"Shifting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of idleness, and the cure for it is honest and constant employment. She herself has told me that lace is worn in hell; and as she must know how to make it, let it never be out of her hands; for when she is occupied in shifting the bobbins to and fro, the image or images of what she loves will not shift to and fro in her thoughts; this is the truth, this is my opinion, and ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... you looked out upon the flats some bright spring morning and found them transformed into a shallow lake by the creek's first flood, and seen one great expanse of shining gold as the sun smote the thin ice made in the night but to disappear long before mid-day and leave a surface all ripples and shifting lights and shadows, upon which would come an occasional splash and great out-extending circles, as some huge mating pickerel leaped in his glee? Have you stood sometime, in sheer delight of it, and drawn into distended lungs the air ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... dense that no one could have run more than a few yards, most of them went along quite carelessly, picking and eating a fruit of the melon family called Mponko. When the animal heard them approach he always fled, shifting his stand and doubling on his course in the most cunning manner. In other cases I have known them to turn back to a point a few yards from their own trail, and then lie down in a hollow waiting for the hunter to come up. Though a ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... illicit cultivation of cannabis has decreased, with production shifting from large to small plots and nurseries to evade aerial detection ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... ever come into his life. How she had raged at him in that last memorable talk; how vital, how vigorous she was, uncompromising, direct, courageous! And as a swimmer, who miles away from shore in the cruel shifting green water, might think with aching longing of the quiet home garden, the kitchen with its glowing fire and gleaming pottery, the pleasant homely routine of uneventful days, and wonder that he had ever found safety and comfort anything less than a miracle, Warren ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... subjecting it to a jet of fervent, though nowise brilliant, thought to-night. It has become luminous, and its clear rays, penetrating the abyss of the remote past, have brought within our ken some stages of the evolution of the earth. And in the shifting "without haste, but without rest" of the land and sea, as in the endless variation of the forms assumed by living beings, we have observed nothing but the natural product of the forces originally possessed by the substance of ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... there—a place like a football stadium only there aren't any seats," explained Bud, breathlessly. By this time he was surrounded by the others, all maintaining a precarious foothold in the shifting shale. And what they saw caused them all to join ...
— The Boy Ranchers on the Trail • Willard F. Baker
... demons, was kindled in the jaws of a lofty cavern, into which an inlet from the lake seemed to advance; and he conjectured, which was indeed true, that the fire had been lighted as a beacon to the boatmen on their return. They rowed right for the mouth of the cave, and then, shifting their oars, permitted the boat to enter in obedience to the impulse which it had received. The skiff passed the little point or platform of rock on which the fire was blazing, and running about two boats' lengths farther, ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... aisles of the forest he saw a strange, streaky, murky something moving, alive, shifting up and down, never an instant the same. It must have been the wind—the heat before the fire. He seemed to see through it, but there was nothing beyond, only opaque, dim, mustering clouds. Hot puffs shot forward into his face. ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... changed. A wild gale was blowing and rain beat about them in level sheets. A wet fog came and went and gave place at last to a steady rain, as the gale gave place to a hurricane. They spent a miserable day and night shifting from shelter to shelter with the shifting wind; another day and another night. Their provisions were almost gone, the fire refused to burn in the fierce downpour, the horses drifted ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... lieutenant, with his eye still glued to his glass; "and the sharp eyes appear to belong to an equally sharp crew; they are shaking out their reefs fore and aft and shifting their jib, all at the same time. Depend upon it, sir, we shall have to work for that craft before ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... chagrin at the result of the interview. He now began to adopt a different course, and entering into long discussions with Amabel, strove by every effort of wit and ridicule, to shake and subvert her moral and religious principles. But here again he failed; and once more shifting his ground, affected to be convinced by her arguments. He entirely altered his demeanour, and though Amabel could not put much faith in the change, it was a subject of real rejoicing to her. Though scarcely conscious of it herself, he sensibly won upon her regards, and she passed many hours ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... mark:—Mr. Cochrane Johnstone is to pay and to lend to Mr. De Berenger four hundred pounds. As he was to give him four hundred pounds, why did he, or Mr. Butt (for they are one and the same) take so much trouble, and go through so much circuity in shifting and changing the bank notes? You observe, that the bank note for L.200 is sent to the bankers, and exchanged for two notes of L.100 each; and then the same agent is sent to the Bank of England to get two hundred notes of L.1 each; and that about the same time another ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... without the definition of classes, which give the light and shade that Heine speaks of in "Don Quixote"; that it lacks types and customs that can be widely recognized and accepted as national and characteristic; that we have no past; that we want both romantic and historic background; that we are in a shifting, flowing, forming period which fiction cannot seize on; that we are in diversity and confusion that baffle artistic treatment; in short, that American life is too vast, varied, and crude for the purpose ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... direct responsibility on the part of any heritor for its upkeep, and what seemed everybody's business became nobody's. This condition of laissez faire was confirmed by a sentimental though unreasonable objection to shifting into their right position a number of head-stones which time and weather had either displaced or Darwin's worms had covered up. It was only five or six years ago that a Committee was formed, which in a regular manner, and with the consent ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... religion can have to bear is the burden of tradition, and humour is the determined foe of everything that is conventional and traditional. The Pharisaical spirit loves precedent and authority; the humorous spirit loves all that is swift and shifting and subversive and fresh. One of the reasons why the orthodox heaven is so depressing a place is that there seems to be no room in it for laughter; it is all harmony and meekness, sanctified by nothing but the gravest of smiles. What wonder that humanity is ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... never acquire leprosy. Occasionally, too, the disease arises from excessive corruption of matter in repletion of blood, and hence it is more frequent in sanguineous diseases, like synocha, and during the prevalence of south winds or the shifting of winds to the south, and in infancy—the age characterized particularly ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... what you like, from Emperor of Morocco to Confused Noise Without. I was on the stage once. I'm particularly good at shifting scenery." ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... she herself was in a somewhat leaky condition. They, however, only laughed at the leaking. "It will keep the boat sweet, and give Jack Nobs and Auguste something to do," observed Master Trundle, cocking his eye at me. Notwithstanding this, we stood on, the breeze shifting conveniently in our favour till nightfall, when we put into a small harbour, the entrance to which our pilot for a wonder knew. The next day we continued our course, landing in a bay, up which we ran ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... in the form of jingles, ballads, parodies in prose, and other satirical essays, was inspired by the recent publication of the Pope-Swift Miscellany. In his preface Smedley indicts Swift for an almost endless series of misdemeanors—for shifting his allegiance from the Whigs to the Tories; for restricting his verse to the burlesque style and its groveling doggerel manner; for failing in eloquence and oratory, theology and mathematics; and for being a pedant, poetaster, hack-politician, jockey, gardener, punster, and skilful swearer. In ...
— A Letter From a Clergyman to his Friend, - with an Account of the Travels of Captain Lemuel Gulliver • Anonymous
... firebox went up the chimney all night, and fell in showers on deck. Every now and again a spark would burn through the "Wagga rug" of a sleeping shearer, and he'd wake suddenly and get up and curse. It was no use shifting round, for the wind was all ways, and the boat steered north, south, east, and west to humour the river. Occasionally a low branch would root three or four passengers off their wool bales, and they'd get up ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... House of Everlasting Fire" to-day. But who can say what it will be a year or a decade hence? A clogging or a shifting of the vents below sea-level, and Kilauea's lake of fire may become again explosive. Who will deny that Kilauea may not soar even above Mauna Loa? Stranger things have happened before this in the ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... to him that the stove-neater came in too often to look at the thermometer, and that trains never stopped passing and his own train was always roaring over bridges. The noise, the whistle, the Finn, the tobacco smoke—all mixed with the ominous shifting of misty shapes, weighed on Klimov like an intolerable nightmare. In terrible anguish he lifted up his aching head, looked at the lamp whose light was encircled with shadows and misty spots; he wanted to ask for ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... and found a single inhabitant, a man who was splitting fir for torches, but the conversation was limited to alternate puffs from our pipes. There was a fine aurora behind us—a low arch of white fire, with streamers radiating outward, shifting ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... first to be {32} developed. In canoe and pirogue, bateau, flatboat, and ark, settlers went up and produce came down. But the winding stream, the shifting channel, the swift current, the frequent snag and sand-bar made navigation down-stream dangerous and navigation upstream incredibly slow: the heavier vessels took three months for the trip from New Orleans to Louisville. With the coming of the steamboat a strong ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... their bridal-cakes. I write of Youth, of Love;—and have access By these, to sing of cleanly wantonness; I sing of dews, of rains, and, piece by piece, Of balm, of oil, of spice, of ambergris. I sing of times trans-shifting; and I write How roses first came red, and lilies white. I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing The court of Mab, and of the Fairy King; I write of Hell; I sing, and ever shall Of Heaven,—and hope to have it ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... after this conversation we fell in with several vessels wind-bound at the entrance of the Channel. I took charge of one, and the wind shifting to the South West, and blowing strong, I carried her up to the Pool. As soon as I could leave her I took a boat to go down to Greenwich, as I was most anxious to have a long conversation with Virginia. It was a dark squally night, with rain ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... of which any one may attest by walking up, in the cloudy and dark day, the Cairn-a-Mount, a lofty knoll, across which a road leads to Deeside, to the north of the poet's birthplace, and watching the sea of vapour boiling, shifting, sinking, rising, ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... corner of a pleasant street, and as if they were among the shifting scenes of a panorama, the entire foreground had changed. Wretchedness! that word no more described the horrors of their surroundings than could any other that came to Dora's mind. The scene beggared description. ...
— Three People • Pansy
... billowy cheeks. Now the rocks light up with warmer glow, and long, horizontal shadows are thrown across the hoary curtain, and slowly the gorgeous cloud-crests lift away and more and more the heights come gleaming into view. Now there are breaks and caverns here and there through the shifting vapors, and hurried little glimpses of the cliffs beyond, and these cloud-caves grow and widen, and broad sheets of yellow light seem warming up the dripping wall and changing into mist the clinging beads of dew. And now, ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... neglected; so numerous and so irregularly scattered, without apparent regard for fields, that when we were told these were graves we could not give credence to the statement, but before the city was reached we saw places where, by the shifting of the channel, the river had cut into some of these mounds, exposing brick vaults, some so low as to be under water part of the time, and we wonder if the fact does not also record a slow subsidence of the delta plain under the ever increasing load ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... obeyed almost mechanically. His heart was beating fast. His back was pressed against the cold rock. The fingers of both hands were nervously buried in the soft turf. Once more his eyes were riveted upon this land of shifting shadows. The whole panorama of life seemed suddenly unveiled before his eyes. More real, more brilliant now were the things upon which he looked. The thread of ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... between civilized men and the nameless savage is love of home, and the powerful races are those in whom this instinct is the strongest. Such fealty is not born in the shifting almost tent-dwellers of Manhattan. ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... for me and my news," murmured the Lizard thoughtfully, shifting his geographical bread-crumbs. "If I be too long away, he will move without ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... mottled in the deep twilight that midnight brought in this latitude. They had threaded into the ice-field as long as the light lasted, following the lanes of blue water till they closed, then drifting idly till others appeared; worming out into leagues of open sea, again creeping into the shifting labyrinth ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... had aduertisement, that one had victuals, standing in the Northerly latitude of twelue degrees. Howbeit it was not our good lucke to finde it, which fell out partly by the obstinacie of our master: for the day before we fell with part of the Ilands the wind came about to the Southwest, and then shifting our course we missed it. So the wind increasing Southerly, we feared we should not haue bene able to haue doubled the Cape, which would haue greatly hazarded our casting away vpon the coast of India, the Winter season and Westerne Monsons already being come in, which Monsons ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt
... dumb, patient stream went winding and winding along through its shifting pathway; in some places its waters were parted, and then again, lower down, they would meet once more. I could see that the stream from year to year was finding itself new channels, and flowed no longer in its ancient track, but I knew that the springs which ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... busy that evening. Wot with shifting lighters from under the jetty and sweeping up, it was pretty near ha'-past seven afore I 'ad a minute I could call my own. I put down the broom at last, and was just thinking of stepping round to the Bull's Head for a 'arf-pint when I see Cap'n Smithers come off the ship on to ...
— Night Watches • W.W. Jacobs
... Election of December, 1900, there was a shifting of offices in the Cabinet, by which Mr. Brodrick succeeded Lord Lansdowne as Secretary of State for War, and Lord Selborne became First Lord of the Admiralty instead of Mr. Goschen. Lord Roberts was ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... noticed too little the flickering gold of the leaves at evening, the purple hills, and the shifting stories and glories of the sky; but now, whatever she saw him try to imitate, she learned to examine. She was a woman, and admired sunset, etc., for this boy's sake, and her whole heart expanded with a new sensation that softened her manner to all the world, ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... over a flat bed of limestone, cracked into the appearance of a tesselated pavement. For many miles there is no pass over the Kymore range, except this, significantly called "Ek-powa-Ghat" (one-foot Ghat). It is evidently a fault, or shifting of the rocks, producing so broken a cliff as to admit of a path winding over the shattered crags. On either side, the precipices are extremely steep, of horizontally stratified rocks, continued in an unbroken line, and the views across the plain and Soane ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... was speeding along at a fast clip, and dinner that day was served about three miles in the air. Then, desiring to test the gliding abilities of the airship, it was sent down on a long slant, with the propellers stationary, the shifting planes and ...
— Tom Swift and his Airship • Victor Appleton
... into strips No bigger than the airy feathers That ducks preen out in changing weathers Upon the shifting ripple-tips. ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... and shifting from one pleasant thought to another, when he heard Travers's voice behind him raised impressively. "And they both went at Van hammer and tongs," he heard Travers say, "one in front and the other behind, kicking and striking ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... to think that the trouble lay with the clock; that I had been deceived in my conclusions, and that it was not running at the time of the crime. Mr. Gryce may have ordered it wound, and then have had it laid on its back to prevent the hands from shifting past the point where they had stood at the time of the crime's discovery. It was an unexplainable act, but a possible one; while to suppose that it was going when the shelves fell, stretched improbability to the utmost, there having been, so far as we could ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... and 21 I cover shifting and left thumb action: in No. 9, finger action—flexibility and evenness, the left thumb relaxed—the fundamental idea of the trill. After the interrupted types of bowing (grand detache, martele, staccato) ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... things stood with regard to absenteeism. This had existed before the Union'; indeed, if the curious reader will turn to Johnson's "Dictionary" he will find it damned in a definition. But it was enormously intensified by the shifting of the centre of gravity of Irish politics, industry, and fashion from Dublin to London. The memoirs of that day abound in references to an exodus which has left other and more material evidence in ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... knew it was made by a cantering horse; that the intervals were due to the patches of dead leaves in its course, and that the varying movement was the effect of its progress through obstacles and underbrush. It was therefore coming through some "blind" cutoff in the thick-set wood. The shifting of the sound also showed that the rider was unfamiliar with the locality, and sometimes wandered from the direct course; but the unfailing and accelerating persistency of the sound, in spite of these ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... attempt to excavate any of these, claiming that their ancestors or members of their families are buried in them and must not be disturbed. In the dunes human skeletons are frequently exposed by the shifting of the sands by the high wind. The natives seem to have little regard for these. Perhaps they are of the "common people," while cairns cover the chiefs or priests. There is a tradition that in "the ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... which cost England so many lives, ignorantly and needlessly sacrificed to ministerial disregard of physical laws and its consequences,—lessons which, unfortunately, seem to have but little effect on cabinets, owing to their shifting personelle, England following up the disasters of Carthagena with the still greater blunder of the Walcheren expedition, where, out of England's small available physical war material, nearly forty thousand ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... but when his eyes closed and his head fell too far forward, he righted himself and rested his right elbow on his left fist. He puffed out the grey smoke and dozed alternately, spitting now and then into the middle of the room or shifting his hands. When the pipestem began to twitter like a young sparrow, he knocked the bowl a few times against the bench, emptied the ashes, and poked his finger down. Yawning, he got up and laid ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... careful enough in the use of our words. Strictly speaking, neither history nor growth is applicable to the changes of the shifting surface of the earth. History applies to the actions of free agents, growth to the natural unfolding of organic beings. We speak, however, of the growth of the crust of the earth,[1] and we know what we mean by it; ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... guests passed in and out of the inn, and were attracted to the door by the appearance of strangers, we were able to form the most charming pictures, till all Murillo's groups seemed combined in the shifting scene within that ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... he exclaimed uneasily, shifting in his seat. "If the Styx be more gloomy than this accursed stream, then Jesu pity its voyagers. Never have I put in so miserable a night, to say nothing of a strained back, and a pair of sore hands. What are those black, crawling things yonder? Mon Dieu! I have seen a thousand hideous ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... the black muzzle that looked him squarely in the eye was too much for Caleb's nerves. Beseeching the sentry, in whining tones, to turn that weapon t'other way, he shinned up the pickets, Dixon and Billings shifting their hold from his arms to his legs and feet as he ascended, and in two minutes more he stood within the ...
— True To His Colors • Harry Castlemon
... equipment; but they were not old travelers enough to care to begin upon them yet. As to Leslie Goldthwaite, her book lay ready open before her, for long, contented reading, in two chapters, both visible at once—the broad, open country, with its shifting pictures and suggestions of life and pleasantness; and the carriage interior, with its dissimilar human freight, and its yet more varied hints of history and character ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... study of your conscious states to note the difference in clearness of the different processes that are going on in consciousness. Do you find a constant shifting? ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... all adopted a similar line of conduct. So no rain fell in the valley from one year's end to another. Though everything remained green and flourishing in the plains below, the inheritance of the Three Brothers was a desert. What had once been the richest soil in the kingdom became a shifting heap of red sand; and the brothers, unable longer to contend with the adverse skies, abandoned their valueless patrimony in despair, to seek some means of gaining a livelihood among the cities and people of the plains. All their money was gone, and they had nothing left ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... filled you with fear; but it was in her eye that the symbol of her prophetic power might be said to lie. It was wild, gray, and almost transparent, and whenever she was, or appeared to be, in a thoughtful mood, or engaged in the contemplation of futurity, it kept perpetually scintillating, or shifting, as it were, between two proximate objects, to which she seemed to look as if they had been in the far distance of space—that is, it turned from one to another with a quivering rapidity which the eye of the spectator ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... later days that he became cool as he realized his danger, while Tom quite lost his head as the success of the defence disappointed his attack. To hit hard, to rush in and throw his enemy, was all he had of the tactics of offence. The younger lad, untouched, light on his feet, was continually shifting his ground; then at last he struck right and left. He had not weight enough to knock down his foe, but as Tom staggered, John leaped aside and felt the joy of battle as he got in a blow under ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... been developing for half a century. The great mass of the reading world, to whom the arts should minister, have now forgotten that poetry is a consolation in times of doubt and peril, a beacon, and "an ever-fixed mark" in a crazed and shifting world. Our poetry —and I am speaking in particular of American poetry — has been centrifugal; our poets have broken up into smaller and ever ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... be the same human heat and pressure behind it; it is like the central heating of hotels as explained in the advertisements and announcements. The temperature can be regulated; but it is not. And it is always rather overpowering for an Englishman, whose mood changes like his own mutable and shifting sky. The English mood is very like the English weather; it is a nuisance and a ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... safe, child," Dick said cheerfully. "Just lie quiet in my arms. We have come five hours' journey, and as my horse is getting tired, I am changing to yours. Ibrahim is shifting the rugs that you ...
— The Tiger of Mysore - A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib • G. A. Henty
... lay, a sound of busy splashing came to their ears, which promptly made them forget their fatigue. Shifting themselves very slowly and with utter silence, they found that the place of ambush had been most skilfully chosen. In perfect hiding themselves, they commanded a clear and near view of the new dam and all ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... didn't feel very fit and I didn't think it would be any use playing, feeling like I did. If you don't feel well you can't play very well, and so I thought I'd say so. I didn't mind being dropped, sir. I deserved it. And—and that's quite all right." Don got up, his eyes shifting to the door. ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... shifting sand bars make navigation of the Wisconsin difficult and impracticable, although the government has spent large sums of money ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... there was a great bustle and shifting of places, while Mrs. Corney and her daughters carried out trays full of used cups, and great platters of uneaten bread and butter into the back-kitchen, to be washed up after the guests were gone. Just because she was so ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... will not wonder how old harbours so often become silted up. The sea has washed the land into them. But more, the sea-currents do not allow the sands of the aestuary to escape freely out to sea. They pile it up in shifting sand-banks about the mouth of the aestuary. The prevailing sea-winds, from whatever quarter, catch up the sand, and roll it up into sand-hills. Those sand-hills are again eaten down by the sea, and mixed with the mud of the tide-flats, ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... pale eyes shifting away from my glance; "too ill for Philadelphia, but not too ill for New York, where, I am told, he has been most of the time since your—what ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... had put the situation tersely, but with a considerable amount of accuracy. Earth and sea and sky were ablaze with swarms of shooting, shifting lights, which kept crossing each other and making ever-changing patterns of a magnificent embroidery, and amidst these, huge shells and star-rockets were bursting in clouds of smoke and many-coloured flame. The thunder of the big guns, the grinding rattle of the quick-firers, and the hoarse, whistling ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... like to ask a few," exclaimed a weazen-faced, excitable little man whom I had before noticed shifting in his seat in a restless manner strongly suggestive of an intense but hitherto repressed desire ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... and the day fair, though I could not but be aware, as we bowled along towards the bar, that a retreating storm had left some indications of its past presence in the tossing foam that sprang upwards as the waves dashed upon that treacherous heap of shifting sand. The pilot sat in the stern-sheets of the dancing boat, steering steadily with an oar. His brother tended the sail, and I was crouched amidships. As we approached nearer the scene of commotion, our younger companion assumed a station in the bow of the boat and began to sound with an oar. This ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... bumpers to the other side of the freights. He swept the scene with a searching glance, finally detected the shifting glow of a night watchman's lantern, and ...
— Bart Stirling's Road to Success - Or; The Young Express Agent • Allen Chapman
... the preceding night she had lain broad awake in her bed, staring at the shifting shadow pictures that the electric lights, shining through the trees down in the square, threw upon the walls and ceiling of her room. She had eaten but little since morning; a growing spirit of unrest had possessed her for the last two days. Now it had reached a head. She could no longer ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... thing was to be sure that everybody should be in the right place at the tea-table, and this the Widow thought she could manage by a few words to the older guests and a little shuffling about and shifting when they got to the table. To settle everything the Widow made out a diagram, which the reader should have a chance of inspecting in an authentic copy, if these pages were allowed under any circumstances to be the vehicle of illustrations. ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... than now, in the earlier epochs of our planet, we have some reason to believe: but the subject is too long a one to enter on now; and all I can say is, that you must conceive for yourself the chalk gradually brought up to the surface, worn away along a shifting shoreline by the waves of the sea, and covered in shallow water by the clays and sands on which Odiham stands; and which compose the earliest part ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... was shifting dangerously. Paul had at first been a pleasing playmate and a celebrity whose devotion was flattering as a tribute to her charm and beauty. Now a constant comparison asserted itself to her mind between her husband's financial limitations and the pleasing scope of Paul's access to Hamilton's treasury. ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... the contending armies, birds began to drop down on the earth. And the sun himself disappeared behind the thick cloud of arrows shot, and the firmament looked bright as if with myriads of the fireflies. And shifting their bows, the staves of which were decked with gold, from one hand to another, those heroes began to strike each other down, discharging their arrows right and left. And cars encountered cars, and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... realized. The wind, after shifting for several days, blowing sometimes from the north, sometimes from the south, settled definitely in the west. But it was always a strong breeze, almost a gale, ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... them to their journey's end much sooner than was really to be the case. The sun had set, the moon had not yet risen, and the night was very dark. Jaime, who continued to maintain a short interval between his horse and the mules of Rita and her attendant, kept shifting his restless glances from one side of the road to the other, as though he would fain have penetrated the surrounding gloom. He was passing a thicket that skirted the road, when a cautious "Hist!" inaudible to his companions, arrested his attention. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... shifting, sonorous, pulsing crowd glimpses could be had of Jerry's high hat, battered by the winds and rains of many years; of his nose like a carrot, battered by the frolicsome, athletic progeny of millionaires and by contumacious fares; of his brass-buttoned green ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... lower classes for clothes was almost equal to their other wants. The stores had been long exhausted, and winter was at hand. Nothing more ludicrous can be conceived than the expedients of substituting, shifting, and patching, which ingenuity devised, to eke out wretchedness, and preserve the remains of decency. The superior dexterity of the women was particularly conspicuous. Many a guard have I seen mount, in which the number of soldiers without ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... ambush—and there is nothing like this for showing what a man is made of; it comes out then who is cowardly and who brave; the coward will change colour at every touch and turn; he is full of fears, and keeps shifting his weight first on one knee and then on the other; his heart beats fast as he thinks of death, and one can hear the chattering of his teeth; whereas the brave man will not change colour nor be frightened on finding himself in ambush, but is all the time longing to go into action—if the best ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... the "splendor" of it preached by the German philosophers and British Jingoes, who upheld it as the great strengthening tonic for their race, and as the noblest experience of men. Every line these German soldiers wrote might have been written by one of ours; from both sides of the shifting lines there was the same death ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... a breeze from the land, we weighed, and steered our course S.S.E. for the Scarcies bar, but the wind shifting to the S.E. and the ebb tide running strong, we were nearly driven out of sight of land; we were therefore obliged again to anchor, and wait the change of tide. Trusting to a sea breeze that had just set in, it being slack water, we again weighed: the serenity of the ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... example from your old tutor. Erase from your mind everything that he imprinted there. Do not build your castle upon the shifting sand. And look well ahead, and be sure of your ground, before you build upon the charming creature who is sweetening ...
— Rosmerholm • Henrik Ibsen
... fully employed in changing their residence, and shifting over the bedding and utensils; and that night they slept within the stockade. Ready had run up a very neat little outhouse of plank, as a kitchen for Juno, and another week was fully employed as follows: the stores were divided; those ...
— Masterman Ready - The Wreck of the "Pacific" • Captain Frederick Marryat
... labour, or rather this shifting of responsibility on to another's shoulders, had its bad results, for while the dog improved every day in sharpness and conscientious performance of duty, the boy did the opposite. Tim became somewhat careless and lazy, and though ...
— Our Frank - and other stories • Amy Walton
... "The wind's shifting, sir," said the sailing-master. "I'm afraid we shan't get round the point this tide, unless we lay her off ...
— Miss or Mrs.? • Wilkie Collins
... line of conduct. So no rain fell in the valley from one year's end to another. Though everything remained green and flourishing in the plains below, the inheritance of the three brothers was a desert. What had once been the richest soil in the kingdom, became a shifting heap of red sand; and the brothers, unable longer to contend with the adverse skies, abandoned their valueless patrimony in despair, to seek some means of gaining a livelihood among the cities and people of ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... There was considerable shifting of population. Certain parts of the country which had been quite thickly populated with small farmers or domestic manufacturers now lost the greater part of their occupants by migration to the newer manufacturing districts or to America. As in the sixteenth century, ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... to avoid the sand-banks; but how narrow was the water-way-at this season usually overflowing! The beds of papyrus on the banks now grew partly on dry land, and their rank green had faded to straw-color. The shifting ooze of the shore had hardened to stone, and the light west wind, which now rose and allowed of their hoisting the sail, swept clouds of white dust before it. In many cases the soil was deeply fissured and wide cracks ran across the black surface, yawning ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... where the bitter waters of the Amargossa River rise from their hidden depths to flow for a few hundred yards between gray hills of shifting sand, the trails of the two parties converged. By the time they reached this dismal oasis they were killing their oxen for such shreds of meat as they could strip from the bones; but as every wagon left the place, climbing the divide ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... Some of it has resulted in great gain, but a large part of it has been wasted through lack of an organized plan. Work has been begun and not enough money appropriated to finish it. In the course of a few years much of the value of the work is destroyed by the action of the current or by shifting sands, or if a stretch of river is finished in the most approved manner, often it is not used much, in some cases actually less after than before the work was begun, and these things have created a prejudice against ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... oars to get the craft clear of the ship, which was accomplished in a few minutes. Then the Frenchman stepped the mast, which had been carefully adjusted on board of the ship, while Christy rigged out the shifting bowsprit. In half an hour they had placed the spars and bent on the sail, for everything had been prepared for expeditious work. The sails filled, and the skipper took his place at ...
— Fighting for the Right • Oliver Optic
... of the west were less bent upon obtaining a constitutional provision declaring for the gradual emancipation of slaves than they were in 1829-30. Their efforts were directed towards shifting the political balance of power from east to west, whereby this purpose might be accomplished with less difficulty.[38] In this they were not successful. Likewise the east was dissatisfied over the apportionment of representation and the west did not want to accept the principle ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... Curse ratify'd by God's, upon Cham; But though I think that even a Naturalist may without disparagement believe all the Miracles attested by the Holy Scriptures, yet in this case to flye to a Supernatural Cause, will, I fear, look like Shifting off the Difficulty, instead of Resolving it; for we enquire not the First and Universal, but the Proper, Immediate, and Physical Cause of the Jetty Colour of Negroes; And not only we do not find expressed in the Scripture, that the Curse ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... misery of this shifting sand bring us and our prayers into contempt," began one, "and our darkened and blistered aspect, let our fame incline thy mind to tell us who thou art, that so securely plantest thy living feet in ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... don't you go a waving your precious hand, for it gives me such a turn to think you've let go, and have only got one hand to hold on with, and just turning the corner too, and the pony a shaking its tail, and shifting about with its back legs, till how you don't slip off on ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... to the nearest monte game, where the "spieler"—a smooth-faced lad of not more than nineteen—sat behind his three-legged little table, green covered, and idly shifting the cards about maintained a rather bored flow of conversational ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... were silently going on. The dazzling triumphs of physical science, which had led poetry itself to emulate the marble impassivity of the scientific temper, were undiminished; but they were seen in a new perspective, their authority ceased to be exclusive, the focus of interest was slowly shifting from the physical to the psychical world. Lange, writing the history of Materialism in 1874, virtually performed its obsequies; and Tyndall's brilliant effort, in 1871, to equip primordial Matter ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... chestnut trees, mulberries, and laurels, and fringed, close by the highway, with rolling heights, on which grew the vine. On the left was the far expanding lake, with its bays and creeks, and the shadows of its stately hills mirrored on its surface. It looked as if some invisible performer was busy shifting the scenes for the traveller's delight, and spreading a different prospect before his eye at every few yards. New bays were continually opening, and new peaks rising on the horizon. "It was so rough with tempests when we passed by it," says Addison, ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... mountains of Dolores. The channel is arid. Mountain torrents rush through it only in the season of thunderstorms, and they have burrowed and ploughed through its surface, scarring it with deep furrows and shifting waterfalls. Near the mouth of the pass and at no great distance from the plain, one of these arroyos has cut through an ancient village, exposing on both banks the lower walls and rooms of its buildings, visible on ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... shifting his ground. "Well, you don't want to impede the course of justice, do you?—because that's what you seem to me to be after, and you won't find it pay in the long run. I'll get this out of you in a friendly way if I can; if not, some other way. Come, give me your account, fair and full, of how ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... before the Flood "there was a perpetual equinox," and no vicissitudes in Nature. After that event the standard of life diminished one-half, and in the time of the Psalmist it had sunk to seventy years, at which it still remains. Austerities of climate were affirmed to have arisen through the shifting of the earth's axis at the Flood, and to this ill effect were added the noxious influences of that universal catastrophe, which, "converting the surface of the earth into a vast swamp, gave rise to fermentations of the blood and a weakening ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... active on different occasions. Later, at the advent of the Lincoln government, the Department of the Interior was charged with the enforcement of the slave-trade laws. It would indeed be surprising if, amid so much uncertainty and shifting of responsibility, the law were not poorly enforced. Poor enforcement, moreover, in the years 1808 to 1820 meant far more than at almost any other period; for these years were, all over the European world, a ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... are duly propitiated they can give anything they need." The story makes it probable that the ancestors of these Manjhis dwelt in Sarguja. The Manjhis of Mirzapur are not boatmen or fishermen and have no traditions of having ever been so. They are a backward tribe and practise shifting cultivation on burnt-out patches of forest. It is possible that they may have abandoned their former aquatic profession on leaving the neighbourhood of the rivers, or they may have simply adopted the name, especially since it has the meaning of ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... "Ludar told me but just now the weather was fair and settled, and that the breeze was shifting to the south." ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... neck of the boy who carried him. This caused the latter to jump and bounce about in such a manner that many of the blows directed at his burthen missed their aim. It was an understood thing, however, that the boy carrying the felon should aid him in every way in his power, by yielding, moving', and shifting about, so that it was only when he seemed to abet the master that the ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... your idea of my duty, Martha? You've been talking in riddles, so far," he protested, shifting uneasily ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... bondage of wrought deeds. Here shall no end be hindered, no hope marred, No loss be feared: faith—yea, a little faith— Shall save thee from the anguish of thy dread. Here, Glory of the Kurus! shines one rule— One steadfast rule—while shifting souls have laws Many and hard. Specious, but wrongful deem The speech of those ill-taught ones who extol The letter of their Vedas, saying, "This Is all we have, or need;" being weak at heart With wants, seekers of Heaven: which comes—they say— As "fruit ...
— The Bhagavad-Gita • Sir Edwin Arnold
... the far-off future to any man who is able to look thereon, break the seals, and read the record. Glowing stars are the alphabet of this lofty page. They combine to form words. Meteors, rainbows, auroras, shifting groups of stars, make pictures vast and significant as the armies, angels, and falling stars in the Revelation of St. John—changing and progressive pictures ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... along the great river's entire length, and far eastward and westward, calling it Louisiana, in honor of King Louis XIV. A metal plate, bearing the arms of France, the king's name, and the date of the discovery, was fixed on a pillar in the shifting soil. ...
— Heroes of the Middle West - The French • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... then. I'm temporarily out of a job," said Napoleon, "and the life I'm leading is killing me. If it weren't for Talma's kindness in letting me lead his armies on the stage at the Odeon, with a turn at scene-shifting when they are not playing war dramas, I don't know what I'd do for my meals; and even when I do get a sandwich ahead occasionally I have to send it to Marseilles to my mother. Give me your contract, and if I don't ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... man must also make. I know very well that to conceal for years a considerable deficit is a costly operation, requiring purchases and sales, the handling and shifting of funds, all of which is ruinous in the extreme. But, on the other hand, M. Favoral was making money, a great deal of money. He was rich: he was supposed to be worth millions. Otherwise, Costeclar would ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... His children, and its teachings are true for all times and for all places. "The Bible," as Professor Butcher says,[128] "is the one book which appears to have the capacity of eternal self-adjustment, of uninterrupted correspondence with an ever-shifting and ever-widening environment." Nowadays this appears a truism, but the truth first presented itself to the Jewish-Alexandrian community when they came in contact with external culture. The Palestinian and Babylonian Jews, free for the most ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... by the combination of French with Russian schemes of aggrandizement. If Canning, left without an ally in Europe, had called the new world into existence to redress the balance of the old, his Whig successors might well look with some satisfaction on that shifting of the weights which had brought over one of the Great Powers to the side of England, and anticipate, in the concert of the two great Western States, the establishment of a permanent force in European ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... of motives, at any rate, made me exceedingly regardful of every shifting light and shade of his really remarkable narrative. I remained keenly alert not to miss a phase of it, but carefully to ponder and ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... from Cong, at which it used to be. This change is a drawback to Cong. There are mills at Cong that used to grind indian corn, but they are not used now for some reason or other, and are falling into ruin. The shifting of the landing place was done by Lord Ardilaun, the stoppage of the mills by him also. The landing place where the little steamer waited for freight and passengers had a little crowd, who seemed to have more to do than just to look on, and there was ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... Countess of Denby!" von Schellen charged again, once more levelling his accusing finger at her. "And you, sir," shifting the direction of his finger to point at the supposed Mr. Launce, "are ...
— Dave Darrin After The Mine Layers • H. Irving Hancock
... pain before The orient splendour of the face of Death, As a great light beside a shadowy sea; And in a high will's strenuous exercise, Where the warmed spirit finds its fullest strength And is no more afraid, and in the stroke Of azure lightning when the hidden essence And shifting meaning of man's spiritual worth And mystical significance in time Are instantly distilled to one clear drop Which mirrors earth ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... Own to be gone utter and forever in but a little minute. And the uncertainty of the luminous vapour did cling about her, and to make her to seem unreal to my gaze; for the vapour did be in constant movement, and to give a seeming of shifting to and fro of all that ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... whiled away another heavy three quarters of an hour in watching and commenting on the incessantly shifting crowd which swept past Holborn Bars. Miss Selina sometimes looked out too, but more often sat fidgeting and wondering why Ascott did not come; while Miss Leaf, who never fidgeted, became gradually more and more silent. ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... love me? Do I love you, Mary? Oh, can you mean to liken me To the aspen tree. Whose leaves do shake and vary, From white to green And back again, Shifting and contrary? ...
— Country Sentiment • Robert Graves
... Any perceptible displacement by parallax—for so the apparent change in position, due to the earth's motion, is called—would would have made the star shift towards the north. Bradley, however, when observing it on the 17th, was surprised to find that the apparent place of the star, so far from shifting towards the north, as they had perhaps hoped it would, was found to lie a little more to the south than when it was observed before. He took extreme care to be sure that there was no mistake in his observation, and, ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... than the canvas and the pigment are the picture. The prose of every-day life is reality in fragments,—the Alps split into paving-stones,—Achilles with a cold in the head. Seen in due connection, they make up the reality; but their prominence as they occur is casual and shifting, and the result dependent on the spectator's power of discerning, amid the endless series in which they are involved, more or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... nobody knew, chiefly because nobody cared to know. Any one sufficiently curious to trace the steps of such an obscure pair might have discovered without great trouble that they had taken advantage of his adaptive craftsmanship to enter on a shifting, almost nomadic, life, which was not without its pleasantness ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... and the fragrance of the springtime of the world [2]. Or take another sort of instance. Take the pleasures which nature spreads before us with a generous hand, hills and fields and woods and rocks, flowers and the songs of birds, the ever-shifting aspects of clouds and of landscapes under light and shadow. How few persons in most countries—for there is in this respect a difference between different peoples—notice these things. Everybody sees them few observe them ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... posts at once. Meanwhile France, controlling all the coasts from Bremen to Genoa, not only excluded British messengers, but carried on her diplomatic bargaining in Germany without let or hindrance. For all his trouble, Thomas Grenville could get no firm footing amidst the shifting sands of Prussian diplomacy. So nervous were the Austrian Ministers as to Prussia's future conduct that they seemed about to come to terms with France and join in the plunder of the smaller German States. This might have been the upshot had not French ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... races of invaders, which long protected the Celts against the aggressions of the kings of Wessex, and which sheltered Alfred from the pursuit of the Danes. In those remote times this region could be traversed only in boats. It was a vast pool, wherein were scattered many islets of shifting and treacherous soil, overhung with rank jungle, and swarming with deer and wild swine. Even in the days of the Tudors, the traveller whose journey lay from Ilchester to Bridgewater was forced to make a circuit of several miles in order to avoid the waters. When Monmouth ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Seventeen rough hearts had welcomed her. They had assembled about that little cabin in which the light was shining now, speechless in their adoration of this woman who had come among them, their caps in their hands, their faces shining, their eyes shifting before the glorious ones that looked at them and smiled at them as the woman shook their hands, one ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... storm is holding him back," said Baxter, shifting uneasily as she gazed earnestly ...
— The Rover Boys on Land and Sea - The Crusoes of Seven Islands • Arthur M. Winfield
... strong convulsion of his heart rends up a hollow groan from its emptiness. And Vivia draws aside the curtain, and the gentle wind brings in the sweet earthy scent of fresh furrows lately wet with showers, and the ever-shifting procession of the silent stars unveil themselves of gauzy cloud, and glance sadly down with their abiding eyes ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... as government stores. This demand being refused, the squadron opened fire on the town, while the boats under the command of Lieutenant Mackenzie pulled in, and set fire to seventy-three vessels and some corn-stores on shore. The wind shifting, there seemed a probability that the more distant ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... they take two pieces of dry soft wood, one is a stick about eight or nine inches long, the other piece is flat: The stick they shape into an obtuse point at one end, and pressing it upon the other, turn it nimbly by holding it between both their hands as we do a chocolate mill, often shifting their hands up, and then moving them down upon it, to increase the pressure as much as possible. By this method they get fire in less than two minutes, and from the smallest spark they increase it with great speed and dexterity. We have often ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... idleness, than it was at first. This mystery of use without consumption, of warmth without combustion, seems like magic, but was merely an ingenious application of the art now happily lost but carried to great perfection by your ancestors, of shifting the burden of one's support on the shoulders of others. The man who had accomplished this, and it was the end all sought, was said to live on the income of his investments. To explain at this point how the ancient ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... or lagoon, opposite Cape Carnaveral. It extends along nearly the entire eastern coast of Florida, varying in width from three to six miles, and is separated from the Atlantic by a narrow sand ridge, which is pierced at different points by shifting inlets. It is very shoal, so much so that we were obliged to haul our boat out nearly half a mile before she would float, and the water is teeming with stingarees, sword-fish, crabs, etc. But once afloat, we headed to the southward with a ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... the working out of his theme, visualize the stage-picture in considerable detail; and we find that almost all modern dramatists do, as a matter of fact, pay great attention to what may be called the topography of their scenes, and the shifting "positions" of their characters. The question is: at what stage of the process of composition ought this visualization to occur? Here, again, it would be absurd to lay down a general rule; but I am inclined to think, both theoretically and from what can be gathered of the practice ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... heart quickened with joy. They had sent a message from heart to heart across the wide space of the plains, and the wireless telegraphy of hearts was established. Great tears rushed to blot the last flutter of white from the receding landscape, and then a hill loomed brilliant and shifting, and in a moment more shut out the sight of station and dim group and Hazel knew that she was back in the world of commonplace things once more, with only a memory for her company, amid a ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... nations, agriculture became and in the mind of the people remained the germ and core of their national and of their private life. The house and the fixed hearth, which the husbandman constructs instead of the light hut and shifting fireplace of the shepherd, are represented in the spiritual domain and idealized in the goddess Vesta or —Estia— almost the only divinity not Indo-Germanic yet from the first common to both nations. One of the oldest legends of the Italian stock ascribes ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... in pregnancy, ascended another. As Mr. Roper moved round the base of the tree, in order to look the Blackfellow in the face, and to speak with him, the latter studiously avoided looking at Mr. Roper, by shifting round and round the trunk like an iguana. At last, however, he answered to the inquiry for water, by pointing to the W. N. W. The woman also kept her face averted from the white man. Proceeding farther down the river they saw natives encamped at a water-hole, ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... and for mother earth! We are all yours, mi signore! We are your children; your household; your feudal family! but we never heard of a Church. We are all varying forms of the same ultimate energy; shifting symbols of the same absolute unity; but our only unity, beneath you, is nature, not law! We thank you for no human institutions, even for those established in your name; but, with all our hearts we thank you for sister our mother Earth and ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... muttered, looking after them. "I can tell it from their shifting glances and hitching gait, as though they never could break from the habit of the lock-step; I will keep my ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... unfit to paint when there is so much to do at hand.... Started fairly early this morning for the Pagoda, and sat outside it in a gharry pulled up opposite the entrance porch and steps. It takes courage to attempt to sketch such a scene of shifting beauty! These architectural details, carvings in gold and colour, ought to be ground at till the whole is got by heart—then brush and colour let go, with a prayer to ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... while his hands involuntarily tightened their hold upon the paper. He grew uncomfortable under Darrell's scrutiny, moved restlessly once or twice, then turning, looked directly into the piercing dark eyes fixed upon him. His own eyes, which were small and shifting, instantly dropped, while the dark blood mounted angrily to his forehead. A few moments later, he changed his position so that Darrell could not see his face, but the latter determined to watch him and to give Whitcomb a word of warning at the ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... vibrate with it. A few of these are audible to the ordinary listener, but very keen ears will hear more of them. In Claude Debussy's compositions, his system of harmony and tonality is intimately connected with these laws of natural harmonics. His chords, for instance, are remarkable for their shifting, vapory quality; they seem to be on the border land between major and minor—consonance and dissonance; again they often appear to float in the air, without any resolution whatever. It was a new aspect of music, a new style of chord progression. ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... Hawthorne, a statue of night and silence, sat a little removed, under a portrait of Dante, gazing imperturbably upon the group; and as he sat in the shadow, his dark hair and eyes and suit of sables made him, in that society, the black thread of mystery which he weaves into his stories; while the shifting presence of the Brook Farmer played like ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... demand for Kazakhstan's traditional heavy industry products resulted in a short-term contraction of the economy, with the steepest annual decline occurring in 1994. In 1995-97, the pace of the government program of economic reform and privatization quickened, resulting in a substantial shifting of assets into the private sector. Kazakhstan enjoyed double-digit growth in 2000-01 - and a solid 9.5% in 2002 - thanks largely to its booming energy sector, but also to economic reform, good harvests, and foreign investment. The opening of the Caspian Consortium pipeline in 2001, ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... Once more, by slightly shifting his helm, Captain Garland allowed her to drop alongside, the respective bows and sterns of the two ships being in ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston
... same witnesses, who tell the same story as before, and a third witness, who tells the same thing, and in addition gives further testimony corroborative of the charge. So with Trumbull. There was no shifting of ground, nor inconsistency of testimony between the new piece of evidence ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... on, and it was time to return, when the wind shifting, headed them, and they were compelled to take to their oars, Jacob and the boy pulling, while Adam steered. They kept close in shore to avoid the tide, which was running to the southward. The wind increased too, and they made but slow progress, so that ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... miserable appointment of Londonderry.[3] Shiel brought it forward, and a storm burst from every side. Stanley made a strong speech against it, and Mahon totally broke down. Peel spoke cleverly, as usual, but fighting under difficulties, and dodging about, and shifting his ground with every mark of weakness. The result is that Londonderry cannot go, and must either resign or his nomination be cancelled. This is miserable weakness on the part of the Government, and an ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... the hardest job I ever struck," he growled, shifting impatiently from shade to shade, and dratting the flies and dust; and even sank so low as to envy the ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... about six inches of growth they can either be placed in another house, or in hot-bed frames, if they are to be kept under glass. The usual manner of keeping them in pots during summer, shifting them into larger and larger sizes, I consider injurious to the free development of the plants, as the roots are distorted and cramped against the sides of the pots, and cannot spread naturally. I prefer shifting them into cold frames, in which beds have been ...
— The Cultivation of The Native Grape, and Manufacture of American Wines • George Husmann
... not rule an intelligent Caucasian minority. Ignorance, vice, poverty, and superstition could not rule intelligence, experience, wealth, and organization. It was here that the "one could chase a thousand, and the two could put ten thousand to flight." The Negro governments were built on the shifting sands of the opinions of the men who reconstructed the South, and when the storm and rains of political contest came they fell because they were not built upon the granite foundation ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... face, with its curious shifting lights and shadows, looked up at me for once suffused ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine |
