"Focussed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... at Kennington to-day come to see better sights than carts and banners. Surrey cricket has focussed itself at Kennington; rather curiously, it has happened that Surrey plays cricket to-day on no other ground. Kent and Sussex, two neighbours, play their county matches on three grounds or four; Surrey, which has traditions at Mitcham and Dorking, has shrunk back to Kennington ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... of the long faces were two square holes, from the edges of which the inside walls focussed back on two smaller, circular diaphragms. That made the two openings act somewhat like megaphone horns to still further magnify the sound which was emitted directly from this receiver without using any earpieces, and could be listened to anywhere in the room, if we chose. ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... bad reputation which still followed him. The public would have found it hard to believe that at last Alan Massey was leading the most temperate and arduous of lives and devoting himself exclusively to one woman whom he treated as reverently as if she were a goddess. The gazes focussed upon Alan now inevitably included the girl with him, as lovely and ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... a man on a wheel just flash past that open spot back along the trail!" he cried; and immediately every eye was focussed on the spot indicated; for coming at just such a moment the ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... like a striking cobra, its forked tip flaming blue and green fire as it focussed upon the open door. But Leah was already gone. Gordon heard her flying footsteps as she raced down the hall. Arlok promptly sped after her ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... short, the imaginary object which figures in the hallucination is perceived under the same conditions as if it were real. Various other experiments are detailed in support of this formula. The opera glasses only act as if they were focussed upon the point of hallucination, and in the case of a short-sighted subject they had to be altered to allow for the defect of vision. If the patient looks through a prism the image is seen duplicated, although the subject is absolutely ignorant of ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... tense, one can in a few moments compel it to be calm. This is not done by a word simply. Nor is it done by hypnotism. It is by the exercise of power. One feels the spirit of peace as definitely as heat is perceived on a hot summer day. The power can be as surely used as the sun's rays can be focussed and made to do work, to set fire ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... of speedy flying, Bob, idly scanning the sky through the glass, focussed upon a tiny speck in the distance. All three had clamped on their radio receivers and hung the transmitters by straps across their shoulders. Speaking into the transmitter ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... the pupil is the lens of the eye, which also is adjustable by the action of a little muscle, called the "ciliary muscle". This muscle corresponds to the focussing mechanism of the camera; by it the eye is focussed on near or far objects. The eye really {195} has two lenses, for the cornea acts as a lens, but is not adjustable. The "aqueous and vitreous humors" fill the eyeball and keep it in shape, while still, ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... Burns in 1914 from the Office of the Local Government Board, over which he then presided, 'that few, if any, conferences held in London in recent years have done more good for the cause of social progress than the Industrial Remuneration Conference of 1885. The Conference focussed public opinion and sympathy upon a large number of important questions, which have since made greater headway than they would have done if the Conference had not taken place. I have the highest opinion of the value of its work, and of the good influence it exercised in stimulating inquiry ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... not been focussed on the occupant of Stateroom A he would have wondered a good deal as to what had taken Justin O'Reilly on a "flying trip" west. This was O'Reilly's first year in Congress, and he'd manoeuvred to make himself a conspicuous figure in Washington one way or other. ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Scotia, and the St. Lawrence, met and crossed the equally important lines of travel from the British Islands to the same points. This circumstance contributed to the importance of that place as a naval and commercial centre, and also focussed about it by far the larger part of the effort and excitement of the first privateering outburst from the United States. As Rodgers' bold sortie, and disappearance into the unknown with a strong squadron ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... Think of it, the past is not only focussed there, in a man's soul, it IS there. How could it be reflected from there if it were not there? All things that he has ever seen, known, felt, believed of the surrounding world are now within him, have become part of him, in part are him—he has been changed into their image. He may deny it, he ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... Bergson and common sense is, precisely, how far it does go. Both sides would admit that, in this fact directly known, what is in the full focus of attention at any given moment is very limited; on the other hand both would admit that this fully focussed fact is set in a context, or fringe, with no clearly defined limits which also goes to make up the whole fact directly known though we do not usually pay much attention to it. The fact directly known being given the problem is to find out what it is and how it ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen
... were at once focussed on the stately gray stone building that stood in the center of a wide stretch of green campus, shaded by great trees. At various points of the campus were situated smaller buildings which Mabel Ashe pointed out as Science Hall, the gymnasium, ...
— Grace Harlowe's First Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... me that it is a fact, he never once lowered his eyes or focussed the little party before him, although ultimately the tea table could not have been more than a few yards off. There stood the stranger with a vacant expression which would have made the fortune of a performer in a waxwork show, and hoped and almost ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... his attention was focussed stood against the wall, the young man sitting in the corner between November and the woman. Of two tables between it and P. Sybarite's, one was vacant, the other occupied by a brace of hatchet-faced male intimates of the dive and ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... it was women driven to distraction by unappeased longing rather than men hungry with desire who formed the chief subject of romantic art. Pictures focussed on woman in all her varied moods and flattered the male mind by portraying her wilting with sadness when deprived of ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... in his triumphal car, he hated Hickney Heath, hated the wild "hoorays" of waggon-loads of his supporters on their way to the polls, hated the smug smiles of his committee-men at polling stations. He forgot that he did not hate England. A little black disk an inch or two in diameter if cunningly focussed can obscure the sun in heaven from human eye. There was England still behind the little black disk, though Paul for the moment ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... crowd before the store was perceptibly agitated. Its members whispered excitedly one to another, and all their eyes were focussed upon three men approaching from up the trail. The trio were ordinary-looking creatures, ill-clad and even ragged. In a more stable community their apprehension by the village constable and arrest for vagrancy would have been immediate. "French Louis," ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... a Jane Austen to record it. Our interests are focussed on the most ridiculous subjects. Recently they took an ecclesiastical turn, which I think should be reported to you. The station was left "spiritually" in charge of a Y.M.C.A. deacon for a fortnight: and discussion ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... Forster focussed his eyes on the writing again. There was no doubt at all that it was Bentley's. They had roomed and studied together for four years at MIT, and then there had been a couple of years' post-graduate work after that. During all that time they had used ...
— Warning from the Stars • Ron Cocking
... Professor Kircher, a German philosopher of rare talents and extensive reputation. The instrument is simple and familiar. It is a form of the microscope. The shadows cast by the object are, by means of lenses, focussed upon something capable of reflection, such as a wall or screen. No essential changes in the principles of construction have been made since the time of Kircher; but the modern improvements in lenses, lights, and pictures, have raised the character of the instrument ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... anxious rectitude of his attire the artistic interest in modern man is concentrated upon his head and hands; and upon these salient points Carriere focussed his art. Peaceful or disquieted, his men and women belong to our century. Spiritually Eugene Carriere is the lineal descendant of the Rembrandt school—but one who ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... adoring eyes of the three musicians who were "hairdressers in the daytime" focussed passionately upon Miss Van Tuyn, distracted her attention. She felt masculinity intent upon her and ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... exclaimed impatiently. "My instrument does certainly magnify to a marvellous extent, but not by the old device of the simple microscope, which merely focussed a large area of light rays into a small one. So crude a process could never show an atom to the human eye. I add much to that. I restore to the rays themselves the luminosity which they lost in their passage through ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... this Apostle's writings we read of 'the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.' Yes, there, as focussed into one strong voice, all the summonses are concentrated and gathered. For in Jesus Christ we see the possibilities of humanity realised, and we have the pattern of what we ought to be, and are called thereby to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... is everywhere specific, nowhere individual. Now this same remark applies to all specific types. The only reason why we notice individual differences in the case of the human type more than we do in the case of any other types, is because our attention is here more incessantly focussed upon these differences. We are compelled to notice them in the case of our own species, however small they may appear to a naturalist, because, unless we do so, we should not recognise the members of our own family, or be able to distinguish between ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... it was an absurd wish, and impracticable, and dismissed her; and then her whole mind focussed itself on Mr. Brooks's barn. Eleanor saw nothing else through the morning, whatever she was doing. It was impossible! yet it was a first, last, and only chance, perhaps in her life, of hearing the words of truth so spoken as she knew they would be in that place that night. ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... unjust aggression could become a matter for discussion in Jurisprudence is the case of a mother with child. Is the child under those circumstances really an unjust aggressor? Let us study that important case with the closest attention. Let all the rays of light we have gathered so far be focussed on this particular point. Can a physician ever be justified in destroying the life of a child, before or during its birth, by craniotomy or in any other manner, in order to save its mother's life, on the plea that the child is an unjust assailant ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... crouched there muttering and thinking of the narrow escapes they had had, Bart carefully focussed the glass, no easy task in the deep gloom that surrounded them; and after several tries he saw something which made him utter an ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... that the debtor class wished to scale them down. The radicals believed that the Supreme Court was in the control of the wealthy; the conservatives, that their opponents sought to assail the highest tribunal in the land. The peculiar circumstances preceding the year 1896, however, focussed attention on the monetary standard rather than upon the other demands ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... the table, flushed with wine and the exertion of hilarity. Twenty eyes were focussed on the queer, insignificant little man in the doorway. If they had not been capable of focussing them on anything a moment before, they acquired the power ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... struggle, equivocal and half-hearted, with the North Carolina authorities under Tipton—despite all these heroic efforts, the star of Franklin swiftly declined. The vigorous measures pursued by General Joseph Martin, and his effective influence focussed upon a movement already honey-combed with disaffection, finally turned the scale. To the Franklin leaders he sent the urgent message: "Nothing will do but a submission to the laws of North Carolina." Early in April, 1788, Martin wrote ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... buried in the loneliest solitude of the Apennines. And truly on such occasions I know no place so fascinating, so like an earthly Eden! The whole scene thrills one like lovely music. All the charms of nature and art are there focussed in brightest perfection. The grounds are gay with starry anemones, and billowy acacias crested with odorous wreaths of yellow foam, dark and mysterious with tall ilexes, cypresses, and stone-pines, enlivened by ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... using a small but powerful telescope, uttered an exclamation, and focussed the instrument on a speck that seemed moving ...
— Tom Swift Among The Diamond Makers - or The Secret of Phantom Mountain • Victor Appleton
... its passage strikes against the walls of the vocal tract. That part of the tract upon which it last impinges before issuing from between the lips determines the placement of a tone. The singers should think of the tone as focussed upon the front of the hard palate—behind the upper front teeth at about the point where the roof of the mouth begins to curve down toward them. If the tone is placed further forward than this, its quality will be metallic; if too far back, throaty. To impinge ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... a hundred other points in Washington's career in which the same supremacy of character, magnanimity focussed on service to an ideal, is revealed in conduct. I see it in the wisdom with which he, a son of the South, chose most of his generals from the North, that he might secure immediate efficiency and unity in the army. I see it in the generosity with which he praised the achievements ...
— The Americanism of Washington • Henry Van Dyke
... kiss had crystallized his feeling for her into driving desire, so it had focussed and intensified his discontent. Before he had been more or less resigned to wait for his fortune and the power he meant to make of it; now it seemed to him that unless he could achieve these things at once, they would never mean anything to him. For money was the one thing that ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... Rothenstein brightly focussed him. 'Yes, I do,' he replied after a moment, with pride rather than effusion—pride in a ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... biggest liar, Bud Lee," said the old man good-naturedly, "I ever focussed my two eyes on. I'll lay an even bet there ain't nobody ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... master with his book and the three apprentices each with his repairing job. The lamp hung over the table, and smoked; it managed to lessen the darkness a little. The little light it gave was gathered up by the great glass balls which focussed it and cast it upon the work. The lamp swayed slightly, and the specks of light wriggled hither and thither like tadpoles, so that the work was continually left in darkness. Then the master would curse and stare ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... Baltic, whence came the naval stores essential to the efficiency of the British fleet; to the Bay of Biscay, intercepting the convoys despatched from France to her navies abroad; and to the Chops of the Channel, where focussed the trade routes from East and West, and where more than once heavy losses had been inflicted upon British commerce by the allies. All these services received conspicuous and successful illustration during Howe's brief command, at the hands either of the commander-in-chief ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... (Mysticism, p. 394). "Its results feed every aspect of the personality: minister to its instinct for the Good, the Beautiful and the True. Psychologically it is an induced state in which the field of consciousness is greatly contracted: the whole of the self, its conative power, being sharply focussed, concentrated upon one thing. We pour ourselvea out or, as it sometimes seems to us, in towards this overpowering interest: seem to ourselves to reach it and be merged with it. Whatever the thing may ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... conscious retrospection that I ever definitely traced its damnable approach to form. At the time, it was to me only a seething, dimly phosphorescent cloud of fungous loathsomeness, enveloping and dissolving to an abhorrent plasticity the one object on which all my attention was focussed. That object was my uncle—the venerable Elihu Whipple—who with blackening and decaying features leered and gibbered at me, and reached out dripping claws to rend me in the fury which this horror ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... flashed as he shrugged pleased denial of claim to such courage, then his roving gaze focussed upon a distant object and the confident expression altered swiftly to uneasiness, awe, superstitious terror. Terry, startled at the transformation, followed the direction of his dread stare and saw that his eyes were fixed upon the distant, mist-wreathed crest of Apo. He understood. ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... doctrines that underlay our action, and long before we possessed the knowledge on which it was said to have been based." But for one afternoon in the year the attention of the House of Commons was intelligently focussed on the details of the suffering of those, the weakest workers of all, on whose shoulders the fabric of our industrial system rests. Matters left previously to the agitation of some voluntary society or to the pages of the "novel with a purpose" were marshalled according to their ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... Mr. Dinwiddie focussed his eyes, then stumbled to his feet and caught Clavering by the arm. "Yes," he muttered. "Get me out of this and take me where I can get a drink. ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... obediently and scanned the west and north. His eyes traversed skein after skein of the brilliant colorful patternings, but he was unable to find a very closely netted region. He was about to announce his discovery to Caradoc when his lense focussed on another grim menace ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... leverets play in the waggon-track. At even a fern-owl beats by, passing close to the eaves whence the moths issue. On the narrow waggon-track which descends along a coombe and is worn in chalk, the heat pours down by day as if an invisible lens in the atmosphere focussed the sun's rays. Strong woody knapweed endures it, so does toadflax and pale blue scabious, and wild mignonette. The very sun of Spain burns and burns and ripens the wheat on the edge of the coombe, and will ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... rolling in a fine frenzy from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, also focussed itself on the pile of soot; and a thrill went through him. Soot in the fireplace! Smith washing his hands! ("You know my methods, my dear Watson. ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... felt a sudden thrill of alarm pass over him, even before he had focussed the glasses upon Jimmy's so-called "cloud." He suspected what it might prove to be, and the very thought of being caught out on the ocean by a fog gave ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel
... strange fixed gaze of the physician, whose face had visibly bleached,—blanched to corpse-pallor. Silent seconds passed; and still the eyes stared—flamed as if the life of the man had centralized and focussed within them. ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... broken window and down the street, seeking to escape, instinctively and gropingly, from the awful shambles. And thereafter I lived nightmare. My memory of what happened in the succeeding hours is the memory one would have of nightmare. Many events are focussed sharply on my brain, but between these indelible pictures I retain are intervals of unconsciousness. What occurred in those intervals I know ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... the days that have followed, and is completed while the Peace Conference is still in session, holding in the balance, as many believe, the fate of many hopes, and perhaps the whole future of the world. We see focussed there in Paris all the motives that have ever entered into human history and all the ideals that have influenced human affairs. The question must have arisen in all minds in, some form as to what the place of these motives and ideals and dramatic moments is in the progress ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... was not looking at him. His eyes were focussed just before his nose where the bowl of a pipe was beginning to glow. Carrington could hear the lips gently sucking, and then the aroma of tobacco came in a strong wave through the trees. Finally the match went out, and the glowing pipe began to move slowly ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... everywhere, it is upon the margin that our attention should be focussed, because it is round about the margin (wherever it is found) that the changes are taking place which really matter for society. When Mr. Mallaby-Deeley buys an estate in Covent Garden from the Duke ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... face speculative difficulties in plenty, but the great fact remains that in Revelation steady light is focussed on the moral qualities of the divine Nature and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... had an impression of somebody squeaking as it went down. It was the sort of impression one disregards. The collapse of the pile of goods just sufficed to end his subconscious efforts to get something to hit somebody with, and his whole attention focussed itself upon the struggle in the window. For a splendid instant Parsons towered up over the active backs that clustered about the shop window door, an active whirl of gesture, tearing things down and throwing them, ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... atlases makes it difficult for us to think of the world in other terms than those of map and diagram; knowledge and science have focussed things for us, and our imagination has in consequence shrunk. It is almost impossible, when thinking of the earth as a whole, to think about it except as a picture drawn, or as a small globe with maps ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... fix my thought on what I am reading, and easily take in its meaning. The act of will, the effort of attention, the intending of the mind on each word and line of the page, just as the eyes are focussed on each word and line, is the power here contemplated. It is the power to focus the consciousness on a given spot, and hold it there Attention is the first and indispensable step in all knowledge. Atten. tion to spiritual things is the ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... These three men now focussed their attention upon him, the fourth of the line, standing beside the tree brought into the house. Each of them in his own way had wrought out a work for civilization, using the woods as an implement. In his own case, the woods around him having disappeared, ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen
... more complete—there was a villainy of circumstances that cut these men off more completely from the rest of mankind, whose ideal of conduct had never undergone the trial of a fiendish and appalling joke. They were exasperated with him for being a half-hearted shirker: he focussed on them his hatred of the whole thing; he would have liked to take a signal revenge for the abhorrent opportunity they had put in his way. Trust a boat on the high seas to bring out the Irrational that lurks at the bottom of every thought, sentiment, sensation, emotion. It was part of the burlesque ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... God, or whatever we choose to call it, and the wilful rebel, victim of his own passions; not, as in the Roman State and family, between the man who performs religious duties and the man who wilfully neglects them—between pius and impius; but between the universal law of love, focussed and concentrated in the love of Christ, and the sleep, the darkness, the death of a world that will not ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... He swung the searchlight in an arc and focussed it at length on something that appeared only as a field of blurred movement. He wiped the moisture from the wall before the lens, and there was revealed to us a sight that makes my heart pound even now when I ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... one aboard seemed to have his gaze focussed on Jerry by this time, as though he might be the one to decide whether the hunt had better be abandoned right then and there, or kept up ...
— The Outdoor Chums on the Gulf • Captain Quincy Allen
... focussed on the differences rather than the similarities between the musical art and a new art of mobile color, we come next to the consideration of the matter of form. Now form is essentially of space: we speak about the "form" of ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... would have seared the Sphinx. "There's nothing wrong with the machine!" he said, almost-but-not-quite shouting. "There's nothing wrong with the television! There's nothing wrong with the wiring! There must be something wrong at the other end—where the Ray is focussed! And I intend ...
— Stairway to the Stars • Larry Shaw
... wonder would there have been such a thing as a broken bottle anywhere about the stack, Miss Q——? The sun came out unusually strong this morning, I noticed; and it's a well-known scientific fact that the action of the solar rays, focussed by such a medium as I have suggested, will produce ignition—provided, of course, that the inflammable material is in ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... I forgot all around me. With my fancies focussed on my lover, I leaned back in my armchair, gazing at the rising moon. My word, at that moment I ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... bell rang that summoned him to the carpet in the cashier's office it seemed as though the eye of everyone of his associates was raised from the work that had employed their attention and was focussed upon him. ...
— Dick the Bank Boy - Or, A Missing Fortune • Frank V. Webster
... the point of view about the treatment of desertion has been changing during the past fifteen years. The case worker's attention used to be focussed on the danger of increasing the desertion rate by a policy of too sympathetic care for deserters' families. Little study was made of individual causes, and in so far as there was a general policy of treatment it was to insist, wherever a desertion law existed, that the deserted wife go ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... His efforts culminated, after mirrors of ten, twenty, and thirty feet focal length had successively left his hands, in the gigantic forty-foot, completed August 28, 1789. It was the first reflector in which only a single mirror was employed. In the "Gregorian" form, the focussed rays are, by a second reflection from a small concave[309] mirror, thrown straight back through a central aperture in the larger one, behind which the eye-piece is fixed. The object under examination is thus seen in the natural direction. The ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... of attempts have been made to explain the doubling of the canals merely as effects of refraction or reflection; and it has even been suggested that it may arise from the telescope not being accurately focussed. ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... flag that floated over the little cupola; and for the second time, old Hector, watching up on the cliff, viewed this infallible portent of an event out of the ordinary. His hand trembled as he held his marine glasses to his blurred eyes and focussed on The Sawdust Pile, in time to see his son enter the limousine with Nan Brent and her child—and even at that distance he could see that the car in which they were departing from the Sawdust Pile was not the one in which Donald had left The Dreamerie. ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... later that his eyes focussed on the left hand view-screen. Red and yellow flames were gushing out at the bottom of the rocket, and it was beginning to tremble. Then the upper jets, the ones that furnished power for the generators, began firing. He looked anxiously ...
— The Answer • Henry Beam Piper
... movement in every cot. Eyes were all front, gazing in the direction of a golden-haired beauty, who blushed a deep pink when she realised how many pairs of eyes from the train were focussed on her. Soon horny hands were being kissed in her direction. Shyly, she sent a kiss or two back, and then ...
— Some Naval Yarns • Mordaunt Hall
... traditional ramparts, a type of philosophy has sprung up, slowly undermining the very foundations; or, to vary the simile, while the former two have captured certain outworks, the latter has made its way to within striking distance of the citadel, and that the more unobserved because attention has been focussed almost exclusively upon the more imposing performances of the ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... lost control of myself—begged as no man should beg another even for life, though the things I sought were more than life. He calmly awaited the end of my feverish, broken petition; then he went to work as the expert diamond cutter goes at a crystal. He focussed my position, twisted and turned my arguments, chipped and split my reasoning, smoothed off the corners, and then polished up the subject so that it might retain its old-time lustre for the bedazzlement of the customer whose favorable decision he ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... tongue, and Venning, opening his eyes, suddenly heard these sounds at once, notwithstanding the walls of the cavern trembled to the hollow thunder of the waters. His eyes fell upon something beyond-the fire. He did not move, or cry out, or wonder where he was; his mind was focussed like his wide-opened eyes on that object. It was like a face, and yet he could not make out whether it was the face of man, or bird, or beast, or reptile. One glance at the thing by any one else would have been more than enough, so terrible ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... fact that in the very nature of things one cannot rush through this pervading beauty of the earth, but has to plod onwards step by step along a toilsome roadway, enables the scenery to be so impressed upon one's mind as to be focussed for life in one's memory. One is held spellbound; these are the pictures never forgotten. Here I sit in a corner of the earth as old as the world itself. These mountains are as they were in the great beginning, when the Creator and Sustainer of all things pure and beautiful looked ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... mean? His father had told him, and the uncanny events of the evening stood evidence of Dr. Cairn's wisdom. The mysterious and evil force which Antony Ferrara controlled was being focussed ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... remember, floated, like a mist, through my fading consciousness, that now perhaps—now—there was silence around me; that now, could my palsied lips find dialect, I should be heard, and understood. My whole soul rose focussed to the effort—my body jerked itself upwards. At that moment I knew my spirit truly great, genuinely sublime. For I did utter something—my dead and shuddering tongue did babble forth some coherency. Then I fell back, and all was once more the ancient ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... one eye and focussed the other on her. "Haven't any little son—my mistake!" Then he turned the open gig-lamp on me and began again. "S'prised at you, John; little son is the most won'erful thing any father and mother could possess with the possible 'ception of a li'l daughter—ain't that so, ...
— You Should Worry Says John Henry • George V. Hobart
... her out of the poor-house." Bergstein's voice had grown as soft as an Oriental's. "I buried him at my own expense. It's hard on her—she's got a little girl who was always ailin'—sickly from the first." He fumbled at his scrubby black beard, his rat-like eyes focussed on the ground. ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... are employed, the instructions proceed to state that the distance between them would be about 1/10th of the distance from the part of the object focussed. The example given is a group of portraits, and the angle, 1 in 10, is afterwards spoken of as being equivalent to an ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 186, May 21, 1853 • Various
... that the excited, fat manager, who was dancing up and down, mopping his forehead with a red bandanna with one hand, and waving the megaphone with the other when not shouting through the same, might call the scene off, the boy stopped short, focussed again on the amazing picture, and got another snap-shot ...
— The Boy Scouts with the Motion Picture Players • Robert Shaler
... education. It means that all phases of the process— the relation of pupil and teacher, school and home, the government and discipline, the lessons taught in every subject, the environment, the proportioning of the curriculum, of physical, emotional and intellectual culture—all shall be focussed and organized upon the one significant ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... which, uncontrolled in any way by human choice (and even under that control as it always is to some extent), mechanically registers the action of the light rays which define the impress of natural forms and scenes through the lens focussed upon the plate. So that, as we often see in a photograph, some unimportant or insignificant detail is reproduced with as much distinctness (or more) as are the leading figures or whatever form the interesting features or the motive of the subject. The picture suffers ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... one, complimentary or otherwise, bestowed upon him by his neighbours. Indeed, such was the dearth of original names that it is on record that old Ian McAllister, the first schoolmaster in the McDonald settlement, was often compelled as he flung his tawse across the room at some focussed point of mischief behind the stove, to pause even at the boiling-point of his wrath, to deliver himself of some such explanation of the ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... the attention and interest of the universe have been largely focussed on the marvellous achievements of the human intellect. Discoveries, inventions, advanced methods and great strides of progress in countless directions are the boast and pride of modern times. There is no disputing this, nor is there any doubt but that a great wave of scientific ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... come. She would feel better afterward! June stroked the short hair of that shapely head; and all the scattered mother-sense in her focussed itself and passed through the tips of her fingers into the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... you live, Amarilly?" she asked, her eyes sparkling as she focussed them on the family. "You needn't come for the washing the first time. I will bring it myself so I can see all your little brothers. Be sure to come to the Guild next Saturday, and then I'll have the rug for you to take home. ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... the first two books of a trilogy which, at the time when I write, is still unfinished, Mr. Bennett again presents the process of the generations, but he has given us a more intense dramatic interest, he has singled out a few persons for more significant characterisation; he has focussed his picture better, concentrated the interest, and produced emotional tension. The reason why Pickwick retains its place as the first of Dickens' novels is that it is almost the only book he wrote which had a really satisfactory hero—an ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... humour, and the quaintly untrammelled American intelligence, focussed upon diverse and age-encrusted civilizations, which caught the instantaneous fancy of a vast public. It was a virgin field for the humorous observer; Europe had not yet become the playground of America. It was rather a terra ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... but she did infinitely more. She gave him a son, and in that son all his hopes and dreams, his secret humilities and unconscious vanities, his political devotions and antipathies were all brought together and focussed in one great determination that this son of his should have all that he had been denied; that in this son every one of his own inarticulate aspirations should ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... stood there, waiting until, by very force of motionless persistence, she had focussed every eye upon her person. Then, according to the mandates of the Ladies' Galaxy, she hurled her bridal bouquet down across the banister, not upon the waiting Eva Saint Clair Andrews who hankered ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... hundred or more places where it should be saved. This is not concentration. Concentration means the focussing of a force; and when the mathematical faculty of the brain alone should be at work, the force is not focussed if it is at the same time flying over all other parts of the body in useless strain of innumerable muscles. Tell another man, one who works naturally, to solve the same problem,—he will instinctively and at once "erase all previous impressions" in muscle ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... heaps, rocky bits of woodland, are favorite resorts. The Carolina wren decidedly objects to being stared at, and likes to dart out of sight in the midst of the underbrush in a twinkling while the opera-glasses are being focussed. To let off some of his superfluous vivacity, Nature has provided him with two safety-valves: one is his voice, another is his tail. With the latter he gesticulates in a manner so expressive that it ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... book and focussed his glasses on the tow. The track of the fire was patent to the world now, and we were unbending the sails from the yards ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... the surface of the sail is gradated to that focus. Try to copy this sail once or twice, and you will begin to understand Turner's work. Similarly, the wing of the Cupid in Correggio's large picture in the National Gallery is focussed to two little grains of white at the top of it. The points of light on the white flower in the wreath round the head of the dancing child-faun, in Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... contentions and rivalries of the political parties grew apace; and in 1797, just before the retirement of Washington at the close of his second administration, the struggle between Democrats and Federalists became focussed on the prize of the Presidency—the "Father of his Country" having declined to stand for a third term. The candidates, we need hardly say, were John Adams, who had been Vice President in Washington's administration, and Thomas Jefferson, the former being the standard-bearer ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... the bank, such far-ranging meditations gave place to considerations immediate and concrete, Iglesias' whole mind being focussed to arrive at the facts of the case. And this was far from easy. For alarm stalked those usually self-secure and self-complacent rooms and glass and mahogany-walled corridors; men looking up from their desks as he, Iglesias, passed, with anxious faces, or moving with ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... distinction to others of your notice. Those were, in every sense, full—dress affairs; this one, in all senses, undress. It is the work of an amateur, you can see at once—small, rather blurred to begin with, not perfectly focussed, and fading now towards the end of all such gear. It represents a bareheaded young lady in a white gown pinned very high. She is standing in a pond, with the water well over her knees. One hand keeps her balance with a pole, the other ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... cigarette, tossed the match out the open top of the window, then paused in his tracks with the cigarette two inches from his mouth—which fell faintly ajar. His eyes were focussed upon a spot of brilliant color on the roof of a ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... of the window. The Land Office capped the summit of a bold hill. The eyes of the Commissioner passed over the roofs of many houses set in a packing of deep green, the whole checkered by strips of blinding white streets. The horizon, where his gaze was focussed, swelled to a fair wooded eminence flecked with faint dots of shining white. There was the cemetery, where lay many who were forgotten, and a few who had not lived in vain. And one lay there, occupying very small space, whose childish heart had been large enough to desire, while near its ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... expression which could be had through Him alone. And then imagine the struggle required to defeat this opposing power. Think of what the ordinary man has to meet and overcome to conquer the desire for Personal Aggrandizement—and then think of what the Master had to fight, with the focussed desire of the entire Race-Thought striving to express itself through Him! Truly the Sins of the World bore down upon Him with their mighty weight. And yet He knew that He had taken upon Himself this ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... I focussed the lens on the flush-cut surface of closely-rolled leaf, and explored every part of ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... back, the standing moved for a better view-point, the room focussed on Plimsoll, Wyatt and the three cow-chums. Then Wyatt stepped aside. There was a malicious little grin on his face. Mormon's suggestion as to his private grudge against Plimsoll was not without foundation. Wyatt had been glad ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... and the beach, now destitute of life, lay sung to by the sea and flown over by the gulls. Nothing speaking of man lay there but the boat that looked like a toy cast there by a child. It held her eyes, focussed her thoughts, and became the centre of a sudden longing, a desire soul searching as the desire for water—the desire for civilization, for the things and ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... keener, because we recognise that the Poet never thought about us at all. He excites our sympathies by his own intuitions into the clashing ideas, which he represents in the tragedy of a passionately loving and a jealous nature. We learn truths, not of fact, but of life, focussed and arranged as an artist arranges them, and permeated with that strange sense of wonder which only Life can give. We feel the suggestion of an inevitable dim something beyond, to explain the unexplainable, the tragedy of character, and the ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... she focussed through the narrow slits upon Joan and with a hot, deep resolve she ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... and Gray he led the way up to the landing before Kazmah's apartments. It was vaguely lighted by two police-lanterns. Four men were standing there, and four pairs of eyes were focussed ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... happened simultaneously, or in a span of seconds strangely scant. The gunners sprang to station, whipping away the tarpaulin, while their lieutenant focussed binoculars upon the confused distances of the night. Obedient to his instructions, the long, gleaming tube of steel ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... Death, Faith and Hope, Aspiration, Suffering, and Remorse, were not, as to the eighteenth-century rhymester, merely Greek ladies draped in flowing raiment; to him they were realities, intensely focussed in himself. Watts was giving of himself, of his knowledge and observation of what Love is and does, and how Death appears so variously; and who but a man who knew the melancholy of despair could ...
— Watts (1817-1904) • William Loftus Hare
... largest shells, was the telephone-room, the nerve-centre of the whole complicated system of defense, with a switchboard larger than those in the "central office" of many an American city. By means of the thousands of wires focussed in that little underground room, General Dubois was enabled to learn in an instant what was transpiring at Douaumont or Tavannes or Vaux; he could pass on the information thus obtained to General Nivelle at Souilly; or he could talk direct to the Ministry of War, in Paris. I ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... fascinating visitor, appeared to be the Vampire. Doppelganger, Astral creations, and all such-like, did not comply with the conditions of my night experience. The Wehr-Wolf is but a variant of the Vampire, and so needed not to be classed or examined at all. Then it was that, thus focussed, the Lady of the Shroud (for so I came to hold her in my mind) began to assume a new force. Aunt Janet's library afforded me clues which I followed with avidity. In my secret heart I hated the quest, ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... Major, 'shook hands with Mrs. Lorimer as she entered the cab. The order given to the driver was Euston station. Thus a lady of great personal charm, whose terrible experience has for some weeks focussed the attention of the civilised world upon the affairs of her ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... was focussed on North Carolina. In the early summer President Wilson telegraphed to Governor Bickett: "I need not point out to you the critical importance of the action of your great State in the matter of the suffrage amendment." The Governor replied ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... of it!" Bambi cried, with unpremeditated warmth, which focussed Jarvis's eyes upon her. "He'll be here only a little while, and we will reminisce. He ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... power of Simon Giguet was not the only serious event that was happening in Arcis. For the last two days the attention of the little town had been focussed on a personage just arrived, who proved to be the first Unknown of the present generation. The stranger was at this moment the subject of conversation in every household in the place. He was the beam fallen from heaven into ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... for once, perhaps, too near his material to allow the rich atmospheric effects which he prefers, and in spite of the unforgetable portrait of Zenobia and powerful passages of realistic description, the book is not quite focussed. In "The Marble Faun" Hawthorne comes into his own again. Its central problem is one of those dark insoluble ones that he loves: the influence of a crime upon the development of a soul. Donatello, the Faun, is a charming young creature of the natural sunshine until his love for the ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... unnerving and terrifying impression of an unseen and yet real presence did not endure; and, as she focussed her eyes on the open book she held in her hand, it became fainter and fainter, while she realised, with a keen sense of relief, what it was that had brought the presence of her absent friend so very near ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... bullet strike the river ahead of the boat, and send a spiral column of water shooting into the air. He put up his glasses and focussed ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... the larger the gifts of His companionship. Our need is the measure of His prayer. 'Satan hath desired to have you, but thou, Peter, dost stand in the very focus of the danger, and so on thee are focussed, too, the rays of My love and care.' Be sure, dear friends, that it is always so for us, and that when you want Christ most, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... inner pocket, surprise affording him some amusement. His interest in Sachigo had abruptly focussed itself ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... with a flashlight set back in a metal tube so that the rays of the light are not diffused but can be focussed only on ...
— Lectures in Navigation • Ernest Gallaudet Draper
... inadequate as it is, of a history of furniture from the earliest time of which we have any record, until from the extraordinary growth of the vast Roman Empire, the arts and manufactures of every country became as it were centralised and focussed in the palaces of the wealthy Romans, brings us down to the commencement of what has been deservedly called "the greatest event in history"—the decline and fall of this enormous empire. For fifteen generations, ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... nothing except, perhaps, a suspense of fever in which the sick man perceives the searchlights of the world's assembled navies in act to converge on one minute fragment of wreckage—one only in all the black and agony-strewn sea. Then those beams focussed themselves. Earth as we knew it—the full circuit of our orb—laid the weight of its impersonal and searing curiosity on this Huckley which had voted that it was flat. It asked for news about Huckley—where and what it might be, and how it talked—it knew how it danced—and ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... could—then—but he would not anticipate. Drew's advent had focussed his desire to put himself, and her, to the test. Joyce had precipitated matters, ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... have taken place in the human habitation, the scenes of Nature around, from which he drew the inspirations of his youthful genius, remain unchanged. Every feature of landscape loveliness is focussed in that matchless panorama. Behind is a range of wild mountains, whose many-shaped peaks and crags, clad with pine and olive, assume, as the day wears on, the golden and purple hues of the sky—sloping down into the midst ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... the unexpected. Now he gave her a long account of the day-school that he sometimes patronized. The account was interesting, and she had often pressed him for it before, but she could not attend now, for her mind was focussed on the invisible. She discerned that Mrs. Wilcox, though a loving wife and mother, had only one passion in life—her house—and that the moment was solemn when she invited a friend to share this passion with her. To answer "another day" was to answer as a fool. "Another day" will ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... the steps behind the others to the old garden, which was the pride of every pupil in Warwick Hall. The hollyhocks from Ann Hathaway's cottage had not yet begun to flaunt their rosettes of color, but the rhododendrons from Killarney were in gorgeous bloom. As Lloyd focussed the camera in such a way as to make them a background for a picture of the sun-dial, Betty heard Kitty ask: "You'll let us know early in the morning what your ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston |
