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More "Cracked" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the parlor, and when he heard her funny, little, cracked voice calling him, he nearly went crazy: "Jimmy, Jimmy, James Augustus!" she said, which ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... had finished reading his paper. Two bright spots in his cheeks showed that he had felt a good deal in writing it, and the flush returned as he listened to his own thoughts. Poor old fellow! The "cracked Teacup" of our younger wits,—not yet come to their full human sensibilities,—the "crank" of vulgar tongues, the eccentric, the seventh son of a seventh son, too often made the butt of thoughtless pleasantry, was, after all, a fellow-creature, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of interest and ridicule in the public prints. A lively picture has lately been set before us of Gallipoli. Take, says the writer, a multitude of the dilapidated outhouses found in farm-yards in England, of the rickety old wooden tenements, the cracked, shutterless structures of planks and tiles, the sheds and stalls, which our bye lanes, or fish-markets, or river-sides can supply; tumble them down on the declivity of a bare bald hill; let the spaces between house and house, thus accidentally determined, be understood ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... by little during five days, and on the sixth day the thunder cracked, the rain poured down, the ocean billows swelled, the land was flooded, the lightning flashed, the mist closed down, the rainbow arched, the colored cloud rose over ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... down to the very branches, and as they burned down they were put out one after the other, and then the children had permission to plunder the Tree. So they fell upon it with such violence that all its branches cracked; if it had not been fixed firmly in the ground, it would ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... A shell cracked overhead, and the shrapnel ripped down along the trench behind them with a storm of bullets thudding into the ground ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... more indolent life of the metropolis to the quieter and more active pursuits of the country, his character had bettered a little—inasmuch as it was a shade more accessible to spiritual influences; the hard soil had in a few places cracked a hair's breadth, and lay thus far open to the search of those sun rays which, when they find the human germ, that is, the conscience, straightway begin to sting it into life. To this betterment the company of his daughter had chiefly contributed; ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... a celebrity on his own road for the preparation of certain dishes, which no one else could do as well, however many markets and refrigerators and kitchen ranges might be at command. One of these dishes was a peculiar form of cracked wheat, made crisp and savory after some mysterious fashion, and eaten with thick cream. Like most chefs, the cook liked to do the things in which he excelled, and finding that it was admired, he gave the party this ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge
... early formative years of Hugh McVey's life had been spent within sound of the lapping of the waters of the Mississippi River. He had seen it in the hot summer when the water receded and the mud lay baked and cracked along the edge of the water; in the spring when the floods raged and the water went whirling past, bearing tree logs and even parts of houses; in the winter when the water looked deathly cold and ice floated past; and in the fall when it was quiet ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... appears, was occasionally Voltaire's amanuensis there; him he did recommend zealously to the new King of Prussia, who was not deaf on the occasion. This, in the fire of satirical wit, is what we can transiently call "giving alms to a Prussian Excellency;"—not now excellent, but pensioned and cracked; and the reader perceives, Luiscius had probably more than one razor, had not one been enough, when he did the rash act. Friedrich employed Luiscius Junior, with no result that we hear of farther; and seems to have thought Luiscius Senior an absurd fellow, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... recovered my senses after the cracked skull I got from one of your tie-beams," added Lettsome; and Fareham saw that both men had their doublets coated with dust and cobwebs, in a manner which indicated a remorseless searching of places unvisited ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... lords of all. From room to room the wind went shuddering On some vague endless quest; now pausing here To lift an arras, and then hurrying on, To some fresh clue, belike! The sharp-nosed mouse Through joist and floor discreetly gnawed her way, And for her glossy young a lodging made In a cracked corselet that once held a heart. The meditative spider undisturbed Wove his gray tapestry from sill to sill. Over the transom the stone eagle drooped, With one wing gone, in most dejected state Moulting his feathers. A blue poisonous vine, ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... vanished; the twelve-inch armoured conning-tower cracked like an eggshell; the barbette collapsed like the crust of a loaf, and the big 9.2 gun lurched backwards and lay with its muzzle staring helplessly at the clouds. The deck crumpled up as though it had been burnt parchment, ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... bag of gold, and another into the bargain, too high a price to pay for it. What is the use of a house filled with fine furniture when the heart is so full of sorrow? At home we all eat together out of a cracked clay dish across which a tinker had drawn a wire, with rude wooden spoons made by my father, yet how we all relished it!—what ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... cases acute inflammation is treated by employing cold applications during the initial stage. Cracked ice when contained in a suitable sack may be held in contact with the affected part and the pack is supported by means of cords or tapes as suggested in the discussion on treatment of scapulohumeral arthritis on page 66. Later, hot applications ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... captain and Charley were talking; flame and smoke continued to burst out from the point in almost a continuous stream, while those in the canoes were not inactive. Where an arm or leg showed to their hawk-like eyes, their rifles cracked sharply, to be generally rewarded with a howl of pain from some cutthroat who had been winged. But there could be but one end to such a battle. The convicts were well protected behind big trees, while the flimsy sides of their canoes afforded the brave little band ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... comparatively light; but when the climbing of the hill began, numbers of Boers who had been waiting ready poured in their fire. All along the ridge, from behind every rock and stone, the smokeless Mausers cracked (it was then the fire rose to that rippling noise we were listening to on the other side of the range), and the sleet of bullets, slanting down the hill, swept our fellows down by scores. But there was never any faltering. They had been told to ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... the sight of the fat bottle peekin' out of the cracked ice; but she gets over that feelin' after Miss ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... negro whose age was supposed by Mrs. M——r to be about one hundred and twenty. He had been in her husband's house, who was an officer in the Spanish service, when she married, and first came here half a century back, and was then considered past labour. The old boy was quite a wag; cracked several jokes, as well as his want of teeth would let him, upon one of the company about to be married; and, on being shown a lump of fine Cavendish tobacco he had asked for, his eye sparkled like a serpent's. Mr. M——r assured me his appetite ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... Young man in the plain' is my name; 'he that never suffereth corruption' is my name. I am the Soul, the creator of the god Nu who maketh his habitation in the underworld: my place of incubation is unseen and my egg is not cracked. I have done away with all my iniquity, and I shall see my divine Father, the lord of eventide, whose body dwelleth in Annu. I travel(?) to the god of night(?), who dwelleth with the god of light, by the western region of the ...
— Egyptian Literature
... were passing through a denser part than ever; so close were they that the large drooping boughs of some of the trees cracked and rustled and snapped as they passed by, to get to what seemed to be quite a lagoon shining clear and silvery, as seen by those on board the steamer through quite a tunnel of ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... me, and I'll—just look at it." She touched the stained old book with shrinking fingertips; the moldering leather cover and the odor of soiled and thumb-marked leaves offended her. The first page was folded over, and when she spread it out, the yellowing paper cracked along its ancient creases; it was a map, with the signs of the Zodiac; in the middle was ...
— The Voice • Margaret Deland
... the stranger's shoulder with a cat-like quickness of motion and cracked with seemingly no interval of aim-taking, and the bird fell as ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... subject before, but it is so important that the reader must excuse repetition. There came an inevitable severance, an inevitable period of strife. The magic mirror of the soul, reflecting nature as heretofore in calm and simple grace, was suddenly cracked across. The new self-conscious man (not all at once but gradually) became alienated from his tribe. He lapsed into strife with his fellows. Ambition, vanity, greed, the love of domination, the desire for property and possessions, set in. The influences of fellowship ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... and stood a moment, shuddering. Then he went straight to the door. He tried to step lightly. The first stair cracked like a shot. He listened. The old woman stirred in her bed. The staircase was dark. There was a slit of light under the stair-foot door, which opened into the kitchen. He stood a moment. Then he went ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... the river about three p.m. on the 16th, at Makaberab, or, as the natives call it, Omdabiya—i.e., the place of hyenas. For over a mile, men and animals had to make their way through halfa-grass scrub, and then over bare alluvial land, deeply sun-cracked and scored in all directions. The ground was cris-crossed like a chessboard, the lines being a foot to two feet apart, and four to six inches wide, and several feet in depth. There were numberless spills through these pitfalls. One camel snapped his leg, and many mules and horses ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... it," I reminded myself. Followed the voice, a voice from the stable, the cracked, whining tenor of a very aged vassal of the Arrowhead, one Jimmie Time. Jimmie, I gathered, was currying a horse as he sang, for each bar of the ballad was measured by the double thud of a currycomb against the side of a stall. Whistle, guitar, and voice now attacked ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... every one of which bore the stamp of the broker's shop—things which had been graceful and pretty in their day, but from which the ormolu-moulding had been knocked off here, and the inlaid-wood chipped away there, and the tortoiseshell cracked in another place, until they seemed the very emblems of decay. It was as if they had been set up as perpetual monitors—monuments of man's fragility. "This is what life comes to," they said in their ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... banquet. The coaches clattered up to the Grandcourt gate; the seventy, with their wraps and coats, were escorted, by their hosts in a body, to the chariots; horns sounded; cheers answered cheers; caps waved; whips cracked, and in five minutes the Grandcourt gate was as silent as if it guarded, not a fortress of hearty schoolboys, but a ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... a third part of the night had passed Grettir heard a loud noise. Something was going up on to the building, riding above the hall and kicking with its heels until the timbers cracked again. This went on for some time, and then it came down towards the door. The door opened and Grettir saw the thrall stretching in an enormously big and ugly head. Glam moved slowly in, and on passing the door stood upright, reaching to the roof. He turned to the hall, resting his arms on the ...
— Grettir The Strong - Grettir's Saga • Unknown
... scene, which we reached by the time he had brought the tale to a conclusion. It was certainly a most remarkable chasm, whose existence was only to be accounted for by reference to the volcanic agency of which abundant traces exist in Southern France. The whole side of the mountain was cracked and rent asunder, forming a narrow ravine of vast depth, in the manner of the famous Mexican barrancas. In some places might be traced a sort of correspondence on the opposite sides; a recess on one side into which a projection on the other ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... a good deal of a journey, if I remember rightly, but pleasant. Horsham sits in a plain which is as level as a floor—one of those famous dead levels which Australian books describe so often; gray, bare, sombre, melancholy, baked, cracked, in the tedious long drouths, but a horizonless ocean of vivid green grass the day after a rain. A country town, peaceful, reposeful, inviting, full of snug homes, with garden plots, and plenty of shrubbery ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... equal in number to all the other houses; and that the full character of the place might be evident, several faded, tinselled, and painted females looked boldly at the strangers from their open lattices, or more modestly seemed busied with the cracked flower-pots, filled with mignonette and rosemary, which were disposed in front of the windows, to the great risk of the passengers." It is to a dilapidated tavern in the same foul neighbourhood that the gay Templar, it will be remembered, takes Nigel to be sworn in a brother of Whitefriars by drunken ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... long enough, somebody comes. The brave Courier comes, and gives you admittance. You walk into a seedy little garden, all wild and weedy, from which the vineyard opens; cross it, enter a square hall like a cellar, walk up a cracked marble staircase, and pass into a most enormous room with a vaulted roof and whitewashed walls: not unlike a great Methodist chapel. This is the sala. It has five windows and five doors, and is decorated with pictures which would gladden the heart of one of ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... returned John Grueby, beating down his guard with his whip, and striking him on the head with its butt end. 'Yes, I played a little once. You wear your hair too long; I should have cracked your crown if it had been a ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... exhibit much less simplicity and moderation; or, to speak more properly, slovenliness and penury in their dress than in their furniture.... The distance at which they are from the Cape may, indeed, be some excuse for their having no other earthenware or china in their houses but what was cracked or broken; but this, methinks, should not prevent them being in possession of more than one or two old pewter pots, and some few plates of the same metal; so that two people are frequently obliged to eat out ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... temperature of his hot water, wandered into the garden, looked to see if the shrubs were budding, sat at the edge of the water where he had built himself a kiosk, examined the joinery of his house,—had it sprung? had the walls settled, the panels cracked? or he would come in fretting about a sick hen, and complaining to his sister, who was nagging the servant as she set the table, of the dampness which was coming out in spots upon the plaster. The barometer was Rogron's most useful bit of property. He consulted it at all ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... so careless. I'll pay for the goblet cheerfully," Adah said, not to Asenath, but to Anna, who answered kindly: "No matter; it was already cracked across the bottom—don't mind." ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... a thing most terrible to see and to hear, and fit to make one's hair stand on end. The ship was afterwards in equal danger, when the ice formed beneath, raising her and bearing her up as though she had been lifted by some instrument." Soon the ship cracked to such a degree, that prudence dictated the debarkation of some of the provisions, sails, gunpowder, lead, the arquebuses as well as other arms, and the erection of a tent or hut, in which the men might be sheltered ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... thee, whether thy small headpiece be sound or cracked, my boy. But whether this scurvy ruffian be thy father or no, 'tis all one, he shall not have thee to beat thee and abuse, according to his threat, so thou prefer ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... is that of the conservatoire and opera. The Hof Theater, opera, and conservatoire are all under one royal direction. The latter has been recently reorganized with a new director, in accordance with the Wagner notions somewhat. The young king is cracked about Wagner, and appears to care little for other music: he brings out his operas at great expense, and it is the fashion here to like Wagner whether he is understood or not. The opera of the "Meister-Singer ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... head. Never did sailor go aloft more quickly than he swung himself up from branch to branch. Quickly he reached the overhanging bough. At its juncture with the trunk he paused for a second to catch his breath, then swung himself out on it cautiously, hand over hand. The bough creaked and cracked ominously, but did not break. Near the end of the limb he stopped, and throwing a leg over to free his hands, he knotted one end of the rope to the branch and flung the other ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... the garden is a vine-covered arbor, with seats and tables, and at the end of it is the opening into a little chapel, a domestic chapel, carpeted like a parlor, and bearing all the emblems of a loving devotion. By the garden gate hang three small bells, from some old mission, all cracked, but serving (each has its office) to summon the workmen or ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... boat, tearing at his oars till all cracked again. It was as though he wished to punish himself by his gigantic efforts. Her form grew smaller and smaller as he rowed out to sea, till at length she was out of sight; but he had deserved it all. "Deuce take the women!" and each time he repeated the words he sprang to his ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... all at sea. He hung up the telephone receiver with a vague feeling that being a reporter on a special assignment was not all it was cracked ...
— Larry Dexter's Great Search - or, The Hunt for the Missing Millionaire • Howard R. Garis
... itself, filled with all these flaming masses, became so heated that it could no longer be breathed. The atmosphere itself was burning, the glass of the windows cracked,' and apartments became untenable. The Emperor stood for a moment immovable, his face crimson, and great drops of perspiration rolling from his brow, while the King of Naples, Prince Eugene, and the Prince de Neuchatel ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... reflections of the stars. The Chinamen swarmed up the hatch-way, voluble and shrill. Again the "Bertha Millner" lifted and sank, the tubs sliding on the deck, the masts quivering like reeds, the timbers groaning aloud with the strain. In the stern something cracked and smashed. Then the trouble died away, the ripples faded into the ocean, and the schooner settled to her keel, ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... farewell!... On parting with life, to you alone I stretch out my hands. Would I might once more inhale the fresh, bitter fragrance of the wormwood, the sweet scent of the mown buckwheat in the fields of my native place! Would I might once more hear far away the modest tinkle of the cracked bell of our parish church; once more lie in the cool shade under the oak sapling on the slope of the familiar ravine; once more watch the moving track of the wind, flitting, a dark wave over the golden grass of our ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... lbs. of powder each and 8 of lead. had it not have been for that happy expedient which I devised of securing the powder by means of the lead, we should not have had a single charge of powder at this time. three of the canesters which had been accedentally bruized and cracked, one which was carelessly stoped, and a fifth that had been penetrated with a nail, were a little dammaged; these we gave to the men to make dry; however exclusive of those five we have an abundant stock to last us back; and we always take care to put a proportion of it in ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... with the time fixed and fore-arranged. And evident also that ten is the hour awaited; for, while in the act of examining his dial, the old mission clock, restored to striking, tolls just so many times; and, before the boom of its cracked bell has ceased rolling in broken reverberation through the trees, he thrusts the watch hurriedly into his fob. Then stands in expectant attitude, with eyes upon the embouchure of the upper path, scanning it more eagerly than ever. There is a strange coincidence between ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... was over, and just after he had finished the fence round his tent, one day when Robinson was at work in the cave, all of a sudden the earth began to fall from the roof, and the strong props he had put in cracked in a way which frightened him terribly. At the same time there was a curious moaning, rumbling noise, that he could not understand. He rushed out, and so afraid was he that the roof was falling in, and that he should be buried, that he ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... The people were mad with terror and anguish, and, reeling and staggering, sought refuge in every corner in order to avoid the falling beams and splinters. Joseph and Mary looked for Jesus, and found him quietly asleep on a bench. The storm thundered over his head, the masts cracked, but he slept peacefully. Mary bent over him, and climbed on to the bench so that they might not be hurled apart. She would let him sleep on, what could a mother's love do more? But Joseph thought it time to be prepared, and so they woke him. ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... her so that he could look into her face, and the cry upon his lips was frozen into a grief-stricken horror. Her hair unbound, hanging loose, tangled about her face, dull and soiled with the gray sand-dust, her lips dry, cracked, unnaturally big, her cheeks pinched and stamped at the corners of her mouth with the misery through which she had lived—was ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... had thought to baffle him and who, being present at his preachment and hearing the rare shift employed by him and from how far he had taken it and with what words, had so laughed that they thought to have cracked their jaws. Then, after the common folk had departed, they went up to him and with all the mirth in the world discovered to him that which they had done and after restored him his feather, which next year stood him in as good stead as the coals had ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... this life a man does not become godly, what prospect is there that in the next world, starting with sin, there would be a seraph evoluted? Surely the sculptor has more prospect of making a fine statue out of a block of pure white Parian marble than out of an old black rock seamed and cracked with the storms of a half century. Surely upon a clean, white sheet of paper it is easier to write a deed or a will than upon a sheet of paper all scribbled and blotted and torn from top to bottom. Yet men seem to think that, though the life ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... and thin, and by no means reassuring of aspect. With his low, narrow forehead, sunken nose, and hard mouth, he looked like a Kalmuck Tartar; a pair of small, wide-awake black eyes, the crabbed irregular outline of his countenance, a voice like a cracked bell—the man's whole appearance, in fact, combined to give the impression that this was a consummate rascal. A honeyed tongue compensated for these disadvantages, and he gained his ends by talk. Cavalier, a stout, thick-set young fellow, looked more like the driver of a mail ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... broke into a smile. It did really seem as if it cracked, because her lips had been set in such a tight line. "It ain't very often children like flowers unless they can pick them," she replied. "I can't sleep nights sometimes, wishing my garden wasn't so near ...
— Jewel's Story Book • Clara Louise Burnham
... public distress did Tom Walker set up as usurer in Boston. His door was soon thronged by customers. The needy and adventurous, the gambling speculator, the dreaming land-jobber, the thriftless tradesman, the merchant with cracked credit—in short, everyone driven to raise money by desperate means and desperate sacrifices ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... cracked horn she blows, At which the hounds fall a-bounding; While th' moon in her sphere Peeps trembling for fear, And ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... violently. I aimed low, behind his shoulder, and pulled trigger. At the crack of the rifle all the bison, without the momentary halt of terror-struck surprise so common among game, turned and raced off at headlong speed. The fringe of young pines beyond and below the glade cracked and swayed as if a whirlwind were passing, and in another moment they reached the top of a very steep incline, thickly strewn with boulders and dead timber. Down this they plunged with reckless speed; their surefootedness was a marvel in such seemingly unwieldy beasts. A column ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... squealing, crowding to the fence, where, standing with upturned faces and small covetous eyes, they awaited the feast of golden grain which the old man hastened to scatter amongst them. Then, leaning upon the fence, he noted each greedy grunter as he wriggled his small tail in keenest enjoyment and cracked the sweet corn. ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... had received a strain which was too much for it, and one of the iron wings broke partly across; and this flaw, hidden by leather and padding, had been lurking in the dark and biding its time. When Janet braced her foot in the stirrup and made the horse dodge, it cracked the rest of the way, whereupon the jagged point of metal pressed into his shoulder with her weight upon it. It was nothing less than this ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... and that five dollars for the passenger and his two tin boxes was like doing it for nothing. The money was paid; the boxes were loaded into the wagon, and Robert Louis seated upon one of them, with a horse-blanket around him, in the midst of a pouring rain, the driver cracked his whip and started away. He drove three blocks to the starboard and one to port, and backed up in front of Number Ten West Street, which proved to be almost directly across the street from the place where the "Devonia" was docked. But strangers in a strange country can not ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... sit and hear as love hears it grief's heart's cracked grate's screech? Chance lets the gate sway that opens on hate's way and shews on shame's beach Crouched like an imp sly change watch sweet love's shrimps lie, a ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... source of great delight to us when he took a piece of chalk in his hand, sat himself down with us at his round table and began to draw-mills, houses, animals, and all sorts of other things. At the same time he cracked the merriest jokes, which still resound in my ears. Even the chief of his pleasures was not one for him if we did not share it. It consisted in drinking slowly a half jug of brandy, in remembrance of better days, and in smoking a pipe at the same time, on Sunday morning after ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... reddish obelisk of Luxor looked like a column of jet; the fountains were playing in the Place de la Concorde, and in the Tuileries gardens beyond the breeze dreamily stirred the foliage which hid from Lynde's view the gray facade of the gutted palace, still standing there, calcined and cracked by the fires of the Commune. Presently all this began to distract him, and when he returned to the hotel he was in a humor that would have been comparatively tranquil if so many tedious miles had not stretched between Paris ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... and a bullet spatted into the yellow clay, two inches from the toe of his boot. Also, a rifle cracked sharply. He took the hint, and put his hands immediately on a level with ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... thee to understand that I have sat for thirty long years at the head of the Friends' meeting in this town and never has it been said that my wits are cracked. Furthermore, this is none of thy affair. ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... man was driving wrong, once or twice, and was on the point of cursing him to that effect, from the window. But at last, with an anxious throb at his heart, he recognised the dingy archway, and the cracked brown marble tablet over the keystone, and he recognised ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... morella cherries, and a peck of black hearts. Stone the morellas and crack the stones. Put all the cherries and the cracked stones into a demi-john, with three pounds of loaf-sugar slightly pounded or beaten. Pour in two gallons of double-rectified whiskey. Cork the demi-john, and in six months the cherry-bounce will be fit to pour off and bottle for use; but the older ...
— Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry Cakes, and Sweetmeats • Miss Leslie
... Margaret looked forth with a small, white-pillared face, from a grove of oaks. It had a flowery churchyard, and around it a white paling, keeping in the dead, and keeping out all roaming cattle. There was a small cracked bell, and the swallows forever circled above the eaves and in and out of the belfry. Without the yard, beneath the oaks, were a horserack and a shed for carriages. To-day there were horses at the rack and tied beneath ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... me a tin basin, water, a bit of rag for a towel, and a small, cracked mirror, in which my reflection was scarcely recognizable. He was a man of few words, contenting himself with uttering merely a dry comment on Kennedy, who had dropped back into a convenient chair, and buried his ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... of heating points away from the crack might be found in welding a lattice work with one of the bars cracked through (Figure 25). If the strips parallel and near to the broken bar are heated gradually, the work will be so expanded that the edges of the break are drawn apart and the weld can be successfully made. In this case, the parallel bars next to the broken ...
— Oxy-Acetylene Welding and Cutting • Harold P. Manly
... Shalott," said Rudolph Musgrave, "the mirror is cracked from side to side, isn't it? I am sorry. For life is not so easily disposed of. And there is only life to look at now, and life is a bewilderingly complex business, you will find, because the laws of it are so childishly simple—and implacable. ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... the crazy looking vehicle and found the seats ample and comfortable despite the appearance of dilapidation everywhere prevalent. The driver mounted the box, cracked his whip, and the lean nags ambled away ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... daylight and raspberry-red by candle-light, or by daylight transmitted through the stone. As red and green are the military colours of Russia, the mineral became highly popular as a gem-stone. The dark green crystals are usually cloudy and cracked, and grouped in triplets presenting a pseudo-hexagonal form. Alexandrite was found originally in the emerald- mine of Takovaya, east of Ekaterinburg in the Urals, and afterwards in the gold-bearing sands of the Sanarka ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... wonderful things for the city and the whole surrounding country. He once said that we don't know what a valuable thing we have right in our midst. I guess we've lived here longer than he has, and should know a thing or two. It is not necessary for a half-cracked old man to come and tell us of our possessions. But, say, here he is now, coming along in ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... railroad. It was night, and, with nothing better to do, they were waiting to see the train go by. Some were sitting in little groups up and down the platform of the station, and some were perched upon a pile of cross-ties. They seemed to be in great good-humor, and cracked jokes at each other's expense in the midst of boisterous shouts of laughter. The writer sat next to one of the liveliest talkers in the party; and, after listening and laughing awhile, told the "Tar Baby" ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... under that tree, just as politely," explained Katherine, her cracked voice shattered utterly by the tumble, "feeding Sandhelo long blades of grass, when Slim came up the path, puffing the way he always does when he climbs the hill, and sat down beside me to get his breath before going on to his ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... seemed to have a thousand voices of experiences. A great piece was broken off one corner of the footboard. The wound in the wood looked sinister. Directly opposite the bed stood the black walnut bureau, with its swung glass. The glass was cracked diagonally, and reflected the bed and its occupant with an air of experience. Gordon went directly to his patient. Beside him sat Georgie K. He looked at the two doctors and shook his head gravely. His great blond face was unshaven and ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... snake, which was hidden in the grass, bit that very nurse on her foot, so that she fell down as if dead. The Queen was very much vexed by this accident, but she soon selected another, who was just stepping forward when an eagle flew by and dropped a large tortoise upon her head, which was cracked in pieces like an egg-shell. At this the Queen was much horrified; nevertheless, she chose a third time, but with no better fortune, for the nurse, moving quickly, ran into the branch of a tree and blinded herself with a thorn. Then the Queen in dismay cried that there must be some malignant ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... burning, and feet ran up and down. "Fire!" rang from men's voices. Fire cracked above his head; he sprang up at the window, and dashed his hand through it, and fell back. He sprang again, and caught the woodwork; it gave way, and he fell back, nearly stunning himself. The flames roared fearfully ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... billhook from the woodman's shed, and with a ladder climbed into the lower part of the tree, where he began lopping off—"shrouding," as they called it at Hintock—the lowest boughs. Each of these quivered under his attack, bent, cracked, and fell into the hedge. Having cut away the lowest tier, he stepped off the ladder, climbed a few steps higher, and attacked those at the next level. Thus he ascended with the progress of his work far above the top of the ladder, cutting ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... made a severe attack on Lord George Bentinck, who, he asserted, was the real party in the cause. Witnesses for the plaintiff described the horse at various periods of its career; it was of a bay colour, with black legs, and a little white on the forehead; its heels were cracked, and, in 1842, it broke the skin on one leg, which left a scar. George Hitchcock, a breaker of colts, employed to break Running Rein in October, 1842, was cross-examined to ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... up in my book—you see I could do no less after the handsome way he cracked me up in his—and I cant go back on it now. (Breaking loose from Balsquith.) No: its no use, Balsquith: he can dictate his ...
— Press Cuttings • George Bernard Shaw
... returned to the dingle. Isopel was seated near the fire, over which the kettle was now hung; she had changed her dress—no signs of the dust and fatigue of her late excursion remained; she had just added to the fire a small billet of wood, two or three of which I had left beside it; the fire cracked, and a sweet ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... my adieus, the postillion cracked his whip, and we started. "There is no danger of bad weather for a month," said the driver, "and when we get up farther you will see what will pay you for the trouble of coming:" a speech that promised well for the day, I argued; and a certain share of ...
— Scenes in Switzerland • American Tract Society
... the artificial bird was singing its best, and the Emperor lay in bed listening to it, something inside the bird said, "Whizz!" Something cracked. "Whir-r-r!" All the wheels ran round, ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... nothing that becomes a pretty woman more than the mere commonplace act of pouring out tea. It was certainly so in this case. When I looked at the white cloth upon the table, the heavy brass tray, and the silver jugs and teapot, and thought of my own cracked earthenware vessel, then reposing in a cupboard in my office, and in which I brewed my cup of tea every afternoon, I smiled to myself. I felt that I should never use it again without recalling this meal. After that I wondered whether ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... o'clock) Oatmeal, hominy or cracked wheat (cooked three hours), served with milk, a little salt but very little sugar. A soft egg, boiled, poached, or coddled. Stale bread and butter. One glass of warm milk. At 10 o'clock, the juice of ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... princesses looking on trumpeters blowing; and all these personages eating, and their veins filled with sweet-scented juices: works of art made to be destroyed. The guests breached a bastion, crunched a crusader and his horse and lance, or cracked a bishop, cope, chasuble, crosier and all, as remorselessly as we do a caraway comfit; sipping meanwhile hippocras and other spiced drinks, and Greek and Corsican wines, while every now and then little Turkish boys, turbaned, ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... As he cracked this joke, however, a young page came and announced that Mr. Feng had arrived. Pao-y concluded that the new comer must be Feng Tzu-ying, the son of Feng T'ang, general with the ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... gathered around the lamp, putting a new dissected puzzle together. Before he knew how it came about his bashfulness had vanished and he was a part of that circle. When the puzzle was completed Mary brought out a chafing-dish and a bowl of nuts, which she commanded him to "pick out" while Jack cracked them. She was going to try a new kind of candy. Later, when he disclosed the fact that he could play a little on the guitar, Norman brought out his mother's, bidding him "tune up ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... greatly fatigued Rodin, his head fell back upon the pillow, and he wiped his cracked and bleeding lips ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... on wheels then in the vicinity with its two broken-winded horses, and the clown with the cracked voice, and the big woman with the red face, and the thin and hungry ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... talked, at first, of the cloaks being disturbed; but Madame Beck told me afterwards she thought they hung much as usual: and as for the broken pane in the skylight, she affirmed that aperture was rarely without one or more panes broken or cracked: and besides, a heavy hail-storm had fallen a few days ago. Madame questioned me very closely as to what I had seen, but I only described an obscure figure clothed in black: I took care not to breathe the word "nun," certain that this word would at once suggest to her mind an idea of romance ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... and Blind Hal of Bednall Green? Verily, that was the purport of my message. The poor knave hath been sorely sick and more cracked than ever this autumn; insomuch that Father Robert spent whole nights with him; and though he be better now, and as much in his senses as e'er he will be, such another access is like to make an end of him. Now, Father Robert saith that you, Sir Page, know who the poor man is by birth, and that he ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... he was a cracked egg," Ross muttered. He looked to where Crowley slouched, his eyes narrow as though considering his chances of rushing the other. Crowley grinned and shook his head. "Don't ...
— The Common Man • Guy McCord (AKA Dallas McCord Reynolds)
... He cracked his whip, and at the junction of a cross-road fell in with and joined the travelers. My father was well known to his lordship, who expressed much pleasure that the journey to the capital should be ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... discovered a remarkable rock to the north-east, named by the Indians the Rock-nest, and then recollected that the river ran at its base. Our course was immediately changed to that direction, but the traverse we had then to make was more dangerous than the former one. The ice cracked under us at every step and the party were obliged to separate widely to prevent accidents. We landed at the first point we could approach but, having found an open channel close to the shore, were obliged to ferry the goods across on pieces ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... the blazing logs and lay as still as though life no longer animated their tawny bodies. From far away there came the lonely howl of a wolf; a great white man-owl fluttered close to the camp and chortled his crazy, half-human "hello, hello, hello;" the trees cracked with the tightening frost, but neither wolf howl nor frost nor the ghostly visitant's insane voice aroused those who ...
— The Gold Hunters - A Story of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds • James Oliver Curwood
... Thursdale to expand with the pressure of fate; but something in him cracked with it, and the rift let in new light. He went up to his friend and ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... the jurisdiction of the Terran Empire. When he'd cracked that safe and made off with a hundred thousand credits, he'd headed here, because the planet was part of something called the Clearchan Confederacy. No extradition treaties or anything. Perfectly safe, if the planet ...
— The Helpful Robots • Robert J. Shea
... brings everything already prepared, in which case the waiters are busy unpacking the big tin boxes and placing the bain-marie (a sort of fireless cooker receptacle in a tank of hot water) from which the hot food is to be served. Huge tubs of cracked ice in which the ice cream containers are buried are already standing in the shade of the areaway or ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... driven many miles with the stream. In the mean time, I sent another party to fetch the guanicoes which our people had shot the night before; but they found nothing left except the bones, the tygers having eaten the flesh, and even cracked the bones of the limbs to come at the marrow. Several of our people had been fifteen miles up the country in search of fresh water, but could not find the least rill: We had sunk several wells to a considerable depth where the ground appeared moist, but upon visiting them, I had the mortification ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... of deeper hue than perse, Was of a calcined and uneven stone, Cracked all asunder ...
— Dante's Purgatory • Dante
... slowly on. The few spectators teased the ant-eater in one corner, or the first violin in another. One or two young farmers' boys were a little uproarious with egg-pop, and danced awkward breakdowns at the end of the tent. Then a cracked bell sounded and the curtain rose, showing hardly more of the stage than was plainly ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... an' fetch't, an' fliskit, [plunged, stopped, But thy auld tail thou wad hae whiskit, capered] An' spread abreed thy weel-fill'd brisket, [chest] Wi' pith an' pow'r, [rooty hillocks, Till spritty knowes wad rair't and riskit, roared, cracked] An' slypet owre. ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... utterly desolated by a horde of savage Scythians from the mountains of the north and east, such people as we now call the Kurds. Its palaces had no lofty Greek columns to stand for memorials, as at Palmyra or Persepolis; and when the outer casings of brick and alabaster were cracked away, and the ashes of the upper stories and the clay of the inner constructions, soaked by the rains, covered the ruins of temple and palace, nothing was left to mark the site but the grass-covered hill. No wonder that ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... three men, each in different ways exhibiting how small a thing Absalom's death was to all but the heartbroken father, and each going his own road, heedless of what lay below the heap of stones. The world goes on all the same, though death is busy, and some heart- strings be cracked. The minute details which fill the most part of the story, lead up to, and throw into prominence, David's burst of agony at the close. The three men, Ahimaaz, Joab, and the Cushite (Ethiopian), are types of different kinds of self-engrossment, which is little touched ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... who blunder into saying unpleasant things, there are a few who do so of set intention. And such people ought to be cracked. They can do a great deal of harm,—inflict a great deal of suffering. I believe that human beings in general are more miserable than you think. They are very anxious,—very careworn,—stung by a host of worries,—a good ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... the greatest fire and intensity, assuming sometimes the aspect of a battle. Blows with the formidable sticks were given and received. Brown skins were streaked with blood, heads were cracked, and a Cayuga was killed. Such killings were not unusual in these games, and it was always considered the fault of the man who fell, due to his own awkwardness or unwariness. The body of the dead Cayuga ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... A twig cracked sharply under Pollyanna's foot, and the man turned his head. With a cry of dismay Pollyanna ran ...
— Pollyanna • Eleanor H. Porter
... become of that dreadful man who had hissed his threats in her ear? He had quite vanished; there was no doubt about that. No one could be more different than this mild old man, who kept on saying kind things in his cracked voice. Elsie, watching him very narrowly, thought she saw something that reminded her of the Uncle William who had so mysteriously disappeared, and wondered whether this might be really his father. Yet that did not make his presence there ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... not a bad-looking young man, for while his horses were drinking he laid over on the broad bare backs and bending down studied his own reflection in the bright water. Then an old woman came out of a cottage close by, and began talking to him in her West Country dialect in a thin high-pitched cracked voice. Their talking was the only sound in the village; so silent was it that all the rest of its inhabitants might have been in bed and fast asleep; then, the conversation ended, the young man rode out with a ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... hands and clasps them, like a child praying. Since, however, the BABY does not stop wailing, he hovers over it in indecision; then, picking it up, sits down again to dandle it, with his face turned toward the open window. Finding that it still wails, he begins to sing to it in a cracked little voice. It is charmed at once. While he is singing, the AMERICAN appears in the corridor. Letting down the passage window, he stands there in the doorway with the draught blowing his hair and the smoke of his cigar all about him. The LITTLE MAN stops singing and shifts ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... just felt as if I had to chew something," she protested. "You know well enough what breakfast was like, Jerry Meredith. I COULDN'T eat scorched porridge and my stomach just felt so queer and empty. The gum helped a lot—and I didn't chew VERY hard. I didn't make any noise and I never cracked the ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... He'd whoop um an sen' um tuh de fiel'. Dey couldn' visit no slaves an no slaves was 'lowed tuh visit em. So mah cousin Sallie watched him hide de key so she moved dem a li'l further back so dat he had tuh lean ovah tuh reach dem. Dat mawnin soon when he come tuh let em out she cracked him in de haid wid de poker an made little Joe help put his haid in de fiuh place. Dat day in de fiel' Little Joe made er song; "If yo don' bleave Aunt Sallie kilt Marse Jim de blood is on huh under dress". He jes hollered hit. "Aunt Sallie kilt Marse Jim." Dey zamined Aunt Sallie's under ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... kinds, with game in huge numbers, and whole tuns of the best liquors, foreign and domestic. Thus the highroads were filled with droves of bullocks, sheep, calves, and hogs, and choked with loaded wains, whose axle-trees cracked under their burdens of wine-casks and hogsheads of ale, and huge hampers of grocery goods, and slaughtered game, and salted provisions, and sacks of flour. Perpetual stoppages took place as these wains became entangled; and their rude drivers, swearing and ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... reminder of Gloria that all existence had become, it was necessary for him to have hope. So he built hope desperately and tenaciously out of the stuff of his dream, a hope flimsy enough, to be sure, a hope that was cracked and dissipated a dozen times a day, a hope mothered by mockery, but, nevertheless, a hope that would be brawn and sinew ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the reins, cracked the whip, shouted a couple of banzais from the Japanese national anthem, and away we rushed like the wind—when it ...
— You Can Search Me • Hugh McHugh
... His entwined fingers cracked as he tore his hands apart, flung out his arms, and leaned his forehead on them in a passion of fury. The other two looked at his shaking back—the attenuated Mr. Jones with mingled scorn and a sort of fear, Ricardo with the expression ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... that minute to speak of the matter, and inquire into its magnitude. They be all of them disposed to say that it will burn itself out fast enough like other fires; but I trow some amongst them are aroused to a fear that it may spread far in this dry wind, and with the houses so parched and cracked with heat. Then I came away, having done mine errand, and went back to the fire. It had spread all too fast even in that short time, and the worst thing is that no means seem to be taken to stop it. The people run about ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... turquoise collar till the clasp gave way and thrust the blue stones into the low-cut bodice. The band sounded louder than ever, the light danced and waved. Round and round and round again, while the ring-master's whip cracked monotonously. ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... to lay hands on a few of them myself, Master Guy," Tom said earnestly, "say out in that wood there with a quarter-staff, and to deal with four of them at a time. They have burnt my bow, and I shall not get even with them till I have cracked fully a ...
— At Agincourt • G. A. Henty
... for I cannot kill. And if you, then, had come to Falaise and gone to the market, you might have bought a pennyworth of cherries of me. And all this might have been if I had not, one day, heard an old half-witted blind man play a cracked fiddle on the high road, thirty ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... legs really is broken," said Mother, as she set the Horse upright. And, being a wooden horse with rockers under him, such as some chairs have, the Horse could stand upright, even though one of his legs was cracked clear through. ...
— The Story of a White Rocking Horse • Laura Lee Hope
... and twisted in his weakening bonds. There was a soft snapping as several now thoroughly dried sections of the brown substance cracked loose. The termite team whirled around; the ruler stared, as though in sudden ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... little group of old boatmen sitting at the end of the bridge on a long bench that was their especial property. They moved stiffly and slowly; their white heads were bowed breastward; their voices were cracked with age. Yet they seemed to be cheery together, as they basked in the hot sunshine—that warmed only comfortably their lean old bodies—and talked of ancient victories over sand-bars and rapids: and the while looked southward over the broad Rhone water ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... the bell was cast, and the result was even worse. Still the metals obstinately refused to blend one with the other; and there was no uniformity in the bell, and the sides of it were cracked and fissured, and the lips of it were slagged and split asunder; so that all the labor had to be repeated even a third time, to the great dismay of Kouan-Yu. And when the Son of Heaven heard these things, he was angrier than before; and sent his messenger ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... at the thought of you marryin'. 'Be the hokey O!' he says whenever I go a-near him, an' then he starts laughin' an' tellin' me it's the great news altogether. 'I wish,' says he, 'the oul' lad was alive. He'd be makin' hell's blazes for joy!' Och, he's cracked, that fella. I tell him many's the time it's in the asylum he should be, but sure, you might as well talk to the potstick as talk to him. He'll drive you to the station with a heart an' a han', and the capers of him when ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... speak—waited with a keyed-up intensity of longing that was almost physically painful. At last, unable to bear the continued silence, she spoke again. Her voice cracked a little. ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... around the head of the third mate and there was a long scream from Kamasura—but the blacksnake only cracked loudly in the air. Borgson laughed with a hideous delight. Harrigan, sickly white, bowed his head. Again the blacksnake whirled and again it cracked, but this time on naked flesh, and the scream of Kamasura was like the ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... "I have this advantage over some, that I cannot be fooled with the fancy that this poor miserable body of mine is worth thinking of beside the smallest suspicion of duty. What is it but a cracked jug? So down the slope I went, got into the garden, and made my way through the tangled bushes to the house. I knew the place perfectly, for I had often wandered all over it, sometimes ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... name Is "Fortune", spins within the swirl Of waters cold and oceans' ring, Condemned, forsaken for his sin. On earth they plunder'd, robbed and stole From month to month and year to year; There Franchise-stealers cracked with leers As Plebeians stung, groaned with might. Now one and all damn'd on this shoal Yuck addling brains and shriek with fear, Now all shrink at Hell's laughing seers As Remorse storms the ughly night. Here Pat McCarrens filch no vote, A Grady eats no mellow pea, A ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... distinctions of race, but descend into the minuter subdivisions of states and commonwealths, nay, that they honeycomb the town, the village, and even the family, so that the surface of society all over the world is cracked and seamed, sapped and mined with rents and fissures and yawning crevasses opened up by the disintegrating influence of religious dissension. Yet when we have penetrated through these differences, which affect mainly the intelligent and thoughtful part of the community, we shall find underlying ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... wrath rose higher at sight of the steam and smoke. A fire was the very thing he had defied the gipsies again and again to make on his land. He cracked his whip with a vicious snap, and rushed ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... and small measures of water, or of such milk as the camels and goats could yield, were served out to the people; but the portion we obtained was scarcely sufficient to cool our parched tongues. Our very skin felt like leather, and was cracked and scorched all over. A short time only could be given for rest, however; another blast might sweep up clouds of sand and overwhelm us; another fatiguing march during a day and night over the Desert had to be passed. Besides, every drop ...
— Saved from the Sea - The Loss of the Viper, and her Crew's Saharan Adventures • W.H.G. Kingston
... the ice was there, The ice was all around: It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, Like noises ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... speak only "Mex," had got no supper ready. Knight would let Annesley do nothing, but he deftly helped the woman to fry some eggs and make coffee. He tried to find dishes which were not cracked or broken, ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... mind and heart of your own creatures: think of them long, entirely, solely: never of style, never of self, never of critics, cracked or sound. Like the miles of an open country, and of an ignorant population, when they are correctly measured they become smaller. In the loftiest rooms and richest entablatures are suspended the most spider-webs; and the quarry out of which palaces ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... was the proper liberator of Persimmon Sneed, and that the payment of money would encourage crime. The contradictory man's wife was ready to commit crime, if necessary, in this cause, and would have cheerfully cracked the bank in Colbury. And certainly this seemed almost unavoidable at one time, for to possess herself of this sum of her husband's hoard his signature was essential. The poor woman, in her limp sunbonnet and best calico dress, clung to the grating of the teller's window, and presented in futile ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... note was the second explosive point in our conversation. I was too much concerned at the moment to take in all his words implied or to appreciate the fine dexterity with which a difficult situation was being handled. These decisive sentences were cracked off quick, sharp, emphatic, like the snapping of a bunch of firecrackers. I began a "But, Mr. Rogers," when he interrupted, and his words ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... Rifles cracked along the line while those sappers and patrols sent out by the enemy—who hardly believed life still possible in the shattered trenches—were shot down or driven back to cover. Henri then, peering over the trench, turned of a sudden and rushed to ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... planted in the earth. Around these holes were then hung blankets, and all the cooking utensils of the deceased, pots, kettles, and pans, each with a hole punched through it, and all her crockery-ware, every piece of which was first cracked or broken, to render it useless; and then, when all was done, they left her to remain for one year, when the bones would be buried in a box in the earth directly under the canoe; but that, with all its appendages, would never be molested, but left ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... cried Cunningham in a high, cracked voice. "To put our heads into hemp at the last moment. If anything happens to young Cleigh, back to Manila you go with the yacht! Clear out! At the last moment!" It was ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... has cost thee a cracked crown?" asked Erling, a little more gently, as he observed the exhausted condition of ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... thy rogue's sconce cracked shall be, Thy base-born bones be-thwacked shall be. I'll deal thee many a dour ding For that thou darest ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... whack," said the doctor. "It's cracked her skull. It'll be weeks before she gets over it—if she ever does. I'll ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... or nothing! She is within sixty yards of us, and she keeps advancing. We turned the horses' tails to her. I knelt on one side, and, taking aim at her breast, let fly. The ball cracked loudly on her tawny hide, and crippled her in the shoulder, upon which she charged with an appalling roar, and in the twinkling of an eye she was in the midst of us, At this moment Stofolus's rifle exploded in his hand, and Kleinboy, whom I had ordered ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... gathered the ripened apples themselves, and now goodly garlands of them hung from the attic-rafters, above the dried beans whose blossoms had so sweetened June, and above last year's corn-bins. That corn the first passing neighbor should take to mill and exchange a portion of for cracked wheat; and as the flour-barrel still held out, they would be tolerably well off for cereals, little Jane thought. They had kept only one cow, and Tommy Low would attend to her for the sake of his suppers,—suppers at which Vivia must forego her water-cresses now; but Janet had a bed of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... widening trade deficit and higher inflation are emerging risks to the economy. Georgia has suffered from a chronic failure to collect tax revenues; however, the new government is making progress and has reformed the tax code, improved tax administration, increased tax enforcement, and cracked down on corruption. Government revenues have increased nearly four fold since 2003. Due to improvements in customs and financial (tax) enforcement, smuggling is a declining problem. Georgia has overcome the chronic ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... travellers even at nightfall pushed by his door and drove to the next town. Teamsters and drovers, who in those days were apt to be very thirsty, learned, even before temperance societies were thought of, to practice total abstinence on that road, and cracked their whips and goaded on their teams in full view of a most tempting array of bottles and glasses, from behind which the surly little landlord glared out upon them with a look which seemed expressive of all sorts of evil wishes, broken ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... wood kindled. A million sparks flew out as it cracked under the assault of the devouring fire. The flame spread itself out to a larger volume; it widened, expanded, and clasped the kindling all around in its fervid embrace. The flame had been baffled at first; ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... wonderful to see Tanno fight. Every swing of his pole cracked on a skull. Men fell about him by twos and threes, ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... than this! Good-by, Mr. Striker!" He strode across the room, seized a mallet that lay at hand, and before Rowland could interfere, in the interest of art if not of morals, dealt a merciless blow upon Mr. Striker's skull. The bust cracked into a dozen pieces, which toppled with a great crash upon the floor. Rowland relished neither the destruction of the image nor his companion's look in working it, but as he was about to express his displeasure ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... there had been no wind, saving a light zephyr that laid its bitter finger on the exposed flesh. Now a legion of devils were preparing for attack. A sound like unto a human sigh broke the silence. It died away and came again, a little stronger. Immediately Jim pulled the "leader" dog to the lift and cracked the ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... with John, to whom she was always kind, though she thought him "cracked," and after a little desultory hovering about the shells, for which she did not really care, except when they were made up with glass beads, she was apt to sit down on the after-deck, with John beside her (unless the Skipper appeared, in which ...
— Nautilus • Laura E. Richards
... he knew, Receive thou my blood too (quoth he), and therewithal he drew His sword, the which among his guts he thrust, and by and by Did draw it from the bleeding wound, beginning for to die, And cast himself upon his back. The blood did spin on high As when a conduit pipe is cracked, the water bursting out Doth shoot itself a great way off, and pierce the air about. The leaves that were upon the tree besprinkled with his blood Were dyed black. The root also, bestained as it stood A deep dark purple colour, straight upon the berries cast, Anon scarce ridded ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... more light, so she opened the door wide and pushed aside the curtain. A fragment of cracked mirror was nailed to the door. She faced it, rapidly undoing the glossy masses of her hair; then lifting her gown, she buckled the army belt underneath, slipped the revolver into it, smoothed out the calico, and crossed the floor ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... thou arbiter of friendship, protector of the guest, preserver of fellowship, lord of the hearth, launcher of the lightning, avenger of oaths, compeller of clouds, utterer of thunder (and pray add any other epithets; those cracked poets have plenty ready, especially when they are in difficulties with their scansion; then it is that a string of your names saves the situation and fills up the metrical gaps), O Zeus, where is now your ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... place; in 1865 one of the largest towns in New Zealand was to be seen. Wood and canvas were the building materials—the wood unseasoned pine, smelling fresh and resinous at first, anon shrinking, warping, and entailing cracked walls, creaking doors, and rattling window-sashes. Every second building was a grog-shanty, where liquor, more or less fiery, was retailed at a shilling a glass, and the traveller might hire a blanket and ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... some choice little chickens left in her care by the doctor. But not one light was to be seen in any place, and the inky blackness was awful to look upon, so I turned away, and just as I did so, something cracked and rattled down over the shingles and then fell to the ground. But which roof those sounds came from was impossible to tell. With "goose flesh" on my arms, and each hair on my head trying to stand up, I went back to ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... bank with such force as to draw the pintles of our rudder. This finished us for the day: before it could be replaced, it was time to make fast for the night; so there we lay, holding by our rotten piece of rope, which cracked and strained to such a degree, as inclined us to speculate upon where we might find ourselves in the morning. However, we could not help ourselves, so we landed, made a large fire, and cooked our victuals; not, however, venturing ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... the darkness a shriek split the night like a sudden flash of flame—a great ringing scream that cracked and swelled and stopped. With one wild effort the man hurled himself out the door and plunged through the darkness. Panting and cursing, he flashed his huge revolver—"bang! bang! bang!" it cracked into the night. The sweat poured from his forehead; the terror ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... to stoop to enter the stage, and, once in, he appeared to fill that side upon which he sat. Then the driver cracked his whip; the stage lurched and began to roll; the motley crowd was left behind. Helen awakened to the reality, as she saw Bo staring with big eyes at the hunter, that a stranger adventure than she had ever dreamed of had began with the rattling ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... indistinguishable pattern, was partially torn from the walls and the hanging portions swayed in the same current of air that waved the cobwebs. There was no furniture of any description in the room, except the heavy, gilt-framed mirror over the mantel. It was cracked and much of the gilt frame had fallen away. She went into the next room, then into the one beyond that, which seemed to stretch across the back of the house, and so through the door at the left of the room into ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... long since cracked open the valve of his oxygen flask when the climb was ended, and his goggles were frosted in the arctic cold so that it was only with difficulty he ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... Keefe turned on full power, and the thing simply melted within its case. All I saw was a surge of white-hot metal pouring over the plinth, a glimpse of Salad's inscription, 'To the Eternal Memory of the Justice of the People,' ere the stone base itself cracked and powdered into ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... suit of clothes, now pressed and cleaned after the rough trip from the coast, and dressed as carefully as possible in the dingy room of my boarding house. A glance into the cracked mirror convinced me, that, however I might have otherwise suffered from the years of hardship, I had not deteriorated physically. My face was bronzed by the sun, my muscles like iron, my eyes clear, every movement of my body evidencing strength, my features lean and clean ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... wolverine took a jump, and the first time nearly reached the sky; the second time he cracked it, and the third time he made a hole and crawled in. Ojeeg nimbly followed, and they found themselves on a beautiful, green plain. Lovely shade trees grew at some distance, and among the trees were rivers and lakes. ...
— Thirty Indian Legends • Margaret Bemister
... overtime," himself, preferring to lay down the law to companionable persons in neighboring cafes rather than to possible clients in his office. When Tompkins had lighted the gas, Larcher saw a cracked low ceiling, a threadbare carpet of no discoverable hue, an old desk crowded with documents and volumes, some shelves of books at one side, and the other three sides simply walled with books and magazines in ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... Church had been saved; the concentration of the fire fighters around its corner had been efficacious. The stout old structure which had survived so many years of winters out of the east had survived one peril more. Its brick walls stood with their paint cracked and split, its tower tottered, scorched and feeble, but the building itself was intact. Score one to Boston, and to the indomitable forces battling for ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... power, and the consequent pleasures, in their full degree. For observe, that a thing is not properly said to have been the result of a great power, on which only some part of that power has been expended. A nut may be cracked by a steam-engine, but it has not, in being so, been the subject of the power of the engine. And thus it is falsely said of great men, that they waste their lofty powers on unworthy objects: the object may be dangerous or useless, but, as far as the phrase has reference to difficulty of performance, ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... sultry, and even the sand, on which we rested, was very hot. Our last drop of water was consumed. My father did not know it, but I had given it to him. I had begun to suffer dreadfully from thirst. My throat seemed lined with a coating like the face of a file, and my lips were hard and cracked; while the skin, from the drying effects of the sun, the wind, and the sand, was peeling off my face. My father did not feel so much pain as I did; but my strength, I fancied, had in no way failed me, and I thought ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... visit no slaves an no slaves was 'lowed tuh visit em. So mah cousin Sallie watched him hide de key so she moved dem a li'l further back so dat he had tuh lean ovah tuh reach dem. Dat mawnin soon when he come tuh let em out she cracked him in de haid wid de poker an made little Joe help put his haid in de fiuh place. Dat day in de fiel' Little Joe made er song; "If yo don' bleave Aunt Sallie kilt Marse Jim de blood is on huh under dress". He jes hollered hit. "Aunt ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... distant thunder rolled behind heavy and opaque clouds. Ethelberta bade adieu to her attentive satellite, called to Cornelia, and entered a cab; but before they reached the inn the thunder had increased. Then a cloud cracked into flame behind the iron spire of the cathedral, showing in relief its black ribs and stanchions, as if they were the bars of a blazing ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... patio a low door gave access to a long, but narrow and damp, corridor that was everywhere black; only at the extreme end there was a square of light that entered through a high window with a few cracked, filthy panes,—a ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... himself free of my grasp as the besiegers again launched their battering-ram against the door with a frightful crash, and his revolver cracked smartly thrice, as he bent far out with one hand clinging to the ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... especially considering how great a favourite she is, and my Lady Yarmouth's friend. The monarch is never less generous than when he has a mind to be so: the only present he ever made my father was a large diamond, cracked quite through. Once or twice, in his younger and gallant days, he has brought out a handful of maimed topazes and amethysts, and given them to be raffled for by the maids of honour. I told my Lady Yarmouth it had been a great loss ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... evidently for the purpose of eating it where they feel most at home. This one had gathered a half dozen big fresh-water clams onto his dining table, and sat down in the midst to enjoy the feast. He would take a clam in his fore paws, whack it a few times on the rock till the shell cracked, then open it with his teeth and devour the morsel inside. He ate leisurely, tasting each clam critically before swallowing, and sitting up often to wash his whiskers or to look out over the lake. A hermit thrush sang marvelously sweet above him; the ...
— Wilderness Ways • William J Long
... the banquet," he would exclaim as he lit up a sou's worth of wood with which to fry the herring. The little squares of sausage would be placed on the soap dish. At times he prevailed on the Count to go down and get the cracked pitcher full of water, which made up their morning drinking cordial, while Paul was frying the herring. After it was cooked, it was scrupulously divided into two equal parts and they seated themselves. After meals they generally went out to ascertain news from the government ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... each side of the fixed table furnished seating capacity for twenty men, provided none objected to an occasional nudging from his neighbor's elbow. The dishes, different from any she had ever eaten from, were of enormously thick porcelain, dead white, variously chipped and cracked with fine seams. But the food, if plain, was of excellent quality, tastily cooked. She discovered herself with an appetite wholly independent of silver and cut glass and linen. The tin spoons and steel knives ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... When a pistol cracked, far down the road, and a faint yell came shrilling through the quiet sunshine, they craned necks till their muscles ached. Like a summer sand-storm they came, and behind them clattered their friends, the dust concealing horse and rider alike. Whooping ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... our fault, for, from a military point of view, it is now impregnable." What the effect of a bombardment may be upon the morale of the inhabitants we have yet to see. In any case, however, until several of those hard nuts, the forts, have been cracked, a ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... up, with the reins in his hand, and called out to the horses to start on. He talked to his horses in French, and they seemed to understand him very well. The great thing, though, was cracking his whip. You can scarcely conceive how fast and loud he cracked his whip, first on one side and then on the other, till the whole court rang again. The horses sprang forward and trotted off at great speed out of the place, and wheeled round the corner to the quay; and while they were going, the conductor came climbing up ...
— Rollo in Geneva • Jacob Abbott
... is a hole in the earth made visible. That is to say, in old days, when mountains were much loftier than they are now, various agencies brought it to pass that they split and cracked and yawned down to the innermost cores of their being in such hideous fashion that chasms and holes of great depth and perpendicularity were opened in them. Thereupon the interior fires were released, and these, vomiting up a vast supply of molten material, filled said ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... the stories were all told, the jokes all cracked, and the laughter all laughed, and the little deacon wished the parson good-by, and jogged happily homeward; but more than once he laughed to himself, and said, "Bless my soul! I didn't know the parson had so much fun in him." ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... similitude of some strange and presumably extinct saurian; and a Dresden china shepherdess, whose shattered crook had long since disappeared, peeped coquettishly through the engraved crystal of a tall candle shade at the bloated features of a mandarin, on a tea-pot with a cracked spout—that some Darrington, stung by the gad-fly of travel, had brought to the homestead from Nanking. A rich blue glass vase poised on the back of a bronze swan, which had lost one wing and part ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... strongly built and had not yielded to their shoulders. Throwing down his empty rifle, Tuttle ran into the portal, thrust Ellhorn to one side as if he had been a boy, and lunged against the door with all his ox-like weight. Mead threw himself against it at the same instant, and it cracked, ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... more effect than to kick up the dust once behind and once ahead of them as they ran. The instant they reached the rocks where they found shelter Bucks drew back out of sight, and none too soon, for as he pulled himself away from the ledge, a rifle cracked viciously from below and the slug threw a chunk of granite almost up into his face; the fat man was ...
— The Mountain Divide • Frank H. Spearman
... so that he could look into her face, and the cry upon his lips was frozen into a grief-stricken horror. Her hair unbound, hanging loose, tangled about her face, dull and soiled with the gray sand-dust, her lips dry, cracked, unnaturally big, her cheeks pinched and stamped at the corners of her mouth with the misery through which she ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... speech than you think. Every sentence with which he dismisses a refractory subordinate is a nut of which the shell must be cracked in order to get at the kernel. When he tells you to remember your parents and their sad fate, such words from his lips, and under the present circumstances, can hardly mean anything else than this: that you should not forget how easily ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... such a lack of power in our lives? The reservoir up yonder is full to overflowing, with clear, sweet, life-giving water. And here all around us the earth is so dry, so thirsty, cracked open—huge cracks like dumb mouths asking mutely for what we should give. And the connecting pipes between the reservoir above and the parched plain below are there. Why then do not the refreshing waters come rushing down? The answer is very plain. ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... potatoes, cracked open, white as the snow without, floury and smoking; dabs of Mrs. Iden's delicious butter, a little salt and pepper, and there was a dish for a king. The very skins were pleasant—just ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... overspreading its banks on either side, while far below, and most dreadful of all, the fall could be heard of pieces of the earth's crust into pits of fire and the vast rumble and groan of a world. Houses crumbled, people were pressed to death and maimed in the blackness, streets cracked asunder, trees were uprooted, chaos ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... the declining light still resting sweetly on the woods and hamlets. There are no postilions in the world, I believe, who can handle their whip like those of Italy. In very pride and joy our postilion cracked his whip, till the woods rang again. He took a peculiar delight in startling the echoes of the old villages, and the ears of the old villagers. Each report was like that of a twelve-pounder. This continual thunder, kept up above ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... together half an hour later, and they walked up through the hot main street of the little colliery town. It was not an attractive place, with rickety plank sidewalks raised several feet above the street, towering telegraph-poles, wooden stores, and square frame houses cracked by the weather, and mostly destitute of any adornment or paint. Blazing sunshine beat down upon the rutted street, and an unpleasant gritty ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... for the Duchesse's ball. I will get an invitation for you, and will keep the cotillion for you. The idea of running away as you did, and never telling any one where you were going to. I always said you were a little cracked. And letting all your things be sold! If you had only told me! I should like so much to have had that Turkish ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... midst of destruction there were enclaves of unshaken structures. On the Rue Mazel, "Main Street," the chief clothing store rose immune amid ashes on all sides. Its huge plate-glass window was not even cracked. And behind the window a little mannikin, one of the familiar images that wear clothes to tempt the purchaser, stood erect. A French soldier had crept in and raised the stiff arm of the mannikin to the salute, pushed back the hat to a rakish angle. The mannikin seemed alive ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds
... falchion lightened with a sudden gleam, As the pike's armor flashes in the stream. He sheathed his blade; he turned as if to go; The victim knelt, still waiting for the blow. "Why strikest not? Perform thy murderous act," The prisoner said. (Hs voice was slightly cracked.) "Friend I HAVE struck," the artist straight replied; "Wait but one ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Halvor's watch. The chain to which it was attached was also a clumsy contrivance. The case was quite plain and dented. It was not much of a watch: it had no crystal, and the enamel on its face was cracked. ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... Mose nodded in his chair, Duke sat in the open doorway, stuffing the last banana into his little stomach, which was already as tight as a kettle-drum. He had cracked his whip until he was tired, but he still kept cracking it. He cracked it at every fly that lit on the floor, at the motes that floated into the shaft of sunlight before him, at special knots in the door-sill, or at nothing, as the spirit ...
— Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... pretty woman more than the mere commonplace act of pouring out tea. It was certainly so in this case. When I looked at the white cloth upon the table, the heavy brass tray, and the silver jugs and teapot, and thought of my own cracked earthenware vessel, then reposing in a cupboard in my office, and in which I brewed my cup of tea every afternoon, I smiled to myself. I felt that I should never use it again without recalling this meal. After that I wondered whether it would ever be my good fortune to sit in this ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... the weapon's muzzle into line with the hideous face above him, then sent a stream of lead crashing upward into the creature's head. The bullet struck squarely home. The tentacles tightened convulsively with a force that almost cracked Powell's ribs. Then in another paroxysm of agony the ...
— Devil Crystals of Arret • Hal K. Wells
... wagon-driver intimating that we had at length reached our proper location, we took our boxes out of the wagon, and placed them on the ground. He bade us goeden dag, or farewell, cracked his long whip, and drove away, leaving us to our reflections. My wife sat down on one box, and I on another. The beautiful blue sky was above us, and the green grass beneath our feet. We looked at each other for ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... 42-centimeter guns, the first of Germany's terrible surprises, were brought into action against these forts, and their concrete and armored steel turrets were cracked as walnuts are cracked between the jaws of a nut-cracker. The Army of the Meuse then made its way like a gray-green cloud of poison gas through Belgium. A cavalry screen of crack Uhlan regiments preceded it, and it made no halt worthy of note until ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... statesman that has dropped his mask and cracked his sackbut. Men trust him for what he is, and he never deceives ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... wondered dreamily, could he have meant? Not Ruby! Ruby was dead. I looked at his stiff body again and shuddered. The whistle of a train sounded from the valley below, and then an errand-boy passed along the road at the back of the house (for the second or third time that day) singing in a cracked voice the fragment of a popular melody, of which I am sorry to say ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... bird always ready to sing?" said Leah tenderly, as she beheld the innocent, happy child by her side. "May you never know a note of sadness, my love; sing on, while you may." Then Leah sadly turned her eyes upward to the cracked, stained wall overhead, and faintly murmured, "Here I am at last, alone-alone in the Queen City, friendless and penniless-alone in the place where I once possessed thousands-alone in my search for the only being who ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... on this day he had spoken out—gently, deprecatingly, but frankly—before the whole company. Never had Mildred Gower been so sad and so blue as she was that day and that night. She came to the rehearsal the following day with a sore throat. She sang, but her voice cracked on the high notes. It was a painful exhibition. Her fellow principals, who had been rather glad of her set-back the day before, were full of pity and sympathy. They did not express it; they were too kind ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... his way to the Green Meadows. He had brushed his red coat until it shone. His white waistcoat was spotless, and he carried his big tail high in the air, that it might not become soiled. Reddy was feeling as fine as he looked. He would have liked to sing, but every time he tried his voice cracked, and he was afraid that some one would hear him and laugh at him. If there is one thing that Reddy Fox dislikes more than another, ...
— The Adventures of Unc' Billy Possum • Thornton W. Burgess
... rule, been men who were as much below the level of moral respectability as conventionalism had already adjudged them to be below the level of social respectability. Regard anyone as a mirror with a cracked face and he will soon justify your opinion of him. If the morals of Chinese actors will not bear investigation it is probably due to the social ostracism to which they have always been subjected. The same phenomenon may be seen in connection with Buddhism. As soon as Buddhism in China ceased ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... The very severe injury to the ramparts, particularly on the northwest side to the casemates, all along the front, (which were cracked from end to end,) to the levees, which were completely riddled, and to the works in general. The demolition was so great, that the shell holes in the ground left hardly anywhere a free passage ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Belgium, the danger buildings are erected on a novel plan. They are circular in ground plan and lighted entirely from the roof by means of a patent glass having wire-netting in it, and which it is claimed will not let a splinter fall, even if badly cracked. The mounds are then erected right up against the walls of the building, exceeding them in height by several metres. For this method of construction it is claimed that the force exerted by an explosion ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... about searching in asylums, and rivers, and woods, and floods. And whenever they heard any sound, they stood rising their heads, anxiously thinking that their son was coming, and said, 'O yonder cometh Satyavan with Savitri!' And they rushed hither and thither like maniacs, their feet torn, cracked, wounded, and bleeding, pierced with thorns and Kusa blades. Then all the Brahmanas dwelling in that hermitage came unto them, and surrounding them on all sides, comforted them, and brought them back to their ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... nail—a regular she cat. And I wasn't idle, though all I had was that hatchet and my long arms. But they were too many for me, and there was no place for me to put my back against a wall. When I come to, minutes after they'd cracked me on the head—here, ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... great apartment where the treasure lay less damage was wrought by the earthquake. A few ingots toppled from the higher tiers, a single piece of the rocky ceiling splintered off and crashed downward to the floor, and the walls cracked, though ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... white men drove their spurs deep into their horses' flanks, throwing themselves forward in their saddles with the same motion. With mad plunges the animals leaped toward the highwaymen. Even as he spoke Abe's gun had cracked thrice in quick succession—the Mexicans firing at about the same instant. Two of the horsemen on the left went down and the surveyor reeled almost out of his saddle. But Holmes did not see. His own revolver ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... could see a great black object coming straight at me. I knew well it was a smack, an' gave a roar that might have done credit to a young walrus. The smack seemed to sheer off a bit, an' I heard a voice shout, 'Starboard hard! I've got him,' an' I got a blow on my cocoanut that well-nigh cracked it. At the same time a boat-hook caught my coat collar an' held on. In a few seconds more I was hauled on board of the Cherub by Manx Bradley, an' the feller that was clingin' to my neck like a young lobster was Fred Martin. The Saucy Jane went ...
— The Lively Poll - A Tale of the North Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... points away from the crack might be found in welding a lattice work with one of the bars cracked through (Figure 25). If the strips parallel and near to the broken bar are heated gradually, the work will be so expanded that the edges of the break are drawn apart and the weld can be successfully made. In this case, the parallel bars next to the broken one would be heated highest, the next ...
— Oxy-Acetylene Welding and Cutting • Harold P. Manly
... inn-yard, and issued into the street. A passing priest doffed his cap, and a few urchins in grimy shirts shouted, "Gentleman, please give a poor orphan a trifle!" Presently the driver noticed that a sturdy young rascal was on the point of climbing onto the splashboard; wherefore he cracked his whip and the britchka leapt forward with increased speed over the cobblestones. At last, with a feeling of relief, the travellers caught sight of macadam ahead, which promised an end both to the cobblestones ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... star' effect, and those silent, amazed folks that Mary had compelled to come up the trail; the children and dogs and that comical boy tolling an old, cracked dinner bell; the procession to the clump of trees where the old women's children and grandchildren are buried—why, Aunt Doris, I see it all like a wonderful picture! There's no place on earth ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... hand upon the stage, for the poor fellow was feeble, the moment he got himself erect with his face to the audience, he plunged into his song, if song it could be called, executed in a cracked and strained falsetto. The result, enhanced by the nature of the song, which was extremely pathetic and dubiously moral, must have been excruciation to every good ear and every sensitive nature. Long before the relief of its close arrived Hester had made up her mind that it was her ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... sand. Night came again, a cold, windy night. I slept well until a mule stepped on my bed, which was conducive to restlessness. At dawn, cold, gray clouds tried to blot out the rosy east. I could hardly get up. My lips were cracked; my tongue swollen to twice its natural size; my eyes smarted and burned. The barrels and kegs of water were exhausted. Holes that had been dug in the dry sand of a dry streambed the night before in the morning yielded ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... shot cracked the back of the seat within the two-inch space between the shoulders of Littlefield and Miss Derwent. The next went through the ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... white pine; the arabesque screens and lattices that looked as if made of pierced cardboard; the golden minarets that seemed to be glued to the shell-like towers, and the hollow battlements that visibly warped and cracked in the fierce sunlight,—all appeared more than ever like a theatrical scene that might sink through the ground, or vanish on either side to the sound of the prompter's whistle. Recalling Raymond's cynical insinuations, he could not help fancying that the house had been built by a conscientious ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... into even more violent action. She leaped into the air and then took off at a rapid trot, then a run. Her hands were tearing at her clothes and her mouth seemed to be working violently. She was halfway to the top of the nearest dune before a rifle cracked. She dropped, to ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... undisguised hard selfishness to servants and dependants, counting their every approach to comfort a needless waste,—grudging the Roman Catholic cook her cup of tea at dinner on Friday, when she must not eat meat,—and murmuring that a cracked, second-hand looking-glass must be got for the servants' room: what business have they to want to know how ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... they crack five others: these are afterwards ground and smoothed on the edges. In the Tyrol the rough watch glasses are supplied at once from the glass house; the workman, applying a thick ring of cold glass to each globe as soon as it is blown, causes a piece, of the size of a watch glass, to be cracked out. The remaining portion of the globe is immediately broken, and returns to the melting pot. This process could not be adopted in England with the same economy, because the whole of the glass taken out of the pot is subject ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... wears on, the tranquillity grows more profound. The villas opposite stand asleep in the sunshine; the sound of a single footstep is heard on the pavement; and anon you hear the feeble, cracked voice of old Willie, the water-cress man, distinctly articulating the cry of 'Water-cresses; fine brown water-cresses; royal Albert water-cresses; the best in London—everybody say so.' The water-cresses are welcomed on the terrace as an ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... Colonel's house had received a coat of paint, which, like Madame Latour's rouge in her latter days, only served to make her careworn face look more ghastly. The kitchens were gloomy. The stables were gloomy. Great black passages; cracked conservatory; dilapidated bathroom, with melancholy waters moaning and fizzing from the cistern; the great large blank stone staircase—were all so many melancholy features in the general countenance of the house; but the Colonel thought it perfectly, cheerful ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... A Gern blaster cracked with a vivid blue flash and the man plunged lifelessly to the ground. She flinched instinctively and fell over an unseen rock, the bag of precious clothes flying from her hand. She scrambled up again, her left knee half numb, and turned ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... this is awful! Every bone in me is cracked and this silk dress is ruined—yes, is ruined! I tell yer it ain't fit for Mirandy's little gal's doll! And my! I know my heart is broken, too; I can hear it rattle! I'll never come with you and that horrid ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... monkeys climbing a tree—the female had a little one in her arms. Where the bird had wings, and the beasts four legs planted on the ground, the monkeys had arms, and, at the end of each, hands, with five fingers; they gathered nuts and cracked them, and picked out the kernels, throwing the shells away—the mother caressed her young one with gentle fingers. The Soul saw also the larger ape with its almost upright form. 'Ah!' sighed the Soul, 'they ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... taking a stiff walk. I took supper with Madame Dubois, and we sat at table till midnight. Her conversation pleased me more and more; her mind was well-furnished, her speech elegant, and she told her stories and cracked her jokes with charming grace. She was devoid of prejudices, but by no means devoid of principle. Her discretion was rather the result of system than of virtue; but if she had not a virtuous spirit, her system would not have shielded her from ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... I clenched my rifle. From the loops we poured Quick shots upon the foe, who, shrinking back, To the low cabin-roofs applied the brand— Up with fierce fury flashed the greedy flames. Just then my brother thrust his head from out A loop—quick cracked a rifle, and he fell Dead on the planks. With yells that froze my blood, A score of warriors at the blockhouse-door Heaped a great pile of boughs. A streak of fire Ran like a serpent through it, and then leaped Broad up the sides. Through every ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... unfriendly air after the death of his friend the great King, he kept the seas as a free trader, and far and wide roamed the longship which he commanded. The gruff old captain who guarded the port of Wisby [Footnote: Wisby, A famous old walled town on the island of Gottland.] against all sea-thieves, cracked his face into what was meant for a happy smile when his watchers told him that the inrushing craft looked surely enough like Ulf's. The laughter-loving fisherwomen of Marwyk [Footnote: Marwyk. An old seaport on the coast of Flanders.] sprang up and threw silvery herring at ...
— The Iron Star - And what It saw on Its Journey through the Ages • John Preston True
... waited for rescue. In the meantime she fastened the outrigger back on the canoe, using for lashings all the cocoanut fibre she could find, and also what remained of her ahu. The canoe was badly cracked, and she could not make it water-tight; but a calabash made from a cocoanut she stored on board for a bailer. She was hard put for a paddle. With a piece of tin she sawed off all her hair close to the scalp. Out of the ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... going to pinch them all. I'll tell you. It was easy. I piped the Magpie off to a chap named Kenleigh having the bonds up there in his rooms in an apartment house. I couldn't crack Kenleigh's safe myself, but it was nuts for the Magpie—see? He cracked the safe. I was with him, and I copped that near-diamond pin of his, and left it there so there wouldn't be any guessing as to who pulled off the job, and then we beat it back to his place to divide—and I beaned him. I ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... it comes into contact with the stigma, in the abnormal flowers the outer coat of the pollen-grains split while still within the anther, from which latter, indeed, they could not escape, owing to the indehiscent nature of the latter. Again, the pollen-tube of the abnormal grains cracked, in its turn, on mere exposure to the air, and liberated the fovilla, so that the pollen of these atrophied anthers was necessarily impotent, because it opened before it could be applied to the stigma, even had that been rendered possible by ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... Rosa grew more and more bewildered. The baby howled a great deal during the day. His large china christening-bowl was cracked by Mrs. Gashleigh altering the flowers in it, and pretending to be very cool, whilst her hands ...
— A Little Dinner at Timmins's • William Makepeace Thackeray
... glaring surface of hardened chalk, in the crevices of which the usual prickly plants can alone exist. Some of the hill-tops exposed a smooth natural pavement where the rain had washed away all soluble portions and left the bare foundation cracked in small divisions as though artificially inlaid. Now and then a wretched specimen of the Pinus Maritima, about six feet high, was to be seen vainly endeavouring to find nourishment in the clefts of the barren rocks. I do not believe the ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... Gordon among them. Before the evening was past it had been arranged that these would-be-martyrs should hire a truck, and make their debut on Main Street the very next evening. Old hands in the movement warned them that they would only get their heads cracked by the police. But the answer to that was obvious—they might as well get their heads cracked by the police as get them blown to pieces ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... Never did sailor go aloft more quickly than he swung himself up from branch to branch. Quickly he reached the overhanging bough. At its juncture with the trunk he paused for a second to catch his breath, then swung himself out on it cautiously, hand over hand. The bough creaked and cracked ominously, but did not break. Near the end of the limb he stopped, and throwing a leg over to free his hands, he knotted one end of the rope to the branch and flung the ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... anyway. But if the Boss isn't nursing a cracked wrist, it isn't my fault. I don't know what Jeems did to Red, but he, too, departed in a damaged condition. Do you have to do that?" Val demanded testily, squirming as Rupert ran his hands lightly over the boy's shoulders and down his ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... hundred feet I could hear pursuers, and a moment later a revolver cracked, ploughing up the dust in front of me. Another bullet followed, and, seeing that affairs were getting desperate, I dodged round the end of some cars, only to plump into a man running at full speed. The collision was so unexpected that we both ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... be cracked and cold, Though ruin all the place enfold, These ashes that have lost their name Shall warm my life with ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... women! Lads and lasses!" he cried in a shrill, cracked voice of strange accent. "Hither, hither quickly, and make ready to give your pennies. For the tumbling is about to begin,—the most wonderful tumbling ...
— John of the Woods • Abbie Farwell Brown
... last the slapping and shuffling of shoes along the pavement within, as the portress and another nun came to let him in. Then there were faint rays of light from their little lamp, quivering through the cracks of the old weather-beaten door upon the cracked marble steps on which Sor Tommaso was standing. A thin voice asked who was there, and Sor Tommaso answered that he was the doctor. Then he heard a little colloquy in suppressed tones between the two nuns. The one said that the doctor was expected and must be let in without question. ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... has been strained; the potatoes should be lightly shaken to allow the moisture to steam out. This makes them mealy and more palatable. Potatoes which have been baked in their skins should be pricked when tender, or the skins be cracked in some way, otherwise they very soon become sodden. A very palatable way of serving potatoes, is to peel them and bake them in a tin with a little oil or butter, or vege-butter; they should be turned occasionally, in order that they should brown ...
— The Allinson Vegetarian Cookery Book • Thomas R. Allinson
... music began again with such violence that the painted canvas trembled. The clown, having seized the sticks of a drum fixed on one of the beams of the scaffolding, mingled a triumphant rataplan with the bombardment of the bass-drum, the cracked thunder of the cymbals, and the distracted wail of the clarionet. The ringmaster, roaring again with his heavy voice, announced that the show was about to begin, and, as a sign of defiance, he threw two or three ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... and melted and froze; and April came, and wherever the Poor Boy went with his love there was a sound of water falling, running, and roaring. The ice in lakes and streams wore thin along the shores, broke, lost its grip, tinkled in the brooks, clashed and cracked in the river. In the lakes the margin of water between the ice islands and the shore grew wider and wider. In open spaces, faced south, the snow melted and thinned until black soil showed in patches. Rain came, more and more ...
— If You Touch Them They Vanish • Gouverneur Morris
... in a long sweep. It must have been built a hundred years ago, he thought, and it might have seemed a charming, comfortable old place were it not so unutterably dejected and dingy. Its windows were cracked, the grass grew tall and ragged upon its lawns, a litter of rubbish lay about the back door, and the woodwork, that should have been white, was gray ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... Creek corral. The boys got betting pretty lively that I dassent make my word good as to dealing with him, so I loped my cayuse full tilt by Mr. Snake, and swung down and catched him up by the tail from the ground, and cracked him same as a whip, and snapped his head off. You've saw it done?" he said ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... A bleak grandeur clung to it still. Decayed mouldings, it had aplenty: great splotches on wall and ceiling, where plaster had been tried through the year and found wanting; unsightlier splotch between the windows whence the tall gilt mirror had been plucked away for cash; broken chandelier, cracked panes, loose flooring, dismantled fireplace. But view the stately high pitch of the chamber, the majestic wide windows and private balcony without, the tall mantel of pure black marble, the still handsome walnut paneling, waist-high, the massive splendid doors. No common ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... said Tansley. "And they've distributed all the various official posts, sinecures most of 'em, amongst their friends. That Town Trustee business is the nut to crack here, Brent, and a nut that's been hardening for centuries isn't going to be cracked with an ordinary implement. Come now, ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... barbed wire does not ring like a cracked bell unless somebody touches it; and from the darkness just in front and above their heads, Dan and Dennis heard a guttural whisper, and, realising that they were immediately under the enemy's parapet, lay as flat ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... Doctor Thomas Mayberry of Providence drew might have cracked the breast of a giant. In this world no record is kept of the great moments when a private individual's universe collides with his far star and ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... we grappled like two wild beasts, my fingers at his throat. I knew the strength of the man, but my first blow had sent his brain reeling, while the surprise of my unexpected assault gave me the grip sought. He struggled to one knee, wrenching his arms free, but went down again as my fist cracked against his jaw. Then it was arm to arm, muscle to muscle, every sinew strained as we clung to each other, striving for mastery. He fought like a fiend, gouging and snapping to make me break my hold, ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... his religion. He had always been naturally religious, taking on trust what he was taught; and he had an instinctive pleasure in clean and healthy things. But on winter nights at the mountain, when the tingling stars sprang in and out of their black ambush and frost cracked the tombstones; in summer, when lightning crackled in the woods and ripped along the hillside like a thousand devils, the need of a God grew ever more urgent. He spoke ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... creature. Much of this good discourse we had. But here, above all, I was pleased to see the person who had his blood taken out. He speaks well, and did this day give the Society a relation thereof in Latin, saying that he finds himself much better since, and as a new man, but he is cracked a little in his head, though he speaks very reasonably, and very well. He had but 20s. for his suffering it, and is to have the same again tried upon him: the first sound man that ever had it tried on him ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... it another way, Gaster might be called the object-glass through which Duespeptos looked out upon the world,—a glass always bubbly, distorted, and cracked, generally filmy and smoky, never achromatic, and decidedly the worse for wear. I think that the world thus seen must have had a very odd look to him. His most fitting salutation to each fellow-peptic, as he crossed the field of vision, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... No fire could be got to burn and no tea had been made. There was nothing to eat except a few very hard ration biscuits and some eggs boiled hard the night before, and now frozen through and through. One cracked the shell and found icicles beneath, and miserably held fragments of egg in one's mouth ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... I cut with a sickle, and then thrashed it with a flail. Mrs Young sewed several sheets together, and one day, when there was a steady, gentle breeze blowing, we winnowed the chaff from the wheat in the wind. There were no mills within hundreds of miles of us; so we merely cracked the wheat in a hand coffee-mill, and used some of it for porridge, and gave the rest to the Indians, who made use of it in ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... the Roman under the unprovoked storm had the young Jew's sympathy; so that when he reached the corner of the house, the latter leaned yet farther over the parapet to see him go by, and in the act rested a hand upon a tile which had been a long time cracked and allowed to go unnoticed. The pressure was strong enough to displace the outer piece, which started to fall. A thrill of horror shot through the youth. He reached out to catch the missile. In appearance the motion ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... at he knew not what intervals thereafter. He was conscious of cruel torment and a clumsy transfer into another vehicle, confused sounds of groans, curses, waving lights, and the hissing of escaping steam almost in his very ears. Then the anguish of thundering wheels, until his cracked brain reeled and he was mercifully unconscious. How long? His eyes opened on a clean white wall, flowers hung from the windows in plumy festoons, birds sang in the yellow dazzling sunlight. What could ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... the hard deck, nibbled what little ship bread was not water-soaked,— for they had lost all their bacon,—and caught rain water to drink. In cold, hunger, and wet, these men, like true American sailors, sang their songs, cracked their jokes, and ...
— Hero Stories from American History - For Elementary Schools • Albert F. Blaisdell
... given utterance to this amazing rigmarole stood at the top of a terrace flight (much cracked and broken) between two leaden statuettes (headless)—a willowy child in a large-brimmed hat, with a riding-switch in one hand and the other holding up an old tartan shawl, which she had pinned about her to imitate ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... hereafter. The variety of utensils presented showed that some of the poor souls had been hard put to it for things to fetch their soup in. One brought a pitcher; another a bowl; and another a tin can, a world too big for what it had to hold. "Yo mun mind th' jug," said one old woman; "it's cracked, an' it's noan o' mine." "Will ye bring me some?" said a little, light- haired lass, holding up her rosy neb to the soupmaster. "Aw want a ha'poth," said a lad with a three-quart can in his hand. The benevolent-looking old gentleman who had taken ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... a cracked voice close to his side. "He must have had but a poor education, since he does not know how to cross a little stream like this. Or is he afraid of wetting his fine golden-stringed sandals? It is a pity his four-footed schoolmaster ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... crouching in the position from which he had catapulted the red-haired man, cast upwards a single glance at the other brother, and then he sprang in. The poker hissed through the air with the vigour of a strong man's arms behind it and it would have cracked the head of Mac Strann like an empty egg-shell if it had hit its mark. But it was heaved too high, and Mac Strann went in like a football player rushing the line, almost doubled up against the floor as he ran. ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... after day echoing with the steady fusillade from marsh to covert, from valley to ridge. Guns flashed at dawn and dusk along the flat tidal reaches haunted of black mallard and teal; the smokeless powder cracked through alder swamp and tangled windfall where the brown grouse burst away into noisy blundering flight; where the woodcock, wilder now, shrilled skyward like feathered rockets, and the big northern hares, not yet flecked with snowy patches of fur, loped off into swamps ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... saw that it was filled with little knots of men, some of whom stared at her father, though as she passed their hats came off. Miss Schuyler, on her part, noticed that most of the stores were shut, and felt that she had left New York a long way behind as she glanced at the bare wooden houses cracked by frost and sun, rickety plank walks, whirling wisps of dust, and groups of men, splendid in their lean, muscular symmetry and picturesque apparel. There was a boldness in their carriage, and a grace that approached the statuesque in ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... break a player's nerve by pounding at a weakness, do it. I remember winning a 5-set doubles match many years ago, against a team far over the class of my partner and myself, by lobbing continually to one man until he cracked under the strain and threw the match away. He became so afraid of a lob that he would not approach the net, and his whole game broke up on account of his lack of confidence. Our psychology was good, for we had the confidence ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... the relics on my knee. The metal of each was tarnished out of knowledge. But the trumpet was evidently an old cavalry trumpet, and the threads of its parti-colored sling, though fretted and dusty, still hung together. Around the side-drum, beneath its cracked brown varnish, I could hardly trace a royal coat-of-arms and a legend running, "Per Mare Per Terram"—the motto of the marines. Its parchment, though black and scented with woodsmoke, was limp and mildewed; ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
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