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Tossing   Listen
noun
Tossing  n.  
1.
The act of throwing upward; a rising and falling suddenly; a rolling and tumbling.
2.
(Mining)
(a)
A process which consists in washing ores by violent agitation in water, in order to separate the lighter or earthy particles; called also tozing, and treloobing, in Cornwall.
(b)
A process for refining tin by dropping it through the air while melted.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Tossing" Quotes from Famous Books



... forward in attack, his doughty helmet tossing defiance as he came on. He held his strong shield before his breast, and brandished his bronze spear. The son of Peleus from the other side sprang forth to meet him, like some fierce lion that the whole country-side has met to hunt and kill—at first he bodes no ill, but when some ...
— The Iliad • Homer

... against the red sunrise, stood the high sharp peaks of Kluchei, grouped around the central wedge-like cone of the magnificent Kluchefskoi volcano. Nearly a month before I had seen these noble mountains from the tossing deck of a little brig, seventy-five miles at sea; but I little thought then that I should see them again from a lonely camp in the woods of the ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan

... rough cloth, and pushed into a rough coffin, and carried out in a box waggon, and let him down into a pauper's grave, without a prayer or a benediction. Around the other gathered the pomp of the land; and lordly men walked with uncovered heads beside the hearse tossing with plumes on the way to a grave to be adorned with a white marble shaft, all four sides covered with eulogium. The one man was killed by logwood rum at two cents a glass, the other by a beverage three dollars a bottle. I ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage

... themselves; at times he would be overwhelmed in the tossing waves of contradiction and impossibility; but still his head would come up into the air and he would get a breath before he went down again. And with every fresh conflict, every fresh gleam of doubtful victory, the essential idea ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald

... of them all enters her white buffalo-skin teepee: Tossing her babe at the warrior's feet, she stands before him, defiant; But he straightway levels his spear at ...
— Old Indian Days • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman

... a changed tone, tossing his head back, and making a gesture as of throwing away something. "There was nothing in ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham

... the bay, and as the steamer slowly gathered way and her bow swung gradually seaward, women and girls, kerchief waving, came drifting back along the rail, leaning far over and throwing kisses to the tossing shallops on the dark waves beneath, then gathering about the stunted flagstaff at the stern, calling loudly their parting words, all unconscious of Loring, who had stepped aside to give them room and so found himself close to little Pancha, lost to everybody ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King

... rolling over it still; it is all restless, tossing. But it is sinking, sinking to rest!—Heaven grant that I may find my place of refuge before it is ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair

... a whirl of gay blue skirts and cheerfully tossing blue feathers. "Good-by, dear Crusader!" she said with a catch in her voice that might have been either a laugh or a sob. "The next time you see me you'll ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer

... thought on awakening was for his chum. Charley was tossing restlessly on his blanket, his face and hands flushed and hot with fever. All of Walter's attempts to rouse him met only with unintelligible words and phrases. The exertion of the previous day in his weak state, the opening of his wound afresh, ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely

... of no consequence," said Ella, tossing her head; "we are very comfortable; and though I should like a piano, I am in no ...
— Marjorie's Vacation • Carolyn Wells

... the driving haze, and saw, tossing on the rough water, a skiff which seemed to be making toilsome progress toward the doomed craft. Farther up the stream she thought she could discern the party in the yawl, striving to reach shore with the cumbersome cordelle. Pole, nor ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable

... the fair and friendly moon The band that Marion leads— The glitter of their rifles, The scampering of their steeds. 'Tis life to guide the fiery barb Across the moonlight plain; 'Tis life to feel the night-wind That lifts the tossing mane. A moment in the British camp— A moment—and away Back to the pathless forest, Before the ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various

... anger, but with futility. Jenks now poured the gold back into the first, then into a third, and thus into several, tossing them each time on the table, and the clinking pieces sounded clear in the room. Bishop Meakum was watching the operation like a wolf. "Now, Major," said Jenks, "is your gold in the original sack, or which sack is ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister

... observed the brutal habit which 'some persons' have, of recklessly attacking shrubs and flowers, as though they were rank weeds (or secessionists), and, without in the least enjoying their spoils, tossing their quivering, trembling victims aside, before they are dead or even withered? Such are not worthy of flowers, excepting French flowers, which are not supposed to suffer. Oh, my countrywomen! would that they did suffer ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... capable, were guarding the herd, riding slowly around the fringe of tossing horns, tired, dusty, but ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer

... man when Simmy arrived at his apartment. George was rolling and tossing and moaning in his delirium, and ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon

... much of this order, consists in tossing a heavy stone, instead of a hammer. The Scotch call this game "putting the stone," sometimes using stones that might be called young rocks, and they "put" or throw them in a different way from the people ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton

... the morning the eager pilots, tossing on their beds in a sleeplessness induced by the promise of the coming of dawn, were more fully awakened by the deep and sullen thundering of thousands of big guns hammering at the lines. It was no fitful, momentary outburst; it was the constant earth-shaking roar that presages a drive. ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke

... Cardigan had come back and was close behind Lord George while he was speaking, without the other knowing it. He called out, "Lord George Paget!"; and on the latter turning round said to him in an undertone, "I am surprised!"; and "tossing his head in the air added some other remark which was not heard." Lord George lowered his sword to the salute, and, without speaking turned his horse and rode on after his men. The "C" Troop chronicler is ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes

... their writing, once a month, to their father told of happenings that seemed strangely remote from the humdrum life of London. "By Jove, the old lady gives those youngsters a good time!" Mark Rainham would comment, tossing them across the table to his wife. He did not guess at the dull rage that filled her as she read them—the unreasoning jealousy that these children should have opportunities so far beyond any that were likely to occur ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce

... That night, tossing in bed, Mark Griffin found the lady of the tree occupying the center of his thoughts. He had to acknowledge to himself the simple truth, that she interested him more than any other woman he had ever seen; ...
— Charred Wood • Myles Muredach

... I must tell you that Standish did not at once agree," answered Don Carlos, tossing away the butt of his cigarette. "His idea was that Cojuelo had only been bluffing, and that it was merely a question of offering him enough money. Incidentally, you were right in your estimate, Myra. He said he would pay anything up to ten thousand pounds as a ransom for you. When I told him Cojuelo ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage

... cried Sandy, jumping up from where he lay in the grass and tossing the book lightly from her hand; "it's the sin and the shame to keep you poking in books, now the spring is here. Martha, do you mind the sound of the wind ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice

... That a passion should lead you to forget to some extent the times in which we live, is conceivable; but I, my dear fellow, have not the mythological bandage over my eyes.—Well, then consider your position. For fifteen years you have been tossing in the literary world; you are no longer young, you have padded the hoof till your soles are worn through!—Yes, my boy, you turn your socks under like a street urchin to hide the holes, so that the legs cover the heels! In short, the joke is too stale. Your excuses are more ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac

... Esmond!—the Marquis of Esmond," says the prince, tossing off a glass, "meddles too much with my affairs, and presumes on the service he hath done me. If you want to carry your suit with Beatrix, my lord, by blocking her up in gaol, let me tell you that is not the way to ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... still tossing in the storms off the Great Cape, Covilham and his friends had started from Lisbon to settle the course of the future sea-route to India by an "observation of all the coasts of the Indian Ocean," to explore what they could of Upper Africa, to find Prester John, and to ally ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley

... light seemed to fade from before his eyes, and he looked up, and, behold, a mist, of the color of blood, had come over the sun; and the bank of black cloud had risen very high, and its edges were tossing and tumbling like the waves of the angry sea. And they cast long shadows, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester

... off to the steerage for good; and 'twas desperately lonely for me, aboard the big ship, tossing by night and day through the rough ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan

... the cliff road, on to the clusters of Chinese huts that made a little fishing-village by itself on the edge of the bay. Whatever Spanish or English vocabulary Timoteo used, he aroused two or three Chinamen to forsake their frames of drying fish and cease tossing over the other small fish that lay drying on ...
— Out of the Triangle • Mary E. Bamford

... out, as soon as I landed upon the quay I handed my keys to a commissaire, gave up my passport, and sought a bed, and was soon in my dreams tossing again upon the channel-waves. I was waked by the commissaire, who entered my room with the keys. He had passed my baggage, got a provisional passport for me, and now very politely advised me to get up and take the first train to Paris, ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett

... thought himself in a bad plight now, as he felt the barrel floating out from the land and tossing about on the waves. How many days he spent thus he could not tell, but at last he felt that the barrel was knocking against rocks, at which he was a little cheered, thinking it was probably land and not merely a reef ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang

... she came to the bed on which the girl was tossing restlessly, "there's something on your mind. Mother's eyes are quick in reading the face of her child. You are thinking—you are debating something that won't let you rest, when you need rest so much. Oh, Millie darling, my heart was growing apathetic—it seemed ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe

... if you fly up here with your burning wings," they chirped piteously. "You will scorch us to death," shouted the trees, tossing their heads angrily ...
— How the Fairy Violet Lost and Won Her Wings • Marianne L. B. Ker

... said the visitor, contemptuously tossing the typed script of his new-wrought editorial on the desk. "That's libellous, if you choose. But I don't ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... himself against a small tree, survey it solemnly for a moment or two, and go on unsatisfied. A breeze had come down from the mountain and was swaying all the tree-tops above him. He would look up steadily at the tossing branches, and then hurry on to survey the next little tree he met, with paws raised against the trunk and dull eyes following ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long

... white satin hat, and a lofty plume of feathers, with a pearl necklace and diamond earrings, set off her loveliness most conspicuously. At every wheel round Mr Bang slewed his head a little on one side, and peeped in at one of her bright eyes, and then tossing his cranium on t'other side, took a squint in at the other, and then cast his eyes towards the roof, and muttered with his lips as if he had been shot all of a heap by the blind boy's but—shaft; but every now and then as we ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott

... a dark, old-fashioned chamber, rich and gloomy. There, sunk in the down of a huge bed with carved ebony posts, lay the laird, far too ill to be incommoded by the luxury to which he was unaccustomed. His head kept tossing from side to side and his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various

... without damage, farther than the loss of a few sails and light spars. For two days the storm howled furiously, the sky and sea were like ink, with sheets of rain and foam driving through the air, and raging billows tossing our ship about ...
— Fighting the Whales • R. M. Ballantyne

... home in the highest spirits, tossing Annie in the air, as he met her in the passage, and declaring himself so far from tired that he had not felt so well for a year, and that the mountain breezes had taken the weight off his chest for good and all. He was in perfect raptures with Lassonthwayte and with ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge

... all flowering trees, as distinguished from creepers, is the sea-loving pohutu kawa. When the wind is tossing its branches the contrast is startling between its blood-red flowers and the dark upper side and white, downy under side ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves

... through the wrong arch, which brought us into a tourbillon below which tried to make this old scow stand on its head. Of course I lost my temper and blew it off in a way to be heard above the roar of the tossing waters. I lost it because the admiral had taken that arch in deference to my opinion that it was the best one, while his own judgment told him to take the one nearest the other side of the river. I could have poisoned him I was so mad to think I had hired such a turnip. A boatman ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... sahib, instead of lessening, the rainstorm grew into a deluge that saved us from being seen. As I led my twenty men forward I looked back a time or two, and once I could dimly see steamers and some smaller boats tossing on the sea. Then the fiercest gust of rain of all swept by like a curtain, and it was as if Europe had been shut off forever—so that I recalled Gooja Singh's saying on the transport in the Red Sea, about a curtain being drawn and our not returning that way. My twenty men marched ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy

... the singular part of my story," he said at last. "It will remind you of an old-fashioned romance. Such as I sit here, talking in this wild way, and tossing off provocations to destiny, my destiny is settled and sealed. I am engaged, I am given in marriage. It's a bequest of the past—the past I had no hand in! The marriage was arranged by my father, years ago, when I was a boy. The young girl's father was his particular friend; ...
— Eugene Pickering • Henry James

... long, dreary night? I felt the cold, too, more than I had done since we began our voyage. How much more must poor Duppo have suffered, with less clothing! I should have liked to have lighted a fire; but with the rain falling, and the tree tossing about, that was impracticable. We all three—Duppo, True, and I—sat crouching together in the most sheltered part of the tree. Thus the hours of darkness approached, and crept slowly on. Did I say my prayers? it may be asked. Yes, ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston

... corpse was found by the shallows of the ford; and the mark of violence across the temples, as of some blow, led them to guess that in scaling the banks his head had struck against one of the tossing boughs that overhung them, and the blow had precipitated ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... and picked it up, but instead of returning it to his belt, toyed with it absently as he made inquiries about the lead and the yields on the field. All eyes were attracted by the peculiar manner in which he handled the weapon, tossing it to and fro carelessly, and twirling it through his fingers ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson

... us have a look at the carriage. Five full-blooded stallions were harnessed to it, and all of them were tossing their gaily decked heads proudly. Two of them were beside the shafts and three in front, and each of the three had jangling bells around his neck, to warn all whom they might encounter to get out of the way. On the ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai

... as a schoolgirl, tall and stag-like, always running, her rebellious knees tossing up scant petticoats, her long hair rarely leaving more than one eye visible through its smother of tangled silk. She was very brown then and very bony, and so ridiculously soft of heart that her tenderness was regarded by her schoolmates as an unfortunate infirmity. She ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson

... sweet that Nick could not make up his mind to break it; not to do so gave his tossing spirit such a sense of permanence, of having at last unlimited time before him in which to taste his joy and let its sweetness stream through him. But at length he roused himself to say: "It's queer how things coincide. I've had a little bit of good news in one of the letters ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton

... and rubbish in front of it, until horses, lines, lash and cuss words drop in despair, and give it up. The desirable and necessary thing was to preserve the exact and delicate shape of the moldboard so that it would scour as bright as a new silver dollar in any soil, rolling and tossing the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard

... Gevresin, pointing to a sort of liquid serpent at the bottom of the precipice, writhing and tossing between rocks in the ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... impatiently tossing her head, "do not twist your answers to me—only wise men and courtiers have the skill to do that and hide it. As yet you are neither. Is she ten, or is she twenty, or is she mid-way betwixt ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... machinations, pieces of rowan-tree and woodbine, but especially of rowan-tree, were placed over the doors of the cow-houses, and fires were kindled by every farmer and cottar. Old thatch, straw, furze, or broom was piled in a heap and set on fire a little after sunset. While some of the bystanders kept tossing the blazing mass, others hoisted portions of it on pitchforks or poles and ran hither and thither, holding them as high as they could. Meantime the young people danced round the fire or ran through the smoke shouting, "Fire! blaze and burn the witches; ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer

... ye see the wrathfull sea from farre In a great mountaine heap't with hideous noyse, Eftsoones of thousand billowes shouldred narre*, Against a rocke to breake with dreadfull poyse; Like as ye see fell Boreas with sharpe blast Tossing huge tempests through the troubled skie, Eftsoones having his wide wings spent in wast, To stop his wearie cariere** suddenly; And as ye see huge flames spred diverslie, Gathered in one up to the heavens to spyre, Eftsoones consum'd to fall downe feebily, So ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser

... reason of the repeated signalling, for a sudden squall had burst upon the eastern sea, which by that time, although perfectly calm below, was tumbling about in waves so large that the gun-boat was tossing like a cork at her anchor, and it was found to be almost impossible to work the air-pump. In fact it was only by having two men stationed to keep Ram-stam on his legs that ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne

... He did it by force of an aphorism, which he had often in his mouth, that "money kept longer than three days stinks." So he made use of it while it was fresh. A good part he drank away (for he was an excellent toss-pot), some he gave away, the rest he threw away, literally tossing and hurling it violently from him—as boys do burrs, or as if it had been infectious,—into ponds, or ditches, or deep holes,—inscrutable cavities of the earth;—or he would bury it (where he would never seek ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... tossing her hair back over her shoulders, as she raised the heavy, fluted tappa mallet in her thick, strong right hand, and dealt the rough cloth a series of quick strokes—"Oho!" said the dark-faced Lagisiva, looking up at the White Man, "because I be a woman dost think me ...
— By Reef and Palm • Louis Becke

... the irrepressible small boy who did the heavy part of the hissing and hooting. These young lads roosted on the Court House wall, on the range wall of the bridge so thickly that the wonder was how they could keep their position. The crowd heaved and swayed at the other end of the bridge, a tossing tide of ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall

... yours, Norah?" queried Jim a minute later, tossing his fish down on the grass close to his sister ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce

... found Tina tossing about in a pretty white bed, her hands and feet bound in onions, her whole body swathed in red flannel saturated with turpentine, and her head bandaged with dock leaves wet with vinegar. There was a hot fire, and the room was ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various

... squadrons: trumpets blew, Chargers neighed, and trappings glowed Brave as the bright Orient's. Look on the seas that run to greet Sunrise: look on the leagues of wheat: Look on the lines and squares that fret Leaping to level the lance blood-wet. Tens of thousands, man and steed, Tossing like field-flowers in Spring; Ready to be hurled at need Whither their great lord may sling. Finger Romeward, Romeward, King! Attila, my Attila! Still the woman holds him fast As ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... threatened to overwhelm them, but which, as she rose on their summits, passed harmlessly under her, hurling, however, tons of water upon her deck. The wind was still blowing fiercely, but a rift in the clouds above, through which the sun threw down a bright ray of light upon the tossing water, showed that the gale ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty

... (Reads.) "What with the effect of the sun's brightest beams upon the ancient glass windows—various hues reflected upon the gothic pillars— gorgeousness of the procession—sacerdotal ornaments—tossing of censers—crowds of people—elevation of the host, and sinking down of the populace en masse." It really is a magnificent line of writing, and which my work requires. One or two like that in my book would do well to be quoted by impartial critics, before the public are permitted to read it. ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... he exclaimed, tossing his arms to Heaven, "a fine claim that, as I live; a fine argument by which to induce me to place another man in your arms. I am to do it because I ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini

... horses come, wounded and trembling, out of the melee; others appear, running in fright, carrying dying troopers still sitting their chargers, the head drooping on the breast, the sword-arm hanging lifeless, the blood-stained sabre dangling from the wrist, tossing, swinging, and cutting the poor animal's flanks, goading him on in his aimless flight. In this moment of intense excitement, the Rebels give way on the left. Our troopers follow in hot pursuit. On they go, over the dead and dying. At the sound of the "recall," back they come, to take breath and ...
— History of the Second Massachusetts Regiment of Infantry: Beverly Ford. • Daniel Oakey

... I have but a mere smattering, my father also designed to have it taught me by a device, but a new one, and by way of sport; tossing our declensions to and fro, after the manner of those who, by certain games of tables, learn geometry and arithmetic. For he, amongst other rules, had been advised to make me relish science and duty by an unforced will, and of my own voluntary motion, and to educate my soul ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... not over. Again the wind struck the ship with tremendous force, the lightning, as before, playing round her, crackling and hissing as it touched the wildly tossing waves. Suddenly there came a frightful crash. The splinters flew on every side, and the tall mainmast, tottering for a moment, fell over the side, breaking away the bulwarks—either it or the lightning which had riven ...
— The Missing Ship - The Log of the "Ouzel" Galley • W. H. G. Kingston

... half-emptied tumbler in front of him. Presently he stumbled out on to the deck. It was a dark night, and a strong head wind was blowing. He groped his way to the railing and leaned over, with his head half buried in his hands. Below, the black tossing sea was churned into phosphorescent spray, as the steamer drove ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... Ajax on the one hand leaped (or possibly jumped) into the fight wearing on the other hand, yes certainly a steel corselet (or possibly a bronze under tunic) and on his head of course, yes without doubt he had a helmet with a tossing plume taken from the mane (or perhaps extracted from the tail) of some horse which once fed along the banks of the Scamander (and it sees the herd and raises its head and paws the ground) and in his hand a shield worth ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock

... thunder was like a hundred cannon about our ears. It was so sudden and so frightful to me that I had but one idea, that of getting into the piazza, where was comparative safety. Having reached it, we turned to face the elements. Nothing could be seen through the thick deluge. The ocean itself, tossing and tumbling in angry darkness, seemed fighting with the other ocean that poured from the black wall above, and all was one tumult of thunderous fury. This elemental war lasted but a short time, and gave place to a quiet as sudden as its angry burst. It was my first ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various

... our lives. I wonder, do they keep rappee in heaven?" He snapped down the lid of his gold snuffbox—that faithful companion and consoler of so many years—and cast it viciously at the head of one of the oncoming peasants. Then tossing back the lace from his wrist he brought his sword into guard and turned aside a murderous stroke which an ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini

... thirty-five he began to study with diligence the Alexandrine models, and gained much credit by his translation of the Argonautica of Apollonius. Ovid often mentions this poem with admiration; he calls Varro the poet of the sail-tossing sea, says no age will be ignorant of his fame, and even thinks the ocean gods may have helped him to compose his song. [99] Quintilian with better judgment [100] notes his deficiency both in originality ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell

... The men began tossing out the bags of sand. Squinty saw them, but he was not afraid. Why should he be? for no men or boys had ever been ...
— Squinty the Comical Pig - His Many Adventures • Richard Barnum

... night must come to an end. Many people, when kept awake in a comfortable bed with the toothache or some other pain, or perhaps with a little fever, think themselves very miserable, and much to be pitied. Peter Pongo and I were rather worse off, tossing about on the grating out on the Atlantic there, not having anything to eat, and not knowing any moment when we might be washed away from our unsteady raft. How we held on during all that night I cannot tell. The light came at last. We knew where the ...
— My First Cruise - and Other stories • W.H.G. Kingston

... eye fell directly on the basket, but it was empty. She caught his glance, and told him she had emptied it in the dust-hole as usual. Mr. Hardie uttered an angry exclamation. Betty, an old servant of his wife's, resented it with due dignity by tossing her ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade

... and the bay was almost landlocked with an island, but down below us was a myriad twinkling lights, hundreds of them, rising and falling. The snow had taken off for a little, and a hazy moon hurrying behind grey clouds showed us the ships tossing and straining at their cables. Some of the lights seemed to move slowly past the others, and these I took to be vessels ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars

... picture this girl on the rugged Farne Rocks, casting her quiet, observant eyes over the wide sea, and praying for the safety of those who were tossing about in ships. We can imagine her, in her own mind, making heroes out of very common men, and rather exaggerating than under-rating the sorrows of humanity. We are sure that no storm-distressed bird ever came to the window of the lighthouse-home for shelter and was denied ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope

... shot from the Symetry screeching around them, tossing the gravel in their faces, the men from New Hampshire crossed the neck of land, ascended the hill, and came into position by a low stone wall surmounted by rails. Lieutenant Walden's company was nearest the Mystic ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin

... hairy throats Of the mist-buried herds; and for a man To stand amid the cloudy roll and moil, The phantom waters breaking overhead, Shades of vex'd billows bursting on his breast, Torn caves of mist wall'd with a sudden gold, Reseal'd as swift as seen—broad, shaggy fronts, Fire-ey'd and tossing on impatient horns The wave impalpable—was but to think A dream of phantoms held him as he stood. The late, last thunders of the summer crash'd, Where shrieked great eagles, lords of naked cliffs. The pulseless forest, lock'd ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford

... held on by Boxall, who undertook to help me in the same way. In a moment after I had got into my new position I was fast asleep; and though the wind had been increasing, and the sea was consequently rougher than before, even the tossing of the raft did ...
— Saved from the Sea - The Loss of the Viper, and her Crew's Saharan Adventures • W.H.G. Kingston

... away again, as Swinton spoke, and then returned to gaze upon the caravan, stirring up the dust with their hoofs, tossing their manes, and lashing their sides with their long tails, as they curvetted and shook their heads, sometimes stamping as if in defiance, and then flying away like the wind, ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat

... of motion, Weariness and wild alarm, Tossing on the tossing ocean, Where the tusked seahorse walloweth In a stripe of grassgreen calm, At noon-tide beneath the lea; And the monstrous narwhale swalloweth His foamfountains in the sea. Long enough the winedark wave our weary bark did carry. ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson

... away. She reached her room before the other girls had arrived home, and tossing the coral ornaments on her dressing-table, she flung herself across her bed and gave way to the most passionate, heart-broken sobs that had ever rent her ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade

... me greatly if I could have known this at the time. But, as I said, I supposed Margaret dared not tell me. After a long time of weary tossing and heartache, sleep came at last to me; but it brought Pete and his wife and the overseer and Margaret in new combinations of trouble; and I got ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell

... Odyssey downward tales of sea-peril and shipwreck had the most powerful fascination. Yet to that race of sailors the sea always remained in a manner hateful; "as much as a mother is sweeter than a stepmother," says Antipater,[27] "so much is earth dearer than the dark sea." The fisherman tossing on the waves looked back with envy to the shepherd, who, though his life was no less hard, could sit in quiet piping to his flock on the green hillside; the great merchantman who crossed the whole length of the Mediterranean on his traffic, or even ventured ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail

... seemed to be a league away. He told himself that he was the play-thing of sensorial illusions and that he was incapable of reacting. He stretched out on a couch, but instantly he was cradled as by the tossing of a moving ship, and the affection of his heart increased. He rose to his feet, determined to rid himself, by means of a digestive, of the food which ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... hour, and finds new proof of his grandeur and glory in every dashing wave and every whistling blast. With but a single inch between him and a watery death, he gazes from his narrow deck upon the boundless expanse of tossing, foam-crested billows; while, as far as his eye can stretch, not a foot of land appears. His vessel may be on fire, she may fill with water, she may be riven by lightning; but there is no friendly sail to which wrecked man may fly and be safe. His ship will ...
— Daughters of the Cross: or Woman's Mission • Daniel C. Eddy

... is over, with its mad tossing of flowers and bonbons, its showering of confetti, its brilliantly draped balconies running over with happy faces, its barbaric races, its rows of joyous contadine, its quaint masquerading, and all the glad folly of its Saturnalia. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various

... was said to him,—lying on his side, breathing with short gasps,—his apparent disease being inflammation of the chest, although the surgeon said that he might be found to have sustained internal injury by bruises. he was restless, tossing his head continually, mostly with his eyes shut, and much compressed and screwed up, but sometimes opening them; and then they looked brighter and darker than when I first saw them. I think his face was not at any time so stupid as at ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... indeed! Of course it was a planned thing!—regularly settled before you left London. Oh yes! I like your innocence, Mr. Caudle; not knowing what I'm talking about. It's a heart-breaking thing for a woman to say of her own husband; but you've been a wicked man to me. Yes: and all your tossing and tumbling about in the bed won't make it ...
— Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures • Douglas Jerrold

... rushing past within fifty paces of where we stood, snorting with rage, and tossing his horns high in the air—his pursuers close upon him. At this moment one of the vaqueros launched his lazo, which, floating gracefully out, settled down over one horn. Seeing this, the vaquero did not turn his horse, but sat facing the bull, and permitted the rope to ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid

... shaky bench in my domain and wondering for the hundredth time what it was that made the difference between my bit and the bit of orchard in front of me. The fruit trees, far enough away from the wall to be beyond the reach of its cold shade, were tossing their flower-laden heads in the sunshine in a carelessly well-satisfied fashion that filled my heart with envy. There was a rise in the field behind them, and at the foot of its protecting slope they ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp

... And you'll not be home a day and night before you'll be tossing and hushing him, and the moon'll not be too good for him to have, should ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... is not hard to find something to play. I like to play at basket ball with a child, and I can enjoy tossing a ball for an hour if the child will stick to the game that long. Playing basket ball in the open air on a sunshiny day is one of the very ...
— How to Eat - A Cure for "Nerves" • Thomas Clark Hinkle

... since been viewing herself in the large looking-glass, and practising pretty airs—now a smile, now a ceremonious dignity of aspect, and now a softer smile than the former—kissing her hand, likewise, tossing her head, and managing her fan; while, within the mirror, an unsubstantial little maid repeated every gesture, and did all the foolish things that Polly did, but without making her ashamed of them. In short, it was the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various

... box-seat, the other on an impromptu one, which he made for himself upon a sack of corn slung beneath the front windows of the coupe,—and while our horses fell into an easy jog, we could see the return ones go on before at a swagging run, with their loosened harness tossing and hanging from them as they took their own course, now on one side of the way, now on the other, according to the promptings of their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various

... hand, and appeared to bring before me a distant ocean where all the books of the world were tossing up and down like agitated waves. The octodecimos bounded over the surface of the water. The octavos as they were flung on their way uttered a solemn sound, sank to the bottom, and only rose up again with great difficulty, ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac

... own road down to the store, without waiting for the help of the village snow-plough to make things easier for him. Many a path had Waitstill broken in her time, and it was by no means one of her most distasteful tasks—that of shovelling into the drifts of heaped-up whiteness, tossing them to one side or the other, and cutting a narrow, clean-edged track that would pack down into the ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin

... did it?" Sinnet asked, presently, after drinking a very small portion of liquor, and tossing some water from the pannikin after it. "You're sure ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker

... white snake in and out among the far upper meadows: then ruptured free with ear splitting wrench. The air was ripped to tatters. The forest, the rock wall, the foundations of the universe gave way; the huge hemlocks were tossing and bending like feathers; the upper forests toppled and spilled like an inverted matchbox. Then the whole world, earth, air, rocks, forest, shot down in a blinding rush, in a viscous torrent of titanic fury. ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut

... the police-court," said Holmes thoughtfully, tossing aside the paper. "The question for us now to solve is the sequence of events leading from a rifled jewel-case at one end to the crop of a goose in Tottenham Court Road at the other. You see, Watson, ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... knew himself conquered: he knew he should yield to Paula—had indeed yielded; but there was now, in his solitude, an hour or two of reaction. He did not drink from the bottles sent. He went early to bed, and lay tossing thereon till far into the night, thinking over the collapse. His teetotalism had, with the lapse of years, unconsciously become the outward and visible sign to himself of his secret vows; and a return to its opposite, however mildly done, signified ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy

... one when any long-fronded flickers of the fire-light waved across and touched it. More often they fell short, and made quivering circles shine where they struck the broken water in the mid-stream. Without, beyond either arch, nothing was distinguishable except glimmers of white foam shaken and tossing. On the left, looking up the river, it seemed as if many spectral hands, borne nearer and nearer, came waving and beckoning out of the night, to pass by and away down the river, still beckoning and waving, carried further and further, on ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane

... into a stronger cage. At times this apprehension becomes so powerful, (and when one man feels it, a million do,) that it resembles the passage of the wind over a broad field of grain, where you see the whole crop bending and swaying beneath one impulse, and each separate stalk tossing with the self-same disturbance as its myriad companions. At such periods all Englishmen talk with a terrible identity of sentiment and expression. You have the whole country in each man; and not one of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... stronger, day by day; I hear the soul of Man around me waking, Like a great sea, its frozen fetters breaking, And flinging up to heaven its sunlit spray, Tossing huge continents in scornful play, And crushing them, with din of grinding thunder, That makes old emptinesses stare in wonder; The memory of a glory passed away Lingers in every heart, as, in the shell, Resounds the bygone freedom of the sea, And every hour new signs of promise ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... Perrichet's broad back against the door. Then he went down upon his knees, and, tossing the rugs here and there, examined with the minutest care the inlaid floor. By the side of the bed a Persian mat of blue silk was spread. This in its turn he moved quickly aside. He bent his eyes to the ground, lay prone, moved this way and ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason

... had he not high honor?— The hillside for a pall! To lie in state while angels wait, With stars for tapers tall! And the dark rock-pines, like tossing plumes, Over his bier to wave, And God's own hand, in that lonely land, To lay him in ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman

... who hath freedom running by his door, yet cannot enjoy the least benefit thereof. His greatest grief is that his credit was so good and now no better. His land is drawn within the compass of a sheep's skin, and his own hand the fornication that bars him of entrance: he is fortune's tossing-ball, an object that would make mirth melancholy: to his friends an abject, and a subject of nine days' wonder in every barber's shop, and a mouthful of pity (that he had no better fortune) to midwives and talkative gossips; and all the ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various

... he lay behind the parapet, began to be puzzled. Why did not the attack begin? He looked over to the city. It was a place of tossing lights and wild clamours. The noise of it was carried on the night wind to Phillips' ears. But about the Residency there was quietude and darkness. Here and there a red fire glowed where the guards were posted; now and then a shower of sparks leaped up into the air as a fresh ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason

... sick; and this is another trouble. It is very difficult, too, at such times, for so large a company to get their food. They cannot go to get it; for they cannot walk, or even stand, on account of the pitching and tossing of the ship; and it is equally difficult to bring it to them. The poor children are always greatly neglected; and the mournful and wearisome sound of their incessant fretting and crying adds very much to the general discomfort ...
— Rollo in London • Jacob Abbott

... presently deep in the natural tunnel piercing the mountain proper. This extension of the subterranean waterway proved to be a noble cavern, wide and high enough to pass a loaded wain, as we determined by tossing pebbles against the arching roof. None the less, 'twas full of crooks and windings; and in the sharpest elbow of them all, where we were like to lose our way by blundering into one of the many branching side passages, Richard stopped me with ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde

... years have elapsed since the occurrence of the events recorded in this volume. The interval, with the exception of the last few months, has been chiefly spent by the author tossing about on the wide ocean. Sailors are the only class of men who now-a-days see anything like stirring adventure; and many things which to fire-side people appear strange and romantic, to them seem as common-place ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville

... pardon, sir," faltered out Nabendu. "There has been a mistake—some confusion," and wet with perspiration, he tumbled out of the room somehow. And that night, as he lay tossing on his bed, a distant dream-like voice came into his ear with a recurring persistency: "Babu, you ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore

... by the master, chained in a corner in the midst of heaped trunks and valises. Here a squat and brawny god held sway, with much noise, hurling trunks and boxes about, dragging them in through the door and tossing them into the piles, or flinging them out of the door, smashing and crashing, to ...
— White Fang • Jack London

... lives down in the old town, Numero 3, Rue des Mages. I fear you will find the walk rather long, but you have the whole afternoon before you, and do not hurry; if you are not back in time for dinner, I will order a portion to be saved, or Goton, with whom you are a favourite, will have pleasure in tossing up some trifle, for your especial benefit. You shall not be forgotten, ma bonne Meess. And oh! please!" (calling me back once more) "be sure to insist on seeing Madame Walravens herself, and giving the basket into her own hands, in order that ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte

... as model for this female votary of Dionysus. Before he made this drawing, Michelangelo had not seen those frescoes of the dancing Bacchantes from Pompeii; nor had he perhaps seen the Maenads on Greek bas-reliefs tossing wild tresses backwards, swaying virginal lithe bodies to the music of the tambourine. We must not, therefore, compare his concept with those masterpieces of the later classical imagination. Still, many of his contemporaries, vastly inferior to him in penetrative insight, a Giovanni da ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... this lady to account for some of her opinions. Here he is. Now Eleanor," said he tossing the book into her lap and ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner

... punishing each other with each other's tastes; getting stock subjects of disputation; laughing unseasonably at each other's vexations and discomforts; and endeavouring to settle everything by the force of sufficient reason, instead of by some authorised will, or by tossing up. Thus, in the short time of a journey, almost all modes and causes of human disagreement ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps

... noiselessly across the strand, but the white steed of the king is restless as he nears the boat, sniffing the air and tossing his head. The king speaks to him, thinking that it is the swinging sail which he pretends to fear. And then the horse starts and almost rears, for at the sound of the clear voice there rises somewhat from the hollow of the little craft, and the ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler

... currant-trees, the elders with the pale side of their leaves turned upwards—all were dashing themselves about, and looking as though they were trying to wrench themselves free from their roots. From the avenue of lime-trees showers of round, yellow leaves were flying through the air in tossing, eddying circles, and strewing the wet road and soaked aftermath of the hayfield with a clammy carpet. At the moment, my thoughts were wholly taken up with my father's approaching marriage and with the point of view from which Woloda regarded it. The future seemed ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy

... like a school-boy. He shouted back his adieus to each of us; the negro on the front seat gathered up his lines, and braced his feet; the negro standing at the head of the team loosened his hold, and stepped swiftly to one side. There was a prancing of slender limbs, a tossing of two black heads, and they were gone. There were tears of joy in the eyes of the good woman at my side when ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey

... practised, rather unimaginable; but there was no one like her in the Boston time for cursing queens and eagle-beaked mothers; the Shakespeare of the Booths and other such would have been unproducible without her; she had a rusty, rasping, heaving and tossing "authority" of which the bitterness is still in my ears. I am revisited by an outer glimpse of her in that after age when she had come, comparatively speaking, into her own—the sight of her, accidentally incurred, one tremendously hot summer night, as she slowly moved from her lodgings ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James

... "taking ill rest," as he quaintly expresses it in his journal, "and consulting much with myself of my trouble." He expected, or at least hoped, that some intimation would be vouchsafed from his Master as touching the way he should pursue, but none was granted; and he lay there, full of tossing and unquiet, the greater part of the night. On the following morning, at his first awaking, which was early, being still in heaviness, and not knowing what to do, came another friend to his bedside, who advised him that he should ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... with corn fields, meadows, and green pastures covered with sheep, whose soft bleatings thrilled in my ears and transported my senses into new regions, so different was my charmed and tranquillized mind from the tossing anxieties attendant on the horrors I had recently witnessed. Surely there is nothing in the world, short of the most undivided reciprocal attachment, that has such power over the workings of the human heart as the mild sweetness of nature. The most ruffled temper, when emerging from ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter

... huntsmen were halloing, and he was about to be devoured. All these were the terrible ravings of fever; and very awful it was to see the young squire with his hair all shaved off, and vinegar rags over his head, tossing his arms about, and endeavouring at times to burst from his nurses, and leap out upon the floor. The one prevailing thought in all the sick boy's ravings was Jacob Dobbin's rose bush. Jacob, or his rose bush in some form or ...
— The One Moss-Rose • P. B. Power



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