|
|
|
More "Thinness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which was never, and could never be, closed, flanked by lamp-standards carrying no lamp. Rust was the only active agent to be seen there at this time of the day and year. The palings along the front were rusted away at their base to the thinness of wires, and the successive coats of paint, with which they were overlaid in bygone days, had been completely undermined by the same insidious canker, which lifted off the paint in flakes, leaving the raw surface of the ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... the dwarf decided to satisfy himself upon the matter. All around him lay slabs of rock, some of which were worn perfectly smooth and to the thinness of a tombstone, by centuries of polishing in the iron jaws of glaciers. Selecting one of these of convenient size, Otter approached the edge of the bridge, pushing the stone before him over the frozen snow. Here the ice was perfect, except for a slight hoar-frost ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... pretty, but her whole life, which had been but a succession of pious works, had eventually cast over her a species of whiteness and brightness, and in growing older she had acquired what may be called the beauty of goodness. What had been thinness in her youth had became in her maturity transparency, and through this transparency the angel could ...
— What Great Men Have Said About Women - Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 77 • Various
... would dream of wearing, and yet stays warmer than he does, can stand more exposure without outward evidence of suffering than he can stand, and is less susceptible than he to colds and grips and pneumonias. Compare the thinness of her heaviest outdoor wrap with the thickness of his lightest ulster, or the heft of her so-called winter suit with the weight of the outer garments which he wears to business, and if you are yourself a man you will wonder why she doesn't freeze stiff when the thermometer falls to the twenty-above ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... consequently if the diet is of such a nature as to induce over-abundance of fat, the child will be born too fat. This does not mean a healthy child by any means, and it may mean considerable extra pain for the mother. A mother inclined to thinness need not fear that this diet will reduce her. The taking of cream, eggs, bacon and other fat foods often has the opposite effect from that desired. A thin person adopting the above light diet will ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... scarcely two inches apart, and about half as deep, and held perhaps half a million extremely small books. Each comprised many hundreds of pages, made of a perfectly opaque, bluish-white material of such incredible thinness that ordinary India-paper ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... elsewhere, the humour gives us a certain impression of thinness. It is pressed too far, and spun out too long. Compare De Quincey's mode of beating out his one joke through pages of laboured facetiousness, with Swift's concentrated and pungent irony, as in the proposal for eating babies, or the argument to prove that the abolition of Christianity may ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... which at last he saw, now looked tearfully out from their large orbits, but more innocently than a bird from its nest. Over her broad forehead she had wound a large silk handkerchief in turban fashion. It hung down behind. She wished to conceal the thinness of her hair. He smiled to recognise her again in this. More spiritualised, more ethereal in her beauty, her innermost aspirations shone forth without effort. Her thin hands caressed his hair, and now she gazed ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... he leaned back in his chair and watched them. For all her strange beauty, Julia, too, was one of the suffering children of the world. The lines of her figure, which should have been so subtle and fascinating, were sharpened by an unnatural thinness. Aaron's cheeks were almost like a consumptive's, his physique was puny. There was something in their expression common to both. Maraton was conscious of a wave of pity as he ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... mouth, the whole effect of this beautiful face on the mind of those who beheld her was that of a deep melancholy and sweetness, impressing itself once and for ever. Tall and slender, but without the excessive thinness of some young girls, her movements had that careless supple grace that recall the waving of a flower stalk in the breeze. But in spite of all these smiling and innocent graces one could yet discern in Robert's ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... paid a long visit to his patient. He was not portentous in manner and he did not confine his conversation to the subject of symptoms. He however included something of subtle cross examination in his friendly talk. The girl's thinness, her sometimes panting breath and the hollow eyes made larger by the black ring of her lashes startled him on first sight of her. He found that the smallness of her appetite presented to Dowie ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... were in a sad state by this time, his pajamas were torn and his hands were worn tender from using them for feet when running along on all fours. At the same time his temper was wearing to a point of dangerous thinness. It was likely to break down the slender barrier that held it ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Ozarks • Frank Gee Patchin
... be awkward for Pats. But he resolved to suppress any outward manifestations of that state. This task was all the harder, as his legs embarrassed him. He knew them to be thin,—of a thinness that was startling and unprecedented,—and now, as he confronted the northeast wind, their shrunken and ridiculous outlines were cruelly exposed. He was sensitive about these members, and he thought she had glanced furtively in their direction. ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... luster, nor an unsympathetic bold scrutiny, a scrutiny of brass, should see that she was getting gray. There was no fault about her figure; she had that for her satisfaction; she was more graceful than Jean's square thinness, more slim ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... black ones. They are girt with a bit of native linen, so long that after having been knotted it hangs from the waist to the knees; and it serves to make their garb more decent than it would be because of the meagerness and thinness of the breeches. Or if they do not have that, then they use two brazas' length of the same cloth or silk, which at its full width they wind about the body, joined in front with one end crossed below the other. In that manner they cover the breeches entirely, and ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... doctor's good wife he replied in answer to the question "George Sand is your particular friend?" "Not even George Sand." And is he to be blamed for evading tiresome reminders of the past? He confessed that his excessive thinness had caused Sand to address him as "My Dear Corpse." Charming, is it not? Miss Stirling was doubtless in love with him and Princess Czartoryska followed him to Scotland to see if his health was better. So he was not altogether deserted by the women—indeed he could not live ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... one who had been restrained from greed, lust and violence came. Those who held an honest doubt as to some one policy, or act, questioned, found their mere doubt become in Aguado's mind damning certainty. And so many good Spaniards dead in war, and so many of pestilence, and such thinness, melancholy, poverty in Isabella! And where was the gold? And was this rich Asia of the spices, the elephants, the beautiful thin cloths and the jewels? The friends of Christopherus Columbus had their say also, but suddenly ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... the new one, that's flat," muttered the widow; and she drew out the old one and began to fold it up. But though she had made much of its thinness and insufficiency to the Baroness, she was so powerfully affected at parting with it, that all its good qualities came ...
— Old-Fashioned Fairy Tales • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... got under way, into the heaving waters of the now agitated lake. Side by side, with the quick and easy dip of their elastic single oars, the rowers now sent their light, sharp canoes, dug out to the thinness of a board from the straight-grained dry pine, rapidly ahead over the broken and subdued waves of the cove, in which they had been stationed, till they rounded the intervening woody point which had cut off the view of the lower end ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... the strain they had been under. They were few, they were unshaven and dirty and lean as hungry hounds; but they were the men whom Steve had once bidden Hardwick Elliott to watch, once they had begun to scent combat. Fat Joe was no longer plump. Steve was worn down to actual thinness. And it would have taken a careful eye to have selected the chief from ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... from the seams with their knives, and by iron rings in each corner, now eaten with rust to almost the thinness of wire, they lifted the hatch. Below was a filthy-looking layer of whitish substance, protruding from which were charred, half-burned staves. First they repeated the experiment with the smouldering rag, and finding that it burned, as before, they descended. The whitish substance ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... once struck with the largeness of a pumpkin and the thinness of the stem upon which it grew. "What could the Almighty have been thinking about?" he cried. "He has certainly chosen a bad place for a pumpkin to grow. Eh zounds! Now I would have hung it on one of these ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... are made of all these which are not drapery, but the ideas peculiar to drapery; the properties which, when inherent in a thing, make it drapery, are extension, non-elastic flexibility, unity and comparative thinness. Everything which has these properties, a waterfall, for instance, if united and extended, or a net of weeds over a wall, is drapery, as much as silk or woollen stuff is. So that these ideas separate drapery in our minds from everything else; they are peculiarly characteristic of it, and therefore ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... appealing eyes, with their trick of following people about. She looked a little pale and pathetic, which somehow gave her a specious air of being pretty, which she really was not at all. The swaying young thinness of those very slight girls whose soft summer muslins make them look like delicate bags tied in the middle with fluttering ribbons, has almost invariably a foolish attraction for burly young men whose characters are ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... privacy and security of her own room, and with muffins and oysters for tea, Aunt Blin took out her upper teeth, that she might eat comfortably. Poor Aunt Blin! she showed her age and her thinness so. She had fallen away a good deal since she had been sick. But she was getting better. On Monday morning, she thought she would certainly be able to go out. All she had to do now was to be careful of her cough; and Bel had just bought her a ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... myself. On his return with the inkstand to the corner of my shelf, he could not resist sometimes boasting when he had not made a single blot; or confessing to me, in perfect confidence, how much the thinness of Susan's upstrokes, or the thickness of her downstrokes, was owing to the clearness of his slit or the ...
— The Doll and Her Friends - or Memoirs of the Lady Seraphina • Unknown
... while the strange aviator continued to peer out with strangely shining eyes through the holes of his mask. The effect of that human intelligence, sheltered in there behind that expressionless celluloid, whose frail thinness they all knew covered unspeakable frightfulness, ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... the irrepressible Sam, "unless it is that it is in my blood; for one of the last things I heard my mother say, ere I left home, was that, to judge by the thinness of the milk furnished by the farmer who supplied us, he much reminded her of Pharaoh's daughter, as he took a ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... other. He says: "It is interesting to notice that those parts of the cortex which, according to the current view, were associated with the defective sense organs were also particularly thin. The cause of this thinness was found to be due, at least in part, to the small size of the nerve cells there present. Not only were the large and medium-sized cells smaller, but the impression made on the observer was that they were also less numerous than ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... into my waistcoat. He was clad in a long black overcoat, and a boy's knee-pants, and under the peak of his cap twinkled the merriest black eyes that ever lighted up a smiling face of olive hue. Thereafter, he was more and more, with the thinness of his small black legs, and his habit of hopping up and down, and dancing threateningly about, with mischief latent in every motion, like a crow which in being tamed has acquired one of the worst traits of civilization. He began babbling and gurgling in Spanish, and took my hand for a ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... frankness and abruptness in his speech, but who was in reality the most specious flatterer of the entire party. Mr. Jenks rejoiced in the following personal advantages: red hair, a blue nose, goggle eyes, and jaws of transparent thinness. ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... place in this manner: A person finds himself attacked with languor, loses his appetite, grows visibly thinner, and, at the end of eight or ten days, sometimes a fortnight, dies, without fever, or any other symptom than thinness and drying up of ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... the hill selected for the reservoir site. Labor was scarce and commanded a wage of $2.50 per day for ordinary work; the laborers mixing concrete were paid $2.75 per day. Another source of much relative expense was the high cost of lumber and carpenter work on the forms. On account of the thinness of the walls and roof, the cost of lumber and labor required per cubic yard of concrete was considerable. A part of the lumber was used the second time in forms, but it was found impracticable to delay the work ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... music, and the workmanship is skilful. If one can get over the thinness of the part-writing, especially in the slow movements, there is much to enjoy in them. The style of movement—Tempo di Menuetto—in No. 2 recalls Emanuel Bach's "Wuertemberg" sonatas ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... son-in-law of our enemy, was sent to Maestricht to sound the Dutch. But in proportion as they saw peace desired were they less inclined to listen to terms. They had even the impudence to insinuate to Harlay, whose paleness and thinness were extraordinary, that they took him for a sample of the reduced state of France! He, without getting angry, replied pleasantly, that if they would give him the time to send for his wife, they would, perhaps, conceive another opinion of the position of the realm. In effect, she was extremely ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... to the kind of the voice in respect of its smoothness or roughness, sonority or thinness, musicalness or harshness; also in respect of ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... reports a case of a man of fifty-eight, who was almost devoid of hair all his life and possessed only four teeth. His skin was very delicate and there was absence of sensible perspiration and tears. The skin was peculiar in thinness, softness, and absence of pigmentation. The hair on the crown of the head and back was very fine, short, and soft, and not more in quantity than that of an infant of three months. There was a similar peculiarity in his cousin-german. Williams mentions ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... nothing to hear! Only across the inner sky The wing of a shadowy thought flits by, Vague and featureless, faceless, drear— Only a thinness to catch the eye: Is it a dim foreboding unborn, Or a buried memory, wasted and worn As the fading frost of a wintry sigh? Anon I shall have it!—anon!—it draws nigh! A night when—a something it was took place That drove the ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... perceived a very ancient man clad in a white robe. He was broad-faced and bald-headed, and his eyes burned beneath his shaggy eyebrows like two coals in ashes. He supported himself on a staff of cedar-wood, gripping it with both hands that for thinness were like to those of a mummy. For a while he considered us both as though he were reading our souls, then said in ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard
... the luster of a pearl, or as is said in the trade, the orient, depends upon the number of layers that take part in the reflection, and this number in turn depends upon the translucency of the material and the thinness of the layers. Very fine pearls usually have very many, very thin layers taking part in the reflection. The degree of translucency, considered apart, is sometimes called the "water" of ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... course, takes a hand at helping a yarn get from house to house but nobody makes such a specialty of this sort of social work as Fanny Foster. There are some Green Valley folks who attribute Fanny's up and down thinness to this wearing industry yet both men and women are always glad to see her and her reports always drive blue cares away and provoke ripples of ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... were beguiled into a theoretical exposition of the universe. A sense of thinness and unreality accompanies much of their talk, because it is not, like Emerson's, in constant touch with active ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... readiness, Burns, in spite of all remonstrance from his friend, lifted him in his powerful arms and carried him upstairs. The exertion made him breathe a little heavily for a moment, but that was all. Leaver was not a light burden, in spite of his thinness, for his frame was that of a man who should carry many pounds more than ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... more attention than he would ordinarily have given. She was a tallish girl, whose figure would have been unusually good had it been properly filled out; as it was, she was thin, but only too thin for her proportions—her thinness, had she been three inches shorter, would have passed for a graceful slenderness. But Brent took this in at a glance; his attention was more particularly concentrated on the girl's face—a delicate oval, framed in a mass of ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... complexion had lost that first freshness of youth which, like the bloom that the breath of morning spreads over fruit, disappears at the slightest shock from without, although it may have been respected by the heat of the sun. Yet in this premature paleness and in this somewhat unhealthy thinness there seemed to be an indefinable charm; her eyes, more sunken, but inscrutable as ever, showed less pride and more melancholy than of old; her mouth had become more mobile, and her smile was more delicate and less contemptuous. When she spoke ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... shuddering all the while because the barriers between them are so weak. Although the little old man's back was bent like a day-laborer's, it was easy to see that he must formerly have been of medium height. His excessive thinness, the slenderness of his limbs, proved that he had always been of slight build. He wore black silk breeches which hung about his fleshless thighs in folds, like a lowered veil. An anatomist would instinctively have recognized the symptoms of consumption ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... weight blueness grass imposition ocean introduction thinness man air spirit Socrates ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... were, to be presenting it with the freedom of the city. For up to this time she has seemed like a stranger at Rome, and has not put herself in the way of our conversation; and that, too, chiefly because of a certain highly polished thinness of things and words. For I am aware that there are some men who are able to philosophise in any language, but who still employ no divisions and no definitions; and who say themselves that they approve of those things alone to which nature silently assents. ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... the other side, the lonely prickly pear, and a heap of ashes from a deserted camp-fire. He says the citizens of this state lack the richness of an aesthetic and religious tradition. He says there is no substitute for time. But even these things make for coincidence. This apparent thinness California has in common with the routine photoplay, which is at times as shallow in its thought as the shadow it throws upon the screen. This newness California has in common with all photoplays. It is thrillingly possible for the ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... in fact at once observed his clothes as he had crossed the grass to her seat under the copper beech. She had seen that his fine thinness was inimitably fitted and presented itself to the eye as that final note of perfect line which ignores any possibility of comment. He did not wear things—they were expressions of his mental subtleties. Feather on her ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... woman, that. She's hung on. She just wouldn't die, though she was pretty close to skin and bone all wrapped around a bit of fire when she went out with the sheep. Oh, she's thin now. Never will be fat. But it's the prettiest thinness I ever saw, and when I get back, and the trees begin to bear, and the kids get going to school, she and I are going to do Paris. I don't think much of that burg, but she's just hankered ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... Southern California, and in great quantities in the hot valley of San Joaquin, beyond the Sierra Madre range. The best Malaga raisins, which have the reputation of being the best in the world, may never come to our market, but I have never eaten a better raisin for size, flavor, and thinness of skin than those raised in the El Cajon Valley, which is watered by the great flume which taps a reservoir in the Cuyamaca Mountains, and supplies San Diego. But the quality of the raisin in California will be improved by experience ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... thinness had become gaunt, but it was not that so much as the colouring of her face and the fact that she was wearing pince-nez that made her an absolutely different being. This was the third time in her life that Judy was coming down to the West. Once it had been as a very young girl, full of dreams ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... vertebra of this same Call-duck (fig. 40, B), the two branches of the haemal spine stand much closer together than in the wild duck (A), and the descending haemal processes are much shortened. In the Penguin duck the neck from its thinness and erectness falsely appears (as ascertained by measurement) to be much elongated, but the cervical and dorsal vertebrae present no difference; the posterior dorsal vertebrae, however, are more completely anchylosed to {284} ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... under side of the point is notched by a small circular saw to receive the iridium point, which is selected with the aid of a microscope. A flux of borax and a blowpipe secure it to its place. The point is then ground on a copper wheel of emery. The pen-blank is next rolled to the requisite thinness by the means of rollers especially adapted for the purpose, and tempered by blows from a hammer. It is then trimmed around the edges, stamped, and formed in a press. The slit is next cut through the solid iridium ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... not their equal; assigning as a reason that porphyry was introduced into Rome at a period when the fine arts were tending to their decline. Notwithstanding the hardness of the substance, they are executed with such taste and perfection, that the porphyry is reduced to the thinness ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... an active growing condition. The criminal's skull must be studied by post mortem examination, and the most effective method is by placing a taper through the foramen magnum at the bottom of the skull which will reveal the more active organs by the translucency and thinness of the bones, while the inactive organs are indicated by their opacity and thickness, as in ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... personality and peculiarities of Legrand and Dupin, who are thus individualized, humanized, and related to the real world. If they had not been accepted by the narrator as actual beings of flesh and blood, they might otherwise retain the thinness and the dryness of disembodied intelligences working ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... Army, made it a Maxim, That good Wigs, delicate Linen, and a chearful Air, were to a poor Dependent the same that working Tools are to a poor Artificer. It was no small Entertainment to me, who knew his Circumstances, to see him, who had fasted two Days, attribute the Thinness they told him of to the Violence of some Gallantries he had lately been guilty of. The skilful Dissembler carried this on with the utmost Address; and if any suspected his Affairs were narrow, it was attributed ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... to prove that, owing to the planet's distance from the sun, and the thinness of its atmosphere, the temperature of Mars must be very low, probably below freezing-point even at the equator. Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace has gone further than this, and suggests that the temperature must be eighty ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... made of lead; which, upon examination was found to be so corroded, that several perforations were observed in the cylinder, in which the bucket plays; and the cistern in the upper part was reduced to the thinness of common brown paper, and was full of holes, like ...
— A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons • Fredrick Accum
... longer warm. The darkness, too, made Gertrude restless and they searched the storage closets vainly for candles. When they sat down again they could hear the panting of the engine. The exhaust had the thinness of extreme cold. They were winding on heavy grades among the Buttes of the Castle Creek country, and when the engineer whistled for Castle station the big chime of the engine had shrunk to a baby's treble; it was ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... eyed the preacher. She followed their looks; and there, in the pulpit, was a face as of a staring corpse. The friar's eyes, naturally large, and made larger by the thinness of his cheeks, were dilated to supernatural size, and glaring her way ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... that the shameful fact of Kalora's thinness was being whispered among the young men of Morovenia. When the daughters were out for their daily carriage-ride both wore flowing robes. In the case of Kalora, this augmented costume was intended to conceal the absence of ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... the thin little children. Elisabeth hadn't come to us yet," Roger went on, referring to a Belgian baby that had been sent to the Club to take care of, "and I wasn't so accustomed to thinness as I've grown to be since, and it made me—well, it just ...
— Ethel Morton at Rose House • Mabell S. C. Smith
... tendency to overtreat, rather than undertreat (when there was choice or danger) my subject. (Many members of my craft, I gather, are far from agreeing with me, but I have always held overtreating the minor disservice.) ... There was the danger of the noted "thinness"—which was to be averted, tooth and nail, by cultivation of the lively.... And then there was another matter. I had, within the few preceding years, come to live in London, and the "international" light lay, in those days, to my sense, thick and rich upon the scene. It was the ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... the Tower, and assuming the head of its establishment, my mother was naturally anxious that, poor battered invalid though the Tower was, it should still put its best leg foremost. Sundry cards, despite the thinness of the neighborhood, had been left at the door; various invitations, which my uncle had hitherto declined, had greeted his occupation of the ancestral ruin, and had become more numerous since the news of our arrival had gone ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... she said, with a penetrating glance at Susan. What a pretty girl Susan must have been, so soft and pale and appealing, a little human wood-anemone! She would be very pretty again when she had got over the scared look and the thinness which was almost emaciation. And how well that print suited her! Lady O'Gara had sent down a bundle of things to the South lodge, so that Susan might not appear as a scarecrow to the people. The print had pale green leaves sprinkled over a white surface. It suggested a snowdrop, perished ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... loose and ungraceful. His tie was grimy; his shirt frayed; his trousers turned up, but still falling over his heels; his hat, too large for him, came almost to his ears. In the increased pallor and thinness of his face, his dark eyes seemed to have come nearer together. He would have been a ludicrous object but for the intense earnestness of his expression. He came towards them with rapidly blinking eyes. ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... not hide the eminent unsuitability of the feast itself to its elegant surroundings. True, the bread and butter was of wafer-like thinness, there were hot cakes of the crispest, finest variety, and the plum-cake which was Martha's welcome to the bride was of the richest, most ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... though she was still impetuous, still unconscious of self, she was glowing with womanhood, and ready to be loved. She was not beautiful, except in so far as she was young, for youth is always beautiful; she was tall, of a sweet and delicate thinness, and with the faint coloring of a blush-rose; her dimple was exquisite; her brows were straight and fine, shading eyes wonderfully star-like, but often stormy—eyes of clear, dark amber, which, now that David had come ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... had to find its expression and its stay in the buttress. But even the buttress, although it bears witness to the outward and horizontal force of weight, was nevertheless so fashioned with its gable and pinnacle, or its own arched form, as to aid the upward movement. The thinness of walls and partitions, and the piercing of these with arches and windows, by lightening the force of weight, also contributed to increase the vertical movement. At sight of a true Gothic cathedral, we feel ourselves fairly lifted off the ground ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... the opportunity to examine him at my ease. I certainly should never have known him. In the first place his red beard, ragged and untrimmed, hid much of his face, and his hair was long; but the most surprising change in him was his extreme thinness. It made his great nose protrude more arrogantly; it emphasized his cheekbones; it made his eyes seem larger. There were deep hollows at his temples. His body was cadaverous. He wore the same suit that I ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... than I, how much stronger his body, that he could do anything with me if he liked. He asked me, very politely, whether I'd mind blowing out the candle and I did it at once. He watched me as I walked across the floor and I felt ashamed of my thinness and my ugliness and I know that he knew that I was ashamed. After the light was blown out I heard him settle into his bed with a great heavy plop. I couldn't sleep for a long time, and at every ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... I see a immense mirror turnin' round and round seemin'ly invitin' folks to look. But as I glanced in, I tell the truth when I say, I wuzn't much bigger round than a match, and the thinness made me look as tall as ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... talked in this detachment from her personal affairs, she led the way up bare stairs to her small bedroom. The resplendent woman behind her took note of the widow's excessive thinness, the greyness of her straight, tight hair, the rigid lines of a black stuff gown that had not a scrap of trimming on it—not even the lawn sleeve-bands widows use—and thought of Bennet Goldsworthy's old-time annoyance when his wife was proved to have fallen ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... eyes devoid of the slightest understanding. It was when the great French surgeon looked upon these—little tots whose minds were shattered by cruelties purposely conceived for them, and whose bodies were starved to skeleton thinness in order that thieves and degenerates might grow fat—that he swore a mighty oath and buried his face ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... knuckles and took a turn or two up and down the cabin. Douglas noted with a little sense of pity the extreme thinness of the rounded shoulders under the denim jumper. Douglas dished the bacon and put a loaf of Mary's ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... wagon for the inevitable priest we always set ashore at such a place. The missionary we landed was the young father from Arichat, and in appearance the pleasing historical Jesuit. Slender is too corpulent a word to describe his thinness, and his stature was primeval. Enveloped in a black coat, the skirts of which reached his heels, and surmounted by a black hat with an enormous brim, he had the form of an elegant toadstool. The traveler is ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... for a while in silence. Every now and then she would pause in front of one of the great mirrors of the room, and look at the reflection of her tall thinness and the ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... comical an effect in a from as in a side view, as may be seen in No. 29. The wearer was an elderly woman with gray hair which hung down in a half-curled bang on either side of her thin face. Her hat which was simply "dripping" with feathers suggested a fanciful letter "T" and exaggerated the thinness of her face in a remarkably funny way. The feathers overhanging the brim increased the broadness of the hat, and looked singularly waggish fluttering against the spriggy-looking projections of gray hair. The rules for the wedge-shaped face, as may ...
— What Dress Makes of Us • Dorothy Quigley
... responded, in a violent ellipse, and introduced his own mother, who took in the fact of Miss Andrews's tall thinness, topped with a wide, white hat and waving white plumes, and her little face, irregular and somewhat gaunt, but with a charm in the lips and eyes which took the elder woman's heart with pathos. She made talk with Mrs. Andrews, who affected one as having the materials of social ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... had grown thinner than ever, or rather that her thinness, which had formerly had a healthy reed-like strength, now suggested fatigue and languor. And her face was spent, extinguished—the very eyes were lifeless. All her vitality seemed to have withdrawn itself into ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... the men of marching feet—. Now and then he sang for them in that thin old voice whose thinness was so overlaid by the passion of his patriotism that those who listened found no ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... go clear. But here's what happened in my case: I had a new man in the wheel-house, here, and he almost rammed me into Cuttyhunk, gave me a touch and go with the Pollock Rip Lightship, and had me headed toward Nauset when the fog lifted. And he was steering my courses to the thinness of a hair, at that! Say, I took a sudden tumble and frisked that chap and dragged a toad-stabber knife out of his pocket—one of those regular foot-long knives. It had been yawing off that compass all the way from a point ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... persuade the men to embark in cases of this kind would have been out of place, as it is not only discomfort, or even the risk of the loss of a limb, but life itself that becomes the question. The boats, notwithstanding the thinness of our ranks, left the vessel at half-past five. The rough weather of yesterday having proved but a summer's gale, the wind came to-day in gentle breezes; yet, the atmosphere being cloudy, it had not a very favourable appearance. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sums. For that extraordinary statement he received two castigations,—one at home, that was mild, and one from the schoolmaster, who was careful to lay the rod upon the boy's sliding-place, punishing him, as he jocosely called it, on a sliding scale, according to the thinness of his pantaloons. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... A man who loves is sure. A man has no such sure knowledge of anything else on this earth or in the beyond. I am afraid thy love is of the morning cloud thinness, and will ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... contrasted with the A (ah), it is a thin, flat, and slightly unsatisfactory and disagreeable sound, analogically related to the natural semitone fa of the Diatonic Scale of Musical Tones. This Sound signifies accordingly, THINNESS, ATTENUATED MATTER, the Ghost or Spirit of Nature, related to Odic Force, Magnetisms, Electricity, etc.; still not, however, Spirit in the sense of Mind, or in the Religio-Spiritual sense of the word. This is the exceptional or bastard Vowel-Sound which has but an imperfect or half claim to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... prudence. The prudence of the mere wealth and respectability of the most esteem'd life appears too faint for the eye to observe at all, when little and large alike drop quietly aside at the thought of the prudence suitable for immortality. What is the wisdom that fills the thinness of a year, or seventy or eighty years—to the wisdom spaced out by ages, and coming back at a certain time with strong reinforcements and rich presents, and the clear faces of wedding-guests as far as you can look, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... impoverished Spanish hidalgo, who dines on three olives and sups on an air upon his mandoline. There was a reason for his extreme frugality; he feared that if he ate and drank like other people he might lose his phenomenal thinness, which was of inestimable value to him in a professional point of view. If he should be so unfortunate as to gain flesh, his attractions would diminish in an inverse ratio, so he starved himself almost to death, and was constantly seen anxiously examining the buckle of his belt, to make ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... skull-cap, which hardly allowed a hair to escape, was all that distinguished the seated personage. He held his head so bent upon his breast, that nothing was to be seen of his face thus thrown into shadow, except the tip of his nose, upon which fell a ray of light, and which must have been long. From the thinness of his wrinkled hand, one divined that he was an old man. It was Louis XI. At some distance behind them, two men dressed in garments of Flemish style were conversing, who were not sufficiently lost in the shadow to ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... Narrative" volume 5 part 1 page 18.) At the cataracts of the great rivers Orinoco, Nile, and Congo, the syenitic rocks are coated by a black substance, appearing as if they had been polished with plumbago. The layer is of extreme thinness; and on analysis by Berzelius it was found to consist of the oxides of manganese and iron. In the Orinoco it occurs on the rocks periodically washed by the floods, and in those parts alone where the stream ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... inspection. Her skin, her white throat, her arms and hands and fingernails, her waist and ankles and her pretty feet, were all absolute perfection. The illusion that veiled her slender arms stood at crisp angles; the silk stockings showed a warm skin tint through their thinness; her lower eyelids had been skillfully darkened, her cheeks delicately rouged, and her lips touched with carmine; her brows had been clipped and trained and pencilled, her lashes brushed with liquid dye, and what fragrant powders and perfumes ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... the comet's surpassing thinness and lightness is not a mere speculative opinion. It rests upon incontrovertible proof. In 1770, Lexell's Comet passed within six times the moon's distance of the earth, and was considerably retarded in its motion by ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... drowsy hum of mid- summer —with that charm of Italian vegetation that comes to us as its confession of having scenically served, to weariness at last, for some pastoral these many centuries a classic. In a certain cheapness and thinness of substance—as compared with the English stoutness, never left athirst—it reminds me of our own, and it is relatively dry enough and pale enough to explain the contempt of many unimaginative Britons. But it has ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... the letter which lay on the table, and to materialize strangely and inexplicably. It was the fragrance of brown hair, and the light of youthful eyes; and in this perfume, and this light, he realized her entire person; every delicate defect of thinness. She hung over him in all her girlishness, and he clasped her ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... towering into the pale blue sky, threw sharp shadows on the rich red and orange surface of the tiles. Below, the court was half in shadow, and utterly quiet and deserted. To the left there was a gleam of green, atoning for its spring thinness and scantiness by a vivid energy of colour; while straight across the court, beyond the rich patchwork of the roofs and the picturesque outlines of the chimneys, a delicate piece of white stone-work rose into air—the spire of one of Wren's churches, as ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... so much weight during the last ten days that I begin to fear that I shall, ere long, get too fat to buckle on my armour. But, bad as the thinness was, it was nothing to the dirt. Moreover, I was coming near to losing my voice. There was nothing for us to talk about in our misery, and often days passed without a word being exchanged between ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... lost the lovely carnation of the cheek, but the meandering veins of the temples and eyelids were painfully apparent; and with the eyes so large and clear as to be more like veronicas than ever, made the effect almost ghastly, together with excessive fragility of the form, and the shadowy thinness of the hand that held Phoebe's. Bertha's fingers, at her weakest, had been more substantial than these small things, which had, however, as much character and force in ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in many poems and epigrams of Buchanan, Borbonius, and Barleius. If the reader is not quite attentive such poems will often deceive him, but being re-read and examined they beget a kind of distaste because of the thinness of the matter. Consequently, we have looked carefully for this fault, and have eliminated many poems that are melodious in this way and ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... showed her added cares in the thinness of her face and certain drawn lines about the mouth, but it had not lost its ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... however, to learn the color of the other's style, he bowed politely, assured him that he was enchanted, that Carolus did not wait for him to finish the sentence. He ran to bolt the door, and then took up a small memorandum book, the thinness of which brought a smile of satisfaction ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... did of her mistaken ambition, her fruitless sacrifices, the thing appeared to him as a terrible and useless tragedy. He saw the thinness of her figure, the faint lines which her tireless purpose had written upon her face—and he felt that it was on the tip of his tongue to beg her to give it up—to reason with her in the tone of a philosopher and with the experience ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... your father," said Colwyn. It went to his heart to see the entreaty in her eyes, the pitiful droop of her lips and the thinness of her face. ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... through the narrow opening above my head, and, striking on the opposite wall, gleamed there for a few minutes in radiant and dazzling beauty, passing obliquely upward the while until it grew narrower and more narrow, dwindled down to the thinness of a thread, and finally vanished. I had witnessed the last gleam of earthly sunlight I was ever ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... are most constantly used in the mental habits of the individual. The illumination of the skulls of these two youths (here Professor Windsor inserted a lighted taper in each) discloses a nearly uniform thinness of the entire skull, showing that they exercised all the faculties of the mind. The skull of this old warrior, however, presents a different appearance under the same test. You will notice that the illumination is confined to that portion of the skull ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... English comic papers and found that the following list comprised all the subjects discussed: Mothers-in-law; Hen-pecked husbands; Twins; Old maids; Jews; Frenchmen and Germans; Italians and Niggers; Fatness; Thinness; Long hair (in men); Baldness; Sea sickness; Stuttering; Bloomers; Bad cheese; Red noses. A like examination of American newspapers would perhaps result in a slightly different list. We have, of course, our purely local ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... then kept one day without water or moist meat, you shall see him took so thin in many places as in the musculous parts, that you will hardly believe it to be the same Horse, especially if he be (as the Phrase is among Horse-masters) a Nash or Wash-Horse. The cause of which thinness will easily be granted to be only an exhaustion of Juice, expended out of the Blood, which did stuff out these Vessels. And whoever, that is used to ride hard, shall observe, how thick this foul Horse breaths, and at what a rate he will reek and sweat, will not much wonder at the alteration. ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... as music, and the workmanship is skilful. If one can get over the thinness of the part-writing, especially in the slow movements, there is much to enjoy in them. The style of movement—Tempo di Menuetto—in No. 2 recalls Emanuel Bach's "Wuertemberg" ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... it were, into very contact with the senses. The eye loves to wander over the bountiful provisions nature is throwing forth in every direction for our comfort, and fixes its gaze on the clouds, which, having lost the chilling thinness of winter, roll in rich volumes, amidst the clear and softened fields of azure so peculiar to the season, leading the mind insensibly, to dwell on the things of another and a better world. It was on such a day, that the inhabitants of B—— thronged toward the village church, for the ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... ornamented the van. As it burnt several candles the lantern became hot, which somewhat warmed the cabin, and was a welcome increase of temperature, for although the floor was protected by oil-cloth, upon which were double layers of Scinde rugs, the extreme thinness of the walls made it unpleasantly cold with the thermometer outside at 40 degrees. The servants were saved an immense amount of trouble by the presence of the gipsy-van, which at the time they hardly appreciated; they had no tent-pitching upon ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... disappointment. She was so happy that it was almost stupid—a disproof of the extraordinary intelligence he had formerly found in her. Didn't she know how bad St. George could be, hadn't she recognised the awful thinness—? If she didn't she was nothing, and if she did why such an insolence of serenity? This question expired as our young man's eyes settled at last on the genius who had advised him in a great crisis. St. George was still before the chimney-piece, but now ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... momentary twinge, gone almost before he had realised it, a sudden clear conception of his great loneliness. The satisfaction he strove to extract from improving his estate for the benefit of his brother Gustav appeared to him at that moment to bear a singular resemblance, in its thinness, to Frau Dellwig's charitable soup. He got off his horse to speak to her, and rested his eyes, tired by looking at the hideous passions on the brawler's face, on hers. "To-day is the important day, is it not?" he asked, glancing from her flower-like ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... on well—songs, toasts and sentiments—punch, puns and witticisms, were handed about in abundance; in the mean time, the room began to wear an appearance of thinness, many of the boxes were completely deserted, and the Knights of the Bound Table were no longer surrounded by their Esquires—still the joys of the bowl were exhilarating, and the conversation agreeable, though at times a little more in a strain of vociferation ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... about and the other fellows scribbling away for dear life, the landladies in this close and that square, with faces hardened and tempers sharpened by generations of needy students, out of whom they must nevertheless make their scanty livings, the penetrating Edinburgh airs, the thinness of my cloak and the clumsiness of my countrified rig—these all kept me singularly aware of myself, and prevented any yielding to the folly of homesickness, or, as in my case, "Irma-sickness," to give the ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... me of my coffee now!" said Mr. Prohack, surrendering his cup. "Is it thin, or isn't it? I pride myself on living the higher life; my stomach is not my inexorable deity; but even on the mountain top which I inhabit there must be a limit to the thinness ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... railway-track. We sat with our backs to the precipice, because what little wind there was came from that quarter. At some time or other the fog thinned a little; we did not know when, for we were facing the empty universe and the thinness could not show; but at last Harris happened to look around, and there stood a huge, dim, spectral hotel where the precipice had been. One could faintly discern the windows and chimneys, and a dull blur of lights. Our first emotion was deep, unutterable ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... no longer warm. The darkness, too, made Gertrude restless and they searched the storage closets vainly for candles. When they sat down again they could hear the panting of the engine. The exhaust had the thinness of extreme cold. They were winding on heavy grades among the Buttes of the Castle Creek country, and when the engineer whistled for Castle station the big chime of the engine had shrunk to a baby's treble; it was ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... fat and sensual is to appear to mitigate the latter evil with at least a pretence at good humor; to be thin and sensual is to be a devil. This man was evil, not with the grossness of a debauchee but with the thinness of the devotee. And he was an old man, too. Sixty odd years of vicious life, glossed over in the last two decades by an assumption of respectability, had swept over the gray hairs, which evoked ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... husbands Twins Old maids Jews Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, Niggers (not Russians, or other foreigners of any denomination) Fatness Thinness Long hair (worn by a man) Baldness Sea-sickness Stuttering Bad cheese 'Shooting the moon' (slang expression for leaving a lodging-house without ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... struck with the largeness of a pumpkin and the thinness of the stem upon which it grew. "What could the Almighty have been thinking about?" he cried. "He has certainly chosen a bad place for a pumpkin to grow. Eh zounds! Now I would have hung it on one of these oaks. That would have been just as it should be. Like fruit, like tree! What a pity, Hodge," ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... mountain' when we shouldn't have done either, and we have bought experience and paid for it. Never mind! experience is nearly always worth its price. And I have nearly lost my cough, and Robert is dosing me indefatigably with cod's liver oil to do away with my thinness.... ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... that is the only word which applies to his appearance. His regular features, in their extreme thinness, were ethereal as the face of an angel, but he had not the painful look of emaciation which one so often sees in the faces of those long kept in confinement. He was very thin indeed, but there was a perfect grace in all his movements, ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... and saw with gladness her shivering cease. As I buttoned it at her throat I marvelled at the thinness of her, and at the delicacy of her face. In the opal light of the luminous sky her great ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... enemy, was sent to Maestricht to sound the Dutch. But in proportion as they saw peace desired were they less inclined to listen to terms. They had even the impudence to insinuate to Harlay, whose paleness and thinness were extraordinary, that they took him for a sample of the reduced state of France! He, without getting angry, replied pleasantly, that if they would give him the time to send for his wife, they would, perhaps, conceive another opinion of the position of the ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... is, I do not see that there is any difficulty in the bees, whilst at work on the two sides of a strip of wax, perceiving when they have gnawed the wax away to the proper thinness, and then stopping their work. In ordinary combs it has appeared to me that the bees do not always succeed in working at exactly the same rate from the opposite sides; for I have noticed half-completed rhombs at ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... with what song, can the dry thinness of my meagre muse rightly extol the shining lily, whose whiteness is as the whiteness of gleaming snow, whose sweet scent is as the scent of ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... he saw, was of middle age and of very ordinary appearance; so ordinary, in fact, that he was difficult to describe—his only peculiarity being his extreme thinness. Pleasant—that is, good—vibrations issued from his atmosphere and met Dr. Silence as he advanced to greet him, yet vibrations alive with currents and discharges betraying the perturbed and disordered condition of his mind and brain. There was ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... successful composers in the new genre were those who were actually innocent of any musical training whatsoever. Monsigny (1729-1817) is a particularly striking instance of natural genius triumphing in spite of a defective education. Nothing can exceed the thinness and poverty of his scores, or their lack of all real musical interest; yet, by the sureness of his natural instinct for the stage, he succeeded in writing music which still moves us as much by its brilliant gaiety as by its tender pathos. 'Le Deserteur,' his most ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... seemed to have the drowsy hum of mid- summer —with that charm of Italian vegetation that comes to us as its confession of having scenically served, to weariness at last, for some pastoral these many centuries a classic. In a certain cheapness and thinness of substance—as compared with the English stoutness, never left athirst—it reminds me of our own, and it is relatively dry enough and pale enough to explain the contempt of many unimaginative Britons. But it has an idle abundance and wantonness, a romantic shabbiness and dishevelment. At the ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... altered, but she was startled by the extent of the change; for being naturally fair and high-coloured, he was a person on whom the traces of illness were particularly visible. The colour was totally gone, even from his lips; his cheeks were sunken, his brow looked broader and more massive from the thinness of his face and the loss of his hair, and his eyes themselves appeared unlike what they used to be in the hollows round them. He seemed tranquil, and comfortable, but so wan, weak, and subdued, and so different from himself, that she was very much shocked, ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... it was close to that. He was bareheaded, and his long coarse hair, black as an Indian's, was shot with gray. At first it would have been difficult to name the blood that ran strongest in his veins. His hair, the thinness of his face and body, his eyes, and the tense position in which he had paused, were all Indian. Then, above these things, Philip saw the French. Swiftly it became the dominant part of the man before him, and he was not ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... it is engaged in an endless struggle with the terrace materials. In times of flood, the walls of the terraces compel the tide to flow over the tops of these accumulations. Owing to the relative thinness of the water beyond the bed, and to the growth of vegetation there, the current moves more slowly, and therefore lays down a considerable deposit of the silt and sand which it contains. This may result during a single flood in lifting the ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... had reached that age when young women's hands are slender but still rosy, when their forms have still that charming delicacy which some people call thinness and others youthfulness, and when their movements have that excessive suppleness which is like awkwardness, but which it would be the height of art to imitate. Leaning back with easy grace in their arm chairs, which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... embark in cases of this kind would have been out of place, as it is not only discomfort, or even the risk of the loss of a limb, but life itself that becomes the question. The boats, notwithstanding the thinness of our ranks, left the vessel at half- past five. The rough weather of yesterday having proved but a summer's gale, the wind came to-day in gentle breezes; yet, the atmosphere being cloudy, it a not a very favourable appearance. ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and weak—a phenomenon for which he accounted by the national habit of always covering the head. There does not seem to be in reality any ground for supposing that such a practice would at all tend to produce such a result. If, therefore, we regard the fact of thinness as established, we can only view it as an original feature in the physical type of the race. Such a feature would imply, on the supposition that the heads were of the ordinary size, a large brain-cavity, and so an unusual volume of brain, which is generally a concomitant ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... fool's talk and giving out words that are foolishness! There is no one at all can put away from his road the bones and the thinness ...
— New Irish Comedies • Lady Augusta Gregory
... in the buttress. But even the buttress, although it bears witness to the outward and horizontal force of weight, was nevertheless so fashioned with its gable and pinnacle, or its own arched form, as to aid the upward movement. The thinness of walls and partitions, and the piercing of these with arches and windows, by lightening the force of weight, also contributed to increase the vertical movement. At sight of a true Gothic cathedral, we feel ourselves fairly lifted off the ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... taken to prevent the galleon from passing us unobserved, we had not been inattentive to the means of engaging her to advantage, when we came up with her: For, considering the thinness of our hands, and the vaunting accounts given by the Spaniards of her size, her guns, and her strength, this was a consideration not to be neglected. As we supposed that none of our ships but the Centurion and the Gloucester were ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... by high mountains. The soil of this extensive district is most fertile, and is capable of producing large crops of rice, on the low irrigable lands, and the dry grains and tea on the sides of the hills. From some cause, however, either the thinness of population or the want of a remunerative crop,[15] large tracts of this fertile district have been allowed to go out of cultivation. Everywhere I observed ruinous and jungle-covered terraces, which told of the more extended ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... detestable even at the time, and some of which, forms of discomfort and annoyance, linger on to this day. The playhouse, in short, was almost a place of physical torture, and it is still rarely in Paris a place of physical ease. Add to this the old thinness of the school of Scribe and the old emptiness of the thousand vaudevillistes; which part of the exhibition, till modern comedy began, under the younger Dumas and Augier, had for its counterpart but the ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... had time to examine my surroundings Mr. Pulitzer entered the room on the arm of the major-domo. My first swift impression was of a very tall man with broad shoulders, the rest of the body tapering away to thinness, with a noble head, bushy reddish beard streaked with gray, black hair, swept back from the forehead and lightly touched here and there with silvery white. One eye was dull and half closed, the other was of a deep, ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... watching Captain West. In a way he bears a sort of resemblance to several of Washington's portraits. He is six feet of aristocratic thinness, and has a very definite, leisurely and stately grace of movement. His thinness is almost ascetic. In appearance and manner he is the perfect ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... fineness of the luster of a pearl, or as is said in the trade, the orient, depends upon the number of layers that take part in the reflection, and this number in turn depends upon the translucency of the material and the thinness of the layers. Very fine pearls usually have very many, very thin layers taking part in the reflection. The degree of translucency, considered apart, is sometimes called the ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... white robe. He was broad-faced and bald-headed, and his eyes burned beneath his shaggy eyebrows like two coals in ashes. He supported himself on a staff of cedar-wood, gripping it with both hands that for thinness were like to those of a mummy. For a while he considered us both as though he were reading our souls, then said in a full ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard
... he was very long, Basil Ransom, and he even looked a little hard and discouraging, like a column of figures, in spite of the friendly face which he bent upon his hostess's deputy, and which, in its thinness, had a deep dry line, a sort of premature wrinkle, on either side of the mouth. He was tall and lean, and dressed throughout in black; his shirt-collar was low and wide, and the triangle of linen, a little crumpled, exhibited by the opening of his waistcoat, ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... All this criminal nonsense about being a soldier—sabers and spurs, and dashing around behind a flag, the wrong flag, too—" She caught her breath in an unusual betrayal of emotion. And now she studied Drew with some deliberation, noting his thinness, itemizing ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... dreamed he was a very skeleton for thinness—not an unusual vision of fat men—and also a Tyrolean yodler, displaying himself before a huge audience of gigantic human beings, who laughed so loudly that he could not open his lips to frame the familiar words of his song. In the despair of a frantic nightmare, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... sort, well adapted for forcing. The stalks are rather slender, covered with a thin skin of a bright-scarlet color; and their substance throughout is of a fine red, which they retain when cooked, if not peeled,—a process which, owing to the thinness of the skin, is not considered necessary. Even when grown in the dark, the stalks still preserve the crimson tinge. It was raised from ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... parsley—i.e., parsley that has been thrown into boiling water before it is chopped. Colour the soup green with a little spinach extract (vegetable colouring sold in bottles by all grocers). The thinness of the soup can be removed by the addition of a ...
— Cassell's Vegetarian Cookery - A Manual Of Cheap And Wholesome Diet • A. G. Payne
... turns to deepest crimson, the white of the calla lily becomes a gorgeous yellow, rose and blackberry lose their thorns, the cactus its spines. The meat of the walnut and almond become richer in quality, while their shells diminish to the thinness of ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... abandoned my foils for the time and set about the manufacture of a guitar, which cost me much labour and brought out more ingenuity than I had ever thought myself capable of. To reduce the wood to the right thinness, then to bend and fasten it with wooden pegs and with gums, to add the arm, frets, keys, and finally the catgut strings—those of another kind being out of the question—kept me busy for some days. When completed it was a ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... still continued to form. It looked heavy, and yet it was nearly without weight. Not a twig was bent down under its load, yet with its halo of frost it measured fully two inches across. The crystals were large, formed like spearheads, flat, slablike, yet of infinite thinness and delicacy, so thin and light that, when by misadventure my whip touched the boughs, the flakes seemed to float down rather than to fall. And every one of these flat and angular slabs was fringed with hairlike needles, or with ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... young woman, who was called Maritornes, assisted the daughter, and the two made up a bed for Don Quixote in a garret which had served for many years as a straw-loft. The bed on which they placed him was made of four roughly planed boards on two unequal trestles; a mattress which, in thinness, might have been a quilt, so full of pellets that if they had not through the holes shown themselves to be wool, they would to the touch seem to be pebbles. There was a pair of sheets made of target leather; ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... remarked, had everything "gradely" about her. The table-cloth was not only snow-white and beautifully mended, but of fine quality; the spoons were silver, worn to egg-shell thinness, but resplendently bright; the teapot, a heavy, old-fashioned Britannia metal one, was polished till it might have been of the same precious ore; the cups and plates were of delicate transparent china. ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... whole effect of this beautiful face on the mind of those who beheld her was that of a deep melancholy and sweetness, impressing itself once and for ever. Tall and slender, but without the excessive thinness of some young girls, her movements had that careless supple grace that recall the waving of a flower stalk in the breeze. But in spite of all these smiling and innocent graces one could yet discern in Robert's ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... degree of plumpness, which gave ample promise of a speedy voluptuous development. Though plumpness in the female figure is considered to be incompatible with perfect grace, I agree with those who regard it as decidedly preferable to an excessive thinness, though the latter be accompanied with the lightness of a zephyr, and ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... that curve of habitual anguish which is seen in condemned persons and desperately sick people. Her hands were, as her mother had divined, "ruined with chilblains." The fire which illuminated her at that moment brought into relief all the angles of her bones, and rendered her thinness frightfully apparent. As she was always shivering, she had acquired the habit of pressing her knees one against the other. Her entire clothing was but a rag which would have inspired pity in summer, and which inspired horror in winter. All ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... nine other Indians, men, women and boys, lying on the rock floor in a dreadful state of thinness ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... who had often observed Miss Pett in her peregrinations through the Market Place, and had been accustomed to speaking of her as a thread-paper, or as Mother Skin-and-Bones, because of her phenomenal thinness, wondered how it was that a woman of such extraordinary attenuation should possess such powerful fingers—her grip on his wrist was like that of a vice. And somehow, in a fashion for which he could not account, especially in the disturbed and anxious state of his mind, ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... clumps like an otter, his head crouched down and his long bow pointed before him as though it were a spear. Half a minute more, and he was before them—a very strange man to see. His years were not so many, thirty perhaps, and yet his face looked quite old because of its lack of colouring, its thinness, and the hard lines that marked where the muscles ran down to the tight, straight mouth and up to the big forehead, over which hung hair so light that at a little distance he seemed ashen-grey. Only in this cold, rocky face, set ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... observation that plates of a uniform thickness yield uniform colours. 'If,' he says, 'you take any small piece of the Muscovy glass, and with a needle, or some other convenient instrument, cleave it oftentimes into thinner and thinner laminae, you shall find that until you come to a determinate thinness of them they shall appear transparent and colourless; but if you continue to split and divide them further, you shall find at last that each plate shall appear most lovely tinged or imbued with a determinate colour. If, further, by any means you so flaw a pretty thick piece ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... and boa-constrictors, shuddering all the while because the barriers between them are so weak. Although the little old man's back was bent like a day-laborer's, it was easy to see that he must formerly have been of medium height. His excessive thinness, the slenderness of his limbs, proved that he had always been of slight build. He wore black silk breeches which hung about his fleshless thighs in folds, like a lowered veil. An anatomist would instinctively have recognized the symptoms ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... extent of Rome, and the thinness of its population, left many of the streets utterly deserted. The principal nobles were thus enabled to possess themselves of a wide range of buildings, which they fortified, partly against each other, partly against the people; their numerous ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... undertreat (when there was choice or danger) my subject. (Many members of my craft, I gather, are far from agreeing with me, but I have always held overtreating the minor disservice.) ... There was the danger of the noted "thinness"—which was to be averted, tooth and nail, by cultivation of the lively.... And then there was another matter. I had, within the few preceding years, come to live in London, and the "international" light lay, in those ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... in his chair and watched them. For all her strange beauty, Julia, too, was one of the suffering children of the world. The lines of her figure, which should have been so subtle and fascinating, were sharpened by an unnatural thinness. Aaron's cheeks were almost like a consumptive's, his physique was puny. There was something in their expression common to both. Maraton was conscious of a wave of pity as he ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... at Vernons, absorbed her whole attention, but Pinckney noticed this morning that the hand, that old, perfect, delicately shaped hand, trembled ever so slightly as it measured the tea from the tortoise-shell covered tea caddy, and that the thin lips, lips whose thinness seemed only the result of the kisses of Time, were moving as though debating some ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... Archipelago. They are called in the Malay language gunong-api, or more correctly, gunong ber-api. Lava has been seen to flow from a considerable one near Priamang; but I have never heard of its causing any other damage than the burning of woods. This however may be owing to the thinness of population, which does not render it necessary for the inhabitants to settle in a situation that exposes them to danger of this kind. The only volcano I had an opportunity of observing opened in the side of ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... pass it quietly together, and simply have the children to dine. So many of the people of whom we were fond at the time we were married have passed away, that I am sure we should be appalled by the thinness of the ranks when we began to reckon who are left. Besides, I don't think that a notice not to bring silver would really protect the poor wretches who didn't wish to bring any. It would seem too evidently to mean that they needn't bring ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... THINNESS is the state of that individual, the muscular frame of whom is not filled up by strength, and who exhibits all angles of the ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... Brent look at her with more attention than he would ordinarily have given. She was a tallish girl, whose figure would have been unusually good had it been properly filled out; as it was, she was thin, but only too thin for her proportions—her thinness, had she been three inches shorter, would have passed for a graceful slenderness. But Brent took this in at a glance; his attention was more particularly concentrated on the girl's face—a delicate oval, framed in a mass of dark hair. She was all dark—dark hair, an olive complexion, ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... was tired and lay stretched on the ground. He looked bloodless and wan, the grizzled beard not able to hide the thinness of his face. The healthful vigor he had found on the prairie had left him, each day's march claiming a dole from his hoarded store of strength. He knew—no one else—that he had never recovered the vitality expended at the time of Bella's ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... or flax, for things are made of all these which are not drapery, but the ideas peculiar to drapery; the properties which, when inherent in a thing, make it drapery, are extension, non-elastic flexibility, unity and comparative thinness. Everything which has these properties, a waterfall, for instance, if united and extended, or a net of weeds over a wall, is drapery, as much as silk or woollen stuff is. So that these ideas separate drapery in our minds from everything ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... they stood, they were able to locate the clearing by means of a thinness of the trees, a few more rays of daylight penetrating from that direction. Hay-uta happened to be looking toward that point, when he caught the outline of a figure stealing along the margin of ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... by the roadside, and as it was near my bungalow I watched to see how the eggs were deposited. The bird laid one egg each day on the 11th, 12th and 13th, and then began to sit, so on the 15th I took the nest. When fresh the eggs are beautifully pink from the thinness of the shell." ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... (the error of believing that matter can be intelligent for good or evil), we can catch clear glimpses of God only as the mists disperse, 205:18 or as they melt into such thinness that we per- ceive the divine image in some word or deed which indicates the true idea, - the supremacy and real- 205:21 ity of good, the nothingness and ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... he had drunk at a stream, stood still, and gazed upon his likeness in the water. While there, in admiration, he was praising his branching horns, and finding fault with the extreme thinness of his legs, suddenly roused by the cries of the huntsmen, he took to flight over the plain, and with nimble course escaped the dogs. Then a wood received the beast; in which, being entangled and caught by his horns, the dogs began to tear him to pieces with savage bites. While ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... make a thin woman look anything but thin. Often by accentuating her thinness, a woman can make an effect as type, which gives her distinction. If she were foolish enough to try to look fatter, her lines would be lost without attaining the contour of the rounded type. There are of course fashions in types; pale ash blonds, red-haired types (auburn or golden red with ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... you don't!" said Miss Phipps promptly. Her cheeks had grown quite red with surprise, and she pulled in her upper lip, and bit at it hard as she looked down at her new pupil, and noted the flat nose, the wide mouth, and the elf-like thinness of the shabby figure. "Pixie! that's a very charming little name, but a fancy one, surely. ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... not cry as he told the story nor did his lip so much as quiver at the recollection of their sufferings. He made no effort to describe them, but the hollows in his cheeks and the dreadful thinness of his arms and little body told it all more eloquently ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... her warm body in his embrace, the feeling of her smooth, round arm, through the thinness of her sleeve, pressing against his cheek, thrilled Annixter with a delight such as he had never known. He bent his head and kissed her upon the nape of her neck, where the delicate amber tint melted into the thick, sweet smelling mass of her dark brown hair. She shivered a little, holding him ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... the ground totally; and above these are loaded the high lights like gems—note the sparkling strokes on the peacock's plumes. We believe that Van Eyck's high lights were either, in proportion to the scale of picture and breadth of handling, as loaded as these, or, in the degree of their thinness, less brilliant. Was then his system the same as Rubens'? Not so; but it differed more in the management of middle tints than in the lights: the main difference was, we believe, between the careful preparation of the gradations of drawing in the one, and the daring assumption of massy ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... about the schoolmaster's thinness and lightness,—how he might suspend himself from the spider's web and ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... twelve or fifteen miles up from Charleston, between the approaching rivers Ashley and Cooper, had all been recovered from the enemy. But the necessities of the Americans, the want of military 'materiel', the thinness of the regiments, and the increasing strength of the British, derived from foreign troops and accessions from other posts in America, left it doubtful, under existing circumstances, whether it could be long retained. But this misgiving was ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... youth which, like the bloom that the breath of morning spreads over fruit, disappears at the slightest shock from without, although it may have been respected by the heat of the sun. Yet in this premature paleness and in this somewhat unhealthy thinness there seemed to be an indefinable charm; her eyes, more sunken, but inscrutable as ever, showed less pride and more melancholy than of old; her mouth had become more mobile, and her smile was more delicate and less contemptuous. When she spoke to me, I seemed to ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... equally true of the greatness and smallness of the fingers? Can sight adequately perceive them? and is no difference made by the circumstance that one of the fingers is in the middle and another at the extremity? And in like manner does the touch adequately perceive the qualities of thickness or thinness, of softness or hardness? And so of the other senses; do they give perfect intimations of such matters? Is not their mode of operation on this wise—the sense which is concerned with the quality of hardness is necessarily ...
— The Republic • Plato
... shrouded in the greys of coming rain, yet the thinness of the cloud threw a silvery light on the sea, and an unusual depth of blue to ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... in the thin, gray fog that filled the huge station from the platform to the glass roof. The latter had vanished, indistinguishable from sky invisible, and from the brooding darkness, in which the lamps innumerable served only to make spots of thinness. It was a mist, not a November fog, properly so called; but every breath breathed by every porter, as he ran along by the side of the slowly halting train, was adding to its mass, which seemed to Mary to grow in bulk and density as she gazed. Her quiet, simple, decided manner at once secured ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... just passed thirty, but the premature thinness of his hair in front, the listless droop of his heavy shoulders, and the bluish pallor about his firm jaw contrived to make him appear older than he was. There was a kindliness in the wrinkles about his eyes, and his mouth, though solid, was not lacking in indications of intuitive ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... nitrification which occurs in soil (far more speedy than in experiments in solutions under any conditions yet tried) is probably owing to the great mass of nitrifying organisms which soil contains, and to the thinness of the liquid layer which ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... a mass of coarse, matted black hair; presently it was seen that this covered a body of fearful thinness, almost a skeleton, but with the muscles standing out like wires. The hands were of a dusky pallor, covered, like the body, with long, coarse hairs, and hideously taloned. The eyes, touched in with a burning ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James
... red-stockinged feet are as shapely as a woman's, the expressive, almost transparent hands might be those of an artist as they finger caressingly his collection of intaglios and luxuriate in the smoothness of jades and ivory carvings. His excessive pallor and thinness would give an expression of asceticism, almost of spirituality to the intellectual face were it not in a measure contradicted by the craft in the close-set, slanting eyes, which with the pointed, fulvous beard suggest a possibility of foxy cunning, and inspire in the beholder ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... and he knew the appearance of them all. How many times he had watched them or their duplicates striding and mincing and bounding by, each moving like an animated note of interrogation! They were long, and medium, and short. There were women of a thinness beyond comparison, sheathed in skirts as featly as a rapier in a scabbard. There were women of a monumental, a mighty fatness, who billowed and rolled in multitudinous, stormy garments. There were slow ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... elk-hunting, as the plains are so boggy that they would be hock-deep every quarter of a mile. Thus no person can thoroughly enjoy elk-hunting who is not well accustomed to it, as it is a sport conducted entirely on foot, and the thinness of the air in this elevated region is very trying to the lungs in hard exercise. Thoroughly sound in wind and limb, with no superfluous flesh, must be the man who would follow the hounds in this wild country—through jungles, rivers, plains and ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... courage. I gave the lid of the manhole half a turn and made a hasty explanation to Cavor; but now he was the more sanguine. He answered me in a voice that seemed extraordinarily small and remote, because of the thinness of the air that carried the sound. He recommended a nip of brandy, and set me the example, and presently I felt better. I turned the manhole stopper back again. The throbbing in my ears grew louder, and then I remarked that the piping note of the outrush had ceased. ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... an inquiring mind, the dwarf decided to satisfy himself upon the matter. All around him lay slabs of rock, some of which were worn perfectly smooth and to the thinness of a tombstone, by centuries of polishing in the iron jaws of glaciers. Selecting one of these of convenient size, Otter approached the edge of the bridge, pushing the stone before him over the frozen snow. Here the ice was perfect, except for a ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... pale face was not set off by the severity of her toilet; there was no touch of spring or brightness anywhere, no look or note which should belong to one so young, unless it was the extreme thinness ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... certain effect of hardness and thinness about Utopian speculations. Their common fault is to be comprehensively jejune. That which is the blood and warmth and reality of life is largely absent; there are no individualities, but only generalised people. In almost every Utopia—except, ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... the lips to such thinness that the depressions between the teeth were clearly revealed. From the first dose to the last breath this was a case of dying, and the most persistent fight for life against immense odds I have ever become aware of in ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... Latin, and, as it were, to be presenting it with the freedom of the city. For up to this time she has seemed like a stranger at Rome, and has not put herself in the way of our conversation; and that, too, chiefly because of a certain highly polished thinness of things and words. For I am aware that there are some men who are able to philosophise in any language, but who still employ no divisions and no definitions; and who say themselves that they approve of those ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... sinewy arms were bare to the shoulder, and he wore a shell of some metallic substance as a breast-and back-plate, not unlike the very ancient body armor of Raf's own world. The rest of his body was covered by the bandage strips, but they were of a dead black, which, because of the natural thinness of his limbs, gave him a rather unpleasant resemblance to a spider. Various sheaths and pockets hung from a belt pulled tight about his wasp middle, and a helmet of the metal covered his head. Soldier? Raf was sure that ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... kind," she said, with a penetrating glance at Susan. What a pretty girl Susan must have been, so soft and pale and appealing, a little human wood-anemone! She would be very pretty again when she had got over the scared look and the thinness which was almost emaciation. And how well that print suited her! Lady O'Gara had sent down a bundle of things to the South lodge, so that Susan might not appear as a scarecrow to the people. The print had pale green leaves sprinkled over a white surface. It suggested a snowdrop, perished ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... encounter this effect in but slightly varied form. Yet there is a continual richness in his harmonic texture. I can think of no other composer, save Wagner, whose chord-progressions are so full and opulent in colour. His tonal web is always densely woven—he avoids "thinness" as he avoids the banal phrase and the futile decoration. In addition to the plangency of his chord combinations, as such, his polyphonic skill is responsible for much of the solidity of his fabric. ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... mournful silence, and regarded his son, who now approached, leaning on one of the courtiers. When he looked at the girl, he recoiled with disgust; for she was so gaunt and tall that the clothes of Desiree scarcely covered her knees, and her extreme thinness, her red, hooked nose, her black and ill-shaped teeth, made her as ugly as Desiree was beautiful. Prince Warrior, who for months had thought of nothing but his lovely bride, stood petrified. "King," said he to his father, "I ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... aging factors here are the erosion of the wind—and that's negligible in this atmosphere—and the cracks caused by changing temperature. And one other agent—meteorites. They must crash down occasionally on the city, judging from the thinness of the air, and the fact that we've seen four strike ground right here ...
— Valley of Dreams • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... and kept an open-all-night chop-house, a mean hole in the wall two doors from the corner, where Cake's surpassing thinness made her invaluable at the sink. Also the scraps she carried home in her red, water-puckered hands helped out materially. Then her mother took a boarder and rested in her endeavours, feeling she had performed ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... island of Kotelnoi, and in N. lat. 76 degrees 38 minutes saw a vapour which led him to believe in the existence of an open sea. In a second trip he actually saw this sea with its drifting ice, and came back convinced of the impossibility of going further in a sledge on account of the thinness of ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... indicate a very great degree of thinness. Specimens of sheet gold ornaments found in the tombs are thicker, but are sufficiently thin to indicate that, if actually made by these people, almost any degree of thinness could be attained by them. It would probably not ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... unshaven and dirty and lean as hungry hounds; but they were the men whom Steve had once bidden Hardwick Elliott to watch, once they had begun to scent combat. Fat Joe was no longer plump. Steve was worn down to actual thinness. And it would have taken a careful eye to have selected the chief from their ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... her now eyed the preacher. She followed their looks; and there, in the pulpit, was a face as of a staring corpse. The friar's eyes, naturally large, and made larger by the thinness of his cheeks, were dilated to supernatural size, and glaring her way ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... spoke to the men of marching feet—. Now and then he sang for them in that thin old voice whose thinness was so overlaid by the passion of his patriotism that those who listened found no ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... that contains a one or two per cent water solution of liquor cresolis compositus, or a coal tar disinfectant, or that has from three-fourths to one and one-half inches of oil on top of the water, is the most satisfactory method of destroying the hog louse. Because of the thinness of the hog's coat and the danger from irritating the skin when strong solutions of a disinfectant are used, most swine breeders prefer crude oil as a remedy for lousiness in hogs. Crude oil may be applied to the bodies of hogs with a swab. If this ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... rounded an outcropping of rock about ten miles from the East Coast Mausoleum. They were facing each other, poised defensively, eyes alertly on each other, about twenty feet apart. She was blond and lean with the conditioning of outdoor life, almost to the point of thinness. And although not really beautiful, she was attractive and young, probably not yet twenty. Her features were even and smooth, her hair wild about her face. She wore a light blouse and faded brown shorts ...
— The Happy Man • Gerald Wilburn Page
... it be a fine or a broad pointed nib, plays a certain part in determining the thickness or thinness of the strokes, I am willing to allow, but here again we have no argument against graphology, for most people have their favourite nib—just as they prefer one occupation to another—and this is the one which will best serve to define their characteristics. ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... more towards his host—whose side-face, revealed above the skylight, was now turned towards him—he was struck by the profile, whose clearness of cut was refined by the thinness, incident to ill-health, as well as ennobled about the chin by the beard. Away with suspicion. He was a true off-shoot ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... record being less than one-thousandth of an inch in depth, and many of them probably ten to one hundred times as shallow. Edison finally decided to apply a preliminary metallic coating of infinitesimal thinness, and accomplished this object by a remarkable process known as the vacuous deposit. With this he applied to the original record a film of gold probably no thicker than one three-hundred-thousandth of an inch, or several hundred times less than the depth of an average wave. ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... not for me to determine which of our English porcelains is the best; probably, indeed, one will be found superior in hardness, another in whiteness, a third in the thinness and evenness of the glaze, a fourth in the form of the articles, a fifth in the design, and a sixth in the colours. In hardness and in fusibility, they are probably all inferior to the Dresden and to the Sevres porcelain; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 548 - 26 May 1832 • Various
... patent cases concerning incandescent lamps. As used by electricians the term generally applies to the carbon filament of incandescent lamps. This as now made has not necessarily any fibres, but is entitled to the name of filament, partly by convention, partly by its relative thinness and want of stiffness. (See Incandescent ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... frequent. One evening, she even presented herself, all of a sudden, in full ball-dress. These surprises might have perilous consequences. He reproached her for her lack of prudence. Nevertheless, he was not taken with her appearance. The low body of her dress exposed her thinness too freely. ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... you mine," Verrian responded, in a violent ellipse, and introduced his own mother, who took in the fact of Miss Andrews's tall thinness, topped with a wide, white hat and waving white plumes, and her little face, irregular and somewhat gaunt, but with a charm in the lips and eyes which took the elder woman's heart with pathos. She made talk with Mrs. Andrews, who affected ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... off a champagne bottle, there being no clasp to hold it in its place. I saw Evelyn turn away again, and Charles, who was watching her, suddenly went off to the fire, and began to complain of the cold, and of the thinness of his silk stockings. ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... in it, had been for more than an hour assembled, but the thinness of the attendance not only proved the woful prevalence of sickness and distress in the parish, but sharpened the pedagogue's vinegar aspect into an expression of countenance singularly peevish and gloomy. When the lad entered, a murmur of pleasure and welcome ran through the scholars, and ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... moment Bobichel appeared. Was this the poor clown? No; there were no smiles on his lips, no quips and cranks on his tongue. His thinness had become emaciation. ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... fate, inasmuch as it has sunk some way in, and begun to sprout. The field, like many a one in hilly country, had places where the hard pan of underlying rock had only a thin skin of earth over it. Its very thinness helped quick germination, for the rock was near enough to the surface to get heated by the sun. So, with undesirable rapidity, growth began, and shoots appeared above ground before there was root enough made below to nourish them. There was only one possible end for such premature ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... had a new frock on which was exactly the colour of the big, appealing eyes, with their trick of following people about. She looked a little pale and pathetic, which somehow gave her a specious air of being pretty, which she really was not at all. The swaying young thinness of those very slight girls whose soft summer muslins make them look like delicate bags tied in the middle with fluttering ribbons, has almost invariably a foolish attraction for burly young men whose ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... allowed a hair to escape, was all that distinguished the seated personage. He held his head so bent upon his breast, that nothing was to be seen of his face thus thrown into shadow, except the tip of his nose, upon which fell a ray of light, and which must have been long. From the thinness of his wrinkled hand, one divined that he was an old man. It was Louis XI. At some distance behind them, two men dressed in garments of Flemish style were conversing, who were not sufficiently lost in the shadow to prevent any one who had been present at the performance of Gringoire's mystery ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... and brought up a fingerling which he silently unhooked and threw back overboard. "Considering the thinness of the air where you came out, maybe half a cubic mile of it had to transpose into your time to let your ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... of formation. La Place supposed his nebulous matter to be gas in a state of white-heat combustion, compared with which the heat of the hottest fire would be a cool bath. In no other way could he dissipate the world's substance into sufficient thinness for his vortices. But Spencer saw that this tremendous heat would be fatal to all forms of life, and especially to sensitive beings; and Tyndall shows us that this original matter must have had all the potencies of life and sensation, and a potency of sensation means being able to ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... receive the iridium point, which is selected with the aid of a microscope. A flux of borax and a blowpipe secure it to its place. The point is then ground on a copper wheel of emery. The pen-blank is next rolled to the requisite thinness by the means of rollers especially adapted for the purpose, and tempered by blows from a hammer. It is then trimmed around the edges, stamped, and formed in a press. The slit is next cut through the solid iridium point by means of a thin copper wheel fed with fine emery, and a saw extends ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... more, I confess, in the curiosity of analysing the structure. By what process of logical accretion was this slight "personality," the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl, to find itself endowed with the high attributes of a Subject?—and indeed by what thinness, at the best, would such a subject not be vitiated? Millions of presumptuous girls, intelligent or not intelligent, daily affront their destiny, and what is it open to their destiny to be, at the most, that we should make an ado about it? ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... gaumeri resembles examples of A. fusca in immature dark pelage, but it differs from this species in the thinness of the ears, and in the greater relative length of the narrower and more tapering tragus, and in its very much smaller size. In size it resembles both 'Vesperugo' propinquus Peters and V. (Marsipolaemus) ...
— Description of a New Vespertilionine Bat from Yucatan • Joel Asaph Allen
... inches of her ankles, showing under it ragged stockings and shoes trodden down at heel, so much too large for her feet that they had evidently belonged to her mother. She looked tall for her years, but this was owing to her extreme thinness. Her arms were like sticks, and her sunken cheeks showed the bones of her face; but it was a pathetic face, both on account of the want and anxiety so plainly written on it and its promise of beauty. There was not a particle of colour in it, even the thin lips were almost white, but the ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... home, and he could linger at the club to talk of big game while she waited for him. Flushed, excited, he stood there on the white bearskin rug midway between the bed and the wood-fire, while she felt his charm stealing like a drug over her senses. Though she had begun to realize the thinness of his mental qualities, she was still as completely in the power of his physical charm as she had been on the day of her wedding. In the flickering light of the fire he appeared to diffuse the glamour of romance, of adventure; and she ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... only may be necessary,—will be found of great use for a variety of purposes other than the one being referred to; they can be used not only for pressing against, but for the opposite, as when a rib or portion of it has from some cause—perhaps fracture or thinness—bulged outwardly. It will be perceptible at once that for direct pressure against a part of the ribs, situated near the upper block, that the little joist will slip unless a nick is made for its reception ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... the compacted oakum from the seams with their knives, and by iron rings in each corner, now eaten with rust to almost the thinness of wire, they lifted the hatch. Below was a filthy-looking layer of whitish substance, protruding from which were charred, half-burned staves. First they repeated the experiment with the smouldering ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... but very unpalatable. Expectoration was her pet abomination, and she was inclined to think that this "most vile and universal habit of chewing tobacco" was the cause of a remarkable peculiarity in the male physiognomy of Americans, the almost uniform thinness and compression of their lips. So often did Mrs. Trollope recur to this habit that she managed to give one the impression that this country was in those days ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
Copyright © 2025 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
