. She hesitated when about to go down-stairs. She had not heard Evelyn go down. She wondered whether she had better wait until she went, or go into her room. She finally decided upon the latter course. Evelyn was standing in front of ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... in this action was cool and effective. Their fire covered the advance of the troops, and silenced more than one of the enemy's guns. "The American ships," writes a British historian, "with their heavy discharges of round and grape, too well succeeded in thinning the ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... us, but they don't mind how we suffer! The sun blazes down all day, and not a drop of drink do we get except at meals. In spite of their care we slip through their hands. Sunstroke and fever are always thinning our ranks. That is the history of it, mate, and if I were to talk till morning I could not tell you more. I suppose by your cut that you ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... was in vain; their numbers were thinning rapidly; and at length Lieutenant Saumarez himself, being hit in three places, reluctantly, but very properly, gave the signal for return. The remainder of the day was spent in throwing shot and shell, as circumstances required, so as to prevent ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... from their southern seclusion, had shaken the ungrateful motherland which cast them out. He would escape; and now was the time to do it! For the rain had long since ceased; the dawn was approaching fast; the cloud was thinning from black to pearly grey. Now was his time—were it not for those two men! To be kept, guarded, stopped by them, or by any man! Shameful! intolerable! He had fled hither to be free, and even here he found himself a prisoner. True, they had promised to let him go if ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... stock also cut just above the bud. * * * All shoots must be kept rubbed off so as to give the buds the right of way. The small buds about the base of the scions or those on the two-year-old wood are preferred. Where the buds are small and in a cluster, several may be included in one set and the thinning ...
— The Pecan and its Culture • H. Harold Hume
... that one chief cause of the desertion which was thinning his army was the natural unwillingness of the men to leave their families in a state of destitution. Cork and its neighbourhood were filled with the kindred of those who were going abroad. Great numbers ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... cloud of dirty black smoke, gray and red tinged with mortar and brick-dust, appeared up above the roofs on the other side of the square, spread slowly and thickly, and hung long, dissolving very gradually and thinning off ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... though difficult photography would be unrivalled. Even in thick weather the clouds are mostly below; and their rapid movement, the kaleidoscopic changes which their coming and going, their thickening and thinning, their rising and falling produce, are a never-failing source of interest and pleasure. The changes of light and shade, the gradations of color, were sometimes wonderfully delicate and charming. Seen through rapidly attenuating mist, the bold crags of the icy ridge between the glacier ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... fire as seems almost as impossible to advance against as against the lightnings of heaven. They halted, wavered, and gave signs of confusion; but they were soon restored to order and again came on. Again one of those close and terrible volleys was poured into them, thinning the ranks and encumbering every step with dead; and again they halted and wavered. This time they deployed in line of battle and commenced a fierce fire on the opposing divisions; accompanied by yells peculiar to themselves—such ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... attempt to extend your line BEYOND the foe's, so as to outflank him, would probably have produced so much confusion in your own phalanx as to promise certain disaster. Of course for an inferior force to accept battle by thinning its line, to be able by extending to meet the long lines of the enemy, would involve the greatest risk of being broken through at the center. The best remedy for inferior numbers was manifestly to ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... at forty, had no thought of marrying. Not that there was anything austere or saturnine about Hugo. He made you think, somehow, of a cherubic, jovial monk. It may have been his rosy rotundity, or, perhaps, the way in which his thinning hair vanished altogether at the top of his head, so as to form a tonsure. Hugo Mandle, kindly, generous, shrewd, spoiled his old mother in the way in which women of seventy, whose middle life has been hard, like to be spoiled. First ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... been taking my tonic regularly but apparently without deriving beneficial results. Its especial purpose is for the thinning of the blood. Assuredly though, if my blood has been appreciably thinned my mental attitude remains unchanged. Perversely I continue to be the subject of contradictory and conflicting moods impossible to understand and difficult to describe. Certainly I have never been in this ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... sudden shower was falling down from heaven, drenching anew wet pastures, thinning the mud upon brown lanes, poppling upon the washed highway. Dainty scale-armour of a million leaves protected Anthony. Ere this was penetrated, the fusillade ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... either condition is to be suspected it becomes our duty to learn the reasons for this striking symptom. Loss of flesh has also a collateral value of great import, because it is almost an invariable rule that rapid thinning is accompanied soon or late with more or less anaemia, and it is uncommon to see a person steadily gaining fat after any pathological reduction of weight without a corresponding gain in amount and quality of blood. We too rarely reflect that the blood ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... churchyard, decide to do what is necessary with no needless alterations. This plan of preservation, as already intimated, is probably the most desirable. But we know instances, especially in and around London, where good work has been done by judiciously thinning out the crop of tombstones, clearing away the least presentable features of the place, and making the ground prim with flower-beds and borders. To do this much, and to introduce a few seats, will leave the graveyard still a graveyard in the old sense, and requires no authority ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... choose none of them. Any woman with a white face might have had as many sweethearts; but I think it was my managing ways that took Powell's fancy. If a fairy could only move a lot of the women from the places where they are not wanted, and put them where they are, there would be a wonderful thinning taken out of Scotland and planted in Australia. But ye see there are no fairies; and at such a distance, it costs a lot of money to move such commodities as single women. I have puzzled my brains whiles about the matter, Miss Jane, and many a time I have repented ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... again after a time. "The woods are thinning," he said. "A few more steps and we shall come out on the shores of the San Juan, near to a small village of the Yemassees, in which there are many whose eyes have been opened to the truth. There we ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... since Alec had a public dinner to attend, and Lucy was going to the play with Lady Kelsey, he took Julia Crowley to the opera. To make an even number he invited Robert Boulger to join them at the Savoy. After brushing his hair with the scrupulous thought his thinning locks compelled, Dick waited in the vestibule for Mrs. Crowley. Presently she came, looking very pretty in a gown of flowered brocade which made her vaguely resemble a shepherdess in an old French picture. With her diamond necklace and a tiara in her dark hair, ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... nail on the head, square's a hatchet, parson," responded the deacon. "The congregation is thinning; the young people don't come to the meetings, and the little children are afraid ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... man's head. Over the top of the walls fell branches of fruit-trees, and grape-vines still with a few clusters of late grapes hanging from them. Beyond were the tops of lofty shade-trees, and between the branches, where the foliage was rapidly thinning, we could catch glimpses of the stone chimneys and dormer-windows of ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... January 22nd, 1806, and Harmon, the first-born, married Cynthia Bent, June 8th, 1807. The four eldest sons were married within the year and a half, and on April 14th, 1808, Sallie, the eldest daughter, entered the matrimonial haven. This was thinning out the old home pretty fast. The sons, however, all settled near Prospect, and were several years getting finally located in their own homes. Harmon took the Mauger farm left him by his grandfather; Thomas, the Patten farm, joining the glebe. John settled at ...
— The Chignecto Isthmus And Its First Settlers • Howard Trueman
... reason terrified Cutty. He put both hands into his hair, but he drew them out immediately without retaining any of the thinning gray locks. Done up, both of them; that was the matter. He longed to console her, but knew not what to say or how to act. He had not seen a woman weep like this in so many years that he ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... the fall of the leaf, and an autumnal sunset threw the lengthening shadow of haunted Lisnavoura, close in front of the solitary little cabin, over the undulating slopes and sides of Slieveelim. The birds were singing among the branches in the thinning leaves of the melancholy ash-trees that grew at the roadside in front of the door. The widow's three younger children were playing on the road, and their voices mingled with the evening song of the birds. Their elder sister, Nell, was "within in the house," as their phrase is, seeing after ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... and apply as little pigment as may be used for the effect. Kerosene oil is an ideal thinning medium for tube oil colors. Have very little paint upon the brush when applying the tints to a fish ...
— Taxidermy • Leon Luther Pray
... Twylee washed the blood from the knife and wiped it dry on her apron. She opened the oven and took out the browned cobbler. Sweet apple juice bubbled to the surface through the half moons and burst in delights of sugary aroma. The sun broke through the thinning edge of the thunderhead. ...
— One Martian Afternoon • Tom Leahy
... extended. I was here in scrubs to the north of it. The last night we camped at the dam was exceedingly cold, the thermometer falling to 26 degrees on the morning of the 16th of August, the day we left. I steered south-east, and we came out of the scrubs, which had been thinning, on to the great plain, in forty-nine or fifty miles. Changing my course here to east, we skirted along the edge of the plain for twenty-five miles. It was beautifully grassed, and had cotton and salt-bush on it: also some little clover hollows, in which rainwater ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... be only so in name. These saguaros were thinning out, growing stunted, and most of them were single columns. Gradually other cactus forms showed a harder struggle for existence, and the spaces of sand between were wider. But now the dreaded, glistening ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... But the fact remains that the Indians of our generation are not as familiar with Bonaparte's name as were their fathers and grandfathers, so either the predominance of English-speaking settlers or the thinning of their ancient war-loving blood by modern civilization and peaceful times, must one or the other account for the younger Indian's ignorance of the ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... distinct now that the languor of summer was gone, and all animal nature seemed more invigorated and more elastic. Health and her inhabitants were returning to the city, and the guests of the hospitable planters were thinning from the country. Business was reviving and ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... fundamental principles in the care of trees. To a tree growing on a city street or on a lawn where nature fails to supply the requisite amount of water, the latter must be supplied artificially, especially during the hot summer months, or else dead branches may result as seen in Fig. 89. Too much thinning out of the crown causes excessive evaporation, and too much cutting out in woodlands causes the soil to dry and the trees to suffer for the want of moisture. This also explains why it is essential, in wooded areas, to retain on the ground the ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison
... the crevices of the floor, watching the stones flying as it were from beneath our feet. Soon the court-house was reached, and hustled into a common cell, I found myself amongst a crowd of boys and men, all bound for the 'dock.' One by one the names are called, and the crowd is gradually thinning down, when the announcement of my own name fell on my startled ear, and I found myself stumbling up the stairs, and finding myself in daylight and the 'dock.' What a terrible ordeal it was. The ceremony ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... blew a blast at the fast thinning fog. This noise was just what the stoker wanted. He quickly plunged his pistol into the porthole and fired it point blank in the very face of the old man. There could be no question of missing. He looked up at the three eager faces and nodded that ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... the ropes. They also bandaged the eyes and mouths of the unconscious mariners with strips of blanket. By this time the light on the stranded ship was burning low. The skipper and his companions examined the four boats, dragged one of them down to the edge of the tide and launched it. The fog was thinning swiftly, and a gray pallor was spreading in the east and south. They manned the boat and pulled out for the wreck, ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... designs and appears lighter when held to the light. Of course you are all familiar with this appearance from having noticed the watermarks in note paper. On rare occasions the watermark is a thickening of the paper instead of a thinning. In such a case the watermark appears more opaque than the paper. Watermarks in paper used for stamps are, of course, intended as a security ...
— What Philately Teaches • John N. Luff
... strode on, and with him were Mr. Grayson and Mr. Plummer. Hobart was at the candidate's elbow. Twilight was at hand and the darkness was increasing, although the snow was thinning. Hobart, peering out on the plain, saw only the swells of snow rising and falling like a white sea, and overhead the sky of sullen clouds. He marked the agony on the faces of the candidate and the "King," and his own heart ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... of the hounds. The "tally-ho" comes cheerly up to us from the valley through the crisp October air, and we see puss scudding along up the hedgerow, the hounds and the foremost runners in the next field, the rest thinning out and straggling behind them. Among these we recognise with glee a friend or two, who years ago were in the first flight of every Uppingham paper-chase (si nunc foret illa uventus), labouring across a turnip-field, or held by the leg ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... that the warders' morning watchfulness might yield to the influence of use and time; but near nine, when the morning fog showed signs of thinning, he approached the water-can to ask for a drink, O'Hara being then two yards from him, ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... moments, and again the light shone out; but meantime the boat's bow had veered several points. Turning toward it, I was off full speed this time for about five minutes, before the fog swept in again. Then another rest on my oars. The fog drifted out and drifted in backwards and forwards, now thinning here, then thinning there; but no other glimpse of the light did I get that night. For a moment, a shadowy-looking schooner glided slowly along a few hundred feet ahead of me, and directly across ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... slowly approached Lord Claud. Now that the hour for the play had all but come, the room was thinning of its guests. He felt more courage to speak to this strange being, who seemed so great ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... in my ears, and the sound of Cavor's movements diminished. I noted how still everything had become, because of the thinning of the air. ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... turned into a velvet dusk. The great Change was drawing near. The silence lay like a thinning veil of mist upon the mountain-top. The clouds were parting in the East, all tinged with gold, like burnished gates flung back for the royal coming of the sun-god. The stillness that lay upon all the waiting earth was sacred as ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... off his hat, and we said the Angelus in silence together. I noticed the silver gathering over his ears, and the black hair was visibly thinning on the top. I watched him keenly for those few seconds. I did not know that those musical strains of the midday Angelus were his death-knell—the ringing up of the great stage-manager, Death, for his volte subito—his leap ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... of the Virginia Legion gathered up his reins. "Thank you, general! Au revoir—and laurels to us all!" With a wave of his hand to Cleave, he was gone, crashing through the thinning pines to the broomsedge field and his ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... assembled on the towers of St. Stephen's, that they might hear from the lips of the sentinels the first tidings of joy; in the churches women and children were on their knees imploring Heaven to send them succor; while without the Turks, who had just begun a fresh assault, were thinning the ranks of their defenders, and adding to the mournful numbers of the widows and ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... stepped around to the side of the tug and stared anxiously southward. Bits of flotsam mottled the blue expanse, but it really appeared as if the saving drift weed were thinning to nothing. Hogan glanced back over the ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... now become thinned; many populous villages have disappeared—brother, the Nansemonds are not what they were, at least in numbers. But they have not lost their courage and valour, nor degenerated from the ancient renown of their fathers, nor has the thinning of their nation in the least tarnished the reputation of the few who yet live, or caused their enemies to deem them less than men. None can say that they ever turned their backs upon a foe, or shunned encountering one who wished for ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... shortness of food, which was thinning the flesh over Finn's haunches now, it was another cause which led him to swerve from the north-westerly course in a south-westerly direction. He paid no particular heed to old Tufter's continuous growls about the direction taken by the pack under ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... has been gradually thinning out, and Sam Young told him yesterday that he is afraid it will pinch out altogether. Last Saturday's cleaning up at the battery only yielded ten ounces of melted gold—worth about forty pounds—and the week's expenses came to one hundred and ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... not unpleasant to either of them, muffled as they were in heavy clothing, for it imparted briskness and vigour to their strong young bodies, and they went on at a swift pace through the densest part of the city, into the thinning suburbs and then toward the fields and open spaces which lay on the nearer side of the earthworks. Not a human being did they see not a dog barked at them as they passed, scarcely a light showed in a window; all around them the city lay in ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... from being the frivolous young thing that her father's banter indicated. She had a train of admirers, never thinning from year to year, to be certain, for it had been the regular fate of adolescent male Shelbyville to get itself tangled up in love with Alice Price ever since her high-school days. Many of the youngsters soon outgrew the affection; but it seemed to become a settled and permanent affliction ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... several shops to purchase various kinds of household necessaries, and round every place at which she stopped he hovered like her evil spirit; following her when she reappeared. It was nigh eleven o'clock, and the passengers in the streets were thinning fast, when she turned, doubtless to go home. The ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... waters without endangering their precious limbs. As the district which these animals frequented was in the present case a very circumscribed one—fresh individuals could come neither down from the Kenia nor over the waterfall at the end of the great plateau—we soon succeeded in so thinning their numbers that only a few examples were left, the destruction of which we handed over to our Andorobbo huntsmen, whom we furnished with weapons for this Purpose, and to whom we offered a large premium for every crocodile slain in the Eden lake or in the Dana above the waterfall. ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... place when the two caiques passed—just a thinning of the silken veil, with only one fold of the yashmak slipped over the eyes, softening the fire of their beauty; then a quick, all-enfolding, all-absorbing look, as if she would drink into her very soul the man she loved, and the ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... flavour, and so numerous as to be all very small. Of late years, however, they have gradually improved so much in flavour, as to become a remarkably spirited, juicy apple, attaining a good size, which has probably been promoted by thinning them, though a full crop has always been left upon the tree; and they are now greatly esteemed by ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... hard to pass by. Much as I love to bring to mind, over and over again, "Ivanhoe" and "Waverley," I love quite as much to summon to my view Walter Scott, the woodsman of Abbotsford, with hatchet at his girdle, and the hound Maida in attendance. I see him thinning out the saplings that he has planted upon the Tweed banks. I know how they stand, having wandered by the hour among them. I can fancy how the master would have lopped away the boughs for a little looplet through which a burst of the blue Eildon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... forefront. It rolled up to and across a concrete highway, watched by perspiring motor cops who had performed miracles in clearing a path for it among the horde of sightseeing cars. It swept on into a spindling pine wood. Behind it lay a thinning sheet of vapor—thick white mist which seemed to rise and move more swiftly to overtake the main body. It lay across the highway in a sheet which was ten feet deep, then ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... are 3.4 times as numerous as those of the first, those of the eighth magnitude are three times as numerous as those of the seventh, while the sixteenth magnitude stars are only 1.7 as numerous as those of the fifteenth magnitude. This steadily decreasing ratio is probably due to an actual thinning out of the stars toward the boundaries of the stellar universe, as the most exhaustive tests have failed to give any evidence of absorption of light in its passage through space. But in spite of this ...
