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More "Topple" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it. The houses are mostly of wood, one-storied, and roofed with corrugated iron. There is only one brick shop-front in the street, which so over-tops the others, that malicious, perhaps envious, neighbours say it is sure to topple down some day on to the footway. The shops are of the usual description, grocers, bakers, butchers, and drapers; and the most frequent style of shop is a store, containing everything from a pickaxe and tin dish (for gold washing) to Perry Davis's patent Pain-killer. We have of course our inns—the ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... must drench the monster I have awakened until he sleeps again. I drink and become oblivious. In these last paroxysms there is nothing for me but brandy. I shut myself up alone and pour down my gullet huge draughts of spirit. It mounts to my brain. I am a man again! and as I regain my manhood, I topple over—dead drunk. ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... being chilled with poverty, steeped in contempt, he had passed into the sunshine of fortune, and was lifted to the very pinnacle of public favour"; yet even there could not count on the continuance of success, but was, "like the giddy sailor on the mast, ready with every blast to topple down into the fatal bowels of the deep!" He might have traced his habit of ale-house tippling to the last long precious draught of his favourite usquebaugh, which he took in the prospect of bidding farewel for ever to his native land; and his conjugal infidelities to his first ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... ice. The more conformable ice-blocks will gradually be cemented together, while the fierce winds that beat upon the ridge will wear away the supports of the more egregious and unstable blocks, and one by one they will topple into the abyss on this side or on that. It will probably never again be the smooth, homogeneous slope it has been; "the gable" will probably always present a wide cleft, but the slopes beyond it, stripped now of their accumulated ice so as to be unclimbable, ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... be said that a theoretical physicist was judged by his inability to handle research apparatus; the clumsier he was in research, the better he was with theory. But Wolfgang Pauli was a lot more than clumsy. Apparatus would break, topple over, go to pieces, or burn up if Pauli just ...
— Psichopath • Gordon Randall Garrett
... shoulder in an instant, but the shekarry in an excited whisper implored me not to fire. I hesitated, and just then the stately head turned round to look behind, and exposing the beautifully curving neck full to my aim, I fired, and had the satisfaction of seeing the fine buck topple ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... what feeling 'more than joy' can be, unless haply it topple over t' other side and become woe, and I would be loth to breed ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... people made their wills before they took a journey of a hundred miles; and no wonder, when the roads were so bad that men had frequently to be hired to walk beside a gentleman's carriage, and give it a push to either side, when it showed an inclination to topple over; or oxen sometimes were fetched, to pull the coach out of a deep quagmire of mud, from which only one half of it was visible. So Farmer Lavender shook his head, and said "he didn't know, no, he didn't, whether he'd ...
— The Gold that Glitters - The Mistakes of Jenny Lavender • Emily Sarah Holt
... to assure himself that he would topple over at the right moment, and slipped the ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... practiced it as much as I should have liked, but when I got up there on the platform I felt pretty sure I could do it. I wasn't running much risk anyhow, except that of failure. I knew I wouldn't fall, for I could have grabbed the wire in my hands if I had started to topple over." ...
— Joe Strong The Boy Fire-Eater - The Most Dangerous Performance on Record • Vance Barnum
... its breath was not felt within it, and the rain was heard descending in deluging showers without, though no drop came through the open roof. The thunder shook the walls and pillars of the old fabric, and threatened to topple them down from their foundations, but they resisted the shocks. The lightning played around the tall spire springing from this part of the fane, and ran down from its shattered summit to its base, without doing any damage. The red bolts struck the ground innocuously, though ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... sole-leather trunks slung on one side of him, and on the other a mountainous heap of hand-bags and valises. This is the only creature with four legs, bigger than a dog, that ever gets down the Clovelly street; and why he does not lose his balance, topple backward, and go rolling continuously down till he falls into the sea below, nobody can imagine. But the valiant little animal kept steadily on, assisted by his owner, who followed and assiduously whacked him with a stout stick, and he reached ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... morning, when the queen receives the homage of her subjects. She gets her presents, and there are pretty speeches made to her, and she has her dainty feast and her crown of flowers. Yes, that time is the crown of the day, and that is just the moment when the poor little queen shall topple down. The throne shall be knocked from under her; the presents will vanish; the sovereignty will cease to exist. Poor, poor little queen without a kingdom! How will you like it, Paulie? Do you think you could bear it? To have no ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... from the corners of buildings. The leaves of the doors burst asunder; the skirts of the walls fall in; the architraves topple over. ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... is also another pair of symbols describing the futility of the wicked. The wicked is "as a bowing wall." The wall is out of perpendicular, out of conformity with the truth of the plumb-line, and it will assuredly topple into ruin. So is it with the wicked: he is building awry, and he will fall into moral disaster. He is also "as a tottering fence." The wind and the rain dislodge the fence, it rots at its foundations, and one day it lies prone upon ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... individuals, families, races, which tend to raise themselves above the common level; painfully they climb the rugged heights, attain the summits of power, of wealth, of intelligence, of talent, and then, no sooner are they there than they topple down and disappear in gulfs of mental and physical degeneracy." The demographical researches of Hansen ("Die drei Bevolkerungsstufen", Munich, 1889.) (following up and completing Dumont's) tended, indeed, to show that urban ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... started to topple, and von Liegnitz himself spun away from the blow. The spanner caught him on the shoulder, and he grunted in pain, but he kept ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... said Jim, huskily, determined to break in somewhere on a long chance that the letter would blow out to sea or the Produce Exchange tower topple over. ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... Vesuvius, although history says that now and again the mountain bubbles out in irruption, and the lava destroys many villages, and even towns. In other countries there are earthquakes, but the people forget all about them until the shock comes, and the houses begin to topple over their heads." ...
— The Cornet of Horse - A Tale of Marlborough's Wars • G. A. Henty
... fetes—if not, another bright summer holiday—that I once saw darkly disturbed in this quiet little hamlet. Standing upon the table-rock that juts out at the foot of the fall so as to half-bridge over the lower-most eddy, I saw a small object topple over the summit of the cascade. It was nothing but a common pail or stable-bucket, as I perceived, when it glided past, almost within arm's length of me, and disappeared down the winding gorge. When ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... float southward with the currents, they melt very rapidly. The heat of the sun and the action of the waves gradually round off the sharp angles and topple down the spires that characterised them in the land of their birth. The process of dissolution, too, is carried on internally; for rain and melted water on the surface percolates through the mass, rendering it ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... of his back, the after-oar reciprocating by rapping his knees in front. He is thus completely wedged before and behind, and can only expand himself sideways by settling down on his stretched legs; but a sudden, violent pitch of the boat will often go far to topple him, because length of foundation is nothing without corresponding breadth. Merely make a spread angle of two poles, and you cannot stand them up. Then, again, it would never do in plain sight of the world's riveted eyes, it ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... To topple over from the sublime to the ridiculous is not difficult. But the presence of humour might save the sublimities from a fall, and Browning had hitherto in his art made but slight and occasional use of a considerable gift of humour which ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... even if a shell had exploded in it and knocked it so out of shape that when a man lay curled in his blanket his last waking thought was likely to be of the wall that bellied out above him as if strongly anxious to topple upon ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... that which you profess, (Howe'er you come to know it,) answer me; Though you untie the winds, and let them fight Against the churches—though the yesty waves Confound and swallow navigation up— Though bladed corn be lodg'd, and trees blown down— Though castles topple on their warder's heads— Though palaces and pyramids do slope Their heads to their foundations—though the treasure Of nature's germins tumble all together, Even till destruction sicken, answer me To ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, Issue 353, January 24, 1829 • Various
... travel and hit new trails. I don't just want to start out like Jean is doing and rush over three thousand just to settle down at the other end for ever and ever. I'd want to keep on going. It's such a comfort to know that the world is round after all, and you can't topple ...
— Kit of Greenacre Farm • Izola Forrester
... requiring little intelligence. Most of the people of the world are unintelligent—unfit to do any other work. If it were not done by them it would not be done, and it is the basic work. Withdraw them from it and the whole superstructure would topple and fall. Yet there is too little of the work, and there are so many incapable of doing anything else that adequate return is out of the question. For the laboring class there is no hope of an existence ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... well that your house, with all that therein is, stands on the edge of a precipice, and that at any moment a landslip might topple it over into everlasting ruin. And yet you behave as though your house was planted in the midst of a vast and secure plain, sheltered from every imaginable havoc. I speak metaphorically, of course. It is not a material precipice that ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... a torrential rain fell, but it lulled neither wind nor sea. The hurricane was unleashed at a speed of forty-five meters per second, hence almost forty leagues per hour. Under these conditions houses topple, roof tiles puncture doors, iron railings snap in two, and twenty-four-pounder cannons relocate. And yet in the midst of this turmoil, the Nautilus lived up to that saying of an expert engineer: "A well-constructed hull can defy any sea!" This submersible was no resisting ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... my range of vision new constellations, and into my soul has come the clear, white light of peace and truth. With you I am purified, freed from sin, and harmony fills my tired heart. Without you—why, really I have never dared think about it, for fear that reason would topple, and my mind forget its 'customed way—let's talk of music. * ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... measured the aperture at the bottom. No giant, such as these were, could crowd through that hole. And the hopper was heavy. Applying all his strength to it, he felt it give ever so slightly. It was not bolted down; it was merely balanced there. He would be able to topple it over. And, once over, it would be a difficult affair ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell
... corporation the glands of internal secretion are the directors. But the huge corporation, not to topple over with its own unwieldy size, must be composed of smaller units, each within itself a corporation, and governed by a directorate. There are, in the corporation-organism, different departments and bureaus, subdivisions of function, which constitute the smaller corporations within the larger corporation. ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... Tuileries, were crowned by a blaze, which lent them the aspect of sacrificial pyres. The dome of the Invalides was flaring with such brilliancy that you instinctively feared lest it should suddenly topple down and scatter burning flakes over the neighborhood. Beyond the irregular towers of Saint-Sulpice, the Pantheon stood out against the sky in dull splendor, like some royal palace of conflagration reduced to embers. Then, as the sun declined, the pyre-like edifices gradually ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... another one!" cried Tom, reeling about. He saw Mr. Damon and Mr. Fenwick topple to the beach. The roaring increased, and the rumbling was like thunder, close at hand. The island seemed to ...
— Tom Swift and his Wireless Message • Victor Appleton
... be heard the staccato spatter of bullets on her iron sides as the machine-guns sprayed her from end to end. Now and then one of the gunners would reach one of her searchlights, and as the ray was extinguished, one almost expected to see her topple in the direction of her broken support, but in each case it was quickly replaced by another, and she continued to drop nearer ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... sleeves of his jacket were so short, that four inches of bone above his wrist were bared to view—hat he had none—his ears were very large, and the rims of them red with cold, and his neck was so immeasurably long and thin, that his head appeared to topple for want of support. When he had come on deck, he stood with one hand raised to his forehead, touching his hair instead of his hat, and the other occupied with a half-roasted red-herring. "Yes, sir," said Smallbones, ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... pumpkins; anything except useful citizens. How could they be? They had the attraction of the lamp, the appetite of the hawk, the occupation of the pumpkin: nothing was given them to do but to shine, destroy, and fatten. Their hands were kept empty: a trifle in their heads would topple them over; they were monuments of the English system of compromise. Happy for mankind if they were monuments only! Happy for them! But they had the passions of men. The adulation of the multitude was raised to inflate them, whose self-respect had not one prop to rest an, unless ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... foreign affairs are quiet and unbroken," wrote Mirabeau after Frederick's death. "But at the first gunshot or at the first stormy situation the whole of this little scaffolding of mediocrity will topple to the ground. How all these underling Ministers would crumple up! How everyone, from the distracted chief to the convict-gang, would shout for a pilot! ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... Bheestees of the station congregated, some coming and some going, like bees at the mouth of a hive, but most standing on the wall and letting down their leather buckets into the water. As they begin to haul these up again hand over hand, you will look to see them all topple head foremost into the well, but they do not as a rule. It makes an imaginative European giddy to look down into that Tartarean depth; but then the Bheestee is not imaginative. As the hot season advances, the water retreats ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... ripples, melting into blue. As for me—I have laid hands on a canal—the Rio Giuseppe—all of it—from the beginning of the red wall where the sailors land, along its crookednesses to the side entrance of the Public Garden, and so past the rookeries to the lagoon, where the tower of Castello is ready to topple into the sea. ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... depended on felling this forest monarch before the arrival of the Matabili. The latter could not be far-off, and every exertion was made to get the fortress ready for receiving the attack. There was a doubt as to the direction the tree would take in falling. Should it topple over into the water, their labour would be lost, and the way would be open for the Matabili to reach them by a rush. Should it fall across the isthmus, it would form an insurmountable barrier to their enemies. In silence and ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... stronger and stronger. For the new life must be so regulated that it continually increase and progress, but it must suffer much opposition. For the devil is such a furious enemy that when he sees that we oppose him and attack the old man, and that he cannot topple us over by force, he prowls and moves about on all sides, tries all devices, and does not desist until he finally wearies us, so that we either renounce our faith or yield hands and feet and become listless or impatient. Now to this end the consolation is ...
— The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther
... of the city less striking. The innumerable towers and spires of the churches rose tall and dark through the wavering sheet of flame, and every now and then one of them would topple down or disappear, as if swallowed up by the devouring element. For a short space, the fire seemed to observe a regular progressive movement, but when it fell upon better material, it reared its blazing crest aloft, changed its hues, and burnt with redoubled intensity. Leonard watched ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... mandate, and his autocrat promptly dragged one foot from under him, causing him to topple on the parapet. He hissed at her. Le Rossignol looked up at the threatening flat head and ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... slowly," Bruce was wont to say in his booming, bell-like tone. "Never be in a hurry—-especially don't be in a hurry about answering letters. If you leave things long enough and quiet enough they answer themselves, whereas if you hurry matters balanced on the edge of a precipice, they often topple over instead of settling and remaining comfortably ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... an earthquake!" Do the words express the reality before us as we move along the mile of road between Albert and La Boisselle? Hardly. The earth-shudder that visits a volcanic district may topple towns and villages into ruins in a few minutes. It does not tear and grind and pound what it has overturned, through hour after hour, till there is nothing left but ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... figure came, stepping slowly and with age, a woodstack on his back. Heavier even than a knapsack containing a spirit kettle and a Decameron and biscuit remainders in a paper bag, it must be. Peter watched the slow figure sympathetically. Would he sway and topple over; and if he did would the woodstack break his fall? The whisky flask stood ready on ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... many things people can live without," said Fleda rather dreamily, intent upon settling an uneasy rose that would topple over. ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... the shingle rattles, The great waves topple and pour, Full of the fury of ancient battles, Clamant with ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... down-stream direction. It is an inverted reminder of the wind-moulded spruce. Although the stout beech props itself by great roots thrown landward, yet, sooner or later, the ripples will filter in beyond the centre of gravity and the mighty tree will topple and mingle with its shadow-double which for so many years the stream ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... me mean!" blustered Fred, and coming closer, he hit Nat on the shoulder. At once our hero hit back, and Fred received a thump in the mouth that caused him to topple backwards. ...
— From Farm to Fortune - or Nat Nason's Strange Experience • Horatio Alger Jr.
... the palanquin bearers went down, and the palanquin itself began to topple. The Greatest Noble screamed as he ...
— Despoilers of the Golden Empire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... left of the road, which had now become absolutely impassable again on account of innumerable transports. It was a dangerous ride, for any moment the bicycle might smash into some unseen obstacle and topple over into the abyss on the right, into which stones and loose earth were continually falling as the cycle pushed them to ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... lovely," Mollie agreed warmly, "but it does require the right kind of skirt, Grannie. Did anyone ever topple over ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... if so, you must have noticed that the track is banked very steeply at the corners, and when the motorist is going round these corners at, say, 80 miles an hour, his motor makes a considerable angle with the level ground, and looks as if it must topple over. The aeroplane acts in a similar manner, and, unless some means are taken to prevent it, it ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... "in the next street to ours there is a miserable building, that looks as if it were just going to topple over; and away up in the third story, in a little room just under the eaves, live two poor, lonely old women. They are both nearly on to ninety. I was in there day before yesterday. One of them is constantly confined to her bed with rheumatism; ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... we ran down to the stepping-stones by which we had come, in order to save the time which we should have been compelled to waste in feeling for a foothold as we went. Every second was of importance, and I fully expected to see Dennis topple unconscious into the pool below before I should be able to save him. I knew what it was exactly; he was going through my own horrible experience of "drowning on dry land," to quote Garnesk's vigorous phrase. Imagine my astonishment, therefore, when I reached Dennis's ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... operations by going straight up in the air—so straight that for an instant Ann thought she must surely topple backwards, and wondered with a little breathless thrill of admiration how Brett contrived to keep his seat at all at such an angle. Possibly the mare wondered also, for, coming down once more on all four feet to find the hated incumbrance still astride her back, ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... were a sorrowful thing, that retreat. The best I could do was to remain till the very last, having to deal with a number of persistent louts who all but suffocated me, at that. But I managed to empty my slinger into some of them and to topple the rest. I was mainly angry that Klow ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... as the painted stakes sold by seed houses. The stakes should be forced well down into the soil. Often, in dry weather when the ground is hard, they are not driven down far enough and the first hard rain softens the soil around them, and, if a strong wind exists, the plant may topple over and carry the stake with it. In tying them don't hug them as you would a long-lost brother; give them some natural freedom. In large groups, place the stakes around them, three or four feet apart, and string from stake to stake, running ...
— Making a Garden of Perennials • W. C. Egan
... topple over when I stand up," replied the American. "The rock is narrow and my head is already swimming. I fear I cannot reach you. ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... it, and manure it, and delve in it, for you who are born rich just as we are born poor. The masses will always be what they are, and stay what they are. The number of us who manage to rise is nothing like the number of you who topple down! We know that well enough, if we have no education! You mustn't be after us with your sheriff all the time,—not if you're wise. We let you alone, and you must let us alone. If not, and things get worse, you'll have to feed us in your prisons, where we'd be much better off ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... reel upon her rudder. Our man-of-war's man had rode in many a wild sea, but never before had he seen the like of that. Nevertheless, he clung to his seat like a limpet, and pulled at his oar with all his might. The others were more accustomed to that special work. Just as she seemed about to topple over, the boat dropped forward and plunged out to sea. The next wave caught her in the same way, but with less power. Another stroke of the short, stout oars, and they had got fairly ...
— The Thorogood Family • R.M. Ballantyne
... repeated, very gravely, "and if you ever saw a caterpillar topple over, you'd know it's a serious thing, and not sit g'inning like that—and I ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... to the gravel," Chris warned. "He'll never keep his legs. He'll topple over into the pool. Not one horse in a thousand could ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... amusement. But the present was not yesterday or the day before. It was a moment of grim necessity—and the tiny weapon gave him the satisfaction of knowing that he was not entirely helpless against the javelins. It would shoot as far as the stockade, and it might topple a man over if he hit him just right. Anyway, ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood
... pleasure was to come and sit Oft when the sun sloped midway to the west, Watching with sweet enjoyment interknit The long light slant across the green earth's breast, And clouds upon the ranges opposite, Rolled up into a gleaming thundercrest, Topple and break and fall in purple rain, And mist of summer showers ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... travelling, unlike most of the men of that breed, was a very nervous person, and it was not without much persuasion that I had succeeded in inducing him to join me in my camp under the shadow of the great rock. He feared that it would topple over and crush us, nor was he completely reassured until Saiyid Jasin—the chief of his followers—a shrunken, wizened little man of many wiles, had propped the stone up with a slender sapling, over which he had duly recited ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... catch himself, and finally topple from the seat. As the reins slipped from his fingers the ponies lunged up the arroyo. Waco crouched, clutching the foot-rail. A bullet hummed over his head. Gaining the level, the ponies broke into a wild run. The red wind whined as it drove across the mesa. The buckboard lurched sickeningly. ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... of crass material endeavour," small wonder that the American had remained in spiritual poverty of the most debasing sort until the New Dawn should come to enrich him, to topple in ruins an exploiting ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... long, rambling sentences that topple a letter over onto the waste basket toboggan. But the sentence with a climax, working up interest step by step, is indispensable. By eye test, by mechanical test, by erasure test and by strength test, Orchard Hill Bond makes ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... for the line was old and neglected, but why should it happen now? He hung up the receiver and reviewed it all calmly. There were a hundred things which might happen to the line, for it passed through rough country near Vegas; but the weather was fair and there was no wind blowing to topple over the poles. No one used the line but him—it had been connected up by Blount when he had first taken over the mine—and yet the wire had been cut. But by whom? As he sat there pondering he raised his eyes to the hill-top, and Stiff Neck ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... and engineers and builders have to take this law into consideration or the structures they put up would topple over. And your body learned the law when you were a little over a year old, or you never could have walked. It is worth while for your brain to know it, too, because it is a very practical law that you can ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... realized his power over these men; now he perceived that these men, some of them, realized it even better than he.... Realized it and resented it; resented it and fought with all the strength of their souls to undermine it and make it topple in ruin. ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... Farwell was his friend and had taught him all he knew, but Farwell's age did not in the least blind Jerry-Jo to the fact that he was a man, and he did not enjoy seeing Priscilla so free and easy with any other of the male sex, be he ancient enough to topple into the grave. ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... government was overthrown militarily by Laurent Desire KABILA, who immediately assumed governing authority; KABILA pledged to hold elections by April 1999, but in December 1998 announced that elections would be postponed until all foreign military forces attempting to topple the government had withdrawn from the country; KABILA was assassinated in January 2001 and was succeeded ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Man. Such cones are on the tops of almost all our mountains, and they are all called "men". At the bottom of the Carrock Man I seated myself for shelter, but the wind became so fearful and tyrannous, that I was apprehensive some of the stones might topple down upon me, so I groped my way farther down and came to three rocks, placed on this wise 1/32*** each one supported by the other like a child's house of cards, and in the hollow and screen which they made, I sate ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... failed him he began to sink. If we turn away from Jesus Christ, and interrupt the continuity of our faith by calculating the height of the breakers and the weight of the water that is in them, and what will become of us when they topple over with their white crests upon our heads, then gravity will begin to work, and we shall begin to sink. And well for us if, when we have sunk as far as our knees, we look back again to the Master and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... dozen soprani. Some passenger's fingers have entered his vest-pocket, and the boys are on the alert. Through the air, twirling and glittering, tumbles an English shilling, and drops into the deep water beyond the little fleet. Instantly all the lads leap, scramble, topple head-foremost out of their little tubs, and dive in pursuit. In the blue water their lithe figures look perfectly red,—all but the soles of their upturned feet, which show nearly white. Almost immediately they all rise ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... and a man's half a lifetime of effort and ambition ended in abandonment of effort not because he was a failure but because the choice of a profession had been a blunder. A multitude of men topple into this chasm and crawl out nobody. Few of them at middle age in the darkness of that pit of failure can grope within themselves for some second candle and by it once more become illumined through and through. He found his second candle,—it should have ...
— A Cathedral Singer • James Lane Allen
... had climbed upon the rocks and looked down upon the sea, I had wondered to myself whether, if the knowledge were put out before me, I could compose a story of Spanish treasure and pirates. For I am a prey to such giddy ambition. A foul street—if the buildings slant and topple—will set me thinking delightfully of murders. A wharf-end with water lapping underneath and bits of rope about will set me itching for a deep-sea plot. Or if I go on broader range and see in my fancy a broken castle on a hill, I'll clear its moat ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... understand all that, but lance against lance, sword against sword, men against men, a people against a people! I can understand the deadly rage of the victors, the sanguinary reaction of the vanquished, the political volcanoes which rumble in the bowels of the globe, shake the earth, topple over thrones, upset monarchies, and roll heads and crowns on the scaffold. But what I cannot understand is this mutilation of the granite, this placing of monuments beyond the pale of the law, the destruction of inanimate things, which belong neither to those who destroy ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... Therefore what may seem at the time of doing the work to be cheapness, is really the greatest extravagance. It is like building a brick wall with clay for mortar. The bricks and the workmanship cost full price, and the small saving on the mortar will topple the wall over in a few years, while, if well cemented, it would have lasted for centuries. The cutting and filling of the ditches, and the purchase and transportation of the tiles, will cost the same in every case, and these constitute ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... is sane, straight along, year in and year out, and we all know it. Our insanities are of varying sorts, and express themselves in varying forms —fortunately harmless forms as a rule—but in whatever form they occur an immense upheaval of feeling can at any time topple us distinctly over the sanity-line for a little while; and then if our form happens to be of the murderous kind we must look out—and so ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... gaped and upheaved, and the people who thronged it screamed still more shrilly as their feet were crushed by the grinding blocks. And now too the great pyramid itself was commencing to split, and gape, and topple. The roofs of its splendid chambers gave way, and the ponderous masonry above shuttered down and filled them. In part, too, one could see the destruction now, and not guess at it merely from the fearful hearings of the darkness. Thunders ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... corner," said an urchin, "she's Joe Cough's wife. I seed her going down the street with a great big bundle, and Mam said, she looked like she was going to topple over." ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... movement. The huge stack of magazines, looking as if it would topple over, so much on the slant was it, was slowly moving into an upright position again! He leaped forward, thrusting his revolver between the opening of the two portions, and ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... thrill of the chase, not at all that we wished harm to a soul in the world. If, on occasion, a slight hint of maliciousness did find its place with us, it was only because in this insecure world it is delightful to reaffirm our own security as we watch our neighbours topple over. We do not wish them to "topple," but if somebody has got to fall we would rather it were ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... meridian. By that time the heat has increased from an arctic temperature to double the boiling water point, from 250 deg. below zero to 500 deg. above it, or the point at which tin melts. Subjected to these extremes, the glassy rocks crack, shiver and crumble away; enormous land slides occur; peaks topple over; and tons of debris, crashing down the mountains, are swallowed up forever in the yawing ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... just in time to avoid falling into a well camouflaged machine-gun nest. One of the foliage-covered gunners, thinking Wims was about to topple on him, jumped aside. His ankle twisted under him and he fell, catching the barrel of the machine gun just under the edge of his ...
— I Was a Teen-Age Secret Weapon • Richard Sabia
... sighting I could make, it seemed to me that the opposite upper edge was directly over me—that is to say, mechanically speaking, its center of gravity barely falls with the base, and a heave of only a yard or two more would cause it to topple over. (Page 257.) ...
— The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... alone at first the rock you encounter. Get behind the boulder by taking a roundabout path. Then quietly dig the support from under the negative idea. If you make no fuss while you are undermining the obstacle, it will be likely to topple over and roll from your path without your prospect's noticing that it has disappeared. If his interest is diverted from it, there is no reason why he should turn his mind back to a stubborn insistence on his objection. Should he be conscious that the rock of his earlier opposition ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... mischievous as anything. In one hand he held a white fluff-feather. Now these feathers are as light as anything, and will blow in the wind; and whatever they are placed under, whether light or heavy, they are bound to topple over as soon as the ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... and mouthed by a well-trained butcher dog, of no recognisable breed. Sometimes, after receiving its wound, a bird would walk about for a second or two, apparently unhurt; then suddenly stagger and topple over. Sometimes, as the trap opened, a bird would stand dazed. Then a ball was trundled at it to compel it to rise. Grey breast feathers strewed the whole inclosure, in places quite thickly, like a carpet. As for the crowd at the tables inside ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... out!" screamed Violet as the bookcase shook and the statue seemed about to topple over by ...
— Billie Bradley and Her Inheritance - The Queer Homestead at Cherry Corners • Janet D. Wheeler
... too much on its hands to bother with people like her. No, there is a certain—well, immovability about the conventional, and Lilas wasn't strong enough to topple it over." ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... sailor was longer than usual in taking aim, but when he fired the schooner's foremast was seen to topple over, and her head flew up into the wind, thus presenting ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... this tower of granite, weathering the hurts of so many ages. Yet a little waving hand built this huge wall, and that which builds is better than that which is built. The hand that built can topple it down much faster. Better than the hand and nimbler was the invisible thought which wrought through it; and thus ever, behind the coarse effect, is a fine cause, which, being narrowly seen, is itself the effect of a finer cause. Every thing looks permanent until its secret ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... materials, and next a proper use of them. The painter's pigments are the bricks wherewith the mortar of his mind must be mixed, either to erect an edifice that shall endure for ages, or one which will quickly topple over like a house of cards. Now in nothing more than in painting is prevention better than cure—indeed cure may be said to be here out of the question: for good or for evil a picture once painted is painted for ever. Without a strong constitution there is no hope for it; no chemistry can ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... any more accurately. It was simply a walk with the least possible waste of energy. It fitted Dr. Holmes's definition of walking as forward motion to prevent falling. And yet Field never gave you the impression that he was about to topple over. His legs always acted as if they were weary and would like to lean their master up against something. As to what that something might be, he ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... said Kennedy; "but Al-Sirat's arch is the bridge—narrow as the edge of a razor, or the thread of an attenuated spider—which is supposed to span the fiery abyss, over which the good skate into Paradise, while the bad topple over it. Don't you remember Byron's lines about it in ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... or tired: Insatiate wanderer, marvellously fired, Most grandly piling and piling into the air Stones that will topple or arch ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... or who, having striven forward, sink on their knees, overcome by a vision which they alone can behold. And recollecting that fresco of Signorelli's, you feel as if this vast, tall canvas at S. Maria dell' Orto, where topple and welter the dead and the quick, were merely so much rhetorical rhodomontade by the side of the old hymn of ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... the axe carried Malan forward. He lost his balance, threw up his hands and began to topple. I saw the shadow of the horse fall swiftly across the light. Malan was seized by the collar and flung violently backward. Then Woodford caught the lantern from Marks and came on down the abutment ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... with sword and lance At Algesiras land, Where is the bold Bernardo now Their progress to withstand? To Burgos should the Moslem come, Where is the noble Cid Five royal crowns to topple ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... load with solid shot, to take his time about computing distance, elevation of piece, and aiming it. When he had the gun ready, we once more raised the cap, and promptly the bullet came. The sergeant had his piece ready aimed and he quickly said "fire." The next I saw the pine tree break off and topple over, and down fell a man with his gun in his hand. Our men sent up a great shout. General Ferrero was delighted with such an exhibition of marksmanship. I noticed that as soon as the reb. struck the ground he jumped up and ran into the thicket ...
— Campaign of Battery D, First Rhode Island light artillery. • Ezra Knight Parker
... cannot be disturbed, which is very silly. But I know myself: if I go to your house at Nohant, I shall have a month of dreaming about my trip. Real pictures will replace in my brain the fictitious pictures which I compose with great difficulty. All my house of cards will topple over. ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... newspaper. Mrs. Cramer on the left, having finished her sweeping, had come out on the porch also, and in garments that indicated no padding whatever dropped into a rocking chair, crossed her legs, made a dab at her loosely piled hair to see it did not topple down, and proceeded to read the morning newspaper. It was positively shocking, thought Mrs. Barnett, how women could so far ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... Dorothy ran after the wagon containing their friends, while the vehicle swayed from side to side in the road, they saw it give a sudden lurch, and almost topple over on the steep embankment which descended ...
— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose
... what has happened. The old sealer, however, is not surprised at their indifference, guessing its cause. He knows that in the weird forests of Tierra del Fuego there is many a tree standing, to all appearance sound in trunk, branches, everything, yet rotten from bark to heartwood, and ready to topple over at the slightest touch, even if but a gun be rested against it. The fall of such trees being a thing of common occurrence, and the natives accustomed to it, they never give it a second thought. The fishers in the canoes have not heeded it, while the sneezing of Caesar has ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... saw the drop in her face, when he saw features and expression fall from the lofty height of anticipation as a pile of cards topple in a mass upon the table, he was sorry. Her mouth opened—gaped. She looked as if a flat hand had ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... they do and sometimes they don't," answered the cowboy. "It all depends. Out here on the plain, where there isn't any high land or cliffs for them to topple over, there isn't much danger. The cattle will run until they get tired out. But, of course, some of 'em get stepped on and hurt, and that's bad. And sometimes our cattle get mixed in with another herd, when they stampede this way, and it's ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Uncle Fred's • Laura Lee Hope
... you to choose some other whelp. Being in your best lust, I would topple with ye, And pluck a good crow, ere ye brake your fast with me. What? are you mankin[261] now? I reckon it best, I, To bind your hands behind you, even ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Robert Dodsley
... hardy the spoiler who ventures thither. Yet, to descend from these speculative comparisons, it seems that thou hast a friendly and meaning purpose in thy warnings. Thou knowest that there are in this armament men who grudge to me whatever I now owe to Fortune, who would topple me from the height to which I did not climb, but was led by the congregated Greeks, and who, while perhaps they are forging arrowheads for the eagle, have sent to place poison and a snare in its distant nest. So the Nausicaa is on its voyage to Sparta, conveying to ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... Ja, but he must have left after I tumbled into the tank, for I received no response to my cries. Doubtless he had felt as certain of my doom when he saw me topple from our hiding place as I had, and lest he too should be discovered, had hastened from the temple and back to ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... State, Or blended States, or peoples, pass the bounds Set for their progress, they must topple and fall Into that gulf of ruin which has swallowed All ancient Empires, States, Republics; all Perishing, in like manner, from the selfsame cause! The terrible conjunction of the event, Close with the provocation, stands apart, A social ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... better since we returned." And now Mrs. Corey, as if forced to the point, said bunglingly that the young ladies had wished to come with her, but had been detained. She based her statement upon Nanny's sarcastic demand; and, perhaps seeing it topple a little, she rose hastily, to get away from its fall. "But we shall hope for some—some other occasion," she said vaguely, and she put on a parting smile, and shook hands with Mrs. Lapham and Penelope, and then, after some lingering commonplaces, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... green chimney pots, its narrow streets and vivid awnings, its wide avenues and the ancient Castle to the north. To the south, the fortress and the bridges; encircling the city a thick, high wall with here and there enormous gates flanked by towers so grim and old that they seem ready to topple over from the sheer fatigue of centuries. A soft, Indian summer haze hangs over the lazy-lit valley; it is always so ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... a purple skin, Men and maidens carry in, Brimming baskets on their shoulders, Which they topple one by one Down the winepress. Men are holders Of the place there, and alone Tread the grapes out, crush them down, Letting loose the soul of wine— Praising Bacchus as divine, With the loud songs ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... Whom nothing touched of danger, or of harm. His life was just a rare-bit dream, where some one Seems like to fall before a truck or train— Instead he walks across them. Or you see Shadows of falling things, great buildings topple, Pianos skid like bulls from hellish corners And chase the oblivious fool who stands and smiles. The buildings slant and sway like monstrous searchlights, But never touch him. And the mad piano Comes up to him, puts down its angry head, Runs out a friendly tongue ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... all right. There was a terrific, roaring explosion, and she staggered backwards under the savage kick of the recoil. Recovering herself instantly, and proud of the great noise she had made, she peered through the smoke, expecting to see the bear topple over upon his nose, extinguished. Instead of that, however, she observed a convulsive flopping of wings in the birch-tree above the bear's head. Then, with one reproachful "gobble" which rang loud in Mrs. Gammit's ears, the ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... massed and dun In the wild purple of the glowering sun Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud The menacing scarred slope; and, one by one, Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire. The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear, Men jostle and climb to meet the bristling fire. Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear, They leave their trenches, going over the top, While time ticks blank ...
— The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon • Siegfried Sassoon
... he didn't topple over when I touched his boat," said Louise. "I should have thought it all my fault, ...
— The Girl Scouts at Sea Crest - The Wig Wag Rescue • Lillian Garis
... on getting up to him to jump off his horse, seize the steer by a horn and the muzzle, then stoop down and grip the animal's upper lip with his teeth, turn his hands loose, and so by means of his powerful jaws and neck alone throw down and topple the steer over. The negro took many chances, and often the huge steer would fall on him in such a way as would have broken the neck or ribs of any ordinary white man. In this case also the steer must be an active one and going at a good pace, ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... wavered and seemed about to topple over, at the same time emitting a groan of pain which proved him to be thoroughly human. Helen was frightened, but there was a new kind of awe in this fright. All suggestion of superstition had left her and in its place was ...
— Campfire Girls at Twin Lakes - The Quest of a Summer Vacation • Stella M. Francis
... ain't got anything to tell," said Peaches, folding her arms and tilting her chin so high Mickey feared she might topple backward. ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... pile thirty-five feet high on one side and six or seven rods square, putting hay between the outside layers to exclude the air; for when the wind, though never so cold, finds a passage through, it will wear large cavities, leaving slight supports or studs only here and there, and finally topple it down. At first it looked like a vast blue fort or Valhalla; but when they began to tuck the coarse meadow hay into the crevices, and this became covered with rime and icicles, it looked like a venerable moss-grown and hoary ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... I shall desire you to choose some other whelp. Being in your best lust, I would topple with ye, And pluck a good crow, ere ye brake your fast with me. What? are you mankin[261] now? I reckon it best, I, To bind your hands behind you, even as ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Robert Dodsley
... showing you," was the reply. "If you built your heavy wall on the bank, the water would strike the concave bank at one of these crossings, eat away the earth under the wall and your wall would topple in. Then the current would cross the stream, undermine the bank on the other side and your masonry would crumble there, too. So ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... was right. The houses were generally constructed of canes, plastered with mud, and painted yellow. As the result of earthquakes, scarce a house stood upright—some leaned sideways, and looked as if they were going to topple over into the road; while others leaned back, as if, were you to push against them, they would collapse and crush ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... and the carpenters walked away, leaving him looking up at the trees and thinking how it would seem to see them topple over and come crashing down into the Cocahutchie, to be made up into chairs and tables. Just as long as he could remember anything he had seen the old trees standing guard there, summer and winter, leafy or bare, and they were ...
— Crowded Out o' Crofield - or, The Boy who made his Way • William O. Stoddard
... a huge head projecting over the edge. I could not be mistaken. It was that of a lion. In another instant he might spring down upon me. My only hope of escape was to fire immediately, and drive him off. Even then I dreaded that he might topple over when shot, and destroy me in his dying struggles. I raised my rifle and fired. A fearful roar was the answer to the sound of my piece. Scarcely daring to look up, I began loading again as rapidly as I could; for even then I feared that the monster would spring down. ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... the back of a chair, feeling she was surely going to topple over in a swoon. Summoning all her reserve of nerve power, she strove ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... onto that stay or you'll topple overboard," warned Frank, as Ben, balancing himself, ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... lightless passage to the front rooms, a curious sensation touched Halder—a terrifying conviction that some undefinable thing had just gone wrong. And with that, his whole body was suddenly rigid, every muscle locking in mid-motion. He felt momentum topple him slowly forwards; then he was no longer falling but stopped, tilted off-balance at a grotesque angle, suspended in a web of forces he could not feel. Not the slightest sound had come from Kilby, invisible in the blackness ...
— The Other Likeness • James H. Schmitz
... brought up the pictures when he escorted his wife. There were two pretty bits of landscape on the shore of Lake Geneva, and the other a Holland scene, with a stretch of canal and a queer house that looked as if it might topple over some day, if the foundation was ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... overthrown militarily by Laurent Desire KABILA, who immediately assumed governing authority; KABILA pledged to hold elections by April 1999, but in December 1998 announced that elections would be postponed until all foreign military forces attempting to topple the government had withdrawn from the country; KABILA was assassinated in January 2001 and was succeeded ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... one wonders, that there are times when one small nook of earth shuts out, as it were, the whole universe from our eyes, when one personal interest occupies us to the exclusion of the whole world of action, and progress, and speculation, and thought? Thrones may topple over, nationalities be effaced, revolutions in politics, in religion, in science be effected, and all pass unheeded while we sit counting our own private loss and gain in love or friendship, in grief or joy. Whilst Madelon has been wearying out her little heart ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... by a little stream, and leads, serpent-fashion, towards the rocks. We pass, in this brief progress, the Sugar-loaf; and observing the ravages which time is making on its inverted cone, we anticipate the hour, probably not very distant, when it will topple over, and fall flat upon the earth. But this is nothing. Our ragged guide conducts us across a wooden bridge, up a road, hollowed out by nature, through the rocks, till suddenly we reach what resembles the mouth of a mine, across which a door is drawn. ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... would be a scramble for gold. And people would begin to hoard things ... and no one would trust any one else. There would be suspicion and fear and greed and hate ... and very swiftly and very surely, civilisation would reel and topple and fall to pieces.... At any moment that might happen. So far, indeed, things were still steady ... calamity had not come so quickly as imaginative men had foretold ... but presently, when the slums ... ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... detective found himself falling, and knew that his chair must topple over, the thought instantly came to him that Chick would escape the greater part of the confusion resulting from it—and he knew that he could rely upon Chick's activity and resource as ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... know not what feeling 'more than joy' can be, unless haply it topple over t' other side and become woe, and I would be loth ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... to topple, and von Liegnitz himself spun away from the blow. The spanner caught him on the shoulder, and he grunted in pain, but he kept ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... fight continued. It could not last much longer. Despair pulled at the German's heartstrings as he saw his observer topple for a moment in his seat, then pitch forward into space. The biplane tipped dangerously, righted itself and sped like a homing pigeon in the direction of the German lines. There was nothing left but to fly for it. The German dared not look behind; only by the mercy of God were the Frenchman's ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... a game in which they pile blocks up to see how high they can go before they topple over. In medieval times, petty rulers in their Italian states vied with one another to see who could build the tallest tower. Some beautiful results of this game still remain in Florence, Siena, and other Italian hill cities. Currently, Americans vie in a similar way ...
— A Brief History of Element Discovery, Synthesis, and Analysis • Glen W. Watson
... correspond closely to her ideal of a man, something that was dear to her. If that ideal did not—and his intelligence insisted that he could not—survive the reality, then his house was built on sand and must topple. ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... mother—himself, his own valuable, important future? And all for a sewer rat! Let him hang, let the fellow hang if he must! And that was not certain. Appeal! Petition! He might—he should be saved! To have got thus far, and then, by his own action, topple himself down! ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... that a theoretical physicist was judged by his inability to handle research apparatus; the clumsier he was in research, the better he was with theory. But Wolfgang Pauli was a lot more than clumsy. Apparatus would break, topple over, go to pieces, or burn up if Pauli just walked into ...
— Psichopath • Gordon Randall Garrett
... dash o'er them and topple around, They see they are pretty near sure to be drowned. A terrible wave o'er the quarter-deck breaks, And the vessel it sinks ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... Windsor Park, and it is not impossible to miss the right path through the trees. But if you are walking north from the lake it is worth while to make your way to the Cumberland obelisk—a gaunt column which the clustering ivy and shrubs at its base will some day topple down among the grass and heather—and to reach the Bishop's Gate through the single narrow stretch of Windsor Great Park that lies in Surrey. In winter, pheasants crouch under the brushwood or splutter through the trees; ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... night when I break from the fight, My Kingdom's awaiting for me; There's comfort and rest, and the warmth of your breast, And little ones climbing my knee. There's fire-light and song — Oh, the world may be wrong! Its empires may topple and fall: My home is my care — if gladness be there, It's a mighty ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... foaks were thar, fra near an' far, At couldn't fairly hopple; An' laffin' brats, as wild as cats, Ower heeads an' heels did topple. ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... that, you see," Mary went on; "set for the climax, like the springs in a French play, when I came along at just the moment and with just the word, to topple it over. Being Paula, she couldn't help doing exactly what she did. So, however it comes out, I shall be the one person she won't be ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... so quaintly that she broke into peals of silvery laughter over him. Paul was pleased with her, and half inclined to be proud of her for the first time in his life, though he had a nervous fear lest her gaiety should topple over like an unskilled ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... the queen receives the homage of her subjects. She gets her presents, and there are pretty speeches made to her, and she has her dainty feast and her crown of flowers. Yes, that time is the crown of the day, and that is just the moment when the poor little queen shall topple down. The throne shall be knocked from under her; the presents will vanish; the sovereignty will cease to exist. Poor, poor little queen without a kingdom! How will you like it, Paulie? Do you think you could bear it? To have no kingdom and ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... "'Tention-l !" shriek a dozen soprani. Some passenger's fingers have entered his vest-pocket, and the boys are on the alert. Through the air, twirling and glittering, tumbles an English shilling, and drops into the deep water beyond the little fleet. Instantly all the lads leap, scramble, topple head-foremost out of their little tubs, and dive in pursuit. In the blue water their lithe figures look perfectly red,—all but the soles of their upturned feet, which show nearly white. Almost immediately they all rise again: one holds up at arm's- length ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... is banked very steeply at the corners, and when the motorist is going round these corners at, say, 80 miles an hour, his motor makes a considerable angle with the level ground, and looks as if it must topple over. The aeroplane acts in a similar manner, and, unless some means are taken to prevent it, it will ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... you are dying. The only way for us to find out is to try to get the machine working and topple ourselves one way or the other. If we fall back, we will all live. If we fall into ...
— The Day Time Stopped Moving • Bradner Buckner
... stopped outside the door. He stood openmouthed, maddened and still, as if in the midst of a catastrophe. The door-handle rattled lightly. It seemed to him that the walls were coming apart, that the furniture swayed at him; the ceiling slanted queerly for a moment, a tall wardrobe tried to topple over. He caught hold of something and it was the back of a chair. So he had reeled against a chair! Oh! Confound it! ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... battle-shout—pealed above the bellowing stadium. Even as he cried it, all saw his form draw upward as might Prometheus's unchained. They saw the fingers of the Spartan unclasp. They saw his bloody face upturned and torn with helpless agony. They saw his great form totter, topple, fall. The last dust cloud, and into it the multitude ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... firm on my legs yet," he laughed, "and I must n't topple over, as Miss Batterson has left me for a ...
— Polly of the Hospital Staff • Emma C. Dowd
... beach Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring bark Diminish'd to her cock; her cock, a buoy Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge That on the unnumber'd idle pebble chafes, Cannot be heard so high. I'll look no more, Lest my brain turn and the deficient sight Topple down headlong. ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... vase swayed backwards and forwards; it seemed to be uncertain whether or no to topple over on to the head of one of the old men, but eventually determined to go the other way, and came crashing over towards the German poet, who darted out of the way ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... slide guided by the hand of a stronger and more expert companion. How soon we learned to do the trick, and what fun there was in "keep the pot a-boiling," while strings of youngsters took the slide. What if some did topple over? No bones were broken, and the incident always caused a ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... and Cape Roux are so exposed to the sun, and so protected from the cold, that this region has been called the Petite Afrique. Cape Roux itself, the abrupt termination of a lofty ridge, looks as if it would topple over into the sea, to which it is so close that both the rail and the road have to pass through it by tunnels. On the eastern side of this cape is the equally picturesque and sheltered bay, the Mer d'Eze, backed by a phalanx of ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... through me. Some little distance back a tree hung over the sandy bottom, its roots partially laid bare by the washing of the stream which had now disappeared. The trunk was inclined at a sharp angle; but little force would be needed, I thought, to topple it over until it lay athwart the path which the pursuers must follow. Its foliage was thick, and though I did not flatter myself 'twould put an end to the pursuit, I thought it might serve as a check, and enable Uncle Moses to gain strength ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... meant that nook for your garden. It is the only place that is sheltered from the wind and at the same time has sunshine and a good outlook. But the wall has thrice been all but finished, and each time the stones have begun to sink and topple. This time Howel the mason was nearly killed. Of course, a feeble bent old woman who can hardly hobble ten rods cannot have undermined a wall at this distance. That is absurd. But the panic the men have got into is not. That wall will have to ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... of the road a bent figure came, stepping slowly and with age, a woodstack on his back. Heavier even than a knapsack containing a spirit kettle and a Decameron and biscuit remainders in a paper bag, it must be. Peter watched the slow figure sympathetically. Would he sway and topple over; and if he did would the woodstack break his fall? The whisky flask ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... besieged had combined, shoulder to shoulder, to make one magnificent and desperate onslaught on to the obdurate door, they quietly "raised the siege," and quitting their hold, left the phalanx of small heroes to topple head over heels and one over another on to the stone floor of the passage, while they sauntered off arm-in-arm to the scene ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... Icarian pinions, all too frail, Were sure my fancy's flight to fail. Confined within this mortal clod, Vain man would yet ascend to God, Presumptuous, as of yore, to be The heir of immortality. But, from those fair, celestial heights Of fervid fancy's loftiest flights, My airy visions topple down To where cool reason's realm is found, And fancy folds her weary wings, Content, the while, with ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... point, from 250 deg. below zero to 500 deg. above it, or the point at which tin melts. Subjected to these extremes, the glassy rocks crack, shiver and crumble away; enormous land slides occur; peaks topple over; and tons of debris, crashing down the mountains, are swallowed up forever in the yawing chasms of the ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... slid away cursing. There were some who lounged with a false sedateness, and some who fluttered in an equally false timidity. Some wore velvet shoes without heels. Some had shoes, the heels whereof were of such inordinate length that the wearers looked as though they were perched on stilts and would topple to perdition if their skill failed for an instant. They passed and they looked at him; and from each, after the due regard, he looked away to the ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... by a moment of complete silence, of complete inaction. The crew behind the captain stood still, staring and frozen with consternation. The captain stood slightly stooped over, his knees bent, mouth open, gasping for air, his eyes popping. Slowly, brutishly he began to wilt and topple forward. He was almost bent double before he fell; and with the thud of his body upon the deck, one of the crew groaned: "Killed by a fist blow, ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... Jean Roland and no one else. She is the smallest and the darkest and much the best dressed. I do hope and trust it will be love at first sight. She is already just wild about you, without ever even seeing you, and when she sees you she is sure to topple over completely." ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... man, and was bending to clamp it over the pit, when from the parapet to the right a sudden cross-fire swept the head of the breach. A bullet struck him in the hand. He looked up, with the pain of it, in time to see Major Frazer spin about, topple past the sergeant's hand thrust out to steady him, and pitch headlong down the slope. The ladder-bearer and another tall Royal ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... when a few goatskin bags were pierced the raft would begin to topple over and the men with oars would themselves direct the raft toward the shore, preferring to take their chance among Kurds than with the rocks that stuck up like fangs out of the raging water. No, sahib, I could ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... the spot where the voyage was to end. There was no going beyond that clear-cut line. When the ship came up to it, there would be no more water beyond; naught but a vast space into which the vessel must topple and go on falling to the end of time. The great sirens were silent, for the fog of the night before had lifted, laying bare a desolate plain. The ship was sliding into oblivion, magnificently indifferent to the catastrophe that awaited its ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... the helmeted figure of Moa casting off Anita—and then the two girls leaping upon Miko. It threw him off his balance, and my hanging weight made him topple forward. He took a step to recover himself; his hand with the knife was flung up with an instinctive, involuntary balancing gesture. And as it came down again, I forced the knife-blade to graze his throat. Its point caught in the ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... and months. Why, no one is sane, straight along, year in and year out, and we all know it. Our insanities are of varying sorts, and express themselves in varying forms —fortunately harmless forms as a rule—but in whatever form they occur an immense upheaval of feeling can at any time topple us distinctly over the sanity-line for a little while; and then if our form happens to be of the murderous kind we must look out—and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... lingered, were retrieved and mouthed by a well-trained butcher dog, of no recognisable breed. Sometimes, after receiving its wound, a bird would walk about for a second or two, apparently unhurt; then suddenly stagger and topple over. Sometimes, as the trap opened, a bird would stand dazed. Then a ball was trundled at it to compel it to rise. Grey breast feathers strewed the whole inclosure, in places quite thickly, like a carpet. As for ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... He had chosen a spot where the rock rose perpendicularly above the road. "Drop them over," he said, "so that they may fall straight. The biggest you must roll over with your levers, but work them to the edge and let them topple over; don't thrust them out or they will ...
— Won by the Sword - A Story of the Thirty Years' War • G.A. Henty
... glaze them into ice. The more conformable ice-blocks will gradually be cemented together, while the fierce winds that beat upon the ridge will wear away the supports of the more egregious and unstable blocks, and one by one they will topple into the abyss on this side or on that. It will probably never again be the smooth, homogeneous slope it has been; "the gable" will probably always present a wide cleft, but the slopes beyond it, stripped now of their accumulated ice so as to be unclimbable, may build up again and give ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... screamed Violet as the bookcase shook and the statue seemed about to topple over by reason of Billie's ...
— Billie Bradley and Her Inheritance - The Queer Homestead at Cherry Corners • Janet D. Wheeler
... this feeling, for Farwell was his friend and had taught him all he knew, but Farwell's age did not in the least blind Jerry-Jo to the fact that he was a man, and he did not enjoy seeing Priscilla so free and easy with any other of the male sex, be he ancient enough to topple into the grave. ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... the drop in her face, when he saw features and expression fall from the lofty height of anticipation as a pile of cards topple in a mass upon the table, he was sorry. Her mouth opened—gaped. She looked as if a ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... before, that was not new to me, a remembered fear, had me fast; a remembered voice seemed to speak clearly incomprehensible words that had moved me before. The sheer faces of the enormous buildings near at hand seemed to topple forwards like cliffs in an earthquake, and for an instant I saw beyond them into unknown depths that I had seen into before. It was as if the shadow of annihilation had passed over them beneath the sunshine. ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... to Ja, but he must have left after I tumbled into the tank, for I received no response to my cries. Doubtless he had felt as certain of my doom when he saw me topple from our hiding place as I had, and lest he too should be discovered, had hastened from the temple ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... numerous files of newspapers neatly arranged against the blank spaces of the walls, and a huge pile of old magazines which stood in one corner, reaching nearly up to the ceiling, and threatening to topple over each instant, like the Leaning Tower at Pisa. There were green paper shades at the windows, some faded chintz valances about the bed, and two or three easy-chairs covered with chintz. On a black-walnut shelf between ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... rise to a total height of 5,000 feet above sea level. The surface of the country, too, is often broken by groups, or clusters of rocks, either low or of moderate elevation, composed of immense boulders, the topmost ones of which are often so finely poised as to seem ready to topple over at the slightest touch. The highest point of the plateau is about 3,500 feet, and is crowned as it were by the fine bold range of the Bababuden mountains, which have an average elevation of about 6,000 ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... the long, rambling sentences that topple a letter over onto the waste basket toboggan. But the sentence with a climax, working up interest step by step, is indispensable. By eye test, by mechanical test, by erasure test and by strength ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... since his time has been to build on an addition now and then, as need arose, and to change the ornamentation to suit the taste of the day. At one time, it seemed that the whole structure might be rent asunder and topple into ruins; but again there came a master-builder named Abraham Lincoln, and with the aid of a million devoted workmen who rallied to his call, he ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... upset the spider-legged table that was always ready to topple over on the least provocation, made a hopeless labyrinth of her embroidery silks, gave her a kiss of greeting, and hurried on with numberless questions, just as if he were in the greatest possible haste, and it was a necessity of life and death that he should throw off everything ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... passed resolutions restricting the height of the buildings to six stories. They ain't going to take the chance that New York does, and have some of these big tall ten-story affairs topple over ...
— The Sorrows of a Show Girl • Kenneth McGaffey
... the trail. When the figure was within ten yards Cutler slowly drew an ivory-handled pistol. The lieutenants below saw the man leap to the middle of the bridge, sway suddenly with arms thrown up, and topple into White River. The current swept the body down, and as it came it alternately lifted and turned and sank as the stream played with it. Sometimes it struck submerged stumps or shallows, and bounded half out of water, then drew under with nothing ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... the gratification of that naughty curiosity! Then, quite unexpectedly—oh! what a start it gave her!—the solitary white object burst upon her view, leprous and ghastly as the yawn of a cotton-mouth. Tombs ruin soon in Louisiana;—the one Chita looked upon seemed ready to topple down. There was a great ragged hole at one end, where wind and rain, and perhaps also the burrowing of crawfish and of worms, had loosened the bricks, and caused them to slide out of place. It seemed very black inside; but Chita wanted to know what was there. She pushed her way through a gap ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... recollect the horrors with which they fed my heated fancy during an eruption of Vesuvius. We were distant from that volcano, with mountains between us; but its convulsive throes shook the solid foundations of nature. Earthquakes threatened to topple down our convent towers. A lurid, baleful light hung in the heavens at night, and showers of ashes, borne by the wind, fell in our narrow valley. The monks talked of the earth being honey-combed beneath us; of Streams of molten lava raging through its veins; of caverns of sulphurous flames ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... joke, and we never thought you would fall. No one else fell. We kept pulling it away by the string, you know, a few inches at a time, so that you did not notice, but you had really farther and farther to stretch, and it was that that made you topple over." ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... gave the lariat a quick flirt, the loop running out perpendicularly, like a rolling hoop, and not more than a foot from the ground, writhing, undulating, the circle constricting quickly, sinuously. The girl saw the loop topple as it neared the steer—it was much like the motion of a hoop falling. It met one of the steer's hoofs as it was flung outward; it grew taut; the rope straightened and Patches swung off to the right at an acute angle. He did not brace his legs, this time. This ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... have been a heavy blow for you, my poor ALINE. I can understand that your spirits can never be really high again. And then for poor Master Builder SOLNESS to be so taken up with that Miss WANGEL as he was—that, too, was so wretched for you. To see him topple off the tower, as he did ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 11, 1893 • Various
... and because his heart failed him he began to sink. If we turn away from Jesus Christ, and interrupt the continuity of our faith by calculating the height of the breakers and the weight of the water that is in them, and what will become of us when they topple over with their white crests upon our heads, then gravity will begin to work, and we shall begin to sink. And well for us if, when we have sunk as far as our knees, we look back again to the Master and say, 'Lord, save me; I perish!' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... staggering under the weight of falling buildings, and being overwhelmed in the ruins; upheaving masses of rock, and burying themselves beneath; vainly striving to sustain the pillars of heavy roofs that topple down upon their heads; and, in a word, undergoing and doing every kind of mad and demoniacal destruction. The figures are immensely large, and exaggerated to the utmost pitch of uncouthness; the colouring is harsh and disagreeable; and the whole effect more like (I should imagine) a violent ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... come nearer to being killed right here in Baileyville than ever I have while cruising in mid-ocean. Folks take their lives in their hands every time they cross a city street. Then, too, aren't there high buildings to topple over; flagpoles to snap asunder, signs to blow down; chimneys to shower their bricks on your head; not to mention the death-dealing currents that come through telegraph and telephone wires? Add to this threatening collection ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... had not played football for three seasons for nothing. He quietly ducked, allowing his unscientific assailant to overbalance himself, and topple head first on the lobby outside, at the particular moment when the real owner of the racehorse and the real wine-merchant, who had just arrived, reached the top of ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... pavilions of the new Louvre and the Tuileries, were crowned by a blaze, which lent them the aspect of sacrificial pyres. The dome of the Invalides was flaring with such brilliancy that you instinctively feared lest it should suddenly topple down and scatter burning flakes over the neighborhood. Beyond the irregular towers of Saint-Sulpice, the Pantheon stood out against the sky in dull splendor, like some royal palace of conflagration reduced ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... booming, bell-like tone. "Never be in a hurry—-especially don't be in a hurry about answering letters. If you leave things long enough and quiet enough they answer themselves, whereas if you hurry matters balanced on the edge of a precipice, they often topple over instead of settling and ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... blink hastily, he derived some moral support from the green gleam of the starboard light shining feebly upon the flight of rain and sprays. He was actually looking at it when its ray fell upon the uprearing sea which put it out. He saw the head of the wave topple over, adding the mite of its crash to the tremendous uproar raging around him, and almost at the same instant the stanchion was wrenched away from his embracing arms. After a crushing thump on his ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... Well!" she said. "If old Topple hasn't another lot of kittens. Have them? To be sure you may, and welcome, when they are big enough ...
— A Sweet Little Maid • Amy E. Blanchard
... of the palanquin bearers went down, and the palanquin itself began to topple. The Greatest Noble screamed as he fell ...
