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More "Brassy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Mr. Barker interrogatively, as he settled the flower in his gray coat, and let the paper ribband of the "ticker" run through his other hand, with its tale of the tide of stocks. Yellow Mr. Screw shot a lurid glance from his brassy little eyes. ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... indeed! When Dolly came downstairs it was all that she could do to push her way through the porch. All along the horizon the sky was brassy-yellow, but above the wind screamed and stormed, and the torn, hurrying clouds were now huddled together, and now frayed off into countless tattered streamers. In the field near the house her father and three or four labourers were working with poles and ropes, hatless, ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... womanly reserve she kept silence; but the public was not slow to imagine plenty of reasons for the separation. This, together with the fact that men had begun to penetrate the veil of romantic secrecy with which Byron surrounded himself and found a rather brassy idol beneath, turned the tide of public opinion against him. He left England under a cloud of distrust and disappointment, in 1816, and never returned. Eight years were spent abroad, largely in Italy, where he ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... in front of the residence of a young lawyer of my friends, after performing in whose honour, through the medium of a very brassy band, a Secession Schottische or Palmetto Polka, it clamorously demanded his presence. After a very brief interval he appeared, and altho' he is in private life an agreeable and moderately sensible young man, he succeeded, to my mind at any ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... said Mrs. Hopkins, pleased to have made an impression. "I suspected there was something wrong about her the morning she came to the house here. And she changed her name, too, as brassy as you please." ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... after him he was sitting in the old black panther's cage with the brute's head in his lap, stroking and twisting its ears as if it were a kitten. The cage door was wide open, and the day was already growing hot and brassy ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... 74 70 67 24 En route to Nuwaybi', along Sinai shore. Morning grey; light clouds everywhere. Dull brassy sunrise. Water dark. Wind south, felt very damp. Sinai hills clouded over: cirri strata high ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... night was driven back. An hour after, when she lifted her head again, the stars were still glittering through the foggy arch, like sparks of brassy blue, and hills and valleys were one drifting, slow-heaving mass of ashy damp. Off in the east a stifled red film groped through. It was another day coming; she might as well get up, and live the rest of her life out;—what else ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... visitor bore every mark of being an average commonplace British tradesman, obese, pompous, and slow. He wore rather baggy grey shepherd's check trousers, a not over-clean black frock-coat, unbuttoned in the front, and a drab waistcoat with a heavy brassy Albert chain, and a square pierced bit of metal dangling down as an ornament. A frayed top-hat and a faded brown overcoat with a wrinkled velvet collar lay upon a chair beside him. Altogether, look as ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... like a brassy ball of fire hangs low upon the threatening horizon; the next, it has dropped into the belt of grayish mist that marks the earth's end and darkness has spread its silent, ominous mantle over the forest. Almost, as a room is plunged into blackness upon the snuffing out of a candle ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... and details grew clearer. He saw the frogmen, and their backs were to him! Between them, he caught a glimpse of something brassy and round, and he saw the octopus, clinging to the reef to one side of ...
— The Wailing Octopus • Harold Leland Goodwin
... the roof of the church swung upon its arms like an acrobat in petticoats, and loudly pealed the hour of seven. Its hammer boomed against the brassy gown, the town rang from end to end with the clamour of the curfew, and its tale of another day gone rumoured up the glens. Near at hand the air of the playground and of the street was tossed by the sound into tumultuous waves, ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... deeper seas. The birds which are confined to continents are, according to Mr. Gould, brighter-coloured than those of islands. The insect-species confined to sea-coasts, as every collector knows, are often brassy or lurid. Plants which live exclusively on the sea-side are very apt to have fleshy leaves. He who believes in the creation of each species, will have to say that this shell, for instance, was created with bright colours for a warm sea; but ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... up some courage from the relaxation in the savage grimness of his captors, which seemed implied by this rough pleasantry, and with him such recuperation of spirits naturally took the form of brassy self-assertion. ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... Arethusa was not present, it could not do much good. Arethusa did not forget a single creature at the Farm. Beginning with Miss Asenath, every living thing had a gift. Miss Johnson had a collar of wonderfully shiny, brassy beauty; old Baldy, the horse, had a new blanket; and there was even a catnip ball for the grey cat that slept in front of Mandy's stove. There were so many cats at the Farm that it was quite impossible to remember them all, but Arethusa reasoned that they would ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... a fierce and wrathful sunset had burned itself out on a brassy sky. The sun, a lurid ball of fire, had sunk in billows of blood-red cloud, and pitch blackness had fallen upon earth and sky and sea. Everything above and below breathed of speedy tempest, but the midnight was drawing near, and the storm had not ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... the air-passage causes cyanosis and dyspnoea. When the oesophagus is pressed upon, the patient may have difficulty in swallowing. The left recurrent nerve may be stretched or pressed upon as it hooks round the arch of the aorta, and hoarseness of the voice and a characteristic "brassy" cough may result from paralysis of the muscles of the larynx which it supplies. The vagus, the phrenic, and the spinal nerves may also be pressed upon. When the aneurysm is on the transverse part of the arch, the trachea is pulled down with each beat of the heart—a ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... side of the person who carries an unsuspicious, self-respectful, open face, into any presence, such people as these seem unworthy of the race to which they belong. It is not the bold, brassy, self-asserting man who is their superior, because his sort of offensive forwardness originates in even a worse state of mind and heart than the habit of shying. When a man shies, he only suspects that he is ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... like so many before it; the sun was low on the horizon, and its yellow beams were throwing a brassy tint over the sea and sky; the sailors were engaged, some fishing with patient assiduity, others, grouped into small knots, listening to prosy yarns; while a few were prostrated round the decks in attitudes of perfect abandonment or sleep. The officers were leaning over the taffrail, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... a man's thumb, but the feature of the collection was one about the shape and size of a full-grown potato. This nugget was said to be worth $250. Those who have seen the Alaska gold say it is very bright, and brassy in color, but not as fine in quality as ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 41, August 19, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... blowing dull and hollow from south-west; the clouds are rolling faster and faster up from the Atlantic; the sky to westward is brassy green; the glass is falling fast; and there will be wind and rain enough to-night to sweep even Aberalva ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... The timothy stalk is like a file; the rye straw is glazed with flint; the grasshoppers snap sharply as they fly up in front of you; the bird-songs have ceased; the ground crackles under foot; the eye of day is brassy and merciless; and in harmony with all these things is the rattle of the ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... to a young female he's managed to bump into and spill in the slush just as he fetched the curb. He has his hat off and is beggin' her pardon in his best society way too; although he must have seen at a glance what she was,—one of these brassy-eyed parties with a hand-decorated complexion and ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... is not gold in the El Dorado of the West. Many schemes and laws have its lustre; but they have the brassy sound of the neo-pagan state-monopoly ideal. This thought of the supremacy of State in matters of education permeates Dr. Foght's report from cover to cover. In general, legislation is looked upon in our new Provinces as the universal panacea ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... was this feat, it was far less so than a young man's performance of the ophicleide, a serpentine instrument that coiled round and about its player, and when breathed into persuasively gave forth prodigious brassy sounds that resembled the night-noises of beasts of prey. This item roused the Indian god from his umbilical contemplations, and as the young ophicleide player, somewhat breathless, passed down the ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... drink—but there's no saying what a man may come to. It's the nights that are the worst. I'm glad to get up at dawn and see to the beasts. And there's that infernal watching of the sky—looking out all the time for clouds that don't come—or if they do, end in nothing. You know that brassy glare of the sun rising that means always scorching dry heat? Think of it a hundred times worse than you've ever seen it! The country as far as you can look is like the floor of an enormous oven, with the sky, red and white-hot for a roof, and all the life there ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... philanthropic feelings, I turned once more to talk with the professor of niblicks and approach shots and holes done in three without a brassy. We were a merry party at lunch—a lunch fortunately in Mrs. Beale's best vein, consisting of a roast chicken and sweets. Chicken had figured somewhat frequently of late on our daily ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... flesh), Thou wilt not only loose the forfeiture, But, touch'd with human gentleness and love, Forgive a moiety of the principal; Glancing an eye of pity on his losses, That have of late so huddled on his back, Enow to press a royal merchant down And pluck commiseration of his state From brassy bosoms and rough hearts of flint, From stubborn Turks and Tartars, never train'd To offices of tender courtesy. We all expect a ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... The months of April and May of the year 1881 were not, as a general thing, a favourable season for visiting the Ducal Palace and the Academy. The valet-de- place had marked them for his own and held triumphant possession of them. He celebrates his triumphs in a terrible brassy voice, which resounds all over the place, and has, whatever language he be speaking, the accent of some other idiom. During all the spring months in Venice these gentry abound in the great resorts, and they lead their helpless captives through churches ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... particular with anything, and in the late afternoon I roused myself, put them all back, and shut the glass doors. I had nothing to show for my day's experience except a deep little round ache in the back of my neck and a faint brassy taste in my mouth. I complained ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge
... of the purest sort in the untracked snows of northern forests, but never a white so pure, so soft, so warm as this. And then he saw by the undulations of the streak that it was a flock of long, graceful birds moving in single file from west to east. Shimmering in the brassy dawn sun, they rode like dream birds upon a vermilion sea, their slow movements so graceful, so rhythmic as seemingly to represent no effort, as if the birds merely floated along, their beauty and grace the ultimate expression of the spirit of the scene. They ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... Mr. Wall's lips as he entered the meeting place. He hurriedly joined his patrol. The color guard and the troop bugler stepped to the front, and the brassy notes of "To the Colors" rose and fell. Standing stiffly at salute, the troop pledged allegiance to the flag, and repeated the scout oath. The bugler stepped ...
— Don Strong, Patrol Leader • William Heyliger
... in khaki struts the limelit boards: With false moustache, set smirk and ogling eyes And straddling legs and swinging hips she tries To swagger it like a soldier, while the chords Of rampant ragtime jangle, clash, and clatter; And over the brassy blare and drumming din She strains to squirt her squeaky notes and thin Spirtle of ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... to paste their enormous placards on the walls, down to the sad morning when the caravans left the market-place, Winnie and I and Rhona Boswell had talked 'Wombwell.' It was not merely that the large pictures of the wild animals in action, the more than brassy sound of the cracked brass band, delighted our eyes and ears. Our olfactories also were charmed. The mousy scent of the animals mixed with the scent of sawdust, which to adults was so objectionable, was characterised by us as delicious. All ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... under the railway arch was a congestion of workmen's dwellings. The road from Surbiton and Epsom ran under the arch, and, like a bright fungoid growth in the ditch, there was now appearing a sort of fourth estate of little red-and-white rough-cast villas, with meretricious gables and very brassy window-blinds. Behind the Avenue was a little hill, and an iron-fenced path went over the crest of this to a stile under an elm-tree, and forked there, with one branch going ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... brassy notes ringing up through the silence was agony to him. How long the day would be. He looked at his watch. It was seven thirty. How did they come to be ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... "Get out of the way!" a voice shrieked "out of the way, out of the way, OUT OF THE WAY!" Her heart lurched, her stomach twisted convulsively, and there was a brassy taste in her mouth. Instinctively, she stamped down on the brake pedal, swerved sharply into the outer lane. By the time she had topped the rise, she was going a cautious 50 miles an hour and hugging the far edge ...
— The Sound of Silence • Barbara Constant
... hills above their camp Denver could see the dumps and hoists, and the mill that was going up below, and as the ore-trains glided by on the newly finished narrow-gauge he picked up samples of the copper. It was the same as his vein, a brassy yellow chalcopyrites with chunks of red native copper, and he forgot the daily heart-ache and the ignominy of his task as he contemplated the wealth that awaited him. Yes, the mine was still his, though he was herded ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... blower and bloat, a gas-bag and fanfaron, a Gascon and a carajo, alma miserabile, and a pudding-head, a sacre menteur and a verfluchte prahlerische Hauptesel, a brassy old blunder-head and a spupsy, un sot sans pareil and a darned old hoffmagander; a pepper-pot-pourri, a thafe of the wurreld and an owld baste, the divil's ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... glowed with the flaring gas-jets and the naphtha-lamps, hissing and wavering before the February wind. Voices, raucous, clamant, abominable, were belched out of the blazing public-houses as the doors swung to and fro, and above these doors were hideous brassy lamps, very slowly swinging in a violent blast of air, so that they might have been infernal thuribles, censing the people. Some man was calling his wares in one long continuous shriek that never stopped or paused, and, ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... be written in the terms of peace, And evermore on brassy tablets graven, That England shall demand no right nor lease Of frontier nor of town, nor armoured haven, But cede with unreluctant paw To Germans and to German law The whole of this egregious SHAW, And only re-annex the BARD ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 2, 1914 • Various
... laboured with her fork, its four shining prongs resounding against the stones and dry clods in little clicks. Sometimes she was completely involved in the smoke of her fire; then it would leave her figure free, irradiated by the brassy glare from the heap. She was oddly dressed to-night, and presented a somewhat staring aspect, her attire being a gown bleached by many washings, with a short black jacket over it, the effect of the whole being that of a wedding and funeral guest in one. The women further back wore white aprons, ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... fairly cheerful in the town of Birmingham that night, I recall an active and interested mood. I spent the night in Birmingham because the train service on was disarranged, and I could not get on. I went to listen to a band that was playing its brassy old-world music in the public park, and I fell into conversation with a man who said he had been a reporter upon one of their minor local papers. He was full and keen upon all the plans of reconstruction ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... another the letter "L," another like an axe-head, and one like a peasant's sabot. Some were almost black with iron stains, and some were set with "jewels" of quartz, but for the most part they were formless fragments of a rich and brassy yellow. ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... And the empty other half of the sky Seemed in its silence as if it knew What, any moment, might look through A chance gap in that fortress massy:— Through its fissures you got hints Of the flying moon, by the shifting tints, Now, a dull lion-colour, now, brassy Burning to yellow, and whitest yellow, Like furnace-smoke just ere flames bellow, All a-simmer with intense strain To let her through,—then blank again, At the hope of her appearance failing. Just by the chapel, a break in the railing Shows a narrow path directly across; 'Tis ...
— Christmas Eve • Robert Browning
... Sirius was turning the sky to gray, trimming a few scattered clouds with gold. As he stared at the sky, Sirius rose with a brassy glare. Near it he could see its white hot dwarf star companion. It was going to be a real scorcher, he decided; worse than any desert on Earth. He sat ...
— The Quantum Jump • Robert Wicks
... the clarionet. "No doubt the trombone is a little cracked and brassy, so to speak, because of a hinfluenza as has wonted him for some weeks; but there's good stuff in 'im, sir, and plenty o' lungs. The key-bugle is a noo 'and, but 'e's capital, 'ticklerly in the 'igh notes an' ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... long summer day. I hear it in the dry and parched August when most birds are silent, sometimes delivered on the wing and sometimes from the perch. Indeed, with me its song is as much a midsummer sound as is the brassy crescendo of the cicada. The memory of its note calls to mind the flame-like quiver of the heated atmosphere and the bright glare of the meridian sun. Its color is much more intense than that of the ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... windows, shone beneath a statue of the Virgin. There was not another soul in the church. A terrible silence fell with the gathering darkness. In a little wicker basket at the foot of the benignant mother were about twenty photographs of soldiers, some in little brassy frames with spots of verdigris on them, some the old-fashioned "cabinet" kind, some on simple post-cards. There was a young, dark Zouave who stood with his hand on an ugly little table, a sergeant of the Engineer Corps with a vacant, ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... word of that speech, and he kept the treasure. There had been another thing with it, tied on with string. But Aunt Maud had found that, and taken it away "to take care of," and he had never seen it again. It was brassy, with a white stone and some sort of pattern on it. He had the treasure, and he had not the least idea what it was, with its bells that jangled such pretty music, and its white spike so hard and ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... as she writes.] — Six yards of stuff for to make a yellow gown. A pair of lace boots with lengthy heels on them and brassy eyes. A hat is suited for a wedding-day. A fine tooth comb. To be sent with three barrels of porter in Jimmy Farrell's creel cart on the evening of the coming Fair to Mister Michael James Flaherty. With the best compliments of this season. ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... the one Benny had built for me to wear at his weddin', that I gets sore. Course, she'd only borrowed it for Pa Sykes to wear on a Sunday afternoon call, him bein' a little runt of a gent, with watery eyes and a red nose, that never does anything on his own hook. And if he hadn't denied it so brassy I shouldn't have called him down so hard, right in the front hall with half ...
— Torchy • Sewell Ford
... across the whole width of the Villa, as if the air had glowed there with its own cold, bluish, and dazzling light. This magic spot, behind the black trunks of trees and masses of inky foliage, breathed out sweet sounds mingled with bursts of brassy roar, sudden clashes of metal, and grave, ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... Creaker the Grackle with the sun shining on him was truly beautiful. His head and neck, his throat and upper breast, were a shining blue-black, while his back was a rich, shining brassy-green. His wings and tail were much like his head and neck. As Peter watched it seemed as if the colors were constantly changing. This changing of colors is called iridescence. One other thing Peter noticed and this was that Creaker's ...
— The Burgess Bird Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... Magee, staring at the very brassy bars at the foot of his bed, "what new variations on seclusion the ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... sounded more richly, dulcetly, than in that "Serenade fuer dreizehn Blaeser." At a first hearing of "Also Sprach Zarathustra," it seemed as though the very dayspring had descended into the orchestra to make that famous, brassy opening passage. For here, in the hand of Strauss, the orchestra begins to round out its form and assume its logical shape. The various families of instruments are made independent; often play separately. The shattering brass of which Berlioz had dreamt is realized. Violas d'amore, hecklephones, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... boldness—that boldness which is of the brassy brow and insensate nerves; but I love the courage of the strong heart, the fervour of the generous blood; I loved with passion the light of Frances Evans' clear hazel eye when it did not fear to look straight into mine; I loved the tones ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... Captain Shad. "Did you ever hear such brassy talk in your life! I wish to thunder I'd been here. There'd have been one mighty sick patient ready for the doctor and he wouldn't have been a South Harniss native either. But Mary-'Gusta didn't take none of his sauce, I tell you; that girl of ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... inspection. Our visitor bore every mark of being an average commonplace British tradesman, obese, pompous, and slow. He wore rather baggy grey shepherd's check trousers, a not over-clean black frock-coat, unbuttoned in the front, and a drab waistcoat with a heavy brassy Albert chain, and a square pierced bit of metal dangling down as an ornament. A frayed top-hat and a faded brown overcoat with a wrinkled velvet collar lay upon a chair beside him. Altogether, look as I would, there was nothing remarkable about the man save his blazing red head, and the expression ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... through it with indifference; they made friends with the sergeant, and some were proud of walking with him "out of bounds." Left, right! Left, right! For my own part, I think I have never hated man as I hated that broad-shouldered, hard-visaged, brassy- voiced fellow. Every word he spoke to me, I felt as an insult. Seeing him in the distance, I have turned and fled, to escape the necessity of saluting, and, still more, a quiver of the nerves which affected me so painfully. If ever a man did me harm, it was he; harm physical and moral. In all ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... at the change in her. Her hair, that had still shown its old brassy hue when last he had seen her at the time of the fall of the Government, was now a faded grey—that harsh green-grey that fair hair nearly always turns to on its way to white. There were hollows under her eyes, and her full mouth looked drawn. She smiled at his ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... open to the hot glare from a brassy sky or an oven where the July caloric blazed like a blast from the open mouth of a retort—such that day seemed Moosac Square in the heart of the cotton-mill city. High buildings closed in its treeless, ill-paved, dirty area. The air, made blistering by the torch of the sun, beat back and ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... abundant return to the province, and that by this means millions of tons of timber, then standing worthless in the forest, would find a profitable market. It was during this session that Messrs. Peto, Brassy and Betts proposed to construct the European and North American Railway, on certain conditions. The subsidies offered by the province at this time were twenty thousand pounds a year for twenty years, and a million acres of land for the European and North ...
— Wilmot and Tilley • James Hannay
... blew again; the child turned over and unclosed her eyes. A brassy light glimmered between leafless apple branches outside her window. Through the frosty radiance of sunrise ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... of the sunset and its effects on the objects around us. There were woods in the distance. A rich sandy light, (nay, of a much deeper colour than sandy,) lay over these woods that blackened in the blaze. Over that part of the woods which lay immediately under the intenser light, a brassy mist floated. The trees on the ramparts, and the people moving to and fro between them, were cut or divided into equal segments of deep shade and brassy light. Had the trees, and the bodies of the men and women, been divided into equal segments by a rule or pair of compasses, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... glancing through a few old letters. I did nothing in particular with anything, and in the late afternoon I roused myself, put them all back, and shut the glass doors. I had nothing to show for my day's experience except a deep little round ache in the back of my neck and a faint brassy taste in my mouth. I complained of ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge
... enemies sallow, a coat of pea-green or snuff-brown must be scrupulously eschewed, whilst black or invisible green would, by contrast, make that appear delicate and interesting, which, by the use of the former colours, must necessarily seem bilious and brassy. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... unlawful, without a vast amount of dust, and many people grumbling, and mourning for the good old times, when all the world was happiness, and every man a gentleman, and the sun himself far brighter than since the brassy idol upon which he shone was broken—from all this loss of ancient landmarks (as unrobbed men began to call our clearance of those murderers) we returned on the following day, almost as full of anxiety as we were of triumph. In the first place, what could we possibly do with all these women and ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... The herald, with his brassy voice, again went the rounds, announcing the day's event and the tardy fulfillment of the boy's commission. Then came the bustle of preparation. The out-door toilet of the people was performed with care. I cannot describe just how I was attired or painted, but I am under the impression ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... and described by every traveller with displeasure, by all with truth. The ill look of the very few and very unhealthy inhabitants confirms their descriptions; and beside the pale and swelled faces which shock one's sight, here is a brassy scent in the air as of verdigris, which offends one's smell; the running water is of an odd colour too, like that in which copper has been steeped. These are sad desolated scenes indeed, though this is not the season ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... Forgive a moiety of the principal, Glancing an eye of pity on his losses, That have of late so huddled on his back, Enow to press a royal merchant down, And pluck commiseration of his state From brassy bosoms and rough hearts of flint, From stubborn Turks and Tartars, never train'd To offices of tender courtesy. We all ...
— The Merchant of Venice • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... mixtures as a Jacobinical sneer at the pretentious appellation of silver given it by its maker. After the introduction of nickel from the mines in Saxony, the words "German silver" became truthfully appropriate as applied to that metal, but so habituated have the trade and the public become to brassy mixtures that German silver must always be understood ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... of him as his flesh, and I respect him for disdaining to shirk the difficulty by throwing the meanness of a cloak over it, and for recognizing the folly of masquerading our Yankee statesman in a Roman toga, and the indecorousness of presenting him as a brassy nudity. It would have been quite as unjustifiable to strip him to his skeleton as to his flesh. Webster is represented as holding in his right hand the written roll of the Constitution, with which he points to a bundle of ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... this plantation, Mr. Bartram was shown a vast fountain of hot mineral water, which issued from a ridge or bank of the river, in a great cove or bay. The water, though hot and of a disagreeable brassy and vitriolic taste, and very offensive to the smell, was perfectly transparent, and exhibited to view a prodigious number of fish, and alligators, which were ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... the brassy notes ringing up through the silence was agony to him. How long the day would be. He looked at his watch. It was seven thirty. How did they come to be having mess ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... samauma); and on the inner sides lined with of the tips of palm-fronds. They are long and purseshaped. The young when first hatched have very much shorter bills than their parents. The only species of Trochilinae which I found at Caripi were the little brassy-green Polytmus viridissimus, the sapphire and emerald (Thalurania furcata), and the ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... driven back. An hour after, when she lifted her head again, the stars were still glittering through the foggy arch, like sparks of brassy blue, and hills and valleys were one drifting, slow-heaving mass of ashy damp. Off in the east a stifled red film groped through. It was another day coming; she might as well get up, and live the rest of her life out;—what else had ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... like the vegetation of an oasis. For fifty kilometres the earth under our wheels was made up of a kind of glistening red slag covered with pebbles and stones. Not the scantest and toughest of rock-growths thrust a leaf through its brassy surface, not a well-head or a darker depression of the rock gave sign of a trickle of water. Everything around us glittered with the ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... "yellow-stain," or the still more horrible combination where ruby has been acided off from a yellow base. But it is a question of the actual quality of the two tints and also of their quantity. What I have spoken of looks horrible because the yellow is of a brassy tone, as stain so often is, especially on green-white glasses, and the red inclining to puce—jam-colour. It is no use talking, therefore, of "red and yellow"—we must say what red and what yellow, ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... his treasure to his cellar. Was it the dulness of the candle that made the metal look so black? After a night of feverish tossing on his bed he arose and went to the cellar to gloat upon his wealth. The light of dawn fell on a heap of gray dust, a few brassy looking particles showing here and there. The curse of the ghost had been of power and the silver was silver no more. Mineralogists say that the nodules are iron pyrites. Perhaps so; but old residents know that they ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... experienced in the treatment of his type. She knew exactly what to do with it; how to lead it on, how to fend it off, how to throw cold water on its enterprise without dashing it too greatly, how to banish any little, sulky cloud that might appear on the brassy horizon ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... the bold, brassy look was gone from her face, like a mask that had slipped. "I'm sorry. And I'll ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... were not, as a general thing, a favourable season for visiting the Ducal Palace and the Academy. The valet-de- place had marked them for his own and held triumphant possession of them. He celebrates his triumphs in a terrible brassy voice, which resounds all over the place, and has, whatever language he be speaking, the accent of some other idiom. During all the spring months in Venice these gentry abound in the great resorts, and they lead their helpless captives through churches and galleries in dense ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... was a brassy blue, and Applehead won Luck's fierce enmity by remarking that he "calc'lated he'd better get his garden in." Luck went away off somewhere on the snuffy little bay, that day, and did not return until ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... the untracked snows of northern forests, but never a white so pure, so soft, so warm as this. And then he saw by the undulations of the streak that it was a flock of long, graceful birds moving in single file from west to east. Shimmering in the brassy dawn sun, they rode like dream birds upon a vermilion sea, their slow movements so graceful, so rhythmic as seemingly to represent no effort, as if the birds merely floated along, their beauty and grace the ultimate ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... is of the brassy brow and insensate nerves; but I love the courage of the strong heart, the fervour of the generous blood; I loved with passion the light of Frances Evans' clear hazel eye when it did not fear to look straight into mine; I loved the tones with ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... brilliant hues. On the shore, under the palms, wandered a crowd of white-robed Arabs, with red or blue turbans. Occasionally one saw a khaki uniform. It was intensely hot and damp. A haze lay over the further reaches of the river, and the sky had a brassy look unlike the intense turquoise clarity of the Egyptian sky. The palm fronds seemed metallic. As far as the eye could see along the right bank lay a confused mass of low white buildings, tents, huts of yellow matting and piles ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... for a moment, nurse," he said with a brassy vibration in the voice—a sign of nervous strain. With a smothered protest the nurse left, and Jim stood beside the bed ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... his eyes. Sirius was turning the sky to gray, trimming a few scattered clouds with gold. As he stared at the sky, Sirius rose with a brassy glare. Near it he could see its white hot dwarf star companion. It was going to be a real scorcher, he decided; worse than any desert on Earth. ...
— The Quantum Jump • Robert Wicks
... in, expressed a haughty pride in keeping with her hand, her chin, her brows, and her beautiful figure. And—as a last diagnostic to guide the judgment of a connoisseur—Natalie's pure voice, a most seductive voice, had certain metallic tones. Softly as that brassy ring was managed, and in spite of the grace with which its sounds ran through the compass of the voice, that organ revealed the character of the Duke of Alba, from whom the Casa-Reales were collaterally descended. These indications were those of violent passions without tenderness, sudden ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... man was at the ship's side, shading his eyes against the dazzle that made a brassy light over sea and sky. The Ryukyu Islands, off the port beam, were not visible in the metallic haze that grew as the sun arched higher. The fitful wind gave promise of stopping altogether and leaving ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... with the sound of fiddles and pianos in the big dance hall whose roof covered all the vices which thrive best in the dark. Later a trombone and cornet joined the original musical din, lifting their brassy notes on the vexed night air. Bands of horsemen came galloping in, yelping the short, coyote cries of the cattle lands. Sometimes one of them let off his pistol as he wheeled his horse up to the hitching rack, ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... how the tones of a badly-played instrument would sound if the instrument were correctly handled. An unskilled trumpeter in an orchestra, for example, may draw from his instrument tones that are too brassy, blatant, or harsh. An observant hearer knows exactly what these tones would be if the instrument were ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... by its hardness, greenish color, occurrence, and action of acid. Iron pyrites is always known by its brassy metallic aspect and great hardness. Copper pyrites, by its aspect from the other minerals, and from iron pyrites by its inferior ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... wrathful sunset had burned itself out on a brassy sky. The sun, a lurid ball of fire, had sunk in billows of blood-red cloud, and pitch blackness had fallen upon earth and sky and sea. Everything above and below breathed of speedy tempest, but the midnight was drawing near, and the storm had not ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... I meet the Black and White Creeping-Warbler, whose fine strain reminds me of hair-wire. It is unquestionably the finest bird-song to be heard. Few insect strains will compare with it in this respect; while it has none of the harsh, brassy character of the latter, being very delicate ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... are a kind of black ironstone, exceedingly tough and hard, occurring in detached masses, and a variety of bright pyrites disseminated among the darker flagstones, either as irregularly-formed, brassy-looking concretions of small size, or spread out on their surfaces in thin leaf-like films, that resemble, in some of the specimens, the icy-foliage with which a severe frost encrusts a window-pane. Still further on I came upon a vein of ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... huge splotches, refulgent patches, explosions, vibrating surfaces; surfaces that are smooth and oily surfaces, as in his waters, that are exquisitely translucent. You can't pin him down to a particular formula. His technique in other hands would be coarse, crashing, brassy, bald, and too fortissimo. It sometimes is all these discouraging things. It is too often deficient in the finer modulations. But he makes one forget this by his entrain, sincerity, and sympathy with his subject. As a composer he is less satisfactory; it is the first impression or nothing in ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Barker interrogatively, as he settled the flower in his gray coat, and let the paper ribband of the "ticker" run through his other hand, with its tale of the tide of stocks. Yellow Mr. Screw shot a lurid glance from his brassy little eyes. ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... radically different place the world seems when one doesn't have to begin the day with an alarm clock! There is a hateful authority in its brassy, peremptory summons that puts one on the defensive immediately. To be sure, Nance dreamed she heard it the following day at noon, and sprang up in bed with the terrifying conviction that she would be late ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... spiritual kind; while once only—in the story entitled "William Wilson"—Poe enters that field of ethical romance which Hawthorne constantly occupies. What he has in common with Irving is chiefly the attitude of spectatorship, and the careful refinement of the style, so different from the loud, brassy manner of modern writing. Hawthorne never uses slang, dialect, oaths, or colloquial idioms. The talk of his characters is book talk. Why is it that many of us find this old-fashioned elegance of Irving and Hawthorne irritating? ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... sore. Course, she'd only borrowed it for Pa Sykes to wear on a Sunday afternoon call, him bein' a little runt of a gent, with watery eyes and a red nose, that never does anything on his own hook. And if he hadn't denied it so brassy I shouldn't have called him down so hard, right in the front hall ...
— Torchy • Sewell Ford
... throughout his orchestra scores. Never have wind instruments sounded more richly, dulcetly, than in that "Serenade fuer dreizehn Blaeser." At a first hearing of "Also Sprach Zarathustra," it seemed as though the very dayspring had descended into the orchestra to make that famous, brassy opening passage. For here, in the hand of Strauss, the orchestra begins to round out its form and assume its logical shape. The various families of instruments are made independent; often play separately. ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... the room. Someone gave a choking cough and then a brassy voice fairly shouted, 'Why, man, they're dead! ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... a brassy substance and looks very much like the precious metal, but you need a mine ...
— Elam Storm, The Wolfer - The Lost Nugget • Harry Castlemon
... o' Sabbath days, His face is not a face o'er brassy; Her mither sits to praise the claes; Holds him her box; to win the lassie He taks a pinch, and greets wi' granny, And helps his chair up nearer Jenny, And vows he loves her muir than any. She thinks her mither seldom wrong, And "Loggan ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... on the walls, down to the sad morning when the caravans left the market-place, Winnie and I and Rhona Boswell had talked 'Wombwell.' It was not merely that the large pictures of the wild animals in action, the more than brassy sound of the cracked brass band, delighted our eyes and ears. Our olfactories also were charmed. The mousy scent of the animals mixed with the scent of sawdust, which to adults was so objectionable, was characterised by us as delicious. All these Wombwell delights came back to me ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... commenced. Soft gleams of light shot from the horizon upward, the dark-blue heavens assumed a lighter tint, the pencilled rays growing broader and fusing together, producing a strange and rapidly-spreading nebulous light. The cloud of low-lying mist now became a brassy hue, seemingly heated to ignition, and then from its very substance appeared to rise a fiery, glowing mass that flooded the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... sun of Summer shines from out a brassy sky, And has parched and browned the meadows, and the creek's run dry, O sweet it is to wander there and hear the water sing It's rippling song of gladness from ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... bell upon the roof of the church swung upon its arms like an acrobat in petticoats, and loudly pealed the hour of seven. Its hammer boomed against the brassy gown, the town rang from end to end with the clamour of the curfew, and its tale of another day gone rumoured up the glens. Near at hand the air of the playground and of the street was tossed by the sound into tumultuous waves, so that even in the schoolroom ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... climbed to the top of one of the buttes to get a better view of the country, and to the northward saw a high mountain; but before descending, he observed some black stones under his feet and on picking one up found it heavy and filled with a brassy-colored metal. He then picked up several of the stones and put them into his pockets, but being desirous of reaching water as soon as possible, he gave ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... that speech, and he kept the treasure. There had been another thing with it, tied on with string. But Aunt Maud had found that, and taken it away "to take care of," and he had never seen it again. It was brassy, with a white stone and some sort of pattern on it. He had the treasure, and he had not the least idea what it was, with its bells that jangled such pretty music, and its white spike so hard and smooth. He did not know—but I know. ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... with cheap new furniture, in which blinding colors and bad taste predominated. Carpets, curtains, chair and sofa covers, and hassocks, all bright scarlet; cornices, mirrors, and picture frames, (framing cheap, showy pictures,) all in brassy looking gilt. Through this sitting-room the girl passed into a bedroom, where, also, the furniture was in scarlet and gilt, except the white draperied bed and the dressing-table. Here the girl threw herself down in an ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... whole width of the Villa, as if the air had glowed there with its own cold, bluish, and dazzling light. This magic spot, behind the black trunks of trees and masses of inky foliage, breathed out sweet sounds mingled with bursts of brassy roar, sudden clashes of ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... man—banker, merchant, manufacturer, and what not. A big, loud man, with a stare and a metallic laugh. A man who could never sufficiently vaunt himself—a self-made man. A man who was always proclaiming, through that brassy speaking-trumpet of a voice of his, his early ignorance and poverty. A man who ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... as being fairly cheerful in the town of Birmingham that night, I recall an active and interested mood. I spent the night in Birmingham because the train service on was disarranged, and I could not get on. I went to listen to a band that was playing its brassy old-world music in the public park, and I fell into conversation with a man who said he had been a reporter upon one of their minor local papers. He was full and keen upon all the plans of reconstruction that were now shaping over the lives of humanity, and I know that something ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... "No doubt the trombone is a little cracked and brassy, so to speak, because of a hinfluenza as has wonted him for some weeks; but there's good stuff in 'im, sir, and plenty o' lungs. The key-bugle is a noo 'and, but 'e's capital, 'ticklerly in the 'igh notes an' flats; besides, bein' young, 'e'll improve. As to the French ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... outside, a threatening murmur became audible. It was an unholy blend of rasping shouts and shriller chanting, punctuated by notes of a brassy gong. As Charlie listened, the volume ...
— Flamedown • Horace Brown Fyfe
... causes cyanosis and dyspnoea. When the oesophagus is pressed upon, the patient may have difficulty in swallowing. The left recurrent nerve may be stretched or pressed upon as it hooks round the arch of the aorta, and hoarseness of the voice and a characteristic "brassy" cough may result from paralysis of the muscles of the larynx which it supplies. The vagus, the phrenic, and the spinal nerves may also be pressed upon. When the aneurysm is on the transverse part of the arch, the trachea is pulled down with each beat of the heart—a clinical phenomena known ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... There was not another soul in the church. A terrible silence fell with the gathering darkness. In a little wicker basket at the foot of the benignant mother were about twenty photographs of soldiers, some in little brassy frames with spots of verdigris on them, some the old-fashioned "cabinet" kind, some on simple post-cards. There was a young, dark Zouave who stood with his hand on an ugly little table, a sergeant of ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... west did a single cowboy come into view to remind the girl of the heroic past, and this one but a symbol—a figure of speech. Leaning forward upon his reeling, foaming steed, he spurred along the road as if pursued, casting backward apprehensive glances, as if in the brassy eyes of the car he read his doom—the doom of all ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... R. Sporangium orbicular, much depressed, the base umbilicate, stipitate, cernuous; the greater part of the wall thin and delicate, with a scanty covering of yellow granules of lime, becoming naked and then brassy and iridescent, after maturity soon disappearing; the lower basal portion thicker and more persistent, with a layer of small yellow scales of lime. Stipe long, flexuous, bent at the apex, plicate, pale brown to yellow-brown, darker toward the base. Capillitium of slender tubules, ...
— The Myxomycetes of the Miami Valley, Ohio • A. P. Morgan
... to look for: the brassy, regularly cut crystals with the black stripings, such as has led countless men to go through untold hardships in the belief that they had found gold. In fact, iron pyrites is often called "fool gold," so ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... links most of his time was spent in retrieving lost balls or replacing America. Whether it was that Archibald pressed too much or pressed too little, whether it was that his club deviated from the dotted line which joined the two points A and B in the illustrated plate of the man making the brassy shot in the Hints on Golf book, or whether it was that he was pursued by some malignant fate, I do not know. Archibald ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... really constitutes a garage. He usually does not even know what the word means. Any roofed-over shed or shack, with doors or not, is what one generally has to put up with to-day, for housing his resplendent brassy ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... the waters, healthfully agitated, vary in saltiness according to the proximity of the rivers. The rocks and deeps are covered with a vegetation which is green near the surface, becoming darker and darker, even turning to a dark red and brassy yellow as it gets further from the light. In this oceanic paradise of nutritive and luminous waters charged with bacteria and microscopic nourishment, life is developed in exuberance. In spite of the continual traps of the fishermen, the marine herds ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... enough; she was as interested in everything as usual; as active at the nets, playing superbly, and with all her heart in the game—while it lasted; she swung her slim brassy with all the old-time fire and satisfaction in the clean, sharp whack, as the ball flew through the sunshine, rising beautifully in a long, low trajectory ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... the sun rose clear, but was soon overcast. The clouds became lowery, and from them, black and ominous, as they soon appeared, lightning flashed, thunder rolled, and a little rain fell. Toward nine o'clock, the clouds became thinner, and assumed a brassy or coppery appearance, and earth, rocks, trees, buildings, water, and persons were changed by this strange, unearthly light. A few minutes later, a heavy black cloud spread over the entire sky except a narrow rim at the horizon, and it was as dark as it usually is at nine ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... desk very soon after supper-time the Doctor had joined him, and with an unusual expression of leisure and friendliness had settled down lollingly on the other side of the fireplace with his great square-toed shoes nudging the bright, brassy edge of the fender, and his big meerschaum pipe puffing the whole bleak room most deliciously, tantalizingly full of forbidden tobacco smoke. It was a comfortable, warm place to chat. The talk had begun with politics, drifted a ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... that high brassy pitch of voice which Jem and I had adopted for this bravado period of our existence—"I think she's like our old white hen that turned up its eyes and died of the ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Huggin big schooner, sah," said Caesar sharply; and he had hardly spoken when the heavy but sharp brassy sound of a big gun came from quite another direction. "And dat Massa Huggin oder schooner, ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... at the window looked like that of an East Indian!" declared Will. "His skin was brassy, and his eyes had the devil's leer in them just as the eyes of the Little Brass God ...
— Boy Scouts in Northern Wilds • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... thirty years ago, we do not wonder that so many operators failed to make tight, good-wearing fillings. As it came from the manufacturer it looked fairly bright, but after being exposed to the air for a short time it assumed a light brassy color, and lost what small amount of integrity it originally possessed. This tin was not properly refined before beating, or something was put on the foil while beating, so that it did not have the clean, bright surface and cohesive quality which our best foil now has. ...
— Tin Foil and Its Combinations for Filling Teeth • Henry L. Ambler
... gives more pleasure to the performers than any other sort of labor. Yet the delight it imparts to the listeners is apt to be tempered by a certain sense of incongruity between the peaceful citizens who compose it and the bellicose din they produce. There is a note of barbarism in the brassy jar and clamor of the instruments, enhanced by the bewildering ambition of each player to force through his piece the most noise and jangle, which is not always covered and subdued into a harmonious whole by the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... prairie, the veil swept across into place again; and he managed to check his wild flight, and look about him. His empty lips were gibbering without a sound escaping them, and his very heart shivered with cold, for all the brassy heat of the day. But the breeze was wandering on again; under the great sun the prairie spread dim to the southwest, and tawny to the northeast; only between his own loose knees the horse trembled in every limb, ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... The industrious, the skilful and the strong saw the product of their labor enjoyed by the indolent, the unskilled and the improvident; and self-love rose against benevolence. A band of musicians thought their brassy harmony was as necessary to the common happiness as bread and meat, and declined to enter the harvest-field or the workshop. A lecturer upon natural science insisted upon talking while others worked. Mechanics, whose single day's labor brought two dollars into the common stock, insisted ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... he's managed to bump into and spill in the slush just as he fetched the curb. He has his hat off and is beggin' her pardon in his best society way too; although he must have seen at a glance what she was,—one of these brassy-eyed parties with a hand-decorated complexion and ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... was one great lurid, brassy glare, overhung with banks of sinister clouds, a leaden purple above, fiery crimson below. The unnatural light fell strongly upon us both. A big shadow passed for an instant across the sunset, and we, looking instinctively up, saw the ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... some courage from the relaxation in the savage grimness of his captors, which seemed implied by this rough pleasantry, and with him such recuperation of spirits naturally took the form of brassy self-assertion. ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... may have become. There is a singular optical illusion, for instance, in going through a tunnel, which nearly every one must have observed, and yet which nobody, so far as we can learn, has thought it worth while to explain: no sooner have you plunged into complete darkness, and the great brassy monster at the head of the train is tearing and wheezing, and panting away with you through the gloom, at the rate possibly of twenty miles to the hour, than, if you happen to fix your eye on the faintly illuminated brickwork which you are so rapidly dashing past, the apparent ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... the doorway, and he heard her laugh and saw her feet twinkle like blood-red moths, and he called to Sir Dinar. But Sir Dinar heard only the brassy music, nor did any of the dancers turn their heads, though Sir Galhaltin called a second time and more loudly. Then Sir Sentrail and Sir Ozanna also began to call, fearing they knew not what for their comrade. But the guests still drifted by as ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... me laugh, white folks! De idea of my lossin' my sight a lookin' 'round for a third husband! You sho' is agreeable. Ain't been so tickled since de secon' time I was a widow. You know my secon' husband was bad after blind tiger liquor, and harlot eyed, brassy, hussy women. ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... tree with great rapidity, but flies away when molested. It is about half an inch in length. "It is of a flattish, oblong form, and of a shining, greenish black color, each of its wing cases having three raised lines, the outer two interrupted by two impressed transverse spots of brassy color dividing each wing cover into three nearly equal portions. The under side of the body and legs shine like burnished copper; the feet are shining green." This beetle appears in June and July, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... in this case Pretensions rather brassy, For talents to deserve a place Are qualifications saucy; So, their worships of the Faculty, Quite sick of merit's rudeness, Chose one who should owe it all, d'ye see, To ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... and bloat, a gas-bag and fanfaron, a Gascon and a carajo, alma miserabile, and a pudding-head, a sacre menteur and a verfluchte prahlerische Hauptesel, a brassy old blunder-head and a spupsy, un sot sans pareil and a darned old hoffmagander; a pepper-pot-pourri, a thafe of the wurreld and an owld baste, the divil's ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... numerous and busy—the horses can barely stand still, and nod their heads to shake them off. The hills seem near, and the trees on the summit are distinctly visible. Such noises as are heard seem exaggerated and hollow. There is but little cloud, mere thin flecks; but the horizon has a brassy look, and the blue of the sky is hard and opaque. Farmer George recollects that the barometer he tapped before coming out showed a falling mercury; he does not like these appearances, more especially the heated breeze. There is a large quantity of hay in the meadow, ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... a church would volley a tremendous crash of bronze into the narrow streets; and between whiles I could hear the faint echoes of far-off chanting, the brassy distant gasps of trombones. A woman in black whisked round a corner, hurrying towards the route of the procession. I took the same direction. From a wine-shop, yawning like a dirty cavern in the basement of a palatial old building, issued suddenly a brawny ruffian ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... cool breath of a slumbering child, came a faint air from the land. The bell of the frigate, clanging in its brassy throat, struck for midnight. The sentinels on their posts cried "All's well!" The old brig was letting fall her top-sails, and the sound of the oars in the cutter's ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... ploughed ground and prayed for rain. His frightened boys had taken him home, and later on, the same afternoon, when they brought news of four more cows down with "the pleuro" in an outer paddock, he had stood up outside his own door and shaken his fist at the brassy sky and cursed high heaven to the terror of his family, till his brave, sun-browned wife dragged him inside and soothed him. And Peter ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... drawing-room, through the open windows, was flooded with such a confusion of odours and bird-notes as might warrant the hope that Madame de Mauves would renew with him for an hour or two the exploration of the forest. Her sister-in-law, however, whose hair was not yet dressed, emerged like a brassy discord in a maze of melody. At the same moment the servant returned with his mistress's regrets; she begged to be excused, she was indisposed and unable to see Mr. Longmore. The young man knew just how disappointed he looked and just what Madame Clairin thought of it, and this consciousness determined ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... rude, defaced coins. One was a perfect staple, another the letter "L," another like an axe-head, and one like a peasant's sabot. Some were almost black with iron stains, and some were set with "jewels" of quartz, but for the most part they were formless fragments of a rich and brassy yellow. ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... with that sense of the ridiculous in the aspect of some of its conditions which belongs to the sagacious common-sense side of his nature. The married women, he says, were against the community. "It was to them like the brassy and lacquered life in hotels. The common school was well enough, but to the common nursery they had grave objections. Eggs might be hatched in ovens, but the hen on her own account much preferred ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Brumley's mind desisted for sheer lack of material. Given this lady and that board and his general impression of Harman's refreshment and confectionery activity—the data were insufficient. A commonplace man no doubt, a tradesman, energetic perhaps and certainly a little brassy, successful by the chances of that economic revolution which everywhere replaces the isolated shop by the syndicated enterprise, irrationally conceited about it; a man perhaps ultimately to be pitied—with this young goddess finding herself.... Mr. Brumley's ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... "Oh, you mean Brassy Bangs," broke in Randy. "I know that fellow only too well. I had quite a set-to with him ...
— The Rover Boys at Big Horn Ranch - The Cowboys' Double Round-Up • Edward Stratemeyer
... with pale hair drawn tightly back and fastened under a small hat pinned precariously aloft; her eyes were steady, like his own. She wore a black dress ornamented with large carmine dots, with a scant black ribband about her waist, her sole adornment a brassy wedding ring, that almost covered an entire joint. She spoke in a rapid, absent voice, as if her attention were perpetually wandering down from the subject in hand to an invisible kitchen stove, or ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... friend's alarm to the uttermost. His nose changed from the natural copper hue which it had acquired from many a comfortable cup of claret or sack, into a palish brassy tint, and his teeth chattered with apprehension at the unveiled audacity of my proposal, which seemed to place the barefaced plunderer before him in full atrocity. As he faltered for an answer, I relieved him in some degree by a question ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Christian influence, which is the exhibition, in truth, of the mind of Christ, springing from the love of Christ in the soul, is no wise increased in value by being beaten out into plates as thin as imagination can conceive, and employed to gild the brassy admixture of earthly influence,—the titles, honours, rank, wealth, learning and secular power of this world. It looks indeed like a mighty globe of gold; and the eyes of the inexperienced may be caught by it; but the least scratch proves its brassy character. ...
— Christian Devotedness • Anthony Norris Groves
... coast and islands puffy folds of dazzling white, nearly 5,000 feet high, were based upon dark-grey streaks of cloudland simulating continents and archipelagoes. Within the tropics the heavens appear lower, and we never sight blue or purple water save after a tornado. The normal colour is a dirty, brassy yellow-brown, here and there transparent, but ever unsightly in the extreme. It must depend upon some unexplained atmospheric conditions; and the water-aspect is often at its ugliest when the skies are clearest. I have often seen the same tints ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... writes.] — Six yards of stuff for to make a yellow gown. A pair of lace boots with lengthy heels on them and brassy eyes. A hat is suited for a wedding-day. A fine tooth comb. To be sent with three barrels of porter in Jimmy Farrell's creel cart on the evening of the coming Fair to Mister Michael James Flaherty. With the best compliments ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... regular and well formed. His skin is coarse, unwrinkled and weather-beaten, his eyes possess a natural and unaffected fierceness, the most extraordinary I ever beheld: they are full, bright, and of a brassy colour. He looked directly at me, and his stare is by far the most intense I ever beheld. This time, however, curiosity made me a match, for I vanquished him. It is when he regards you, that you mark the singular expression ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various
... breathless, dead calm of the desert there was no sound or movement. On all sides the vast gray waste stretched, a yawning inferno of dead, dry sand overhung with a brassy, cloudless sky in which swam the huge ball of molten silver that for ages had ruled ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... moment he began to plead this heat not merely as an excuse for his uneasiness, but as a reason for returning to camp. The heat was intense, he argued. Above him the light of an African midday sun poured out of a brassy sky into a sort of inverted funnel, and lay in blinding pools upon the scattered slabs of rock. Within the hollow, every cup of the innumerable flowers which tapestried the cliffs seemed a mouth ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... the "Decameron." It contains both the grandest morality and most degrading obscenity ever conceived in the brain of mortal man. There are passages whose beauty and power might cause the heart of an angel to leap in ecstasy, others that would call a blush of shame to the brassy front of the foulest fiend that ever howled and shrieked through the sulphurous ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... that always-arresting type that combines a warm dusky skin with blue eyes and fair hair. The eyes, in her case, were a soft smoky blue, set in thick and inky black lashes, and the hair was brassy gold, banded carelessly but trimly about her rather broad forehead. Her mouth was wide, deep crimson, thin-lipped; it had humorous possibilities all its own, and Nina and Ward thought her never so fascinating ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... patriarchal beards, slim saleswomen who wore masses of marcelled curls and real Irish lace, she watched them all. She drank in the music of the Park concerts, she dreamed in the libraries, she eagerly caught the first brassy mutter of ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... bombastic sound the patriotic lyrics of Bjerregaard Johan Storm Munch, S. O. Wolff, etc., which are yet sung at festal gatherings, by the side of Bjoernson's "Yes, we Love our Native Country," and "I will Guard Thee, my Land!" There is the brassy blare of challenging trumpets in the former; they defy all creation, and make a vast deal of impotent and unprofitable noise about "The roaring northern main," "The ancient Norway's rocky fastness," "Liberty's temple in Norroway's valleys," and "Norway's lion, whose axe doth ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... became the youngest man in the room,—an extraordinary case of rejuvenescence. He surveyed the room with triumph. He sniffed up the brassy and clicking music into his vibrating nostrils. He felt no envy of any man in the room. When the band paused he clapped like a child for another dose of fox-trot. At the end of the third dose they were both ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... they came together in the centre, and a row of pools of quicksilver had taken the place of the solid metal. Two smaller electrodes were plunged into the mercury, which gradually curdled and solidified, until it had resumed the solid form, with a yellowish brassy shimmer. ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... not catch. They half halted and made a brave attempt to pose as Germans, to judge by their guttural talk and brassy front. ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... mind," rang Mr. Chown's brassy voice, "that it's by no means certain Liversedge is to be our candidate. I am in a position to assure you that many of our most reliable men are not at all satisfied with that choice—not at all satisfied. I don't mind going so far as to declare ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... Brassy, her father's solicitor, from Cator Hill. He had been often in the house, a short fat man with a purple face, clothes of a horsy cut, and large, red, swollen fingers. He took now possession of the house with much self-importance. "Well, Miss Maggie" (he blew his words ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... khaki struts the limelit boards: With false moustache, set smirk and ogling eyes And straddling legs and swinging hips she tries To swagger it like a soldier, while the chords Of rampant ragtime jangle, clash, and clatter; And over the brassy blare and drumming din She strains to squirt her squeaky notes and thin ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... Bob'll have to play short here," grumbled Dick Tresize. "He ought to have insisted on Trevanion giving him strokes. By George, he's surely not going to be such a fool as to risk a brassy!" ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... its four shining prongs resounding against the stones and dry clods in little clicks. Sometimes she was completely involved in the smoke of her fire; then it would leave her figure free, irradiated by the brassy glare from the heap. She was oddly dressed to-night, and presented a somewhat staring aspect, her attire being a gown bleached by many washings, with a short black jacket over it, the effect of the ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... she started to protest, but she said nothing. After frozen seconds, she sighed and went to open it. The curtains billowed, and a babble of conversation blew in from the terrace of the Keith mansion. With the sound came the occasional brassy discord of a musician tuning his instrument. She clutched the window-sash as if she wished ...
— Death of a Spaceman • Walter M. Miller
... sire? Who thy sire's sire? And who were his forbears? Cam'st thou from Asia? Where the race swarms like fireflies, Where many races mark. As with colored belts, its tropics! What pigment stained thy skin? Was it a red, or wert thou Olive-dyed, or brassy? Handsome thou couldst hardly have been, With those high cheek-bones, That mighty jaw, and its grim chops, That long skull, so broad at the back parts, That low, retreating forehead! Doubtless thine eyes ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... in good time." In the pancake phone Fay's laugh was brassy. "But I'm glad you've decided to lend a hand, Gussy. This thing is moving faaaasst. Nationwise, adult underground ticklerization ...
— The Creature from Cleveland Depths • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... perfect staple, another the letter "L," another like an axe-head, and one like a peasant's sabot. Some were almost black with iron stains, and some were set with "jewels" of quartz, but for the most part they were formless fragments of a rich and brassy yellow. ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... Sabbath days, His face is not a face o'er brassy; Her mither sits to praise the claes; Holds him her box; to win the lassie He taks a pinch, and greets wi' granny, And helps his chair up nearer Jenny, And vows he loves her muir than any. She thinks her mither seldom wrong, And "Loggan ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... clothes are as much a part of him as his flesh, and I respect him for disdaining to shirk the difficulty by throwing the meanness of a cloak over it, and for recognizing the folly of masquerading our Yankee statesman in a Roman toga, and the indecorousness of presenting him as a brassy nudity. It would have been quite as unjustifiable to strip him to his skeleton as to his flesh. Webster is represented as holding in his right hand the written roll of the Constitution, with which he points to a bundle of fasces, which he ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... with the circumstances?" asked Turlington, retorting Launce's question on him, with a harsh ring of defiance in his brassy voice. ...
— Miss or Mrs.? • Wilkie Collins
... case left him in no doubt,—this poor wrecked bit of humanity beached upon the bleak shore of a charity ward was harmless. He absolved her of all evil intent, of any desire to obtain anything under false pretenses. He even absolved the blonde person, who despite her brassy hair, her hectic face, had of a sudden become a kind, gentle, and soothing presence. "Well, dearie, you got a straight tip from that feller. All I had to do was to show that piece o' paper he give you, and this kind gent'man come right off to see you," said ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... white folks! De idea of my lossin' my sight a lookin' 'round for a third husband! You sho' is agreeable. Ain't been so tickled since de secon' time I was a widow. You know my secon' husband was bad after blind tiger liquor, and harlot eyed, brassy, hussy women. ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... appellation of silver given it by its maker. After the introduction of nickel from the mines in Saxony, the words "German silver" became truthfully appropriate as applied to that metal, but so habituated have the trade and the public become to brassy mixtures that German silver must always be understood as of that ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... were again so lively that they went to a Chinese restaurant that was frequented by clerks and their sweethearts on pay-days. They sat at a teak and marble table eating Eggs Fooyung, and listened to a brassy automatic piano, and were ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... him to sketch her,—for the benefit of Art. Three medical students and one attorney Miss Herne numbered as having been driven into a state of dogged despair on that triumphal occasion. Mr. Holmes may have quarrelled with the rendering, doubting to himself if her lip were not too thick, her eye too brassy and pale a blue for the queen of months; though I do not believe he thought at all about it. Yet the picture ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... of one of the buttes to get a better view of the country, and to the northward saw a high mountain; but before descending, he observed some black stones under his feet and on picking one up found it heavy and filled with a brassy-colored metal. He then picked up several of the stones and put them into his pockets, but being desirous of reaching water as soon as possible, he gave little thought to ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... insolent defiance of outraged law. For more than a generation one victim has been waiting avenging. Still the murdered ward lifts unavailing hands toward brassy heavens, imploring just reckoning upon her brutal slayer. Over earth and sea, in unmerited exile, wanders an unfortunate victim of lying circumstance, fearless to a fault of personal harm, yet bound by ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... mid-summer, now, the sun shone hot and brassy from a cloudless sky, and the buffalo grass was beginning to exchange its fresh greenness for a shade of dirty tan. Only the delicious coolness of the short nights made bearable the long, hot, monotonous days during which the girl ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... evening, when the great city turned out to breathe, and sat with opened shirt and loosened bodice on the dirty steps; when the hurdy-gurdy executed brassy scales and the lights flared in endless sparkling rows; when the trolley gongs at the corner pierced the air, and feet tapped cheerfully down the cool stone steps of the beer-shop, Ardelia, bare-footed and abandoned, nibbling at a section of bologna sausage, cake-walked insolently ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... and, by light of a lantern, transferred his treasure to his cellar. Was it the dulness of the candle that made the metal look so black? After a night of feverish tossing on his bed he arose and went to the cellar to gloat upon his wealth. The light of dawn fell on a heap of gray dust, a few brassy looking particles showing here and there. The curse of the ghost had been of power and the silver was silver no more. Mineralogists say that the nodules are iron pyrites. Perhaps so; but old residents know that ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... Having eaten he lit a cheroot and was jotting down in his notebook the information that he had gathered that morning, when a shrill trumpet from the invisible Badshah made him grasp his rifle. Skilled in the knowledge of the various sounds that elephants make he knew by the brassy note of this that the animal was in deadly fear. He sprang up to go to his assistance, when Badshah burst through the trees and came towards him at his fastest pace, his drooping ears and tail and outstretched trunk showing that he ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... imparts to the listeners is apt to be tempered by a certain sense of incongruity between the peaceful citizens who compose it and the bellicose din they produce. There is a note of barbarism in the brassy jar and clamor of the instruments, enhanced by the bewildering ambition of each player to force through his piece the most noise and jangle, which is not always covered and subdued into a harmonious whole by the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... and laid her upon a motor robe that some kindly spectator had spread in the deep dust. AH about he heard the quick, horrified breathing and muttering of the shocked and sympathetic neighbours who had gathered, but to him there was a brassy light in the world and a hideous taste of inky bitterness in the very air he ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... and tells its story in his "Historic Notes" very kindly and respectfully, but with that sense of the ridiculous in the aspect of some of its conditions which belongs to the sagacious common-sense side of his nature. The married women, he says, were against the community. "It was to them like the brassy and lacquered life in hotels. The common school was well enough, but to the common nursery they had grave objections. Eggs might be hatched in ovens, but the hen on her own account much preferred the old way. A hen without her chickens was but half a hen." ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... coat of pea-green or snuff-brown must be scrupulously eschewed, whilst black or invisible green would, by contrast, make that appear delicate and interesting, which, by the use of the former colours, must necessarily seem bilious and brassy. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... the change in her. Her hair, that had still shown its old brassy hue when last he had seen her at the time of the fall of the Government, was now a faded grey—that harsh green-grey that fair hair nearly always turns to on its way to white. There were hollows under her eyes, and her full mouth looked drawn. ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... a trifle drawn in, expressed a haughty pride in keeping with her hand, her chin, her brows, and her beautiful figure. And—as a last diagnostic to guide the judgment of a connoisseur—Natalie's pure voice, a most seductive voice, had certain metallic tones. Softly as that brassy ring was managed, and in spite of the grace with which its sounds ran through the compass of the voice, that organ revealed the character of the Duke of Alba, from whom the Casa-Reales were collaterally descended. ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... glaring sand, 'Neath the desert's brassy skies, Bound in the silent chains of death A border bandit lies. The poppy waves her golden glow Above the lowly mound; The cactus stands with lances drawn,— A ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... characterized by its hardness, greenish color, occurrence, and action of acid. Iron pyrites is always known by its brassy metallic aspect and great hardness. Copper pyrites, by its aspect from the other minerals, and from iron pyrites by its inferior hardness ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... globose, the peridium persistent with a silver metallic, sometimes brassy, lustre; stipe long, brown or black, tapering upward; hypothallus well developed, brown or purple, usually not continuous; columella swollen, obtuse, short at best, hardly attaining the centre of the sporangium; capillitium ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... I saw at the window looked like that of an East Indian!" declared Will. "His skin was brassy, and his eyes had the devil's leer in them just as the eyes of the Little Brass God ...
— Boy Scouts in Northern Wilds • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... to hold his eyes open and lift his eyebrows up. A man with a pervading appearance on him of being inflated like a balloon, and ready to start. A man who could never sufficiently vaunt himself a self-made man. A man who was continually proclaiming, through that brassy speaking-trumpet of a voice of his, his old ignorance and his old poverty. A man who was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... a moment the bold, brassy look was gone from her face, like a mask that had slipped. "I'm sorry. And I'll take care ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... throat before blowing a bugle, and then, full, rich, deep, and flute-like, he lazily gave out the first bars of his song. Instantly, almost as if it had been a signal, a great tit-mouse sang out, "Tzur ping-ping! tzur ping-ping!" in metallic, ringing notes; a thrush struck in with his brassy, clarion challenge, thrush after thrush taking it up, till, with the clear warble of robin and higher, squeaking notes of hedge-sparrow and wren joining in, the wonderful first bars of the Dawn ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... have become hard. The timothy stalk is like a file; the rye straw is glazed with flint; the grasshoppers snap sharply as they fly up in front of you; the bird-songs have ceased; the ground crackles under foot; the eye of day is brassy and merciless; and in harmony with all these things is the rattle of ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... Mr. Magee, staring at the very brassy bars at the foot of his bed, "what new variations on seclusion the day will ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... I am too familiar—I am sunk in the world. I am a thing to be sneered at by you old-family people. I am next heir to a bran-new Brummagem peerage. 'Gad, I feel brassy already!" ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... explosions, vibrating surfaces; surfaces that are smooth and oily surfaces, as in his waters, that are exquisitely translucent. You can't pin him down to a particular formula. His technique in other hands would be coarse, crashing, brassy, bald, and too fortissimo. It sometimes is all these discouraging things. It is too often deficient in the finer modulations. But he makes one forget this by his entrain, sincerity, and sympathy with his subject. As a composer he is less ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... livid, with brassy edges to the clouds, and here and there a white gleam, more ghastly than the lurid tinge, which, as you looked at it, you momentarily expected would kindle ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... flesh,— Thou wilt not only loose the forfeiture, But, touch'd with human gentleness and love, Forgive a moiety of the principal, Glancing an eye of pity on his losses, That have of late so huddled on his back, Enow to press a royal merchant down, And pluck commiseration of his state From brassy bosoms and rough hearts of flint, From stubborn Turks and Tartars, never train'd To offices of tender courtesy. We all expect a ...
— The Merchant of Venice • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... schists here as most abundant are a kind of black ironstone, exceedingly tough and hard, occurring in detached masses, and a variety of bright pyrites disseminated among the darker flagstones, either as irregularly-formed, brassy-looking concretions of small size, or spread out on their surfaces in thin leaf-like films, that resemble, in some of the specimens, the icy-foliage with which a severe frost encrusts a window-pane. Still further on I came upon a vein of galena; but a miner's excavation in the solid rock, a little ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... The sun's brassy edge glittered above the blue chain of hills as I walked across the pasture towards the path that led winding among the alders to the brook below. I followed it in the deepening evening light and sat down ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... attic was Life. From one corner of the room deep, regular breathing marked the unvarying time of healthy physical life asleep. Nearby a clock beat loud automatic time, with a brassy resonance—healthy mechanical life awake. Man and machine, side by side, ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... Hopkins, pleased to have made an impression. "I suspected there was something wrong about her the morning she came to the house here. And she changed her name, too, as brassy as you please." ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... singularity of the sunset and its effects on the objects around us. There were woods in the distance. A rich sandy light, (nay, of a much deeper colour than sandy,) lay over these woods that blackened in the blaze. Over that part of the woods which lay immediately under the intenser light, a brassy mist floated. The trees on the ramparts, and the people moving to and fro between them, were cut or divided into equal segments of deep shade and brassy light. Had the trees, and the bodies of the men and women, been ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... floor close by Issa's stool, kept handing up one article after another for closer examination. The stuff seemed worthless enough to Constans—trumpery pieces of quartz crystal set in copper and debased silver, rings and bangles of a hue unmistakably brassy, hair ribbons, parti-colored dress goods, pins, needles, and a miscellaneous assortment of useless trinkets. Constans was genuinely astonished that Issa, who had been hitherto something of a good-fellow, should seem interested in such rubbish; but then women were ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... fences full, and the hollows heaped up level, and the birches bent down with their hair hidden, and the broad arms of the fir-trees loaded, like sombre cotton-pickers going home heavily laden. Then to see the brassy streak widen in the west, and the cold moon hang astonished upon the dead tops of some distant pine-trees, was to enjoy a most beautiful picture, with only the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... single sentence, Defoe catches for us the whole soul and character of the situation. It seems very simple, but it sums up marvellously an exact observation and knowledge of the arts of the gipsy child-stealer, of her cunning flattery and brassy boldness, and we can see the simple little girl running back to the house to tell the nurse that a fine lady was kissing the child, and had told her to tell where they were and she should not be frightened, ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... his brassy voice, again went the rounds, announcing the day's event and the tardy fulfillment of the boy's commission. Then came the bustle of preparation. The out-door toilet of the people was performed with care. I cannot describe ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... been remarked and described by every traveller with displeasure, by all with truth. The ill look of the very few and very unhealthy inhabitants confirms their descriptions; and beside the pale and swelled faces which shock one's sight, here is a brassy scent in the air as of verdigris, which offends one's smell; the running water is of an odd colour too, like that in which copper has been steeped. These are sad desolated scenes indeed, though this is not the season for mal' aria neither, which, it is said, begins in May, and ends with September. ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... louder. Enough as yet it is not. 15 If this only remains, perhaps the dog-like Face may colour, a brassy blush may yield us. Swell your voices ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... "Decameron." It contains both the grandest morality and most degrading obscenity ever conceived in the brain of mortal man. There are passages whose beauty and power might cause the heart of an angel to leap in ecstasy, others that would call a blush of shame to the brassy front of the foulest fiend that ever howled and shrieked through the sulphurous ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... what to look for: the brassy, regularly cut crystals with the black stripings, such as has led countless men to go through untold hardships in the belief that they had found gold. In fact, iron pyrites is often called "fool gold," so ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... Head brassy brown; thorax brownish yellow, glossy; elytra with more than the basal half deep blue, with regular deeply pitted punctures, close to each other, an elevated knob at the base in the middle, the apical portion smooth purplish black, the smooth place on the suture running into the ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... the election the sun heaved up on a brassy sky. It was intensely hot through the day, but towards evening gray clouds scudded out of the east, veiling the sun with their twisting masses; at twilight heavy rain-blots were splashing the dust. At eight o'clock, meeting-time, ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... his sixteenth shot, while his opponent had played eighteen. But th' pace had been too swift an' it was merely a question iv which wud be th' first to crack. That misfortune fell to th' lot iv th' sicrety iv war. Findin' himsilf in a bad lie, he undhertook to use a brassy in a spirit iv nawthin' venture nawthin' gain. It was raaly a brillyant shot. A foot nearer th' ball an' he might have accomplished a feat in golufing histhry. But th' luck iv war was against him an' he sthruck himsilf upon th' ankle. Th' prisidint, resolvin' to give ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne
... boys; an occasional tug-boat, disdainfully greeted by Herrick as "Puffing Billy"; a distant caravan, with its endless file of camels and horses and men, melting away in curve after curve, like some mighty serpent, far back into the quivering haze that hovered over the hot brassy desert—such were the main features of the famous passage, begun by Pharaoh-Necho, and finished by Lesseps. The sun was sinking as they cast anchor for the night before Ismailia, and saw the mouth of the Sweetwater Canal, ...
— Harper's Young People, May 11, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... courage from the relaxation in the savage grimness of his captors, which seemed implied by this rough pleasantry, and with him such recuperation of spirits naturally took the form of brassy self-assertion. ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... and May of the year 1881 were not, as a general thing, a favourable season for visiting the Ducal Palace and the Academy. The valet-de- place had marked them for his own and held triumphant possession of them. He celebrates his triumphs in a terrible brassy voice, which resounds all over the place, and has, whatever language he be speaking, the accent of some other idiom. During all the spring months in Venice these gentry abound in the great resorts, and they lead their helpless captives through churches and galleries in dense irresponsible ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... I could not catch. They half halted and made a brave attempt to pose as Germans, to judge by their guttural talk and brassy front. ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... whispered the Colonel, and the party shuffled on down the line of the wall with their faces up and their big hats thrown backwards. The sun behind them struck the old grey masonry with a brassy glare, and carried on to it the strange black shadows of the tourists, mixing them up with the grim, high-nosed, square-shouldered warriors, and the grotesque, rigid deities who lined it. The broad shadow of the Reverend John Stuart, of Birmingham, smudged out both the heathen King ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... to speak of his having met her, for she grew up in the town, and had been working for the Markley Mortgage and Investment Company for half-a-dozen years before he began to notice her. From a brassy street-gadding child of twelve, whose mother crowded her into grown-up society before she left the high school, and let her spell her name Ysabelle, she had grown into womanhood like a rank weed; had married at nineteen, was divorced at twenty-one, and having tried music teaching ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... upon a distant luminous region extending nearly across the whole width of the Villa, as if the air had glowed there with its own cold, bluish, and dazzling light. This magic spot, behind the black trunks of trees and masses of inky foliage, breathed out sweet sounds mingled with bursts of brassy roar, sudden clashes of metal, and grave, ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... was not slow to imagine plenty of reasons for the separation. This, together with the fact that men had begun to penetrate the veil of romantic secrecy with which Byron surrounded himself and found a rather brassy idol beneath, turned the tide of public opinion against him. He left England under a cloud of distrust and disappointment, in 1816, and never returned. Eight years were spent abroad, largely in Italy, where he was ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... knew not their names. Shall one not enjoy a symphony without precise knowledge of the instrument that gives the tune? If an oboe sound a melody, must one bestow a special praise, with a knowledge of its function in the concert? Or if a trombone please, must one know the brassy creature by its name? Rather, whether I listen to horns or birds, in my ignorance I bestow loosely a general approbation; yet is ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... religious antiquities other than images and relics which have a legend. Their appreciation of ecclesiastical art is too often regulated by the practical and utilitarian order of ideas. To dazzle the eye of the peasant may, and does, become the single aim of church ornamentation. Hence the brassy, vulgar altars, and those coloured plaster images of modern manufacture that one sees with regret in so many of the country ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... had never seen a nugget in its native state, was excitedly searching for pieces of gold. Ellen smiled to see her, with Loll at her heels, running hither and thither, expecting any moment to come upon large, brassy-looking lumps resting like eggs ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... that are the worst. I'm glad to get up at dawn and see to the beasts. And there's that infernal watching of the sky—looking out all the time for clouds that don't come—or if they do, end in nothing. You know that brassy glare of the sun rising that means always scorching dry heat? Think of it a hundred times worse than you've ever seen it! The country as far as you can look is like the floor of an enormous oven, with the sky, red and white-hot for a roof, and all the life ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... bore every mark of being an average commonplace British tradesman, obese, pompous, and slow. He wore rather baggy gray shepherd's check trousers, a not over-clean black frock-coat, unbuttoned in the front, and a drab waistcoat with a heavy brassy Albert chain, and a square pierced bit of metal dangling down as an ornament. A frayed top-hat and a faded brown overcoat with a wrinkled velvet collar lay upon a chair beside him. Altogether, look as I would, there was nothing remarkable ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... feat, it was far less so than a young man's performance of the ophicleide, a serpentine instrument that coiled round and about its player, and when breathed into persuasively gave forth prodigious brassy sounds that resembled the night-noises of beasts of prey. This item roused the Indian god from his umbilical contemplations, and as the young ophicleide player, somewhat breathless, passed down the room ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... quicksilver had taken the place of the solid metal. Two smaller electrodes were plunged into the mercury, which gradually curdled and solidified, until it had resumed the solid form, with a yellowish brassy shimmer. ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Mr. Brassy, her father's solicitor, from Cator Hill. He had been often in the house, a short fat man with a purple face, clothes of a horsy cut, and large, red, swollen fingers. He took now possession of the house ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... of the residence of a young lawyer of my friends, after performing in whose honour, through the medium of a very brassy band, a Secession Schottische or Palmetto Polka, it clamorously demanded his presence. After a very brief interval he appeared, and altho' he is in private life an agreeable and moderately sensible young man, he succeeded, to my mind at any rate, ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... and busy—the horses can barely stand still, and nod their heads to shake them off. The hills seem near, and the trees on the summit are distinctly visible. Such noises as are heard seem exaggerated and hollow. There is but little cloud, mere thin flecks; but the horizon has a brassy look, and the blue of the sky is hard and opaque. Farmer George recollects that the barometer he tapped before coming out showed a falling mercury; he does not like these appearances, more especially the heated breeze. There is a large quantity of hay ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... and the breathing of the dogs which had crouched with their bellies in the snow whimpering uneasily. Wild-eyed, the Indian pointed aloft and Connie glanced upward. There was no hint of blue in the cloudless sky. The whole dome of the heavens glared with a garish, brassy sheen from which the sun blazed out with an unwholesome, metallic light that gleamed in glints of gold from millions of floating frost spicules. Even as the two stood gazing upward new suns formed in the ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... upon the roof of the church swung upon its arms like an acrobat in petticoats, and loudly pealed the hour of seven. Its hammer boomed against the brassy gown, the town rang from end to end with the clamour of the curfew, and its tale of another day gone rumoured up the glens. Near at hand the air of the playground and of the street was tossed by the sound into tumultuous ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... of the larynx, especially in infants and children, causing respiratory difficulty and a hoarse, brassy cough. ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... whistle blew again; the child turned over and unclosed her eyes. A brassy light glimmered between leafless apple branches outside her window. Through the frosty radiance of sunrise ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... Yet the mind could dwell contentedly on this new and curious estate of nature, this substance that was neither earth nor water, this place that was neither land nor sea. It had its own colours: in the shadow of the great couchant cloud whose mane was brassy with sunshine that had lodged in the upper air it was purple; otherwise it was brown; and where the light lay it was as bright as polished steel, yet giving in its brightness some indication of its sucking softness. It had its own strange scenery; it had its undulations and its fissures, and between ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... in length. "It is of a flattish, oblong form, and of a shining, greenish black color, each of its wing cases having three raised lines, the outer two interrupted by two impressed transverse spots of brassy color dividing each wing cover into three nearly equal portions. The under side of the body and legs shine like burnished copper; the feet are shining green." This beetle appears in June and July, and does not confine its work ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... another for a space of three or four breaths. Waters was frankly aghast; this, upon the top of his other troubles, was overwhelming. The istvostchik ruptured the moment with a brassy yell. ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... bangles on their arms, wearing robes of dark brilliant hues. On the shore, under the palms, wandered a crowd of white-robed Arabs, with red or blue turbans. Occasionally one saw a khaki uniform. It was intensely hot and damp. A haze lay over the further reaches of the river, and the sky had a brassy look unlike the intense turquoise clarity of the Egyptian sky. The palm fronds seemed metallic. As far as the eye could see along the right bank lay a confused mass of low white buildings, tents, huts of yellow matting and piles of stores. Gangs of Arabs and Indian coolies ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... remarkably masculine, regular and well formed. His skin is coarse, unwrinkled and weather-beaten, his eyes possess a natural and unaffected fierceness, the most extraordinary I ever beheld: they are full, bright, and of a brassy colour. He looked directly at me, and his stare is by far the most intense I ever beheld. This time, however, curiosity made me a match, for I vanquished him. It is when he regards you, that you ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various
... to have a storm, Yussuf?" said Mr Burne, as he looked round at the lurid brassy aspect of the heavens, and the wild ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... CUPRIPES, B. & R. Sporangium orbicular, much depressed, the base umbilicate, stipitate, cernuous; the greater part of the wall thin and delicate, with a scanty covering of yellow granules of lime, becoming naked and then brassy and iridescent, after maturity soon disappearing; the lower basal portion thicker and more persistent, with a layer of small yellow scales of lime. Stipe long, flexuous, bent at the apex, plicate, pale brown to yellow-brown, darker toward the base. Capillitium of slender tubules, forming a dense ...
— The Myxomycetes of the Miami Valley, Ohio • A. P. Morgan
... bells Of rescued Salem are the loving tones Of her dear voice, soft echoing o'er the years. They haunt me in the stillness and the glare Of desert noontide when the horizon's line Swims faintly throbbing, and my shadow hides Skulking beneath me from the brassy sky. And when night comes to soothe with breath of balm And pomp of stars the worn and weary world, Her eyes rise in my soul and make its day. And even into the battle comes my love, Snatching the duty that I offer Heaven. At closing of El-Majed's awful day, When the last quivering ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... orchestra scores. Never have wind instruments sounded more richly, dulcetly, than in that "Serenade fuer dreizehn Blaeser." At a first hearing of "Also Sprach Zarathustra," it seemed as though the very dayspring had descended into the orchestra to make that famous, brassy opening passage. For here, in the hand of Strauss, the orchestra begins to round out its form and assume its logical shape. The various families of instruments are made independent; often play separately. The shattering brass of which ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... things before she had closed her lips, quite forcibly, but as Arethusa was not present, it could not do much good. Arethusa did not forget a single creature at the Farm. Beginning with Miss Asenath, every living thing had a gift. Miss Johnson had a collar of wonderfully shiny, brassy beauty; old Baldy, the horse, had a new blanket; and there was even a catnip ball for the grey cat that slept in front of Mandy's stove. There were so many cats at the Farm that it was quite impossible to remember them all, but Arethusa reasoned that they would ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... heard all through the long summer day. I hear it in the dry and parched August when most birds are silent, sometimes delivered on the wing and sometimes from the perch. Indeed, with me its song is as much a midsummer sound as is the brassy crescendo of the cicada. The memory of its note calls to mind the flame-like quiver of the heated atmosphere and the bright glare of the meridian sun. Its color is much more intense than that of the common bluebird, as summer skies ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... thoracic veins and on the air-passage causes cyanosis and dyspnoea. When the oesophagus is pressed upon, the patient may have difficulty in swallowing. The left recurrent nerve may be stretched or pressed upon as it hooks round the arch of the aorta, and hoarseness of the voice and a characteristic "brassy" cough may result from paralysis of the muscles of the larynx which it supplies. The vagus, the phrenic, and the spinal nerves may also be pressed upon. When the aneurysm is on the transverse part of the arch, the trachea is pulled down with each beat of the heart—a ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... knees and gathered the pale faces of the men together in one glance; and saw that intense expression of agony which physical pain can mold with men's features. And then he strained his eyes over the brassy horizon; but no cloud, no ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... couch-burning plots that she laboured with her fork, its four shining prongs resounding against the stones and dry clods in little clicks. Sometimes she was completely involved in the smoke of her fire; then it would leave her figure free, irradiated by the brassy glare from the heap. She was oddly dressed to-night, and presented a somewhat staring aspect, her attire being a gown bleached by many washings, with a short black jacket over it, the effect of the whole being ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... the links most of his time was spent in retrieving lost balls or replacing America. Whether it was that Archibald pressed too much or pressed too little, whether it was that his club deviated from the dotted line which joined the two points A and B in the illustrated plate of the man making the brassy shot in the Hints on Golf book, or whether it was that he was pursued by some malignant fate, I do not know. Archibald rather ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... never a white so pure, so soft, so warm as this. And then he saw by the undulations of the streak that it was a flock of long, graceful birds moving in single file from west to east. Shimmering in the brassy dawn sun, they rode like dream birds upon a vermilion sea, their slow movements so graceful, so rhythmic as seemingly to represent no effort, as if the birds merely floated along, their beauty and grace the ultimate expression of the spirit of the scene. They flew with their ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... fell pat from the lips of the doctor, and there was no misunderstanding them, and Brassy did not, for ...
— Buffalo Bill's Spy Trailer - The Stranger in Camp • Colonel Prentiss Ingraham
... wilderness we had left seemed like the vegetation of an oasis. For fifty kilometres the earth under our wheels was made up of a kind of glistening red slag covered with pebbles and stones. Not the scantest and toughest of rock-growths thrust a leaf through its brassy surface, not a well-head or a darker depression of the rock gave sign of a trickle of water. Everything around us glittered ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... proved to be the driest known in years. Days, weeks, and even months passed without a drop of rain falling from the brassy sky, and the fine powdery dust permeated everywhere. The weather prophet lost caste, but he persisted in announcing rain, knowing that he had only to stick to it long enough to hit it in ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... Denver could see the dumps and hoists, and the mill that was going up below, and as the ore-trains glided by on the newly finished narrow-gauge he picked up samples of the copper. It was the same as his vein, a brassy yellow chalcopyrites with chunks of red native copper, and he forgot the daily heart-ache and the ignominy of his task as he contemplated the wealth that awaited him. Yes, the mine was still his, though he was herded ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... way in the world a little before they talked of marrying," continued Mr. Mornington; but you ask me as coolly as possible to give you enough to enable you and your wife to travel, before you go into business at all, which I think is pretty brassy. I wonder what my father would have thought if I had made such a request. I honestly believe he would have thrashed me. But as I said, things are different now-a-days." Harry grew very red during this harangue, but wisely ...
— Isabel Leicester - A Romance • Clotilda Jennings
... better after old Brindle fills up on this dust," observed Martin, belligerency in his brassy voice. ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... the hot glare from a brassy sky or an oven where the July caloric blazed like a blast from the open mouth of a retort—such that day seemed Moosac Square in the heart of the cotton-mill city. High buildings closed in its treeless, ill-paved, ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... I turned once more to talk with the professor of niblicks and approach shots and holes done in three without a brassy. We were a merry party at lunch—a lunch fortunately in Mrs. Beale's best vein, consisting of a roast chicken and sweets. Chicken had figured somewhat frequently of late on our daily ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... and occidentals in general laughed at Chinese music, but this was due to their own ignorance of its full import and to the fact that they heard only the dirges of a Chinese funeral procession or the brassy noises that feature a celestial festival. They did not have opportunity to be enthralled by the throaty, vibrant melodies—at once so lovingly seductive and harshly compelling—by which Chinese poets and lovers have revealed their thoughts and won their ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... the youngest man in the room,—an extraordinary case of rejuvenescence. He surveyed the room with triumph. He sniffed up the brassy and clicking music into his vibrating nostrils. He felt no envy of any man in the room. When the band paused he clapped like a child for another dose of fox-trot. At the end of the third dose they were both a little breathless and they had ices. After a waltz they both realised that excess ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... ringing a sort of triumphal peal to the procession of the judges between the court-room and the inn. Contesting with its not too dulcet music blared forth the fanfare of two gorgeous trumpeters in scarlet and gold lace, tie wigs, silk stockings, and huge cocked hats, who filled the street with a brassy melody that suggested Gabriel's stern and awful judgment-summons rather than gave lightness and rhythm to the feet of those who made up the procession. The procession itself had some dreadful aspects and elements as well as others incongruous ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... wind. Dull! Why, on shore we should gaze out on the same streets or fields or trees; but here our residence is driven along like a flying cloud, and we gain a fresh view with every mile! I confess that I like sailing in populous waters, for indeed the lonely tropical seas and the brassy skies are not by any means to be regarded as delightful; but for the present we are supposing ourselves to be in the track of vessels, and there is some new and poignant interest for every hour. Watch this vast pallid cloud that looms up far away; the sun strikes on the cloud, and straightway ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... was great danger of the men being hurled right across the decks and sustaining serious injuries. The gloomy, lowering, red light which had suffused the sky at the going down of the sun had given place to a dull, copper-coloured glow, mingled with a kind of brassy glare, all the more ominous from the fact that there was no visible source of its origin; for in the ordinary course of events it should have been quite dark, except for such light as was given by the moon, ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... his head on one side, sparrow-wise, looked for a moment at the young man and piped, "You're a brassy pup, aren't you!" ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... retrospective view and consider what tin foil was thirty years ago, we do not wonder that so many operators failed to make tight, good-wearing fillings. As it came from the manufacturer it looked fairly bright, but after being exposed to the air for a short time it assumed a light brassy color, and lost what small amount of integrity it originally possessed. This tin was not properly refined before beating, or something was put on the foil while beating, so that it did not have the clean, bright surface and cohesive quality which our best foil now has. No. 4 ...
— Tin Foil and Its Combinations for Filling Teeth • Henry L. Ambler
... she wanted to make a little festival of the evening to welcome Lionel and his wife. So Jan remembered, and appeared in black. But the gloss of the whole was taken off by Jan having his shirt fastened down the front with pins, where the buttons ought to be. Brassy-looking, ugly, bent pins, as big as skewers, stuck ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... come to maturity, often assume a yellowish or saffron tinge; and the longer neck hackles of black Bantam cocks" (7/28. Mr. Hewitt in 'The Poultry Book' by W.B. Tegetmeier 1866 page 248.), when two or three years old, not uncommonly become ruddy; these latter Bantams occasionally "even moult brassy-winged, or actually red-shouldered." So that in these several cases we see a plain tendency to reversion to the hues of G. bankiva, even during the lifetime of the individual bird. With Spanish, Polish, pencilled Hamburgh, silver-spangled Hamburgh ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... post themselves daily, from early morning, in the cabarets around the Cardinal's abode, which was then at the Hotel de Cleves, near the Louvre. Among the domestics let into the secret, Henri de Campion names positively Gauseville. Over them were placed "the Sieurs d'Avancourt and De Brassy, Picardians, very resolute men and intimate friends of Lie." The pretext given out was that the Condes proposing to put an affront upon Madame de Montbazon, the Duke de Beaufort, in order to oppose ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... she was as interested in everything as usual; as active at the nets, playing superbly, and with all her heart in the game—while it lasted; she swung her slim brassy with all the old-time fire and satisfaction in the clean, sharp whack, as the ball flew through the sunshine, rising beautifully in a long, low trajectory against ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... of Summer shines from out a brassy sky, And has parched and browned the meadows, and the creek's run dry, O sweet it is to wander there and hear the water sing It's rippling song of gladness from ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... when we were all settled at a table in a perfectly charming restaurant, the most restful place to eat in that I ever saw. I can't imagine even a fiend being ill-tempered in it for long; and it was deliciously cool, as if we had come into a shadowy green wood after the blazing, brassy glare of ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
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