— The New Heavens • George Ellery Hale
... that disease was raging to such an extent among the French troops at Cap, that the Captain-General had retired to Tortuga, to join his lady, and others of the expedition who were the most carefully guarded. The garrison at Saint Marc was thinning, Therese sent word; and the country people conveyed to Pongaudin the news that funerals were becoming daily more frequent at Limbe, Le Dauphin, and other posts along the ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... don't," he protested. "All I wanted was a shooting party to do a little scientific thinning out of these boar. I'll do some ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... region of which they now hoped to place themselves. The 'primo tenore' statue of Garibaldi had already taken possession of the place in the name of Latin progress, and they met Italian faces, French faces, Spanish faces, as they strolled over the asphalt walks, under the thinning shadows of the autumn-stricken sycamores. They met the familiar picturesque raggedness of Southern Europe with the old kindly illusion that somehow it existed for their appreciation, and that it found adequate compensation ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... days began and ended with a fog, but often between, as golden a sunshine glorified the streets of the grey city as any that ripened purple grapes. To-day the mist had lasted longer than usual—had risen instead of dispersing; but now it was thinning, and at length, like a slow blossoming of the sky-flower, the sun came melting through the cloud. Between the gables of two houses, a ray fell upon the pavement and the gutter. It lay there a very type of purity, so pure that, ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... my first planting of mignonette and growled at the prospective labour entailed by thinning out the fall-sown Shirley poppies (I have quite resolved to plant everything in the vegetable-garden seed beds and then transplant to the flowering beds as the easier task), Lavinia Cortright came up, note-book in hand, inviting herself comfortably ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... through the thinning pack without being touched, although several of the beasts snapped at him and the clashing of their fangs sent cold chills up and down his spine. Then he leaped away at top ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... Dim, gradual thinning of the shapeless gloom Shudders to drizzling daybreak that reveals Disconsolate men who stamp their sodden boots And turn dulled, sunken faces to the sky Haggard and hopeless. They, who have beaten down The stale despair of night, must now renew Their desolation in the truce of dawn, Murdering ...
— The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon • Siegfried Sassoon
... were ever in the minds of the dauntless men who were away facing the enemy, for a direr foe was thinning the blood and blanching the cheeks of wife and child. Therefore, many a hero turned his back on the scenes of his glory and incurred personal ignominy, and sometimes the ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... in Slavery; they would sooner see a black man dead than free. They were about second class in society. He and his sister own well on to one hundred head, though within the last few years he has been thinning off the number by sale. I was allowed one dollar a week for my board; one dollar is the usual allowance for slaves in my situation. On Christmas week he allowed me no board money, but made me a present of seventy-five cents; my mistress added twenty-five ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... her hands appealingly. The moonlight, falling through the thinning forest, showed her white cerements. Then the recollection of all she must have suffered—the awful loneliness in that grim tomb in the Crypt, the despairing agony of one who is helpless against the unknown—swept over me in a wave of pity. What ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... of absolutely unfamiliar ground to cover. The rifle and machine-gun fire was intense, and terribly accurate. The Huns, having no shells directed at them, stood up in their trenches aiming deliberately at each man in the broken and thinning lines. Short rushes were made from shell-hole to shell-hole, each rush proving very costly in casualties. Few, if any, of the men got within 100 yards of the enemy. Captain Attride had been wounded in the body, and Captain Lewis in the thigh, and hardly an officer ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... shroud from the sea! How it eddied and funneled and whorled, now massing thick like frosted glass, now thinning to a web of tissue. Suddenly, while he watched, a lane broke through. He saw clearly the piles at the wharf's end, a glimpse of dark water, and, between him and it, a figure huddled in a cloak—a female figure, also sitting upon an upturned ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... intelligent, and brave men failed as officers. Again, not every good captain made a good colonel, and not every good brigade commander was fit for a division or a larger command. There was a constantly widening test of capacity, and a rapid thinning of the numbers found fit for great responsibilities until the command of great armies was reached, when two or three names are all that we can enumerate as having been proven during the four years of our civil strife to be fully equal ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... plantation, and giving the average return of what might be obtained from cacao cultivation. Last year these trees did not average more than 2 lbs. per tree, and I attribute the increase of crop to the thinning out of both the cacao and ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds |
