Free translatorFree translator
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




More "Dwindling" Quotes from Famous Books



... The dwindling away of the race is, however, inevitable. A few anecdotes may perhaps throw unaccustomed light upon attributes not generally understood, and show that the Australian aboriginal, uncouth savage as he is, is not altogether devoid ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield

... history we know that the development of cold storage in the eighties (which we may regard for the present purpose as equivalent to an increased demand for Australian mutton) caused considerable perturbation in the woollen and worsted industries of Yorkshire. They were faced with a dwindling supply and a soaring price of merino wool; and the adaptability with which they met the situation, and won prestige for the crossbred tops, and yarns and fabrics, to which they largely turned is a matter of just pride in the trade to-day. The fact, however, that this alteration ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson

... just verging above the crimson horizon of his pulpit.—"Awake, thou that sleepest!" Why, the text is quite opposed to DOZINESS! But what of this, if the preacher be addicted to drawling, the weather unobligingly sultry, and you yourself have gradually been dwindling from an uncongenial state of wakefulness into a sleepy calm? 'Tis too much ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various

... scanty resources dwindling fast. One by one his old commissions were paid and disappeared down the hopper of household expenses. He took to thinking of what would happen when the commissions were all paid, and to haunting Fisher's office. Fisher was his contractor client and owed him five hundred dollars. But ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller

... one-sixtieth) of a second. With the stronger light there is a more rapid and a greater loss of the initial intensity of the impression or effect of stimulus, and though each successive effect remains as long, or longer, in dwindling intensity, you get want ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester

... second worry presented itself, one fully as serious. The provisions were dwindling, the seed-sacks shrinking fast, and, estranged from Lounsbury, they had nowhere to ask credit ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates

... beauty, the cards of life's eager game. We gather them up joyfully; but, alas! how rapidly their fictitious beauty fades, and what miserable pasteboard affairs they become to us, as, one by one, we lay them down, and see our treasures dwindling away from us with them, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various

... we sighted a dark, distant ridge, thirty miles away, and the course was corrected by its bearing. Our extravagant hopes of finding a permanently calm region had been dwindling for the last few miles, as a hard bottom, a few inches under the surface, had become evident. They were finally dispelled by a south-west wind springing up during ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... turn his hand to whatever came readiest. I knew one in particular, whose brother is at this moment serving as colonel in the army in India, a man more fitted for a gay London life than a residence in the colonies. The diggings were too dirty and uncivilized for his taste, his capital was quickly dwindling away beneath the expenses of the comfortable life he led at one of the best hotels in town, so he turned to what as a boy he had learnt for amusement, and obtained an addition to his income of more than four hundred pounds a year ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey

... Gera, Saalfeld, to Coburg, is our next day's journey. Up one fork of the Leipzig Pleisse, then across the Leipzig Elster, these streams now dwindling to brooks; leading us up to the water-shed or central Hill-countries between the Mayn and Saale Rivers; where the same shower will run partly, on this hand, northward by the Elster, Pleisse or other labyrinthic course, into the Saale, into the Elbe; and partly, on the ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle

... apparelled, and with a beard curled and plaited into a thousand ringlets. On the other side, plying her industry with unruffled defence, walked Ylga, once again fan-girl, and so still second lady in this dwindling kingdom. ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne

... of conjugal difficulties between Arthur and his queen. But unfortunately these last are not confined to Arthurian experience; and, as we have seen, Arthur's fights with the Saxons, except the last when they joined Mordred, are of ever-dwindling importance for the Romance. ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... and son, and Frank Merrick stood on the gravel-bed outside the little wooden box doing duty as station at Ransome, New Mexico. The transcontinental flier which had dropped them, was dwindling in the distance. Jack Hampton, whom the chums and Mr. Temple had crossed the country from New York to join, was in the center of the group. Greetings had been exchanged, they had all slapped each other on the back indiscriminately and enthusiastically, and now Bob Temple stood ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge

... Rangers were they when they arrived at Washington's headquarters; shoes worn out, clothes in tatters. There they found a dwindling army. The battles of the Brandywine and Germantown had been fought in their absence, and the British were in Philadelphia, planning for a hilarious winter. What remained of the American army must ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane

... the first, much of the second. Kygpton itself was a world as large as your entire solar system, with a diameter roughly of four billion miles. Our ancestors knew that Kygpton was dying, that the store of our most precious element Sthalreh was dwindling. But already our ancestors had mastered the forces of our universe, had made inventions that are beyond your understanding, had explored the limits of our universe in space-cars that were propelled by the free energies in ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei

... this policy, many of them converted to Christianity through your efforts, might very well class your Easter anthems and their great teaching with the newspaper canard relative to a "growing spirit of justice in South Africa"; for our bitter experience proves that spirit to be at best but a dwindling one. ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje

... our forefathers, and a great deal wiser! "Such a craze, however, is too widely diffused, and falls in with too obstinate a preconception [17] in the human race, which has in every age hypochondriacally regarded itself as under some fatal necessity of dwindling, much to have challenged public attention. As real paradoxes (spite of the idle meaning attached usually to the word paradox) have often no falsehood in them, so here, on the contrary, was a falsehood which had in it nothing paradoxical. ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... the Fatherland by reason of its dwindling birth rate. The cradles of Germany are empty to-day; it is your duty to see that they are filled. You bachelors, when your leave comes, marry at once the girl of your choice. Make her your wife without delay. The ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis

... inheritance would be gathered up by Catholics. "Are this belief and friendship," asks the Abbe Etienne, "an indication of the speedy reunion of the children of Mahomet with the great Christian family? We have much reason to think so, when we behold Islamism everywhere dwindling away and giving place to the true faith." Damascus, so sacred in Mussulman estimation, and so intolerant that no Christian could pass within its gates except bareheaded, and on paying a capitation tax, now beholds with pleasure the celebration of Catholic rites. So great ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell

... Town it was quite evident that our sheep were not flourishing. They were, in fact, dwindling daily. Something had to be done, so my father hired a farm about ten miles away, in the direction of Kabousie. I volunteered my services as caretaker of the flock, and to my intense gratification ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully

... whose lives were out of chime, or to inaugurate the existence of new republics. One face I shall never forget. It was that of the self-made temporary dictator of a little country whose importance was dwindling to the dimensions of a footnote in the history of the century. I had been acquainted with him personally in the halcyon day of his transient glory. Like his picturesque land, he won the immortality of a day, was courted and subsidized by competing states ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon

... Adamites, [Footnote: The rise of these oddities is nearly contemporary with Wycliffe and is, like his career, about one hundred years previous to the Reformation proper: the sects are of various longevity. Some, like the Calvinists, have, while dwindling rapidly in numbers, kept their full doctrines for now four hundred years, others like the Johanna Southcottites hardly last a lifetime: others like the Modernists a decade or less: others like the Mormons near a century, their close is not yet. I myself ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc

... 12th a hard frost set in, and until Christmas a strong gale from the southeast blew. No succour could reach the town. The garrison were dwindling fast, and ammunition falling short. It required fully 4000 men to guard the walls and forts, while but 2500 remained capable of bearing arms. It was known that the archduke soon intended to make an ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty

... world. My own initiations were rapid, as became an old sailor, and so, it seemed, were Miss Mavis's, for when I mounted to the deck at the end of half an hour I found her there alone, in the stern of the ship, her eyes on the dwindling continent. It dwindled very fast for so big a place. I accosted her, having had no conversation with her amid the crowd of leave-takers and the muddle of farewells before we put off; we talked a little about the boat, our fellow-passengers and our prospects, ...
— The Patagonia • Henry James

... the flea probably started on its downward course as a comparatively large insect, probably larger than the Ornithomyia. That insect has been able to maintain its existence, without dwindling like the Leptus into a mere speck, through the great modification in organs and instinct, which adapt it so beautifully to the feathery element in which it moves. The bush-tick, wingless from the beginning, and diverging in another ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson

... fever; yet he was, unhappily, with them rather than with Fanny. God knew there was fever enough in his brain! But the winter night was cooling it—a minor image of the final office of death; the choking hunger for Savina was dwindling. He hoped that it wouldn't be repeated. He couldn't answer for himself through many such attacks. Yes, his first love, though just as imperative, had been more ecstatic; the reaching for an ideal rather than the body ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer

... aspect of the Thames Valley in English history dwindles with the dwindling of military energy in our civilisation, and passes with the passing of a governing class that was ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc

... commissariat of his army. Thus the difficulties of the Imperial treasury increased. Justinian became more and more unwilling to loosen his purse-strings for the sake of a province which showed an ever-dwindling return. The pay of the soldiers got more and more hopelessly into arrear. They deserted in increasing numbers to the standard of the brave and generous young king of the Goths. Hence, it came to pass, that in the ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin

... fatal blow at the heart of France. France held her head up still, bleeding from many wounds, but defiant still; and the German High Command, aghast at their own losses—six hundred thousand casualties—already conscious, icily, of a dwindling man-power which one day would be cut off at its source, rearranged their order of battle and shifted the balance of their weight eastward, to smash Russia. Somehow or other they must smash a way out ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... bushes and grasses consisted of globules, glossy spheres of scarlet that ranged in size from pinheads to the bulk of large pumpkins. The branches of the vegetation were formed from strings of the globules set edge to edge and tapering in size like graduated beads strung upon wire, dwindling in bulk until the tips of the branches were as fragile as the fronds of maidenhair fern. The bulk of the shrubbery was head-high, and so dense that Powell could see for only a couple of yards into the thicket ...
— Devil Crystals of Arret • Hal K. Wells

... sir," replied Colin Camber, drawing toward him a piece of newspaper upon which rested a dwindling mound of shag. "This is most disturbing, of course. But since I have not rendered myself amenable to the law, it leaves me moderately unmoved. Upon your second point, Mr. Harley, I shall beg you, to enlarge. You tell me that Don Juan ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer

... of Kent, her train borne by Lady Flora Hastings, and her coronet by Viscount Morpeth; the Duchess of Gloucester, her train borne by Lady Caroline Legge, and her coronet by Viscount Evelyn. (The royal generation next that of George III. was fast dwindling away when these three ladies represented the six daughters and the wives of six of the sons of the old King and Queen. But there were other survivors, though they were not present to-day. The Queen-dowager; Princess Augusta, an aged woman ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler

... of the Daily Mail; unable to talk a foreign language; and with no knowledge of the sciences which are of military use."[15] To this may be added the fact that these young dullards, the supply of whom is dwindling, are, on joining the service, encouraged and accepted rather with reference to their sporting and social qualities than to their ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited

... way beneath your foot, to lose the use of an organ will be to let the alpenstock slip out of your starting fingers. And the excitement, and be sure the happiness, of existence will be to protract the struggle as long as possible, to push as far as you can along the dwindling path, to keep the supports and the alleviations of your labour about you as skilfully as you can, and in the fuss and business of the little momentary episodes of climbing to forget as long and as fully as may be the final and absolutely unavoidable plunge. [A pause, during ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse

... tops below the clear warble of the purple finch proclaimed that under the fronds twilight had fallen. The vast green surface of the hills was streaked here and there with irregular peaks of darkness dwindling eastward. The ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White

... Continent, nor in the solemn problems of Hindustan; it is not the Yellow peril nor the Black peril nor any danger in the wide circuit of colonial and foreign affairs. No, it is here in our midst, close at home, close at hand in the vast growing cities of England and Scotland, and in the dwindling and cramped villages of our denuded countryside. It is there you will find the seeds of Imperial ruin and national decay—the unnatural gap between rich and poor, the divorce of the people from the land, the want of proper discipline and training in our youth, the exploitation ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill

... her grandfather's old friend, but the ache and tedium of life did not return upon her. Her sense of duty and natural affection were very strong. She told herself that if it were her lot to watch for many years beside this dwindling flame, it was a lot of God's giving, not of her own seeking, and therefore good. The letters that came to her from Beechhurst and Caen breathed nothing but encouragement to love and patience, and Harry Musgrave's ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr

... another cheer at this, and the men stood fast as ever—a dwindling party, hard beset, of the defenders of the mess-room veranda, their breast-work for the most part consisting of the bodies ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn

... glue, and I could not swallow them. The roof of our cabin having been taken off, the Breens gave us a shelter, and when Mrs. Breen discovered what I had tried to hide from my own family, that I could not eat the hide, she gave me little bits of meat now and then from their fast-dwindling store. ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... the dwindling ruins are now very scanty, and in point of architecture present nothing worthy of an antiquary's (p. 010) research. They are washed by the streams of the Monnow, and are embosomed in gardens and orchards, clothing the knoll ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler

... have been so hard to find; but obviously the transportation of the whole party to a place of safety, with the limited means at our disposal, was going to be a matter of extreme difficulty. There were twenty-eight men on our floating cake of ice, which was steadily dwindling under the influence of wind, weather, charging floes, and heavy swell. I confess that I felt the burden of responsibility sit heavily on my shoulders; but, on the other hand, I was stimulated and cheered by the attitude of the men. Loneliness is the penalty of leadership, but the man who ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton

... for the timely occupation provided for them, would have spent the cold months in that state of half-starved torpor peculiar to the indigent agricultural labourer when he has nothing to do—at that bitter season when father and mother and shivering little ones watch wistfully the ever-dwindling sack of maize, as day by day two or three handfuls are ground between the stones of the hand-mill and kneaded into a thick unwholesome dough, the only food of the poorer peasants in the winter. But now every ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford

... borders of the land, the pleasure craft will be there, coming and going, and the swift great passenger vessels, very big and steady, doing thirty knots an hour or more, will trace long wakes as they go dwindling out athwart the ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... in huts, the reek of which strikes you like a blow in the face; so long as they will cluster round dead bodies during their tangis or wakes; so long as they will ignore drainage—just so long will they remain a blighted and dwindling race, and observers without eyes will talk as though there was something fateful and mysterious in their decline. One ray of hope for them has quite lately been noted. They are caring more for the education of their children. Some three thousand of these now go to school, not always ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves

... hidden by the deep pit and the heap of sand that the fall of the cylinder had made. Anyone coming along the road from Chobham or Woking would have been amazed at the sight—a dwindling multitude of perhaps a hundred people or more standing in a great irregular circle, in ditches, behind bushes, behind gates and hedges, saying little to one another and that in short, excited shouts, and staring, ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells

... contrary, he entertained hope, hope that he might win. If he did win, he told himself, Johnson was enough of a white man to accept the defeat and leave the horse where he was. Yet his chips were steadily dwindling; the cards persistently refused to come his way; only once thus far had he held a winning hand. But he played on, becoming ever more discouraged, until, suddenly awaking to an unexpectedly good hand, he ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton

... schoolroom passage—a long, lamp-lit vista, hung with old Chinese wall-paper, the running pattern of buds and flowers, large out of all proportion to the bridges, palms, pagodas and groups of little purple and blue-clad men and women disposed, in dwindling perspective, upon its once white surface. Half-way along the passage, their backs towards her, Mary and Mrs. Cooper, the cook—a fair, mild middle-aged, and cow-like person, of ample proportions—stood conversing in ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... ground floor; as one window was brightly illuminated and two others more faintly, it might be supposed that there was a single lamp in one corner of a large apartment; and a certain tremulousness and temporary dwindling showed that a live fire contributed to the effect. The sound of a voice now became audible; and the trespassers paused to listen. It was pitched in a high, angry key, but had still a good, full, and masculine note in it. The utterance was voluble, too voluble even to be quite distinct; a stream ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson

... mighty distance, so that they were lost in the upward space of the night, and did seem to me presently but as a constant, glimmering fire, that did shape a shining Peak into the blackness of the heavens, dwindling into the utmost height. And ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson

... out his hand and Helen hastily slipped her own into it. Silently they returned to their own camp site, the girl carrying in her free hand the wand tipped with the bluebird feather. Several times they paused and looked back. There was nothing but the glow of the dwindling fire and the sweep of sand, covered sparsely with ragged bushes. New stars flared out; the spirit of the night descended upon the desert. As the world seemed to draw further and further away from them, these two beings, strange to the vastness engulfing ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory

... they isolated the Maximalists by every means in their power. They did not admit even one Maximalist into the membership of the Executive Committee at Petrograd, even when our party represented at least one-third of all the Soviet members. Afterwards, when the Petrograd Soviet, by a dwindling majority, passed the resolution for the transfering of all power into the hands of the Soviet, our party put forth the demand to establish a coalition Executive Committee formed on a proportional basis. The old presiding ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky

... degrading 'pessimism as to the essential dignity of man,'[3] the world which we have been to a certain extent disregarding has been changing its character for us. In a number of ways, whilst we have not been perceiving it, its objective grandeur has been dwindling; and the imagination, when again called to the feat, cannot reinvest it with its old gorgeous colouring. Once the world, with the human race, who were the masters of it, was a thing of vast magnitude—the centre of the whole creation. ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock

... the successive stages through which they have naturally and inevitably passed? Neither then is ethic and the moral law. It is not man's creation, it is not his handiwork. It is no mere provincialism of this dwindling sphere of ours, but a fact and a law supreme, holding sway beyond the uttermost star, valid in infinity and eternity, at this hour, the sovereign law of life for whatsoever or whomsoever lives and knows, the adamantine foundation ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... seeing me, he reversed his movement precipitately, flew straight back to the old tree, and alighted in the entrance to the cavity. As I approached, he did not so much seem to move as to diminish in size, like an object dwindling in the distance; he depressed his plumage, and, with his eye fixed upon me, began slowly to back and sidle into his retreat till he faded from my sight. The shrike wiped his beak upon the branches, cast an eye down at ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs

... dwindling trunk and wolfish jaw Revolving sullen things, But most the blind unequal law That ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson

... some resentment at the idea that I was, after all, an outsider and not allowed a part in the real drama that was going on. My happiness was further damped by the fact that luck ran steadily against me, and I saw my bonus dwindling very rapidly. I suppose I may as well be frank, and confess that my bonus, to speak strictly, vanished within six months after I first set foot in "Mon Repos," and I found it necessary to make that ...
— A Man of Mark • Anthony Hope

... that. One perhaps was ursine chiefly, another feline chiefly, another bovine chiefly; but each was tainted with other creatures,—a kind of generalised animalism appearing through the specific dispositions. And the dwindling shreds of the humanity still startled me every now and then,—a momentary recrudescence of speech perhaps, an unexpected dexterity of the fore-feet, a pitiful attempt ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells

... all the facts in both cases, and so did Ernest Seton, who had visited us in the country as well as in our city home. Fuller not only knew the ins and outs of my houses; he was also aware that my royalties were dwindling and that my wife was forced to get along with one servant and that we ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... of cattle, and the sale of their hides and tallow, offer so easy a subsistence, that the population think of no other, and in consequence are poor, degenerate, and dwindling. Their whole education consists in bullock hunting. In this view, unjust and violent as may be the aggressions of the American arms, it is difficult to regret the transfer of the territory into any hands which will bring these fine countries into the general ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various

... himself was very different from his representation. He was a tall and stately person, scrupulously dressed, with a drawn, thin face, and a nose which was grotesquely curved and long. His complexion was of a dead pallor, which was more startling by contrast with a long, dwindling beard of vivid red, which flowed down over his white waistcoat with his watch-chain gleaming through its fringe. Such was the stately presence who looked stonily at us from the centre of Dr. Huxtable's hearthrug. Beside him stood a very young man, whom I understood to be Wilder, the private secretary. ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle

... be tedious and pitiful to tell of all the little intensifications, shade by shade, of the conflict of their individualities. They fell out, dear lady! they came to conflict of words. The stress of perpetual worry was upon them, of dwindling funds and the anxious search for work that would not come. And on Ethel lay long, vacant, lonely hours in dull surroundings. Differences arose from the most indifferent things; one night Lewisham lay awake in unfathomable amazement because she had convinced him she did not care a ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells

... Bronson—the two other surgeons—died of their wounds, served to increase the reputation in which this rebel-convict stood in Bridgetown. It may have been no more than the fortune of war. But the townsfolk did not choose so to regard it. It led to a further dwindling of the practices of his free colleagues and a further increase of his own labours and his owner's profit. Whacker and Bronson laid their heads together to devise a scheme by which this intolerable state of things ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini

... that was preposterous in Miss Livingstone's conduct as a rule that it is not quite fair to explain her attitude either by this exaggeration or by an equally hectic scruple about her right to take care of her guest, such a right dwindling curiously when it has been given in the highest to somebody else. These pangs and penalties may have visited her in their proportion, but they did not take the importance of motives. She rather ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... would have taken a ball in his breast." He recognized at once that "all was over," yet for a short time longer he retained the management of affairs. But his majority in Parliament was steadily dwindling, and evidently with him also "all was over." In his despair he caught with almost pathetic eagerness at what for a moment seemed a chance to save his ministry by treating with the States secretly and apart from France. He was a man not troubled with convictions, ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.

... chemical fertilizers are coming into increasing use in the larger and more economically advanced producing countries. Brazil, particularly, is showing in late years a tendency toward their adoption to make up for the dwindling supply of the so-called natural manures. As the coffee tree grows older, it requires ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... occasion to make much moan about this state of affairs. I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the Customs. That was all. But, nevertheless, it is anything but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect is dwindling away; or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum. Of the fact there could be no doubt; and, examining ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... was living on earth, it is true; but all the ordinary earth desires had died within him. The spiritual life, however, did not die. Day by day it grew stronger and braver; so it came to pass that his sympathies, instead of dwindling and becoming small and narrow, widened, until once more he loved and once more ...
— Daddy's Girl • L. T. Meade

... forth in this history, is come to be regarded as a very dangerous individual. It is astonishing with what facility we gain bad repute from association with a certain class of men and things. Our country is a stalwart oasis, rising in reproachful greatness over the old and dwindling dependencies around it; but our Pierce government is a waste in its centre, contaminating and casting the blight of intrigue upon those connected with it. It builds bulwarks for itself, and breaks them down with the mere fog of its own breakers. It, like a dauntless boy, seizes the helm of State, ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton

... Brilliant, dewless mornings, blinding middays, afternoons held breathless in the remorseless torrent of light. The caravan crawled along the river's edge at a footspace, the early shadows shooting far ahead of it, then dwindling to a blot beneath each moving body, then slanting out behind. There was speech in the morning which died as the day advanced, all thought sinking into torpor in the monotonous glare. In the late afternoon the sun, slipping down the sky, peered through each wagon's puckered canvas opening ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner

... tempest had passed and its activities were dwindling into the renewed whirlwinds of the dance, Gard resumed his seat, his head beginning to swim a little. At last his doubting eyes were as if unsealed. A Vandal tribe, a great and powerful Vandal tribe, still lived ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry

... a belt of timber touched by the light shone with a curious silvery luster. Though it was some distance off, probably a day's journey allowing for the difficulty of the march, Vane gazed at it earnestly. The trees were bare—there was no doubt of that, for the dwindling ranks, diminished by the distance, stood out against the snow-streaked rock like rows of thick needles set upright; their straightness and the way they glistened suggested ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss

... out-buildings, divided the work among them. The woman's husband, Xavier Archambault, employed at the Fall as assistant to look after the bridge and dam, helped at odd moments in the business of the estate, thus making in all six servants, a rather large contingent for a dwindling concern; and Ringfield, listening to these wonders, could not fail to observe that their united wages must reach ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison

... with which I once held him fast as ever hound held hare, never again should HE at least come on errand disgraceful to the honour of Christian king or noble and virtuous maiden. But I—my hours are fast dwindling into minutes—yet, while I have life and breath, something must be ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott

... again, one after the other, all the doors we had half-opened, and look at each other, on the wrong side of the threshold, with dwindling hope in our eyes. ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse

... mechanically he moved to the window and stood looking out, though in reality seeing nothing. He was thinking—thinking hard. The course he had decided to adopt was the right thing—as to that he had no sort of doubt. He had no regular income, and such remnant of capital as he still possessed was dwindling alarmingly. Men had made fortunes at places like Johannesburg, starting with almost literally the traditional half-crown, why should not he? Not that he expected to make a fortune; a fair competence would satisfy him, a sufficiency. ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford

... times past, founded and endowed schools for the education of the natives of the forest; nor would we dampen the faith and hopes of those philanthropists who still believe in the redemption of that dwindling race by the aids of science and civilization; but we confess our inability to perceive any general results, flowing from the attempts of that character, at all adequate to the pains and outlay bestowed on the experiment. And we think we cannot be alone in this opinion. We believe that those results, ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson

... hand.] Dear young lady, you are about to become the wife of one of the best. There are not many of us left; we are a dwindling band, Miss Eden— ...
— The Gay Lord Quex - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur W. Pinero

... of the slain wheeled abruptly and, lashed by the easterly gale, fled out over the open sea, triangular formation dwindling rapidly in ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance

... rhapsodist in words and ideas is a dwindling factor at the present day, and a new presentation of fact is occasionally to be met with in the printed page. The best "book of travel" within the knowledge of the writer, and perhaps one of the slightest in bulk ever written in the English language, is Stevenson's "Inland Voyage"—here were ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun

... impend To witness Time a fickle friend, And Youth a dwindling fire,— I must adore till all years end My first love, ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell

... of his capacity. On December I he broke down the bridges in his rear over the Raritan, and marched through Jersey with a dwindling army. At Princeton he had but three thousand men; destroying every boat, he wisely put the broad Delaware between his army ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell

... had been since a boy whose dreams burned city-ward. Feeling each day a day of adversity and giving no hint, he recognized, yet refused to admit, the dawn of defeat when defeat was far past its dawning. Upon the world of allied assailants that pressed him back—back—ever back on dwindling millions and then shrinking hundreds of thousands he turned a fierce and unsurrendering face. To himself he said even now that his ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck

... finally transform the opposition into reconciliation, the evil disappearing in good. Therefore, every being must at length be saved from misery, if not by redemptive atonement then by absolvent annihilation, and one absolute heaven finally absorb the dwindling hells. ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... region was clothed with a dense forest, so thickly matted, that in some places it was scarcely possible to penetrate it. It grew thinner, however, as they advanced, dwindling by degrees into a straggling stunted vegetation, till, at the height of somewhat more than 13,000 feet, it faded away altogether. The Indians, who had held on thus far; intimidated by the strange subterraneous sounds of the volcano, ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous

... weaver! How will he laugh outright When he sees his dwindling flax field All full of ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester

... a misnomer, socially and politically a dwindling superstition. That is the chief lesson one learns—and one has barely time to take it in—between Queenstown and Sandy Hook. Ocean forsooth! this little belt of blue water that we cross before we know where we are, at a single hop-skip-and-jump! From north to south, perhaps, it may still ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer

... is of it," said Evelyn, reassuringly, to herself, although at the same time she felt uneasiness enough to send her out into the hall to a gable window over the porch, which commanded a view of the camp. Nothing stirring was to be seen, except the dwindling flame of the evening camp-fire, burned every night for cheer, not for warmth. Evelyn crept to a side window. As she reached it a white figure could be seen hurrying ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond

... Avenue. At the next corner they lay motionless in a blockade, while the motor shuddered; then they dodged through an opening where the mud-guards missed by an inch and were whirling west toward Broadway. At 109th Street a bicycle officer stared in amazement at the dwindling number beneath the rear axle, then ducked his head and began to pedal. He overhauled the speeding machine as it throbbed before the doors of Mercy Hospital, to be greeted by a grinning chauffeur who waved him toward the building and ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach

... in the young nation as few then foresaw or even dreamed of. At this era, when the Adams Administration was about to close, Jefferson, in spite of his known liberal, democratic views, was one of the most popular of political leaders, save with the Federalists, now dwindling in numbers and influence. He it was who was put forward on the Republican side for the Presidency, while Adams, still favored by the Federalists and himself desiring a second term of office, became the Federalist candidate. Associated with the latter in the contest was Charles C. Pinckney, ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.

... appear. The case-forms of the different declensions are beginning to run into one another: the plural, for example, of insignis is no longer insignes, but, as in Italian, insigni; and the case-inflexions themselves are dwindling away before the free use of prepositions, which was already beginning to show itself in the ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail

... the books too much, or for being oneself a fool. In my case it does not matter which was my trouble. The trouble itself was the fact. The condition of the fact was mine. For me the life, and light, and sparkle of human intercourse were dwindling. ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London

... now become rare birds. The dwindling of his visitors had at first scarcely attracted his notice; it had been so gradual, like the rest. But at last Dutton found himself alone. The old solitude of his youth had re-knitted its shell around him. Now that he was unsustained by the likelihood of some one looking ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... The night is fresh, silent, exquisite, the eternal song of the cicalas fills the air. We can still see the red lanterns of my new family, dwindling away in the distance, as they descend and gradually become lost in that yawning abyss, at the ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti

... of Patagonia been also dwindling, though, there, if anywhere, still lies the Cape of Bad Hope for the apostles of human degeneracy. Pigafetta originally estimated them at twelve feet. In the time of Commodore Byron, they had already grown downward; yet he said of them that they were "enormous goblins," seven feet high, every ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various

... service gradually diminished; the edifices were found to be too large, and in many instances what had been the sanctuary, where art had exhausted itself in embellishment, partitioned off from the rest of the church, was kept for their dwindling congregations, while the vast aisles and roomy naves went slowly to ruin, or became deserted solitudes. As for the idea of building new religious edifices, the old ones were already too numerous for them, or if, as was not unfrequent, a new sect started into spasmodic life, and its ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud

... on top of one of the highest hills in London, and entrenches itself as a fortress against the poverty and squalor that are creeping up the hill towards it. Around the square there are still gardens and crescents and roads of consideration, but ever dwindling in social status as one goes down the hill, till the consideration vanishes in the degradation of cheap boarding-houses and the homes of Jews of the ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan

... matter to simmer for the present. But that did not mean that Bill would wear "blinders," or that he would sleep with his head under his tarp for fear of finding out what black-hearted renegade had sacrilegiously borrowed Jake. Black-hearted renegade, by the way, was but the dwindling to mild epithets after Bill's more colorful vocabulary had been ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower

... my great relief, there came Lady Auriol swinging along on the other side of the pavement. The cafe, you must know, forms a corner. To the left, the park and the tram terminus; to the right, the street leading to the post office and then dwindling away vaguely up the hill. It was along this street that Lady Auriol came, short-skirted, flushed with exercise, rather dusty and dishevelled. I stood and waved an arresting hand. She hesitated for a second and then crossed the road and met us outside ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke

... the last of a long line of estancieros once rich in land and cattle, but for generations the Canada Seca estate had been dwindling as land was sold, and now there was little left, and the cattle and horses were few, and only a small flock of sheep kept just to provide the house with mutton. His poor relations living scattered ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson

... was low, so low that it seemed but a little higher than the water level, but it bore an amazingly abundant growth. The river seemed to flow through a channel cut in the dense, solid vegetation. Great cypress trees towered up from the water, enormously thick at the roots and rapidly dwindling above. Between their rough trunks cypress scrub, sturdy cabbage palms, mangrove, custard apple and other varieties of tropical trees found space to grow; and between the trunks of the smaller trees was a tangle of palmetto, saw grass, ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen

... which to lay his head, or for a bite or a sup of wine. John and James would give their boats to Judas belike, and he'd bring home about as much fish as would—— But I'm thinking of your father. What will he be saying to all this, and his business dwindling all the while, and we beggars?—the words with which my wife roused me this morning. Of course, says she, if the stone that never was cut out of the mountain with hands is going to be slung and send the Romans toppling, I've naught to say against sharing, but the Kingdom had better ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore

... familiar reminiscences my dwindling interest vanished, and I noticed again, through the window, the house fronts of the place I knew once, when Poplar was salt. The lost sailor himself was insignificant. What was he? A deck hand; one who tarred iron, and could take a trick at the wheel when ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson

... supply will come to an end; but even now it is well understood how the crisis will be met. As the final period draws nearer, families will become smaller and smaller, and in the last Martian century no children will be born; so the diminishing water supply will suffice for the needs of the dwindling population. Thus the race will gradually die out naturally, and become extinct long before the conditions of our world can make life a terror. There will, therefore, be no self-slaughter, nor murderous extermination, amongst ourselves—we shall ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks

... countrymen, and run all hazards abroad, rather than starve at home. Government winked at those emigrations, and every year brought fresh strength to Carolina, insomuch that the lands in Ireland were in danger of lying waste for want of labourers, and the manufacturers of dwindling into nothing. ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt

... as we meet with in the Nile Valley, but actual running brooks, coursing and babbling between the trees, spreading out here and there into pools of water, and in places forming little cascades like those of our own streams, but dwindling in volume as they proceeded, owing to constant drains made on them, until they were for the most part absorbed by the soil before finally reaching ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... the dam' fool," said Mr. Blithers to the chauffeur. A moment later the pedestrian leaped nimbly aside and the car shot past, the dying wail of the siren dwindling away in the whirr of the wheels. "Look where you're going!" shouted Mr. Blithers from the tonneau, as if the walker had come near to running him down instead of the other way around. "Whoa! Stop 'er, Jackson!" he called to the driver. ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... in the afternoon and come back long after dark, damp with the dew and fog. He kept growing paler and weaker and more silent. Some days he did not speak more than a dozen words, but always kind and pleasant. He was just dwindling away; and when the picture was almost done a fever took hold of him. The doctor said it was malaria, but it seemed to me more like a trouble in the throat, a kind of dumb misery. And one night, in the third quarter of the moon, just after the tide turned to run out, he ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke

... hardest, and gave little heed to these things. She saw her own chances of success dwindling farther into the distance, and was surprised to see how little she cared, for a curious callousness had come over her of late. Selfish ambition—selfish, because it often persists in living when all other things are dead—seemed to have died in her at last. ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair

... The candle stood on the counter, its flame solemnly wagging in a draught; and by that inconsiderable movement the whole room was filled with noiseless bustle and kept heaving like a sea: the tall shadows nodding, the gross blots of darkness swelling and dwindling as with respiration, the faces of the portraits and the china gods changing and wavering like images in water. The inner door stood ajar, and peered into that leaguer of shadows with a long slit of daylight like ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... jumps up for a relic. We stood upon the road where Buonaparte (defended by high banks) sent on, but didn't lead, 6,000 of his old Imperial Guard. They charged along the road up to La Haye Sainte, dwindling as they went by the incessant fire of 80 pieces of Artillery, many of them within a few yards, till their number did not exceed 300. Then Napoleon turned round to Bertrand, lifted his hand, cried out, "C'est tout perdu, ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley

... neither very tactfully nor clearly that he was on the way to dwindling into an undisciplined soldier. But it did not matter in the least. For Stella Croyle was not listening. All this was totally unimportant. Men always went about and about when they had difficult things to say to women. Her eyes never left his face and she would know ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason

... still looking at this dwindling figure, which stood as a mere grey blot touched with a white flame against the great green wall of the steep down behind him. And as he stared over the top of the down behind the innkeeper, there appeared an army of black-clad ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton

... comparison such men of the world. My own initiations were rapid, as became an old sailor, and so it seemed were Miss Mavis's, for when I mounted to the deck at the end of half an hour I found her there alone, in the stern of the ship, looking back at the dwindling continent. It dwindled very fast for so big a place. I accosted her, having had no conversation with her amid the crowd of leave-takers and the muddle of farewells before we put off; we talked a little about ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James

... might of fire, in slow decay The scented tears of glowing nectar fall; Lower and lower droops the candle tall And ever dwindling ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius

... we can look to, we can cherish in the past, As the fleeting days that numbered them are dwindling to their last, Like the roses in the autumn that are severed from their stem, Like the dew-bespangled petals when we ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott

... which seemed to have already overtaken Bosnia and Herzegovina; when gallant little Montenegro was already shut out from the sea by the octopus-like grip of Dalmatia crouching along her western shore; when Turkey was dwindling down to almost ineptitude; when Greece was almost a byword, and when Albania as a nation—though still nominally subject—was of such unimpaired virility that there were great possibilities of her future, it was imperative ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker

... river only a dwindling sight of lonely sails was to be seen, heading toward Chesapeake Bay and then to sea. But anyone with eyesight good enough might have seen ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson

... engaged in eight pitched battles and in many skirmishes. Great numbers had been slain on both sides, but the Danes ever received fresh accessions of strength, and seemed to grow stronger and more numerous after every battle, while the Saxons were dwindling rapidly. Wide tracts of country had been devastated, the men slaughtered, and the women and children taken captives, and the people, utterly dispirited and depressed, no longer listened to the voices of their leaders, and refused again to ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty

... to the little dependency of Lullington. The church calls itself the smallest in Sussex but this depends upon what constitutes a church. The existing building is actually the chancel of a former church, perhaps another proof of a dwindling population. ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes

... ear. The boys cheered again, everybody drank a drop of the cider, and from under a cloud of blue smoke, that hung flat as a pancake above them in the still air, all moved onward. Presently the party separated into three groups, each having a gunner to lead it, half a dozen boys to sing, and a dwindling jar of cider for the purposes of the ceremony. The divided choirs clashed their music, heard from a distance; the guns fired at intervals, each sending forth its own particular detonation and winning back a distinctive echo; then the companies separated widely and decreased to mere ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... the realm was thrown on the owner. If he failed in making out a satisfactory history of every ingot he was liable to severe penalties. This Act was, as might have been expected, altogether ineffective. During the following summer and autumn, the coins went on dwindling, and the cry of distress from every county in the realm became ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... back I saw those bent and dwindling figures still standing in the mud. The woman continued to pluck at her dress; the man gazed at the horizon with the same dull vacancy. They had the weary humility of the figures in Millet's "Angelus," without their inspiration, and in their eyes was ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan

... All that the coming of this strange man meant to her rushed suddenly over her. He was a man, obviously, who moved in the world, her world, since he apparently travelled extensively and his father was wealthy enough to run a racing stable as a hobby and was a member of the dwindling class of ancienne noblesse. It was characteristic of her that she put first what she did. How could she bear to meet one of her own order in the position in which she was? She who had been proud Diana Mayo and now—the mistress of an Arab Sheik? ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull

... wave of bitterest disappointment passed over Wilbur as he saw his $30,000 dwindling to nothing. Then the instincts of habit reasserted themselves. The taxpayer in him was stronger than the freebooter, after all. He felt that it was his duty to see to it that the girl had her rights. Kitchell must be made aware of the situation—must be told that Moran, the daughter, the Captain's ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris

... scored a goodly score And showed some splendid cricket, but their deeds Were not colossal, and our own brave Tennant Proved himself all as good a man as they. * * * * * Through them we greet our Mother. In their coming, We shake our dear old England by the hand And watch space dwindling, while the shrinking world Collapses into nothing. Mark me well, Matter as swift as swiftest thought shall fly, And space itself be nowhere. Future Tinleys Shall bowl from London to our Christ Church ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler

... the pigmy vessel as it dipped to the larger stretch of the bay, dwindling with the glint of two blades that flashed with clock-like regularity in the afternoon sun. Soon it reduced to a speck and was out of sight. Clark turned to his office, still contemplating the dignity ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan

... eating-house; knives and forks played but intermittently, and Mary, sitting at the end of the oilcloth-covered table, felt intuitively that she was the centre of the brewing storm. Oh, why hadn't she been contented to stay at home and make over her clothes and share the dwindling fortunes of her aunts, instead of coming ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning

... 16,000,000,000 board feet a year. Some authorities believe that our reserves will last only sixteen years unless measures to protect them are put into effect at once. At the present rate of cutting long-leaf pine trees, our outputs of naval stores including turpentine and rosin are dwindling. We cannot afford to increase our export of southern yellow pine unless reforestation is started on all land suitable for that purpose. Our pine lands of the southern states must be restocked and made permanently productive. Then they ...
— The School Book of Forestry • Charles Lathrop Pack

... sea. The animals and insects living on these modified plants, would themselves be in some degree modified by change of food, as well as by change of climate; and the modification would be more marked where, from the dwindling or disappearance of one kind of plant, an allied kind was eaten. In the lapse of the many generations arising before the next upheaval, the sensible or insensible alterations thus produced in each ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... whiskers bristling, and his eyes malignant. The daybook is banged, the bottles rattled, the counter thumped, and then he is off again with five doors slamming behind him. We can trace his progress when the black mood is on him by those dwindling slams. Perhaps it is that McCarthy has labelled the cough mixture as the eye-wash, or sent an empty pillbox with an exhortation to take one every four hours. In any case the cyclone comes and goes, and by the next meal all ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro

... a fiddle, a pair of saddlebags, a plug horse, and the eternal truth. There was the din of conflict by day on the hustings; there was the sound of revelry by night in the cabins. The mid-night stars twinkled to the music of the merry fiddle, and the hills resounded with the clatter of dwindling shoe soles, as the mountain lads and lassies danced the hours away in the good old time Virginia reel. I rode among the mountain fastnesses like the "Knight of the woeful figure," mounted on my prancing "Rozenante," everywhere ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor

... unrecognizable fragments as many of them were, were popular with the onlookers. Each as it marched by, was hailed with a new roar. Of course there were many tears. There was hardly anybody in all that crowd, over fifty years old, in whom the sight of these fast dwindling ranks did not stir memories of some personal bereavement. The old ladies on the porch no longer used their handkerchiefs chiefly for waving. Queed saw one of them wave hers frantically toward a drooping little knot of passing ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... present day is about equal to that of France, but that, when we analyse the facts, the fertility of the old native-born American population of mainly Anglo-Saxon origin is found to be lower than that of France. This element, therefore, is rapidly dwindling away in the United States. The general level of the birth-rate is maintained by the foreign immigrants, who in many States (as in New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Minnesota) constitute the majority ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... like the bison and the wild pigeon, the pearl-bearing molluscs may be greatly diminished in numbers or even exterminated by the greed of man and his fearfully destructive methods of harvesting nature's productions. In fact, the fisheries have been dwindling in yield for some time, and most of the fine pearls that are marketed are old pearls, already drilled, from the treasuries of Eastern potentates, who have been forced by necessity to accept the high prices offered by the West for ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade

... before him was anxiety, uncertainty. He had cut himself adrift; he was on the great stream. Whither would it lead him? Well—was it not the great stream? Had not all mankind, for all the ages, been floating on it? Or was it but a desert-river, dwindling away beneath the fiery sun, destined to lose itself a few miles on, among the arid sands? Were Arsenius and the faith of his childhood right? And was the Old World coming speedily to its death-throe, and the Kingdom of God at hand? Or was ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley

... becoming less conspicuous. It gradually dwindles until it disappears; beyond this point it either becomes reversed, or else the type has ceased to be a possible one. In our shorthand we have started with A a, and have watched the characteristic a dwindling to zero. When it vanishes we have reached a type which may be specified as A; beyond this point the type would be A - ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... the Prophet. His fame, bruited far and wide, soon aroused the jealousy of many of the neighboring chiefs and medicine men. They saw their power dwindling away and their authority diminishing. They took steps to check the advancing tide of fanaticism, but were at once adroitly met by the introduction of an inquisition into witchcraft, which had been almost universally believed in by the tribes, ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce

... His resources were dwindling. He needed funds for the many secret agents in his employ—needed yet more funds for the purchase and support of his lands in the South. And the minister of Great Britain had given plain warning that unless this expedition up the Missouri could ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough

... conviction has for some time been gaining ground with the great majority of the leading American newspapers, that a decisive victory by either of the two belligerent groups of Powers is no longer to be expected. With the exception of a continually dwindling minority which even to-day still promise their readers the 'ultimate victory' of the Entente Powers, the verdict of the American Press on the probable result of the war is 'a draw,' 'a stalemate.' Only a few newspapers, to which belong those of the Hearst Syndicate, confess to the belief in 'a ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff

... lame weaver, How will he laugh outright When he sees his dwindling flax-field All full of flowers ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various

... high dark buildings of the arsenal came the whirr of many wheels, the thudding of weights, and the buzz and babel of human toil. Beyond, the dwellings of the workingmen, smoke-stained and unlovely, radiated away in a lessening perspective of narrowing road and dwindling wall. ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle

... established order. Feudal communities and dwarf republics exist side by side in the northern Caucasus,[1382] attended by that primitive assertion of individual right, the blood feud.[1383] Often the two forms of government are combined, but the feudal element is generally only a dwindling survival from a remote past. The little Republic of Andorra, which for a thousand years has preserved its existence in the protection of a high Pyrenean valley, is a self-governing community, organized strictly ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... said that there was a difference this morning when I got up and looked out. The sandy paths were dry, showing that there had been no fresh rain in the night. Moreover, the hillsides were open to view, the silver rills that veined the rugged steeps were dwindling, there was a blue sky, and great ranges of wooded or desolate mountains were in clearly cut outline—the first time since the wet period set in. Over the shoulder of the huge pyramid to the east there was actual sunshine, and the fleecy clouds ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior

... servant's keener sight, trained by long stormy nights of watching, was following in its dwindling, mysterious course that misty vision in which he thought to recognize ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle

... the park, all thoughts of festivity had faded. As summer-flies are scattered by rain, so did this congregation, late noisy and happy, in sadness and melancholy murmurs break up, dwindling away apace. With the set sun and the deepening twilight the park became nearly empty. Adrian and Ryland were still in earnest discussion. We had prepared a banquet for our guests in the lower hall of the castle; and thither Idris and I repaired to receive ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley

... watched them go: the doctor walking across the cliffs with resolute stride, the detective making for the path over the moors with bent head and slower step, as though his feet were clogged by the weight of his thoughts. Thalassa watched their dwindling forms until they disappeared, and then stood still, in a listening attitude. The sound of the lawyer stirring in the study overhead seemed to rouse him from his immobility. He closed the door, and stood looking up ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees

... horn for the dam' fool," said Mr. Blithers to the chauffeur. A moment later the pedestrian leaped nimbly aside and the car shot past, the dying wail of the siren dwindling away in the whirr of the wheels. "Look where you're going!" shouted Mr. Blithers from the tonneau, as if the walker had come near to running him down instead of the other way around. "Whoa! Stop 'er, Jackson!" he called to the driver. He ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... hear a word ending in "ell." The two remaining machines close up, and we continue. Very suddenly one of them drops out, with a rocker-arm gone. Its nose goes down, and it glides into the clouds. Yet again I call the flight-commander's attention to our dwindling numbers, and this time I cannot mistake the single-syllabled reply. It ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott

... firm, the Duke of Anjou had accomplished little; and La Rochelle had made good use of the respite to strengthen its works. Every effort to gain a lodgement in its neighborhood had signally failed. The end of December came, and with it cold and discouragement. Anjou's army was dwindling away. The King of Spain and the Pope recalled their troops, as if the battle of the third of October had ended the war, and Santa Fiore, the pontifical general, sent to Rome twenty-six standards, taken by the Italians at Moncontour—a present from ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird

... and dreamy tenants. Many are the oases in this neglected, abandoned state. And the saddening, sickening thought often recurs to me, that, however desolate The Sahara may have been in past ages, it is now getting worse instead of better. Ghadames, and many oases of Fezzan, are dwindling away to nothing, the population lessening, and dispersing under the curse of the ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... praise me, Gaultier, at the ball, Ripe lips, trim boddice, and a waist so small, With clipsome lightness, dwindling ever less, Beneath the robe of pea-y greeniness? Dost thou remember, when, with stately prance, Our heads went crosswise in the country-dance; How soft, warm fingers, tipped like buds of balm, Trembled within the squeezing of thy palm; And how ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun

... diverse sorts of haulage; there will be lakes and lagoons; and when one comes at last to the borders of the land, the pleasure craft will be there, coming and going, and the swift great passenger vessels, very big and steady, doing thirty knots an hour or more, will trace long wakes as they go dwindling out athwart the restless vastness of ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... The Metropolis stretched away, lifting to the north, and sinking to the south into the jewelled river on whose curved bank rose messages of light concerning whisky, tea and beer. The peaceful nocturnal roar of the city, dwindling every moment now, reached them like an emanation ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett

... with her practised step-mother had so advanced Elfride's perceptions, that her courtship by Stephen seemed emotionally meagre, and to have drifted back several years into a childish past. In regarding our mental experiences, as in visual observation, our own progress reads like a dwindling of that we ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy

... image of the world is of individual and varying compass. It may be likened to one of those curious Chinese balls of quaintly carved ivory, containing other balls, one within another, the proportions ever dwindling with each successive inclosure, yet each a more minute duplicate of the external sphere. This might seem the least world of all,—the restricted limits of the quadrangle of this primitive stockade,—but Peninnah Penelope Anne Mivane had ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock

... tolerably poor tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the Customs. That was all. But, nevertheless, it is anything but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect is dwindling away; or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum. Of the fact there could be no doubt; and, examining myself ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... the city had been lost, all industry had come to a practical standstill. Workers did not care to leave homes which might be grassbound by nightfall; employers could not manufacture without backlog of materials, for a dwindling market, and without transportation for their products. Services were so crippled as to be barely existent and with the failure of the watersupply, epidemics, mild at first, broke out and the diseases were carried and spread ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... from the Metropolitan Station. A widow named Murchison kept the house at that time, and she had three medical students and one engineer as lodgers. I occupied the top room, which was the cheapest, but cheap as it was it was more than I could afford. My small resources were dwindling away, and every week it became more necessary that I should find something to do. Yet I was very unwilling to go into general practice, for my tastes were all in the direction of science, and especially of zoology, towards ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle

... personal applications to such as required it. This I found to be an even more discouraging business than the epistolary process, as it was bitterly cold and the streets were filled with slush and snow. The distances were interminable, and each day found my little hoard dwindling away with frightful rapidity into innumerable car-fares and frequent cups of coffee at wayside lunch-counters. I traveled over miles and miles of territory, by trolley-car, by elevated train and ferry-boat, to Brooklyn, to Harlem, to Jersey City and Newark, only to reach my destination ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson

... had behaved ill to him, and he could not say he was free from resentment or pride, but he did make for them what excuse lay in the fact that the congregation had been dwindling ever since the curate at the abbey-church began to speak in such a strange outspoken fashion. There now was a right sort of man! he said to himself. No attempted oratory with him! no prepared surprises! ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald

... of the Street of Ink To paint their parish magazines pink. So generous laymen may haply decide That it may be worth their while to provide Each KENNEDY BELL with stepping-stones To rise to the height of a KENNEDY JONES. But others, a small and dwindling crew, Possibly fit, but certainly few, And cursed with a most pronounced capacity For suffering from inept vivacity, Would gladly be reckoned as unenlightened Could they keep one class of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various

... from the threshold, Great Goddess, with steps meditative and slow; Night steals like a dream to the landscape and slips like a pall o'er its glow. I carry no lamp in my bosom and dwindling in gloom is the track, No token of man's recognition to prompt me to ever turn back. I strike eastward to meet the great day-dawn with the soul of my soul by my side, My goal though unknown is assured me, and the planet of Love is ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens

... and promised to be a mother to it, that she discovered that she had undertaken more than she was able to fulfil. It required no very searching eye to perceive that the little one was not thriving; in truth, she was dwindling away day by day, and those who were in the habit of visiting the Camp gazed sadly at the little pinched face and shrivelled limbs, and foreboded that it would not be long before Michel's child rejoined its mother in the 'silent land.' "Owindia" was the name given ...
— Owindia • Charlotte Selina Bompas

... the essentially angular angels in mediaeval stained glass almost always (as it says in "Patience") contrive to look both angular and flat. There is something intrinsically disproportionate and outrageous in the idea of the distant objects dwindling and growing dwarfish, the closer objects swelling enormous and intolerable. There is something frantic in the notion that one's own father by walking a little way can be changed by a blast of magic to a pigmy. There is something farcical in the fancy that Nature keeps one's uncle in an ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton

... come down to drink, and in pursuit of them is "Buffalo Bill," mounted on his good horse "Charlie." He has been acting as guide for an emigrant party, which soon appears. Camp-fires are lighted, supper is eaten, and the camp sinks into slumber with the dwindling of the fires. Then comes a fine bit of stage illusion. A red glow is seen in the distance, faint at first, but slowly deepening and broadening. It creeps along the whole horizon, and the camp is awakened by the alarming intelligence that the prairie is on fire. The emigrants rush out, and heroically ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore

... lucent Italian atmosphere making him feel himself of their shining company, whirling through the infinite void on one of the innumerable spheres. A broad silver green patch of moonlight lay on the dark water, dwindling into a string of dancing gold pieces. Adown the canal the black gondolas clustered round a barca lighted by gaily colored lanterns, whence the music came. Funiculi, Funicula—it seemed to dance with the very spirit of joyousness. He saw a ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... had been so rainy, I had lived a long day, and now, if ever, could appreciate the singing of this characteristic northern songster, himself such a lover of mountains as never to be heard, here in New England, at least, and in summer-time, except amid the dwindling spruce forests of the upper slopes. I have never before seen him so familiar. On the Mount Washington range and on Mount Lafayette it is easy enough to hear his music, but one rarely gets more than ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey

... these sheltered drifts would lie undiminished and when summer really came, they gave birth to scores of trickling rills. Vegetation sprang up in that moist, needle-mulched soil as luxuriant as any in the tropics. From the time the furry anemone lifted its lavender-blue petals above the dwindling snow patch, until the apples formed on the wild rose bushes and the kinnikinic berries turned red, it was a continuous nosegay. Indian paintbrush, marigolds, blue and white columbines as big as ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills

... last of a long line of estancieros once rich in land and cattle, but for generations the Canada Seca estate had been dwindling as land was sold, and now there was little left, and the cattle and horses were few, and only a small flock of sheep kept just to provide the house with mutton. His poor relations living scattered about the district knew that he was ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson

... General, the crafty self seeking of the Intendant—these and a hundred other things were enough to cause much anxiety at headquarters. The grand schemes of the French for acquiring a whole vast continent were fast dwindling down to the anxious hope of being able to keep ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green

... year 1901—one of those clear bright days which contribute enchantment to that season of spun gold when harvest bounties are garnered on the Canadian prairies. Everywhere was the gleam of new yellow stubble. In serried ranks the wheat stocks stretched, dwindling to mere specks, merging as they lost identity in distance. Here and there stripes of plowed land elongated, the rich black freshly turned earth in sharp contrast to the prevailing gold, while in a tremendous deep blue arch overhead an unclouded sky swept to cup the circumference of vision. ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse

... your sweet fraternal breath. How the Fates have since sundered us! How have you been going on, fattening and beautifying from one degree to another of poetical perfection, while I have, under the chilling shade of the Ochil Hills, been dwindling down from one degree of poetical extenuation to another, till at length I am become the very shadow and ghost of literary leanness! I should now wish to see you, and compare you as you are now with what you were in your 'Queen's Wake' days. For this purpose, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various

... too late.... I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the Customs. That was all. But, nevertheless, it is anything but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect is dwindling away, or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of phial; so that at every glance you find a smaller ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.

... She put her hope in God, and explained so breathlessly to the furious street. One cyclist who took corners on trust she cursed by the Ineffable Name, but instantly withdrew the malediction for luck, and addressed his dwindling back with an eye of misery and a voice of benediction. For a little time neither she nor her daughter spoke of the change in their fortunes saving in terms of allusion; they feared that, notwithstanding their trust, God might hear and shatter them with His rolling laughter. They went ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens

... Italianise into that of the famous composer Giuseppe Verdi) to think it a mere nothing to mount to the top of those sugared pinnacles which he will not believe are many miles distant in reality. After dinner we trudge on, the scenery constantly improving, the snow drawing down to us, and the Romanche dwindling hourly; we reach the top of the Col du Lautaret, which Murray must describe; I can only say that it is first-class scenery. The flowers are splendid, acres and acres of wild narcissus, the Alpine ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler

... small vocal minority in northern Italy seeks the return of parts of southwestern Slovenia Climate: predominantly Mediterranean; Alpine in far north; hot, dry in south Terrain: mostly rugged and mountainous; some plains, coastal lowlands Natural resources: mercury, potash, marble, sulfur, dwindling natural gas and crude oil reserves, fish, coal Land use: arable land: 32% permanent crops: 10% meadows and pastures: 17% forest and woodland: 22% other: 19% Irrigated land: 31,000 km2 (1989 est.) Environment: regional ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... her she could doubtless influence him to stay and care for her. There were many others who could be sent, who did not, could not, mean so much to those they would leave behind. Joe was all she had. She was growing old, and her little store of money was dwindling surely ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll

... apparently in a desperate situation. Famine and consequent sickness were in his camp. His army was daily dwindling away. He was emphatically in an enemy's country. Not a soldier could stray from the ranks without danger of assassination. He had taken Madrid, and Madrid was ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott

... Cardinals, and one runs at first between Fulham's episcopal garden parties and Hurlingham's playground for the sporting instinct of our race. The whole effect is English. There is space, there are old trees and all the best qualities of the home-land in that upper reach. Putney, too, looks Anglican on a dwindling scale. And then for a stretch the newer developments slop over, one misses Bladesover and there come first squalid stretches of mean homes right and left and then the dingy industrialism of the south side, and on the north bank the ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... anxiously to seaward. For a full minute or more he stood gazing under the sharp of his hand out across the sandbank as it seemed to glide rapidly past us, its summit momentarily growing lower as the gig swept along toward the point where the dwindling spit plunged beneath the surface of the water, and, as he gazed, the expression of puzzlement and anxiety on his face rapidly intensified. By this time, too, his action and attitude had attracted the attention of those in the boats astern, and, glancing back at them, I saw ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood

... it," said Evelyn, reassuringly, to herself, although at the same time she felt uneasiness enough to send her out into the hall to a gable window over the porch, which commanded a view of the camp. Nothing stirring was to be seen, except the dwindling flame of the evening camp-fire, burned every night for cheer, not for warmth. Evelyn crept to a side window. As she reached it a white figure could be seen ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond

... reached the point where it could be termed an unusually large accumulation of wealth. For larger accumulations existed upon the earth. A descendant of a man once known as John D. Rockefeller possessed an accumulation of great size, but which, as a matter of fact, was rapidly dwindling as it passed from generation to generation. So, let us travel ahead another one hundred years. During this time, as we learn from our historical and political archives, the socialists began to die out, since they ...
— John Jones's Dollar • Harry Stephen Keeler

... nearer came the roar of the gulf of destruction. A sort of stupor descended. The country—prostrate and writhing—tried to rise, but could not. The government knew not where to turn, or what course to pursue. Grant was growing in strength hourly. Lee's little force was dwindling. Sherman was streaming through South Carolina. Grant was reaching out toward Five Forks. All-destroying war grinned hideously—on all sides stared gaunt Famine. The air jarred with the thunder of ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke

... silent as the cab rapidly bore them across Vauxhall Bridge and through south-west to south-east London, finally to Dulwich Village, that tiny and dwindling oasis in the stucco ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer

... portals heaven doth wide unfold, Amid the angel choir she radiant stands, The eternal Son she claspeth to her breast, Her arms she stretcheth forth to me in love. How is it with me? Light clouds bear me up— My ponderous mail becomes a winged robe; I mount—I fly—back rolls the dwindling earth— Brief is ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... longer soon their colours can we trace, Lost in the mazy distance of the race Till at Salara's far-off bridge descried, Like coursing butterflies, they seem to glide; Then, dwindling farther, in the lengthening course, Mere floating specks supplant both man and horse; Till, having crossed the Columbarium gray, They swerve, and back retrace ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various

... press; nor should they if I thought a year's castigation would do them any good;—it will not: the foundations are too sandy. It is just that this youngster should die away: a sad thought for me, if I had not some hope that while it is dwindling I may be plotting, and fitting myself for ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats

... village was in a state of excitement before night. Poor Reuben Miller had never before been the object of half so much interest. His slowly dwindling fortunes, the mysterious succession of his ill-lucks, had not much stirred the hearts of the people. He was a retice'nt man; he loved books, and had hungered for them all his life; his townsmen unconsciously resented what they pretended ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson

... combat its progress, in order to avoid what appeared to them a greater evil. Declivities like these are descended quickly, and the deplorable presidency of Mr. Buchanan stands to testify to this. The policy of the United States had become doubtful; their good renown was dwindling away even with their warmest friends; their cause was becoming blended more and more with that of servitude; their liberties were compromised, and the Federal institutions were bending before the "institution" of the South; no more rights of the majority ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin

... kindly little fat man and moved off up the village street and beyond the inevitable car tracks to the dwindling country road once more. In the shade of a big tree at a crossroads, Lou glanced up ...
— Anything Once • Douglas Grant

... opportunity of growing into a great and comprehensive Church. We have the opportunity of dwindling into a self-conscious, self-conceited, and unsympathetic sect. Which shall it be? With those to whom, under God, the remoulding of our organic law has been intrusted ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington

... husband who forcibly snatched you from Jivaji to whom you had been sacredly affianced? I shall never forget that night! In the wedding hall we sat anxiously expecting the bridegroom, for the auspicious hour was dwindling away. Then in the distance appeared the glare of torches, and bridal strains came floating up the air. We shouted for joy: women blew their conch-shells. A procession of palanquins entered the courtyard: but while we were asking, "Where is Jivaji?" armed men burst out of the litters like a storm, ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore

... were dry and dwindling when Stanley's father, seeking an opening for his son, put him and money into them. From that moment they had never looked back, and now brought Stanley, the sole proprietor, an income of full fifteen thousand pounds a year. He wanted it. For Clara, his wife, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... very ground he stands upon into wealth, and departs a lord of riches at the end of a few years, leaving the sleepy population, among whom he has amassed them, floated still farther down the tide of dwindling prosperity.... ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... know, Stephen. We're short of money, you know, and the fund is dwindling every day. Don't you think it's a little extravagant to have a turkey for two people? And somehow I don't feel a bit Christmassy. I think I'd rather spend it just like any other day and try to forget that it is Christmas. Everything would ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... Nutter's Lane had now become rare birds. The dwindling of his visitors had at first scarcely attracted his notice; it had been so gradual, like the rest. But at last Dutton found himself alone. The old solitude of his youth had re-knitted its shell around him. Now that he was unsustained by the likelihood of some one ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... blew. Lake Linderman was no more than a narrow mountain gorge filled with water. Sweeping down from the mountains through this funnel, the wind was irregular, blowing great guns at times and at other times dwindling to a ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London

... uncongenial to it. His younger acquaintances in the Nonjuring body, however sincere and generous in temperament, were men of a different order. It was but natural that, as the schism became more pronounced and Jacobite hopes more desperate, the Church views of a dwindling minority should become continually narrower, and lose more and more of those larger sympathies which can scarcely be altogether absent in any section of ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... larkspur level, and holds south along the front of Oppapago, having the high ranges to the right and the foothills and the great Bitter Lake below it on the left. The mesa holds very level here, cut across at intervals by the deep washes of dwindling streams, and its treeless spaces uncramp ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin

... with France. Alone at Neuilly, where she had to seek shelter both for economy and safety, with no means of returning to England, and unable to go to Switzerland through her inability to procure a passport, her money dwindling, still she managed to continue her literary work; and as well as some letters on the subject of the Revolution, she wrote at Neuilly all that was ever finished of her Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution. Her only ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti

... wiser! "Such a craze, however, is too widely diffused, and falls in with too obstinate a preconception [17] in the human race, which has in every age hypochondriacally regarded itself as under some fatal necessity of dwindling, much to have challenged public attention. As real paradoxes (spite of the idle meaning attached usually to the word paradox) have often no falsehood in them, so here, on the contrary, was a falsehood ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... Greca" on account of her knowledge of Hellenic letters. Her uncle, Fray Espiridion Febrer, prior of Santo Domingo, a great luminary of his epoch, had been her teacher, and the "Greek woman" could write in their own language to correspondents in the Orient who still maintained a dwindling ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... since she had left him on the path from the hilltop till his interview the next day, he had looked on her possession as an 'option,' to the acceptance of which circumstances seemed to be compelling him. But ever since, that asset seemed to have been dwindling; and now he was almost beginning to despair. He was altogether cold at heart, and yet highly strung with apprehension, as he was shown into ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker

... words and ideas is a dwindling factor at the present day, and a new presentation of fact is occasionally to be met with in the printed page. The best "book of travel" within the knowledge of the writer, and perhaps one of the slightest in bulk ever written in the English language, is Stevenson's ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun

... many ways they were curiously degenerate and incompetent. They had lost any idea of making textiles, they could hardly make up clothes when they had material, and they were forced to plunder the continually dwindling supplies of the ruins about them ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells

... it seemed that their claim was dwindling. The chronometer which they were to use for the steamer's benefit was lost; the tow-line which they were to furnish had been given back to them; the course to New York which they chalked out had not been accepted; the abandoning of their ship by the Englishmen was clearly ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson

... on her husband's obtaining an engagement for a series of concerts at the chief county town, Mrs. Dixon had insisted on coming with him to St. Mildred's in the hope that country air might benefit Marianne, who, in a confined lodging in London, was pining and dwindling as her brothers and sisters had done before her. Sebastian, who liked to escape from his wife's grumbling and rigid supervision, and looked forward to amusement in his own way at the races, had grudgingly ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge

... half-joking reproof. This fired my boy's wicked little heart with furious resentment; he gathered up his books after school, and took them home; a good many other boys had done it, and the school was dwindling. He was sent back with his books the next morning, and many other parents behaved as wisely as his. One of the leading men in the town, whose mere presence in the schoolroom sent a thrill of awe through the fellows, brought ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells

... me—not from me," Richard repeated, but the power which had upheld him was dwindling fast. He knew, knew beyond question that in a few more moments the truth would be shaken out of him unless he could devise some means of slackening the strain. And ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee

... 1781, that Lord North got this news, taking it "as he would have taken a ball in his breast." He recognized at once that "all was over," yet for a short time longer he retained the management of affairs. But his majority in Parliament was steadily dwindling, and evidently with him also "all was over." In his despair he caught with almost pathetic eagerness at what for a moment seemed a chance to save his ministry by treating with the States secretly and apart from France. He was a man not troubled with convictions, and having been ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.

... My dwindling space warns me that I must very soon pause; but these examples can be extended ad infinitum, should another opportunity be ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 184, May 7, 1853 • Various

... there grew yet more, above in the mighty distance, so that they were lost in the upward space of the night, and did seem to me presently but as a constant, glimmering fire, that did shape a shining Peak into the blackness of the heavens, dwindling into the utmost height. And thus was ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson

... the errors of the Jewish faith and turn to the Christian verity, which he might see still wax and prosper, as being holy and good, whereas his own faith, on the contrary, was manifestly on the wane and dwindling to nought. The Jew made answer that he held no faith holy or good save only the Jewish, that in this latter he was born and therein meant to live and die, nor should aught ever make him ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio

... will be remembered, was the first to discover the possibilities of proving (by figures) the dwindling reserves of hostile man-power. His estimates, based upon pure reason, personal experience and some two tons of figures, have been carefully revised and brought to date, more especially for the benefit of those busy people who cannot take a holiday by the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 19, 1917 • Various

... a mirror now, And in it a long perspective I could trace Of my begetters, dwindling backward each past each All with the kindred look, Whose names had since been inked down in their place On the recorder's book, Generation and generation of my mien, ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy

... north. The complexion of this race was also a red-brown, but they were redder or more copper-coloured than the Tlavatli. They also were a tall race, averaging about eight feet during the period of their ascendency, but of course dwindling, as all races did, to the dimensions that are common to-day. The type was an improvement on the two previous sub-races, the features being straight and well marked, not unlike the ancient Greek. The approximate birthplace of this race may be seen, marked with ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot

... gradually towards the fixed stars, so that perhaps it might be right to make the man in the moon trustee for that part of the accumulations which rises above the optics of sublunary bankers; whilst the Ceylon pillar is constantly unweaving its own granite texture, and dwindling earthwards. It is probable that each of the parties will have reached its consummation about the same time. What is to be done with the mustard- seed, Ceylon has forgotten to say. But what is to be done with the half-crown and its surplus, nobody can doubt after ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... 11 And it came to pass after my father had spoken these words he spake unto my brethren concerning the gospel which should be preached among the Jews, and also concerning the dwindling of the Jews in unbelief. And after they had slain the Messiah, who should come, and after he had been slain he should rise from the dead, and should make himself manifest, by the Holy Ghost, ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous

... the Review—a poor business, truly! Is there a reason for a man's wits dwindling the moment he gets into a critical High-place to hold forth?—I have only glanced over the article however. Well, one day I am to write of you, dearest, and it must come to ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett

... sensual fleece, O turn aside,—and take, I pray, That he below may rest in peace, Thy ever-dwindling soul, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth

... increasing proportion of people—more especially in our suburban areas—who are, so far as our old divisions go, delocalized. They represent, in fact, a community of a new sort, the new great modern community, which is seeking to establish itself in the room of the dwindling, little, highly localized ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells

... . . My species are dwindling, My forests grow barren, My popinjays fail from their tappings, My larks ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy

... And did he not declare that if the white men came again without their iron tubes, then certain secret things would happen—oh! ask them not, in time they shall be known to you, and the people of the Pongo who were dwindling would again become fruitful and very great? And that is why we welcome you, white men, who arise again from the land of ghosts, because through you we, the Pongo, shall become fruitful ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard

... This kept them poor and low, and they scarce had sufficient credit to procure necessaries to subsist or till their ground. They never had anything to store, all was from hand to mouth; so one or two bad crops broke them. Others found their stock dwindling and decaying visibly, and so removed before all was gone, while they had as much left as would pay their passage, and had little more than what would carry them ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin

... experience comes the baby, richer in each generation by a new and improved father. He is born and cherished, however, by the same kind of mother, bringing to her tremendous task no new tool worthy of the time, but merely the same old dwindling, overworked "maternal instinct." ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... nationality. I need hardly say that increasing intensity of sound will suggest vehemence, approach, and its visual synonym, growth, as well as that decreasing intensity will suggest withdrawal, dwindling, ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell

... a little mill to saw timber, grind corn, forge iron, or weave cloth. Most of these mills are now deserted. In countless villages the old blacksmith shop, once a center of business, is abandoned. Here and there a patriarchal smith still serves a dwindling group of customers and speaks with mingled pride and pathos of his sons, now in the automobile business in ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter

... into the one leading up to the first capital we were to visit. Then I found myself between miles and miles of stately white pillars, rising and sinking as the road found its natural levels, and growing in the perspective before us and dwindling behind us. I could not keep out of my mind a colonnade of palm-trees, only the fronds were lacking, and there were never palms so beautiful. Each pillar was inscribed with the name of some Altrurian who had done something for his country, written some beautiful poem ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells

... begins to understand how impossible it would have been for that structure to have come into existence de novo, however urgently the world had need of it. But it happened that the coal needed to replace the dwindling forests of this small and exceptionally rain-saturated country occurs in low hollow basins overlying clay, and not, as in China and the Alleghanies for example, on high-lying outcrops, that can be worked as chalk is worked in England. From this fact it followed that some quite unprecedented pumping ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... him awfully. The candle stood on the counter, its flame solemnly wagging in a draught; and by that inconsiderable movement, the whole room was filled with noiseless bustle and kept heaving like a sea: the tall shadows nodding, the gross blots of darkness swelling and dwindling as with respiration, the faces of the portraits and the china gods changing and wavering like images in water. The inner door stood ajar, and peered into that leaguer[5] of shadows with a long slit of daylight like a ...
— Short-Stories • Various

... he emphatically declared, as he stirred up the dwindling fire, and added a couple of sticks. "I expected to be with her before this, but here I am, lodged like a bear in this ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody

... how the crisis will be met. As the final period draws nearer, families will become smaller and smaller, and in the last Martian century no children will be born; so the diminishing water supply will suffice for the needs of the dwindling population. Thus the race will gradually die out naturally, and become extinct long before the conditions of our world can make life a terror. There will, therefore, be no self-slaughter, nor murderous extermination, amongst ourselves—we ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks

... after effect of a good dinner, that dwindling away of pleasant emotions; perhaps it was the very triviality of the offense for which he was thus suddenly arraigned; at any rate, he lost his temper, and he was rather ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath

... feared Rome even while they hated her, and would desert him at the first sign of defeat; that he had to provide daily for the wants of both men and animals, and that for sixteen years he remained in Italy with a dwindling army, striking terror into the hearts of the bravest of the Romans, you may have some little idea of the sort of ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang

... a self-confidence and reliance that had felt no need for that aid; and now it seemed the only means by which to restrain his heart from swelling beyond the compass of his body, by which to cherish his brain from dwindling and shrivelling quite away. Some sharp-toothed creature kept tearing and dragging on his maimed left hand; he never could see it, he could not shake it off; but he ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman

... and Pietro and Violante gone! Only his saint to guard him—that was why she chose the new one; he would not be tired of guarding namesakes. . . . After all, she hopes her boy will come to disbelieve her history, as herself almost does. It is dwindling fast to that: ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne

... real worries than these trifling social maladjustments between her old friends and her new one. Her small funds were dwindling rapidly, as usual, even with the practice of a greater economy than she had ever before attempted. All her feeble efforts to find employment and earn money had failed. She felt herself slipping down, and with all her courageous determination to ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick

... back the animated picture of the little settlement wherein we figured but a moment before gradually faded into distance. The wild-looking assembly was blotted from the shore. But still above the rapidly dwindling buildings waved the flag of the oldest chartered trading association in ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming

... point in his familiar reminiscences my dwindling interest vanished, and I noticed again, through the window, the house fronts of the place I knew once, when Poplar was salt. The lost sailor himself was insignificant. What was he? A deck hand; one who tarred iron, and could take a trick at the wheel when some one was watching ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson

... I felt more and more that his love must be dwindling to make him act as he did. I thought it all over wearily enough and asked myself whether I had done everything I should to hold my husband's love. I had kept him in at nights. I had cut down his smoking. I had ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock

... but that, when we analyse the facts, the fertility of the old native-born American population of mainly Anglo-Saxon origin is found to be lower than that of France. This element, therefore, is rapidly dwindling away in the United States. The general level of the birth-rate is maintained by the foreign immigrants, who in many States (as in New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Minnesota) constitute the majority of the population, and altogether number considerably over ten millions. Among ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... bombardment of Rome. Garibaldi prolonged his defence until the end of the month. Then, when sufficient breaches had been opened, the French stormed the ramparts and entered Rome. Garibaldi attempted to throw his forces into Venice to prolong the war against Austria. With his ever-dwindling followers he was hunted from place to place. In the end, through the devotion of Italian patriots, he managed to escape to America. On July 14, the restoration of the Pope's authority over Rome was announced by Oudinot. Pio Nono, however, showed no inclination to place himself in the power of his ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson

... hunted, Shann got a better idea of the land about the river. It was sere, the vegetation dwindling except for some rough spikes of things pushing through the parched ground like flayed fingers, their puffed redness in contrast to the usual amethystine coloring of Warlock's growing things. Under the climbing sun that whole stretch ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton

... entrenches itself as a fortress against the poverty and squalor that are creeping up the hill towards it. Around the square there are still gardens and crescents and roads of consideration, but ever dwindling in social status as one goes down the hill, till the consideration vanishes in the degradation of cheap boarding-houses and the homes of Jews of the ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan

... would think it over. As he gave no signs of life or thought, the popular composer then wrote to him at length on the subject, offering him fifty pounds for the job, half of it on account. Lancelot was in sore straits when he got the letter, for his stock of money was dwindling to vanishing point, and he dallied with the temptation sufficiently to take the letter home with him. But his spirit was not yet broken, and the letter, crumpled like a rag, was picked up by Mary Ann and straightened out, and carefully placed ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill

... and on August 18 another desperate assault was made, which, like the other, failed. Yet the position of the besieged was becoming desperate: dwindling daily in numbers, they were becoming too feeble to hold the long line of fortifications; but, when his council suggested the abandonment of Il Borgo and Senglea and withdrawal to St. Angelo, ...
— Knights of Malta, 1523-1798 • R. Cohen

... determination plainly marked in their haggard faces, they set to work in the shelter of the dwarfed pines around them, and packed one sledge with all they felt to be necessary to take on this forlorn hope expedition, and with it the last of their dwindling store of food. ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn

... be earning something before he invested in expensive apparel, be it never so desirable and important. However, he would outfit himself just as soon as a regular earning capacity justified his going into his carefully husbanded but dwindling savings. He pictured himself clad as a lily of the field, unconscious of perfection as Herbert Cressey himself, in the public haunts of fashion and ease; through which vision there rose the searing prospect ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... Dunbar shooting right on ahead. And all three of them dwindling and dwindling and blinking ...
— To Each His Star • Bryce Walton

... depleted by the equivalent of nearly a regiment every day. The civilian leaders had already suggested the last expedients of despair,—the enrolling of boys of fourteen years and old men of sixty-five, nay, even the enlistment of slaves. But there was no cure for the mortal dwindling. The Confederacy was ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse

... seemed to have already overtaken Bosnia and Herzegovina; when gallant little Montenegro was already shut out from the sea by the octopus-like grip of Dalmatia crouching along her western shore; when Turkey was dwindling down to almost ineptitude; when Greece was almost a byword, and when Albania as a nation—though still nominally subject—was of such unimpaired virility that there were great possibilities of her future, it was imperative that ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker

... streams. Soon as the tender dam 90 Has formed them with her tongue, with pleasure view The marks of their renowned progenitors, Sure pledge of triumphs yet to come. All these Select with joy; but to the merciless flood Expose the dwindling refuse, nor o'erload The indulgent mother. If thy heart relent, Unwilling to destroy, a nurse provide, And to the foster-parent give the care Of thy superfluous brood; she'll cherish kind The alien offspring; pleased thou shalt behold 100 Her tenderness, and ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville

... Dear young lady, you are about to become the wife of one of the best. There are not many of us left; we are a dwindling band, ...
— The Gay Lord Quex - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur W. Pinero

... have them; and stand but for cyphers or worse among the churches of God. Farther, edification is that that cherisheth all grace, and maketh the Christians quick and lively, and maketh sin lean and dwindling, and filleth the mouth with thanksgiving to God. But to contest with gracious men, with men that walk with God; to shut such out of the churches; because they will not sin against their souls, rendereth ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... effort I raised myself to the top, and moving as cautiously as a rheumatic patient, stood up beside him under the blaze of the sun. The sphere lay behind us on its dwindling snowdrift thirty ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells

... chief source of internal weakness to the commonwealths. Nor did the burghers see far enough or philosophically enough to recruit their numbers by a continuous admission of new members from the wealthy but unfranchised citizens.[2] This alone could have saved them from the death by dwindling and decay to which they were exposed. The Italian conception of citizenship may be set forth in the words of one of their acutest critics, Donato Giannotti, who writes concerning the electors in a state:[3] 'Non dico ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds

... is presented in the comparison of these two aspects of the theological change that has come to pass,—the growing importance of the ethical, and the dwindling importance of the miraculous in the religious thought of to-day. This may reassure those who fear whereto such change may grow. The inner significance of such a change is most auspicious. It portends the displacement of a false by the true conception of supernatural Religion, and the removal ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton

... and I stood alone in the street, up which yellowish wreaths of fog were beginning to roll. It had been quite clear and bright when I entered the house, but now the sky was settling down into a colourless grey, the light was failing and the houses dwindling into dim, unreal shapes that vanished at half their height. Nevertheless I stepped out briskly and strode along at a good pace, as a young man is apt to do when his mind is in somewhat of a ferment. In truth, I had a good ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman

... exception. This river he mistook for the Albert, so named by Captain Stokes during his marine survey of the north coast. A.C. Gregory rectified the error in after years, and gave the river the name of the lost explorer for whom he was then searching. With fast-dwindling supplies, lagging footsteps, and depressed spirits, the expedition travelled slowly on to the south-west corner of the Gulf where, in crossing a large river, the Roper, four of the horses were drowned in consequence of the boggy banks. This misfortune so limited their ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc

... plunged down the bank, and dragged slowly over the sand-beds; sometimes the hoofs of the oxen were scarcely wetted by the thin sheet of water; and the next moment the river would be boiling against their sides, and eddying fiercely around the wheels. Inch by inch they receded from the shore, dwindling every moment, until at length they seemed to be floating far in the very middle of the river. A more critical experiment awaited us; for our little mule-cart was but ill-fitted for the passage of so swift a stream. We watched ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.

... the commissariat of his army. Thus the difficulties of the Imperial treasury increased. Justinian became more and more unwilling to loosen his purse-strings for the sake of a province which showed an ever-dwindling return. The pay of the soldiers got more and more hopelessly into arrear. They deserted in increasing numbers to the standard of the brave and generous young king of the Goths. Hence, it came to pass, that in the spring of 544, when Totila had been only for two and a half years ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin

... broke and the ragged land leapt into full view with magical abruptness. It was as though Nature had grown her forest within the confines of a field embraced by an imaginary hedge. There were no outskirts, no dwindling away. It ended in one clean-cut line. And beyond lay the rampart hills, fringed and patched with disheveled bluff, split by rifts and yawning chasms. And ever they rose higher and higher as the distance gained, and, though summer was not yet at its height, it ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum

... from catching stray glimpses of his patent-leathered toes. Little BEN was not made for the country, that was certain. A life of Clubs and dinner-parties would have suited him to perfection. In his Club he could always pose before a select and, it must be added, a dwindling circle as a man of influence. "There is no Club, however watched and tended, but one dread bore is there." BEN might have developed into a prime bore, but as he was plentifully supplied with money and had a good ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 17, 1891 • Various

... restlessly from side to side. The agony was beginning to master him. His powers of endurance were dwindling. ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell

... the lands newly raised above the sea. The animals and insects living on these modified plants, would themselves be in some degree modified by change of food, as well as by change of climate; and the modification would be more marked where, from the dwindling or disappearance of one kind of plant, an allied kind was eaten. In the lapse of the many generations arising before the next upheaval, the sensible or insensible alterations thus produced in each species would become organised—there ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer

... the platform. They were very small and seemed to be far away. I blinked. Horror surged over me. Their figures were dwindling as they stood there. Polter was saying something to the man at the microscope. Other men were nearby, watching. All were normal, save Polter and Babs. A moment passed. Polter was standing by the chair in which the man at the microscope was sitting. And Polter's ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings

... defying all, you strive To make yourself the richest man alive. Yet where's the profit, if you hide by stealth In pit or cavern your enormous wealth? "Why, once break in upon it, friend, you know, And, dwindling piece by piece, the whole will go." But, if 'tis still unbroken, what delight Can all that treasure give to mortal wight? Say, you've a million quarters on your floor: Your stomach is like mine: it holds no more: Just as the slave who 'neath the ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace

... might as well be as comfortable as we can." She reached for the canteen lying in a fast dwindling strip of rock shade. We drank sparingly. She let me dribble a few drops upon her shoulder. Thenceforth by silent agreement we moistened our tongues, scrupulously turn about, wringing the most from each brief ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin

... there appear. The case-forms of the different declensions are beginning to run into one another: the plural, for example, of insignis is no longer insignes, but, as in Italian, insigni; and the case-inflexions themselves are dwindling away before the free use of prepositions, which was already beginning to show ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail

... what availeth grammar As taught in straitest schools— The hammer of the Crammer Forging Bellona's tools— Or words that humbly stammer Regardless of the rules? And what availeth fretting, Deep sighs, and dwindling waist, And what the sad forgetting Of culinary taste, Since still thou fondly spurnest Five hundred thou. (or "thee."?) And on young STONEY turnest ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, March 4, 1893 • Various

... series of sanguinary battles took place between the Indians and strong Illinois militia forces supported by detachments of United States troops under General Brady. It was not until the beginning of August that Black Hawk was finally defeated, his dwindling horde almost annihilated, and the old chieftain, betrayed into the hands of the whites by the Winnebagos, was made a prisoner of war. And so, summarily, the present chronicler disposes of the "great Black Hawk war," and returns to his narrative and the ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon

... the United States had twenty times as much land, fit for whites, on which to grow bigger and bigger populations of their own blood under their own flags. This meant that the new, strong, and most ambitious German Empire was doomed to an ever-dwindling future as a world-power in comparison with the British Empire. The Germans could not see why they should not have as good a "place in the sun" of the white man's countries as the British, whom they now looked on very much as our ancestors looked upon the oversea Spaniards about ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood

... stood as high as I did. But, as I stared at it, in stupefied amazement,—as you may easily imagine,—the thing dwindled while I gazed. I did not stop to see how far the process of dwindling continued,—a stark raving madman for the nonce, I fled as if all the fiends in ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh

... irrespective of the presence or otherwise of sheep scab, were conferred upon the Board of Agriculture. An inspector of the board or of the local authority was by the same act authorized to enter premises and examine sheep. Each year the disorder runs a similar course, the outbreaks dwindling to a minimum in the summer months, June to August, and attaining a maximum in the winter months, December to February. It is chiefly in the "flying'' flocks and not in the breeding flocks that the disease is rife, and it is so easily communicable that a drove of scab-infested ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... made recovery more difficult. Of course he should really have become a soldier; but soldiering in those days was an expensive calling. As a baronet—even as an Irish baronet—a good deal would have been expected of him, far more than the dwindling means of Roscarna could possibly supply, and since every career seemed closed to him but one of provincial dissipation he is scarcely to be blamed ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young

... of 1837 there was a marked stagnation in home politics, mainly due to an equipoise of parties and serious divisions in the ranks of the ministerialists as well as of the opposition. Not only was there a very strong conservative majority in the house of lords, with a sufficient though dwindling liberal majority in the house of commons, but neither majority was amenable to party discipline. The aggressive policy and vexatious tactics of Lyndhurst were distasteful to his nominal leader, the Duke of Wellington, and still more ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick

... In Mona's eyes she was absolutely beautiful, and her long tail—nearly black at the top and dwindling to a peculiar greyish hue at the bottom—was another source ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin

... Assisi, Pope Urban IV., the holy St Bridget of Sweden, and the notorious Queen Joanna II. of Naples. Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, afterwards Pope Pius II., however, seems to have thought Amalfi, ever dwindling in size and importance, too mean a place to own so great a treasure, and he accordingly transported the head of the Saint to Rome, where it is now accounted amongst the four chief relics of St Peter's. Perhaps it was to counterbalance the loss of so important ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... was silent and long drawn out. I easily reached town and the platform before it had finished watering at the tank. It moved up, made a short halt, I saw my trunk come out of it, and then it moved away silently as it had come, smoking and dwindling into distance unknown. ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister

... middle-income economy that is heavily dependent on dwindling oil resources, but sustained high oil prices in recent years have helped build Oman's budget and trade surpluses and foreign reserves. Oman joined the World Trade Organization in November 2000 and continues to liberalize ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... possibilities, as Sturgis had told Pell; and though the hot season lasted interminably and caused one's spirits, as well as one's hopes, to droop, there were enchanting spring days and bright, colorful, dwindling autumns when the air was keen and clear, and life was a song with youth ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne

... friend, but the ache and tedium of life did not return upon her. Her sense of duty and natural affection were very strong. She told herself that if it were her lot to watch for many years beside this dwindling flame, it was a lot of God's giving, not of her own seeking, and therefore good. The letters that came to her from Beechhurst and Caen breathed nothing but encouragement to love and patience, and Harry ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr

... facts in both cases, and so did Ernest Seton, who had visited us in the country as well as in our city home. Fuller not only knew the ins and outs of my houses; he was also aware that my royalties were dwindling and that my wife was forced to get along with one servant and that we used the ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... happy youth. See how brightly the candle burns. From boundless stretches of space the icy wind blows, circling, careering, and tossing the flame. In vain. Bright and clear the candle burns. Yet the wax is dwindling, consumed by the fire. ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev

... timidity, directed on him the slowly dwindling fire of her gaze, Dundas was afraid to put his arm round her waist; this rosy-cheeked giant, who was a champion boxer and had been wounded five times, was as bashful ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois

... her views of his capacity. On December I he broke down the bridges in his rear over the Raritan, and marched through Jersey with a dwindling army. At Princeton he had but three thousand men; destroying every boat, he wisely put the broad Delaware between his army ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell

... sun was very strong and a heavy shimmer clothed the plain. Through this shimmer we caught sight of something large and black and flapping. It looked like a crow-or, better, a scare-crow-crippled, half flying, half running, with waving wings or arms, now dwindling, now gigantic as the mirage caught it up or let it drop. As we watched, it developed, and we made it out to be a porter, clad in a long, ragged black overcoat, running zigzag through the bushes ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White

... that were his cattle straying over them, and beyond these the home landing and the masts of the Golden Rose. The sun was near its setting; the men had left the fields; over all things were the stillness and peace, the encroaching shadows, the dwindling light, so golden in its quality, of late afternoon. When he crossed the bridge over the creek, the hollow sound that the boards gave forth beneath his horse's hoofs had the depth and resonance of drumbeats, and the cry of a solitary heron in the marsh seemed louder than its wont. He passed ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston

... soared in a wild outburst. Give the eagle the throat of the lark, and after he has struck down his prey in the centre of the sky and sent the ragged feathers and the slain body falling down to earth, what would be the song of the eagle rising again and dwindling out of sight in the heart of the sky? What terrible pean would he send whistling down to the dull earth far below? And such was the music that came before the coming of Dan Barry. It did not cease, as usual, at a distance, but it came closer and closer, and it swelled ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand

... overhead the men poured forth from their quarters armed and bristling, to be greeted by a volley of gunshots, the thud of bullets, and the dwindling whine of spent lead. They leaped from shelter to find themselves girt with a fitful hoop of fire, for the "Stranglers" had spread in the arc of a circle and now emptied their rifles towards the centre. The defenders, however, maintained surprising order considering the suddenness of their ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach

... surroundings. He looked about him awfully. The candle stood on the counter, its flame solemnly wagging in a draught; and by that inconsiderable movement the whole room was filled with noiseless bustle and kept heaving like a sea: the tall shadows nodding, the gross blots of darkness swelling and dwindling as with respiration, the faces of the portraits and the china gods changing and wavering like images in water. The inner door stood ajar, and peered into that leaguer of shadows with a long slit of ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various

... Life he felt had no further happiness to offer him. He hated Miriam, and there was no getting away from her whatever might betide. And for the rest there was toil and struggle, toil and struggle with a failing heart and dwindling courage, to sustain that dreary duologue. "Life's insured," said Mr. Polly; "place is insured. I don't see it does any harm to ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells

... through the changes we are relating. What if these capacities had, by simple nourishing food, cleanly care-taking, and brighter, kindlier associations, been trained into full working order? Left alone or ill-tended they were daily dwindling, and the depreciation was going on not solely at the expense of little Ginx, but of the whole community. To reduce his strength one-half was to reduce one-half his chances of independence, and to multiply the prospects of his continuous application ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins

... water is dwindling. Organized and juvenile crimes cost the taxpayers millions of dollars each year, making it essential that we have improved enforcement and new legislative safeguards. The denial of constitutional rights to some of our fellow Americans on account of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... his seat by the window, and drummed with impatient fingers on the sill. He was small, like his brother, but of a compact, sturdy build. His chin, instead of dwindling to a point, was square and stubborn, and his eyes looked straight ahead at the thing he wanted, and neither saw nor cared for what lay outside. He had been trying ever since leaving the cemetery to bring ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice

... of the modern and real immensity of the unfathomed Skies. But suddenly the vast meaning of my words rushed into my mind; I felt myself dwindling, falling through the blue. And yet, in these silent seconds, there thrilled through me in the cool sweet air and night no chill of death or nothingness; but the taste and joy of this Earth, this orchard-plot of earth, floating unknown, ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith

... two other surgeons—died of their wounds, served to increase the reputation in which this rebel-convict stood in Bridgetown. It may have been no more than the fortune of war. But the townsfolk did not choose so to regard it. It led to a further dwindling of the practices of his free colleagues and a further increase of his own labours and his owner's profit. Whacker and Bronson laid their heads together to devise a scheme by which this intolerable state of things should be brought to an end. But ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini

... rapidly dwindling category of older hackers with FORTRAN, or even assembler, as their language of choice. They often prefer to be known as {Real Programmer}s, and other hackers consider them a bit odd (see "{The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer}" in Appendix A). ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... the pearl-bearing molluscs may be greatly diminished in numbers or even exterminated by the greed of man and his fearfully destructive methods of harvesting nature's productions. In fact, the fisheries have been dwindling in yield for some time, and most of the fine pearls that are marketed are old pearls, already drilled, from the treasuries of Eastern potentates, who have been forced by necessity to accept the high prices ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade

... the great fight went on, and at every cast of the spear Odysseus and his men added another to the list of the slain. Seeing their numbers dwindling fast, the wretched remnant of the wooers lost heart altogether and huddled together like sheep at the end of the hall. To complete their discomfiture a terrible voice was suddenly heard in the air, and a gleam as from ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell

... them, and the sorrows that lie lurking on every man's path. He saw more distinctly what Christ came to do; and how he did it by complete self-abnegation, and by descending to the level of the lowest. But he had no delight in standing up in his pulpit in full face of his dwindling congregation. Language seemed poor to him; and it had grown difficult to him to put his burning thoughts into words. As the bitter experience of daily life seared his very soul, he found that no smooth, fit expressions of his self-communing rose to his lips. It pained him to face ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton

... the fourth century, at Rome, that the strong modern opposition to homosexuality was first clearly formulated in law.[265] The Roman race had long been decaying; sexual perversions of all kinds flourished; the population was dwindling. At the same time, Christianity, with its Judaic-Pauline antagonism to homosexuality, was rapidly spreading. The statesmen of the day, anxious to quicken the failing pulses of national life, utilized this powerful Christian feeling. Constantine, Theodosius, and Valentinian ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... Tatho gorgeously apparelled, and with a beard curled and plaited into a thousand ringlets. On the other side, plying her industry with unruffled defence, walked Ylga, once again fan-girl, and so still second lady in this dwindling kingdom. ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne

... their colours can we trace, Lost in the mazy distance of the race Till at Salara's far-off bridge descried, Like coursing butterflies, they seem to glide; Then, dwindling farther, in the lengthening course, Mere floating specks supplant both man and horse; Till, having crossed the Columbarium gray, They swerve, and back retrace their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various

... not praise me, Gaultier, at the ball, Ripe lips, trim boddice, and a waist so small, With clipsome lightness, dwindling ever less, Beneath the robe of pea-y greeniness? Dost thou remember, when, with stately prance, Our heads went crosswise in the country-dance; How soft, warm fingers, tipped like buds of balm, Trembled ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun

... he fought Lee did not know. He was aware that the girl was screaming—and that he was hurling clutching figures away—figures that came pouncing back. Then the roaring in his head was a vast uproar. The fighting, scrambling dark shapes all seemed dwindling until they were tiny points of white light—like stars in ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings

... Knossos to a close had already happened. The Cretan wares which filtered into Egypt after 1400 B.C. were the products of the Minoan decadence, when the survivors of the Empire of the Sea-Kings—a broken and dwindling race—were still trying to maintain a slowly failing tradition of art under the new masters, perhaps the Mycenaeans of the mainland, who, driven forth themselves by the pressure of Northern invaders, had crushed in their turn the gentler ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie

... on that morning tide When they flee away from the dwindling lands Will feel the clutch of mother hands And the soul ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy

... reply; "we are quite as strong as our forefathers, and a great deal wiser! "Such a craze, however, is too widely diffused, and falls in with too obstinate a preconception [17] in the human race, which has in every age hypochondriacally regarded itself as under some fatal necessity of dwindling, much to have challenged public attention. As real paradoxes (spite of the idle meaning attached usually to the word paradox) have often no falsehood in them, so here, on the contrary, was a falsehood which had in it nothing paradoxical. It ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... citadel would prove offensive to the estates, while it could hardly be agreeable to the King; and yet it is not certain that he could have accomplished his purpose in any other way. Moreover, the achievement was one of a projected series by which he meant to re-vindicate his dwindling authority. He was weary of playing the hypocrite, and convinced that he and his monarch were both abhorred by the Netherlanders. Peace was impossible—war was forbidden him. Reduced almost to a nullity by the Prince ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... the besieged were, unfortunately, dwindling. One had been shot through the head, two others had been wounded, and Lisle himself had received a bullet in his shoulder. There were now but two unwounded men; but the other four were all capable of using their rifles, at a pinch. It ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty

... perhaps, a mimic moon, but no other light unless his path chanced to lie through Herzogstrasse. In that street a couple of windows on the first floor showed bright and unabashed, and the curious passer-by could detect upon the blind the shadows of men growing to monstrous giants and dwindling to pigmies according as they approached or retired from the lamp ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason

... them. In and around the spaceport center, a multitude of the fellows they were never to see again had paused long enough in their own affairs to mesh thoughts in a final projection of encouragement that reached after the dwindling ship like a gesture ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan

... dreamed of. At this era, when the Adams Administration was about to close, Jefferson, in spite of his known liberal, democratic views, was one of the most popular of political leaders, save with the Federalists, now dwindling in numbers and influence. He it was who was put forward on the Republican side for the Presidency, while Adams, still favored by the Federalists and himself desiring a second term of office, became ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.

... solicitor to whom my father was now assistant. Stillwood, Waterhead and Royal dated back to the Georges, and was a firm bound up with the history—occasionally shady—of aristocratic England. True, in these later years its glory was dwindling. Old Mr. Stillwood, its sole surviving representative, declined to be troubled with new partners, explaining frankly, in answer to all applications, that the business was a dying one, and that attempting to ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome

... were dwindling to a shadow. For two months the siege of Queretaro continued, steadily growing closer. During this trying time Maximilian showed the best elements of his character. He was gentle and cheerful in demeanor, and brave in action, not hesitating to expose himself to ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris

... convex. I had never seen it thus—had never been so far above its surface before. A huge grey ball down there which was our Earth. Outlines of sea and land. Then continents and oceans, enveloped by patches of cloud area. A grey ball, changing to a glowing, vaguely dull red; then silver. Dwindling—gleaming brighter silver on one side where the sunlight ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings

... little river, dwindling into a creek of perplexed channel before the trail is found that ties the two great valleys together. One cannot miss it now, for when I last passed over it it was being paved, or macadamized, and a steam-roller was doing in a few days what the moccasined or sandalled feet ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... He wore the prescribed conventional air, subject in half a minute to a rapid blinking of the eyelids. His wife could have been inimically imagined fascinated and dwindling. A spot of colour came to her cheeks. She likewise ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... felt more and more that his love must be dwindling to make him act as he did. I thought it all over wearily enough and asked myself whether I had done everything I should to hold my husband's love. I had kept him in at nights. I had cut down his smoking. I had stopped his playing cards. What more was there ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock

... only a dwindling sight of lonely sails was to be seen, heading toward Chesapeake Bay and then to sea. But anyone with eyesight good enough might have seen a ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson

... hold on to the capital loses it, since he sacrifices profits from which more would have come. Running his antiquated engine, the unenterprising man has to content himself with small returns and, in the meanwhile, sees his actual productive fund dwindling by the deterioration of the ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark

... liberally for the commissariat of his army. Thus the difficulties of the Imperial treasury increased. Justinian became more and more unwilling to loosen his purse-strings for the sake of a province which showed an ever-dwindling return. The pay of the soldiers got more and more hopelessly into arrear. They deserted in increasing numbers to the standard of the brave and generous young king of the Goths. Hence, it came to pass, that in the spring ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin

... if you take it by the card, but the spirit of joy or the spirit of sorrow has the power to multiply its potentialities amazingly. Both these spirits walked by Evander's side during his second day at Harby. The one that went in sable reminded him that his horizon was dwindling almost to his feet; the other, in rose and gold, hinted that it is better to be emperor for a day than beggar for a century. And truly through all that day Evander esteemed himself happier than an emperor. For he had discovered ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... not the worst. I have said that there was a difference this morning when I got up and looked out. The sandy paths were dry, showing that there had been no fresh rain in the night. Moreover, the hillsides were open to view, the silver rills that veined the rugged steeps were dwindling, there was a blue sky, and great ranges of wooded or desolate mountains were in clearly cut outline—the first time since the wet period set in. Over the shoulder of the huge pyramid to the east there was actual sunshine, and the fleecy clouds were high. ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior

... late.... I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the Customs. That was all. But, nevertheless, it is anything but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect is dwindling away, or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of phial; so that at every glance you find a ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.

... some penniless Yankee, who presently turns the very ground he stands upon into wealth, and departs a lord of riches at the end of a few years, leaving the sleepy population, among whom he has amassed them, floated still farther down the tide of dwindling prosperity.... ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... accomplished little; and La Rochelle had made good use of the respite to strengthen its works. Every effort to gain a lodgement in its neighborhood had signally failed. The end of December came, and with it cold and discouragement. Anjou's army was dwindling away. The King of Spain and the Pope recalled their troops, as if the battle of the third of October had ended the war, and Santa Fiore, the pontifical general, sent to Rome twenty-six standards, taken by the Italians at Moncontour—a present from Charles the Ninth, which Pius accepted with ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird

... strange about each; in each Moreau had blended this animal with that. One perhaps was ursine chiefly, another feline chiefly, another bovine chiefly; but each was tainted with other creatures,—a kind of generalised animalism appearing through the specific dispositions. And the dwindling shreds of the humanity still startled me every now and then,—a momentary recrudescence of speech perhaps, an unexpected dexterity of the fore-feet, a ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells

... extension of twenty-five days in which to meet them. Thus pressed, Raoul looked into his affairs and asked for the accounts, and it then appeared that the receipts of the newspaper covered only two-thirds of the expenses, while the subscriptions were rapidly dwindling. The great man now grew anxious and gloomy, but to Florine only, in whom he confided. She advised him to borrow money on unwritten plays, and write than at once, giving a lien on his work. Nathan followed this advice and obtained thereby ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac

... guests in the park, all thoughts of festivity had faded. As summer-flies are scattered by rain, so did this congregation, late noisy and happy, in sadness and melancholy murmurs break up, dwindling away apace. With the set sun and the deepening twilight the park became nearly empty. Adrian and Ryland were still in earnest discussion. We had prepared a banquet for our guests in the lower hall ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley

... great planet-wide drought. The Canal Builders—men with machines recognizable as steam-shovels and derricks, digging and quarrying and driving across the empty plains with aqueducts. More cities—seaports on the shrinking oceans; dwindling, half-deserted cities; an abandoned city, with four tiny humanoid figures and a thing like a combat-car in the middle of a brush-grown plaza, they and their vehicle dwarfed by the huge lifeless buildings around them. She had not the least doubt; ...
— Omnilingual • H. Beam Piper

... first, ever since she had left him on the path from the hilltop till his interview the next day, he had looked on her possession as an 'option,' to the acceptance of which circumstances seemed to be compelling him. But ever since, that asset seemed to have been dwindling; and now he was almost beginning to despair. He was altogether cold at heart, and yet highly strung with apprehension, as he was shown into the ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker

... steam-railway system to scrap and get rid of, stations, signals, fences, rolling stock; a plant of ill-planned, smoke-distributing nuisance apparatus, that would, under former conditions, have maintained an offensive dwindling obstructive life for perhaps half a century. Then also there was a great harvest of fences, notice boards, hoardings, ugly sheds, all the corrugated iron in the world, and everything that was smeared with tar, all our gas works and ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells

... raised in Berkshire) are good for hardly anything to eat,—a fair-sized quarter dwindling down to almost nothing in ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... and stood looking out, though in reality seeing nothing. He was thinking—thinking hard. The course he had decided to adopt was the right thing—as to that he had no sort of doubt. He had no regular income, and such remnant of capital as he still possessed was dwindling alarmingly. Men had made fortunes at places like Johannesburg, starting with almost literally the traditional half-crown, why should not he? Not that he expected to make a fortune; a fair competence ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford

... centuries of ancient grudge. Often in Roman literature Praeneste is mentioned as the typical country town. Her inhabitants are laughed at because of their bad pronunciation, despised and pitied because of their characteristic combination of pride and rusticity. Yet despite the dwindling fortunes of the town she was able to keep a treaty with Rome on nearly equal terms until 90 B.C., the year in which the Julian law was passed.[166] Praeneste scornfully refused Roman citizenship in 216 B.C., when it was offered.[167] This refusal Rome never forgot nor forgave. No Praenestine families ...
— A Study Of The Topography And Municipal History Of Praeneste • Ralph Van Deman Magoffin

... use of an organ will be to let the alpenstock slip out of your starting fingers. And the excitement, and be sure the happiness, of existence will be to protract the struggle as long as possible, to push as far as you can along the dwindling path, to keep the supports and the alleviations of your labour about you as skilfully as you can, and in the fuss and business of the little momentary episodes of climbing to forget as long and as fully as may be the final and absolutely unavoidable plunge. [A pause, ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse

... not make me forget that my position was still very awkward. My stock of money was dwindling, and I could not expect to live in the Admiral's house for ever; while, as long as we remained at Rochelle, Henry of Beam's generous promise was ...
— For The Admiral • W.J. Marx

... horizon of his pulpit.—"Awake, thou that sleepest!" Why, the text is quite opposed to DOZINESS! But what of this, if the preacher be addicted to drawling, the weather unobligingly sultry, and you yourself have gradually been dwindling from an uncongenial state of wakefulness into a sleepy calm? 'Tis too much for beldame Nature, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various

... submerged beneath the Turkish flood more than eight centuries ago, has retained little individuality except in its religion, and nothing of its native speech but a garbled vocabulary embedded in a Turkified syntax. Yet even this dwindling rear-guard has been overtaken just in time by the returning current of national life, bringing with it the Greek school, and with the school a community of outlook with Hellenism the world over. Whatever the fate of eastern ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth

... the nearer houses beginning to stand out sharp and black against the red glow beyond. It was a barn behind a huge frame house that was afire, the dry hay burning like powder, and by the time they reached it the flames were already dwindling. The hose was lying like a python all about the streets, while upon the neighbouring roofs were groups of firemen with helmets and axes; some were shouting into the street below, and others were holding the spouting nozzles of the hose. "Ah," exclaimed an old man, standing near to Ida and ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris

... of nine or ten years are dragged from their squalid beds at two, three, or four o clock in the morning and compelled to work for a bare subsistence until ten, eleven, or twelve at night, their limbs wearing away, their frames dwindling, their faces whitening, and their humanity absolutely sinking into a stone-like torpor, utterly horrible ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell

... worked her hardest, and gave little heed to these things. She saw her own chances of success dwindling farther into the distance, and was surprised to see how little she cared, for a curious callousness had come over her of late. Selfish ambition—selfish, because it often persists in living when all other things are dead—seemed to have died in her at last. Had she overcome it? Or was it that ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair

... something new. A track now led across the desert. It had sunk deep into the alkali, and the soft edges had closed over it like snow, so that the wheel marks and the hoof marks and the prints of men's feet looked old. Almost in a straight line it led to the west. Its perspective, dwindling to nothingness, corrected the deceit of the clear air. Without it the cool, tall mountains looked very near. But when the eye followed the trail to its vanishing, then, as though by magic, the Ranges drew back, and before them denied ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White

... "I don't know, Stephen. We're short of money, you know, and the fund is dwindling every day. Don't you think it's a little extravagant to have a turkey for two people? And somehow I don't feel a bit Christmassy. I think I'd rather spend it just like any other day and try to forget that it is Christmas. Everything would ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... She summed up the whole town and its possibilities; and she wondered what opportunities the world out beyond Panama had for her. She recalled two trips to Philadelphia and one to Harrisburg. She made out a list of openings with such methodical exactness as she devoted to keeping the dwindling lodge insurance from disappearing altogether. Hers was no poetic outreach like that of the young genius who wants to be off for Bohemia. It was a question of earning money in the least tedious way. Una was facing the feminist ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis

... knew all the facts in both cases, and so did Ernest Seton, who had visited us in the country as well as in our city home. Fuller not only knew the ins and outs of my houses; he was also aware that my royalties were dwindling and that my wife was forced to get along with one servant and that we used the street ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... said. All very well, but I needed money. While I had been making with Eleanore those long and delightful explorations of the harbor and ourselves, at home my father's bank account had been steadily dwindling, and all that I had been able to make had gone ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole

... been part of the money of the realm was thrown on the owner. If he failed in making out a satisfactory history of every ingot he was liable to severe penalties. This Act was, as might have been expected, altogether ineffective. During the following summer and autumn, the coins went on dwindling, and the cry of distress from every county in the realm ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... after some hesitation marched up the river, crossing at Kingston. The loyalists however had plucked up heart. The insurgents' column, in the advance to London, was cut in two. Wyatt at the head of the leading section made a desperate effort to reach Ludgate with ever dwindling numbers; but when he arrived at the City gates, though he did indeed in his own words "keep touch," his small and exhausted following was in no condition for prolonged fighting. He was taken prisoner without difficulty. Many of his followers were captured. ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes

... Richard repeated, but the power which had upheld him was dwindling fast. He knew, knew beyond question that in a few more moments the truth would be shaken out of him unless he could devise some means of slackening the strain. And then ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee

... I saw those bent and dwindling figures still standing in the mud. The woman continued to pluck at her dress; the man gazed at the horizon with the same dull vacancy. They had the weary humility of the figures in Millet's "Angelus," without their inspiration, and in their eyes was ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan

... part of the century had inspired millions with high hopes of social regeneration and rekindled the beacon fires of faith in the world. The Saint-Simonians had, as an organized body, disappeared; the Fourierists were a dwindling sect, discouraged by the failure of the one great trial of their system, the famous Brook Farm experiment, in the United States; the Owenite movement had never recovered from the failures of the experiments at ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo

... last days' march. The path of his life was growing desolate and gloomy; the vegetation was dwindling; the great groves diminished into sparse, miserable lichens. From the murky abyss came an icy breath; he saw it in the distance, he walked without escape toward its gorge. The fields of dreams with ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... and on; he paid less and less attention to it, and it became increasingly obvious that opposition to the proposition was dwindling. Cries of, "Vote! Vote!" began to be heard from its supporters. Prince Ganzay rose from his desk and came ...
— Ministry of Disturbance • Henry Beam Piper

... alike of their would-be friend, the enemy, is a factor in the German subduing process the world outside must appreciate. But the Belgians are paying the price. Their resources are diminishing day by day. The world's benevolence is dwindling and they are facing an immediate future wherein life's necessities will have to be defined in terms of the irreducible minimum. The whole nation, we are told, is growing so thin on the small ration that can be provided, that ...
— No. 4, Intersession: A Sermon Preached by the Rev. B. N. Michelson, - B.A. • B. N. Michelson

... good finish for what had been a most exciting day; and, now that the faithless lantern was burning itself out, and dwindling away down below, and that the fire in my sleeve was put out, I had to remain in darkness. I stumbled along the rampart of the wall until I could get down into one of the streets, where, having roused the people, I was able to purchase another light, and reach home again in safety. After the ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor

... to me like a ship with its countless pilgrims, Vanishing in the far-away blue of the sky, Its sailors' song becoming fainter and fainter in the air, While I sink in the bosom of the endless night, fading away from myself, dwindling ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore

... People's Bank failure was one of those uncompromising summers that arrive in May and depart only with the last leaf in October. The river dwindling to a feeble stream staggered between distant banks, and the countryside lay parched and panting beneath ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice

... the doctor took his fee, gave the Captain's hand a cordial grip, expressive of sympathy and kindliness, and went his way, feeling assured that a good deal hung upon that little life which he had left slowly ebbing away, like a narrow rivulet dwindling into dryness under a ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon

... taking it "as he would have taken a ball in his breast." He recognized at once that "all was over," yet for a short time longer he retained the management of affairs. But his majority in Parliament was steadily dwindling, and evidently with him also "all was over." In his despair he caught with almost pathetic eagerness at what for a moment seemed a chance to save his ministry by treating with the States secretly and apart ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.

... her face in the pillow and began sobbing quietly to herself. It was cowardly of him to take advantage of his superior strength! She had experienced very real terror all the same, so terrible had that quaint mask of Fontan's become. And her anger began dwindling down as though the blow had calmed her. She began to feel respect toward him and accordingly squeezed herself against the wall in order to leave him as much room as possible. She even ended by going to sleep, her cheek tingling, her eyes full ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola

... especially the Anglo-American part of the population—if there results an undermining of the physique, not only in adults, but also in the young, who, as I learn from your daily journals, are also being injured by overwork—if the ultimate consequence should be a dwindling away of those among you who are the inheritors of free institutions and best adapted to them; then there will come a further difficulty in the working out of that great future which lies before the American nation. ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various

... music, but his money was fast dwindling away, and the body could not be sustained by sweet sounds. But the poor unknown violinist, who was only another atom in the surging life of the great city, could earn nothing. He was on the verge of starvation, but he would not go back to Christiana. ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden

... you, more bold, Ne'er quit your gain for fiercest heat or cold: Fire, ocean, sword, defying all, you strive To make yourself the richest man alive. Yet where's the profit, if you hide by stealth In pit or cavern your enormous wealth? "Why, once break in upon it, friend, you know, And, dwindling piece by piece, the whole will go." But, if 'tis still unbroken, what delight Can all that treasure give to mortal wight? Say, you've a million quarters on your floor: Your stomach is like mine: it holds no more: Just as the slave who 'neath the bread-bag sweats No larger ration than ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace

... in possibilities, as Sturgis had told Pell; and though the hot season lasted interminably and caused one's spirits, as well as one's hopes, to droop, there were enchanting spring days and bright, colorful, dwindling autumns when the air was keen and clear, and life was a song with youth for ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne

... Sunday after Trinity we marched out from another small village in the hot afternoon. This one was a model village, snug in the fields, and dwindling daily. The German shells are dropping there every day. In the course of another six months if the fronts of the contending armies do not change, that village will be a litter of red bricks and unpeopled ruins. As it is the women, ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill

... that could be expected of them. There was only a tiny fragment of the meteorite left, and it was dwindling swiftly. But our time was passing ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various

... The land was low, so low that it seemed but a little higher than the water level, but it bore an amazingly abundant growth. The river seemed to flow through a channel cut in the dense, solid vegetation. Great cypress trees towered up from the water, enormously thick at the roots and rapidly dwindling above. Between their rough trunks cypress scrub, sturdy cabbage palms, mangrove, custard apple and other varieties of tropical trees found space to grow; and between the trunks of the smaller trees was a tangle of palmetto, saw grass, jungle vine, Virginia creeper and the ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen

... sooner than the rest of the audience; but they, too, were becoming a little restless, and it would not be long ere they fully awoke. One thing I saw with perfect clearness and some terror, and that was that Barber himself realized that his power was dying within him. He appeared to be dwindling, shrinking down; in his eyes were suffering and a terrible panic—the distress of a beaten man appealing for mercy. The catastrophe must fall ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... at this dwindling figure, which stood as a mere grey blot touched with a white flame against the great green wall of the steep down behind him. And as he stared over the top of the down behind the innkeeper, there appeared an army of black-clad and marching men. ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton

... up to the tip of the chamber; slightly convex and crisscrossed by millions of fine lines like those upon a spectroscopic plate, but with this difference—that within each line I sensed the presence of multitudes of finer lines, dwindling into infinitude, ultramicroscopic, traced by some instrument compared to whose delicacy our finest tool would be as a crowbar to ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... Come along, Pyrrhias, and be put up. Quick's the word. The attendance is dwindling; there will be small competition. Well, who buys ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata

... profound loneliness. As he raised himself with another sigh, the top of the window tipped off his cap, which fell into the water. He cared little for the loss, but stood watching the cap as it floated slowly away with the current, and compared its receding form with his dwindling joys. The current, which was not strong there, carried the cap straight to the knoll several hundred yards off, on which stood the smoking-box of old Sam Ravenshaw, and ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne

... and looked east. The dust-cloud was dwindling every minute. And without hope, she cast another glance towards the corrals. Evidently, the men agreed that it was unnecessary for two of them to stay in the heat of the sun to prevent her from getting at a horse. Hastings had ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand

... father before him, for the passage of every generation had made recovery more difficult. Of course he should really have become a soldier; but soldiering in those days was an expensive calling. As a baronet—even as an Irish baronet—a good deal would have been expected of him, far more than the dwindling means of Roscarna could possibly supply, and since every career seemed closed to him but one of provincial dissipation he is scarcely to be blamed for ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young

... young lady, you are about to become the wife of one of the best. There are not many of us left; we are a dwindling band, Miss Eden— ...
— The Gay Lord Quex - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur W. Pinero

... every country. Paintings are growing smaller, as if to keep in proportion with the small modern salons. That this is due to the great influence of M. Meissonier there is no doubt, but no diminution of his own fame accompanies the dwindling of his pictures. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various

... which can be acquired only in the unviolated sanctuaries of nature, "where man is distant, but God is near"—will not rashly assert his right to extirpate a tribe of harmless vegetables, barely because their products neither tickle his palate nor fill his pocket; and his regret at the dwindling area of the forest solitude will be augmented by the reflection that the nurselings of the woodland perish with the pines, the oaks, and the beeches that sheltered them. [Footnote: Quaint old Valvasor had observed the subduing ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh

... plan of having clergymen trained In the very heart of the Street of Ink To paint their parish magazines pink. So generous laymen may haply decide That it may be worth their while to provide Each KENNEDY BELL with stepping-stones To rise to the height of a KENNEDY JONES. But others, a small and dwindling crew, Possibly fit, but certainly few, And cursed with a most pronounced capacity For suffering from inept vivacity, Would gladly be reckoned as unenlightened Could they keep one class of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various

... sculptured marbles in pilastered colonnades, are fit abodes for the nobles who reared them five centuries ago, of whose refined and costly living we read in the pages of Dante or of Folgore da San Gemignano. And though the necessities of modern life, the decay of wealth, the dwindling of old aristocracy, and the absorption of what was once an independent state in the Italian nation, have obliterated that large signorial splendour of the Middle Ages, we feel that the modern Sienese are not unworthy ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... Steam guns in the towers, thermit projectiles from the cannon far away: now this.... And the concealing cloud of Death Mist was rising still, headed straight up toward the zenith. It looked like a tiny, dwindling pearl. ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... and parcel of the musical vocabulary, intelligible alike to people of every nationality. I need hardly say that increasing intensity of sound will suggest vehemence, approach, and its visual synonym, growth, as well as that decreasing intensity will suggest withdrawal, dwindling, and placidity. ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell

... time with the dwindling firelight playing about him, his manhood and his desires locked in a grim struggle, wondering at the hold this forest elf had gained upon him, wondering how it was that she had stolen into his heart and head and taken such utter possession of him. ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach

... exultation of the glory of Bar-Wul-Yann was gone, yet still the pink cliffs glowed, the fairest marvel that the eye beheld-and this in a land of wonders. And soon the twilight gave place to the coming out of stars, and the colours of Bar-Wul-Yann went dwindling away. And the sight of those cliffs was to me as some chord of music that a master's hand had launched from the violin, and which carries to Heaven of Faery the tremulous ...
— Tales of Three Hemispheres • Lord Dunsany

... and without warning, Catia had swept in and dominated him completely, dominated him with her oozy layer cake, and her two sorts of lemonade, and with her Princeton grenadier of a hat. Beside it all, he felt himself dwindling into insignificance, despite the hind-side-before waistcoats of the visiting clergymen and his mother's gown of stiff black satin. It was a positive relief to him when he could turn his back upon the whole hot, chattering function, and, with Catia's ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray

... was clear and cold, and the snow had crept nearer the belt of dwindling pines that looked like matches tufted with moss. They grew in size as they rolled down the tremendous slopes, until they towered above the track in tall, dark spires. The mist had gone; rocks and trees and glistening summits were sharply cut, ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss

... from. How can you call him husband who forcibly snatched you from Jivaji to whom you had been sacredly affianced? I shall never forget that night! In the wedding hall we sat anxiously expecting the bridegroom, for the auspicious hour was dwindling away. Then in the distance appeared the glare of torches, and bridal strains came floating up the air. We shouted for joy: women blew their conch-shells. A procession of palanquins entered the courtyard: but ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore

... ran straight ahead, close to the shore of the mainland, and if the Follow Me's exploit proved successful she was due to increase her dwindling lead by a good mile unless the Adventurer accepted the challenge and followed her example. For a minute Steve hesitated. Then: "If she can do it, we can," he muttered, and slowly turned the wheel, his eyes darting to the chart. "No depth shown here," he ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour

... well-known charity school, in connection with Dartmouth college, may have, in times past, founded and endowed schools for the education of the natives of the forest; nor would we dampen the faith and hopes of those philanthropists who still believe in the redemption of that dwindling race by the aids of science and civilization; but we confess our inability to perceive any general results, flowing from the attempts of that character, at all adequate to the pains and outlay bestowed on the experiment. And we think we cannot be alone in this opinion. ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson

... tender care, and to console them as it may for the inevitable parting near at hand. Now, within three or four days of the end, the kitchen is as scrupulously and vigilantly perfect as it could be in the height of the season; and our dwindling numbers sit down every night to a dinner that we could not get for much more love or vastly more money in the month of August, at any shore hotel in America. It is true that there are certain changes going on, but they are going on delicately, almost silently. A strip of carpeting ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... by the bed when he reached out his arm for the telephone. The squeaking of a valve—what? Carl's hand, infinitely gentle, on his chest, bringing up the soft blankets, and his good clean oxygen dwindling, dwindling— ...
— Martyr • Alan Edward Nourse

... marked in their haggard faces, they set to work in the shelter of the dwarfed pines around them, and packed one sledge with all they felt to be necessary to take on this forlorn hope expedition, and with it the last of their dwindling store of food. ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn

... its works; and if anything grows too weak or stupid to take care of itself, she gives it its due deserts by letting it die and disappear. So, you plant or you animal, are you among the strong, the successful, the multiplying, the colonising? Or are you among the weak, the failing, the dwindling, the doomed? ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley

... and it was at this moment that the Admiral hove in sight round the corner of the deck-house. When Miss Dorn looked up, Mr. Masterson was gone; the crowd, still laughing, was dwindling; and there stood her uncle. He had on what she termed his "quarter-deck expression." Before he could speak she had ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various

... a word. He was too disgusted with himself to speak. He clenched his fists, and put his teeth together, and held his breath. In the silence he could hear the dwindling sound of Rocco's footsteps ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett

... of gray-bearded, helmeted warriors holding mailed blonde women in their arms, of queens with golden ornaments on their arms leaning over parapets and agitating their scarves, of women throwing themselves into the sea upon which ghastly barks were dwindling, of oldish men and young girls conversing teasingly through a window by a lilac-bush, that were Wagner. There were books with stories of magical swans and hordes of gold and baleful curses, of phantasmal storm ships and hollow hills and swords lodged in tree-trunks awaiting their wielders, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... they are past hope; the whites have just refused their taxes - I mean the council has refused to call for them, and if the council consented, nobody would pay; 'tis a farce, and the curtain is going to fall briefly. Consequently in my History, I say as little as may be of the two dwindling stars. Poor devils! I liked the one, and the other has a little wife, now lying in! There was no man born with so little animosity as I. When I heard the C. J. was in low spirits and never left his house, I could scarce refrain from going ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson

... signs of life or thought, the popular composer then wrote to him at length on the subject, offering him fifty pounds for the job, half of it on account. Lancelot was in sore straits when he got the letter, for his stock of money was dwindling to vanishing point, and he dallied with the temptation sufficiently to take the letter home with him. But his spirit was not yet broken, and the letter, crumpled like a rag, was picked up by Mary Ann and straightened out, and carefully placed ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill

... liable to cease when it fails. They belong to the permanent, invisible order of things. Suppose one loses his body. Then there is no force whereby earth can hold its child any longer to its breast. It flies on at terrific speed, dwindling to a speck in unknown distances, and leaving the man amid infinitudes alone. But there are other attractions. There was One uplifted on a cross to draw all men unto him. Love has finer attraction for souls than gravitation ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren

... crowning difficulties to the theory of special design, furnishes the best possible evidence in favour of hereditary descent; seeing that this irregularity then becomes what may be termed the anticipated expression of progressive dwindling due to inutility. Thus, for example, to return to the case of wings, we have already seen that in an extinct genus of bird, dinornis, these organs were reduced to such an extent as to leave it still doubtful whether ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes

... to transport the Spanish troops, at once and without parole, back to their own country. Secretary Alger was no unskillful politician, and he was right in believing that this device, though unconventional, would make a strong appeal to an army three years away from home and with dwindling hopes of ever seeing Spain again. On the 15th of July a capitulation was agreed upon, and the terms of surrender included not only the troops in Santiago but all those in that military district—about ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish

... development of cold storage in the eighties (which we may regard for the present purpose as equivalent to an increased demand for Australian mutton) caused considerable perturbation in the woollen and worsted industries of Yorkshire. They were faced with a dwindling supply and a soaring price of merino wool; and the adaptability with which they met the situation, and won prestige for the crossbred tops, and yarns and fabrics, to which they largely turned is a matter of just pride in the trade to-day. The fact, however, that this alteration in the supply ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson

... could be termed an unusually large accumulation of wealth. For larger accumulations existed upon the earth. A descendant of a man once known as John D. Rockefeller possessed an accumulation of great size, but which, as a matter of fact, was rapidly dwindling as it passed from generation to generation. So, let us travel ahead another one hundred years. During this time, as we learn from our historical and political archives, the socialists began to die out, since they at last realized the utter futility of combating the balance of power. The account, ...
— John Jones's Dollar • Harry Stephen Keeler

... the sea, and the other, more smooth and undulating, towards a fair scene of inland beauty, straggled the little hamlet of Pont-y-fro. Jos Hughes's shop was the very last house in the village, the road beyond it merging into the rushy moor, and dwindling into a stony track, down which a streamlet trickled from the peat bog above. The house had stood in the same place for two hundred years, and Jos Hughes looked as if he too had lived there for the same length of time. His quaintly cut blue cloth coat adorned with large brass buttons, his knee breeches ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine

... walking up and down in a small grassy path, which was sprinkled with snowdrops. The "side-garden" was a ruined, over-grown square, planted in miniature box, which the elder Gay had laid out after one of his visits to Italy. Now, with its dwindling maze and its unpruned rose-bushes, it resembled a picture which has been blotted out until the original intention of the artist is no longer discernible. Yet the place was exquisite still. Spring had passed ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow

... come to Saturn. It is nearly as large as Jupiter, and has a huge ring of planetary matter revolving round it in addition to seven moons. Further and further we go, and the planets behind us are disappearing, and even the Sun is dwindling down to a mere speck; still we hurry on, and at last alight on another planet, Uranus, about sixty times larger than our Earth; we see moons in attendance, but they have scarcely any light to reflect; the Sun is only a star now; but we must hasten on deeper and deeper into ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein

... the Nile Valley, but actual running brooks, coursing and babbling between the trees, spreading out here and there into pools of water, and in places forming little cascades like those of our own streams, but dwindling in volume as they proceeded, owing to constant drains made on them, until they were for the most part absorbed by the soil ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... abandoned state. And the saddening, sickening thought often recurs to me, that, however desolate The Sahara may have been in past ages, it is now getting worse instead of better. Ghadames, and many oases of Fezzan, are dwindling away to nothing, the population lessening, and dispersing under the curse of the ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... had yonder infidel Ilderim, or whatsoever he is called, again in the gripe with which I once held him fast as ever hound held hare, never again should HE at least come on errand disgraceful to the honour of Christian king or noble and virtuous maiden. But I—my hours are fast dwindling into minutes—yet, while I have life and breath, something must be ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott

... intervals, and that the least departure from this order would destroy the effect. But Nature produces her effects at random, and seems only to increase the beautiful illusion by that infinite variety of decoration in which she revels, binding tree to tree in a tangle of anaconda-like lianas, and dwindling down from these huge cables to airy webs and hair-like fibres that vibrate to the wind of ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson

... glance at the dwindling figure on the cliff, and then went silently below and stood in a pleasant reverie before the smashed door. He came to the same conclusion regarding the desperate nature of his character as the others; and the nervous ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs

... they are able to perform in marriage," said my lady, with a sigh. "I fear he has lost large sums; and our property, always small, is dwindling away under this reckless dissipation. I heard of him in London with very wild company. Since his return, letters and lawyers are constantly coming and going: he seems to me to have a constant anxiety, ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray

... disguised are equally founded on fact and will be recognized by the dear but fast dwindling fraternity of good old-timers. The mother of the boy still lives her steadfast beautiful creed on the Upper Missouri; and the old frontiersman still lives on the Saskatchewan, one of the most picturesque and heroic figures in the West to-day. I may say that both missionaries support ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut

... the others seemed like figures in a fever; yet he was, unhappily, with them rather than with Fanny. God knew there was fever enough in his brain! But the winter night was cooling it—a minor image of the final office of death; the choking hunger for Savina was dwindling. He hoped that it wouldn't be repeated. He couldn't answer for himself through many such attacks. Yes, his first love, though just as imperative, had been more ecstatic; the reaching for an ideal rather than the ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer

... not alone compose the surplus labor army. There are the skilled but unsteady and unreliable men; and the old men, once skilled, but, with dwindling powers, no longer skilled. {3} And there are good men, too, splendidly skilled and efficient, but thrust out of the employment of dying or disaster-smitten industries. In this connection it is not out of place to note the misfortune of the workers in the British iron trades, who are suffering because ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London

... one after another they thanked him and so went cheerily down the Pass. Shere Ali watched them as they went, wondering that men should take such a journey and endure so much discomfort for their faith. He watched their dwindling figures and understood how far he was set apart from them. He was of their faith himself, nominally at all events, but Mecca—? He shrugged his shoulders at the name. It meant no more to him than it did to the White People who had cast him out. But that chance meeting lingered in his memory, ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason

... agreed: "an' 'twas Little Pony, easterly shore," he added, his voice dwindling away, "that Tom ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan

... is about equal to that of France, but that, when we analyse the facts, the fertility of the old native-born American population of mainly Anglo-Saxon origin is found to be lower than that of France. This element, therefore, is rapidly dwindling away in the United States. The general level of the birth-rate is maintained by the foreign immigrants, who in many States (as in New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Minnesota) constitute the majority ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... clothes one day and a tattered blanket the next, and sit smoking crowded in huts, the reek of which strikes you like a blow in the face; so long as they will cluster round dead bodies during their tangis or wakes; so long as they will ignore drainage—just so long will they remain a blighted and dwindling race, and observers without eyes will talk as though there was something fateful and mysterious in their decline. One ray of hope for them has quite lately been noted. They are caring more for the education of their children. Some three thousand ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves

... inhabitants of Patagonia been also dwindling, though, there, if anywhere, still lies the Cape of Bad Hope for the apostles of human degeneracy. Pigafetta originally estimated them at twelve feet. In the time of Commodore Byron, they had already grown downward; yet ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various

... near. On seeing me, he reversed his movement precipitately, flew straight back to the old tree, and alighted in the entrance to the cavity. As I approached, he did not so much seem to move as to diminish in size, like an object dwindling in the distance; he depressed his plumage, and, with his eye fixed upon me, began slowly to back and sidle into his retreat till he faded from my sight. The shrike wiped his beak upon the branches, cast an eye down at me and at his lost mouse, and then ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs

... the steamer came in, Baptista saw her husband rush down to meet it; and soon after there appeared at her door four tall, hipless, shoulderless girls, dwindling in height and size from the eldest to the youngest, like a row of Pan pipes; at the head of them standing Heddegan. He smiled pleasantly through the grey fringe of his whiskers and beard, and turning to the girls said, 'Now come ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.

... head, and said he did not know. I asked him if he had heard of the Griffin, but he said no. I broke away from him and went for miles along the bank eastward, seeing the rare trees of the marshes dwindling in the distance, and up against the horizon a distant spire, which I thought might be the Spire of March. For March and the Griffin were not twenty miles away. And still the great ditch stood between me ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc

... though he did not feel energy enough to answer. Then, as he watched two sleek, brown ponies with their yellow-clad riders dwindling among the rocks, his memory cleared suddenly, and he realised that the first great journalistic chance of his life was slipping away from him. It was a small fight, but it was the first of the war, and the great public ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle

... constant successes, it became evident to Rebecca, considering these things, that their position was but a precarious one, and that, even although they paid scarcely anybody, their little capital would end one day by dwindling into zero. "Gambling," she would say, "dear, is good to help your income, but not as an income itself. Some day people may be tired of play, and then where are we?" Rawdon acquiesced in the justice of her opinion; and in truth he had remarked that after a few nights of his little suppers, &c., ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray

... of the house is plain now. It was once the residence of a country squire, whose family, probably dwindling down to mere spinsterhood, got merged in the more territorial name of Donnithorne. It was once the Hall; it is now the Hall Farm. Like the life in some coast town that was once a watering-place, and is now a port, where the genteel ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot

... those two young Englishmen at the head of the faithful few charged out on the guns. But for Jenkyns the glorious end had come, and sword in hand he fell, some seventy paces out, a lasting honour to the great Civil Service of India. Yet on went Hamilton and his dwindling band, and taking no denial, stayed not by bullet nor sword nor bayonet, again captured the guns. And then began again the dreadful heart-straining struggle of desperate men set to a task too great. Again with splendid effort they dragged the guns ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband

... differences rather than similarities in the community life. Sectarianism is very largely maintained by churches in small places. Where church competition is severe, and especially when church support is dwindling, the Church advertises its distinctiveness and enters upon a life-and-death grapple with its neighbor institutions. Of course this develops sectarianism and forbids the wide outlook in its teaching that is required of a ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves

... Tasso drew his inspiration from the beauty surrounding him. Returning, we may climb the heights above Castellamare, and looking down among the boughs and leaves, see the crisp water glistening in the sun; and clusters of white houses in distant Naples, dwindling, in the great extent of prospect, down to dice. The coming back to the city, by the beach again, at sunset; with the glowing sea on one side, and the darkening mountain (Vesuvius), with its smoke and flame, upon the other, is a sublime conclusion to the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various

... whirr of many wheels, the thudding of weights, and the buzz and babel of human toil. Beyond, the dwellings of the workingmen, smoke-stained and unlovely, radiated away in a lessening perspective of narrowing road and dwindling wall. ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle

... right to make the man in the moon trustee for that part of the accumulations which rises above the optics of sublunary bankers; whilst the Ceylon pillar is constantly unweaving its own granite texture, and dwindling earthwards. It is probable that each of the parties will have reached its consummation about the same time. What is to be done with the mustard- seed, Ceylon has forgotten to say. But what is to be done with the half-crown and its surplus, nobody can doubt after reading my last will and testament. ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... Yedinstvo. A very small and dwindling group, composed almost entirely of the personal following of Plekhanov, one of the pioneers of the Russian Social Democratic movement in the 80's, and its greatest theoretician. Now an old man, Plekhanov was extremely patriotic, too conservative even for the Mensheviki. After the Bolshevik ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed

... in horrified amazement: its size was that of a rickety baby under three, while its wizened face was that of a spell-struck creature of no assignable age, or the wax image of some dwindling life wasting away before the witch-kindled fire of a diabolical hatred. The tiny hands and arms were pitiably thin, and showed under the yellow skin sharp little bones no larger than a chicken's; and at her wrists ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... not only sharing the wealth, but the fame which the publication of these gems was bound to bring. But he had to explain that he was poor, and that he could not bring out the poems without financial aid. The money which had been given Edgar to set out in the world with, was already dwindling, but he managed to subscribe a sum which Thomas declared would be sufficient, with the little he himself could add, for the printing of a modest edition, in a ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard

... town of cheap fashion, a town of glass and stucco. The pungent odour of the eucalyptus trees, the light breeze stirred not the foliage, sheared into mathematical lines. It was like yards of baize dwindling in perspective; and between the tall trunks great plate-glass windows gleamed, filled ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore

... she pictured herself, the possessor of true love, streams of happiness flowing into her heart. She had formed a high ideal of life; the present did not satisfy her. Hope had sustained her, and that hope, that idea of a pure, refined, elevated and noble life, chastened by love, was now dwindling away and she seemed destined to join the great ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel

... of Honiton lace is made both here and at Beer, though this East Devon industry is slowly dwindling in the several localities in which it was once an important ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes

... of Europe at large, most of which, from port to port, was done by her seamen, but that of England as well. Even of the English coasting trade much was done by Dutch ships. Under this competition, the English merchant marine was dwindling, and had become so inadequate that, when the exclusion of foreigners was enforced by the Act, the cry at once arose in the land that the English shipping was not sufficient for the work thus thrust upon it. "Although our own people have not ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan

... was dwindling now before his eyes. He was conscious of a great despair. How useless of him to attempt so impossible ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole

... left the last of the dwindling pines behind, and pushed on along a slope that was strewn with shattered rock and debris which made walking arduous. Then they reached a scarp of rock ground smooth by the slipping down of melting snow, and when they had crossed that their difficulties ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss

... after on that pious aspiration of her grandfather's old friend, but the ache and tedium of life did not return upon her. Her sense of duty and natural affection were very strong. She told herself that if it were her lot to watch for many years beside this dwindling flame, it was a lot of God's giving, not of her own seeking, and therefore good. The letters that came to her from Beechhurst and Caen breathed nothing but encouragement to love and patience, and Harry Musgrave's letters were a ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr

... more in themselves but the history of the successive stages through which they have naturally and inevitably passed? Neither then is ethic and the moral law. It is not man's creation, it is not his handiwork. It is no mere provincialism of this dwindling sphere of ours, but a fact and a law supreme, holding sway beyond the uttermost star, valid in infinity and eternity, at this hour, the sovereign law of life for whatsoever or whomsoever lives and knows, the adamantine foundation upon ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... Tescheron. If I had it to do over again, I could not possibly quote such favorable terms for our facilities—I could not possibly. No, sir, I could not possibly think of doing so." Mr. Smith's emphasis took the form of dwindling repetition so common to men of business, who have hold of the best end of the bargain, and have decided to ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent

... young, and she had not had half enough out of life as yet; and besides, her theories and preconceived plans for the safe and sound ordering of her life appeared to lack weight—nay, they were dwindling already into insignificance. ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers

... his penknife, and addressed him some half-joking reproof. This fired my boy's wicked little heart with furious resentment; he gathered up his books after school, and took them home; a good many other boys had done it, and the school was dwindling. He was sent back with his books the next morning, and many other parents behaved as wisely as his. One of the leading men in the town, whose mere presence in the schoolroom sent a thrill of awe through the fellows, brought his son in after such an escapade, and told the teacher that ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells

... of bushes and grasses consisted of globules, glossy spheres of scarlet that ranged in size from pinheads to the bulk of large pumpkins. The branches of the vegetation were formed from strings of the globules set edge to edge and tapering in size like graduated beads strung upon wire, dwindling in bulk until the tips of the branches were as fragile as the fronds of maidenhair fern. The bulk of the shrubbery was head-high, and so dense that Powell could see for only a couple of yards into ...
— Devil Crystals of Arret • Hal K. Wells

... small and dwindling group, composed almost entirely of the personal following of Plekhanov, one of the pioneers of the Russian Social Democratic movement in the 80's, and its greatest theoretician. Now an old man, Plekhanov was extremely patriotic, too conservative ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed

... cloud of blue smoke, that hung flat as a pancake above them in the still air, all moved onward. Presently the party separated into three groups, each having a gunner to lead it, half a dozen boys to sing, and a dwindling jar of cider for the purposes of the ceremony. The divided choirs clashed their music, heard from a distance; the guns fired at intervals, each sending forth its own particular detonation and winning back a distinctive echo; then the ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... "Such a craze, however, is too widely diffused, and falls in with too obstinate a preconception [17] in the human race, which has in every age hypochondriacally regarded itself as under some fatal necessity of dwindling, much to have challenged public attention. As real paradoxes (spite of the idle meaning attached usually to the word paradox) have often no falsehood in them, so here, on the contrary, was a falsehood which had in it nothing paradoxical. It contradicted all the indications of history and ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... thought of Douwie. Scarcely as tall as himself; the big, rounded, mouselike ears, and the flat, cloven pads that could carry her so swiftly over the sandy Martian flatlands. One of the last dwindling herds of native Martian douwies, burden-carriers of a vanished race, she had been Tommy's particular pride and joy for the last ...
— Native Son • T. D. Hamm

... moon, but no other light unless his path chanced to lie through Herzogstrasse. In that street a couple of windows on the first floor showed bright and unabashed, and the curious passer-by could detect upon the blind the shadows of men growing to monstrous giants and dwindling to pigmies according as they approached or retired from ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason

... in the comparison of these two aspects of the theological change that has come to pass,—the growing importance of the ethical, and the dwindling importance of the miraculous in the religious thought of to-day. This may reassure those who fear whereto such change may grow. The inner significance of such a change is most auspicious. It portends the displacement of a false by ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton

... steadily increasing proportion of people—more especially in our suburban areas—who are, so far as our old divisions go, delocalized. They represent, in fact, a community of a new sort, the new great modern community, which is seeking to establish itself in the room of the dwindling, little, highly ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells

... English friends personally; but when it came to the national feeling of Germany against England, nowhere was it so bitter as in Hamburg. Here the hate was born of more than national sentiment; it was of the pocket; of seeing fortunes that had been laboriously built dwindling, once thriving businesses in suspended animation. There was no moratorium in name; there was worse than one in fact. A patriotic freemasonry in misfortune took its place. No business man could press another for the payment of debts lest he be pressed in turn. What would happen when ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... often followed by precipitate decay. This had been the case with the eastern caliphate, and was now so with the western. During the life of Alhakem's successor, the empire of the Omeyades was broken up into a hundred petty principalities; and their magnificent capital of Cordova, dwindling into a second-rate city, retained no other distinction than that of being the Mecca of Spain. These little states soon became a prey to all the evils arising out of a vicious constitution of government and religion. Almost every accession to the throne was contested by numerous competitors ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott

... toes. Little BEN was not made for the country, that was certain. A life of Clubs and dinner-parties would have suited him to perfection. In his Club he could always pose before a select and, it must be added, a dwindling circle as a man of influence. "There is no Club, however watched and tended, but one dread bore is there." BEN might have developed into a prime bore, but as he was plentifully supplied with money and had a good cook and a pleasant wife, he would always have managed to gather round ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 17, 1891 • Various

... are a casual in the streets of London, homeless, friendless, weary with looking for work all day and finding none. Night comes on. Where are you to go? You have perhaps only a few coppers, or it may be, a few shillings, left of the rapidly dwindling store of your little capital. You shrink from sleeping in the open air; you equally shrink from going to the fourpenny Dosshouse where, in the midst of strange and ribald company, you may be robbed of the remnant of ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth

... justified her views of his capacity. On December I he broke down the bridges in his rear over the Raritan, and marched through Jersey with a dwindling army. At Princeton he had but three thousand men; destroying every boat, he wisely put the broad Delaware between ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell

... of bitterest disappointment passed over Wilbur as he saw his $30,000 dwindling to nothing. Then the instincts of habit reasserted themselves. The taxpayer in him was stronger than the freebooter, after all. He felt that it was his duty to see to it that the girl had her rights. Kitchell must be made aware of the situation—must be told ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris

... household, her coronet by Viscount Villiers; the Duchess of Kent, her train borne by Lady Flora Hastings, and her coronet by Viscount Morpeth; the Duchess of Gloucester, her train borne by Lady Caroline Legge, and her coronet by Viscount Evelyn. (The royal generation next that of George III. was fast dwindling away when these three ladies represented the six daughters and the wives of six of the sons of the old King and Queen. But there were other survivors, though they were not present to-day. The Queen-dowager; Princess Augusta, an aged woman ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler

... waste their strength against the second Russian fortified line; and even if that were broken through, St. Petersburg and Moscow would still be far distant, and Russia's immense resources in men would enable her to bring up body after body of reserves against the dwindling invading force. ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... was the last of a long line of estancieros once rich in land and cattle, but for generations the Canada Seca estate had been dwindling as land was sold, and now there was little left, and the cattle and horses were few, and only a small flock of sheep kept just to provide the house with mutton. His poor relations living scattered about the district knew that he was not ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson

... aglow with the choicest flowers; proud-rifted rocks, pale and ghastly, as if cleft by an earthquake; foaming cascades springing madly down the cliffs, leaping through chasms spanned with aquatic creepers, and then dwindling into ever-gurgling streams, that glided through ravines curtained with verdant drapery—such were some of the details of the picture; but how vain the endeavour to describe this redundant beauty! A friend, who ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various

... if you will, Fairfax. Hoot! Hiss me off the stage! I am no longer worthy of the confraternity of honest, bold, free and successful fellows. I am dwindling into a whining, submissive, crouching, very humble, yes if you please, no thank you Madam, dangler! I have been to school! Have had my task set me! Must learn my lesson by rote, or there is a rod in pickle for me! Yes! I! That identical Clifton; that bold, ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft

... been a quiet movement. One by one the smaller firms had tottered, bled drier and drier by increasing production costs, increasing labor demands, and an ever-dwindling margin of profit. One by one they had seen their stocks tottering as they faced bankruptcy, only to be gobbled up by the one ready buyer with plenty of funds to buy with. At first, changes had been small and insignificant: boards of directors shifted; the men were paid higher ...
— Meeting of the Board • Alan Edward Nourse

... "where man is distant, but God is near"—will not rashly assert his right to extirpate a tribe of harmless vegetables, barely because their products neither tickle his palate nor fill his pocket; and his regret at the dwindling area of the forest solitude will be augmented by the reflection that the nurselings of the woodland perish with the pines, the oaks, and the beeches that sheltered them. [Footnote: Quaint old Valvasor had observed the subduing influence of nature's solitudes. In describing the lonely Canker-Thal, ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh

... Marbles, and even the essentially angular angels in mediaeval stained glass almost always (as it says in "Patience") contrive to look both angular and flat. There is something intrinsically disproportionate and outrageous in the idea of the distant objects dwindling and growing dwarfish, the closer objects swelling enormous and intolerable. There is something frantic in the notion that one's own father by walking a little way can be changed by a blast of magic to a pigmy. There is ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton

... whatsoever he is called, again in the gripe with which I once held him fast as ever hound held hare, never again should HE at least come on errand disgraceful to the honour of Christian king or noble and virtuous maiden. But I—my hours are fast dwindling into minutes—yet, while I have life and breath, something must be done, ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott

... that morning tide When they flee away from the dwindling lands Will feel the clutch of mother hands And the soul of the ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy

... now, And in it a long perspective I could trace Of my begetters, dwindling backward each past each All with the kindred look, Whose names had since been inked down in their place On the recorder's book, Generation and generation of my mien, ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy

... Minneha had received the rescued infant, and promised to be a mother to it, that she discovered that she had undertaken more than she was able to fulfil. It required no very searching eye to perceive that the little one was not thriving; in truth, she was dwindling away day by day, and those who were in the habit of visiting the Camp gazed sadly at the little pinched face and shrivelled limbs, and foreboded that it would not be long before Michel's child rejoined its mother in the 'silent ...
— Owindia • Charlotte Selina Bompas

... Edinburgh street, and inhaled, by juxtaposition, your sweet fraternal breath. How the Fates have since sundered us! How have you been going on, fattening and beautifying from one degree to another of poetical perfection, while I have, under the chilling shade of the Ochil Hills, been dwindling down from one degree of poetical extenuation to another, till at length I am become the very shadow and ghost of literary leanness! I should now wish to see you, and compare you as you are now with what you were in your 'Queen's Wake' days. For this purpose, I would ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various

... all that could be expected of them. There was only a tiny fragment of the meteorite left, and it was dwindling swiftly. But our time was passing even ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various

... to as the source of political authority, of manners and literature. It was for many of {19} the residents their recent abode and, for all except a few of Dutch, German, or French extraction, their ancestral country. But already this "loyalty" on the part of the colonists was dwindling into something more sentimental than real. The genuine local patriotism of the colonists was shown by their persistent struggle against the representatives of English authority in the governors' chairs. There had developed ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith

... been stated, in some persons Seminal Disease and Losses of Vital Fluid lead to a wasting away, shrinking or dwindling of the Generative Organs. It exists in others from birth, and is in no way connected with Seminal Disease. Whichever be the case, it is nevertheless true that a wasted or deformed part of the body, be it ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown

... and narrow wharf he went, Seeking a tavern which of old he knew, A front of timber-crost antiquity, So propt, worm-eaten, ruinously old, He thought it must have gone; but he was gone Who kept it; and his widow, Miriam Lane, With daily-dwindling profits held the house; A haunt of brawling seamen once, but now Stiller, with yet a bed for wandering men. There Enoch rested ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson

... twenty-four hours if you take it by the card, but the spirit of joy or the spirit of sorrow has the power to multiply its potentialities amazingly. Both these spirits walked by Evander's side during his second day at Harby. The one that went in sable reminded him that his horizon was dwindling almost to his feet; the other, in rose and gold, hinted that it is better to be emperor for a day than beggar for a century. And truly through all that day Evander esteemed himself happier than an emperor. For he had discovered that Brilliana was ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... so rainy, I had lived a long day, and now, if ever, could appreciate the singing of this characteristic northern songster, himself such a lover of mountains as never to be heard, here in New England, at least, and in summer-time, except amid the dwindling spruce forests of the upper slopes. I have never before seen him so familiar. On the Mount Washington range and on Mount Lafayette it is easy enough to hear his music, but one rarely gets more than a flying glimpse of the bird. ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey

... available window by which we might gain entrance. We retraced our steps, and, passing out of the door, approached the stables from the road. By this time the dawn had made such progress that we knew our chances of getting inside before Mannering's return were dwindling rapidly. We found no more likelihood of obtaining admission from this side ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster

... two young Englishmen at the head of the faithful few charged out on the guns. But for Jenkyns the glorious end had come, and sword in hand he fell, some seventy paces out, a lasting honour to the great Civil Service of India. Yet on went Hamilton and his dwindling band, and taking no denial, stayed not by bullet nor sword nor bayonet, again captured the guns. And then began again the dreadful heart-straining struggle of desperate men set to a task too great. Again with splendid effort they ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband

... that contains a fine pearl. Moreover, like the bison and the wild pigeon, the pearl-bearing molluscs may be greatly diminished in numbers or even exterminated by the greed of man and his fearfully destructive methods of harvesting nature's productions. In fact, the fisheries have been dwindling in yield for some time, and most of the fine pearls that are marketed are old pearls, already drilled, from the treasuries of Eastern potentates, who have been forced by necessity to accept the high prices offered by the West for part of their treasures. In India, pearls have ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade

... usage is the exclusive property of those persons who positively know that all UFO's are nonsense. Fortunately, for the sake of good manners if for no other reason, the ranks of this knowing category are constantly dwindling. One by one these people drop out, starting with the instant they see ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt

... his notorious character and antecedents, to Grosville Park—one of the dwindling number of country-houses in England where the old Puritan restrictions still held? It was said he was on the look-out for a post—Ashe, indeed, happened to know it officially; and Lord Grosville had a good deal ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... "You're dwindling to a most interesting skeleton, Vic," he used to say. "Catch me bothering myself about anything I ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross

... one leading up to the first capital we were to visit. Then I found myself between miles and miles of stately white pillars, rising and sinking as the road found its natural levels, and growing in the perspective before us and dwindling behind us. I could not keep out of my mind a colonnade of palm-trees, only the fronds were lacking, and there were never palms so beautiful. Each pillar was inscribed with the name of some Altrurian who had done something for his country, written some ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells

... Hungary? And let the Russians do what they will with the passes over the Carpathians and raid the Hungarian plain at large? Then he loses a grave proportion of his next year's wheat, much of his dwindling horse supply, his almost strangled sources of petrol. He tempts Roumania to come in (for a great sweep of Eastern Hungary is nationally Roumanian); and he loses the control in men and financial resources of one-half of his ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc

... luggage, and I did not try to remove the false impression. Through her assistance I was able to procure all I required, without exciting more notice and curiosity. My purchases, though they were as simple and cheap as I could make them, drew largely upon my small store of money, and as I saw it dwindling away, while I grudged every shilling I was obliged to part with, my spirits sank lower and lower. I had never known the dread of being short of money, and the new experience was, perhaps, the more terrible to ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton

... Sir Leicester holds his shrunken state in the long drawing-room for all that, and reposes in his old place before my Lady's picture. Closed in by night with broad screens, and illumined only in that part, the light of the drawing-room seems gradually contracting and dwindling until it shall be no more. A little more, in truth, and it will be all extinguished for Sir Leicester; and the damp door in the mausoleum which shuts so tight, and looks so obdurate, will have opened ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... depart. The night is fresh, silent, exquisite, the eternal song of the cicalas fills the air. We can still see the red lanterns of my new family, dwindling away in the distance, as they descend and gradually become lost in that yawning abyss, at the bottom of which ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti

... that beset them, and the sorrows that lie lurking on every man's path. He saw more distinctly what Christ came to do; and how he did it by complete self-abnegation, and by descending to the level of the lowest. But he had no delight in standing up in his pulpit in full face of his dwindling congregation. Language seemed poor to him; and it had grown difficult to him to put his burning thoughts into words. As the bitter experience of daily life seared his very soul, he found that no smooth, fit expressions of his self-communing ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton

... the barracks veranda, an inquisitive little group heard first the clang of the door within, and presently the clatter of hoofs coming round from the yard. Stingaree and Howie—a white flash and a bay streak—swept past them as they stood confounded. And the dwindling pair still bobbed in sight, under a full complement of stars, when a fresh outcry from the cell, and a mighty hammering against its locked door, broke the truth to one ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung

... Only his saint to guard him—that was why she chose the new one; he would not be tired of guarding namesakes. . . . After all, she hopes her boy will come to disbelieve her history, as herself almost does. It is dwindling fast to that: ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne

... hard frost set in, and until Christmas a strong gale from the southeast blew. No succour could reach the town. The garrison were dwindling fast, and ammunition falling short. It required fully 4000 men to guard the walls and forts, while but 2500 remained capable of bearing arms. It was known that the archduke soon intended to make an assault with his whole force, ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty

... discomfort in the dress Dwindling the clothes to nothingness Saving, for due decorum placed, A huckaback about the waist, Or wanton towel-et, whose touch Haply may spare to chafe o'ermuch: A languid frame, from head to feet Prankt in the arduous prickle-heat: An erring fly, that here and there Enwraths ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)

... he was a spirit, escaped from purgatory or the grave, to fulfil a definite purpose. The rarity of such purposeful ghosts in an age like ours, so rich in ghost stories, must have a cause. That cause is, probably, a dwindling of the ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang

... the pouting teat That plenteous streams. Soon as the tender dam 90 Has formed them with her tongue, with pleasure view The marks of their renowned progenitors, Sure pledge of triumphs yet to come. All these Select with joy; but to the merciless flood Expose the dwindling refuse, nor o'erload The indulgent mother. If thy heart relent, Unwilling to destroy, a nurse provide, And to the foster-parent give the care Of thy superfluous brood; she'll cherish kind The alien offspring; pleased thou shalt behold 100 Her tenderness, and hospitable love. If ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville

... seemed but a little higher than the water level, but it bore an amazingly abundant growth. The river seemed to flow through a channel cut in the dense, solid vegetation. Great cypress trees towered up from the water, enormously thick at the roots and rapidly dwindling above. Between their rough trunks cypress scrub, sturdy cabbage palms, mangrove, custard apple and other varieties of tropical trees found space to grow; and between the trunks of the smaller trees was a tangle of ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen

... writer who should just now be re-emerging into his own high place in letters, for unquestionably the recent, though now dwindling, schools of severely technical and aesthetic criticism have been unfavourable to him. He was a chaotic and unequal writer, and if there is one thing in which artists have improved since his time, it is ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton

... rarely took shape of sovereigns. He marvelled at the extraordinary steadiness with which ill-fortune clung to Newtake and cursed when, on two quarter-days out of the annual four, another dip had to be made into the dwindling residue of his uncle's bequest. Some three hundred pounds yet remained when young Blanchard entered upon a further stage of his career,—that most fitly recorded as happening within the shadow ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... The poor soul was inefficient, and he knew it: beneath all her flow of speech ran an undercurrent of wrath against the new learning and all its works. Poverty—sheer terror of a dwindling cupboard and the workhouse to follow—drove her to plead with that which she hated worse than the plague. He heard, and all the while his mind was miles away from her petition; for some chance word or words let fall by her had seemed ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... the gale still blew. Lake Linderman was no more than a narrow mountain gorge filled with water. Sweeping down from the mountains through this funnel, the wind was irregular, blowing great guns at times and at other times dwindling to a ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London

... away. Steam guns in the towers, thermit projectiles from the cannon far away: now this.... And the concealing cloud of Death Mist was rising still, headed straight up toward the zenith. It looked like a tiny, dwindling pearl. ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... conventicle-minister, his laundress, his secretary, a friend of whom he had once borrowed five pounds, and a blind beggar whom he favoured, to various posts about the house and to certain pensions, and these Jack Bull (though his fortune was already dwindling) at ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc

... detail, as one realizes its profound complexity, one begins to understand how impossible it would have been for that structure to have come into existence de novo, however urgently the world had need of it. But it happened that the coal needed to replace the dwindling forests of this small and exceptionally rain-saturated country occurs in low hollow basins overlying clay, and not, as in China and the Alleghanies for example, on high-lying outcrops, that can be worked as chalk is worked in England. From this fact ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... magazines pink. So generous laymen may haply decide That it may be worth their while to provide Each KENNEDY BELL with stepping-stones To rise to the height of a KENNEDY JONES. But others, a small and dwindling crew, Possibly fit, but certainly few, And cursed with a most pronounced capacity For suffering from inept vivacity, Would gladly be reckoned as unenlightened Could they keep ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various

... the direction of the Frome farm, and Ethan's heart contracted as he listened to the dwindling bells. What more likely than that Denis Eady had heard of Zeena's departure for Bettsbridge, and was profiting by the opportunity to spend an hour with Mattie? Ethan was ashamed of the storm of jealousy in his breast. It seemed unworthy of the girl that his ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton

... of the city had been lost, all industry had come to a practical standstill. Workers did not care to leave homes which might be grassbound by nightfall; employers could not manufacture without backlog of materials, for a dwindling market, and without transportation for their products. Services were so crippled as to be barely existent and with the failure of the watersupply, epidemics, mild at first, broke out and the diseases were carried and ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... inevitably dramatic. It was a perfect autumn morning, as he climbed into the car, with a scented mist rising before his eyes, under the mild warmth of a November sun; Lashmar Woods flaunted their last dwindling recklessness of colour, from ivy-green through fading red to russet and lemon-yellow. He had a rare feeling of peace, as he surrendered to the voiceless magic of the still countryside and to whimsical memories of his own childhood. Life ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna

... my heart," said Peterkin, exchanging the axe for his hoop-iron knife, with which he cut off the desired portion. "I'm only too glad, my dear boy, to see that your appetite is so wholesale; and there's no chance whatever of its dwindling down into re-tail again, at least in so far as this pig is concerned. Ralph, lad, why don't you laugh?—eh?" he added turning suddenly to me with a severe ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne

... the cold months in that state of half-starved torpor peculiar to the indigent agricultural labourer when he has nothing to do—at that bitter season when father and mother and shivering little ones watch wistfully the ever-dwindling sack of maize, as day by day two or three handfuls are ground between the stones of the hand-mill and kneaded into a thick unwholesome dough, the only food of the poorer peasants in the winter. But now every man who could handle pickaxe and bore, and sledge-hammer and spade, was out upon the ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford

... neat, little hall bedroom in one of the three-story brick houses—a little white room, white-curtained, white-walled, with white counterpane on the iron bed. She was well content with these narrow quarters, content because it was near Joe, content because it saved money (her savings were dwindling rapidly these days), and finally content because she had shifted the center of her interests to a different set of facts. She was both too busy and too aroused to be sensitive about running water and the minor comforts. Her whole being was engrossed in large activities, and she found ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim

... took his fee, gave the Captain's hand a cordial grip, expressive of sympathy and kindliness, and went his way, feeling assured that a good deal hung upon that little life which he had left slowly ebbing away, like a narrow rivulet dwindling into ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon

... crossed the creek on the bridge, which was well-nigh completed, and walked on into the forest to see what progress the pioneers were making. We each took a firelock with us in hope of knocking over some game for supper, to help out our dwindling larder. We found that the pioneers had cut a road twelve feet wide some two miles into the forest. It was a mere tunnel between the trees, whose branches overtopped it with a roof of green, but it had been leveled ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson

... of it," said Evelyn, reassuringly, to herself, although at the same time she felt uneasiness enough to send her out into the hall to a gable window over the porch, which commanded a view of the camp. Nothing stirring was to be seen, except the dwindling flame of the evening camp-fire, burned every night for cheer, not for warmth. Evelyn crept to a side window. As she reached it a white figure could be seen hurrying away ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond

... went off walking with great strides; and as often as Keola sank in the trough he could see him no longer; but as often as he was heaved upon the crest, there he was striding and dwindling, and he held the lamp high over his head, and the waves broke white about him as ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... now she felt at most a dull satisfaction. She hastened, however, to write the final chapters, and deposited the check when it came in her own bank, drawing the next month's housekeeping money half from that and half from Stefan's rapidly dwindling account. That she was able to do this gave her a ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale

... while, maybe fifty or a hundred years, they may have kept some sort of dwindling civilization. Probably the English language for a while continued, in ever more and more corrupt forms. There may have been some pretense of maintaining the school system, railroads, steamship lines, newspapers and churches, banks and all the rest of that wonderfully complex system ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... twelve times as long as ours. Pursuing our journey, we next come to Saturn. It is nearly as large as Jupiter, and has a huge ring of planetary matter revolving round it in addition to seven moons. Further and further we go, and the planets behind us are disappearing, and even the Sun is dwindling down to a mere speck; still we hurry on, and at last alight on another planet, Uranus, about sixty times larger than our Earth; we see moons in attendance, but they have scarcely any light to reflect; the Sun is only a star now; but we must hasten on deeper and deeper ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein

... lower thousand and two thousand-foot lanes. The lights of Tappen were dwindling beneath us. The interior of the Cometara was humming with the whirr of its circulators and air-receivers, mingled with the throb of air pressure pumps. At three thousand feet I started the air-rocket engines. They came on ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings

... to find bitterness, after all; perhaps it would be his glad good fortune to keep it from her. It was surprising the way he felt his misery dwindling, and instantly he pulled up ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer

... Stillwood, the solicitor to whom my father was now assistant. Stillwood, Waterhead and Royal dated back to the Georges, and was a firm bound up with the history—occasionally shady—of aristocratic England. True, in these later years its glory was dwindling. Old Mr. Stillwood, its sole surviving representative, declined to be troubled with new partners, explaining frankly, in answer to all applications, that the business was a dying one, and that attempting to work it up again would be but putting new wine into worn-out ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome

... was thronged with customers. But he sold his groceries chiefly to loose girls who paid him in their coin, which, although it answered his purpose, would neither buy him goods or pay his rent, and he found his stock rapidly dwindling away without his receiving any cash to replenish it. By dissipation and inattention his new business proved unsuccessful to him. He resolved to abandon it and again try the sea for a subsistence. With a hundred dollars in his pocket, the remnant ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms

... soon their colours can we trace, Lost in the mazy distance of the race Till at Salara's far-off bridge descried, Like coursing butterflies, they seem to glide; Then, dwindling farther, in the lengthening course, Mere floating specks supplant both man and horse; Till, having crossed the Columbarium gray, They swerve, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various

... knives and forks played but intermittently, and Mary, sitting at the end of the oilcloth-covered table, felt intuitively that she was the centre of the brewing storm. Oh, why hadn't she been contented to stay at home and make over her clothes and share the dwindling fortunes of her aunts, instead of coming to this ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning

... this monstrous demand, civil war was to be inaugurated! A power which had been relatively dwindling and diminishing from the beginning—which, in the very nature of things, could not maintain its equality in numbers and in constitutional weight—this minority demanded the control of the Government, in its ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... feasted on music, but his money was fast dwindling away, and the body could not be sustained by sweet sounds. But the poor unknown violinist, who was only another atom in the surging life of the great city, could earn nothing. He was on the verge ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden

... now had the dangerous post at the head of the line. It steamed eastwards for nearly an hour, followed by Togo on a parallel course, the Japanese fire only slackening when fog and smoke obscured its targets, and the fire of the Russians dwindling minute by minute, as gun position after position became untenable or guns ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale

... applications to such as required it. This I found to be an even more discouraging business than the epistolary process, as it was bitterly cold and the streets were filled with slush and snow. The distances were interminable, and each day found my little hoard dwindling away with frightful rapidity into innumerable car-fares and frequent cups of coffee at wayside lunch-counters. I traveled over miles and miles of territory, by trolley-car, by elevated train and ferry-boat, ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson

... probably the latter. In that case, the poem would be exilic; v. 36 too seems to presuppose the exile.] [Footnote 2: These descriptions—to say nothing of v.4 (Moses commended us a law)—are conclusive proof that the poem was composed long after Moses' time. Reuben is dwindling in numbers, Simeon has already disappeared (as not yet in Gen. xlix). Judah is in at least temporary distress, and the banner tribe is Ephraim, whose glory and power are eloquently described, vv.13-17. ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen

... over us; and cleared in a moment to show us the apparition several feet below the floor level. It seemed to strike its solidity of ground. I saw it fall the last little distance with a rush; land, and pick itself up. And with a last sardonic grin upward at us, the dim white figure ran. Dwindling smaller, dimmer, until in a moment it was gone ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings

... came; I speak not now of Argos, where his brother, Not now of Sparta, where his nephews reign'd.— What we found here were tribes of fame obscure, Much turbulence, and little constancy, Precariously ruled by foreign lords From the AEolian stock of Neleus sprung, A house once great, now dwindling in its sons. Such were the conquer'd, such the conquerors; who Had most thy husband's confidence? Consult His acts! the wife he chose was—full of virtues— But an Arcadian princess, more akin To his new subjects than to us; his friends Were the ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... that their claim was dwindling. The chronometer which they were to use for the steamer's benefit was lost; the tow-line which they were to furnish had been given back to them; the course to New York which they chalked out had not been accepted; the abandoning of their ship by the Englishmen was clearly ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson

... great success, the rival claims of the factories and the trenches, sending more and more men from the workshops to the fighting line, in proportion as the unskilled labour of the country—men and women, but especially women—is drawn, more and more widely, into the service of a dwindling amount of skilled labour, more and ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... they went on, but the creek had become a mere rill and they were now high up in a more level stretch of country that was more or less swampy. As they followed the main course of the dwindling stream, looking ever for signs of fur-bearers, they crossed and recrossed the water. At length Quonab stopped, stared, and pointed at the rill, no longer clear but clouded with mud. His eyes shone as he jerked his head up stream and ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton

... emphatically declared, as he stirred up the dwindling fire, and added a couple of sticks. "I expected to be with her before this, but here I am, lodged like a ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody

... is getting better," she said, "now that she is feeling so much at ease about money matters. And the mortgage is slowly dwindling. If I have no bad luck I expect to clear it all off by the end of ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly

... reservoir of energy is the atom; it is the energy of the atom, the atom of elements in the sun, the stars, the earth, from which nature draws for all her supply of energy. Shall we ever discover how we can replenish the dwindling resources of energy, or find out how we can call into being the at present unavailable energy which is stored up in ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson

... ditches as we meet with in the Nile Valley, but actual running brooks, coursing and babbling between the trees, spreading out here and there into pools of water, and in places forming little cascades like those of our own streams, but dwindling in volume as they proceeded, owing to constant drains made on them, until they were for the most part absorbed by the soil before finally reaching ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... and doubtless any change was welcome. When we had seen the last of them, and had watched the vultures swoop down on a horse they had left behind, we took new heart and rode on; and it so happened that the Germans chose that occasion for a rest. Their dwindling Kurdish escort was growing mutinous and they took advantage of a village with high mud walls to get behind cover and try to reestablish confidence. Perhaps they, too, saw the Bakhtiari Khans retiring in the distance, for we were close behind them at that time—so close ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy

... portion of the tree had been artificially removed. These gaps do not extend all round the tree; they are irregularly disposed, some trees having several of them, others none or only one; and they seem to have been caused, when the tree was young, by the dwindling of some principal branch. The Hickory throws out its branches at first very obliquely from the shaft; afterwards the lower ones bend down as the tree increases in size, and acquire an irregular and contorted shape; for, notwithstanding their toughness, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various

... very tactfully nor clearly that he was on the way to dwindling into an undisciplined soldier. But it did not matter in the least. For Stella Croyle was not listening. All this was totally unimportant. Men always went about and about when they had difficult things to say to women. Her eyes never left his face and ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason

... and dwarf republics exist side by side in the northern Caucasus,[1382] attended by that primitive assertion of individual right, the blood feud.[1383] Often the two forms of government are combined, but the feudal element is generally only a dwindling survival from a remote past. The little Republic of Andorra, which for a thousand years has preserved its existence in the protection of a high Pyrenean valley, is a self-governing community, organized strictly ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... St Francis of Assisi, Pope Urban IV., the holy St Bridget of Sweden, and the notorious Queen Joanna II. of Naples. Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, afterwards Pope Pius II., however, seems to have thought Amalfi, ever dwindling in size and importance, too mean a place to own so great a treasure, and he accordingly transported the head of the Saint to Rome, where it is now accounted amongst the four chief relics of St Peter's. ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... savage; whatever bewilderments the missionaries had brought had faded when dwindling population left the isle to its own people. In the minds of my happy companions at the vai puna, modesty had no more to do with clothing than, among us, it had to do with food. The standards of the individual are everywhere formed by the mass-opinion of those ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... submerged. News of Washington's abandonment of the island of New York and retreat into Westchester, pursued by Howe's army, of the capture of Fort Washington and its garrison, of the evacuation of Fort Lee, of the steady dwindling of the Continental Army by the expiration of the terms of enlistment, and still more by wholesale desertions, reached the little community in various forms. But interesting though all this was for discussion at the tavern of an evening, or to fill in the ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford

... to discover how the transplanting of the hothouse plant into the hardy outdoor soil of the country has worked out. There are two results about equally probable in such cases—hardly equally probable, either. The natural result, I should fear, would be the dwindling and stunting of the growth, unless protected by expedients not common to the country, and fertilized until it should be really not growing in ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond

... but unseated most of those who were on the higher end. Indeed one very small and pinched but intelligent little boy, named by his companions Blobby, who looked as if Time, through the influence of privation and suffering, had been dwindling instead of developing him,—actually did come off with a cry of alarm, which, however, changed into a laugh of glee when he found himself in his teacher's arms, instead of lying "busted on the ground," as he afterwards expressed it when relating the incident to an ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne

... the month. Then, when sufficient breaches had been opened, the French stormed the ramparts and entered Rome. Garibaldi attempted to throw his forces into Venice to prolong the war against Austria. With his ever-dwindling followers he was hunted from place to place. In the end, through the devotion of Italian patriots, he managed to escape to America. On July 14, the restoration of the Pope's authority over Rome was ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson

... only sixteen years unless measures to protect them are put into effect at once. At the present rate of cutting long-leaf pine trees, our outputs of naval stores including turpentine and rosin are dwindling. We cannot afford to increase our export of southern yellow pine unless reforestation is started on all land suitable for that purpose. Our pine lands of the southern states must be restocked and made permanently productive. Then they ...
— The School Book of Forestry • Charles Lathrop Pack

... a still more fully developed decision to brave it out, and out, and out, rather than return to ask the help of those whose hand-clasp had weakened in ratio to the dwindling of the gold ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest

... a South Atlantic road Becalmed, and found her hold brimmed up with wheat; "Wheat's contraband," they said, and blew her hull To pieces, murdered one of our staunch fleet, Fast dwindling, of the big old sailing ships That carry trade for us on the high sea And warped out of each harbor in the States. It wasn't law, so it seems strange to me— A big mistake. Her keel's struck bottom now And her four masts sunk fathoms, fathoms deep To Davy Jones. The dank seaweed will root On her ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke









Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org




Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |