"Flinty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... surveys the world; And mounted Sleipner, and in darkness rode To Asgard. And the stars came out in heaven, High over Asgard, to light home the King. But fiercely Odin gallop'd, moved in heart; And swift to Asgard, to the gate, he came. And terribly the hoofs of Sleipner rang Along the flinty floor of Asgard streets, And the Gods trembled on their golden beds Hearing the wrathful Father coming home— For dread, for like a whirlwind, Odin came. And to Valhalla's gate he rode, and left Sleipner; and Sleipner went to his own stall; ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... early settlers used freestone or sienite, or a native porphyritic green stone called beech-bowlder. Sandstone was rarely employed, for though easily carved, it as easily yielded to New England frosts and storms. A hard, dark, flinty slate-stone from North Wales was commonly used, a stone so hard and so enduring that when our modern granite and marble monuments are crumbled in the dust I believe these old slate headstones still will speak their ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... side harder than the other can have its flinty side softened by immersing that part in ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... enemies. These shells are full of tiny holes, through which the pseudopods are extended in their search for food, and for purposes of movement. Some of these shells are composed of secreted lime, and others of a flinty substance, the "selection" of these substances from the ether mineral particles in the water, evidencing a degree cf "thought," and mind, even in these lowly creatures. The skeletons of these tiny creatures form vast deposits of ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... the duke, "if you do not relent and become softer than a ripe fig, you finger no government. It were good indeed, that I should send my islanders a cruel flinty-hearted governor; one who relents not at the tears of afflicted damsels, nor at the entreaties of wise, awful, and ancient enchanters, and sages. In fine, Sancho, either you must whip yourself, or let others whip you, ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... ogress and child-queller was in a steep by-street at Brighton; where the soil was more than usually chalky, flinty, and sterile, and the houses were more than usually brittle and thin; where the small front-gardens had the unaccountable property of producing nothing but marigolds, whatever was sown in them; and where ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... carry on a brisk and lucrative trade, whilst Englishmen, who command the ocean and are sole masters of the deep, must quietly suffer two thirds of their shipping to be dismantled and lie useless in little rivers or before empty warehouses. Their seamen, to earn a little salt junk and flinty biscuits, must spread themselves like vagabonds over the face of the earth, and enter the service of any nation. If, on the contrary, the Government continue to enforce the Orders, trade will still remain in its present deplorable state; an American war will follow, and poor Canada will ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... detective got out. He had had the worst of the bout. But he had discovered one or two things. If he could get Olson to talk, and could separate the fat, flabby man from his flinty wife, it would not be hard to frighten a confession from Hull of all he knew. Moreover, in his fear Hull had let slip one admission. Shibo, the little janitor, had some evidence against him. Hull knew it. Why was Shibo holding it back? The fat man had ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... running on the flinty approach. The chase was so close that the English might have seen ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... spring thaw came to gently let it down into its proper element. Many a farmer, too, whose lands sloped down to a small harbor, or stream, set up by the water side the frame of a vessel, and worked patiently at it during the winter days when the flinty soil repelled the plough and farm work was stopped. Stout little craft were thus put together, and sometimes when the vessel was completed the farmer-builder took his place at the helm and steered her ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... electrify the stomach into easy display of power. We may well marvel that powers so wonderful as the power to think, love, admire, see, hear, and feel are located in structures so fragile as the brain; and we may well marvel at the provision of the turret of flinty hardness to protect it ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... Barbieux,—one of the bravest of the brave and an ex-Zouave officer,—ten Russians, and a few Servians. We were in for a night, and had brought no provender, while all the food in camp was the half of an old goat and some flinty ship's biscuit. The goat was roasted before the camp-fire, laid on a timber platform, which served for bed by night and table by day, and hacked to pieces by the yataghans which had come from the battle two days before. The meat was tough beyond exaggeration, and the biscuit had to be broken ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... an arrow flew, He felt a mortal wound; The drops that warm'd his heart, bedew The cold, and flinty ground. ...
— Poems (1786), Volume I. • Helen Maria Williams
... be said ironically as well as in earnest. Caleb augured the worst, turned a deaf ear to the trio aforesaid, and was moving doggedly on, his ancient castor pulled over his brows, and his eyes bent on the ground, as if to count the flinty pebbles with which the rude pathway was causewayed. But on a sudden he found himself surrounded in his progress, like a stately merchantman in the Gut of Gibraltar (I hope the ladies will excuse the tarpaulin phrase) by three Algerine galleys. "Gude guide us, Mr. Balderstone!" ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... woman who could look with such steady, tearless eyes upon life's realities,—a woman who would not have trodden in flowery ways though every pressure of her foot crushed out some delicious aroma to perfume her life, if the "stern lawgiver, duty," summoned her to a flinty road, and pointed to a glorious goal beyond,—such a woman, having deliberately chosen her path, having tested her strength to walk therein, having pronounced that strength all-sufficient, deserved the tribute of confidence, and an even blind respect to her ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... they said, finding their visits so disagreeable to her) to see her. But their apprehension of what might be the issue was, no doubt, their principal consideration: nothing else could have softened such flinty bosoms. ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... over it to-day. I'm ashamed to look her in the face," said Brooke, vehemently. "I'm ashamed to think of what they—their opinion of me is. A domineering, flinty-hearted, unnatural parent, eh, Maurice? Ogre and tyrant and all the rest of it. As if I ever meant to put a stop to her writing to her mother! I never heard of such an unjustifiable proceeding! I never thought ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... through a gate where soldiers were stationed—so much I could see by lamplight; then, having left behind us the miry Chaussee, we rattled over a pavement of strangely rough and flinty surface. At a bureau, the diligence stopped, and the passengers alighted. My first business was to get my trunk; a small matter enough, but important to me. Understanding that it was best not to be importunate ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... have leapt In transport from my flinty couch, to welcome The thunder as it burst upon my roof, And beckon'd to the lightning, as it flash'd ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... boulders, the walls above being of a material hitherto unknown to builders. You will scarcely believe it when I tell you they are nothing else than the waste rubbish from brickyards, the rejected accumulations of years—not by any means the unburned, but the overburned, the hard, flinty, molten, misshapen and highly-colored masses of burned clay which indeed refused to be consumed, but have been twisted into shapeless blocks by the fervent heat. Of course, with such unconventional materials for the main walls it would be a silly affectation ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... front row are broken or worn down, the next succeeding row occupies the frontal position. The teeth are deeply set in the bony base of the inverted palate, or rather obtrude but slightly above the surface, their office being to break down and grind to powder flinty food. ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... springs From the midst of the ocean; One generated brine Which is from the Corina, To replenish the flood Over seas disappearing; The second, without injury It will fall on us, When there is rain abroad. Through the whelming sky; The third will appear Through the mountain veins, Like a flinty banquet. The work of the King of kings. You are blundering bards, In too much solicitude; You cannot celebrate The kingdom of the Britons; And I am Taliesin, Chief of the bards of the west, Who will loosen Elphin Out ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 3 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... and looked about for a supply of wet sand. The flames received this as a helpful attention, and made the most of it. They seemed to brighten and the twilight to deepen about them. The road was a flinty road in the chalk country, and ill-provided ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... levelled every dale and steep. Each pit and hole that stopped the way They filled with stones, and mud, and clay, And all the ground that rose and fell With busy care was levelled well. They bridged ravines with ceaseless toil, And pounded fine the flinty soil. Now here, now there, to right and left, A passage through the ground they cleft, And soon the rushing flood was led Abundant through the new-cut bed, Which by the running stream supplied With ocean's boundless waters vied. In dry and thirsty spots ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... On the flinty platform that he thus gained he lay weakly motionless, chilled to the bone, dimly conscious that he had for a time been granted a respite from death, but without a hope that it would ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... control. This man would not be denied. Never before had the hardness of his face, the flinty hardness of these desert-bred men, so struck her with its revelation of the unbridled spirit. He looked stern, haggard, bitter. The dark shade was changing to gray—the gray to ash-color of passion. About him now there was only the ghost of that finer, gentler man she had ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... massed, their heads lowered, their tails drooping. The wind, now beginning to carry a vicious note with its whine, drove a heavy dust cloud against them, warning them. The wind was icy, giving the cattle a foretaste of what was to come. And mingling with the dust were fine, flinty snow particles that came almost horizontally against their rumps, stinging them, worrying them. They increased their pace, and soon were running with a swinging, awkward stride, straight toward the wire ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... level, Stanley's musings were broken in upon by a sudden prodigious clatter. Looking up, he became aware of a terror, rolling portentous down the flinty ridge upon him; a whirlwind streak of billowed dust, shod with sparks, tipped by a hurtling color yet unknown to man; and from the whirlwind issued ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... ever more abstracted and Mark King holding apart from her, doing her reverence, drinking always deep of that soft, sweet beauty which was hers. They forsook the creeks where the yellow-leaved aspens fluttered their myriad little gleaming banners; they made slow, zigzag work of climbing a flinty-sided mountain; they looked back upon green meadow and gay poplar grove far below; they galloped their horses across a wide table-land over which shrilled the wind, already sharpened by the season for the work it had to do before many weeks passed. Though there ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... in a week's time, but he was unbroke, savage, and furious. A cargo of Bibles, however, which I hoped occasionally to put on his back, would, I had no doubt, thoroughly tame him, especially when labouring up the flinty hills of the north of Spain. I wished to have purchased a mule, but, though I offered thirty pounds for a sorry one, I could not obtain her; whereas the cost of both the horses, tall powerful stately animals, scarcely amounted ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... have riches hidden away, while I have scarcely the wherewith to buy food for my children! Walls are said to have ears,—why have they not also tongues to cry out to him, to tell him of the misery so near? Is there nothing which could strike a spark of human feeling from his flinty heart?" Then, reproaching herself for the rebellious feeling, she would murmur a prayer for ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... recollect was so surly, harsh, and suspicious when she first came here, and who really has as little cordiality or enthusiasm in her nature as a gridiron or a rolling-pin, seems now to be completely devoted to her; as nearly infatuated as one of her flinty temperament can be,—and who conquers old Hannah's heart—you ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... Meadows behind George's Square) "has for me something of an early remembrance. There is the stile at which I can recollect a cross child's-maid upbraiding me with my infirmity as she lifted me coarsely and carelessly over the flinty steps which my brothers traversed with shout and bound. I remember the suppressed bitterness of the moment, and, conscious of my own infirmity, the envy with which I regarded the easy movements and elastic steps ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... these waters, as transparent as air, you see coral plants of every hue and shape imaginable:—antlers, tufts of azure, waving reeds like stalks of grain, and pale green buds and mosses. In some places, you look through prickly branches down to a snow-white floor of sand, sprouting with flinty bulbs; and crawling among these are strange shapes:—some bristling with spikes, others clad in shining coats of mail, and here and there, round forms all spangled ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... no reason to complain of my treatment by them, for they would not allow me to do any work, but brought me the best food, and did everything for me. Yet, notwithstanding all her tenderness, the charms of the loving Oilyblubbina could not move my flinty heart; but I was obliged to hide my real sentiments, for I had no fancy, unarmed as I was, to fight the father and two brothers, not to speak of having to contend against the rage of the disappointed lady and ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... his mind, swiftly, independent of the element of time. As a matter of fact, there was not sufficient interval for connected thought. Ahead of him was an open place in the woods, a place strewn with flinty stones and arrowheads, with now and then a black and rounded boulder, rolled there by glaciers that had once moved over the face of the earth. This open spot, made barren by forces older than man himself, he had crossed ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
... hundred and twenty-five pounds. Sergeant-Major W. Grant slipped up alongside of me at the head of the column, and we marched out into total darkness. At first it was so dark that a person could almost feel it. The road was firm and flinty under foot, and pretty soon some one started up "The Army of to-day is all Right," and everybody joined in the chorus. We set a slow pace, stepping short and easy so that the end of the column in charge of Captain Warren could keep up. A wonderful man ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... the Christian world standing today on the hill of 'Calvaire.' The storms have been black about the Christian world. The clouds have seemed impenetrable. The earth has been desolate. We have walked on our hands and knees and in our bare feet up the flinty road of Baupaume, 'the saddest road in Christendom,' and along this road we have borne the cross. We, the Christian world, the mothers, the fathers, the little children, have bled. We have stumbled and fallen along the way. And ...
— Soldier Silhouettes on our Front • William L. Stidger
... its eastern skirts; and gets on march again, by its own route. Steadily southward;—and from Liegnitz, and the upland Countries, there will be news of Schwerin and it before long. Rain ending, there ensued a ringing frost;—not favorable for Siege-operations on Glogau:—and Silesia became all of flinty glass, with white peaks to the ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... man, Live and laugh, as boyhood can! Though the flinty slopes be hard, Stubble-speared the new-mown sward, Every morn shall lead thee through Fresh baptisms of the dew; Every evening from they feet Shall the cool wind kiss the heat; All too soon these feet must hide In the prison cells of pride, Lose the freedom of the sod, Like a colt's ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... he had been as close as this to Rechamp! I was wondering if Jean knew it, and if that had sealed his lips and given him that flinty profile. The old horse's woolly flanks jogged on under the bare branches and the old woman's bent back jogged in time with it She never once spoke or looked around at us. "It isn't the noise we make that'll give us away," I said at ...
— Coming Home - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... wrapt in a woman's hide! How could'st thou drain the life-blood of the child, To bid the father wipe his eyes withal, And yet be seen to bear a woman's face? Women are soft, mild, pitiful and flexible; Thou—stern, obdurate, flinty, rough, remorseless. Third part of King ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... the 'pike were built on planks instead of broken stone, and gave out a hollow rumble instead of a flinty roar. The shape and firmness of the road-bed were the same, but the ends of boards sometimes cropped out along the sides. In this day, branches of the old national thoroughfare penetrate to every part of the Hoosier State. The people build 'pikes instead ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... most inhospitable region that I have ever seen. For mile after mile, far as the eye can see, the earth is overlaid by a thick stratum of jagged limestone, so rough that no horse could traverse it, so sharp and flinty that a quarter of an hour's walking across it would cut to pieces the stoutest pair of boots. Under the rays of the summer sun these rocks become as hot as the top of a stove; so hot, indeed, that eggs can be cooked upon them, while metal objects exposed for only a few minutes ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... he turned his steed against the mountain and spurred him up its flinty side. Horse and foot followed his example, eager, if they could not escape, to have at least a dying blow at the enemy. As they struggled up the height a tremendous storm of darts and stones was showered upon ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... thou, like an angry vengeful ghost, Glide hither to disturb this peaceful gloom? What, dost thou envy me my miseries, My chains and flinty pavement, where I oft In sleep behold the image of the death I wish, Forget my sorrows and heart-breaking anguish? These horrors I would undisturb'd enjoy, Attended only by my silent thoughts; Is it to see the wretch that you have made; To view the ruins of ...
— The Prince of Parthia - A Tragedy • Thomas Godfrey
... till their arms come in contact. Then, closing in mutual embrace, they sink together upon the cold flinty floor! ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... acting of sacrifice in your belle cousine to-night! Pasta herself could not do it better. There is a look of 'Oh, ye just gods! what a victim am I!' and with those upturned eyes so charming! Well, and seriously it is a sad sacrifice. Fathers have flinty hearts by parental prescription; but husbands—petit Bossus especially—should have mercy for their own sakes; they should not strain ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... timid youths who venture to put forward their claims to a dance that the Captain has mentally reserved for himself. The mystery is how he has escaped scathless into what his friends now consider to be assured bachelor-hood. Most of his contemporaries, roystering, healthy, and seemingly flinty-hearted fellows, all of them, have long since gone down, one after another, before some soft and smiling little being, and are now trying to fit their incomes to the keep of perambulators, as well as of dog-carts. But SHABRACK has escaped. I found him at his Club, and showed him the letter, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 14, 1893 • Various
... on the summit of the berg, La Salle laid out a parallelogram about eight feet square, and motioning to Peter, proceeded to sink a square shaft into the solid ice, which, at first a little spongy, rapidly became hard and flinty. Aided by the natural shape of the berg, in the course of an hour a cavity had been cleared out to the depth of about six feet. Over this was inverted the box belonging to Davies, and this was kept in place by fragments of ice piled around and over it, after ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... other. When I watched them I said they put me in mind of a white silk parasol opening and shutting. Dr Cuff had a powerful microscope, through which he examined one of the stomachs of the medusae. It was found to be full of diatoms, which are flinty-shelled microscopic animals of every variety of shape, such as stars, crosses, semicircles, and spirals—yet soft as are the jelly-fish, they can consume them. This one medusa had in its stomach no less than seven hundred thousand diatoms, so that it would be rather ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... were several great and deep scratches, or furrows, such as gh and ik, which made the surface yet more rugged, caus'd perhaps by some small Dust casually falling on the Hone, or some harder or more flinty part of the Hone it self. The other part of the Razor ll, which is polish'd on a grinding-stone, appear'd much rougher then the other, looking almost like a plow'd field, with many parallels, ridges, ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... find On the rude rock the bed that fits their kind; There, in the rugged soil, they safely dwell, Till showers and snows the subtle atoms swell, And spread th' enduring foliage;—then we trace The freckled flower upon the flinty base; These all increase, till in unnoticed years The stony tower as gray with age appears; With coats of vegetation, thinly spread, Coat above coat, the living on the dead; These then dissolve to dust, and make a way For bolder foliage, nursed ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... feet to the line, straight and strong, carrying just sufficient bulk to temper his restless energy without impairing its power. Nor did the face offer any shock of disappointment to the promise given by the splendid figure. Salient-jawed and forceful, set with cool, flinty, blue-gray eyes, no place for weakness could be found there. One might have read a moral callousness, a colorblindness in points of rectitude, but when the last word had been said, its masterful capability, remained the ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... the foot-hills of the Rocky Mountains. The fertile plains through which we have been passing are being merged into rocky hills, the level parts being mostly gravelly barrens. The roads are hard and flinty, like pounded glass, which were making some of the cattle-teams and droves very lame and foot-sore. When one got so it could not walk, it was killed and skinned. Other lame ones were lashed to the side of a heavy wagon, partially sunk in the ground, their lame foot ...
— In the Early Days along the Overland Trail in Nebraska Territory, in 1852 • Gilbert L. Cole
... FATHERS have flinty hearts is an expression worth an empire, and is always used with peculiar emphasis and enthusiasm. For a favourite topic of these epistles is the groveling spirit and sordid temper of the parents, who will be sure to find no quarter at the hands of their daughters, should ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... faith in it still. I began multiplying excuses for Quarriar, figuring him as misled by his neighbours, more skilled than he in playing upon philanthropic heart-strings; he had been told, doubtless, that two daughters made no impression upon the flinty heart of bureaucratic charity, that in order to soften it one must 'increase and multiply.' He had got himself into a network of falsehood from which, though his better nature recoiled, he had been unable to disentangle ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... To an inexperienced eye the man's work would have appeared not only hard but hopeless, for although his hammer was heavy, his arm strong, and his chisel sharp and tempered well, each blow produced an apparently insignificant effect on the flinty rock. Frequently a spark of fire was all that resulted from a blow, and seldom did more than a series of little chips fly off, although the man was of herculean mould, and worked "with a will," as was evident ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... or his daughters, will give up all their own little pittance, and make beggars of themselves, to save him from the horrors of a loathsome jail. Human retribution cannot reach this guilt; human feeling may not penetrate the flinty heart that perpetrates it; but an hour is surely coming, with more than human retribution on its wings, when that flint shall be melted, either by the power of penitence and grace, or ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... with painful jar, And the helping angels turn aside Their sorrowing faces the shame to bide. Never on custom's oiled grooves The world to a higher level moves, But grates and grinds with friction hard On granite boulder and flinty shard. The heart must bleed before it feels, The pool be troubled before it heals; Ever by losses the right must gain, Every good have its birth of pain; The active Virtues blush to find The Vices wearing their badge behind, And Graces and Charities feel the fire Wherein the sins of the age expire; ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... from their native salt. But how delightful to reflect, that uncultured barbarism should have produced for us so worthy[135] a fellow-citizen with the saints and member of the household of God.[136] He who brings honey out of the rock and oil out of the flinty rock[137] Himself did this. His parents,[138] however, were great both by descent and in power, like unto the name of the great men that are in the earth.[139] Moreover his mother,[140] more noble in mind than ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... tiger's heart, wrapped in a woman's hide! How could'st thou drain the life-blood of the child To bid the father wipe his face withal, And yet be seen to bear a woman's face? Women are soft, mild, pitiful and flexible, Thou stern, obdurate, flinty, rough, remorseless! ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... tricks the juggler plied; At dice and draughts the gallants vied; While some, in close recess apart, Courted the ladies of their heart, Nor courted them in vain; For often in the parting hour Victorious Love asserts his power O'er coldness and disdain; And flinty is her heart, can view To battle march a lover true - Can hear, perchance, his last adieu, Nor own her ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... flat with marshes and swamps; in the middle, broken and hilly; and in the west, hilly and mountainous. There are some prairies, some thickly timbered land, some heavy timbered. The country is generally a timbered country. Some parts are sandy, some rocky, and some flinty. ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... society in the dressing-room, did make themselves very merry upon the subject, and rallied Mr. Carleton with the common amount of wit and wisdom about his little sweetheart; a raillery which met the most flinty indifference. But none of those who saw Fleda ever thought strange of anything that was done for her; and Mrs. Carleton was rejoiced to have her son take up the task she was fain to lay down. So he really, more than any one else, had the management of her; and ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... a loose rein hanging on the neck of the mustang. Fred gently pulled it and the beast stopped. He was walking so quietly that his hoofs made scarcely any sound in falling upon the flinty surface, and the Indian, from some cause or other, failed to notice the cessation of sound until the distance between them had ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)
... what I find, my lad. I expect it will be nothing. There's a nice fragment of onyx," he continued, picking out and pitching up a piece of flinty-looking rock to the lad. "I dare say there are some good agates here too, if ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... intruders. The black eyes of the three warriors followed the arrow until it was only a flickering speck, far below them; but, before that moment arrived, they saw that it was speeding wide of the mark. When at last, the sharp point struck the flinty rock, and the missile doubled over upon itself and dropped harmlessly to the bottom of the canyon, it was at such a distance from the miners, that they knew nothing of it. They never looked up, nor were they aware of the futile anger of the red men, ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... I!—and at every court, from the court of Cain in Mesopotamia to the court of Victoria in this present, flinty-hearted London; only the truth is, as I have travelled I have changed my name. Bless you, half the Proverbs given to Solomon are mine. What I have lost by keeping company with kings, not even ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 24, 1841 • Various
... Sir King Diderik, Would prove the faulchion’s might; He hewed upon the flinty stone ’Till all ...
— King Diderik - and the fight between the Lion and Dragon and other ballads - - - Translator: George Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... thou,—thy very name is lost! The peasant only knows that here Bold Alfred scooped thy flinty bier, And prayed a foeman's prayer, and tost His auburn head, and said, "One more Of England's foes ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... This was the most dreaded spot in the whole stream, and seldom had a drive been brought through without some disaster. Much blasting had been done, and a number of obstacles blown away. But for all that there were rocks which defied the skill of man to remove. Two flinty walls reared their frowning sides for several rods along the brook. Between these an immense boulder lifted its head, around which the waters incessantly swirled. But when the stream was swollen high enough ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... of the campfires, the unutterable fatigue of forced marches when the men, with their tongues lolling out of their mouths like dogs, staggered along, panting like dogs; the bloody prints of unshod feet on flinty, frozen clods; the shock and fearful joy of the fighting; the shamed numbness of retreats; artillery horses, their hides all blood-boltered and their tails clubbed and clotted with mire, lying dead with stiff legs between overturned guns; dead men piled in heaps and living men huddled in panics—all ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... had caught a faint "click, click," in the direction of the wood; her quicker instinct and rustic training enabled her to determine that it was the ring of a horse's shoe on flinty ground; her knowledge of the locality told her it came from the spot where the trail passed over an outcrop of flint scarcely a quarter of a mile from where she sat, and within the clearing. It was no errant "stock," for the foot was shod with iron; ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... his breakfast—and with his apparently slim accommodations it was a wonder to the boys where he put it all—he snapped, with a flinty glint of his ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... he, "the evil one has been sowing this field with stones, as he did in the days of good Saint Euphemia, our patroness." Saying which, he drew out the small crucifix from under his shirt, and the flinty potato disappeared; but he noticed that one of its ...
— Tales from the Lands of Nuts and Grapes - Spanish and Portuguese Folklore • Charles Sellers and Others
... comprehensible French patois, what I wanted. I answered, in French, that I should like something to eat and drink; whereupon he produced, from a sort of cupboard in the darkest corner of the forecastle, a bowl and a large can of soup, together with a wooden tray of flinty biscuit and an old iron spoon. Pouring a liberal quantity of the soup into the bowl, and plunging the spoon into it, he handed it to me, placed the bread barge within my reach, and again composed ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... western railroads. Your train sweeps across the desert like some bold knight in a joust, and when about to drive recklessly into a sheer cliff it turns a graceful curve and follows up the wild meanderings of a stream until it reaches a ridge along which it finds its flinty way for many miles. At length you come face to face with a great gulf, a canyon—yawning, resounding and purple in its depths. Before you lies a path, zigzagging down the canyon's side to the very bottom, ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... wrought in the soul of Samuel Learoyd. It was reported that the farmer had been attending the revival services held in the little Primitive Methodist chapel about a mile away from his farm, that his flinty heart had been melted, and that he had "found the Lord." The weaver's family was slow to credit this change, though Mary prayed fervently night and morning that it might be true. Their doubts, however, ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... name was the most impressive thing about San Antonio de los Banos. Its streets were narrow and steep and stony, and its flinty little plaza was flanked by stores of the customary sort, the fronts of which were open so that mounted customers from the country might ride in to make their purchases. Crowning two commanding eminences just outside the village limits ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... deadly work was something that had never yet come his knowledge or experience in the bloody days of the Reign of Terror. He could not comprehend it. The suddenly silenced mob was equally unable to grasp the situation. What could be the matter? Had the flinty and inexorable Robespierre turned fainthearted at last? No! That was impossible! The patriots waited with open mouths for an explanation of this ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... of tragic idyl, and of flight and hot pursuit, And the jingle of the bridle, and cuirass, and spur on boot, As our horses's hooves struck showers from the flinty bowlders set In freshet ways with writhing reed and ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... influences by which I had sought to seduce him. He had gone, she said, at the call of duty to accomplish what good he might, but never in the whole course of his professional experience had his words fallen on a more flinty and barren soil. And then, as if it were not enough to flaunt in the face of my old master the extravagances most hostile to the theories of which he was the advocate, I had sought to tempt him with money to become a perpetual ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... penetrates into good dry stone probably 11/2 inches, making the stone hard and flinty, as any stone cutter will soon find out if he tries ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... A horror seizes every breast—a stifled cry of dread: "Who sheds the blood of innocence, the blood on his own head!" That pack'd and perjured jury shrink in conscience-struck dismay, And wish their hands as clear of guilt as they were yesterday. Mackenzie's cold and flinty face is quivering like a leaf, Whilst with quick and throbbing finger he turns o'er and o'er his brief; And the misnamed judges vainly try their rankling thoughts to hide Beneath an outward painted mask of loftiness and pride. Even she, the sweet heroic ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... eloquent, and tells a tale of widespread destruction. Standing near the Tower on the Moor we can see in the distance, stretching from north-west to south east, the range of hills called the “Wolds,” which, with a “cap” of marls, or sandy and flinty loams, are composed almost entirely of chalk; from them, near Cawkwell Hill (the hill par excellence of chalk), comes the water supply of Horncastle and Woodhall. They extend for a length of some 45 miles, with a width of some six miles ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... like his tone of voice; sounds strained and worried—something unusual for the cold, flinty gentleman from Pennsylvania. And his 'friend S.,' of course, means Stevens! Great heavens! then Stevens must now have ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise
... been expected, France and Spain were ruled with a rod of superstition, wielded by the flinty hearts and iron hands of the Bourbons, Louis the Eighteenth of France, and Ferdinand of Spain, a precious pair of English proteges. In spite of all the pledges and securities which had been given, executions, banishments, and proscriptions ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... couldn't get away. Any one would hear our footsteps along this flinty path. Besides, there ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... loved ones, that already sleep in the noiseless Bed of Rest, whom in life I could only weep for and never help; and ye, who wide-scattered still toil lonely in the monster-bearing Desert, dyeing the flinty ground with your blood,—yet a little while, and we shall all meet THERE, and our Mother's bosom will screen us all; and Oppression's harness, and Sorrow's fire-whip, and all the Gehenna Bailiffs that patrol ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... and a series of towers in the wall, on each side of the gateway. Nature has mantled the rock with lichens of various rich tints: its beetling brow is 150 feet above the level of the sea, upon a stratum of mouldering rock, apparently scorched with violent heat, and having beneath it a close flinty sandstone. Its crown is girt with walls and towers, which on the land side have been nearly all repaired. The outer gateway stands between two fine old towers, with time-worn heads; twelve paces within it is a second gate, which is machicolated, and has a portcullis; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 548 - 26 May 1832 • Various
... puppies—take one, lay it in the lap, feed it with every good bit, and drown five; nay, yet worse, forasmuch as the puppies are once drowned, whereas the children are left perpetually drowning. Really, my lords, it is a flinty custom! and all this for his cruel ambition, that would raise himself a pillar a golden pillar for his monument, though he has children, his own reviving flesh, and a kind of immortality. And this is that interest of a family, for which we are to think ill of a government ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... your hall, Who wears no common mien; Hard were the heart, as flinty wall, That would not ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... led to a rocky ridge and there disappeared. Wetzel made no effort to find the chief's footprints on the flinty ground, but halted a moment and studied the ridge, the lay of the land around, a ravine on one side, and a dark impenetrable forest on the other. He was calculating his chances of finding the Delaware's trail far on the other ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... are glad Jesus died for them who know nothing about "suffering with Christ." Yet the Bible is filled with allusions to it. The Heavenly Bridegroom wants a companion who will understand Him. This cold, hard, flinty, wicked world does not. "He came unto His own and His own received Him not." He knocked at the door of His own vineyard and the husband-men said, "Come, let us kill the Son." The divine Lord hungers ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees
... sheer side of the dizziest, deepest chasm in the known world. One of your legs is scraping against the everlasting granite; the other is dangling over half a mile of fresh mountain air. The mule's off hind hoof grates and grinds on the flinty trail, dislodging a fair-sized stone that flops over the verge. You try to look down and see where it is going and find you haven't the nerve to do it—but you can hear it falling from one narrow ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... Perhaps, the flinty hardness, the indifferent crispness, of that voice raised dim memories in the woman's mind, for her glance wavered, ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... wishful "not to offend him." None the less he felt that he had not been well treated. To Mr Brandram he wrote reminding him "that all the difficulty and danger connected with what has been accomplished in Spain have fallen to my share, I having been labouring on the flinty rock and sierra, and not in smiling meadows refreshed by sea ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... I walked round with my father, we passed broad fields of sugar-cane, and farther on the great crinkled-leaved Indian corn flourished wonderfully, with its flower tassels, and beautiful green and then orange-buff ears of hard, sweet, flinty corn. ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... the dancer, leaping like a flame about the stage. In the plainer home garments he recognized the grace, quickness, and gaiety of the artist. Her charm won him at once, the spell which her rare kind have ever been able to cast about the hearts of men. He understood why the flinty detective should be in love with his wife at times, but not why he should continue in that state. She served them with wine and cigars, rolled a cigarette for herself, chatted with the ease and chumminess of a good fellow, ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... at Ross Valley, but people began to say that old Jabel Blake had particles of gold in the flinty composition of his life, and that his trip to Washington had made him gentler and wider in his charities. He was attentive to young children. He encouraged young lovers. He lifted many errant people to their feet, and started them on their way to a braver ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... like the flinty rock, And cold as ocean's foam; You tore them from my clasping arms, And bore them from our home: And now my brothers ye will slay! But they are proud and high, And come with spirits brave and true, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... loading the cooling mountain, gave birth to glaciers that, uniting edge to edge, at length formed one grand conical glacier—a down-crawling mantle of ice upon a fountain of smouldering fire, crushing and grinding its brown, flinty lavas, and thus degrading and remodeling the entire mountain from summit to base. How much denudation and degradation has been effected we have no means of determining, the porous, crumbling rocks being ill adapted for the reception and preservation ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... Feet scrabbled on the flinty path. A dark, thin-faced man in very neat brown clothes and broad-toed shoes came up, followed ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... course. People who smelt metals found that out long enough ago, and it is the same with making glass. If you expose some minerals separately to great heat they merely become powder; but if you combine them—say flinty sand with soda or potash—they run together and become like molten metal. I believe if ironstone and limestone are mixed, the ironstone becomes fluid, so that it can be cast like a metal—in fact becomes ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... surged and chafed and broke over this man's stern, flinty realism, like the warm, blue waters of the Gulf Stream that throw their silvery spray and foam against the glittering walls of sapphire icebergs sailing slowly southward. Her glowing imagery fell upon the bristling points of his close phalanx of arguments, as gorgeous ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... and carry for her. And all the time you go about and boast of your conquest to one another, and imagine that you have subjugated her. But she sits at home and laughs at you, and despises you all from the flinty bottom of her heart. Bah! you're a pack of fools, and I've no patience with you. As for you personally, if you must write any more, tell your fellow men something about their own follies. It won't be news to us, but it may open ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 28, 1891 • Various
... rude. You may fret and fume as you will; for every start and struggle of impatience there shall be so much attendant failure; if impatience become a habit, nothing but failure: until on the path you have chosen for your better swiftness, rather than the honest flinty one, there shall follow you, fast at hand, instead of Beheste and Art for companions, those ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... parts then wiped repeatedly on a clean cotton or other absorbent rag. Pure benzine, if not rubbed in too hard or too long, will not injure the adjacent varnish, be it the delicate film on a thousand pound gem of Cremona or the flinty covering of a less presumptuous output from Naples. When evaporation is complete, it will be so in a few minutes, some clean water brushed in and wiped away, will leave the surfaces in a state for ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... work was resumed, and for another hour all continued busy as bees, cutting and pounding at the flinty ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... a prospect there was little to excite any but a morbid fancy. There were no clouds in the flinty blue heavens, and the setting of the sun was accompanied with as little ostentation as was consistent with the dryly practical atmosphere. Darkness soon followed, with a rising wind, which increased as the shadows deepened on the plain. The ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... limb, the impetus being imparted to the body without any apparent effort, after the manner of a master of the skater's art. These, sweeping forward, were many rods in length, the polished steel frequently giving out a metallic ring as it struck the flinty ice. Now and then, too, a resounding creak sped past, and might have alarmed them had they not understood its nature. It indicated no weakness of the frozen surface, but was caused by the settling of the crystal floor as the water ...
— Cowmen and Rustlers • Edward S. Ellis
... respectful silence hush his voice. Yet do not, for that I am young, and want Experience, slight my counsel and my words. 'Tis not the wantonness of youthful blood That fires my spirit; but a pang so deep That e'en the flinty rocks must pity me. You, too, are fathers, heads of families, And you must wish to have a virtuous son, To reverence your gray hairs, and shield your eyes With pious and affectionate regard. Do not, I pray, because in limb and fortune You still are unassail'd, and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... bad days, When man must tread perforce the flinty path Of duty, hard and rugged, fail not thou Duly at night and morning to give thanks To the all-gracious power that smoothed the way For woman's ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... allows men to be born into the world so corrupt, with so many incentives to sin, and deliberately hides from them the ghastly sight of the eternal torments, which might have saved them from recklessness of life. No one who had trod the dark caverns of Hell or the flinty ridges of Purgatory, as Dante represented himself doing, who had seen the awful sights and heard the heart-broken words of the place, could have returned to the world as a light-hearted sinner! Whatever ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... that the point demanded judicial decision. The authorities were also silent on the subject of alimony. But the woman's feet were bare. The trail to Hogback Mountain was steep and flinty. ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... have Pike's trout (which ranged between two ounces and one-half pound) fried for the early dinner; and here it may be lawful to remark that the trout of the Culm are of the very purest excellence, by reason of the flinty bottom, at any rate in these the upper regions. For the valley is the western outlet of the Black-down range, with the Beacon hill upon the north, and Hackpen long ridge to the south; and beyond that again the Whetstone hill, upon whose western end dark port-holes scarped with white grit mark ...
— Crocker's Hole - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore
... Waverley's mind as he paced his horse slowly through the rugged and flinty street of Tully-Veolan, interrupted only in his meditations by the occasional caprioles which his charger exhibited at the reiterated assaults of those canine Cossacks, the COLLIES before mentioned. The village was more than half a mile long, the cottages ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... see a face by that box for tinder, Glowing forth in fits from the dark, And fading again, as the linten cinder Kindles to red at the flinty spark, Or ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... and forge in the bowels of the earth. To one standing at the mouth of the cave, especially at night, they afford a picturesque spectacle. Gathered round the forge, their bronzed and naked bodies, illuminated by the flame, appear like figures of demons; while the cave, with its flinty sides and uneven roof, blackened by the charcoal vapours which hover about it in festoons, seems to offer no inadequate representation of fabled purgatory. Working in iron was an occupation strictly forbidden ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... it. He sprang from the bed and danced a tarantella, pranced in his cottony nightgown like a drunken Yaqui. The letter announced that the flinty farm at Parthenon, left to Mr. Wrenn by his father, had been sold. Its location on a river bluff had made it valuable to the Parthenon Chautauqua Association. There was now to his credit in the Parthenon National Bank nine hundred and ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... common scaffold confounds the most flinty hearts and the tenderest. However, it was in some measure the heartless part of Hatfield's conduct which drew upon him his ruin; for the Cumberland jury, as I have been told, declared their unwillingness ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 193, July 9, 1853 • Various
... crimson cincture holds Me close; my emerald ocean-robes flow free, And purple soar my mountains, folds on folds, With vale and plain. My bondmaid Moon to me Reveals her marbled snow in cusp and shale— Whilst in my flinty womb the valiant strife Of Fire proclaims me thine and bans the pale Usurper Death beyond my fields of Life. In Winds that wrap my path, lo, I shall sing To thee a choral eternal, Lord of Days, And Life with myriad hearts in me shall sing Thy ...
— The Masque of the Elements • Herman Scheffauer
... less profound. Heat and cold, rain and drought, the winds in relation to the points of the compass, were nearest their wants and supplies, and were never out of their thoughts. In each province they had found the best springs, beds of clay, paint, soapstone, flinty rock, friable stone for sculpture and hard, tenacious stone for tools, and used ashes for salt. The vegetal kingdom was no less familiar to them. Edible plants, and those for dyes and medicines, were on their lists, as well as wood for tools, utensils and weapons, and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... my way were flinty, thorny, Were I sure it led to Thee, Could I pass one day forlornly, Home and rest so near ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... flinty, hard as steel? Nay, more than flint, for stone at rain relenteth: 200 Art thou a woman's son, and canst not feel What 'tis to love? how want of love tormenteth? O! had thy mother borne so hard a mind, 203 She had not brought forth thee, ...
— Venus and Adonis • William Shakespeare
... making love to her, I got most terribly singed myself; and I felt, before I quitted her, that if I had ten thousand a-year, and she was as poor as my dear Judith was, that she should have taken her place—that's the truth. I thought that I never could love again, and that my heart was as flinty as a pawnbroker's; but I found out my mistake ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... two later, armed with a crowbar and other tools, away he started secretly, and found his way again to the lonely dell, where he soon dispersed the stones of the cairn and began his digging. The ground was hard and flinty, and the work anything but easy, but he had not far to dig before he came across something, something hard and round, which increased his excitement ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... the clear blue of the imagination. Hence the direct and unequivocal statement of a man writing under the impulse of some strong feeling, or speaking to a thrilled and an excited audience. Nature, the world, his experience, is no longer hard and flinty, but plastic and yielding, and takes whatever impress his mind gives it. Facts float through his head like half-pressed grapes in the wine-press, steeped and saturated with meaning, and his expression becomes so round ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... stars, that seemed to freeze in the boundless billows of eternal blue. Onward again, before the silver sentinels above us had faded before the blushing face of the dawning. With faces begrimed with dirt, with feet blistered by contact with flinty boulders, with tattered garments flapping around them like feathers on wounded waterfowl, officers and men faced the unknown, as their fathers faced it before them. Meanwhile Hunter was pressing towards ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... goatsuckers at night. And, as if all these were not enough, the finches are found scattered everywhere, from the most secluded spot in nature to the noisy public thoroughfare, and are eaters of most things, from flinty seed to softest caterpillar. This being the state of things, one might imagine that experience and observation are scarcely needed to prove to us that the exotic, strange to the conditions, and where its finest instincts ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... Sea, until He knows all passions of the senses; all The great emotions of the heart; and each Exalted aspiration of the soul. Then may he sit beside the sea and say: 'I, too, have flung myself against the rocks, And kissed their flinty brows with no return; And fallen spent upon unfeeling sands. I, too, have gone forth yearning, to far shores, Seeking that something which would bring content; And finding only what I took away; And I have looked up, through the veil of skies, When all the ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... clouds, the colours in the sky; The gently breeze that whispers by; The fields, all white with waving corn; The lilies that the vale adorn; The reed that trembles in the wind; The tree where none its fruit can find; The sliding sand, the flinty rock, That bears unmoved the tempest's shock; The thorns that on the earth abound; The tender grass that clothes the ground; The little birds that fly in air; The sheep that need the shepherd's care; The pearls that deep in ocean ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... deliberation that fills man with awe, the powerful forces of nature splintered the rocks, crumbled them, filled them with plant food, and turned their flinty grains into a soft, ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... and a half; next bearing 328 degrees for four miles, to the north side of a dry swamp; next bearing 4 degrees for ten miles and a half; next bearing 350 degrees for four miles to a sand hill. Camped. Distance to-day, twenty-five miles, over a very bad country, with large fragments of a hard flinty stone covering the surface. Salt bush with ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... of a flinty race. We never forgive insults; never condone wrongs; and expecting loyalty in our own blood, we cannot live long enough to pardon its treachery. Once, I made an idol of my beautiful, graceful, high-bred girl; but she stabbed my pride, dragged my name through the gutters, broke ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... cleared New England's flinty slopes and plowed Her rocky fields to fairness in the sun, But fared we westward always for we sought A land of golden richness and we knew The land was waiting on the sunset trail. Where we found forest we left fertile fields, We bridled rivers wild to grind our corn, ...
— The Acorn-Planter - A California Forest Play (1916) • Jack London
... no hope of liberalizing the missionary, of humanizing the sharks of trade, of infusing the conscientious drop into the flinty bosom of policy, of saving the Indian from immediate degradation, and speedy death. The, whole sermon may be preached from the text, "Needs be that offences must come, yet we them by whom they come." Yet, ere they depart, I wish there might be some masterly attempt to reproduce, ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... wanders about the most shires of this realm, and with stout audacity demandeth, where he thinketh he may be bold, and circumspect enough where he seeth cause, to ask charity ruefully and lamentably, that it would make a flinty heart to relent and pity his miserable estate, how he hath been maimed and bruised in the wars. Peradventure one will show you some outward wound which he got at some drunken fray, either halting of some privy wound festered with a filthy fiery flankard [brand]. For be well ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... questioned the old woman, searching the girl's face with her small, flinty eyes. "Mebbe you are. You generally tell the truth. I guess if you do feel so, you're the only one; an' I don't quite see how even you ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... which is aggravated by crouching over the densely smoking tezek; and one miserable-looking old character is groaning and writhing with the pain of a severe stomach- ache. By loafing lazily about the tent all day, and chewing these flinty dried peaches, this hopeful old joker has well-nigh brought himself to the unhappy condition of the Yosemite valley mule, who broke into the tent and consumed half a bushel of dried peaches; when the hunters returned ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... little geographical note will help to make the meaning plain. Part of Asher's allotted portion was hilly and rugged. Common sandals, made of wood or leather, would not endure the wear and tear of the sharp, flinty rocks. There was need, therefore, for some special kind of shoes. Hence the form of the promise: "Thy ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... human hands, were bipeds with flimsy, silicious skeletons (almost like those of the silicious sponges) and feeble musculature, standing about six feet high and having round, erect heads, and large eyes in flinty sockets. Two or three of these seem to have been brought in each cylinder, and all were killed before earth was reached. It was just as well for them, for the mere attempt to stand upright upon our planet would have broken every ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... hard skeleton. It is made of lime, and sometimes of flint, which the Sponge obtains from its food. Of course we use only those sponge-skeletons which are soft; but the cheaper kinds do often contain little flinty needles. ...
— Within the Deep - Cassell's "Eyes And No Eyes" Series, Book VIII. • R. Cadwallader Smith
... manner with quite a Rabelaisian mixture of native and half Latin words and iterations for most terms of importance: "Doe but convert, said hee, the slenderest twinckling reflexe of your eye-sight to this flinty ringe that engirtes it, these towred walles, port-cullizd gates, and gorgeous architectures that condecorate and adorne it, and then perponder of the red herringes priority and prevalence, who is the onely inexhaustible mine that hath raised and begot all this, and, minutely, ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... yet lighting his pipe, and passing his heavy hand over his hair, "that brought up Gridley in a man's mind. His was a bad case too, in a different way. Then the two got mixed up in a man's mind with a flinty old rascal who had to do with both. And to think of that rusty carbine, stock and barrel, standing up on end in his corner, hard, indifferent, taking everything so evenly—it made flesh and blood tingle, I ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... once lanc'd thy froward flinty heart And cruddled bloud had thawn with living fire And prickt thy drousie sprite with gentle smart How wouldst thou wake to kindly sweet desire, Thy soul fill'd up with overflowing pleasures Would dew ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More
... resent the story of the sheriff and shoot him down or be shot down himself. All that he regretted was that he had remained mute before Aunt Elizabeth, unable to explain to her a thing which he felt so keenly. And for the first time he realized the flinty basis of her nature. The same thing that enabled her to give half a lifetime to the cherishing of a theory, also enabled her to cast all the result of that labor out of her life. It stung him again to the quick every time he thought of it. There ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... no be harried like bumbee's byke— I'll no be handled unleddy like— I winna hae ye, ye worryin' tyke, The road ye came gae 'lang!" He loupit on wi' an awsome snort, He bang'd the fire frae the flinty court; He's aff and awa' in a snorin' sturt, As hard as ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... Good Shepherd's arms. Your little chile am not lost to you, she's safe at home, de dear bressed home ob heben, whar your moder is Missy Grace. De Hebenly Father say, 'Little Hilda, you needn't walk de long flinty, thorny path and suffer like you'se dear moder. You kin come home now, and I'se 'll take keer ob ye till moder comes.' Bress de little lamb, she smile when de angels come fer her, an' she's safe, safe for ebermore. No tears fer little Hilda, no heartbreak in all her 'ternal life. Dear ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... no! Nor race divine, Nor Dardan sire, nor Goddess mother thine! Form'd in the flinty womb of rocks accurst, 455 Begot by Caucasus, by tygers nurst. What need I more? why doubt of what is plain? One sigh, one look, did all my tears obtain. How name his crimes? did loves extremest woe, Move that ...
— The Fourth Book of Virgil's Aeneid and the Ninth Book of Voltaire's Henriad • Virgil and Voltaire
... changing as you ascend them into variously coloured earth and marl. The beds of the streams and rivers, which swell into torrents during the rainy season, consist of stones and gravel, often of a flinty nature, and often also containing particles of iron. Some basaltic appearances in one of the districts into which the island is divided, and several precipices among the mountains, evidently produced by sudden violence, indicate the volcanic origin of this ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... from that clue of sunbeams Could ever steal one thread? or with a kind Persuasive accent charm the wild loud wind? Fate cuts us all in marble, and the Book Forestalls our glass of minutes; we may look But seldom meet a change; think you a tear Can blot the flinty volume? shall our fear Or grief add to their triumphs? and must we Give an advantage to adversity? Dear, idle prodigal! is it not just We bear our stars? What though I had not dust Enough to cabinet a worm? nor stand Enslav'd unto a little dirt, or sand? I boast a better ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... true way instead of our true way"; and then comes the humorous sally,—"With a little oatmeal for food and a little sulphur for friction, allaying cutaneous irritation with one hand and grasping his Calvinistical creed with the other, Sawney ran away to the flinty hills, sung his psalm out of tune his own way, and listened to his sermon of two hours long, amid the rough and imposing melancholy of the tallest thistles." But from the graver historian, developing the historic ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... in Mindanao had I been fascinated and attracted by that delightfully original tribe of heathen known as the head-hunters. Those grim, flinty, relentless little men, never seen, but chilling the warmest noonday by the subtle terror of their concealed presence, paralleling the trail of their prey through unmapped forests, across perilous mountain-tops, ...
— Options • O. Henry
... for he was courteous and gentle, ready and willing, and always inspired the children with a liking, which old Dr. Potts, with his blue glasses and loud voice, could never do. Dr. Walter also taught the bible-class, and won the flinty hearts of the congregation, and the susceptible ones of the young ladies. He also frequently walked home with Beatrice Dering, and had fallen into the way of occasionally stopping in the evenings, if he happened to be passing and saw them ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving |
