"Sparsely" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one window on the facade; the main building has three on either side of the middle tower. The latter, which is square like a campanile, the corners being vermiculated, is noticeable for the elegance of a few carvings sparsely distributed. Art is timid in the provinces, and though, since 1829, ornamentation has made some progress at the instigation of certain writers, landowners were at that period afraid of expenses which the lack of competition and ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... picture was a cold place on a low western island. Snow was drifting sparsely, and a dull grey Atlantic swell was grumbling on the reefs. He was crouching among the withered rushes, where seaweed and shells had been blown, and snow lay in dirty patches. He felt the thick collar of his shooting-coat tight about his neck, while the December evening grew ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... variable—peristomial border widely dilated, tapering and attenuate posteriorly. The pedicle is slender, smooth, and transparent, and branches sparsely at its distal extremity. There are but few zooids (3 to 4). The ciliary disk projects conspicuously beyond the peristomial border. The pharyngeal cleft is very distinct and extends beyond center of body. Length of ...
— Marine Protozoa from Woods Hole - Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission 21:415-468, 1901 • Gary N. Galkins
... Drugstore had stood but a half-hour before, rose the roofs of what was evidently an inn. A courtyard was sparsely lit by a flaring torch or two, showing a swinging sign hung on a post. The post was planted at the edge of what was now a broad and muddy road. Even as Chris stared, not knowing whether to believe what ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... indicates the nature of this story—that it has to do with the days when the Ohio Valley and the Northwest country were sparsely settled. Such a topic is an unfailing fund of interest to boys, especially when involving a couple of stalwart young men who leave the East to make their fortunes ...
— The Boy Scout Automobilists - or, Jack Danby in the Woods • Robert Maitland
... thirty-sixth, and the elevation of the belt above the sea varies from about 5000 to 8000 feet. From the American River grove to the forest on King's River the species occurs only in small isolated groups so sparsely distributed along the belt that three of the gaps in it are from forty to sixty miles wide. But from King's River southward the Sequoia is not restricted to mere groves, but extends across the broad rugged basins of the Kaweah and Tule rivers in noble forests, a distance of nearly seventy ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... the sparsely furnished and bare-looking house. Six deal boxes, firmly corded with great strands of rope, were piled one on top of the other in the ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... beautiful streets, there was a poverty-stricken section, if sparsely inhabited, just behind Bonwit Boulevard. A group of shacks and squatters' huts down in a grassy hollow, with a little brook flowing through it to the lake, and woods beyond. It would not have been an unsightly spot if the marks ...
— The Campfire Girls of Roselawn - A Strange Message from the Air • Margaret Penrose
... great Basin are yet to be examined. That it is peopled, we know; but miserably and sparsely. From all that I heard and saw, I should say that humanity here appeared in its lowest form, and in its most elementary state. Dispersed in single families; without fire- arms; eating seeds and insects; digging roots, (and hence ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... buttery, where fair, round cheeses fill the shelves, or wanders up the broad stairs with wide landings to the "peacock chamber," he seems to himself always to be going over a temple of sweet and sacred recollections. Into the peacock chamber, therefore, his soul may wander, where the walls are sparsely decked with black-and-white sketches, ill displaying the glorious plumage of the bird, and, like all old pictures, very brown,—even to the four-posted bed, whitely dressed, and heaped to a height ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... into her mother's little shop, locked the door after her, and went softly upstairs, her heart was beating so loud that she hardly knew herself. She slept in a tiny room just at the back of her mother's; it was sparsely furnished, and had a sloping roof at one side. The chest of drawers also did duty as a dressing-table, and there was a small square of looking-glass placed on the top. Susy had secured a candle in a tin candlestick, ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... halt in the shelter of a frozen slough, between two banks, sparsely timbered, but promising all the wood they needed, old as well as new. He made his camp fire on the snow, and the Boy soon had the beef-tea ready—always the first course so long ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... next room she came upon what was an odd treasure trove for an isolated bamboo cabin tucked far away under the Tropic of Cancer. It was a printer's shop, after a fashion. The case was a block of stone, in whose surface the little compartments had been chiseled. They were sparsely accoutred with type and plentifully with cigar ashes. As for a press, there was none. But a form had been made up on a slab of marble, and near by were a tiny hillock of ink, a roller and a mallet. The mysterious printer could at least take proofs. There was one now on a file. Jacqueline ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... was taken were sparsely furnished and rather dark, the windows looking out upon a blank wall, two rooms communicating, but with only a single entrance from the passage without. The most hopeful would have seen little prospect of escape, and the most spirited might wonder if depression could be successfully ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... little cabins farther up the slope, bathers are dressing or undressing: the water is also dotted with heads of swimmers. Women and girls enter it well robed from feet to shoulders;—men go in very sparsely clad;—there are lads wearing nothing. Young boys— yellow and brown little fellows—run in naked, and swim out to pointed rocks that jut up black above the bright water. They climb up one at a time to dive down. Poised ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... in genuine alarm. The situation was worse than had been described to Jack. Reports showed that the bush-raiders were gaining in numbers every day, and growing more bold as they increased in strength. The country, sparsely settled, through which the railroad ran seemed especially fitted for their guerrilla warfare, to say nothing of the poor state of the road-bed, which at places actually made the passage dangerous. Then, too, the cars and engine ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood
... sinking colonel, and then Desborough cried it to his dying crew. The wind sprang up at the moment too, and in a few hours they beached the boat upon a low sandy shore, with the waves breaking gently over it in long easy rollers. It was a desolate coast, sparsely wooded with small trees, and having little evidence of human habitation about it; but no glimpse of heaven could have more rejoiced a dying soul than this bleak haven to which they had been brought. They staggered, half fell, out ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... a law of the range which the stockmen would respect, because it was to their own interests to respect it, was only a phase of a greater need for the presence in that wild and sparsely settled country of some sort of authority which men would recognize and accept because it was an outgrowth of the life of which they were a part. Sheriffs and marshals were imposed from without, and an independent person might have argued that in ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... was delighted, as every Western boy was, in those days, to ride on the old-fashioned but swift-moving stage-coaches that were still the main means of communication between many places in that sparsely ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... gets lighter when we emerge into the more sparsely inhabited districts where fields and heavy vegetation line the road, now very wide and more or less straight. Here the speed is greatly increased, the coachman making ample use of a long stock whip. In Persia ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... stage of the journey would be by water and portage. In this neighbourhood, where the wilderness of sparsely travelled country opened out, he would make for the headwaters of the beautiful Theton River. The river of a hundred lakes draining a wide tract of wooded country. It was a trail which was not unfamiliar; for his ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... mother-in-law sparsely with the ears of grain which she gathered in the fields. Association with so pious a woman as Naomi (49) had already exercised great influence upon her life and ways. Boaz was astonished to notice that if the reapers let more than two ears fall, ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... almost lost the use of his voice, he took a superannuated relation. But as soon thereafter as his health would permit, he entered the service of the Bible Cause and for three years proved an efficient Agent. In this work his field of labor lay mostly in the new and sparsely settled regions of the Chippewa Valley, and along the frontiers of Minnesota. But here he evinced the same perseverance and self-denial which had characterized his whole life. Leaving his most estimable companion, he took the Word of God, and though ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... "What a sparsely settled country this is!" remarked the senator's son. "I declare, it looks like some spots in the far West ...
— Dave Porter in the Far North - or, The Pluck of an American Schoolboy • Edward Stratemeyer
... whether philosophical, scientific, or dramatic, were sorely neglected. The later works of Bacon, the plays of Shirley and Shakerley Marmion, and a few classics, most of which came from the University presses, are sparsely scattered amongst the flood of theological discussion. The history of the best work in the trade in London is practically the history of three men—John Haviland, Miles Fletcher, and Robert Young, who joined partnership and, in addition to a share in the Royal printing-house, ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... so parted with Kanangone, or, as her name may be spelled, Kananone. The carriers were very useless from hunger, and we could not buy anything for them; for the country is all dried up, and covered sparsely with mimosas and ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... Roper, of which river Elsey Creek is a tributary. When he left the camp seen by Gregory, he would, going either south-west or west, find himself in the driest of dry country, which is even now but sparsely settled. And ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... consent, and at once led the way toward the screen of bush that interposed between ourselves and the village. The distance to be traversed was merely some sixty or seventy yards, and to cover this we were obliged to make our way through some sparsely-scattered mangroves. It took us less than a minute to accomplish the journey, and then we found that the bush was much less dense than it had appeared to be, since we were enabled without the least difficulty ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... the fortifications before the rain began. The wind was contrary, and blew in furious gusts; nor were the aspects of nature any more clement than the doings of the sky. For we passed through a stretch of blighted country, sparsely covered with brush, but handsomely enough diversified with factory chimneys. We landed in a soiled meadow among some pollards, and there smoked a pipe in a flaw of fair weather. But the wind blew so hard, we could get little else to smoke. There were no natural ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the size of Rawalpindi it has a smaller population. Nature has decreed that it should be sparsely peopled. The district stretches from the Salt Range on the south to the Hazara border on the north. It contains itself the fine Kalachitta range in the north, the small and barren Khairi Murat range in the centre, and a line of bare hills running parallel with the Indus in the west. ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... long time president and now chairman of the Chicago and Northwestern Railway, illustrates what the railroad does for the country. Twenty-five years ago the Northwestern extended its lines through Northern Iowa. Mr. Hughitt drove over the proposed extension on a buckboard. The country was sparsely settled because the farmers could not get their products to market, and the land was selling ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... Anglican England or Calvinist Holland) had landed in the year 1620, to the Carolinas and Virginia (the tobacco-raising provinces which had been founded entirely for the sake of profit), stretched a thin line of sparsely populated territory. But the men who lived in this new land of fresh air and high skies were very different from their brethren of the mother country. In the wilderness they had learned independence and self-reliance. They were the sons of hardy and energetic ancestors. Lazy and timourous ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... years since Germany began to build up a colonial empire in Africa, and the net result is that, after spending some hundred million dollars, she has acquired over a hundred million square miles of territory, with a sparsely scattered German population of between five and six thousand souls. A third of the adult white population is represented by officials and soldiers. Militarism is rampant everywhere, with the result ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... in the West are vastly different from those in the East. Nevada is a sparsely populated country, and it is not considered to the interest of the State to hedge about too closely the road which leads to citizenship. Anything which may have a tendency to obstruct immigration or turn it in another ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... a vast rain-cloud over Chelsea. A few drops descended, but so warm and so gently that they were not like real rain, and sentimentalists could not believe that they would wet. People, arriving mysteriously out of darkness, gathered sparsely on the pavements, lingered a few moments, and were swallowed by omnibuses that bore them obscurely away. At intervals an individual got out of an omnibus and adventured hurriedly forth and was lost in the gloom. The omnibuses, all white, trotted ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... swung down a steep street and crossed a long bridge over the river, from which he had a view of a wide blue basin, where a score of little yachts lay motionless as floating gulls. In the other direction several sand-bars showed brown, ribbed backs, sparsely covered with coarse grass, and Leigh wished that he could find himself dropped upon one of them, that he might have the pleasure of wading ashore. The fancy put him in a better frame of mind, and the ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... naturally predisposed to be thus affected. The brain is the soil upon which impressions act differently, according to its character, just as, with the sower casting his seed-wheat upon different fields, some springs up into a luxuriant crop, some grows sparsely, and some, again, takes no root, but rots where it falls. Possibly, if these individuals had lived a little longer, they might have passed the border-line which separates mental soundness from mental ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... whispered. But Sarrion was asleep. She went into the room, which was large and sparsely furnished, and, finding the bed, shook ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... family consisted of fifteen persons; James, the future novelist, was the eleventh of twelve children. Their home was in the midst of the forest. Near by was the charming lake, Otsego. The father owned several thousand acres, and was, probably, the most prominent man in that sparsely-settled region. What boy would want a finer opportunity to indulge all the wild propensities that lurk in the untamed heart of every healthy youngster? To roam in the untracked forest, to sail the lake, to hunt, to fish, to dream of the great unknown ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... that it was part of a world with which she would never willingly identify herself again. It was a place where fashion was supreme, and not the spirit of Christ, not even the spirit of a broad, honest, and earnest humanity. The florid architecture, the high-priced and elegantly upholstered pews, sparsely occupied by people who never wished to be crowded under any possible circumstances, and preferred not to touch each other except in a rather distant and conventional way, the elaborately ritualistic service, and the cold, superficial religious philosophy taught, were all as far removed from ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... Jane Jukes Jopp triumphantly. "I've been trying to remember the name all the afternoon. I saw about it in one of the papers. The advertisements speak most highly of it. You take it before breakfast and again before retiring, and they guarantee it to produce firm, healthy flesh on the most sparsely-covered limbs in next to no time. Now, will you remember to get a bottle tonight? It comes in two sizes, the five-shilling (or large size) and the smaller at half-a-crown. G. K. Chesterton writes that he used ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... of the boatmen—a long-legged fellow with a cast in one eye and lantern jaws sparsely covered with sandy whisker—came forward to the bow of the bateau and poised himself for a leap ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... primitive and the free land only in the West. If Switzerland, small in area, naturally a poor country, and with a dense population, has gone far toward banishing pauperism and plutocracy, what wealth for all might not be reckoned in America, so fertile, so broad, so sparsely populated! ...
— Direct Legislation by the Citizenship through the Initiative and Referendum • James W. Sullivan
... exploration is completed." HE forgot the deed of Powell. A recent writer mentions the north-western corner of Arizona as a "mysterious wilderness."* He forgot that it was thoroughly explored years ago. Wilderness it may be, if that means sparsely settled, but mysterious?—no. It is ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... come up on a line. Milledgeville is beautifully situated in the paradise portion of Georgia, the country around being rich, and on the whole, level and fertile. The city itself is laid off with much good taste, the streets being wide and handsome, and the buildings sparsely built along them. The private dwellings, for the most part, were framework, not costly and extravagant, but constructed in plain and wholesome style. The State House, however, was especially grand in its design and material. On leaving this place our forces destroyed ...
— History of the Eighty-sixth Regiment, Illinois Volunteer Infantry, during its term of service • John R. Kinnear
... desert unrolled itself, white, naked, inhospitable, palpitating and shimmering under the sun, unbroken by so much as a rock or cactus stump. In the distance it assumed all manner of faint colors, pink, purple, and pale orange. To the west rose the Panamint Range, sparsely sprinkled with gray sagebrush; here the earths and sands were yellow, ochre, and rich, deep red, the hollows and canyons picked out with intense blue shadows. It seemed strange that such barrenness could exhibit this radiance of color, ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... by a bold, lion-like, red rock. Poison oak, sweet bay trees, calcanthus, brush, and chaparral, grew freely but sparsely all about it. In front, in the strong sunshine, the platform lay overstrewn with busy litter, as though the labours of the mine might begin again to-morrow in ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... slave trade to Jamaica from 1660 to 1672 does not present the varied number of problems which arose during the same time in Barbadoes. Jamaica was as yet more sparsely settled than Barbadoes and therefore unable to take as large a number of Negroes. Nevertheless, even before 1660, there was a need for servants in Jamaica,[45] and there, as in Barbadoes, the Dutch had ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... fishbowl I could see hard little eyes, a yellowed, parchment-like face, a grim-set jaw. I didn't recognize him, and this struck me odd. I thought I knew everyone on sparsely-settled Mars. ...
— The Hunted Heroes • Robert Silverberg
... they went down the slope, and crossing a couple of wheat fields came to a succession of broad meadows, somewhat sparsely timbered. Through these the footpath ran right up to the grim gateway of the ancient Castle, which now loomed before them, outlined in red lines of fire against the ruddy background ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... and upon the face and upper part of the trunk, where they may exist sparsely or in great numbers. They are occasionally associated with oily seborrh[oe]a, the parts presenting a greasy or ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... sight which, in the sparsely populated mountains of Santa Ana, would astonish any one. Orso and Jenny were dressed in their circus attire. The beautiful girl, clothed in pink tights and short white skirt, appearing so suddenly before him, looked in the firelight ...
— Sielanka: An Idyll • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... sparsely furnished rooms opened out of the living-room, and the corridor made a cool resting-place for the wayfaring men who often rode up to the house at sundown, and for whose tired limbs a catre and a rug were sufficient for a night of ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... a mile, it conducted them to a narrow gorge or ravine, lying between two rocky ridges. The ravine itself was not more than ten or a dozen yards in width, and its bottom was filled with snow to the depth of several feet. Along the sides the snow lay sparsely; and in fact there had been scarce any in that place before the fall the preceding night. This had only covered the ground to the depth of a few inches: but it was sufficient to show the footmarks of the ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... the great salt desert, sparsely inhabited by various nomadic races, among which the most important were the Cossseans and the Sagartians. To the latter people Herodotus seems to assign almost the whole of the sandy region, since he unites them with the Sarangians ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... lingered on in the hope that the military would soon be withdrawn from the neighborhood, as it could only be maintained at great expense by the state; and then, as the country was but nominally settled, and so sparsely as to scarcely merit any consideration, they felt assured that they might readily return to their old, or any practices, and without any further apprehension. The necessity, however, which made them thus ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... following Sunday. When there appeared a smallish, Yankee looking individual, wrinkled face, a tuft of beard on his chin, similar to that bestowed upon the comic cartoons of the face of Uncle Sam, a beaked nose, very dirty hands and iron grey hair, sparsely sprinkled over his acorn-shaped head, Alfred thought a farmer or stock breeder had called ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... an inbred desire to climb, was minded to push on to the higher, emptier levels of Bakrota—the great hill that towered, formidable, directly ahead of him. For the chalet-like dwellings of Dalhousie are scattered sparsely over three hills, Bakrota, Terah, Potrain; and the summit of the last and lowest is crowned by Strawberry Bank Hotel, mainly the resort of captains and subalterns from the four plains stations of the district, doing their two months of signalling, ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... sparsely inhabited, and those who live near each other are thrown very much together. For this reason I saw a good deal of Sir Charles Baskerville. With the exception of Mr. Frankland, of Lafter Hall, and Mr. Stapleton, ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... few miles away from what is now the great city of Cincinnati, lay an immense and almost unbroken forest. The whole region was sparsely settled by people of the frontier—restless souls who no sooner had hewn fairly habitable homes out of the wilderness and attained to that degree of prosperity which to-day we should call indigence than impelled ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... a scientific attitude of mind. Careful analysis shows, on the one hand, that the mail-order policy is not the most effective means of cultivating intensively a well populated territory. On the other hand, it shows that the expense of sending salesmen to distant points in sparsely populated areas more than absorbs the profits from their sales. Individual concerns have arrived at these conclusions by experiment and accurate cost-keeping and have succeeded in reaching a scientific decision ...
— Higher Education and Business Standards • Willard Eugene Hotchkiss
... it. The number of persons who have been all but hit by shells is enormous. I went to the left bank of the Seine in order to see myself the state of affairs. At Point-du-Jour there is a hot corner sparsely inhabited. The Prussians are evidently here firing at the viaduct which crosses the river. From there I followed the ramparts as close as I could as far as Montrouge. I heard of many shells which had fallen, but except at Point-du-Jour ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... their daily bread, no writer of the time has left on record. The rich plain of the Euphrates differed so widely from the soil to which they had been accustomed in the land of Judah, with its bare or sparsely wooded hills, slopes cultivated in terraces, narrow and ill-watered wadys, and tortuous and parched valleys, that they must have felt themselves much out of their element in their Chaldaean surroundings. They had all of them, however, whether ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... land was a vast solitude, inhabited, sparsely, by a few of those wandering tribes which had been driven westward—by conquest or by that desire for adventure which has characterised the human race, we suppose, ever since Adam and Eve began to explore the regions beyond Eden. Like the great wilderness ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... and in England (after 1066) the national assembly began as a feudal council, composed of the prelates and barons who held their lands and dignities directly from the Crown. But that of France was, before the twelfth century, seldom convened, sparsely attended, and generally ignored by the greater feudatories, a conference of partisans rather than a parliament. In England the Great Council of the Norman dynasty, inheriting the prestige and the claims of the Anglo-Saxon Witenagemot, held from the first a more respectable position. Even a William ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... the crowd of men and a few women who stood at a little distance and whispered together, with their faces averted from the body around which the men stood grouped. The news had spread as such news will, even in a country so sparsely settled as the Sawtooth. Swan counted forty men,—he did not bother with the women. Fred Thurman had been known to every one of them. Some one had spread a piece of canvas over the corpse, and Swan did not go very near. The ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... farther on, the stream curving to the west, we left it, and found ourselves in a sparsely wooded glade, with a bare and sandy soil beneath our feet, and above, in the western sky, a crescent moon. Again Diccon lagged behind, and presently I heard ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... who, with little other means at their disposal but pick, shovel, and pan, soon fell on the productive bars of rivers and rich ravines where the gold was trapped, derived from its original birthplaces, where it had been sparsely disseminated, to be dispersed by the subsequent disintegrations and denudations of the mountains themselves, and deposited in a disengaged form for the first comer; and so perfect were sometimes these concentrations, in certain localities where water once streamed, that, divested of its ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... "bond" or the size of stones used (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. xv. p. 408). The materials for this revetment must have been quarried in one of those rocky hills—islands, perhaps, formerly—with which Lower Chaldaea is sparsely studded. TAYLOR mentions one seven miles west of Mugheir, in the desert that stretches away towards Arabia from the right bank of the Euphrates (Journal, &c. ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... little while, they arrived by way of a hill, over which they plunged into the middle of the camp. Thorpe saw three large buildings, backed end to end, and two smaller ones, all built of heavy logs, roofed with plank, and lighted sparsely through one or two windows apiece. The driver pulled up opposite the space between two of the larger buildings, and began to unload his provisions. Thorpe set about aiding him, and so found himself for the first time in a ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... bright morning, but more snow on ground and not so cold. Saw many Mongols and Chinese. The country was hilly and sparsely wooded with silver birch and bushes. At Irekte the Russians have quite a colony, and the line apparently has a branch running South. From Irekte to Boukhedou, a distance of about 25 miles, the line passed over some very steep hills. Two engines to ...
— Through Siberia and Manchuria By Rail • Oliver George Ready
... the Barrens, the bad lands of the Arctic, the deserts of the Circle, the bleak and bitter home of the musk-ox and the lean plains wolf. So Avery Van Brunt found them, treeless and cheerless, sparsely clothed with moss and lichens, and altogether uninviting. At least so he found them till he penetrated to the white blank spaces on the map, and came upon undreamed-of rich spruce forests and unrecorded Eskimo ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... deserts were sandy, but this one was composed of hard-packed earth and stones in which plants struggled for survival. It was more like smooth clay. Then, as the desert rose from smooth plain to mountains, the ground became simply broken rock, sparsely dotted with ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... members of the family, including the famous picture of Sir Ralph Temple and his family, attributed to Holbein. I had reached the end of the gallery and sat down in the oriel watching the snow-flakes falling sparsely, and the evergreens below me waving wildly in the sudden rushes of the wind. My thoughts were busy with the events of the previous evening,—with John's illness, with the ball,—and I found myself humming the air of a waltz that had caught my ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... American hands. Jefferson's land purchase was a current topic of conversation. Opinions differed, and men hotly discussed the question whether, even if the President had a constitutional right, he had a moral warrant for saddling upon the young republic a wild domain, of doubtful value, sparsely inhabited by Indians and already dedicated, by tradition, to the rule of an alien, white population. The Spaniard and the Frenchman, sold and transferred, by one power to another, could not be expected to submit. The citizens ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... were interesting. The vast shallow cup to the horizon became a plain sparsely grown with flat-topped thorn trees. It was not a forest, yet neither was it open country. The eye penetrated the thin screen of tree trunks to the distance of half a mile or more, but was brought to a stop at last. Underfoot was hard-baked earth, covered by irregular patches of shale that ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... against any mistake or error in the experiment named. But we persevered and found nature responsive to our demands. Wigglers after awhile made their appearance sparsely in the covered barrel, but the mosquitoes developed from them proved innocuous of harm, as we kept the barrel covered, and they were soon drowned in the water, not having sufficient area of flight to answer the conditions of their ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... main-land, when the captain discovered, far off on the sea, the dark form of a pursuing gun-boat. Immediately he put to sea, and fortunately, the gathering shades of night obscured the pursued vessel in time to prevent capture. The next day, the Cotton States ran ashore on a lone, sparsely inhabited coast, and, anchored at Sandy Bar, a place known to but few as a ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... his high-backed chair, Luke Claridge seemed a part of its dignified severity. In the sparsely furnished room with its uncarpeted floor, its plain teak table, its high wainscoting and undecorated walls, the old man had the look of one who belonged to some ancient consistory, a judge whose piety would march with an austerity that would save a human soul ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... into the room, revealing a clean though most sparsely furnished bedroom. A rag rug on the floor, two chairs, a washstand and mirror and the bed were the only ...
— Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil - The Farm That Was Worth a Fortune • Alice B. Emerson
... face, clean-shaven, strikingly brown of skin and unmistakably foreign beneath the thatch of dark hair sparsely veined in grey, ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... that had been the street of the Ancient People. The yucca and niggerhead cactus grew everywhere. From her doorstep she looked out on the ocher-colored slope that ran down several hundred feet to the stream, and this hot rock was sparsely grown with dwarf trees. Their colors were so pale that the shadows of the little trees on the rock stood out sharper than the trees themselves. When Thea first came, the chokecherry bushes were in blossom, and the scent ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... as a gregarious tree, and is nowhere found in numbers. Like the precious treasures of nature—gold, diamonds, and pearls—her poisons, too, happily for man, are sparsely distributed. Even in the climate and soil congenial to it, the antiaris toxicaria is rare; but wherever discovered is sure to be frequently visited, if in a district where there are hunters or warriors ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... round meditatively. Small as the room was, it had that air of neatness which indicates the presence of a lady. The tea cloth was white, the few ornaments and pictures—brought from The Cottage—the small bookcase and wicker-work basket gave a touch of refinement, which was wholly wanting in his own sparsely furnished and always untidy den. "Coming in here is like—like coming into another world. I feel sometimes as if I should like to suggest that you should charge sixpence for admission. It would be worth that sum to most of the people in the Buildings, as a lesson in the use ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... great territorial divisions of industry are determined first and mainly by natural differences of climate, soil, and material resources. Thus trade arises easily between North and South, between warm and frigid climates, between new countries and old, between regions sparsely and ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... were woods all about; but above the woods, the bare green hills ran smoothly up, so high, that in the winter the sun only peeped above the ridge for an hour or two; beyond the house, the valley wound away into the heart of the hills, and at the end a black peak looked over. The place was very sparsely inhabited; within a close of ancient yew trees stood a little stone church, and a small parsonage smothered in ivy, where an old priest, a cousin of the knight, lived. There were but three farms in the valley, and a rough track led over the hills, little used, except by drovers. At the ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... twilight would soon merge into moonlight; but we would need the moon and stars as well on the road we had to travel. In more than one place it was marked on my map by an ominous, thin black line which meant "Motorists, beware." The country was sparsely populated; people whispered of bandidos; and if anything happened to the car in the middle of the night, there would be no means of ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... country, and reflected credit upon the intelligence and practical wisdom of the members. One of these Acts introduced the law of England with respect to property and civil rights, in so far as the same is applicable to the circumstances of a new and sparsely-settled country. Another established trial by jury. Another provided for the easy collection of small debts. Still another provided for the erection of gaols, courthouses and such other public buildings as might be necessary, in each of the four districts ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... had no water or rail communication. It was 300 miles from its nearest supply-depot, and therefore it had to live off of a country that was sparsely settled by poor people; but Sheridan showed that dominant combination of enterprise and energy, by running every mill and using every means of supply within fifty miles of us, that he developed so fully later in the war. He kept us ...
— The Battle of Atlanta - and Other Campaigns, Addresses, Etc. • Grenville M. Dodge
... before us. It is an excellent circumstance, that hospitality grows best where it is most needed. In the thick of men it dwindles and disappears, like fruits in the thick of a wood; but where man is planted sparsely, it blossoms and matures, like apples on a standard or espalier. It flourishes where the inn and the lodging-house cannot exist, and dies out where they ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... which guards them, are more exposed to fire dangers than any other woodlands in the world. The scant rainfall of many of the western states where great unbroken areas of forest are located increases the fire damages. The fact that the western country in many sections is sparsely settled favors destruction by forest fires. The prevalence of lightning in the mountains during the summer adds farther to the danger. One of the most important tasks of the rangers in the Federal forests is to prevent ...
— The School Book of Forestry • Charles Lathrop Pack
... a pastoral, semi-nomadic people whose activities centre in their flocks and small farms. Their reservation of more than fourteen thousand square miles is the desert plateau region of northern Arizona and New Mexico. Its mesas and low mountains are sparsely covered with pinon and cedar, and on the higher levels are small but beautiful forests of pine. Back and forth in all parts of this vast region the Navaho drive their flocks. At the season when the slight ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... trusted that the two had crept back into their beds; but we did not return to ours. We took one of the camp lanterns and searched for footprints—those which were freshest after the rain. The rough grass growing sparsely out of the sandy earth was not favourable to such attempts, however; and even at dawn, when we looked again before the camp was stirring, we made no notable discoveries such as amateur detectives make, ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... salt-loving plants about them, practically the only vegetation to be seen; between these there is a mass of hummocks, and pinnacles, with occasional sheep that look like goats, feeding on I do not know what, unless it be a tuft-headed small grass which is found sparsely on the higher grounds. In front of our tents are larger mounds on which four camels are nibbling at this grass, these being kept by some Bedouins for giving milk. Seeing some dark-skinned rascals having a ride on them I went up to them and was offered a mount for a penny; then ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... flail to be the only degrading and stultifying work on a farm; but I never knew another farmer who deemed it so, though it was certainly hard work. Last autumn I visited the "Poor Farm" on Quonsett Point in old Narragansett. In the vast barn of that beautiful and sparsely occupied country home, two powerful men, picturesque in blue jeans tucked in heavy boots, in scarlet shirts and great straw hats, were threshing out grain with flails. Both men were blind, one wholly, the other partially so—and were "Town Poor." Their strong, bare arms ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... it was again on the upswing. Men retiring from space were returning to their native planet to live out their remaining years. The descendants of far-flung colonists, coming home on visits, found the sparsely populated mother world appealed to some basic instinct so that they remained. And now the settlements of mankind were on the march, spreading out from the well established sections which had not ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... general. One day, however, I had to try a real estate case which arose in the adjoining town and involved an ancient land-title. An old man named Bradyill Livermore was summoned as a witness for my client. He was, I think, in his ninety-fifth year. He lived in a sparsely settled district and had not been into Worcester for twenty or twenty-five years. I sat down with him in the consultation-room. After he had told me what he knew about the case, I had a chat with him about old times and the changes ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... was enrolled as attending school. This made possible the employment of a teacher for a short term of three months in the vicinity of a few villages, where a large enrollment could be secured, but left unsupplied the greater number living in the sparsely settled neighborhoods. ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... through to Pennsylvania, a distance of nearly one hundred miles, stretches the tract of which I speak. It is a belt of country from twenty to thirty miles wide, bleak and wild, and but sparsely settled. The traveler on the New York and Erie Railroad gets a glimpse ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... sheer joy. What, to him, were the glories of the encircling peaks, the unfolding wonders of this heart of the Rockies, compared with the actual sight of the mushroom growth of pine huts and canvas tents, straggling sparsely up the hill, centring closely in the valley? Children and dogs tumbled over each other on the barren slope which looked like one vast back yard; donkeys grazed there, apparently fattening upon a rich diet of tin cans and shavings. Over yonder was a charred heap which had once been a building ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... as with the weakness of an infant, he was now very near the end of the system. A wall of granite, sparsely dotted with green, rose above him to a height of about three hundred and fifty feet. The length of this range was perhaps six miles, its thickness a mile. Concealed among these ridges, he might be safe, but it was no longer possible ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... day the road lay mostly over the coast mountains. Toward night they entered upon the table-lands of Natal, which were generally level, except where, here and there, a low mountain spur had to be crossed. It was a grassy country, sparsely dotted with palms, with here and there timber in sight up ravines that ran down from the hills, and occasionally they ran upon clusters of heath-flowers. Indeed, the whole country was covered with flowers of rare beauty, but mostly odorless. It was all new and strange, ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... bordering China, South Korea, and Russia; mountainous interior is isolated, nearly inaccessible, and sparsely populated ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... ago, when I was a boy in the then remote and sparsely peopled Mississippi valley, vague tales and rumors of a mysterious body of professional murderers came wandering in from a country which was constructively as far from us as the constellations blinking in space—India; vague tales and rumors of a sect called Thugs, who waylaid travelers in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... knees Henry traced the way. Speedily they passed through the built-up portion of Brooklyn and came shortly to the sparsely settled district through which their road ran. Henry scanned the way with curious interest. He had been over the road but he knew nothing of what he had passed. Occasionally they whirled by a tree close to the road that Henry thought he had glimpsed in ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... the larger task. And who now speaks of Romani? Yet it was one of the decisive battles of the war. Here the Turks made a magnificently organised attempt to break through our defences and reach the Canal. It was indeed a wonderful feat to bring an army of nearly 30,000 men across a sparsely watered desert, with their nearest railhead a hundred and fifty miles away. We found it difficult enough later with the help of the railway. Not only did they bring an army, but dragged, on sledges, heavy guns up to 8 inches in calibre with them—a very rude shock to our experts, who ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... children of my neighbourhood, impressed by its startling shape, call it "the Devilkin." In their imaginations, the queer little creature savours of witchcraft. One comes across it, though always sparsely, in spring, up to May; in autumn; and sometimes in winter, if the sun be strong. The tough grasses of the waste-lands, the stunted bushes which catch the sun and are sheltered from the wind by a few heaps of stones are the ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... something more definite; they held that corner of land where the neck of Denmark joins the mainland of Germany. This we know for certain. There was a considerable immigration of them; enough to make their departure noticeable in the sparsely populated heaths of their district, and to make Bede record the traveler's tale that their barren country still looked "depopulated." How many boatloads of them, however, may have come, we have of course no sort of record: we only know from our common sense that ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... are still a young community. The present population, including that of New Zealand, is a little under five millions, or about the same as that of London; it is chiefly scattered along the coast and the few permanent waterways, and a vast central region is but sparsely inhabited as yet. All climates, from tropical to frigid, are included within the continent, but the want of satisfactory watersheds renders it peculiarly liable to long droughts and sudden floods. The absence of those broad, outward signs of the changing seasons which mark ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... his search. Nothing could be more quaintly old and modest than the baptistery of Riez. It is a small square building of rough cemented stone whose stucco has worn away. The roof is tiled, and from out a flattened dome, blades of grass sprout sparsely. A tiny bell-turret and an arch in the front wall complete the ornamentation of this humble, diminutive bit of architecture, and except that it is different from the usual Provencal manner of construction, one would pass many ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose |
