"Handsbreadth" Quotes from Famous Books
... most trying time of the whole march. Before them lay a broad sheet of water, covering what was known as the Horse Shoe Plain; the floods had made it a shallow lake four miles across, unbroken by so much as a handsbreadth of dry land. On its farther side was a dense wood. Clark led breast high in the water with fifteen or twenty of the strongest men next him. About the middle of the plain the cold and exhaustion told so on the weaker men that the canoes had to take ... — The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... young wheat, And dusky ewes with white lambs in the sun Lay in the valley plain between the hosts Of Israel and Philistia. And on this day Jonathan learnt utter reproach, and love. There on the plain Goliath stood alone, Poised in his mighty bulk, with black locks flowing, A handsbreadth taller even than Saul the king Who shouldered it above the men of Israel, And beat his words of sure defiance out, Ringing across the windless noon. And all Israel heard, and fear was on them, ... — Preludes 1921-1922 • John Drinkwater
... a small house in a street turning up from the Strand, a confined little house of the ordinary lodging-house sort, with a handsbreadth of gravel and shrubs in front, and from the sitting-room window up stairs a side-glance at the sea. From a few words that Mr. Gardiner dropped, Bessie learned that it was theirs for twelve months, until the following ... — The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr |