|
|
|
More "Straightness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a third Joan, a Joan astray. It was this Joan that had come to Lazy-Y Ranch and had cooked for and bullied "the outfit"—a Joan of set face and bitter tongue, whose two years' lonely battle with life had twisted her youth out of its first comely straightness. In Joan's brief code of moral law there was one sin—the dealings of a married woman with another man. When Pierre's living and seeking face looked up toward her where she stood on the mountain-side above Prosper's cabin, she ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... himself in the day's work. He had always been a busy man, and time passed swiftly with him. He and his right-hand man, Sam Vickers, had brought the stud to a pitch of perfection that had earned for his animals a high place in the opinion of the racing community. He had, moreover, a reputation for straightness so unimpeachable that it had become almost a proverb up and down the country. Men said of Jake Bolton that his honour was such that it could stand by itself. Certainly no one ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... on springs. As before, she was indifferently dressed; a small, close hat came down over her face and hid her forehead; her skirt seemed shrunken, and hung limp about her ankles, accentuating the straightness of her figure. But below the brim of the hat her eyes were as bright as ever, and took note of all that happened. On seeing Maurice, she professed to remember him "perfectly," beginning to speak before she had ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... that had made him so lean and stiff and hard. But he was handsomer even than he had been five years ago, and he looked taller, he was so formidably upright and well-built. (As a competitive exhibition Jimmy's straightness was pitiful. And yet, if his antagonist had been anybody but Reggie, it might have had a ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... The valley of Chamouni, largely viewed, and irrespectively of minor ravines and irregularities, is nothing more than a deep trench, dug between two ranges of nearly continuous mountains,—dug with a straightness and evenness which render its scenery, in some respects, more monotonous than that of any other Alpine valley. On each side it is bordered by banks of turf, darkened with pine forest, rising at an even slope to a height of about 3000 feet, so that it may best be imagined as a kind of dry moat, which, ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... eyes and looked about me, and the landscape seemed unfamiliar to me, though it was, as to the lie of the land, an ordinary English low-country, swelling into rising ground here and there. The road was narrow, and I was convinced that it was a piece of Roman road from its straightness. Copses were scattered over the country, and there were signs of two or three villages and hamlets in sight besides the one near me, between which and me there was some orchard-land, where the early apples were beginning to redden on the trees. Also, just on the other side of the road and ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... is too late, that I may reach the Church of Santa Maggiore by keeping straight on through the long, long straightness of the Via Sistina. I reached that church by quite another way after many postponements; for I thought I remembered all about it from my visit in 1864. But really nothing had remained to me save a sense of the exceptional dignity of ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... weary, footsore, and exhausted; my feet so sore and blistered, indeed, that long before I reached a gharrie I was obliged to take off my boots and wrap them in handkerchiefs. The dust was deep and made heavy walking, and the level straightness of a great part of the road is wearisome. Overtaking even at my slow rate of progress a string of creaking buffalo carts, I got upon the hindmost, but after a little rest found the noise, dust, and slow progress intolerable, and plodded on as before, taking ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... size of the copy, an appendage now nearly exploded—their cheek-bones laid within half an inch of the left side of the copy, and the eye set to guide the motion of the hand across, and to regulate the straightness of the lines and the forms of the letters. Others, again, of the more grown boys, are working their sums with becoming industry. In a dark corner are a pair of urchins thumping each other, their eyes steadily fixed on ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... straightness, Younkins guided the leading yoke of cattle directly toward the creek on the other side of which Charlie yet stood, a tall, but animated landmark. When, after descending the gradual slope on which the land lay, the trees that bordered the stream hid the lad from view, ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks
... on, regretting every step that took him from her. But as he reached the next corner his shoulders snapped back into defiant straightness, he thrust his hands into the side pockets of his top-coat, and strode away, feeling that he had shaken off a burden of "niceness." He had, willy-nilly, recovered his freedom. He could go anywhere, now; mingle with ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... and she worries me with her piety; she is quite mad upon the subject of the Gods. I often feel that I am wrong to be so lacking in sympathy with her religious longings; but I hate extremes. "Extreme straightness is as bad as crookedness, and extreme cleverness as bad as folly." She is ever asking me if I do not desire, above all things, the life of the higher road— whatever that may mean. I tell her that I do not know. I would ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... there is no expectation of recovering the straightness of the end of the bone; but these patients are liable to another misfortune, that is, to acquire afterwards a distortion of the spine; for as one leg is shorter than the other, they sink on that side, and ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... nut trees can not be recommended for the dual purpose of timber and nut production, as, for the former purpose, the trees should be planted close together in order to induce length and straightness of trunk with a minimum of top or bearing surface, while for the latter, they should be planted in the open and given space for the maximum development to bearing surface and a minimum length of trunk. The great demand for hickory in the making of axles, wheels, and other vehicle parts ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... the Loop Line train, with Sophia and Fossette opposite to her, Constance had leisure to 'take in' Sophia. She came to the conclusion that, despite her slenderness and straightness and the general effect of the long oval of her face under the hat, Sophia looked her age. She saw that Sophia must have been through a great deal; her experiences were damagingly printed in the details ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... — N. straightness, rectilinearity[obs3], directness; inflexibility &c. (stiffness) 323; straight line, right line, direct line; short cut. V. be straight &c. adj.; have no turning; not incline to either side, not bend to either side, not turn to either side, not deviate to either side; go straight; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... 246. Straightness — N. straightness, rectilinearity^, directness; inflexibility &c (stiffness) 323; straight line, right line, direct line; short cut. V. be straight &c adj.; have no turning; not incline to either side, not bend to either side, not turn to either side, not deviate to either side; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... prayer for fleetness. Keeper of the deer's way, Reared among the eagles, Clear my feet of slothness. Keeper of the paths of men, Hear a prayer for straightness. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... brown skin was clear, smooth and soft in texture. Her eyes clear, too, watchful and reticent; on occasion—such as the driving of a business bargain say, or of a drunken client—hard as flint. Her mouth, a wholesome red, inclined to fullness; but had been governed to straightness of line—will dominant, not only in her every movement, but in repose as she now sat, the chair rockers at a backward tilt, her capable and well-shaped hands folded on her black apron in the hollow of ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... you mean by the Theory of Consequents?" "Look at your shadow," said his teacher; "and you will know." Liehtse turned his head and looked at his shadow. When his body was bent the shadow was crooked; when upright, it was straight. Thus it appeared that the attributes of straightness and crookedness were not inherent in the shadow, but corresponded to certain positions in the body . . . . "Holding this Theory of Consequents," says Liehtse, "is to be at home in the antecedent." Now the antecedent of the ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... selfish, mean-souled, dull-witted human being, whose huge fortune, coupled with the masculine virtues of physical courage and straightness in matters of sport, made him not only popular but in a small way a personage! Pargeter, no doubt, would suffer, especially in his self-esteem; on the other hand, he, the husband, would feel that so had his own conduct, his coarse infidelity, his careless neglect ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... soon to be theirs, and how it should be exercised. From that—by some instinct—Honoria passed on to a talk about Vivien Warren ... a selective talk. She said nothing about David Williams, but enlarged on Vivie's absolute "straightness," especially towards other women; her business capacities, her restoration of her mother to the ranks of the respectable; till at last it seemed as though the burning down of racing stables was a meritorious act ... "ridding England of an evil that good might come." And there was poor Vivie, ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... bushy head; but the daily care is continued until the stems grow to a proper thickness. They are then taken out of the ground, the roots and branches removed, and the stem bored through after being seasoned for some time. The care shown in rearing insures a perfect straightness of stem, and an equable diameter of about an inch or an inch and a half. The last specimens, when cut from the tree, are as much as eight feet in length, dark purple-brown in color, and highly fragrant. At Pesth are made pipes about eighteen inches in length, of the shoots of the mock orange, ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... piety has a natural tendency to become greasy of aspect, and whether, among the many miracles vouchsafed to the amiable and really great Wesley, he received for his disciples of all time to come the gift of a miraculous straightness and lankiness of hair, I know not; but I do know that every Methodist parson I have had the honour to know has been of one pattern, and that Mr. Goodge is ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... be made at a time, and the needle must be put in, exactly at the point where it was drawn out to form the preceding back-stitch, and brought out as many threads further on as were covered by the last back-stitch. The beauty of stitching depends on the uniform length of the stitches, and the straightness of the line formed, to ensure which it is necessary to count the threads for each stitch, and to draw a thread to mark the line. If you have to stitch in a slanting line across the stuff, or the stuff be such as to render the drawing of a thread impossible, a coloured tacking thread ...
— Encyclopedia of Needlework • Therese de Dillmont
... too much resemblance to natural forms it is not necessary to make things ugly; a conventional flower implies no unmeaning straightness or impossible curve, it may keep all its interesting characteristics, but it has to obey other requirements specially necessary in the particular design. Another point to be noted is that, since there is freedom of choice of flowers and other objects, only ...
— Embroidery and Tapestry Weaving • Grace Christie
... decision of judgment and energy of action is demanded, as in times of persecution, width of view and multiplicity of sympathies may not be a source of weakness. Contrast, for example, the character of Mark Fieldes with that of Marmaduke Lemarchant, and it will be clear that the strength and straightness of the latter is closely associated with the absence of that versatility of intellect and affection which make the former a more interesting but far less lovable and estimable personality. To see all sides and issues of a question, is a speculative, but not always a practical advantage; to ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... light on top. The storms beat on its side, the tower leans in the wind, the tower of steel and of stone leans and leans a full two feet. Then when the blast is past, this tower of steel and of stone swings back to straightness again. ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... in the front tier were already on fire, and still more were smouldering, but the straightness of the vent up which the flame was coming, together with the closeness and stillness of the vault, made the flame mount straight up as in a chimney. I therefore divined rather than saw what remained for me to ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... of the same period, Donatello and Luca della Robbia, Matteo Civitale and Mina da Fiesole, who, as I refreshed my memory of them, seemed to me to leave absolutely nothing to be desired in the way of straightness of inspiration and grace of invention. The Bargello is full of early Tuscan sculpture, most of the pieces of which have come from suppressed religious houses; and even if the visitor be an ardent liberal he is uncomfortably conscious of the rather brutal process by which it has been collected. ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... through the roof it became a huge flag pole, fifty feet from base to tip, with a beautiful banner proudly waving from its ball crowned summit. These pillars, both large and small, were bark-coated below the roof. Each one had been carefully selected for its symmetrical straightness, as a representative tree from the different forests of the world. Altogether, they formed a most interesting collection, to which might well be devoted, many hours of admiring inspection, ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... perceived on the hearth-rug, basking before the Minister's ample fire, was Lord Lackington. The sight of that vivacious countenance, that shock of white hair, that tall form still boasting the spareness and almost the straightness of youth, that unsuspecting complacency, confused his ideas and made him somehow feel the ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Gerald rose slowly to his feet and stood by her side. The face of Mr. John P. Dunster, even in unconsciousness, had something in it of strength and purpose. The shape of his head, the squareness of his jaws, the straightness of his thick lips, all seemed to speak of a hard and inflexible disposition. His hair was coal black, coarse, and without the slightest sprinkling of grey. He had the neck and throat of a fighter. But for that single, livid, blue mark across his forehead, he carried ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy sons and of thy daughters, which the Lord thy God hath given thee, in the siege, and in the straightness wherewith thine enemies ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... cell. There was no bed: she allowed herself but two hours' sleep; and this refreshment, such as it was, was taken on the floor, with her head leaning on the stool,—when she lay down in this way, the straightness of the closet preventing her from taking any position that ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... egress. And certainly nothing could get in over the top, or out that way. For though the sides of the great, natural bowl were green up to a certain distance, beyond that, and between the rim and a point half way down, they were almost perpendicular in straightness. And, being of rock, they would, it seemed, afford scarcely a foot or hand-hold for the ...
— The Boy Ranchers on the Trail • Willard F. Baker
... theoretical bases of the social union is naturally considered worse than idle. It is felt by many wise men that the chief business of the political thinker is to interest himself in generalisations of such a sort as leads with tolerable straightness to practical improvements of a far-reaching and durable kind. Even among those, however, who thus feel it not to be worth while to be for ever handling the abstract principles which are, after all, only ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... its inertia of straightness, or centrifugal (or centre-flying) force, tends more away from the centre of motion towards the bottom of the vessel, than ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 491, May 28, 1831 • Various
... excitement, he may make to change or overcome them. Employment is the half, and the primal half, of education—it is the warp of it; and the fineness or the endurance of all subsequently woven pattern depends wholly on its straightness and strength. And, whatever difficulty there may be in tracing through past history the remoter connections of event and cause, one chain of sequence is always clear: the formation, namely, of the character of nations by their employments, and the determination ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... reminiscence of the age of artificiality!" said Ella; "and what an apt commentary upon the subject we were talking about, Phyllis! We were discussing the merits of directness in speech and straightness in every way. We were ridiculing the timid maid—all sandals and simper—of forty years ago. Why should men and women have ever taken the trouble to be affected? Let us go in to lunch and eat with the appetites of men and women of the nineties, ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... to be much offended, because I said, 'Vain man! Think not by the straightness of thine order in outward, and bodily conformity to outward and shadowish circumstances, that thy peace is maintained with God?' But why so much offended at this? [It is say you] 'Because you intend by this the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... has a byway of his own: So much the restless eagerness to shine And love of singularity prevail. Yet this, offensive as it is, provokes Heav'n's anger less, than when the book of God Is forc'd to yield to man's authority, Or from its straightness warp'd: no reck'ning made What blood the sowing of it in the world Has cost; what favour for himself he wins, Who meekly clings to it. The aim of all Is how to shine: e'en they, whose office is To preach the Gospel, let ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... developing itself piecemeal, and growing up under his hands; and so he rarely wearies of what he is doing. Further, his profession has this advantage, that it educates his sense of sight. Accustomed to ascertain the straightness of lines at a glance, and to cast his eye along plane walls, or the mouldings of entablatures or architraves, in order to determine the rectitude of the masonry, he acquires a sort of mathematical ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... inequalities among the rocks. Bright sunshine streamed down on them, the sled ran easily up the slopes and down the hollows, and the men found no difficulty in keeping the pace. Looking back when they nooned, Harding noticed the straightness of their course. Picked out in delicate shades of blue against the unbroken white surface surrounding it, the sled trail ran back with scarcely a waver to the crest of a rise two miles away. This was not ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... I had vague memories (with many a blank between) of a dingy house in the heart of London, in a long street of desolating straightness, that led to a dreary square and back again, and nowhere else for me; and then of a troubled and exciting journey that seemed of jumbled days and nights. I could recall the blue stage-coach with the four tall, thin, brown horses, so quiet and modest and well-behaved; ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... had been somewhat altered. The old school of breeders had evidently determined upon great speed and the ability to stay, through the medium of deep ribs, heart room, wide loins, length of quarter, quality of bone, straightness of fore-leg, and round strong feet; the slack loined, loosely built, and splayfooted hound of former generations had been left behind. To such perfection, indeed, had the Foxhound attained, that long before the close of the eighteenth century sportsmen were clamouring as to what ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... figure as given on p. 386 (Fig. 163) the first dot was made at 3 P.M.; and the tracing was continued for the following 65 h. When the leaf pointed to the dot next above that marked 3 P.M. it stood horizontally. The tracing is remarkable only from its simplicity and the straightness of the lines. The leaf each day described a single great ellipse; for it should be observed that the ascending and descending lines do not coincide. On the evening of the 11th the leaf did not descend quite so ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... wholly unexpected sound pursued Bud and halted him in the trail; the high, insistent howl of a child that has been denied its dearest desire of the moment. Bud looked back inquiringly. The squaw was hurrying on, and but for the straightness of the trail just there, her fat old canvas-wrapped legs would have carried her speedily out of sight. Of course, papooses did yell once in awhile, Bud supposed, though he did not remember ever hearing one howl like that on the trail. But what made the squaw in such a deuce ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... sacred in our Athens, and may the cows of Boston be embalmed with the bulls of Egypt! A white heifer should be perpetually grazing, at her tether, in the shadow of the Great Elm. Would it be wholly unbecoming one born in full view of that lovely inclosure to suggest that the straightness of the lines in which the trees are planted on Boston Common, and the rapidly increasing thickness of their foliage, destroy in the summer season the effect of breadth and liberty, hide both the immediate and the distant landscape, stifle the breeze, and diminish the attractiveness of the spot? ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... beauty infinitely more full of temptation, bloomful with radiant health, the blush of youth and conscious loveliness upon her lips and looking out under the crisp entanglement of her hair, all simple purity and straightness of soul in the fearless innocency of her eyes; the Lady Ysolinde, deeper taught in the mysteries of existence, more conscious of power, not so beautiful, but oftentimes giving the impression of beauty more strongly than her fairer rival, compact ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... I would remark, quite impossible to give directions as to attitudes, but on one point I might advise, in order to save the many inquiries addressed to me, from time to time, upon the subject of the straightness or otherwise of gulls' legs. The fact is—gulls, when standing, tuck the tibia quite close to the abdomen, apparently under the wing, and reveal only a very little portion of the tibio-tarsal joint, keeping the ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... kneeling in her place in the choir, or was alone upon her little balcony over the garden. At such times a luminous pallor gradually took the place of her fresh and healthy complexion, her eyes grew unnaturally dark, with a deep, fixed fire in them, and the regular features took upon them the white, set straightness of a death mask. Sometimes, at such moments, a shiver ran through her, even in summer, and she drew her breath sharply once or twice, as though she were hurt. The expression was not one of suffering or pain, but was rather that of a person conscious of ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... the porch and of all the house's front, bloom flowers of these same delicate tints, the tallest nearest the house, the lesser at their knees and feet. The edges of the beds—gentle waves that never degenerate to straightness—are thickly bordered with mignonette. Not an audacious thing, not a red blossom nor a strong yellow one, nor one broad leaf, nor any mass of dense or dark foliage, comes into view until one reaches ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... from first to last, never challenged the world's attention—that was connected with no great movement or event, political, theological or social; but a life, all the same, that was lived with a truth, an earnestness and a straightness that won the affection and respect of all who came within its influence, and will, or we are much mistaken, glow warmly in the hearts and memories of just all whose eyes now light upon this ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... adventurers went at the job with a will. The line was about a hundred feet long and the method of procedure was this: Frank tested the straightness of the line, as accurately as possible with his eye, while Ben and Harry carried it stretched between them. The end of each hundred feet was signalized by a stone, and Harry, who was at the end of the line, carried his end to this mark before they ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... proportion to their remoteness. Lastly, it is to be remarked that there ultimately arise in the higher social organisms, as in the higher individual organisms, main channels of distribution still more distinguished by their perfect structures, their comparative straightness, and the absence of those small branches which the minor channels perpetually give off. And in railways we also see, for the first time in the social organism, a system of double channels conveying ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... resting on higher places; but when the cutter reaches a high place a shaving will be taken off. Hence it follows that the longer the plane, the straighter will be the surface produced. The length of the plane used is determined by the length of the wood to be planed, and the degree of straightness desired. ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... of us in a perfectly straight line, with neat stone borders on either side, and one got so tired of seeing that line in front of one's nose that one welcomed the smallest change—even a slight ascent or a curve—in its endless, monotonous straightness. We came by and by to a little ascent—quite steep enough for camels. We could have easily avoided it by leaving the road and making a detour at the foot of the hill close to the ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... angles to the plane of its orbit, being inclined but about a degree and a half. The hypothetical inhabitants of this majestic planet must therefore have perpetual summer at the equator, eternal winter at the poles, and in the temperate regions everlasting spring. On account of the straightness of the axis, however, even the polar inhabitants—if there are any—are not oppressed by a six months' night, for all except those at the VERY pole have a sunrise and a sunset every ten hours—the exact day ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... bunches of yellow blossoms, crimson seed-berries, and fresh green leaves, whose surface, not rain-washed for months, is as full of colour as ever. The palm-trees rise without a branch, tall, slender, and graceful, from the warmly generous earth, and spread at last, as if tired of their straightness, into beautiful crowns of fans, which sway toward each other with every breath of air. Innumerable butterflies and humming-birds, in the hot, dazzling sunshine of noonday, will be hovering over the beds of sweet purple heliotrope and finding their ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... and then, with a swift return to her beautiful straightness, said: "But still, Miss Maud, who eveh know when dey say good night dat it ain't good-by?" She fondled my hand between her two as she backed away, kissed it ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... cast in a divine mould of strength and straightness and gallant bearing, and all women proportioned, graceful, and fair, the artist would need no gallery, at least to begin his studies with. He would have to persuade or snatch his models in daily life. Even then, as art creates greater and simpler ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... and tall and straight. Oh, the relief of the tallness and straightness and whiteness! She had thought of something dwarfed and clumsy—dark, misshapen, slouching beast-like on two shapeless feet. Why were people ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... Just what he could have been doing there at such a time I cannot imagine. It seems that he had been working with a road-construction company about three miles out on the road to Guests. I found that out from a perfect stranger." She paused again and the line of her mouth took on a grimmer straightness. "One of the men, who brought him in—a great rough boor he was—had the audacity to suggest that Joseph was around there seeing what he could pick up. I silenced him quickly enough. But can you imagine what brought him to such a place at ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... with fun, came Miss Squeers's tea-drinking—the result of her suddenly falling in love with the new usher, and that chiefly by reason of the straightness of his legs, "the general run of legs at Dotheboys Hall being crooked." How John Browdie (with his hair damp from washing) appeared upon the occasion in a clean shirt—"whereof thecollars might have belonged to some giant ancestor,"—and ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... there—and one of them, the younger evidently, altogether pretty; a straight, slender, grey-eyed English girl of the sort who show "good" figures and fresh complexions. The sister, who was not pretty, was also straight and slender and grey-eyed. But the grey in this case was not so pure, nor were the straightness and the slenderness so maidenly. The brother of these young ladies had taken off his hat as if he felt the air of the summer day heavy in the great pavilion. He was a lean, strong, clear-faced youth, with a formed nose and thick light-brown hair which lay ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... virtuous when they were brave, when they were honest; the idea of using the expression in its later sense occurred, if at all, in jest merely, as a synonym for the eunuch. It was the matron and the vestal who were supposed to be straight, and their straightness was wholly supposititious. The ceremonies connected with the phallus, and those observed in the worship of the Bona Dea, were of a nature that no virtue could withstand. Every altar, Juvenal said, had its Clodius, and even in Clodius' absence there were always ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... saw the house that doubts began to trouble me as to the fitness of my intention. It was a much larger house than any I had ever been in, and there was a straightness and primness about it which somehow did not suggest any very warm welcome to a young sailorman, whose pride in his first appointment and in the spreading of his wings for his first flight ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... large flat-bottomed Chesapeake Bay skiff are shown in figure 4. While it is possible that the narrow beam of this skiff, the straightness of both ends of its bottom camber, and its rig show some New Haven sharpie influence, these characteristics are so similar to those of the flatiron skiff that it is doubtful that many of the Bay sharpies had any real relation to the New Haven boats. As indicated by ...
— The Migrations of an American Boat Type • Howard I. Chapelle
... democracy, and many things seemingly favourable to an oligarchy destroy an oligarchy. Those who think this the only virtue extend it to excess, not considering that as a nose which varies a little from perfect straightness, either towards a hook nose or a flat one, may yet be beautiful and agreeable to look at; but if this particularity is extended beyond measure, first of all the properties of the part is lost, but at last it can hardly be admitted to be a nose at all, on account of the ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... have to finish, either in width or inner recess, as that, one or the other, would necessitate lowering the neck end, which is not what I want to do. First the knife, then the files (coarse ones), and, little by little, I get nearer and nearer to a fit, when I try angle and the straightness of the whole with the fiddle, using compasses to measure from inner point of purfling, upper corner, to corner of fingerboard on corresponding side, with their exact counterparts on the other; and testing height of fingerboard from belly. This is very weary ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... crusader name, Yet it was Darrell had the lion-heart. No love and little liking served this pair, In look and word unpaired as white and black— Of once rich bough the last unlucky fruit. The one, for straightness like a Norland pine Set on some precipice's perilous edge, Intrepid, handsome, little past blown youth, Of all pure thought and brave deed amorous, Moulded the court's high atmosphere to breathe, Yet liking well the camp's more liberal air— Poet, soldier, ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... was inaccurate. She was no mandarin's daughter, this one. She was young and exquisitely slim, with wisdom and sadness written upon her colorless face, and he was informed by a single glance at her exploring bright eyes and the straightness of her fine black brows, that ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... firm little chin just dimpled. Altogether, a face difficult to take one's eyes off. But Nedda was far from vain, and her face seemed to her too short and broad, her eyes too dark and indeterminate, neither gray nor brown. The straightness of her nose was certainly comforting, but it, too, was short. Being creamy in the throat and browning easily, she would have liked to be marble-white, with blue dreamy eyes and fair hair, or else like ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and looked about me, and the landscape seemed unfamiliar to me, though it was, as to the lie of the land, an ordinary English low-country, swelling into rising ground here and there. The road was narrow, and I was convinced that it was a piece of Roman road from its straightness. Copses were scattered over the country, and there were signs of two or three villages and hamlets in sight besides the one near me, between which and me there was some orchard-land, where the early apples were beginning to redden on the trees. Also, just on the other ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... of the numerous lines which intersect the whole of the equatorial and temperate regions of Mars are, their straightness combined with their enormous length. It is this which has led Mr. Lowell to term them 'non-natural features.' Schiaparelli, in his earlier drawings, showed them curved and of comparatively great width. ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... his own: So much the restless eagerness to shine And love of singularity prevail. Yet this, offensive as it is, provokes Heav'n's anger less, than when the book of God Is forc'd to yield to man's authority, Or from its straightness warp'd: no reck'ning made What blood the sowing of it in the world Has cost; what favour for himself he wins, Who meekly clings to it. The aim of all Is how to shine: e'en they, whose office is To preach the Gospel, let the gospel sleep, And pass their own inventions off ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... sculptors of the same period, Donatello and Luca della Robbia, Matteo Civitale and Mina da Fiesole, who, as I refreshed my memory of them, seemed to me to leave absolutely nothing to be desired in the way of straightness of inspiration and grace of invention. The Bargello is full of early Tuscan sculpture, most of the pieces of which have come from suppressed religious houses; and even if the visitor be an ardent liberal he is uncomfortably conscious of the rather brutal ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... case there is no expectation of recovering the straightness of the end of the bone; but these patients are liable to another misfortune, that is, to acquire afterwards a distortion of the spine; for as one leg is shorter than the other, they sink on that side, and in consequence bend the upper part of their ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... between the two third joints of the middle and ring fingers, pressing about the said thumb thereof very hard with them both, and, whilst the remanent joints were contracted and shrunk in towards the wrist, he stretched forth with as much straightness as he could the fore and little fingers. That hand thus framed and disposed of he laid and posited upon Panurge's navel, moving withal continually the aforesaid thumb, and bearing up, supporting, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... line, she could see, sometimes, the tail of Jimmie Batch's glance roving for her, but to all purports his eye was solely for his own replica in front of him, and at such times, when he marched, his back had a little additional straightness ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... every step that took him from her. But as he reached the next corner his shoulders snapped back into defiant straightness, he thrust his hands into the side pockets of his top-coat, and strode away, feeling that he had shaken off a burden of "niceness." He had, willy-nilly, recovered his freedom. He could go anywhere, now; mingle with any sort of people; be ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... witnessing the murder of one of his liege subjects, and demanded, with some asperity, the meaning of the outrage. It turned out to be an affair of Master Simon's, who had selected the tree, from its height and straightness, for a May-pole, the old one which stood on the village green being unfit for farther service. If any thing could have soothed the ire of my worthy host, it would have been the reflection that his tree had fallen for ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... himself up to it; nothing, that is, save a natural benevolence which had not yet been extinguished by the consciousness of official greatness. For Count Vogelstein was official, as I think you would have seen from the straightness of his back, the lustre of his light elegant spectacles, and something discreet and diplomatic in the curve of his moustache, which looked as if it might well contribute to the principal function, as cynics say, of the lips—the active concealment of thought. ...
— Pandora • Henry James
... almost sternly when he went back to the house; though he gave her the lilies, and bid her keep her soul sweet and pure as their white bells. She was sitting by Mistress Gordon's side, in one of those tall-backed Dutch chairs, whose very blackness and straightness threw into high relief her own undulating roundness and mobility, the glowing colours of her Indian silk gown, the shining amber against her white throat, and the picturesque curl and flow of her fair hair. Captain Hyde sat opposite, bending toward her; and his aunt reclined upon ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... party rode through the town, they were struck with the narrowness and straightness of the streets, and at the generally European look of everything; and Mr. Thompson told them that nearly half the population of Buenos Ayres are European. The number of people upon horseback also surprised ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... its way into her heart. Then there was a third Joan, a Joan astray. It was this Joan that had come to Lazy-Y Ranch and had cooked for and bullied "the outfit"—a Joan of set face and bitter tongue, whose two years' lonely battle with life had twisted her youth out of its first comely straightness. In Joan's brief code of moral law there was one sin—the dealings of a married woman with another man. When Pierre's living and seeking face looked up toward her where she stood on the mountain-side above Prosper's cabin, she felt for the first time that she had sinned, and ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... might be the remote town below would take a different air, and my companion the botanist, with his educated observation, might almost see as much, and the train, perhaps, would be gone out of the picture, and the embanked straightness of the Ticino in the Ambri-Piotta meadows—that might be altered, but that would be all the visible change. Yet I have an idea that in some obscure manner we should come to feel at once a difference ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... he began to feel premature little twinges of longing. He gazed at her figure. Her shoulders were a little rounded; much bending over the cradle, ironing board and kitchen range had robbed her back of its straightness. He, too, stooped a little, the result of his toil at the writing-table, and he was obliged to wear spectacles. But at the moment he really was not thinking of himself. He noticed that her plaits were thinner than they had been and that a faint suggestion ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... color was heightened by the pallor my recent illness had given to brow and temples. My hair, from its wetting, was curling in ringlets all around my head. I seized a brush and tried desperately to reduce them to straightness, but the brushing served only to bring out in stronger relief the glint of gold that I despised, and certainly my eyes had never ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... swamp were so intermingled that we actually ran right into a vast bed of rushes without grounding. There was, perhaps, nothing very remarkable about that, but there was a peculiarity about those rushes that Billy was the first to observe and remark upon, namely, their absolutely perfect straightness. This inspired me with an idea: our stock of ammunition was limited, and when it should become exhausted, what were we to do? So long as we remained upon the group we must have weapons of some sort, and the only substitute for the rifle and revolver that I could think of was the bow and arrow. ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... action of the tides, stretched out far as the eye could reach in one long, bold, monotonous line. Like the whole coast of Flanders and of Holland, it seemed drawn by a geometrical rule, not a cape, cove, or estuary breaking the perfect straightness of the design. On the right, just beyond high-water mark, the downs, fantastically heaped together like a mimic mountain chain, or like tempestuous ocean-waves suddenly changed to sand, rolled wild and confused, but still in a regularly parallel course with the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... faithfulness of the seasons than of human tragedy or strenuous overthrow. Even so early she felt great delight in natural things; and when her heart turned to Jethro Moore, she had no doubt whatever of the straightness of its path. She trusted all the primal instincts without knowing she trusted them. She was thirsty; here was water, and she drank. Jethro was a little older than she, the son of a minister in a neighboring town. His father had marked out his plan of life; but Jethro had had enough to do with ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... fact, and a most comforting one; for what a constant anxiety it must have been to believe that the straightness of a child's legs, and the shape of its nose, ears, and head were the direct results of our care! What a responsibility, to which every one must have felt unequal! And what a relief to say: "Nature will think of that. I will leave my baby free, and watch him ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... standing up in the stern-sheets and bending rhythmically, sweep and jerk, sweep and jerk, to his long oar, as if there were wires inside him. His grey picture-frame beard seems to have the effect of concentrating the expressiveness of his face, the satiric glint of his eyes, the dry smile, the straightness of his shaven upper lip, and the kindly lighting-up of the whole visage when he calls to the sea-gulls and they answer him back, and he says with the delight of a child, "There! Did 'ee hear thic?" Keeping close along shore in order to avoid the strength of the flood tide against us, we rode with ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... that don't lick creation for smartness!" he cried. "And how are we to get to this safe? It would serve him right if we collar the lot. It'll teach him that if he ain't honest by nature he's got to be when he deals with the like of us. I like straightness, and by the Lord I'll have it!" He brought his great fist down upon the table to emphasize ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... fingers in between Katharine's, but when she drew them back with the strings upon them, they wavered, lost their straightness, knotted and then resolved themselves into a single loop as in a swift wind a cloud dies away beneath the ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... being too gaudy. Everything is sober here; and the lines of the dress, how simple they all are—no rich curves, no fluttering drapery. They would be quite stiff if it were not for that waving line of round tassels in front, which break the extreme straightness and heaviness of the splendid robe; and all pointing upwards towards that solemn, thin, calm face, with its high white cap, rising like the peak of a snow mountain against the dark, deep, boundless blue sky beyond. That is a grand thought of Bellini's. You do not see the man's hands; ...
— True Words for Brave Men • Charles Kingsley
... with a pale, oblong little face, that looked younger under its softening "bang" of fair curls across the forehead. She was a buff-and-gray-colored creature, with a narrow square chin and narrow square shoulders, and a flatness and straightness about her everywhere that gave her rather the effect of a wedge, to which the big black straw hat she wore tilted a little on one side somehow conduced. Miss Kimpsey might have figured anywhere as a representative of the New England feminine surplus—there was a distinct suggestion ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... many hours of painful walking, two things alone had impressed themselves upon his consciousness: the dark illimitable forest and the double line of rails, which with the absolute straightness of exact science had stretched behind and in front till the tree-tops in the far distance seemed to touch, and the rails themselves to vanish into the black heart of the close-growing pines. For miles he had ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... down at the unconscious man. Gerald rose slowly to his feet and stood by her side. The face of Mr. John P. Dunster, even in unconsciousness, had something in it of strength and purpose. The shape of his head, the squareness of his jaws, the straightness of his thick lips, all seemed to speak of a hard and inflexible disposition. His hair was coal black, coarse, and without the slightest sprinkling of grey. He had the neck and throat of a fighter. But for that single, ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the point where it was drawn out to form the preceding back-stitch, and brought out as many threads further on as were covered by the last back-stitch. The beauty of stitching depends on the uniform length of the stitches, and the straightness of the line formed, to ensure which it is necessary to count the threads for each stitch, and to draw a thread to mark the line. If you have to stitch in a slanting line across the stuff, or the stuff be such as to render the drawing of a thread impossible, a coloured tacking thread should ...
— Encyclopedia of Needlework • Therese de Dillmont
... with God? He whom God hath cursed, and with whom he hath been angry, having changed some of them into apes and swine, and who worship Taghut, they are in the worse condition, and err more widely from the straightness of the path. When they came unto you, they said, We believe: yet they entered into your company with infidelity, and went forth from you with the same; but God well knew what they concealed. Thou shalt see many of them hastening unto iniquity and malice, and to eat things forbidden; ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... at the job with a will. The line was about a hundred feet long and the method of procedure was this: Frank tested the straightness of the line, as accurately as possible with his eye, while Ben and Harry carried it stretched between them. The end of each hundred feet was signalized by a stone, and Harry, who was at the end of the line, carried his end to ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... with a long rubber slicker tight-buttoned from collar to hem. Below that Brent saw rubber boots. She stood with a lance-like straightness, very tall, very pliant, and as he stared with a fixity which would have amounted to impertinence had it not been disarmed by amazement she looked past him and through him as if he were himself ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... line will bear no weight. Not even the science of Vasari will make that form strong which the laws of nature have condemned to weakness. By the position that a straight line will bear nothing is meant that it receives no strength from straightness; for that many bodies laid in straight lines will support weight by the cohesion of their parts, every one has found who has seen dishes on a shelf, or a thief upon the gallows. It is not denied that stones may be so crushed ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... at 3 P.M.; and the tracing was continued for the following 65 h. When the leaf pointed to the dot next above that marked 3 P.M. it stood horizontally. The tracing is remarkable only from its simplicity and the straightness of the lines. The leaf each day described a single great ellipse; for it should be observed that the ascending and descending lines do not coincide. On the evening of the 11th the leaf did not descend quite so low as usual, and it now zigzagged ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... there was no entrance or egress. And certainly nothing could get in over the top, or out that way. For though the sides of the great, natural bowl were green up to a certain distance, beyond that, and between the rim and a point half way down, they were almost perpendicular in straightness. And, being of rock, they would, it seemed, afford scarcely a foot or hand-hold for ...
— The Boy Ranchers on the Trail • Willard F. Baker
... perception and rational choices follow upon those primary creative impulses, and carry out their purpose systematically. At every stage in this development new and appropriate materials are offered for aesthetic contemplation. Straightness, for instance, symmetry, and rhythm are at first sensuously defined; they are characters arrested by aesthetic instinct; but they are the materials of mathematics. And long after these initial forms ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... carriage of his breadth of shoulder. Even his walk was a thing to mark him out from his fellows. It was bold, perhaps even there was a suggestion of arrogance in it. But it was only the result of the military straightness of ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... surgery,' or 'facial' or 'feature surgery.' From the 'beauty shops,' then, as the newspapers call them, he got the idea of changing his nose by cutting and folding back the skin, surgically eliminating the hump, and rearranging the skin over the altered bridge so as to produce perfect straightness when healed. From the same source came the hint of cutting permanent dimples in his cheeks,—a detail that fell in admirably with his design of an agreeable countenance. The dimples would be, in fact, but skilfully made scars, cut so as to last. What ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... regular features, with a colourless olive complexion, clear as to the face and sallow about the neck, formed in her that assemblage of points whose union many persons regard as the perfection of beauty. How, with the tintless pallor of her skin and the classic straightness of her lineaments, she managed to look sensual, I don't know. I think her lips and eyes contrived the affair between them, and the result left no uncertainty on the beholder's mind. She was sensual now, and in ten years' ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... no objection, they went on board, and down into the neat little cabin, which was all the roomier for the straightness of the vessel's quarter. The captain got out a square, coffin-shouldered bottle, and having respect to the condition of their garments, neither of the young men refused his hospitality, though Robert did feel a little compunction at the thought of the horror it would have caused ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... courtesy and saluted Oliver Pollock, who introduced in turn the five, to every one of whom the Governor General gave a bow and a friendly word. Like all others in New Orleans who had seen them, he bestowed an admiring look upon their size, their straightness, and above all, the extraordinary air of independence and resolution that characterized every one of them, indicated, not by the words they said or the things they did, but by an atmosphere they created, something that cannot be described. They had never been in such a room ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... left Ralph with a dazzled sense of Moffatt's strength and keenness, but with a vague doubt as to the "straightness" of the proposed transaction. Ralph had never seen his way clearly in that dim underworld of affairs where men of the Moffatt and Driscoll type moved like shadowy destructive monsters beneath the darting small ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... between the force and direction of the winds and the rise or fall of the sea upon our coast: therefore tidal rise and fall, "instead of having any connection" with the influence of the moon, are "completely controlled" by the direction and force of the wind! There is "a definite relation" between the straightness or want of straightness in a railroad and the speed of the train: ergo, the speed of the train, "instead of having any connection" with the locomotive and the force of steam, is "completely controlled" by the line of the road! It is by no means difficult to philosophize after this ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... sweet breeze that had no variation in itself struck me on the brow, not with heavier blow than a soft wind; at which the branches, readily trembling, all of them were bending to the quarter where the holy mountain casts its first shadow; yet not so far parted from their straightness, that the little birds among the tops would leave the practice of their every art; but with full joy singing they received the early breezes among the leaves, which kept a burden to their rhymes, such as gathers from bough to bough ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 2, Purgatory [Purgatorio] • Dante Alighieri
... the Vote, soon to be theirs, and how it should be exercised. From that—by some instinct—Honoria passed on to a talk about Vivien Warren ... a selective talk. She said nothing about David Williams, but enlarged on Vivie's absolute "straightness," especially towards other women; her business capacities, her restoration of her mother to the ranks of the respectable; till at last it seemed as though the burning down of racing stables was a meritorious act ... "ridding England of an evil that good might come." And there ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... weren't so put about at that as the other apparently expected to find him. He well knew the size of Cicely's love for him, and he'd heard her praise his straightness a thousand times. 'Twas true enough she set great store on her father; but love's love, and Sam was quite smart enough to know that love for a parent goes down the wind afore love for a lover. He looked forward, therefore, and weren't shook ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... voluminous bow. The girl's naturally straight hair had apparently been urged by artificial means to curl in ringlets, but only a part of it had succumbed to the hot iron. The rest fairly bristled in its stiff straightness, and the whole mop was tied up with a large bow of ...
— Marjorie's Vacation • Carolyn Wells
... be enduring from the mother some sharp reprimand, to the amusement of the daughter. As the gate closed behind Dyck and Michael, the three from Virginia turned round and faced them. As Dyck came forward, Sheila flushed and trembled. She was no longer a young girl, but her slim straightness and the soft lines of her figure, gave her a dignity and charm which made her young womanhood distinguished—for she was now twenty-five, and had a carriage of which a princess might have been proud. Yet it was plain that the entrance of Dyck at this ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... or just what she meant by knowing it, or just what would happen because of knowing it. Moving about the large room softly, her harmonious strength and grace were revealed in the swing of her long lithe limbs, the reach of her satiny brown arms, the breadth of her sweet smooth breast, the straightness and firmness of her tall frame. Only a self-reliant girl could have moved as she moved, a girl made self-reliant by exuberant health and ideals and hope. When she stopped moving about and stood before her mirror, her hand on the great rope of shining hair that hung over her ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... persistent nature, whatever effort, under special excitement, he may make to change or overcome them. Employment is the half, and the primal half, of education—it is the warp of it; and the fineness or the endurance of all subsequently woven pattern depends wholly on its straightness and strength. And, whatever difficulty there may be in tracing through past history the remoter connections of event and cause, one chain of sequence is always clear: the formation, namely, of the character of nations by their employments, and the determination of their final ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... from the climb, pushed through the scrub pines at the path's end and stopped suddenly at the marge of the clearing. Her slender girlish figure, clad in corduroy skirt and blue jersey, was poised with lance-like straightness, and a grace as free as a boy's. Her hands, cased in battered gauntlets, went suddenly to her breast, as though she would muffle the palpitant heart beneath the jersey. She stood for a moment looking at the man and the ultramarine ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... the consistent grey, and the air, always so brisk, had fallen still with that ominous lull that comes over everything before a convulsion of nature. Some birds were still hurrying home into the depths of the copses with a frightened straightness of flight, as if they were afraid they would not get back in time, and all the insects that are so gay with their humming and booming had disappeared under leaves and stones and grasses. Elinor saw a bee burrowing deep in the waxen trumpet of a foxglove, as if taking shelter, ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... Corona went downstairs at last, she found Charlotta sobbing in the kitchen porch. The small handmaiden was doubled up on the floor, with her face muffled in her gingham apron and her long braids of red hair hanging with limp straightness down her back. When Charlotta was in good spirits, they always hung perkily over each shoulder, tied up with enormous bows of ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of a good glider are stability, straightness of flight, and a small gliding angle. If the last is as low as 1 in 10, so that the model falls but 1 foot vertically while progressing 10 feet horizontally, the glider is ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... over a white, tree-dappled, sunlit road would be pleasant enough, and, after all, if at the end of the gallop one came again upon that other in whom life was strong and young, and bloomed on rose-cheek and was the far fire in the blue deeps of lovely eyes, and the slim straightness of the fair body, why would it not be, in a way, all to the good? He had thought of her on more than one day, and felt that he wanted to ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... she seemed to hesitate an instant to deal with this—"your not being aware of it is the strangeness in the strangeness. It's the wonder of the wonder." She spoke as with the softness almost of a sick child, yet now at last, at the end of all, with the perfect straightness of a sibyl. She visibly knew that she knew, and the effect on him was of something co-ordinate, in its high character, with the law that had ruled him. It was the true voice of the law; so on her lips would the law itself have sounded. "It has touched you," she went on. "It has done its ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... amateur golfers of Great Britain are in these days suffering from a "debauchery of long driving." The general sense of Mr. Travis's remark is excellent, meaning that there is a tendency to regard a very long drive as almost everything in the playing of a hole, and to be utterly careless of straightness and the short game so long as the ball has been hit from the tee to the full extent of the golfer's power. A long drive is not by any means everything, and the young golfer should resist any inclination to ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... differentiation of the one quality of extension into time and space. ({beta}) It gives a meaning to the observed facts of geometrical and temporal position, of geometrical and temporal order, and of geometrical straightness and planeness. ({gamma}) It selects one definite system of congruence embracing both space and time, and thus explains the concordance as to measurement which is in practice attained. ({delta}) It explains (consistently with the theory of relativity) the observed phenomena of rotation, e.g. ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... a chapter of semi-digression. We now return to the straight course. Is the straightness none too evident? Ah well, it's a matter of relativity. A child is born with one sex only, and remains always single in his sex. There is no intermingling, only a great change of roles is possible. But man in the female ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... as in times of persecution, width of view and multiplicity of sympathies may not be a source of weakness. Contrast, for example, the character of Mark Fieldes with that of Marmaduke Lemarchant, and it will be clear that the strength and straightness of the latter is closely associated with the absence of that versatility of intellect and affection which make the former a more interesting but far less lovable and estimable personality. To see all sides and issues of a question, is a speculative, but not always a practical advantage; ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... places, with the pervading avoidance of flourish or effect. It makes as little of itself as possible, and calls to no one 'Come and look at me!' And yet it is picked out from the trees of the world; picked out for length, picked out for breadth, picked out for straightness, picked out for crookedness, chosen with an eye to every need of ship and boat. Strangely twisted pieces lie about, precious in the sight of shipwrights. Sauntering through these groves, I come upon an open glade where workmen are examining ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... journey, we struck out upon the highway which parallels the coast. Almost immediately, the road changed from a fair country cart-road to a road remarkable at once for its straightness, breadth and levelness. It was, however, dreadfully hot and dusty, and was bordered on both sides with a tiresome and monotonous growth of low, thorn-bearing trees, with occasional clumps of palms. We ate ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... planet. The thought naturally occurred that the canals might be of artificial origin, and might indicate the existence of a gigantic system of irrigation serving to maintain life upon the globe of Mars. The geometrical perfection of the lines, their straightness, their absolute parallelism when doubled, their remarkable tendency to radiate from definite centers, lent strength to the hypothesis of an artificial origin. But their enormous size, length, and number tended to stagger belief ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... Marion. The daughter at fourteen was five feet ten inches in height, the mother an inch taller. Even a badly cut muslin dress could not fully conceal the fine breadth of Little Marion's shoulders nor the splendid length and straightness ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... calling itself newly Hotel, fell backward a step. Villas with the titles of royalty and bloody battles claimed five feet of garden, and swelled in bowwindows beside other villas which drew up firmly, commending to the attention a decent straightness and unintrusive decorum in preference. On an elevated meadow to the right was the Crouch. The Hall of Elba nestled among weather-beaten dwarf woods further toward the cliff. Shavenness, featurelessness, emptiness, clamminess scurfiness, formed ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the age of artificiality!" said Ella; "and what an apt commentary upon the subject we were talking about, Phyllis! We were discussing the merits of directness in speech and straightness in every way. We were ridiculing the timid maid—all sandals and simper—of forty years ago. Why should men and women have ever taken the trouble to be affected? Let us go in to lunch and eat with the appetites of men and women of the nineties, not with the nibblings of society of the fifties. Come ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... what you mean by the Theory of Consequents?" "Look at your shadow," said his teacher; "and you will know." Liehtse turned his head and looked at his shadow. When his body was bent the shadow was crooked; when upright, it was straight. Thus it appeared that the attributes of straightness and crookedness were not inherent in the shadow, but corresponded to certain positions in the body . . . . "Holding this Theory of Consequents," says Liehtse, "is to be at home in the antecedent." ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... full and fair proportion with the upper part; that the nose, in escaping the aquiline bend (always hard and cruel in a woman, no matter how abstractedly perfect it may be), has erred a little in the other extreme, and has missed the ideal straightness of line; and that the sweet, sensitive lips are subject to a slight nervous contraction, when she smiles, which draws them upward a little at one corner, towards the cheek. It might be possible to note these ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... a bodily beauty infinitely more full of temptation, bloomful with radiant health, the blush of youth and conscious loveliness upon her lips and looking out under the crisp entanglement of her hair, all simple purity and straightness of soul in the fearless innocency of her eyes; the Lady Ysolinde, deeper taught in the mysteries of existence, more conscious of power, not so beautiful, but oftentimes giving the impression of beauty more strongly than her fairer rival, compact ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... line was run between them. Along that line, which passes entirely through forest, monuments were erected at every mile, at the crossings of the principal streams and rivers, and at the tops of those hills where a transit instrument had been set up to test the straightness of the line. ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... embonpoint; her eye was of the deepest and most liquid blue, and rendered apparently darker, by long lashes of the blackest jet—for such was the colour of her hair; her nose slightly, but slightly, deviated from the straightness of the Greek, and her upper lip was faultless, as were her mouth and chin; the whole lower part of the face, from the perfect "chiselling," and from the character of her head, had certainly a great air of hauteur, ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... determined is to be fenced with the best quality of galvanized iron barbed wire, strung upon posts placed 20 feet apart. The posts are to be of mesquite, not less than 3 inches in diameter and of a reasonable degree of straightness (not varying more than 5 inches from a straight line). The posts are to be at least 6 feet 6 inches long and are to be planted perpendicularly with 4 feet 6 inches clear and at least 2 feet below the ground ...
— The Repair Of Casa Grande Ruin, Arizona, in 1891 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... a feature in which Mammy took a pride, it was in the straightness of the children's limbs and the flatness of their backs, above all the limbs and backs in the other branches of the family; so, firing up at once, she replied that she would like to see a flatter back than "this here one," laying ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... neither is it capable of being broken. This rope is formed of innumerable fine threads, which, lying closely together, form its thickness. These threads are colorless, are perfect in their qualities of straightness, strength, and levelness. This rope, passing as it does through all places, suffers strange accidents. Very often a thread is caught and becomes attached, or perhaps is only violently pulled away from its even way. ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... as the pinions of the airy fry Of larks and linnets who traverse the sky, Is the Tartana, spun so very fine Its weight can never make the fair repine; Nor does it move beyond its proper sphere, But lets the gown in all its shape appear; Nor is the straightness of her waist denied To be by every ravished eye surveyed; For this the hoop may stand at largest bend, It comes not nigh, ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... operation of holding the barrel less tiresome, it being easier to keep the end of the musket presented to the line pointing downwards than upwards. Formerly, this means of detecting the faults, or want of straightness in the barrel, was, like the working of the rolling-mill, the secret of one man, and he would impart it to no one for love or money. He was watched with the most intense interest, but no clue could be obtained to his secret. They gazed into the barrel for hours, but ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... and working away, with a great needle shaped like a scimitar, till the perspiration ran down her face. It was also she who, standing on the kitchen-table, put up the only two pictures they possessed, Ned and Jerry giving opinions on the straightness of her eye, from below: a fancy picture of the Battle of Waterloo in the parlour; a print of "Harvey Discovering the Circulation of the Blood" on the ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... woman, clothed in a single shift of the sheerest crimson cotton, tied at one shoulder and falling to mid-thigh. Not from Taai did this woman come; one saw that; not from any near island or group. Her beauty was extraordinary, like that of the Marquesans, with that peculiar straightness of all the lines, at once Grecian, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... and two boxes, completed the furniture of her cell. There was no bed: she allowed herself but two hours' sleep; and this refreshment, such as it was, was taken on the floor, with her head leaning on the stool,—when she lay down in this way, the straightness of the closet preventing her from taking any position that ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... there which had cunningly found their own way back, the mass of it hanging behind just to the nape of the little neck in curly fibres, such as renew themselves at their own will after being bathed into straightness like that of water-grasses. Then see the perfect cameo her profile makes, cut in a duskish shell, where by some happy fortune there pierced a gem-like darkness for the eye and eyebrow; the delicate nostrils defined enough to be ready for sensitive ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... in a perfectly straight line, with neat stone borders on either side, and one got so tired of seeing that line in front of one's nose that one welcomed the smallest change—even a slight ascent or a curve—in its endless, monotonous straightness. We came by and by to a little ascent—quite steep enough for camels. We could have easily avoided it by leaving the road and making a detour at the foot of the hill close to the Afghan boundary. Some ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... up and being shot down and walking, Nan and Barry and Gerda and Kay reached Land's End. They went down to Sennan Cove to bathe, and the high sea was churning breakers on the beach. Nan dived through them with the arrowy straightness of a fish or a submarine, came up behind them, and struck out to sea. The others behind her, less skilful, floundered and were dashed about by the waves. Barry and Kay struggled through them somehow, bruised and choked; ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... triumphantly. "The true bowman's hand showeth not in the prettiness of an arrow, mother, but in the straightness and hardness of the wand. Our Robin can fly a shaft right well, I grant you, and I have no question for his skill, but he cannot yet make me an arrow such ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... felt indignant whenever she thought about it, especially as there was always an uneasy sensation of guilt on her own part. She knew it was not a straight transaction, and poor Gwen, with all her faults, loved straightness. For lack of other friendships at school she was forced into companionship with Netta, but she never whole-heartedly liked her. Lately, especially, Netta had taken a rather high-handed tone, and was apt to order her chum about in a manner that Gwen's independent spirit greatly resented. ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... to-day down by the river side. The Cam is a stream much slighted by the lover of wild and romantic scenery; and its chief merit, in the eyes of our boys, is that it approaches more nearly to a canal in its straightness and the deliberation of its slow lapse than many more famous floods—and is therefore more adapted for the maneuvres of eight-oared boats! But it is a beautiful place, I am sure; and my ghost will certainly walk there, "if our loves remain," as Browning ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... their remoteness. Lastly, it is to be remarked that there ultimately arise in the higher social organisms, as in the higher individual organisms, main channels of distribution still more distinguished by their perfect structures, their comparative straightness, and the absence of those small branches which the minor channels perpetually give off. And in railways we also see, for the first time in the social organism, a system of double channels conveying currents in opposite directions, as do the arteries ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... 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
... the wool, and the thickness of the yarn to be produced. These gills are used in the production of worsted yarn until the size of the rope of wool has been so reduced and twisted that there is no chance of any fiber getting crossed or out of the order of straightness. A worsted yarn is, consequently, a straight yarn, or a yarn produced ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley
... to make her a figure of moment and interest. She was handsome in almost a mannish sort of way, being of such height and straightness, and her brown eyes had a depth and fire in which more than a few men had drowned themselves. Also, once she had saved a settlement by riding ahead of a marauding Indian band to warn their intended ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... only had it to put there? Have you seen the cheap alpacas, in two shades, sure to fade in different ways and out of kindred with each other, painfully looped in creasing folds, very much sat upon, but which would not by any means resign themselves to simple smoothed straightness, while silks were hitched and crisp ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... though this goes by a private hand, it is so private, that I don't know it, being an English merchant's, who lodges in this hotel, and whom I do not know by sight: so, perhaps, I may bring you word of this letter myself. I flatter myself Lady Ailesbury's arm has recovered its straightness and its cunning. ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... seem to be much offended, because I said, 'Vain man! Think not by the straightness of thine order in outward, and bodily conformity to outward and shadowish circumstances, that thy peace is maintained with God?' But why so much offended at this? [It is say you] 'Because you intend by this the brethren of ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... operation be successfully performed, the drawn-down tube will have the appearance exhibited, which is suitable either for subsequently closing or handling by means of the drawn-down portion. The straightness of the point can be obtained by a little practice in "feeling" the glass when the tube is rotated as it cools just before it ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... refinement which was new to me, who had hitherto imagined nothing better than a bamboo pole. Bob finally confided to me that he straightened his rods by softening the wood in steam; but I found that they did not long retain their straightness; and, there being no use for them, except the delight of the eye, I presently lost interest in them. Then Bob showed me how to make blow-pipes by pushing out the pith from the stems of some species of bushy shrub that grew outside the walls. He made pellets of clay from his father's studio; ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... best ebony. But all that you have really to do is to keep your back as straight as you can; and not think about what is upon it—above all, not to boast of what is upon it. The real and essential meaning of "virtue" is in that straightness of back. Yes; you may laugh, children, but it is. You know I was to tell you about the words that began with V. Sibyl, what does "virtue" ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... He was at least keeping them straight. And in the circumstances straightness was to be preferred to distance. Soon after leaving Little Hadley he had become ambitious and had used his brassey with disastrous results, slicing his fifty-third into the rough on the right of the road. It had taken him ten with the ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... trees can not be recommended for the dual purpose of timber and nut production, as, for the former purpose, the trees should be planted close together in order to induce length and straightness of trunk with a minimum of top or bearing surface, while for the latter, they should be planted in the open and given space for the maximum development to bearing surface and a minimum length of trunk. The great demand for hickory in the making of ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... again with this tribute to his physical straightness and bloom. Yes, he looked his ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... fallacious as all the others; and this is a mill wheel which touches the waves of the sea at one end and in each complete revolution describes a straight line which represents the circumference of the wheel extended to a straightness. But this invention is of no worth excepting on the smooth and motionless surface of lakes. But if the water moves together with the ship at an equal rate, then the wheel remains motionless; and if the motion ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... alone upon her little balcony over the garden. At such times a luminous pallor gradually took the place of her fresh and healthy complexion, her eyes grew unnaturally dark, with a deep, fixed fire in them, and the regular features took upon them the white, set straightness of a death mask. Sometimes, at such moments, a shiver ran through her, even in summer, and she drew her breath sharply once or twice, as though she were hurt. The expression was not one of suffering or pain, but was rather that of a person conscious of some great danger which must be met without ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... reasons for a course of action so wholly unlike any he had ever yet taken in the case of Lucy Marsham's son, Oliver's thoughts found themselves engaged in a sore and perpetual wrangle. Ferrier, he supposed, suspected him of a lack of "straightness"; and did not care to maintain an intimate relation, which had been already, and might be again, used against him. Marsham, on his side, recalled with discomfort various small incidents in the House of Commons which might have seemed—to an enemy—to illustrate or confirm such an explanation ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... unsparing unapologetic ugliness and the rigid straightness which overwhelmed her. It was the planlessness, the flimsy temporariness of the buildings, their faded unpleasant colors. The street was cluttered with electric-light poles, telephone poles, gasoline pumps for motor cars, boxes of goods. Each man had built with the ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... the foreman, and looked round among the new traceries, mullions, transoms, shafts, pinnacles, and battlements standing on the bankers half worked, or waiting to be removed. They were marked by precision, mathematical straightness, smoothness, exactitude: there in the old walls were the broken lines of the original idea; jagged curves, disdain ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... moment Joan gave the name of Daddy Dan, the wolf-dog kept to the trail with arrowy straightness. Whatever the limitations of Bart's rather uncanny intelligence, upon one point he was usually letter-perfect, and even when a stranger mentioned Dan in the hearing of the dog it usually brought a whine or at least an anxious look. He hewed to his line now with that animal sense ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... made him so lean and stiff and hard. But he was handsomer even than he had been five years ago, and he looked taller, he was so formidably upright and well-built. (As a competitive exhibition Jimmy's straightness was pitiful. And yet, if his antagonist had been anybody but Reggie, it might have had ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... were possible to know with accuracy what his idea of straightness is," said Mr Crawley to his wife. "It may be that things are straight to him when they are buried as it were out of sight, and put away without trouble. I hope it be not so with the bishop." When he went into his school and remembered,—as he ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... higher places; but when the cutter reaches a high place a shaving will be taken off. Hence it follows that the longer the plane, the straighter will be the surface produced. The length of the plane used is determined by the length of the wood to be planed, and the degree of straightness desired. ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... These, therefore, I leave to the maker of histories. Let it be enough to say that the plan of Cortes was to destroy all her vassal and allied cities and peoples before he grappled with Mexico, queen of the valley, and this he set himself to do with a skill, a valour, and a straightness of purpose, such as have scarcely been shown by a general since the ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... alway in affection of the Exercises that were taught in the Upbringing of all the Peoples of the Mighty Pyramid; and by this explaining, you shall understand that I was like to be strong; but indeed, I owed the straightness and shaping of my body to the Mother that bore me. And afterward, in all my life, had I taken pride of my body to be of health and to have strength; and surely this is a matter very fit for pride; and to be told bravely ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... into her chair and let her eyes wander to his breadth of shoulder, straightness of back and even to the curl of his hair that cast its dancing shadows upon the wall in front of him. She had never had a man turn his back on her this way, and yet now the accomplished deed struck her in nowise as boorish ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... that, one or the other, would necessitate lowering the neck end, which is not what I want to do. First the knife, then the files (coarse ones), and, little by little, I get nearer and nearer to a fit, when I try angle and the straightness of the whole with the fiddle, using compasses to measure from inner point of purfling, upper corner, to corner of fingerboard on corresponding side, with their exact counterparts on the other; and testing ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... public-house, calling itself newly Hotel, fell backward a step. Villas with the titles of royalty and bloody battles claimed five feet of garden, and swelled in bowwindows beside other villas which drew up firmly, commending to the attention a decent straightness and unintrusive decorum in preference. On an elevated meadow to the right was the Crouch. The Hall of Elba nestled among weather-beaten dwarf woods further toward the cliff. Shavenness, featurelessness, emptiness, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the numerous lines which intersect the whole of the equatorial and temperate regions of Mars are, their straightness combined with their enormous length. It is this which has led Mr. Lowell to term them 'non-natural features.' Schiaparelli, in his earlier drawings, showed them curved and of comparatively great width. Later, he found them ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... known track of sage philosophy Deserts, and has a byway of his own: So much the restless eagerness to shine And love of singularity prevail. Yet this, offensive as it is, provokes Heav'n's anger less, than when the book of God Is forc'd to yield to man's authority, Or from its straightness warp'd: no reck'ning made What blood the sowing of it in the world Has cost; what favour for himself he wins, Who meekly clings to it. The aim of all Is how to shine: e'en they, whose office is To preach the Gospel, let the gospel sleep, And pass their own inventions off instead. One tells, how at ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... went on board, and down into the neat little cabin, which was all the roomier for the straightness of the vessel's quarter. The captain got out a square, coffin-shouldered bottle, and having respect to the condition of their garments, neither of the young men refused his hospitality, though ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... a prayer for fleetness. Keeper of the deer's way, Reared among the eagles, Clear my feet of slothness. Keeper of the paths of men, Hear a prayer for straightness. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... the cows of Boston be embalmed with the bulls of Egypt! A white heifer should be perpetually grazing, at her tether, in the shadow of the Great Elm. Would it be wholly unbecoming one born in full view of that lovely inclosure to suggest that the straightness of the lines in which the trees are planted on Boston Common, and the rapidly increasing thickness of their foliage, destroy in the summer season the effect of breadth and liberty, hide both the immediate and the distant landscape, stifle the breeze, and diminish the attractiveness ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... are exquisite I can think of no praise pure enough for the sculptors of the same period, Donatello and Luca della Robbia, Matteo Civitale and Mina da Fiesole, who, as I refreshed my memory of them, seemed to me to leave absolutely nothing to be desired in the way of straightness of inspiration and grace of invention. The Bargello is full of early Tuscan sculpture, most of the pieces of which have come from suppressed religious houses; and even if the visitor be an ardent liberal he is uncomfortably conscious ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... in front of us in a perfectly straight line, with neat stone borders on either side, and one got so tired of seeing that line in front of one's nose that one welcomed the smallest change—even a slight ascent or a curve—in its endless, monotonous straightness. We came by and by to a little ascent—quite steep enough for camels. We could have easily avoided it by leaving the road and making a detour at the foot of the hill close to the Afghan ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... you explain what you mean by the Theory of Consequents?" "Look at your shadow," said his teacher; "and you will know." Liehtse turned his head and looked at his shadow. When his body was bent the shadow was crooked; when upright, it was straight. Thus it appeared that the attributes of straightness and crookedness were not inherent in the shadow, but corresponded to certain positions in the body . . . . "Holding this Theory of Consequents," says Liehtse, "is to be at home in the antecedent." Now the antecedent of the personality is the Soul; ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... 'plastic surgery,' or 'facial' or 'feature surgery.' From the 'beauty shops,' then, as the newspapers call them, he got the idea of changing his nose by cutting and folding back the skin, surgically eliminating the hump, and rearranging the skin over the altered bridge so as to produce perfect straightness when healed. From the same source came the hint of cutting permanent dimples in his cheeks,—a detail that fell in admirably with his design of an agreeable countenance. The dimples would be, in fact, but skilfully made scars, cut so ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... highest part of Wether Fell, we find the track taking a perfectly straight line between stone walls. The straightness is so unusual that there can be little doubt that it is a survival of one of the Roman ways connecting their station on Brough Hill, just above the village of Bainbridge, with some place to the south-west. The track goes right over Cam Fell, ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... box. Sandy stretched himself and yawned—after the fashion of any one who has been sleeping a long time in a cramped position; and without being in the least conscious of it, he sidled up to the arm of the throne and rubbed his back up and down—to test the perfect straightness of it. ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... resemblance to natural forms it is not necessary to make things ugly; a conventional flower implies no unmeaning straightness or impossible curve, it may keep all its interesting characteristics, but it has to obey other requirements specially necessary in the particular design. Another point to be noted is that, since there ...
— Embroidery and Tapestry Weaving • Grace Christie
... more symmetrically fashioned than that of the chief. In color he was manifestly white, for all that dirt and the weather could do to disguise it. He was taller even than the great Black Chief himself—but shorter in the body, and achieving his height through length and straightness of leg. He had chest and shoulders of enormous power; but, unlike the barrel-shaped Bow-legs he was comparatively slim of waist and hips. He had less hair on the body—except on the chest and forearm—than his companions; but ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... put about at that as the other apparently expected to find him. He well knew the size of Cicely's love for him, and he'd heard her praise his straightness a thousand times. 'Twas true enough she set great store on her father; but love's love, and Sam was quite smart enough to know that love for a parent goes down the wind afore love for a lover. He looked forward, therefore, and weren't ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... who possessed the countries and abased the servants of God and led armies? Death hath come upon them; and God is the terminator of delights and the separator of companions and the devastator of flourishing dwellings; so He hath transported them from the amplitude of palaces to the straightness of the graves. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Bain,(74) "concrete experience in the first instance, to attain to the notion of whole and part; but the notion, once arrived at, implies that the whole is greater. In fact, we could not have the notion without an experience tantamount to this conclusion.... When we have mastered the notion of straightness, we have also mastered that aspect of it expressed by the affirmation that two straight lines can not inclose a space. No intuitive or innate powers or perceptions are needed in such case.... We can not have the full ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... "If that don't lick creation for smartness!" he cried. "And how are we to get to this safe? It would serve him right if we collar the lot. It'll teach him that if he ain't honest by nature he's got to be when he deals with the like of us. I like straightness, and by the Lord I'll have it!" He brought his great fist down upon the table ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... possessed the stag beetle which was the favourite for the coming races. Another boy called Mason was consumed with longing for this stag beetle; and Bell had said he would give it to him in exchange for Mason's catapult, which was famous in the school for the unique straightness of its two prongs. Mason went to the boy who gave good advice and asked him for his opinion. "Don't swap it for your catty," said the boy who gave good advice, "because Bell's stag beetle may not win after all; and even if it ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... which place was also reported to be most dangerous by reason of the continuall violent and vnresistable current that was reported to haue continuall passage into the straightes, so that once entring therein there was no more hope remayning of returne, besides the perill of shelues, straightness of the passage and vncertayne wyndinges of the same, all which bread dread in the highest degree, the distance and dangers considered. So that before his revealing of the same the matter was in question, whether there were such a passage or no, or whether Magillane did passe the same, if ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... Then, seeing that the arrow was straight in the groove, I replaced the frappings, and immediately discharged it. This time, to my very great pleasure and pride, the arrow went with a wonderful straightness towards the ship, and, clearing the superstructure, passed out of our sight as it fell behind it. At this, I was all impatience to try to get the line to the hulk before we made our dinner; but the men had not yet laid-up sufficient; there being then only four hundred ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... of quality is figure and the shape that belongs to a thing; and besides this, straightness and curvedness and any other qualities of this type; each of these defines a thing as being such and such. Because it is triangular or quadrangular a thing is said to have a specific character, or again because it is straight ...
— The Categories • Aristotle
... or 22. If, however, the slope be too much in the direction shown in Figure 21, practice is necessary to enable the drawing of straight lines if they be long ones, because any variation in the angle of the instrument to the paper obviously vitiates the straightness of the line. If, on the other hand, the square be too close to the line, and the pen therefore requires to be sloped as in Figure 22, the ink flowing from the pen-point is apt to adhere to the square-edge, and the result will be a ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose
... suffering from a "debauchery of long driving." The general sense of Mr. Travis's remark is excellent, meaning that there is a tendency to regard a very long drive as almost everything in the playing of a hole, and to be utterly careless of straightness and the short game so long as the ball has been hit from the tee to the full extent of the golfer's power. A long drive is not by any means everything, and the young golfer should resist any inclination to strive for the 250-yard ball to the detriment ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... take for granted a natural tendency to crookedness. I don't—I don't. What I take for granted is a natural tendency to straightness, when it gets its way. It doesn't always get it, though, especially ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... God? He whom God hath cursed, and with whom he hath been angry, having changed some of them into apes and swine, and who worship Taghut, they are in the worse condition, and err more widely from the straightness of the path. When they came unto you, they said, We believe: yet they entered into your company with infidelity, and went forth from you with the same; but God well knew what they concealed. Thou shalt see many of them hastening unto iniquity and malice, and to eat things forbidden; ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... guess was inaccurate. She was no mandarin's daughter, this one. She was young and exquisitely slim, with wisdom and sadness written upon her colorless face, and he was informed by a single glance at her exploring bright eyes and the straightness of her fine black brows, that she was ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... men hate other people's arrogance!), "that a straight line will bear no weight. Not even the science of Vasari will make that form strong which the laws of nature have condemned to weakness. By the position that a straight line will bear nothing is meant that it receives no strength from straightness; for that many bodies laid in straight lines will support weight by the cohesion of their parts, every one has found who has seen dishes on a shelf, or a thief upon the gallows. It is not denied that stones may be so crushed together by enormous pressure on each side, that a heavy mass ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... Kanaka woman, clothed in a single shift of the sheerest crimson cotton, tied at one shoulder and falling to mid-thigh. Not from Taai did this woman come; one saw that; not from any near island or group. Her beauty was extraordinary, like that of the Marquesans, with that peculiar straightness of all the lines, at once Grecian, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... a simple young man, and he had a simple code of ethics. Above all things he prized and admired and demanded from his friends the quality of straightness. It was his one demand. He had never actually had a criminal friend, but he was quite capable of intimacy with even a criminal, provided only that there was something spacious about his brand of crime and that it did not involve anything mean or underhand. It was the fact that Mr Breitstein ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... of Chamouni, largely viewed, and irrespectively of minor ravines and irregularities, is nothing more than a deep trench, dug between two ranges of nearly continuous mountains,—dug with a straightness and evenness which render its scenery, in some respects, more monotonous than that of any other Alpine valley. On each side it is bordered by banks of turf, darkened with pine forest, rising at an even slope to a height of about 3000 feet, so that it may best be imagined as a kind of dry moat, ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... said Martha slowly. "I shall think of you every day." She spoke almost with indifference, as if she had been asked to dust a room, but she turned aside quickly and pulled the little mat under the hot water jug quite out of its former straightness; then she hastened away down the long white entry, ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett
... another—a refinement which was new to me, who had hitherto imagined nothing better than a bamboo pole. Bob finally confided to me that he straightened his rods by softening the wood in steam; but I found that they did not long retain their straightness; and, there being no use for them, except the delight of the eye, I presently lost interest in them. Then Bob showed me how to make blow-pipes by pushing out the pith from the stems of some species ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... gave himself up to it; nothing, that is, save a natural benevolence which had not yet been extinguished by the consciousness of official greatness. For Count Vogelstein was official, as I think you would have seen from the straightness of his back, the lustre of his light elegant spectacles, and something discreet and diplomatic in the curve of his moustache, which looked as if it might well contribute to the principal function, as cynics say, of the lips—the active concealment of thought. He had been ...
— Pandora • Henry James
... figure would rapidly give way before the insidiousness of Schweinebraten, but her hair would always be beautifully done, each plait smooth and in its proper place, each little curl exactly where it ought to be, the parting a model of straightness, and the whole well deserving to be dignified by the name Frisur. English girls have hair, but they ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... herself with an extreme straightness both of body and soul. She was conscious to the full of her own beauty in her new suit, and of the loveliness of her little sister in her white fur nest of a sledge. She was inordinately proud. She had asked Ida if she might take the child for a little airing before the early Sunday dinner, and ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... historic interest, is in the seventeenth century. Excavations during recent years have done little or nothing to clear up the mystery of Silbury. The fact that the Roman road (which leaves the Bath road just west of Silbury) here deviates slightly from its usual straightness is significant and proves that the mound was in existence when the road was made. The villagers around used to ascend the hill on Palm Sunday to eat "fig cakes" and drink sugar and water. It has been suggested ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... altogether legitimate. Clear, well-digested perception and rational choices follow upon those primary creative impulses, and carry out their purpose systematically. At every stage in this development new and appropriate materials are offered for aesthetic contemplation. Straightness, for instance, symmetry, and rhythm are at first sensuously defined; they are characters arrested by aesthetic instinct; but they are the materials of mathematics. And long after these initial forms have disowned their sensuous values, and suffered a wholly dialectical expansion or ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... white and tall and straight. Oh, the relief of the tallness and straightness and whiteness! She had thought of something dwarfed and clumsy—dark, misshapen, slouching beast-like on two shapeless feet. Why were people afraid ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... divested of his wig his appearance was not so perfect. There was then a hard, long straightness about his head and face, giving to his countenance the form of a parallelogram, to which there belonged a certain meanness of expression. He wanted the roundness of forehead, the short lines, and the graceful curves of face which are necessary to unadorned manly comeliness. ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... foreman, and looked round among the new traceries, mullions, transoms, shafts, pinnacles, and battlements standing on the bankers half worked, or waiting to be removed. They were marked by precision, mathematical straightness, smoothness, exactitude: there in the old walls were the broken lines of the original idea; jagged curves, ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... look so old-fashioned with your gown made all tight, and your hair all tumbling about in curls. Curls are quite gone out.' We must do your hair differently,' she continued, trying to smooth Molly's black waves into straightness. ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... me often, and she worries me with her piety; she is quite mad upon the subject of the Gods. I often feel that I am wrong to be so lacking in sympathy with her religious longings; but I hate extremes. "Extreme straightness is as bad as crookedness, and extreme cleverness as bad as folly." She is ever asking me if I do not desire, above all things, the life of the higher road— whatever that may mean. I tell her that I do not know. I would not be rare, like jade, or common, like stone; just ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... fun, came Miss Squeers's tea-drinking—the result of her suddenly falling in love with the new usher, and that chiefly by reason of the straightness of his legs, "the general run of legs at Dotheboys Hall being crooked." How John Browdie (with his hair damp from washing) appeared upon the occasion in a clean shirt—"whereof thecollars might have belonged to some giant ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... furniture of her cell. There was no bed: she allowed herself but two hours' sleep; and this refreshment, such as it was, was taken on the floor, with her head leaning on the stool,—when she lay down in this way, the straightness of the closet preventing her from taking any position that was not painful ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... that the destined time had arrived for my planting. That afternoon I marked out my corn-field, driving the mare to my home-made wooden marker, carefully observant of the straightness of the rows; for a crooked corn-row is a sort of immorality. I brought down my seed corn from the attic, where it had hung waiting all winter, each ear suspended separately by the white, up-turned husks. They were the selected ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... depth and shadow. Still, beautiful as it all is, one sighs for something which shall satisfy one's craving for startling individuality and grace of form, as in the coco-palm and banana of the tropics. The featheriness of the maple, and the arrowy straightness and pyramidal form of the cryptomeria, please me better than all else; but why criticise? Ten minutes of sunshine would transform the ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... engineer and miner who seems to have a strange sense of direction practically unknown to many other animals. How he manages to form tunnels and burrows in lines of such unusual straightness is unknown; he always works in darkness, unless it is that he can see in the dark. His little hills are not deliberate structures; they are only shaft ends through which this miner throws out the earth that he has scooped from subterranean depths, and in most ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... away, with a great needle shaped like a scimitar, till the perspiration ran down her face. It was also she who, standing on the kitchen-table, put up the only two pictures they possessed, Ned and Jerry giving opinions on the straightness of her eye, from below: a fancy picture of the Battle of Waterloo in the parlour; a print of "Harvey Discovering the Circulation of the Blood" on ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... the river side. The Cam is a stream much slighted by the lover of wild and romantic scenery; and its chief merit, in the eyes of our boys, is that it approaches more nearly to a canal in its straightness and the deliberation of its slow lapse than many more famous floods—and is therefore more adapted for the maneuvres of eight-oared boats! But it is a beautiful place, I am sure; and my ghost will certainly walk there, "if our loves remain," as Browning says, both for the ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to a narrowing from side to side there will be noticed an abnormal straightness of the quarters, with a turning in, more or less sudden, of the heels. This effect is given in these cases by the smith maintaining the shoe of a length and width that should normally fit a foot of that particular animal's ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... when the harvest ripens over huge tracts of country; that is, of course, if the earth's atmosphere allowed a clear view of the terrestrial surface—a very doubtful point indeed. Professor Lowell thinks that the perfect straightness of the lines, and the geometrical manner in which they are arranged, are clear evidences of artificiality. On a globe, too, there is plainly no reason why the liquid which results from the melting of the polar caps should trend at all in the direction ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... a natural tendency to become greasy of aspect, and whether, among the many miracles vouchsafed to the amiable and really great Wesley, he received for his disciples of all time to come the gift of a miraculous straightness and lankiness of hair, I know not; but I do know that every Methodist parson I have had the honour to know has been of one pattern, and that Mr. Goodge is no ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... coast of the Icthyophagi, extending from Malan to Cape Jaser, a distance, by the course of the fleet, of nearly 625 miles, Nearchus was so much favoured by the winds and by the straightness of the coast, that his progress was sometimes nearly 60 miles a day. In every other respect, however, this portion of the voyage was very unfortunate and calamitous. Alexander, aware that on this coast, which furnished nothing but fish, his fleet ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... subserved by the mirror was that of rendering the operation of holding the barrel less tiresome, it being easier to keep the end of the musket presented to the line pointing downwards than upwards. Formerly, this means of detecting the faults, or want of straightness in the barrel, was, like the working of the rolling-mill, the secret of one man, and he would impart it to no one for love or money. He was watched with the most intense interest, but no clue could be obtained to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... gone from the sky. It might be the remote town below would take a different air, and my companion the botanist, with his educated observation, might almost see as much, and the train, perhaps, would be gone out of the picture, and the embanked straightness of the Ticino in the Ambri-Piotta meadows—that might be altered, but that would be all the visible change. Yet I have an idea that in some obscure manner we should come to feel at once ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... size, and slightly disposed towards embonpoint; her eye was of the deepest and most liquid blue, and rendered apparently darker, by long lashes of the blackest jet—for such was the colour of her hair; her nose slightly, but slightly, deviated from the straightness of the Greek, and her upper lip was faultless, as were her mouth and chin; the whole lower part of the face, from the perfect "chiselling," and from the character of her head, had certainly a great air of hauteur, but the extreme melting softness ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... feature in which Mammy took a pride, it was in the straightness of the children's limbs and the flatness of their backs, above all the limbs and backs in the other branches of the family; so, firing up at once, she replied that she would like to see a flatter back than "this here one," laying her ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... next tested for straightness. After the heat-treating, the ends are ground, a spot ground on the enlarged end and each barrel tested on a Brinell machine. The pressure used is 3,000 kg., or 6,614 lb., on a 10-millimeter ball, which is standard. Hardness of 240 ...
— The Working of Steel - Annealing, Heat Treating and Hardening of Carbon and Alloy Steel • Fred H. Colvin
... with heavier blow than a soft wind; at which the branches, readily trembling, all of them were bending to the quarter where the holy mountain casts its first shadow; yet not so far parted from their straightness, that the little birds among the tops would leave the practice of their every art; but with full joy singing they received the early breezes among the leaves, which kept a burden to their rhymes, such as gathers from bough to bough through the pine forest upon the shore of Chiassi, when Aeolus ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 2, Purgatory [Purgatorio] • Dante Alighieri
... side of the house. Staggering after Magdalen, with the basket of keys in one hand and the candle in the other, old Mazey sorrowfully compared her figure with the straightness of the poplar, and her disposition with the crookedness of Sin, all the way across "Freeze-your-Bones," and all the way upstairs to her own door. Arrived at that destination, he peremptorily refused to give her the ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... development of the red lips is more pronounced in the African than in the European,[3] and if there is anything in what has been called the "god-like erectness of the human carriage" then it must be admitted that the Bantu women exhibit a straightness of form which may well be envied ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... to the house; though he gave her the lilies, and bid her keep her soul sweet and pure as their white bells. She was sitting by Mistress Gordon's side, in one of those tall-backed Dutch chairs, whose very blackness and straightness threw into high relief her own undulating roundness and mobility, the glowing colours of her Indian silk gown, the shining amber against her white throat, and the picturesque curl and flow of her fair hair. Captain Hyde sat ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... struck out upon the highway which parallels the coast. Almost immediately, the road changed from a fair country cart-road to a road remarkable at once for its straightness, breadth and levelness. It was, however, dreadfully hot and dusty, and was bordered on both sides with a tiresome and monotonous growth of low, thorn-bearing trees, with occasional clumps of palms. We ate dinner at Juchitan, ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... may be determined is to be fenced with the best quality of galvanized iron barbed wire, strung upon posts placed 20 feet apart. The posts are to be of mesquite, not less than 3 inches in diameter and of a reasonable degree of straightness (not varying more than 5 inches from a straight line). The posts are to be at least 6 feet 6 inches long and are to be planted perpendicularly with 4 feet 6 inches clear and at least 2 feet below the ground surface. Three lines of double ...
— The Repair Of Casa Grande Ruin, Arizona, in 1891 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... no expectation of recovering the straightness of the end of the bone; but these patients are liable to another misfortune, that is, to acquire afterwards a distortion of the spine; for as one leg is shorter than the other, they sink on that side, and ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... Dalness? You may have done poorly at Inverlochy—though I hear the Lowlanders and not you were the poltroons—but blood is thicker than water, and have we not the same hills beside our doors at home, and I have run many miles to warn you that MacDonald is on his way." She told her story with sense and straightness, her frenzy subdued by the day's rigour. Our flight from her cries, she said, had left her a feeling of lonely helplessness; she found, as she sped, her heart truer to the tartan of her name than her anger had let her fancy, and so she followed us round Loch Leven-head, ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... see it now, I never learned great talk, such as that of the Jews, learned in their law, nor such as that of the Romans, learned in their philosophy and in the philosophy of the Greeks. Yet have I talked in simplicity and straightness, as a man may well talk who has lived life from the ships of Tostig Lodbrog and the roof of Brunanbuhr across the world to Jerusalem and back again. And straight talk and simple I gave Sulpicius Quirinius, when I went away ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... perform seated on the ground, with their paper on a copy-board—a piece of planed deal, the size of the copy, an appendage now nearly exploded—their cheek-bones laid within half an inch of the left side of the copy, and the eye set to guide the motion of the hand across, and to regulate the straightness of the lines and the forms of the letters. Others, again, of the more grown boys, are working their sums with becoming industry. In a dark corner are a pair of urchins thumping each other, their eyes steadily fixed on the master, lest he might happen to ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... performed, the drawn-down tube will have the appearance exhibited, which is suitable either for subsequently closing or handling by means of the drawn-down portion. The straightness of the point can be obtained by a little practice in "feeling" the glass when the tube is rotated as it cools just before it loses its ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... favourable to a democracy destroy a democracy, and many things seemingly favourable to an oligarchy destroy an oligarchy. Those who think this the only virtue extend it to excess, not considering that as a nose which varies a little from perfect straightness, either towards a hook nose or a flat one, may yet be beautiful and agreeable to look at; but if this particularity is extended beyond measure, first of all the properties of the part is lost, but at last it can hardly be admitted to be a nose at all, on account of the excess of the rise ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... avoidance of flourish or effect. It makes as little of itself as possible, and calls to no one 'Come and look at me!' And yet it is picked out from the trees of the world; picked out for length, picked out for breadth, picked out for straightness, picked out for crookedness, chosen with an eye to every need of ship and boat. Strangely twisted pieces lie about, precious in the sight of shipwrights. Sauntering through these groves, I come upon an open glade where workmen are examining some timber recently delivered. ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... economy about his body—as was there about all our bodies. The chest was deep, it is true, cavernously deep; but there were no full-swelling muscles, no wide-spreading shoulders, no clean-limbed straightness, no generous symmetry of outline. It represented strength, that body of my father's, strength without beauty; ferocious, primordial strength, made to clutch and gripe and rend ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... of destruction from locusts and drought, vii. 1-6, the vision of the plumbline, symbolical of the straightness to which Israel has failed to conform, vii. 7-9, the vision of the summer fruit, which, by a play upon words, portended the end, viii. 1-3, and the vision of the ruined temple, ix. 1-7. These visions are interrupted by the exceedingly interesting and instructive story of the encounter ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... shall tell thee. The thirst for love, without love of learning, sinks into simpleness. Love of knowledge, without love of learning, sinks into vanity. Love of truth, without love of learning, sinks into cruelty. Love of straightness, without love of learning, sinks into rudeness. Love of daring, without love of learning, sinks into turbulence. Love of strength, without love of learning, ...
— The Sayings Of Confucius • Confucius
... The method employed to do this is somewhat similar to that adopted by a surveyor in drawing the plan of a field. Assuming he had an irregular shaped one, such as is drawn in Fig. X, page 87 [Transcribers Note: Diagram IV], he would proceed to invest it with straight lines, taking advantage of any straightness in the boundary, noting the length and the angles at which these straight lines cut each other, and then reproducing them to scale on his plan. Once having got this scaffolding accurately placed, he can draw the irregularities of the shape in relation to these lines ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... surface, not rain-washed for months, is as full of colour as ever. The palm-trees rise without a branch, tall, slender, and graceful, from the warmly generous earth, and spread at last, as if tired of their straightness, into beautiful crowns of fans, which sway toward each other with every breath of air. Innumerable butterflies and humming-birds, in the hot, dazzling sunshine of noonday, will be hovering over the beds of sweet purple heliotrope and finding their way into the hearts of the passion-flowers, ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... chapter of semi-digression. We now return to the straight course. Is the straightness none too evident? Ah well, it's a matter of relativity. A child is born with one sex only, and remains always single in his sex. There is no intermingling, only a great change of roles is possible. But man in the ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... seemingly unconscious of the half slighting, half pitying admiration elicited by its pathetic beauty. The other, who showed no more than the tip of her nose, held her head bravely erect, while, even through her wrappings, the straightness of ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... explanations of various fundamental observational facts: ({alpha}) It explains the differentiation of the one quality of extension into time and space. ({beta}) It gives a meaning to the observed facts of geometrical and temporal position, of geometrical and temporal order, and of geometrical straightness and planeness. ({gamma}) It selects one definite system of congruence embracing both space and time, and thus explains the concordance as to measurement which is in practice attained. ({delta}) It explains (consistently with the theory of relativity) the observed ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... About the base of the porch and of all the house's front, bloom flowers of these same delicate tints, the tallest nearest the house, the lesser at their knees and feet. The edges of the beds—gentle waves that never degenerate to straightness—are thickly bordered with mignonette. Not an audacious thing, not a red blossom nor a strong yellow one, nor one broad leaf, nor any mass of dense or dark foliage, comes into view until one reaches a side of the dwelling. But there ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... 163) the first dot was made at 3 P.M.; and the tracing was continued for the following 65 h. When the leaf pointed to the dot next above that marked 3 P.M. it stood horizontally. The tracing is remarkable only from its simplicity and the straightness of the lines. The leaf each day described a single great ellipse; for it should be observed that the ascending and descending lines do not coincide. On the evening of the 11th the leaf did not descend ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... water, and looks still as if it had been thoroughly soaked—as if it had faded and shrivelled with a long steeping. The fields and copses, of course, are more forgiving. The railway line follows as well the charming Canal du Midi, which is as pretty as a river, barring the straightness, and here and there occupies the foreground, beneath a screen of dense, tall trees, while the Garonne takes a larger and more irregular course a little way beyond it. People who are fond of canals—and, ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... morning. I knew they had been planted in a right line, and I don't, even now, comprehend why they should not come up in a right line. I weeded them, and though freedom from foreign growth discovered an intention, of straightness, the most casual observer could not but see that skewiness had usurped its place. I repaired to my friend the gardener. He said they must be thinned out and transplanted. It went to my heart to pull up the dear things, but I did it, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... peas are like peas, or young ladies like young ladies. They are newish, three-storied buildings of dingy grey brick with slate roofs, and they are perfectly flat, without a bow-window or even a projecting cornice or window-sill to break the straightness of the line from one end of the street to ...
— Liza of Lambeth • W. Somerset Maugham
... to know it and feel it. It is simpler and more complete than his other novels; it achieves more perfectly what it attempts, and it has about it that charm, very hard to express, which we find in an artist's work the first time he has touched his highest mark—a sort of straightness and naturalness of execution, an unconsciousness of his public, and freshness of interest in his theme. It was a great success, and he immediately found himself famous. The writer of these lines, who was a child at the time, remembers dimly the sensation the book produced, and the little shudder ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... in the upright carriage of his breadth of shoulder. Even his walk was a thing to mark him out from his fellows. It was bold, perhaps even there was a suggestion of arrogance in it. But it was only the result of the military straightness of his body. ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... said, looking a little dazed, but standing with her old straightness. "Who is here? It's Helen! It's—Helen! Oh, Helen—you!" Her face hardened, and her voice was the one of Helen's childhood. "I am afraid I must ask for an explanation ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... Finger Rapids, so-called from the fact that five large masses of rock stand in mid-channel, the river assumes its ordinary straightness and width, with a current from four to five miles per hour. I have already described Five Finger Rapids; I do not think they will prove anything more than a slight obstruction in the navigation of the river. A boat of ordinary power would probably ...
— Klondyke Nuggets - A Brief Description of the Great Gold Regions in the Northwest • Joseph Ladue
... exhausted; my feet so sore and blistered, indeed, that long before I reached a gharrie I was obliged to take off my boots and wrap them in handkerchiefs. The dust was deep and made heavy walking, and the level straightness of a great part of the road is wearisome. Overtaking even at my slow rate of progress a string of creaking buffalo carts, I got upon the hindmost, but after a little rest found the noise, dust, and slow progress intolerable, and ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... forgotten, and carelessness of life is certainly conducive to steadiness of nerve. Jack Vavasour, who was out one day, was under the impression she wished to break her neck. Mrs. Fane became noted in her county for going with the most unflinching straightness, but so little did she care for the reputation, that sometimes she would stick unambitiously to the roads and never take ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... the hearth-rug, basking before the Minister's ample fire, was Lord Lackington. The sight of that vivacious countenance, that shock of white hair, that tall form still boasting the spareness and almost the straightness of youth, that unsuspecting complacency, confused his ideas and made him somehow feel the whole ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of alternate hope and doubt with Bles Alwyn. Strength and ambition and inarticulate love were fighting within him. He felt, in the dark thousands of his kind about him, a mighty calling to deeds. He was becoming conscious of the narrowness and straightness of his black world, and red anger flashed in him ever and again as he felt his bonds. His mental horizon was broadening as he prepared for the college of next year; he was faintly grasping the wider, fuller world, and ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... seemed to belong to her life. It partook rather of the faithfulness of the seasons than of human tragedy or strenuous overthrow. Even so early she felt great delight in natural things; and when her heart turned to Jethro Moore, she had no doubt whatever of the straightness of its path. She trusted all the primal instincts without knowing she trusted them. She was thirsty; here was water, and she drank. Jethro was a little older than she, the son of a minister in a neighboring town. His father had marked out his plan of life; but ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... temples, but yet showing certain tiny rings there which had cunningly found their own way back, the mass of it hanging behind just to the nape of the little neck in curly fibres, such as renew themselves at their own will after being bathed into straightness like that of water-grasses. Then see the perfect cameo her profile makes, cut in a duskish shell, where by some happy fortune there pierced a gem-like darkness for the eye and eyebrow; the delicate nostrils defined enough to be ready for sensitive movements, ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... uncompromising straightness. It lay across the slightly undulating sandy plain like a long yellow ruler; and on each side were the neatly marked squares and parallelograms of the little truck farms, all cultivated by Italians. Their new and unabashed frame ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... there is nothing related concerning him till he reached Dun Usna. It was night when he entered the hall. His brothers were sitting at the central fire. Anli was scouring a shield; Ardane was singing the while he polished a spear and held it out against the light to see its straightness and its lustre. They were in no way ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... The hypothetical inhabitants of this majestic planet must therefore have perpetual summer at the equator, eternal winter at the poles, and in the temperate regions everlasting spring. On account of the straightness of the axis, however, even the polar inhabitants—if there are any—are not oppressed by a six months' night, for all except those at the VERY pole have a sunrise and a sunset every ten hours—the exact day being nine hours, fifty five minutes, and twenty-eight seconds. The ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... particular about its being ornamental, and made of the best ebony. But all that you have really to do is to keep your back as straight as you can; and not think about what is upon it—above all, not to boast of what is upon it. The real and essential meaning of "virtue" is in that straightness of back. Yes; you may laugh, children, but it is. You know I was to tell you about the words that began with V. Sibyl, what does ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... Straightness. — N. straightness, rectilinearity[obs3], directness; inflexibility &c. (stiffness) 323; straight line, right line, direct line; short cut. V. be straight &c. adj.; have no turning; not incline to either side, not bend ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... Here, then, we have all the characters of reefs of the barrier class; and in some outlying reefs we have an approach to the structure of atolls. The source of my doubts about the classification of these reefs, arises from having observed in the Dhalac and Farsan groups the narrowness and straightness of several spits of sand and rock: one of these spits in the Dhalac group is nearly fifteen miles long, only two broad, and it is bordered on each side with deep water; so that, if worn down by the surf, and coated with living corals, it would form a reef nearly similar to those ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... left her, walking forth through the little tables with the uncanny straightness of the man "in liquor." Miss Gregory drank up her coffee ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... produces gum benzoin. It resembles the tamarisk. Mr. Lyall (p. 74 Translations of Ancient Arab Poetry, Williams and Norgate, 1885), calls it a species of Moringa, tall, with plentiful and intensely green foliage used for comparisons on account of its straightness and graceful shape of its branches. The nut supplies a ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... any other Church; but this did not hinder him from consorting with the godless children of the tents, or contributing towards the upkeep of Nonconformist-schools. The gypsies honoured and trusted him because, crooked themselves, they appreciated straightness and clean living in another. They had never known him use a bad word or do a bad thing. He was, on occasion, arrogant, overbearing, ungracious, in short all the unattractive things that a proud and masterful man can be; but his friendship was as strong as the man himself; his charity above the ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... there is another explanation of a line marked on the stone next below the vertical one. I should imagine this line, which is nothing more than a mark such "as might be ruled with a blunt steel instrument, but by a master hand for power, evenness, straightness, and still more for rectangularity to the passage axis," was a mere sign to show where the upright stone was to come. But Professor Smyth, who gives no explanation of the upright stone itself, except that it seems, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... burnt-brown hair was candid; her firm little chin just dimpled. Altogether, a face difficult to take one's eyes off. But Nedda was far from vain, and her face seemed to her too short and broad, her eyes too dark and indeterminate, neither gray nor brown. The straightness of her nose was certainly comforting, but it, too, was short. Being creamy in the throat and browning easily, she would have liked to be marble-white, with blue dreamy eyes and fair hair, or else like a Madonna. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... him to do: that, and to keep Claudine as straight as he could. In a measure, these were the two things that had brought him to the pass in which he now stood, his loyalty to Joe and his resentment of whatever tampered with Claudine's straightness. He was submissive to the consequences: he was still loyal. And now Joe asked him to tell "just what happened," and Happy obeyed with crystal clearness. Throughout the long, tricky cross-examination he continued ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... to be theirs, and how it should be exercised. From that—by some instinct—Honoria passed on to a talk about Vivien Warren ... a selective talk. She said nothing about David Williams, but enlarged on Vivie's absolute "straightness," especially towards other women; her business capacities, her restoration of her mother to the ranks of the respectable; till at last it seemed as though the burning down of racing stables was a meritorious act ... "ridding England of an evil that good might come." And ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... therefore tidal rise and fall, "instead of having any connection" with the influence of the moon, are "completely controlled" by the direction and force of the wind! There is "a definite relation" between the straightness or want of straightness in a railroad and the speed of the train: ergo, the speed of the train, "instead of having any connection" with the locomotive and the force of steam, is "completely controlled" by the line of the road! It is by no means difficult ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... his moral or persistent nature, whatever effort, under special excitement, he may make to change or overcome them. Employment is the half, and the primal half, of education—it is the warp of it; and the fineness or the endurance of all subsequently woven pattern depends wholly on its straightness and strength. And, whatever difficulty there may be in tracing through past history the remoter connections of event and cause, one chain of sequence is always clear: the formation, namely, of the character of nations by their employments, and the determination of their final fate by their ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... house twenty cubits higher; for king Agrippa had at a very great expense, and with very great pains, brought thither such materials as were proper for that purpose, being pieces of timber very well worth seeing, both for their straightness and their largeness; but the war coming on, and interrupting the work, John had them cut, and prepared for the building him towers, he finding them long enough to oppose from them those his adversaries ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... shaft of the spear is a sumpit or blow-pipe. This is a small wooden tube about eight feet long. The smoothness and straightness of the bore is remarkable. The hole is drilled with an iron rod, one end of which is chisel-pointed, through a log of hard wood, which is afterwards pared down and rounded till it is about an ...
— Children of Borneo • Edwin Herbert Gomes
... looking at each other for some time, and I was never more convinced of anybody's straightness and sincerity; but he was straight and sincere with me, and true to you that night, whatever he may have been before and after. So I asked him why he had come, and what had happened; and he said it was not what had happened, but what might happen next; so ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... a course of action so wholly unlike any he had ever yet taken in the case of Lucy Marsham's son, Oliver's thoughts found themselves engaged in a sore and perpetual wrangle. Ferrier, he supposed, suspected him of a lack of "straightness"; and did not care to maintain an intimate relation, which had been already, and might be again, used against him. Marsham, on his side, recalled with discomfort various small incidents in the House ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was responsible for it, or some of the other princesses who had mixed red blood with blue in the days when Virginia belonged to the King. Randy showed signs of it in his square-set jaw, the high lift of his head, his long easy stride, the straightness of his black hair. He showed it, too, in a certain stoical impassiveness which might have been taken for indifference. His world was, for the moment, against him; he would ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... where decision of judgment and energy of action is demanded, as in times of persecution, width of view and multiplicity of sympathies may not be a source of weakness. Contrast, for example, the character of Mark Fieldes with that of Marmaduke Lemarchant, and it will be clear that the strength and straightness of the latter is closely associated with the absence of that versatility of intellect and affection which make the former a more interesting but far less lovable and estimable personality. To see all sides and issues of a question, is a speculative, but not always a practical advantage; to have ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... commonly pinon trees 8 to 10 inches in diameter and 10 to 12 feet long are selected. Three of the five timbers must terminate in spreading forks, as shown in figure 230, but this is not necessary for the other two, which are intended for the doorway and are selected for their straightness. ...
— Navaho Houses, pages 469-518 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... water common in these latitudes at this season marked the prow and wake of the advancing ships with lines of smoky flame. It was this, perhaps, that saved us from disaster—this and the keenness of American eyes, and the straightness of American shooting. From the high-flung superstructure of a big ship one of the eager lookouts noted an unwonted line of shining foam on the port bow. In a second he realized that here at last was the reality of peril. It could be nothing ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... it became a huge flag pole, fifty feet from base to tip, with a beautiful banner proudly waving from its ball crowned summit. These pillars, both large and small, were bark-coated below the roof. Each one had been carefully selected for its symmetrical straightness, as a representative tree from the different forests of the world. Altogether, they formed a most interesting collection, to which might well be devoted, many hours of admiring inspection, by ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... accustomed to the radiant physical bloom of his Rosamund. This woman, with her tenuity, her pallor, her haunted cheeks and temples, her large, distressed and observant eyes—dark hazel in color under brown eyebrows drawn with a precise straightness till they neared the bridge of the nose and there turning abruptly downwards, her thin and almost white-lipped mouth, her cloudy brown hair which had no shine or sparkle, her rather narrow and pointed chin, suggested to him unhealthiness, a human being ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... unconscious man. Gerald rose slowly to his feet and stood by her side. The face of Mr. John P. Dunster, even in unconsciousness, had something in it of strength and purpose. The shape of his head, the squareness of his jaws, the straightness of his thick lips, all seemed to speak of a hard and inflexible disposition. His hair was coal black, coarse, and without the slightest sprinkling of grey. He had the neck and throat of a fighter. But for that single, livid, blue mark across his forehead, he carried with him no signs of his accident. ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... I see you; for though this goes by a private hand, it is so private, that I don't know it, being an English merchant's, who lodges in this hotel, and whom I do not know by sight: so, perhaps, I may bring you word of this letter myself. I flatter myself Lady Ailesbury's arm has recovered its straightness and ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... government. Incessant discussion of the theoretical bases of the social union is naturally considered worse than idle. It is felt by many wise men that the chief business of the political thinker is to interest himself in generalisations of such a sort as leads with tolerable straightness to practical improvements of a far-reaching and durable kind. Even among those, however, who thus feel it not to be worth while to be for ever handling the abstract principles which are, after all, only clumsy expressions of the real conditions that bring and keep men ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... the most brilliant and joyous street in the world; but I think there is less of the quaintness of Italian civilization to be seen in its vivacious crowds than anywhere else in Italy. One easily understands how, with its superb length and straightness, and its fine, respectable, commonplace-looking houses, it should be the pride of a people fond of show; but after Venice and Genoa it has no picturesque charm; nay, even busy Milan seems less modern and more picturesque. The lines ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... N. straightness, rectilinearity[obs3], directness; inflexibility &c. (stiffness) 323; straight line, right line, direct line; short cut. V. be straight &c. adj.; have no turning; not incline to either side, not bend to either side, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree of the artist's prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs. The quality and capacity of that soil, its ability to "grow" with due freshness and straightness any vision of life, represents, strongly or weakly, the projected morality. That element is but another name for the more or less close connexion of the subject with some mark made on the intelligence, with ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... in a white frock, with a broad sash, and experiencing a consciousness of looking remarkably well, in spite of my hair—which, having obstinately repulsed all Jane's advances with tongs and curl-papers, was suffered to remain in all its native straightness. ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman
... you seen the cheap alpacas, in two shades, sure to fade in different ways and out of kindred with each other, painfully looped in creasing folds, very much sat upon, but which would not by any means resign themselves to simple smoothed straightness, while silks were ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... mois, I thought from your features and the straightness of your coal-black hair, that you were." Riel's blood was nigh unto boiling in his veins, but he had craft enough to preserve a ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... even close unto its first articulation, between the two third joints of the middle and ring fingers, pressing about the said thumb thereof very hard with them both, and, whilst the remanent joints were contracted and shrunk in towards the wrist, he stretched forth with as much straightness as he could the fore and little fingers. That hand thus framed and disposed of he laid and posited upon Panurge's navel, moving withal continually the aforesaid thumb, and bearing up, supporting, or under-propping that hand upon the above-specified fore ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... and while she went about her usual Boston business with her usual Boston probity she was really all the while holding herself. She wore her "handsome" felt hat, so Tyrolese, yet some how, though feathered from the eagle's wing, so truly domestic, with the same straightness and security; she attached her fur boa with the same honest precautions; she preserved her balance on the ice-slopes with the same practised skill; she opened, each evening, her "Transcript" with the same interfusion of suspense ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... justness of expression! how true and clear! how little we see nowadays, among grown-up men, of this straightness of the soul—of this losing or never finding "ce moi!" There is more than is perhaps generally thought in this. Man in a state of perfection, would no sooner think of asking himself—am I right? am I appearing to be what inwardly I am? than the eye asks itself—do ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... surface, to its being entangled amidst the matted roots of the turf, and lastly to its being embedded in the mould at various depths beneath the surface. When the same field was re-examined after the interval of a few years, such objects were found at a greater depth than before. The straightness and regularity of the lines formed by the imbedded objects, and their parallelism with the surface of the land, are the most striking features of the case; for this parallelism shows how equably the worms must have worked; the result being, however, partly the effect of the ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin
... happen because of knowing it. Moving about the large room softly, her harmonious strength and grace were revealed in the swing of her long lithe limbs, the reach of her satiny brown arms, the breadth of her sweet smooth breast, the straightness and firmness of her tall frame. Only a self-reliant girl could have moved as she moved, a girl made self-reliant by exuberant health and ideals and hope. When she stopped moving about and stood before her mirror, her hand on the great rope of shining hair that hung over her shoulder, her ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... that is in men rumor often makes mistakes, but for evil she has an infallible eye and at once sets all of her thousand tongues wagging. Indeed, any man with half an eye could not fail to get the meaning of his fixed glance, his hard set jaw, and the straightness of his mouth. If he had been a ghost, men could not have avoided him more sedulously, and the giant servant who stalked at his back. Not that The Corner was peopled with cowards. The true Westerner avoids trouble, but cornered, he ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... snow smoothed out the inequalities among the rocks. Bright sunshine streamed down on them, the sledge ran easily up the slopes and down the hollows, and looking back when they nooned Harding noticed the straightness of their course. Picked out in delicate shades of blue against the unbroken white surface surrounding it, the sledge trail ran back with scarcely a waver to the crest of a rise two miles away. This was not how they had ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... point where it was drawn out to form the preceding back-stitch, and brought out as many threads further on as were covered by the last back-stitch. The beauty of stitching depends on the uniform length of the stitches, and the straightness of the line formed, to ensure which it is necessary to count the threads for each stitch, and to draw a thread to mark the line. If you have to stitch in a slanting line across the stuff, or the stuff be such as to render the drawing of a thread impossible, a coloured ...
— Encyclopedia of Needlework • Therese de Dillmont
... only the unsparing unapologetic ugliness and the rigid straightness which overwhelmed her. It was the planlessness, the flimsy temporariness of the buildings, their faded unpleasant colors. The street was cluttered with electric-light poles, telephone poles, gasoline pumps for motor cars, boxes of goods. Each man had ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... allowed to form a small bushy head; but the daily care is continued until the stems grow to a proper thickness. They are then taken out of the ground, the roots and branches removed, and the stem bored through after being seasoned for some time. The care shown in rearing insures a perfect straightness of stem, and an equable diameter of about an inch or an inch and a half. The last specimens, when cut from the tree, are as much as eight feet in length, dark purple-brown in color, and highly fragrant. At Pesth are made pipes about eighteen inches in length, of the shoots ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... not doing badly. He was at least keeping them straight. And in the circumstances straightness was to be preferred to distance. Soon after leaving Little Hadley he had become ambitious and had used his brassey with disastrous results, slicing his fifty-third into the rough on the right of the road. It had ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... blue butterfly, who danced along as straight as it was possible for him to go, for he, like Bevis, did not like too much straightness. Now the oak knew the butterfly was there, and that was why he dropped his leaf; and so did the nut-tree bough, and that was why he drooped and let the sun sparkle on the water, and the stream smiled to make Bevis follow him to where the butterfly was playing. ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... upright and straight; around him all the trees and beasts and elements and devils may crook and curl like smoke if they choose. All really imaginative literature is only the contrast between the weird curves of Nature and the straightness of the soul. Man may behold what ugliness he likes if he is sure that he will not worship it; but there are some so weak that they will worship a thing only because it is ugly. These must be chained to the beautiful. It is not always wrong even to go, like Dante, to the brink of the lowest promontory ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... features of a good glider are stability, straightness of flight, and a small gliding angle. If the last is as low as 1 in 10, so that the model falls but 1 foot vertically while progressing 10 feet horizontally, the glider is one to be ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... Beatrice's mouth were of a kind that have twisted many men's lives awry; and those men have thought straightness well lost for such red lips. Yes, Beatrice was good to look upon. She had a way of throwing her head back, and showing the smooth, round whiteness of her throat when she laughed, that had thrilled me time and again. And how often, and how gaily ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
