"Crumbled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was not to be. Villarayo has been too strong. That war-vessel with its mighty gun holds us at its mercy. Whoever has that to back him up can rule this place; for any fort that we could raise, even with the guns you have brought, would be crumbled into the dust. There! Farewell! You have your boat. Save yourself and your true, brave men. Quickly, while there ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... and sandy white, and commerce forsook it but for here and there a little shop with fat yellow bags, which were the people's cheeses, hanging in bladders at the door. Crumbled gateways began to appear, and we saw through them that the villa gardens inside ran down and dropped their rose leaves into the blue of the Mediterranean. We met the country people going their ways to town; they looked at us with friendly patronage, knowing all about ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... ever seen it, alive and eloquent with every thought that her woman's speech but half expressed, was very near his—so near, that under her honest eyes the wretched scales fell from his own, his self-wrought shackles crumbled away, and he dropped upon his knees at her feet as she sank into the chair he had quitted. Both his hands were ...
— Jeff Briggs's Love Story • Bret Harte
... woman, poisoned by horrible suggestions, having no refuge either in work or in fatigue, having for my only safeguard against despair and ruin a sacred but frightful grief. O God! it is that grief, that sacred relic of my sorrow, that has just crumbled in my hands! It is no longer, my love, it is my despair that is insulted. Mockery! She mocks at me as I weep!" That appeared incredible to me. All the memories of the past crowded about my heart when I thought of it. I seemed ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... thin, crosswise, three medium size bananas, sprinkle thickly with sugar, then add to a batter made by beating up four egg-yolks and two whites, with one cup crumbled rich stale cake, half-cup sugar, cup very rich milk, and the juice of a large lemon. Mix smooth, pour into a deep pudding dish, and bake in a quick oven, then cover with meringue made from the egg-whites left out, beaten up with a small pinch of salt, two teaspoons cold ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... eye took in the surroundings with a half-amused, half-bewildered expression. The banquet table, despoiled of its beauty, the half-emptied wine glasses, the broken bits of cake, crumbled by beauty's fair fingers; the odor of dying roses, smothered in their bloom, mingled with the scent of the undrunk wine; all told the story of revelry and its ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... shall have crumbled to pieces, the last airship fallen to the ground, the last blade of grass have died upon a dying earth, man, indomitable by his training in resistance to misery and pain, shall set this undiminished light of his eyes against the feeble glow ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... apparent that in the face of such a wind all the pigmy appliances that the populace could bring to act upon such a mass of combustion would be unavailing. As much as could burn that night was burnt, while some of that which would not burn crumbled and fell as a formless heap, whence new flames towered up, and inclined to the north-east so far as to singe the trees of the park. The thicker walls of Norman date remained unmoved, partly because of their thickness, ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... hasten this progress into the compass of a few hours, how overwhelming would be the spectacle! How tremendously would loom this advancing edge, which at first we may conceive as having enormous thickness! How it must have cracked, crumbled, and fallen in frequent titanic crashes as it moved forward. It does not need the imagination of Dore to picture this advance, thus hastened in fancy, grim, relentless as death, its enormous towering head lost in eternal snows, its feet shaken by earthquakes, ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... full of gold and silver. So it was that she strove strenuously, desperately, to keep out the world from her American possessions—a bootless task, for the old order upon which her power rested was broken and crumbled forever. But still she strove, fighting against fate, and so it was that in the tropical America it was one continual war between her and all the world. Thus it came that, long after piracy ceased to be allowed ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... slowly tore it twice across, laid the fragments on a tray, and touched them with a lighted match. As they blazed up one line came out in writhing redness across the page: "I will go away with you as you ask." Then it crumbled into ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... investigation gave us a juster notion of the long lapse of time that must have occurred since any fire had burned upon this hearth. In one corner of the room we found a pile of mats, but on touching these they crumbled into fragments in our hands; and the bone in the pot was so dry and so porous that ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... the winter months to think that the worn-out limbs, the old scarred face of Lois rested, slept: crumbled into fresh atoms, woke at last with a strange sentience, and, when God smiled permission through the summer sun, flashed forth in a wild ecstasy of the true beauty that she loved so well. In no questioning, ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... Japan—in many cases most reluctantly arrived at—that the former ascendency of Buddhism has for ever passed away. "A dull apathy as regards religion has settled down upon the educated classes of Japan. The gods of heathenism have crumbled to nothing before modern science and civilization, and the glimmer of light and truth to which they pointed has gone as well."(34) Sometimes, again, Christianity is spoken of by Buddhists in terms which encourage us to hope that there are ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... now On no peace but the dead, On reek of trenches thunder-shocked, Tense fury of wills in wrestle locked, A chaos crumbled red! ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... Queen might ever rule or reign therein again. They forced the government, monarchy and people to abandon the place. From thence Tara was deserted, and the harp sounded no more through Tara's halls. The city thus cursed crumbled to ruins, and remains to this day buried, awaiting a glorious resurrection. Rome caught her prize at last; but neither Rome nor any other power ever enslaved or conquered Ulster. Beyond the pale—that is, the ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... mountain arose grandly before them, with its smoke-cloud overhanging its steep sides, ascending from where they stood to where the view was lost in smoke. At one part there was a surface of loose sand, and at another wild, disordered heaps of crumbled lava blocks. Over these last Michael Angelo led them, for these blocks formed stepping-stones by which to make the ascent. A number of men were here with chairs and straps, who offered them assistance; but they all declined, even Uncle Moses choosing to rely on his ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... of danger "till death part." Tell me, soul-searching ray, if erst I strove To cherish, feed and guard where grew no love. We sailed away to far Australia's shore, Oh, the long days passed near the ocean's roar. For him on whom I leaned in hope and trust, Proved but coarse clay that crumbled soon to dust. Drinking and gambling, sharks that swallow whole, Homes, jewels, money, reason, body, soul. Alone, for weeks to hear none call my name, And happier alone; then baby came, My firstborn, precious boy, I lived for him For months; then his bright eyes grew dim, And where the ...
— Victor Roy, A Masonic Poem • Harriet Annie Wilkins
... his cynical philosophy of life failed him at that moment. The eternal staging of the drama was the eternal tragedy of the performers. But he was thinking of his son. He had vision enough to realize that in Sisily's death Charles had lost all. His own hardness of outlook melted at that thought. It crumbled his worldliness to ashes, flooded his heart with vain regret, found utterance at last in the ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... excitement of our summer. In fact, I do not know that it was an excitement at all; and I am sure it was not comparable to the presence of our naval squadron, when for four days the mighty dragon and kraken shapes of steel, which had crumbled the decrepit pride of Spain in the fight at Santiago, weltered in our peaceful waters, almost under ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Southern resistance in arms crumbled in 1865 when once Sherman and Grant were under way no doubt startled foreign observers, but in British opinion, at least, the end had been foreseen from the moment Sherman reached the sea at Savannah. The desperate courage of the South was admired, but regarded as futile. ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... discovered a chalkpit among the rocks at the north of the forest, just beyond the edge of trees. The chalk was soft and in some places crumbled to a fine powder, so that when he had rolled himself for a few minutes in the dust all his feathers became as white as snow. This fact gave to Jim Crow a bright idea. No longer black, but white as a dove, he flew away to the forest and passed right by Policeman Blue Jay, who only noticed ...
— Twinkle and Chubbins - Their Astonishing Adventures in Nature-Fairyland • L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum
... doubtless been shaken, and the lofty turrets of Rome have tottered from their foundations, but the seven hills do not appear to be placed on the great cavities of the globe; nor has the city in any age been exposed to the convulsions of nature which in the climate of Antioch, Lisbon, or Lima, have crumbled in a few moments the works of ages in the dust. Fire is the most powerful agent of life ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... and when the dinner was set out David crumbled all the bread and the vessels all at once, and the shepherd said: "Here, hide yourselves or he will devour ...
— Armenian Literature • Anonymous
... great, beautiful church which had been the very soul of Rheims and the pride of France was now nothing but a ruined shell, its wonderful windows broken, its roof gone, its very walls of stone so burned that they crumbled to pieces at a touch. Even the great bronze bells had been melted in the flames and had fallen in molten drops, like tears of grief, into the wreckage below. All the beautiful treasures—the tapestries, wrought by the hands of queens, and even the sacred ...
— The French Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... night in question, that was practically what happened. Two houses adjoining one another were burnt out, and, the roofs having crumbled away, the long thick beams alone were left in position, supported at either end by the stone walls of the houses, and still blazing away, and placing the neighbouring houses that had thatched roofs in ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... with pelts. Where the dry clay crumbled, the roof had been timbered. A rivulet of spring water bubbled in one dark corner. At the same end an archway led to inner recesses. Behind the skin doorway sounded heavy breathing, as of sleepers. I had promised ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... gates and fill her academies."—Chazotte's Essay, p. 30. "We have neither forgot his past, nor despair of his future success."—Duncan's Cicero, p. 121. "Her monuments and temples had long been shattered or crumbled into dust."—Lit. Conv., p. 15. "Competition is excellent, and the vital principle in all these things."—DR. LIEBER: ib., p. 64. "Whether provision should or not be made to meet this exigency."—Ib., p. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Boche trench, that they cleared out of in the end." It is choked up in some places, in others riddled with shell-holes. The sandbags have been torn asunder and gutted; they are crumbled, emptied, scattered to the wind. The wooden props and beams arc splintered, and point all ways. The dug-outs are filled to the brim with earth and with—no one knows what. It is all like the dried bed of a river, smashed, extended, slimy, that both water and men have abandoned. In one place ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... madame," said I, "don't scream and kick so." My lady screamed all the louder and struggled all the worse. When half way down the ladder she said, "Young man, go back immediately, I have forgotten something very valuable to me." At these words the roof fell in, the walls crumbled away, the ladder shook, the earth opened under my feet, and I felt as if I were falling ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... or mark behind them, save these relics fashioned, by the merest of chances, out of a practically imperishable material; steel and copper would have rotted away long ago, and the stoutest palaces crumbled to dust under the teeth of ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... osier bound, That nameless heave the crumbled ground, 30 Quick to the glancing thought disclose Where ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... they came to look, they found that "decay's offensive fingers" had been more busy than they could have imagined, and that whatever they touched of the earlier coffins crumbled into dust before ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... out this wealth and burned up their precious things. This may be true, for to-day men visit the mountains to dig there for wealth, and this which they call gold is found much scattered, as though it had been crumbled and burned and blown wide over the earth upon the four winds. For these reasons this man thought that the mountains had once eaten up the plains; and that perhaps at some time they might ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... they are, boy," said the doctor, "crumbled, grown over, and in utter ruins; but I have had a look long enough to satisfy me that all this was built up—perhaps thousands of years ago. We can prove all that by-and-by. I want to see everyone at work making what ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... and involuntarily turned to the strongest, most dependable personality in her small world. I would have given all my faculty as a writer—my dearest possession—to have been in Somerled's place—to have had her appealing to me while her air-castle crumbled. ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... father's armor till it gleamed One mass of silver. There it stood complete, That august panoply which once struck dread To foemen on the sunny plains of France, Menacing, terrible, this instant stood, With vizard down and jousting-lance at charge As if that crumbled ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... imagined himself, broad awake in the Green Chamber, gazing upon the flickering and occasional flame which the unconsumed remnants of the faggots sent forth, as, one by one, they fell down upon the red embers, into which the principal part of the boughs to which they belonged had crumbled away. Insensibly the legend of Aldobrand Oldenbuck, and his mysterious visits to the inmates of the chamber, awoke in his mind, and with it, as we often feel in dreams, an anxious and fearful expectation, ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... to have seen us when he said that," observed Upton to his wife, as he told her about the interview at dinner that evening. "He was as solemn as an Alp, and apparently as immovable as the Sphinx; and as for me, I simply withered on my stalk and crumbled away into dust. Wherefore, my love, I am through; and hereafter if you are going to make matches for my friends and need outside help, get a hired man to help you. I'm did. If I were you I'd let 'em go their own way, and if their lives are spoiled, why, your conscience ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... Spaniards were seen in full flight along the top of the dyke leading towards the Hague. The rovers followed, leaping from their vessels and slaying all whom they could overtake, many of the fugitives perishing in the fast advancing waves as the dykes crumbled beneath their feet. But yet another fort, that of Lammen, the strongest of all, remained, held by the main body of the enemy. The fleet approached, but the admiral dared not expose his ships to the storms of shot hurled towards them, and therefore waited for the return of ...
— The Lily of Leyden • W.H.G. Kingston
... the quality of its meat. It is considered that good beef is obtained from an animal four or five years old. Beef should be firm, of bright red color, and of fine grain. There should also be a generous supply of suet. The latter should be dry and easily crumbled. In most markets, meat is made more tender by allowing it to hang for several days at ...
— School and Home Cooking • Carlotta C. Greer
... her bondage loosened in decay. And I had increased my difficulties by adopting as part of my task the introduction of all sorts of elaborate, and in many cases extravagantly composed metres, and I had begun to feel that I was working in sand, I could make no progress, the house I was raising crumbled and fell away on every side. These stories had one merit: they were all, so far as I can remember, perfectly constructed. For the art of telling a story clearly and dramatically, selon les procedes de M. Scribe, I had thoroughly learnt from old M. Duval, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... over the land knew,—to say nothing of the younger married women—that this was the beginning of their real independence, the knell of the old order. They were freed. Even the reenforced concrete minds of the last generation imperceptibly crumbled and were as ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... been with snow, it had seemed to have quite a pyramidal base, but the solid ice of its lower parts had in the course of time been eaten away till it was as fragile as the waxen comb it in some places resembled, and had crumbled down as soon as ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... tightly clinched. He sat bolt upright, his burning eyes fixed sternly on the wall before him, his face pallid save for the two round spots of flaming red that burned high upon his cheekbones. His heart was throbbing irregularly. And in his brain, amid the chaos of broken ideals, crumbled idols, and all the jumbled facts of his new understanding of misery and of evil:—amid all his strange and vibrant emotions, there thundered gigantically a series of magnificent minor chords forming a motive over-poweringly climatic. It was the same theme of "hope ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... gales beheld, And hurricanes and marvellous tempests; Lightnings and flames he saw in readiness, That speedily on all his people fell; Apple and ash, their spear-shafts all burned, Also their shields, e'en the golden bosses, Crumbled the shafts of their trenchant lances, Crushed their hauberks and all their steel helmets. His chevaliers he saw in great distress. Bears and leopards would feed upon them next; Adversaries, dragons, wyverns, serpents, Griffins were there, ...
— The Song of Roland • Anonymous
... egress, by the universal exclusion which, in every land, and from every faith, met the religion he belonged to, the faculties within him ran riot, producing gigantic but baseless schemes, which, as one after the other crumbled away, left behind feelings of dark misanthropy ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book I. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... apathy. Unfortunately the new rule, while more economical than the old, was not less arbitrary—military despotism being as little fitted for the development of a people as the rule of a corporation. Men looked aghast as the papacy and papal influence crumbled together, while the seat of real ecclesiastical power was removed from the banks of the Tiber to those of the Seine. Time seemed to be taking its revenge. Seven centuries earlier Lothair had been the vassal of Innocent II; Napoleon was ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... was taken from his mother when he was three nights old?" The Eagle said, "I have been here for a great space of time, and when I first came hither, there was a rock here from the top of which I pecked at the stars every evening; and it has crumbled away, and now it is not so much as a span high. All that time I have been here, and I have never heard of the man for whom you inquire, except once when I went in search of food as far as Llyn Llyw. And when I came there, I struck my talons ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... arrowheads with some sharp-cornered instrument, after which the document was made permanent by baking. They are somewhat fragile, of course, as all bricks are, and many of them have been more or less crumbled in the destruction of the palace at Nineveh; but to the ravages of mere time they are as nearly invulnerable as almost anything in nature. Hence it is that these records of a remote civilization have been preserved to us, while the similar records of such later civilizations as the Grecian ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... sorties, the shrieks of the combatants, and the city ever burning by flames enkindled by red hot shot thrown over the walls. The Russian batteries grew every day more and more formidable, and the ramparts crumbled beneath their blows. The Russian army was so numerous that the soldiers relieved themselves at the batteries, and the bombardment was continued day and night. At length a Tartar army was seen descending the distant mountains and hastening to the relief of ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... end, so excellent as to be the marvel of modern engineers. Their completeness, intelligent purpose, and extent are marvelous. But no one can say, or reasonably surmise, what caused the ruin and decadence of the ancient capitals, which, like those about Delhi, have crumbled away, leaving only a blank memorial of their existence. What could have swept from the globe a population of millions, and left us no clearer record of their once highly civilized occupancy? The carved pillars, ornamental fragments of temples, and stone slabs ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... robust constitutions could scarcely endure to face it. The Thames was at once so frozen over, both above and below the bridge, that crowds ran about on the ice. The streets were now strangely encumbered with snow, which crumbled and trod dusty, mid, turning gray, resembled bay-salt; what had fallen on the roofs was so perfectly dry, that from first to last it lay twenty-six days on the houses in the city—a longer time than had been remembered ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... the palaces of Babylon and the shops of Thebes—in Tyre, in Sidon, in Gades, in Palmyra, in Nineveh. How many nations have perished, how many languages have ceased to exist, how many splendid civilizations have crumbled into ruin, bow many temples and towers and towns have gone down to dust since the sublime frenzy of monotheism first seized this extraordinary people! All their kindred nomadic tribes are gone; their land of promise is in the hands of strangers; ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... and messy," said Gladys, viewing with fastidious distaste a pile of crumbled bricks and mortar which lay at the foot of the stairway, the result of an explosion which had blown a ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... in groups of about a hundred, pulling themselves slowly toward the edges of the great sticky lake that lay within the vaster area where the pink matter dried and crumbled into the strong breeze. Some were smaller than others, offspring who were nudged along by their elders. But these small creatures were the ones who scampered most of all after they had fed. Joyously they danced back toward the mountain. A few ...
— Sweet Their Blood and Sticky • Albert Teichner
... in the whitewashed room by the light of three brass olive oil lamps, I found that my argument had suddenly crumbled. What could I, who had come out of ragged and barbarous outlands, tell of the art of living to a man who had taught me both system and revolt? So am I, to whom the connubial lyrics of Patmore and Ella Wheeler Wilcox have always seemed ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... a forest path. The Sofala, gliding with an even motion, had passed beyond the coast-belt of mud and mangroves. The shores rose higher, in firm sloping banks, and the forest of big trees came down to the brink. Where the earth had been crumbled by the floods it showed a steep brown cut, denuding a mass of roots intertwined as if wrestling underground; and in the air, the interlaced boughs, bound and loaded with creepers, carried on the struggle for life, mingled their foliage in one solid ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... thought, mechanically he crumbled on the cloth a bit of the gilded bread which was placed near his napkin. As a viand, a mere bit of fancy, insignificant in such a repast, it made him think of the naif phrase of the great lady concerning ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... Angel of Light! Each gazes on each,—no barrier between— And the quivering rocks shrink aghast from the scene! The sword of the angel waves free in the air; Death looks to his quiver,—no arrow is there! He falls like a pyramid, crumbled and torn; And a vision of light on his dying eye borne, In glory reveals the blest souls of the slain,— And he sees that his sceptre was transient and vain; For, 'mid the bright throng, e'en the infant ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... "The astonishment of South Africa is a mere detail. When the news reached Zimbabwe, bones that have lain buried for three thousand years rattled in their grave-clothes, and antiquities of the ages crumbled to dust. In the morning, over our coffee, Moore and I ask of the four winds and of the liquid butter and of the unyielding bread, 'Which did he actually marry in the end, and what became ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... enlightenment. Such at least is the faith of an age whose striking characteristic is confidence in education. Men have ceased to care for the bliss there may be in ignorance, and those who dread knowledge, if such there still be, are as far away from the life of this century as the dead whose bones crumbled to dust a ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... the clouds began to gather, and it seemed like rain, but now and then a shaft of sunlight fell on a corner of the table within a few inches of Kate's impatiently moving fingers. She had not been able to eat any breakfast—had just crumbled a piece of bread and sipped a cup of tea, and begged Dick to hasten. It seemed that he hadn't a thought for her, of what her fate would be if they missed the train. She couldn't ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... the mightiest power of the universe, that Righteousness is eternal, and that anything short of it is transitory, they planned a gorgeous edifice with Slavery for its corner-stone; but suddenly, and in an hour, their superstructure and foundation, crumbled. They grasped at dominion, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... greatness was the Hotel de Ville, erected in the sixteenth century, and containing a large collection of modern paintings by French and Belgian artists. Of this structure not a trace remains save a vast blackened pile of crumbled stones and mortar. In the market-place now roam bands of half-starved dogs in search of food; not a roof remains intact. A couple of sentries pace before the hospital at the end of the Grand' Place. A recent photograph in the Illustrated London News taken from ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... watching the river on Tuesday evening, March 25th, when, with a roar that could be heard for blocks, hundreds of tons of dirt in the Morris Street levee crumbled under the pressure, and great walls of water ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... but not so bitterly as for the little one that stayed behind. Why had not God taken her with the rest? And then, so hopeless as he was, so destitute of possibilities of good, his weary frame, his decrepit bones, his dried-up heart, might have crumbled into dust at once, and have been scattered by the next wind over all the heaps of earth that were ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... behind me, I turned towards the east. The road, having been cut in the side of the cliff, exposed layers of brown argillaceous schist, like rotten wood, and so friable that it crumbled between the fingers; but what was more remarkable was that the layers, scarcely thicker than slate, instead of being on their natural plane, were turned up quite vertically. I was now ascending to the barren uplands. Near the brow of a hill I passed ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... hour, is found in the gossip of one poor Monk, and in Nature nowhere else. Oblivion had so nigh swallowed him altogether, even to the echo of his ever having existed. What regiments and hosts and generations of such has Oblivion already swallowed! Their crumbled dust makes up the soil our life-fruit grows on. Said I not, as my old Norse Fathers taught me, The Life-tree Igdrasil, which waves round thee in this hour, whereof thou in this hour art portion, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... magnificent castle in the air which he had builded crumbled at his feet. "This is for me alone," he swore in his heart, and it was only after an hour's cogitation that he resolved upon his course. "I must hunt up Doctor Atwater; but, first, wait for the wishes of ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... a short time with our cutlasses until I became convinced that a city had stood upon the spot at some time in the past, and that beneath our feet, crumbled and ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and open wide our eyes. We hoist our heads with no precaution above the crumbled parapet. ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... And she has a full-decked cabin—that's old style. Hatches are all battened down, but I doubt if this tarpaulin holds water." He stepped on the main hatch, brought his weight on the ball of one foot, and turned around. The canvas crumbled to threads, showing the wood beneath. "Let's go below. If there were any Spaniards here they'd have shown themselves before this." The cabin doors were latched but not locked, and they ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... of February, 1783, the province of Calabria was visited with a terrific earthquake. "The sway of earth shook like a thing unfirm," thousands of houses crumbled to their base, tens of thousands of human beings were buried beneath ruins, or engulfed by the gaping ground. In the small and ancient town of Squillace, the devastation was frightful; amongst others, the spacious mansion of the noble family of PEPE was overthrown and utterly destroyed. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... later the bodies of Levi Hall and his wife (relatives), were deposited in the same earth with that of Mr. Lincoln. The graves of two or three children, belonging to a neighbour's family, are also near theirs. They are all crumbled, sunken and covered with wild vines in deep and tangled mats. The great trees were originally cut away to make a small cleared space for this primitive graveyard; but the young dogwoods have sprung up unopposed in great luxuriance, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... The young candidate in reply speedily put it in far more glowing colours. It was no trivial banner of a party club, it was the red flag of England that he saw before him, the symbol of national moderation and national power, under which, when every throne on the continent had crumbled into dust beneath the tyrannous strength of France, mankind had found sure refuge and triumphant hope, and the blast that tore every other ensign to tatters served only to unfold their own and display its beauty ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... your webs of sunlight to snare me; on moonlit mountains, laughing and calling; in the streets of crowded cities, beckoning and disappearing in the crowd—and everywhere I have fled from you, holding above my head the sign of God's power in me, my gift and my mission.—What use? What use? It has crumbled, and I do ...
— The Faith Healer - A Play in Three Acts • William Vaughn Moody
... with a little dry bread crumbled up and rubbed gently, but firmly, over with the open hand. Cloth covers may be washed with a sponge dipped in a mixture made from the white of an egg beaten to a stiff froth and afterwards allowed to settle. To clean grease marks from ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... those all-absorbing walls. So far, certainly, this was no new experience. It was past four. He waited for the shadows to gather. Light thickened beyond his windows; gradually the outflanking wall and part of a projecting terrace crumbled away in the darkness, as if Night were slowly reducing the castle. The figures on the tapestry in his room stood out faintly. The gallery, seen through his open door, barred with black spaces between the mullioned windows, presently became obliterated, ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... contain for him all that he, according to some highly original conception of ultimate justice, deserves. As for England being 'on the crumble,' I consider it a conservative description of what has been going on in that country for years. In most departments of life England has crumbled, literally crumbled away. What Mr. Carville omits is the emergence of the new England, an England he doesn't like, an England we shall probably find hard to assimilate and which may quite conceivably drive ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... the edge of the Libyan Desert. They are placed along the great Egyptian natural burying place in the western side of the Nile valley, as a sort of boulevard of the tombs of kings and nobles. Most of them are constructed of stone, although several are of adobe or sun-dried brick. The latter have crumbled into great conical mountains, like those of ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... negroes, ran after him. From the breasts of the savage warriors there came a shout—it was not known whether of alarm or of rage, but, before they recovered their wits, the stockade under the pressure of the elephant's head crashed and tumbled; after that the clay walls of the hut crumbled and amid dust the roof flew up in the air; and after a while M'Rua and his men saw the black trunk raised high and at the end of the trunk ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... thought of the characters in the unconvincing wigs and costumes of our school performance. No Gilbert Murray had come as yet to touch these things to life again. It was like the ghost of an antiquarian's toy theatre, a ghost that crumbled and condensed into a gritty dust of construing ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... its awful lightning blaze granite flows like water and big steel rails are welded in the twinkling of an eye.... The interior of Mount Pelee, whose fiery blast destroyed St. Pierre in a moment and crumbled its buildings into dust, would be cool compared with this temperature of 5400 deg. It would melt the White Mountains into rivers of liquid fire. Nothing could withstand its consuming power.... And what makes this stupendous force? The answer seems incredible as the claims for the force ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... and culture.—-The soil is light and sandy, and much mixed with particles of clay-slate, which have crumbled down from the adjoining rocks. I believe these plantations are rarely irrigated, and the land is steep enough to prevent any stagnant water from remaining about the roots of ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... far away to see results, but we were told that as a spectacle the effect of the shell-bursts on the ice crags was remarkable. Under the explosions the immense masses of these translucent fairy islands rocked and changed shape. Faces of ice cliffs crumbled under the hits and sent down avalanches of ice into the furious green seas the shocks of the ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... condition during the process of casting, and it was well that he did so, because the extreme cold had frozen the plaster casts before they were dry, rendering them so brittle that many of them were broken in handling, and the head itself was crumbled into a hundred pieces and had to ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... rains of summer, and the creeping vine That season after season clings in trust, And shivered poppies red as Roman wine,— These things at last will haunt its crumbled dust— Not dreams of empires shattered where they lie, But children's laughter, birds, and ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton
... grinning skulls was ranged round the wall of the churchyard, and the sexton, who gave us admittance to the church, taking up one to show it off, it all crumbled into dust, which filled the air like ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... straight into the middle of the Fianna, and gave his sword good feeding on their bodies, till they broke away before him and made no stand till Lugaidh's Son turned round against him. And those two fought a great fight, till their swords were bent and their spears crumbled away, and they lost their golden shields. And at the last Lugaidh's Son made a stroke of his sword that cut through the foreigner's sword, and then he made another stroke that cut his heart in two halves. And he came back high and proud ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... not the President, who were exceptional. They refused to accept words. They persisted in demanding acts. Step by step under terrific gunfire the President's resistance crumbled, and he yielded, one by one, every minor facility to the measure, always withholding from us, however, the main objective. Not until he had exhausted all minor facilities, and all possible evasions, did he publicly declare that the amendment ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... abruptly into some hollow waterway, the cliffs and pinnacles begin to loom up against the sky; then they seem to close in and block the way, and just as the canyon boxes in to nothing the trail slips into a gash in the face of the cliff where the soft sandstone has crumbled away between two harder strata, and climbs precariously along through the sombre gloom of the gorge to the bright light of the ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... until the coming of the new third. A series of victories unequalled in the world, followed each other, almost too rapidly to be counted, and too numerous to be remembered. The Coalition, every where defeated and confounded, crumbled away like a ball of dust in the hand of a giant. Every thing, during that period, was acted on such a mighty scale that reality appeared a dream, and truth outstript romance. It may figuratively be said, that the Rhine and the Rubicon ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... in less than that time afterward, the city walls enclosed a hunting ground or park for the recreation of Persian monarchs. We cannot well imagine a more complete destruction than has overtaken the once rich and gay metropolis. The ruins are a number of mounds, formed of crumbled buildings, and strewn all over with pieces of brick, bitumen, and ...
— Half Hours in Bible Lands, Volume 2 - Patriarchs, Kings, and Kingdoms • Rev. P. C. Headley
... bust, the storied urn, and proud epitaph; but where is the mausoleum which preserves the names and virtues of those gentle, unobtrusive women—the heroines and comforters of the frontier home? In the East, the simple slabs of stone which record their names have crumbled into the dust of the churchyard. In the far West, they sleep on the prairie and mountain slope, with scarcely a memorial to ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... god, who lives for ever and ever; before whom the gods of the north and of the west and of the east and of the south are as the sand of the desert in the blast; at whose sight the vain deities of Egypt crumbled into pieces, and the God of the Israelites trembled and was made little in the days of Nebuchadnezzar my sire. And I command you, lords and princes of Babylon, you and your wives and your fair women, that ye ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... years she had been the richest woman in Middleborough, the head of everything charitable and religious, the mainstay of ministers, the court of final appeal in the case of sinners and backsliders. Now, in a moment, through no fault of her own, the whole fabric of her life had crumbled. Again had ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... morning the Alderman's face was brighter: it was all a lie, he said. The revolt had crumbled away; my Lord Sussex was impregnably fortified in York with guns from Hull; Lord Pembroke was gathering forces at Windsor; Lords Clinton, Hereford and Warwick were converging towards York to relieve the siege. And as if to show Isabel it was not ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... art here, demon! Impure courtesan! Drinker of blood and gold! 'And he flung holy water upon the corpse and the coffin, over which he traced the sign of the cross with his sprinkler. Poor Clarimonde had no sooner been touched by the blessed spray than her beautiful body crumbled into dust, and became only a shapeless and frightful mass ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... rays of the sun were lower, Ferne went into his garden and lifted his bared brow, that perchance the air might cool it. It was the quiet hour when the goal of the sun is in view, and the shadows of the fruit trees lay long upon the grass. There were breaches in the garden walls where they had crumbled into ruin, and through these openings, beyond dark masses of all-covering ivy, sight might be had of old trees set in alleys, of primrose-yellowed downs, and of a distant cliff-head where sheep grazed, while far below gleamed a sapphire line of sea. Tender quiet, fair stillness, marked the ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... half million drew The breath of six per cent; But soon the worm of what-was-not Fed hard on his content; And something crumbled in his brain When his half ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... herself (as all things must) Is crumbled into native dust; Is now a pasture, where the beast Strays for his vegetable feast, Old Priam's royal palace now May couch the ox, the ass, ...
— The Methodist - A Poem • Evan Lloyd
... wander off the place of his footsteps, he found that he got along securely and even swiftly. He had only one more difficulty with which to contend. In one place the sort of path which the Razor presented was broken and crumbled away, and here Walter's heart again sank despairingly within him, as his attention was suddenly arrested by the additional and unexpected peril. But to turn back was now out of the question, and as it seemed impossible to walk for these few feet, he again knelt ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... which Gracchus was regarded by the poorer of his followers, when they saw him abandoned by the more outwardly respectable of his supporters. The present position of Gracchus showed clearly that the powerful coalition on which he had built up his influence had crumbled away. From a leader of the State he had become but the leader of a faction, and of one which had hitherto proved itself powerless to resist unaided a sudden attack by ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... You say I have set a price on myself. Well, she set a price on herself, but you can't see it. Her price was your honor, that has crumbled; your conscience, that has rotted. You have paid it, and you would pay double if she exacted it. But one thing you shall not do: you shall not judge of my bargains, nor decide what I have paid ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... There, in the shadowy distance, lay the surrounding forest, and here, close at hand, stood the outline of the village buildings. But, underfoot, beyond question, lay nothing but the broken heaps of stones that betokened a building long since crumbled to dust. Then he saw that the stones were blackened, and that great wooden beams, half burnt, half rotten, made lines through the general debris. He stood, then, among the ruins of a burnt and shattered building, ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... spake, the form of Bennaskar perished from the face of the plain, and his body crumbled to atoms and mixed with the dust of the earth; but from his ashes the enchantress Ulin arose, and with an enraged visage turned towards me and said, "Thou art still the victim of my power; and since Bennaskar is no ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... handful of snow from the window-sill. It crumbled in my fingers like patent camphorated tooth-powder, for which purpose I instantly proceeded to use it. Necessity is the mother of invention. Then I turned, as a final test, to my bath. Oh, joy! it was frozen ten inches thick! ...
— Much Darker Days • Andrew Lang (AKA A. Huge Longway)
... old and grey porter's lodge, and an old and grey gateway, with two tall, moss-grown stone pillars, and an iron gate between them. On the top of the pillars were crumbled stone shields, seemingly held in place by a lion on ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... were uncomfortably termed broken victuals had been given away during the winter, and a bewildering amount of begging women and children used to ask interviews with 'the Lady Winslow,' with stories that crumbled on investigation so as to make us recollect the ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Out of the utter stillness came one breath of wind. It rattled the dead leaves of a shrub some distance away and ceased. A handful of dry earth detached itself from the edge of a rail trench and crumbled softly ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... loosen it, try ever so hard. What would he not have given for an axe, or at least a knife. And yet he had never thought of their value when at home. He attempted to cut one root through with his clam-shell, but the shell crumbled and would not cut ...
— An American Robinson Crusoe - for American Boys and Girls • Samuel. B. Allison
... were pretty badly frightened. Many of the poorly constructed adobe huts had crumbled almost into dust. A great yellow cloud, like smoke, hung over the river. This appeared to be at the upper end of Belding's plot, and close to the river. When he reached his fence the smoke and dust were so thick he could scarcely breathe, and for a little while ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... seated skeleton more closely. It was, he discovered, accurately jointed together with strong wire. Clearly this was the work of hands which were born into the world long after the flesh on those mighty bones had crumbled ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... base of a tall fig tree—flourishing in one of the corners, its dense, wide branching top making a literal roof for the otherwise roofless hall—an enormous ant's nest was plastered, a black excrescence looking like burnt paper, and which crumbled like soft crisp cinder as I poked it with the barrel of my gun, to the dismay of its myriad little red inhabitants—the only denizens it would seem of ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... fast, and would not stop; but she ran fast too, for her love would not let him go. Once she nearly had him by the hair, and once she caught him by the cloak; but in her hand it shredded and crumbled like a dry leaf; and still, though there was no breath left in her, ...
— The Blue Moon • Laurence Housman
... their eyes, flew down and sat on one of the seats of the boat, forgettin' in that awful moment that man was their nat'ral enemy. I had a couple of biscuits in my pocket, because I had thought I might want a bite in crossing, and I crumbled up one of these and fed the poor creatures. Then I began to wonder what I was goin' to do, for things were gettin' awfuller and awfuller every instant, and the little boat was a-heavin' and a-pitchin' and a-rollin' and h'istin' itself up, first on one end and then on the ...
— The Magic Egg and Other Stories • Frank Stockton
... like tropical flowers under green glass, flashed towards me through the beryl water, just as ancestor fish had flashed when jewelled hands of harem beauties crumbled cake into the gleaming tank. My mother had told me a legend, that fair favourites of banished sultans prayed to return after death to the Alhambra, in the bronze and gold, rose and purple forms of these fish of the Alberca; and now ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... out of houses, are not to be taken like frosted lead pipes from the ground. Besides," added I, "the chimney is the one grand permanence of this abode. If undisturbed by innovators, then in future ages, when all the house shall have crumbled from it, this chimney will still survive—a Bunker Hill monument. No, no, wife, ...
— I and My Chimney • Herman Melville
... but, whether from considerations of modesty, or for the glorification of the idol, it had afterwards been clothed in a most elaborate costume consisting of a tunic, confined to the waist by a belt, a cloak, and sandals. The tunic was made of a kind of fine canvas that crumbled away when touched; the mantle was of feathers of the most gorgeous hues; and the sandals were of some delicate kind of leather dressed with the hair on; and they, as well as the tunic and belt, were encrusted with minute scales of dull, ruddy yellow ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... importance of this idea of life among the crystals, we must remember that our hardest rocks and metals are composed of crystals, and that the dirt and earth upon which we grow and live are but crumbled rock and miniature crystals. Therefore the very dust under our feet is alive. There is nothing dead. There is no transformation of "dead matter" into live plant matter, and then into live animal matter. ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... grains did creep, That right-hand Giant 'gan his club upsway, As one that startles from a heavy sleep. Full on the upper wall the mace's sweep At once descended with the force of thunder, And hurtling down at once, in crumbled heap, The marble boundary was rent asunder, And gave to Roderick's view new sights of fear ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... a proud monastic pile, o'erthrown, Fear-struck, the brooded inmates rushed and fled; The web, that for a thousand years had grown O'er prostrate Europe, in that day of dread Crumbled and fell, as ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... they were bluffing and took them at their word, with the result that there fell upon Clonderriff a snowstorm of documents—leases and mortgages and conveyances and post-obits—all the documentary debris of a crumbled estate, from the Elizabethan charter on which the first Hewish had founded Roscarna to the illiterate IOU's of Jocelyn's spider-racing days. Considine, up to his neck in it, called on Gabrielle to help in the ordering of her affairs. At Clonderriff they had not room ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... looked around them in silent wonder. They were in a bower of leafy green. It was the top story of the tower, the roof of which had crumbled and toppled in, leaving it open to the sky, with only here and there a slanting beam or two supporting a portion of the tiled roof, affording shelter for the nests of the pigeons crowded closely together. Over everything the ivy had grown in a mantling sheet—a net-work of shimmering ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... people talking earnestly. One man stood up with his back to Chris, one hand gripping the outside ragged bark of the arbour frame with a peculiarly nervous, restless force. Chris could see the hand turned back distinctly. A piece of bark was being crumbled under a strong thumb. Such a thumb! Chris had seen nothing ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... He crumbled suddenly into his seat, his eyes on that unpleasant line about "Prison Stripes for the Mayor". For an instant it seemed as though his fight was irrevocably lost, and he knew it. Lines of age appeared to creep from out the fat folds of his face, and stand mockingly ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... was reached that the piece of iron which we found was in reality a part of one of Captain Kidd's chests, which had become rust-eaten and crumbled, and which had been torn asunder by the growing roots of the tree, and parts of it carried in various directions by them as they had spread, scattering the contents through ...
— Money Island • Andrew Jackson Howell, Jr.
... Max. All considerations of prudence, of caution, crumbled away under the influence of the intense pity he felt for ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... restaurant to kill the half-hour before Antonia's arrival, he ordered a bottle of wine for his companion, a cup of coffee for himself, and, lighting a cigarette, compressed his lips. There was a strange, sweet sinking in his heart. His companion, ignorant of this emotion, drank his wine, crumbled his roll, and blew smoke through his nostrils, glancing caustically at the rows of little tables, the cheap mirrors, the hot, red velvet, the chandeliers. His juicy lips seemed to be murmuring, "Ah! if you only knew of the dirt behind these feathers!" Shelton watched him with ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... or resigned their positions at the command {63} of crowds of armed "minute men." Conventions and congresses, summoned by committees of safety, were elected by the Whigs and assumed control of the colonies, following the example of Massachusetts. The British colonial government, in short, crumbled to nothing in the spring of 1775. Only Gage's force of a few regiments, shut up in Boston, and a few naval vessels, represented the authority of ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... skeleton it could not have been worse! The rose, which last night seemed freshly plucked, full of color and perfume, is brown, dry—a thing kept for centuries between the leaves of a book—it has crumbled into dust between my fingers. Horrible, horrible! But why so, pray? Did I not know that I was in love with a woman dead three hundred years? If I wanted fresh roses which bloomed yesterday, the Countess Fiammetta or any ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... laboriously built up structure of her military state was brought to a futile struggle for life, the whole vast fabric of her underground diplomacy, her intricate, world-penetrating spy system, her marvelously elaborate and totally unscrupulous propaganda, crumbled away; nothing remained of the earlier vigor but a memory—that shall be a ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... when it is finally made ready for the seed. The work must be done with care, and the beds should be marked off in breadths of four feet, with one-foot alleys between. Break all lumps with the spade, and work the surface to a regular and finely crumbled texture. Light soil should be trodden over to consolidate it, and then the surface may be carefully touched with the rake to prepare it for the seed. March and April are the usual months for spring sowing, ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... on the ear of those around, and now at length the sisters divined their fate. One by one they were hurled into the boiling flood: one wild shriek, the billows closed again, and all was over. What the fate of their lovers was, the legend says not. The old castle has crumbled into ruins—the chieftain sleeps in an unknown grave, his very name forgotten; but still the sad ending of the maidens is remembered, and even unto this day the cavern is denominated the "Cave of the Seven Sisters." Such is the above legend as it ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 238, May 20, 1854 • Various
... a high arbour made of bamboo and encircled by a hedge of wild geranium. Its opening was towards the Nile, and when she entered it she perceived, far off, at the end of a long alley of orange-trees, the uneven line of the bank. Just where she saw it the ground had crumbled, the line wavered, and was depressed, and though the water was not visible the high lateen sails of the native boats, going southward in the sun, showed themselves to her strangely behind the fretwork of the leaves. At her approach ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... the moon. Will it be this little white miracle, she wonders. How shall she know it, the star that will save her? Still, ah still, in the moonlight she crouches Bowing her head, for the garland has crumbled! All the wild petals for the thousand and ...
— The Lord of Misrule - And Other Poems • Alfred Noyes
... and the premature dusk of mid-winter was falling as, approaching nearer, we saw where the roof-thatch had decayed, where the insidious finger of Time had crumbled the stone walls. A chilly wind arising, moaned through the naked trees. The shadow of the guillotine seemed to brood oppressively over the scene, and, shuddering, ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... brothers of the convent made a faithful copy, and diligently explained it in their public teaching; they also translated it into Latin, in which it is now known and read; the historian adds that the ancient and original copy, which was so curiously written, instantaneously crumbled into dust and was destroyed ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... was enormous, unforeseen. Taxes went up, sidewalks crumbled back into the grass again, the four or five unfenced little wooden houses that were erected and occupied added to the general effect of forlornness. The Estates were mortgaged, and to the old mortgage on the homestead ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... hundred years ago Mongolia well-nigh ruled the world. Her people were strong beyond belief, but her empire crumbled as quickly as it rose, leaving to posterity only a glorious tradition and a land of mystery. The tradition will endure for centuries; but the motor car and aeroplane and wireless have dispelled the ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... violets, or beans and young potatoes, flourished there, they had deserved their name of jewel-gardens, and to himself he had always called them "the hanging gardens of Babylon"—a phrase that had filled him with a sense of joy. Now they had been long neglected, and the bare earth crumbled underfoot; even grass or weeds seemed afraid to grow there. Dead, quiet, and still, they were become sinister little squares of earth, shrouded by those contorted elders, dry ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... it seemed that the great hall burst open and crumbled into flakes of fire round me. Then a great wind blew: there was a sound as the sound of Worlds rushing down the flood of Time—and ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... crumbled, sending up a flash which threw into relief the narrator's gnarled red face under its grey-black stubble. Pressed into the hollow of the dark leather armchair, it stood out an instant like an intaglio of yellowish red-veined stone, with spots of enamel for the eyes; then the fire ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... soft on Carbery's hundred isles— The summer sun is gleaming still through Gabriel's rough defiles— Old Inisherkin's crumbled fane looks like a moulting bird; And in a calm and sleepy swell the ocean tide is heard; The hookers lie upon the beach; the children cease their play; The gossips leave the little inn; the households kneel to pray— And full of ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... crumbled further on the right the corpse turned over as a man does in bed. They immediately covered him with fresh wood and the fire started up again more ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... dropping asleep, and the fire having increased and burnt off one foot to the ankle, rose in the morning to depart, and knew nothing of his misfortune, until, putting his burnt limb to the ground, to support his body in rising, the extremity of his leg-bone, calcined into lime, crumbled to fragments ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... feelings. Yes, even there, where she had garnered up her heart, she was not Florence, the lovely and beloved woman; but Florence, the wealthy and high-born heiress. The world which she had built upon the faith and heart of Maltravers crumbled away at her feet. The letter dropped from her hands; her whole form seemed to shrink and shrivel up; her teeth were set, and her cheek was ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... skins and let the underlings suffer. While Bering might have averted the disaster that attended the expedition, it must not be forgotten that when he perished, there perished the very soul of the great enterprise, which at once crumbled to pieces. ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... vast operations to a close, and evolved liabilities of upwards of two hundred and fifty thousand. O, the shame and pity of it, and you but three weeks gone! Loudon, don't blame your partner; if human hands and brains could have sufficed I would have held the thing together. But it just slowly crumbled; Bradley was the last kick, but the blamed business just melted. I give the liabilities—it's supposed they're all in—for the cowards were waiting, and the claims were filed like taking tickets to hear Patti. I don't ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his silk gown, and proceeded to set forth the theory of the defense. He said he did not purpose to call any witnesses. The hypothesis of the prosecution was so inherently childish and inconsequential, and so dependent upon a bundle of interdependent probabilities that it crumbled away at the merest touch. The prisoner's character was of unblemished integrity, his last public appearance had been made on the same platform with Mr. Gladstone, and his honesty and highmindedness had been vouched for by statesmen of the highest standing. His movements ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... all alike have perished. In the panorama of the past behold the mighty nations that have risen, one by one, but to fall. Behold their temples, thrones, and pyramids, their gorgeous palaces and stately monuments now crumbled all to dust. Behold every monarch in Europe at this very hour trembling on his throne. Behold the republics on this Western continent convulsed, distracted, divided, the hosts scattered, the leaders fallen, the scouts lost in the wilderness, the once inspired prophets blind and dumb, while ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... a quiet dream. Dream? No, reality. This was the dream, this world of slipping shadows and hurrying gleams of heartbreaking loveliness, through which one roamed, a child chasing butterflies which ever escaped, or which, if captured, crumbled to dust in one's clutching hands. Oh for something strong and firm to hold. Oh Barry, Barry, these few more weeks of dream, of slipping golden shadows and wavering lights, and then reality. Shall I write, thought Nan, "Dear ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... tablespoonful of corn-starch, a dessertspoonful of Tarragon vinegar, and a pint of strong stock. Let all simmer very gently for about one hour. Take up the cutlets, strain the gravy and pour it over them, then sprinkle with a tablespoonful of grated tongue, and the same quantity of parsley dried and crumbled small. Chicken may also ...
— Choice Cookery • Catherine Owen
... pyre was a mass of flame, and the golden armour of the Wanderer shone through the flame, and the black bow twisted and crumbled in the heat. Then of a sudden Meriamun gave a great cry, and tearing the snake girdle from her middle hurled it ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... promontory; and that other brazen Pallas, called, by pre-eminence, "the Beautiful;" and the enormous Colossus of ivory and of gold, "the Immortal Maid"—the protecting goddess of the Parthenon—these have perished. But whilst the fingers of time have crumbled the Pentelic marble, and the glorious statuary has been broken to pieces by vandal hands, and the gold and brass have been melted in the crucibles of needy monarchs and converted into vulgar money, the philosophic ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... to facilitate the process of modelling his works, for—except in portrait-busts—he makes no clay model as other sculptors do, but models directly in the plaster; so that instead of being crumbled, like clay, the original model remains a permanent possession. He has also invented a certain open file, which is of great use in finishing the surface of the marble; and likewise a machine for making ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... serve to distinguish each person's property. I could see nothing peculiar in this gravel; some silicious pebbles as large as a pigeon's egg, pieces of white and reddish quartz, iron stone, and killow, and a soft friable yellow stone, which crumbled to pieces by the fingers, were the chief minerals that I could distinguish. Besides the above there was a great portion of sand, and a yellow ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park
... The danger is to use life to feed the imagination, not to use imagination to feed life. In these sad weeks I have been like a sleeper awakened. The world of imagination, in which I have lived and moved, has crumbled into pieces over my head; the wind and rain beat through the flimsy dwelling, and I must arise and go. I have sported with life as though it were a pretty plaything; and I find it turn upon me like a wild beast, gaunt, hungry, angry. I am terrified by its evil motions, I sicken ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... monuments have crumbled to dust, but the great deed lives on. We rode back to Lamia under the spell of it. It was as if we had been in church and been held by a great preacher who knows how to touch the deepest chords ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various |