— Despoilers of the Golden Empire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... brakes to prevent them from running sideways, and so off the grade. I rode down one of these places, but it was the last as well as the first. Every time the big wagon jolted over a stone—and it was jolt over stones all the time—it seemed as if it must topple over the side and roll to the bottom; and then the way the driver talked to the mules to keep them straight, and the creaking and scraping of the wagons, was enough to ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... time a man has discovered that he is in love with a woman, she is usually so fagged out waiting for the phenomenon, that she is ready to topple right over into his arms ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... of an earthquake!" Do the words express the reality before us as we move along the mile of road between Albert and La Boisselle? Hardly. The earth-shudder that visits a volcanic district may topple towns and villages into ruins in a few minutes. It does not tear and grind and pound what it has overturned, through hour after hour, till there is nothing ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to the left of the road, which had now become absolutely impassable again on account of innumerable transports. It was a dangerous ride, for any moment the bicycle might smash into some unseen obstacle and topple over into the abyss on the right, into which stones and loose earth were continually falling as the cycle pushed them ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... not again, though, topple into any flour barrels. It was Sue who had the next accident at the corner grocery, and this ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue Keeping Store • Laura Lee Hope
... good to turn one's back on that hideous thing, and when they heard the headless trunk topple over on to the floor of the car behind them, both shivered, and the chauffeur's knuckles stood out white as he ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... things people can live without," said Fleda, rather dreamily, intent upon settling an uneasy rose that would topple over. ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... laughed with the rest over the story of the poor tailor who promised a coat to a customer for one, two and three weeks, heaping up his promises one on the other until he had a perfect pyramid of them, only to topple about his ears. She heard with the rest the magnificent voice ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... receiver and reviewed it all calmly. There were a hundred things which might happen to the line, for it passed through rough country near Vegas; but the weather was fair and there was no wind blowing to topple over the poles. No one used the line but him—it had been connected up by Blount when he had first taken over the mine—and yet the wire had been cut. But by whom? As he sat there pondering he raised his eyes to the hill-top, and ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... and won he felt that silent approbation behind him; insensibly it steadied Ford and sharpened his instinct for reading the faces of the other players, so that the miniature towers of red chips and blue grew higher until they threatened to topple—whereupon other little towers began to grow up around them. And the men in the saloon began to feel the fascination of his success, so that they grouped themselves about his chair and peered down over his shoulder at ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... ranged in a loose semi-circle, waiting and watching; only the colts, ignorant of what was to come, had begun to frolic together or bother their mothers with a savage pretense of battle. Alcatraz saw one solid old bay topple her offspring with a side-swing of her head. She wanted an unobstructed ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... that you are likely to be within six feet of the bank and destruction, when you think you are a good half-mile from shore. And you are sure, also, that if you chance suddenly to fetch up against the embankment and topple your chimneys overboard, you will have the small comfort of knowing that it is about what you were expecting to do. One of the great Vicksburg packets darted out into a sugar plantation one night, at such a time, and had to stay there a week. But there was no novelty ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... chimney pots, its narrow streets and vivid awnings, its wide avenues and the ancient Castle to the north. To the south, the fortress and the bridges; encircling the city a thick, high wall with here and there enormous gates flanked by towers so grim and old that they seem ready to topple over from the sheer fatigue of centuries. A soft, Indian summer haze hangs over the lazy-lit valley; it is always ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... finished her sweeping, had come out on the porch also, and in garments that indicated no padding whatever dropped into a rocking chair, crossed her legs, made a dab at her loosely piled hair to see it did not topple down, and proceeded to read the morning newspaper. It was positively shocking, thought Mrs. Barnett, how women could so far ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... his, her own pleading, and the very wind without seemed to pause for his answer. But what she asked was impossible. That wind which he himself had loosed, which was to topple over institutions, was rising, and he could no more have stopped it then than he ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Schiller leads up to his climax. There is no other play of his, early or late, the entanglement of which is so palpably artificial; so like a child's house of cards, built up with bated breath lest a breath should topple it over. According to Boettiger, Schiller once took note of what some critic had remarked upon this lavish use of silence in 'The Bride of Messina' and expressed surprise that any one could so misconceive him. He went on to say, if we can trust Boettiger, that it is 'precisely ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... by forming an imperceptible crevice which grew and grew with the passing of centuries. The natural wall leaned for years and years above the waves, which beat furiously at its base, until it would lose its balance some stormy night and topple like the rampart of a besieged citadel, crumbling into blocks, peopling the sea with new reefs soon to be covered with slimy vegetation, while the winding passages would seethe with foam and sparkle with the metallic gleam ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... inland, are almost invariably found to terminate against glaciers. Thick ice frequently appears, too, crowning the exposed sea-cliffs, from the edges of which it droops in thick, tongue-like, and stalactitic projections, until its own weight forces it to break away and topple down the precipices into ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... divinable. She had found the Tree of Knowledge, but about on every side a great wall soared blackly enclosing her in from the Tree of Life—a wall which her thought was unable to surmount even while instinct urged that it must topple before her advance; but instinct may not advance when thought has schooled it in the science of unbelief; and this wall will not be conquered until Thought and Instinct are wed, and the first son of that bridal will be called The ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... enclosure from which they had come and the hill where Gahan of Gathol lay watching, and then suddenly the smaller figure struck its companion full in the face. Gahan, horrified, saw the latter's head topple from its body, saw the body stagger and fall to the ground. The man half rose from his concealment the better to view the happening in the valley below. The creature that had felled its companion was dashing madly in the direction of the hill upon ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... to rise, but sank back dizzily. The room seemed to become suddenly dark. She feared she would topple over as Amy ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Ocean View - Or, The Box That Was Found in the Sand • Laura Lee Hope
... I; and is this the cause of your lofty gait? Do you straighten yourself to think that you have committed a murder, when a chance-falling stone has often done the same? Is it a proud thing to topple down six feet perpendicular of immortal manhood, though that lofty living tower needed perhaps thirty good growing summers to bring it to maturity? Poor savage! And you account it so glorious, do you, to mutilate and destroy ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... of you! She's 'sooner caught than the pestilence, and the taker runs presently mad.' No use looking daggers! It's a fact. I don't say she flirts outrageously—like I do! She simply expects homage—and gets it. She expects men to fall in love with her—and they topple over like ninepins. Sometimes—when I'm feeling magnanimous—I catch a ninepin as it falls! Look at her now, with that ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... between them. When you are ready to begin cooking, take out the smoky, burning pieces and leave a bed of red-hot coals. If you have no axe and can find no logs, a somewhat similar fireplace can be built up of flat stones, but be sure that your stone fireplace will not topple over ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... one side of him, and on the other a mountainous heap of hand-bags and valises. This is the only creature with four legs, bigger than a dog, that ever gets down the Clovelly street; and why he does not lose his balance, topple backward, and go rolling continuously down till he falls into the sea below, nobody can imagine. But the valiant little animal kept steadily on, assisted by his owner, who followed and assiduously whacked him with a stout stick, ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... would have turned over to the other and wrought so dexterously that, thrusting his loins against one of the sides of the chest, which had not been set on a level place, he caused it first to incline to one side and after topple over. In falling, it made a great noise, whereat the women who slept therenigh awoke and being affrighted, were silent for fear. Ruggieri was sore alarmed at the fall of the chest, but, finding that it had opened in the fall, chose ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... exhibited a strong desire to topple over and fall on people, but by the liberal use of nails and screws and bits of firewood, I made life in the same room with it possible, and then, being exhausted, I had my wounds dressed, ...
— Clocks - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... he said hastily; 'that old fellow looks as though he might topple over any minute;' and before Michael could understand what he meant, he had dived ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... of that huge, uplifted log will topple off, and that man underneath will get his eyes filled with sawdust," ...
— Fil and Filippa - Story of Child Life in the Philippines • John Stuart Thomson
... wide plains and bogs, encircled by high hills, which, like a row of Alpine mountains with pinnacles formed like saws, frown over the sea, which is separated from them only by high clay banks; and year after year the sea bites a large mouthful off of these, so that their edges and summits topple over as if shaken by an earthquake. Thus they look at this day, and thus they were many years ago, when the happy young couple sailed from Spain in the ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... families, races, which tend to raise themselves above the common level; painfully they climb the rugged heights, attain the summits of power, of wealth, of intelligence, of talent, and then, no sooner are they there than they topple down and disappear in gulfs of mental and physical degeneracy." The demographical researches of Hansen ("Die drei Bevolkerungsstufen", Munich, 1889.) (following up and completing Dumont's) tended, indeed, to show that urban as well as feudal aristocracies, burgher ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... felt that if I let that failure stand against me I could never afterward speak in public; and within ten minutes, notwithstanding the protests of my friends, I was back in the hall and beginning my recitation a second time. The audience gave me its eager attention. Possibly it hoped to see me topple off the platform again, but nothing of the sort occurred. I went through the recitation with self-possession and received some friendly applause at the end. Strangely enough, those first sensations of "stage fright" have been experienced, in a lesser degree, in ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... the sill, the ledge inside, the jambs of the door, its edges; stood on the ledge, went through the motions and concluded that I could slam the door shut and not be knocked off into the ooze by its impact or topple off because of the ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... occasionally, on the sidewalks, were there stray pedestrians, and these pedestrians did not loiter. They went their ways with great haste and definiteness, withal there was a curious indecision in their movements, as though they expected the buildings to topple over on them or the sidewalks to sink under their feet or fly up in the air. A few gamins, however, were around, in their eyes a suppressed eagerness in anticipation of wonderful and ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... succeed and prosper in his dealings—so long will all this world's affairs go well with him; and he will grow each day richer and greater and more powerful. But if ever he let one kindly thought for living thing come into his heart, in that moment all his plans and schemes will topple down about his ears; and from that hour his name will be despised ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... and stronger. For the new life must be so regulated that it continually increase and progress, but it must suffer much opposition. For the devil is such a furious enemy that when he sees that we oppose him and attack the old man, and that he cannot topple us over by force, he prowls and moves about on all sides, tries all devices, and does not desist until he finally wearies us, so that we either renounce our faith or yield hands and feet and become listless or impatient. Now to this ...
— The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther
... the carriage window-panes Goes flitting past in furious flight; whole plains With streams and harvest-fields and trees and blue Are swallowed by the whirlpool, whereinto The telegraph's slim pillars topple o'er, Whose wires look ...
— Poems of Paul Verlaine • Paul Verlaine
... Diminish'd to her cock; her cock a buoy Almost too small for sight: the murmuring surge That on the unnumber'd idle pebble chafes Cannot be heard so high.—I'll look no more; Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight Topple down headlong. ...
— The Tragedy of King Lear • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... it) answer me: Though you vntye the Windes, and let them fight Against the Churches: Though the yesty Waues Confound and swallow Nauigation vp: Though bladed Corne be lodg'd, & Trees blown downe, Though Castles topple on their Warders heads: Though Pallaces, and Pyramids do slope Their heads to their Foundations: Though the treasure Of Natures Germaine, tumble altogether, Euen till destruction sicken: Answer me To what ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... hand of a stronger and more expert companion. How soon we learned to do the trick, and what fun there was in "keep the pot a-boiling," while strings of youngsters took the slide. What if some did topple over? No bones were broken, and the incident always caused a ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... guess we'd got into a harbour; but she did not come to an anchor, but sail on and on. Den, looking up through the skylight, I see de boughs ob de green trees oberhead, and a high cliff which seem about to topple down on de deck ob de ship. Still we sail on and on, till at last I hear de anchor let go and de cable run out, and when I come on deck I find de ship in a wide lagoon wid several oder vessels and some large boats, and a village ob huts and sheds under de trees on de shore. I now know dat ...
— The Missing Ship - The Log of the "Ouzel" Galley • W. H. G. Kingston
... he said. He had chosen a spot where the rock rose perpendicularly above the road. "Drop them over," he said, "so that they may fall straight. The biggest you must roll over with your levers, but work them to the edge and let them topple over; don't thrust them out or they will bound over ...
— Won by the Sword - A Story of the Thirty Years' War • G.A. Henty
... finished two new ones last week, stuffed and embroidered within an inch of their lives. There being absolutely no other cushionless place to put them she stood them up against the wall on the stair landing. They topple over half the time and if we come up or down the stairs in the dark we fall over them. Last Sunday, when Dr. Davis prayed for all those exposed to the perils of the sea, I added in thought 'and for all those who live in houses where cushions are loved not wisely but too well!' There! we're ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... vexatious, because I meant that nook for your garden. It is the only place that is sheltered from the wind and at the same time has sunshine and a good outlook. But the wall has thrice been all but finished, and each time the stones have begun to sink and topple. This time Howel the mason was nearly killed. Of course, a feeble bent old woman who can hardly hobble ten rods cannot have undermined a wall at this distance. That is absurd. But the panic the men have got into is not. That wall ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... made and won he felt that silent approbation behind him; insensibly it steadied Ford and sharpened his instinct for reading the faces of the other players, so that the miniature towers of red chips and blue grew higher until they threatened to topple—whereupon other little towers began to grow up around them. And the men in the saloon began to feel the fascination of his success, so that they grouped themselves about his chair and peered down over his shoulder at ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... began to wind her way along like a snake. By the light of her torch Jack saw that the roof threatened at every second to fall in and block the passage. One great stone hung half-released from the grip of its fellows, as if about to topple headlong. The woman went through the tiny space in safety, and then crouched down on the other side and threw the light into the gap to show ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... logs must be close enough together to hold up the pots and pans, and, being round, this leaves too little space between them for the fire to heat the balance evenly; besides, a pot is liable to slip and topple over. A better way, if one has time, is to hew both the inside surfaces and the tops of the logs flat. Space these supports close enough together at one end for the narrowest pot and wide enough apart at the other for ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... lot the first time round, but soon got his equilibrium. He brandished the shears and plunged the points of them into Podgy's belly-wool—also into Podgy's skin. "Bur-UR-R!" Podgy blurted and struggled violently. Dave began to topple about. He dropped the shears. The audience guffawed. Then Dave jumped; but Podgy's horns got caught in his clothes and made trouble. Dave hung on one side of the horse and the sheep dangled on the other. Dave sang out, so ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... said a day will come when the Polar ice shall have accumulated, till it forms vast continents many thousands of feet above the level of the sea, all of solid ice. The weight of this mass will, it is believed, cause the world to topple over on its axis, so that the earth will be upset as an ant-heap overturned by a ploughshare. In that day the icebergs will come crunching against our proudest cities, razing them from off the face of the earth as though they were made of rotten blotting-paper. There is no respect ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... Politi stood so near the edge of a monstrous quarry that it seemed as if it might topple into the abyss at any moment. Our friends were on historic ground, indeed, for these quarries—or latomia, as they are called—supplied all the stone of which the five cities of ancient Syracuse were built—cities which in our age have ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... stimulated and developed in the modern mind, and—what is to be regretted—it has been mostly at the expense of the sense of awe and reverence. We "poke fun" at everything in this country; to whatever approaches the verge of the ridiculous we give a push and topple it over. The fear which all Americans have before their eyes, and which is much stronger than the fear of purgatory, is the fear of appearing ridiculous. We curb and check any eccentricity or marked individuality of manners or dress, lest we expose ourselves to the shafts of ridicule. ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... it was his mortal enemy Sam attacked the unsuspecting palm tree and dealt it such fierce blows that it soon required only a slight exercise of strength to topple ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and the Treasure Cave • Ross Kay
... Saint-Jacques, and, nearer in, the pavilions of the new Louvre and the Tuileries, were crowned by a blaze, which lent them the aspect of sacrificial pyres. The dome of the Invalides was flaring with such brilliancy that you instinctively feared lest it should suddenly topple down and scatter burning flakes over the neighborhood. Beyond the irregular towers of Saint-Sulpice, the Pantheon stood out against the sky in dull splendor, like some royal palace of conflagration reduced to embers. ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... fall in love with Jean Roland and no one else. She is the smallest and the darkest and much the best dressed. I do hope and trust it will be love at first sight. She is already just wild about you, without ever even seeing you, and when she sees you she is sure to topple over completely." ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... enough, although the lower half of it, which was next to the engine-room, was under the water-line. Sam actually found a ladder with hooks at one end of it, and while he was handing it up to us—which was very hard to do, for he had to climb up on all sorts of things—he let it topple over, and the end with the iron hooks fell against the round glass of one of the port-holes. The glass was very thick and strong, but the ladder came down very heavy and shivered it. As bad luck would have it, ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... the window of a filter-maker's shop, close by old Temple Bar. In this window were displayed a number of glass domes, under each of which a little jet of water tossed about a cork ball. The ball would soar sometimes to the roof of the dome and would then topple over, sometimes to be caught midway upon the jet and sometimes to fall to the bottom, but always to be kept drenched and dancing in a melancholy futile way. I was comparing it with myself when a hand was clapped upon my ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... No giant, such as these were, could crowd through that hole. And the hopper was heavy. Applying all his strength to it, he felt it give ever so slightly. It was not bolted down; it was merely balanced there. He would be able to topple it over. And, once over, it would be a difficult affair to handle, especially ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell
... we could see, beyond the Jordan, and away southward to the mountains of Moab and the cliffs of Engaddi, the whole country was covered as with the smoke of a furnace; and the furious sirocco, that threatened to topple us down the gulfs yawning on either hand, had no coolness on its wings. The horses were sure-footed, but now and then a gust would come that made them and us strain against it, to avoid being dashed against the rock on one side, ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... March 4, 1858, Senator Hammond of South Carolina, asked in a speech, "What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years? I will not stop to depict what everyone can imagine, but this is certain: England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her save the South. No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is King[656]." Two years later, writing before the elections of 1860 in which the main question was that of the territorial ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... tell you all about it—to-night, eh?" he said, hastily. He was vastly afraid she might topple over in a swoon. ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... trifle uncomfortable. She had a vague idea the humble-bee was making sport of her. The next moment she was sure of it; for he burst into a deep laugh, and shook so from side to side that she thought he would surely topple off the wisp of hay on which ...
— Dreamland • Julie M. Lippmann
... piking for subs and practicing emergency drills, just to let old Blondy know he can't stop us from coming across—you'd say you were with the Colors! If you stood where I did and saw that little old periscope topple over like a ninepin and heard Tommy say, 'Go get me another apple, Archie—we'll hit 'em again for good luck!'—you'd say you were with the Colors, all right! You might be in the third-line trenches a whole year an' have nothing to do with yourself ...
— Tom Slade with the Colors • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... the subject, he established harmony between the Assembly and Montmorin, and so prevented foreign intervention, at the same time maintaining the honor of France abroad. But this bulwark to the nation's safety was about to topple and fall, precipitated by its own decay. As in all things, Mirabeau had been colossal in his excesses, and like them, the punishment was great. He wished to live, but he did not fear death. Early in 1791 the structure began to weaken, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... me—I have laid hands on a canal—the Rio Giuseppe—all of it—from the beginning of the red wall where the sailors land, along its crookednesses to the side entrance of the Public Garden, and so past the rookeries to the lagoon, where the tower of Castello is ready to topple into the sea. ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... soil; but the other side of the rock, the side that faces the ocean, is barren and deserted, and so steep that the shrubs that grow there have a hard time to remain where they are and look as if they were about to topple over ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... a large, firm berry, and after ripening it would remain on the plant a long time without falling off. These plants grew up in remarkably long canes, but not knowing how to head them back they would often topple over during a heavy storm. This added another valuable lesson to my increasing experience, which resulted in my pinching of the new canes as soon as they had attained a height of from three to four feet. This made the plants more stocky and ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... wrong man. 'No, sir,' said I. 'Find a box for yourself, if you want one.' And I held mine so that he could not see that the bottom of it was glass. Then the captain came along and told him not to try to get down on that hatch, for if he did he would topple into the water and get himself drowned, which would have been certain to happen, for he could not swim. Then the hatch was hauled on deck, and I went below with the captain to his cabin to tell him what I had seen. The stock-broker tried awfully hard to come with us, but ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... cut off the lamps—he's released the platform. God! Look—Foulet!" My voice tore through my throat; my eyes burned with sudden, blinding emotion. In the soft darkness of the starry night I could see the platform waver, topple, rise! It rose straight up, tilting and swaying in the light breeze. What was it Fraser had said? If it was released it would go straight to the stars! ...
— The Floating Island of Madness • Jason Kirby
... and the burning of that bitter indignation; but Jack could not guess at that, and if both felt difficulty in the neatly balanced friendship pledged under the wisteria, if there was a breathlessness for both in the tight-rope performance,—where one false step might topple one over into open hostility, or else, who knew, into complete surrender,—it was Imogen who gained composure from Jack's nervousness, and while he walked the rope with a fluttering breath and an anxious eye she herself could show the most graceful ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... in deep," said David, "so she won't topple, and fix her up to suit yourselves, girls, ...
— Grace Harlowe's Plebe Year at High School - The Merry Doings of the Oakdale Freshmen Girls • Jessie Graham Flower
... mean!" blustered Fred, and coming closer, he hit Nat on the shoulder. At once our hero hit back, and Fred received a thump in the mouth that caused him to topple backwards. ...
— From Farm to Fortune - or Nat Nason's Strange Experience • Horatio Alger Jr.
... thither. Yet, to descend from these speculative comparisons, it seems that thou hast a friendly and meaning purpose in thy warnings. Thou knowest that there are in this armament men who grudge to me whatever I now owe to Fortune, who would topple me from the height to which I did not climb, but was led by the congregated Greeks, and who, while perhaps they are forging arrowheads for the eagle, have sent to place poison and a snare in its distant ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... learning, and happiness; but Mr Lennox became more opposed to the scheme each moment. His one hope was that Mrs Macintyre might turn out to be impossible, in which case these castles in the air would topple to the ground. ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... "Never be in a hurry—-especially don't be in a hurry about answering letters. If you leave things long enough and quiet enough they answer themselves, whereas if you hurry matters balanced on the edge of a precipice, they often topple over instead of settling and remaining ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... soul!" cried Mr. Damon. "It's as much as a man's life is worth to attempt it. If he got dizzy, he'd topple over, and fall a thousand ...
— Tom Swift Among The Diamond Makers - or The Secret of Phantom Mountain • Victor Appleton
... She had seen more than one man dally on the brink, and then topple over to the blankness of despair. Even if she had pitied herself, which she did not, she could have had no mercy on him. Now she was set to her work, and she meant to do it if she brought into play every fascination art and ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... was deceived by his pretension into thinking—you remember that first sermon, Aunt Bell—how independent and noble I thought it was going to be. Oh, Aunt Bell—what a slump in my faith that day! I think its foundations all went, and then naturally the rest of it just seemed to topple. Did you realise it all ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... rather better since we returned." And now Mrs. Corey, as if forced to the point, said bunglingly that the young ladies had wished to come with her, but had been detained. She based her statement upon Nanny's sarcastic demand; and, perhaps seeing it topple a little, she rose hastily, to get away from its fall. "But we shall hope for some—some other occasion," she said vaguely, and she put on a parting smile, and shook hands with Mrs. Lapham and Penelope, and then, after some lingering commonplaces, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... are times when one small nook of earth shuts out, as it were, the whole universe from our eyes, when one personal interest occupies us to the exclusion of the whole world of action, and progress, and speculation, and thought? Thrones may topple over, nationalities be effaced, revolutions in politics, in religion, in science be effected, and all pass unheeded while we sit counting our own private loss and gain in love or friendship, in grief or joy. Whilst Madelon has been wearying out her little heart and ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... such places the stream was engaged at undermining the banks which rose eight and ten feet above the water. Occasional sections, containing tons of earth and covered with tall, slender willow trees, would topple over, falling on the water with the roar of a cannon or a continued salute of cannons; for the falling, once started, quite often extended for half a mile down the stream. At one such place eighteen trees fell in three minutes, and it would ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... seemed about to topple over, at the same time emitting a groan of pain which proved him to be thoroughly human. Helen was frightened, but there was a new kind of awe in this fright. All suggestion of superstition had left her and in its place was the dread that she might ...
— Campfire Girls at Twin Lakes - The Quest of a Summer Vacation • Stella M. Francis
... them, "our friend George bets that when the tower of the Singer Building falls, it will topple over toward the North River, and I bet ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... catastrophe. "All will go on almost of its own accord, so long as foreign affairs are quiet and unbroken," wrote Mirabeau after Frederick's death. "But at the first gunshot or at the first stormy situation the whole of this little scaffolding of mediocrity will topple to the ground. How all these underling Ministers would crumple up! How everyone, from the distracted chief to the convict-gang, would shout for a pilot! Who ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... game in which they pile blocks up to see how high they can go before they topple over. In medieval times, petty rulers in their Italian states vied with one another to see who could build the tallest tower. Some beautiful results of this game still remain in Florence, Siena, and other Italian hill cities. Currently, Americans vie in a similar way with the wheelbase ...
— A Brief History of Element Discovery, Synthesis, and Analysis • Glen W. Watson
... John Buchan and James Winslow, miners working a claim on the Sangre de Christo range, were buried in their cabin beneath a snow slide. It is believed the men are alive although there seems to be small hope of rescuing them on account of an overhanging cliff which may topple at any moment, with the melting snows and crush them out of existence. Rescue parties are ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... off. I linger among its creaking rafters, like the last rat; it will topple down if they don't get some buttresses. They have pulled down three,—Hazlitt, Procter, and their best stay, kind, light-hearted Wainewright, their Janus. [1] The best is, neither of our fortunes is concerned ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... scoundrel. There's Larion, another rich one at Dubetchnya, and I bet he strips the bark off your trees as much as any poor one; and he is a foul-mouthed fellow; his children are the same, and when he has had a drop too much he'll topple with his nose in a puddle and sleep there. They are all a worthless lot, Madam. If you live in a village with them it is like hell. It has stuck in my teeth, that village has, and thank the Lord, the King of Heaven, I've ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... neither glide nor shuffle fits his gait any more accurately. It was simply a walk with the least possible waste of energy. It fitted Dr. Holmes's definition of walking as forward motion to prevent falling. And yet Field never gave you the impression that he was about to topple over. His legs always acted as if they were weary and would like to lean their master up against something. As to what that something might be, he would probably have ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... journey, crawls slowly up the first six miles to the summit of the intervening range at the Cross Foxes Inn, and jolts swiftly down the other six miles, with red hot drag creaking and groaning lugubriously, till it seems to topple over sheer into the sea at the clambering High Street of the old borough. As you turn to descend the seaward slope at the Cross Foxes, you appear to leave modern industrial England and the nineteenth century well ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... centre of the stream by a way of his own, and we ran down to the stepping-stones by which we had come, in order to save the time which we should have been compelled to waste in feeling for a foothold as we went. Every second was of importance, and I fully expected to see Dennis topple unconscious into the pool below before I should be able to save him. I knew what it was exactly; he was going through my own horrible experience of "drowning on dry land," to quote Garnesk's vigorous phrase. Imagine my astonishment, therefore, when I reached Dennis's side ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... roof of the castle was established a sort of furnace for heating water or oil, to be poured down upon the besiegers; and crowbars lay there in readiness to loosen out and dislodge the battlements, and topple them over ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... rise, but sank back dizzily. The room seemed to become suddenly dark. She feared she would topple over ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Ocean View - Or, The Box That Was Found in the Sand • Laura Lee Hope
... Windermere. The coach was greatly overburdened with outside passengers,—fifteen in all, besides the four insiders, and one of the fifteen formed the apex of an immense pile of luggage on the top. It seems to me miraculous that we did not topple over, the road being so hilly and uneven, and the driver, I suspect, none the steadier for his visits to all the tap-rooms along the route from Cockermouth. There was a tremendous vibration of the coach now and then; and I saw that, in ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... tops of almost all our mountains, and they are all called "men". At the bottom of the Carrock Man I seated myself for shelter, but the wind became so fearful and tyrannous, that I was apprehensive some of the stones might topple down upon me, so I groped my way farther down and came to three rocks, placed on this wise 1/32*** each one supported by the other like a child's house of cards, and in the hollow and screen which they made, I sate for a long while sheltered, as if I had been ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... minute to call out that it was time for me to go away. I was not sorry to leave Dubechnia, my sorrow was for my love, for which it seemed that autumn had already begun. What a tremendous happiness it is to love and to be loved, and what a horror it is to feel that you are beginning to topple down from ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... thought, truth or motion can be defined. Who has answered the question, "What is truth?" Man cannot see God and live. We cannot go so far back upon ourselves as to undermine our own foundations; if we try to do so we topple over, and lose that very reason about which we vainly try to reason. If we let the foundations be, we know well enough that they are there, and we can build upon them in all security. We cannot, then, define reason nor crib, cabin and confine ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... the morning, when the queen receives the homage of her subjects. She gets her presents, and there are pretty speeches made to her, and she has her dainty feast and her crown of flowers. Yes, that time is the crown of the day, and that is just the moment when the poor little queen shall topple down. The throne shall be knocked from under her; the presents will vanish; the sovereignty will cease to exist. Poor, poor little queen without a kingdom! How will you like it, Paulie? Do you think you could bear it? To have no kingdom and no crown and no presents ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... shadows; the prison-gloom is sealed on Porphyro's face,—power and purpose indomitable; just as the "gruesome Emperor" is to-day, we find him in that book,—dark in the midst of his glory, as enduring as a Ninevite sculpture, strong and inscrutable as the Sphinx. But his heights topple over with this world's decline, while the other builds for the eternal aeons. Rodomant,—did one fail to find his identity, they would yet recognize him in those old prints, the listening head bent forwards, the features like ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... though, topple into any flour barrels. It was Sue who had the next accident at the corner grocery, and this is ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue Keeping Store • Laura Lee Hope
... we never felt so silly in our lives. Poor bandit, he was just one of those figures that sit in a chair and are pelted with baseballs, three shots for a dime. "Every time you hit the nigger!" That's what the man used to call. When some one hit him a good hard crack he'd topple off the seat and then the man would give you a kewpie doll or maybe an ash-tray. The poor old wooden "nigger" had been packed away and all we had seen was his black face sticking up above ...
— Roy Blakeley's Bee-line Hike • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... hard, disagreeable work, requiring little intelligence. Most of the people of the world are unintelligent—unfit to do any other work. If it were not done by them it would not be done, and it is the basic work. Withdraw them from it and the whole superstructure would topple and fall. Yet there is too little of the work, and there are so many incapable of doing anything else that adequate return is out of the question. For the laboring class there is no hope of an existence that is comfortable in comparison with that of the other class; ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... whale indeed among fishes, a world-bearing monster, who fancieth that all the affairs of this earth rest upon his shoulders. 'Tis a cup which our gallant knight will soon spill for him. Hold fast, fair ladies, for the globe is about to topple from ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... distortion of look and limb, are depicted as staggering under the weight of falling buildings, and being overwhelmed in the ruins; upheaving masses of rock, and burying themselves beneath; vainly striving to sustain the pillars of heavy roofs that topple down upon their heads; and, in a word, undergoing and doing every kind of mad and demoniacal destruction. The figures are immensely large, and exaggerated to the utmost pitch of uncouthness; the colouring is harsh and disagreeable; and the whole effect more like (I should imagine) a violent ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... other, gallant fellow! reined about in wide, sweeping circle, and turned back to meet his running comrade. They saw him bend to lend a helping hand, saw him bend still lower as three of the Indians leaped from their ponies and, kneeling, loosed their rifles all at once; saw him topple out of saddle, and his stricken horse, with flapping rein, trot aimlessly about a moment before he, too, went floundering in his tracks; saw the other soldier turn to face his fate by his dying comrade's side, fighting to the last, overwhelmed and borne down by the rush of red warriors. ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... that must have been a heavy blow for you, my poor ALINE. I can understand that your spirits can never be really high again. And then for poor Master Builder SOLNESS to be so taken up with that Miss WANGEL as he was—that, too, was so wretched for you. To see him topple off the tower, as he did that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 11, 1893 • Various
... aunt, "in the next street to ours there is a miserable building, that looks as if it were just going to topple over; and away up in the third story, in a little room just under the eaves, live two poor, lonely old women. They are both nearly on to ninety. I was in there day before yesterday. One of them is constantly confined to her bed with ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... pilasters, porticos and colonnades, cornices and battlements, flanked here and there with tall outstanding towers, and crowned with spires so slender that it seemed as though a breath of air would suffice to topple them from their foundations. To accomplish the object for which we had come so far, it seemed necessary that we should ascend this butte. The day was perfectly clear and intensely hot, the mercury standing at 92 degrees in the shade, and the red sandstone, out of ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... blot upon the fair face of nature; but it is our sympathy for our kind that makes us think so. If the trees were sympathetic beings, not a poor crippled specimen of humanity would have their pity, but the gnarled and half-rotten giants of the forest, threatening to topple down with every breeze; whilst to our eyes the dying tree, covered with moss and ferns, and, maybe, clasped by climbing vines, is a picturesque and pleasing sight. So, the fishes would pity their comrades caught by the kingfisher, the birds those in the claws of the hawk—every ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... the beanstalk which cut it half in two. The ogre felt the beanstalk shake and quiver so he stopped to see what was the matter. Then Jack gave another chop with the axe, and the beanstalk was cut in two and began to topple over. Then the ogre fell down and broke his crown, and ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... independent girl without any illusions, who is in so many cases the child of such a mother, and who is in revolt so complete from all that mother's traditions, so highly set on the crown of every opposite principle, that nature vindicates itself by the possibility that she may at any moment topple over and become again what her mother was. He would have been a bold man, however, who in the present stage would have prophesied any such fate for Dolly Prestwich, who between working at Whitechapel, attending on a ward in St. Thomas's, drawing three days a week in the Slade School, and other ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... up to him to jump off his horse, seize the steer by a horn and the muzzle, then stoop down and grip the animal's upper lip with his teeth, turn his hands loose, and so by means of his powerful jaws and neck alone throw down and topple the steer over. The negro took many chances, and often the huge steer would fall on him in such a way as would have broken the neck or ribs of any ordinary white man. In this case also the steer must be an ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... were interrupted by a terrific explosion in such close proximity to us that it caused us to jump, and was followed by a deafening crash of falling masonry. From the lattice we saw the high handsome minaret of the palace topple and fall amid a dense smoke and shower of stones. Our men had undermined it and ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... quite well that your house, with all that therein is, stands on the edge of a precipice, and that at any moment a landslip might topple it over into everlasting ruin. And yet you behave as though your house was planted in the midst of a vast and secure plain, sheltered from every imaginable havoc. I speak metaphorically, of course. It is not a material precipice that your house stands on ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... hats—very fine beaux, indeed; and the women stiffly encased in the most uncomfortable garments that ever the wit of mortal devised, holding their heads erect, lest the marvellous pyramids, built up with such expenditure of time and money, should topple over, and, in spite of all disadvantages, looking pretty and piquant. It was a crowd not so far removed from us by time, so that we can attribute to the men and women who composed it the same feelings and sensibilities as our own. And yet they were very far removed ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... The blow was square in the face; it jarred every bone; the world seemed to topple. His mother, rising from her chair, choked slightly, and hurried to join the nurse, who was already on her way upstairs. Cora sent an affectionate laugh across the table to ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... Lanier. Longfellow, who remains even to-day the most popular of our poets, was still in full swing. Lowell was in his prime. Thus it appears that public appreciation, and not creative power, was the first to trip and topple down the slopes of the Parnassian hill. Not until then did ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... so weak as to be scarcely equal to the exertion of getting over the side into the life-buoy or bag, and he was so tall that, despite the efforts he made to double himself together, there was so much of him above the machine that he had a tendency to topple over. This would have mattered nothing if he had possessed even a moderate degree of power to hold on, but his hands were as weak as those of a child. However, the case being desperate, he made the attempt, and was sent away from ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... fair or foul, a ship is generally quick to leave the company of so dangerous a neighbor as an iceberg. Sometimes great masses of ice take a notion to topple over, and, looking at the matter in what light you please, I think that they are not to ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... (much) tro. Tool ilo. Tooth dento. Toothless sendenta. Top (summit) supro. Top (peak) pinto. Top (of head) verto. Topaz topazo. Topic subjekto. Topmost plejsupra. Topography topografio. Topple fali. Topsy-turvy, to turn renversi. Topsy-turvy renversita—ite. Toque cxapo. Torch torcxo. Toreador toreadoro. Torment turmenti. Torment turmento—ado. Torpedo torpedo. Torpedo boat torpedboato. Torpid ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... of youth have come again!" And, from that day to this, no man has ever seen the three Gray Sisters, nor does any one know what became of them. But the winds still whistle through their cheerless cave, and the cold waves murmur on the shore of the wintry sea, and the ice mountains topple and crash, and no sound of living creature is heard in all ...
— Old Greek Stories • James Baldwin
... are transformed into cliffs and caves and towers and minarets. These two aspects of mountain scenery have been seized by painters, and in their art two classes of mountains are represented: mountains with towering forms that seem ready to topple in the first storm, and mountains in masses that seem to frown defiance at the tempests. Both classes have told the truth. The two aspects are sometimes caught by our painters severally; sometimes they are combined. Church paints a mountain like a kingdom of glory. Bierstadt paints a mountain ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... is blocked by a recent landslide, and we plunge unto it. We have to tear our feet out of the soft and clinging earth, lifting them high at each step. Then, when this crossing is laboriously accomplished, we topple down again into the slippery stream, in the bottom of which are two narrow ruts, boot-worn, which hold one's foot like a vice, and there are pools into which it goes with a great splash. In one place we must stoop very ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... throws off with more facility and safety those crude and dangerous humours which must at times arise in all human communities. The march of revolution must here at least be orderly. We are preserved from those reckless and tempestuous sallies that in other countries, like a whirlwind, topple down in an instant an ancient crown, or sweep away an illustrious aristocracy. This constitution, which has secured order, has consequently promoted civilisation; and the almost unbroken tide of progressive amelioration has made us the freest, the wealthiest, and the ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... caress thee [Perceval shrinks]; but believe Before five more have joined the shotten years Whose useless films infest the foggy Past, Traced thick with teachings glimpsed unheedingly, The rawest Dynast of the group concerned Will, for the good or ill of mute mankind, Down-topple to the dust like soldier Saul, And Europe's mouldy-minded oligarchs Be propped anew; while garments roll in blood To confused noise, with burning, and fuel of fire. Nations shall lose their noblest in the strife, And tremble at the ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... felling this forest monarch before the arrival of the Matabili. The latter could not be far-off, and every exertion was made to get the fortress ready for receiving the attack. There was a doubt as to the direction the tree would take in falling. Should it topple over into the water, their labour would be lost, and the way would be open for the Matabili to reach them by a rush. Should it fall across the isthmus, it would form an insurmountable barrier to their enemies. In silence and with intense interest did the Makololo stand watching ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... Western Kansas, in the early Eighties, I saw a loaded four-horse wagon skid and topple in ...
— The Mintage • Elbert Hubbard
... without reason. He had wronged this woman, not with direct intention it was true, but nevertheless he had wronged her; and her presence here could mean nothing less than that fate had selected this spot for the reckoning. She could topple down his carefully reared schemes with the same ease with which he had blown over hers. And to him these schemes were life to his breath and salt to his blood, everything. What was one woman? cynically. "Yes, it is I," in the tongue ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... in the ribs, but Tommy was as white as death and did not even feel it. Something had happened, something that made him feel giddy and very sick. That significant silence was to him nothing short of tragedy. He had seen his hero topple at a touch from the high pinnacle on which he had placed him, and he felt as if the very ground under his feet had become ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... Whatever he might have said or done at the time, it was entirely too late to go back on his conduct now. One event had followed on the heels of another until to slip out a single stone of the structure he had built up would topple over the ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... them, but something which flashed a wild hope through me. Some little distance back a tree hung over the sandy bottom, its roots partially laid bare by the washing of the stream which had now disappeared. The trunk was inclined at a sharp angle; but little force would be needed, I thought, to topple it over until it lay athwart the path which the pursuers must follow. Its foliage was thick, and though I did not flatter myself 'twould put an end to the pursuit, I thought it might serve as a check, and enable Uncle Moses to gain strength ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
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