"Cottony" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... restless behaviour, that they found themselves as much out of their element on these furry materials as on the smooth surface of a bit of straw. I ought to have expected this: had I not just seen them wandering without pause upon the everlastings enveloped with cottony flock? If reaching the shelter of a downy surface were enough to make them believe themselves safe in harbour, nearly all would perish, without further attempts, in the down of ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... grasses and Carices: of woolly or hairy once, Anemone, Artemisia, Myosotis, Draba, Potentilla, and several Compositae, etc.] growing in matted tufts level with the ground. The greater portion had no woolly covering; nor did I find any of the cottony species of Saussurea, which are so common on the wetter mountains to the southward. Some most delicate-flowered plants even defy the biting winds of these exposed regions; such are a prickly ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... destructive of timber, occasioned by a fungus, the Merulius lachrymans, which softens wood and finally destroys it; it resembles a dry pithy cottony substance, whence the name dry-rot, though when in a perfect state, its sinuses contain drops of clear water, which have given rise to its specific Latin name. Free ventilation and cleanliness appear to be the best preservatives ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... 181.).—Cordially do I agree with every word of your correspondent LAUDATOR TEMPORIS ACTI, and especially as to the prayer-books for churches and chapels, printed by the Universities. Experto crede, no solicitude can preserve their "flimsy, brittle, and cottony" leaves, as he justly entitles them, from rapid destruction. Might not the delegates of the University presses be persuaded to give us an edition with the morning and evening services printed on vellum, instead of the miserable ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851 • Various
... coast a curtain of exploding shells stretched straight across the debris of what had been a meadow—a long line of livid obscurity split with flame and storms of driving sand and gravel. Shrapnel leisurely unfolded its cottony coils overhead and the iron ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... about the hips. Here, if anywhere, the Hebrew ladies endeavored to pour out the whole pomp of their splendor—both as to materials and workmanship. Belts from three to four inches broad, of the most delicate cottony substance, were chosen as the ground of this important part of female attire. The finest flowers of Palestine were here exhibited in rich relief, and in their native colors, either woven in the loom, or ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... inquiry proceeding from half a dozen reluctant throats, more or less cottony and muffled, in those various degrees of grievance and mental distress which indicate too early roused young womanhood. The eventual reply seemed to be affirmative, albeit accompanied with a suppressed ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... When he awoke again, he discovered to his surprise that he had been walking in his sleep. He had an empty canteen over his shoulder and he was bareheaded. His head ached and throbbed, his tongue and throat felt dry and cottony; he seemed to have been wandering in a weary land for a long time, for no definite ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... like a panic, in the fear that the orange and lemon culture in Southern California would be a failure. The enemies were the black, the red, and the white scale. The latter, the icerya purchasi, or cottony cushion scale, was especially loathsome and destructive; whole orchards were enfeebled, and no way was discovered of staying its progress, which threatened also the olive and every other tree, shrub, and flower. Science was called on to discover its ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... was in process of construction. Adopting my usual tactics of secreting myself near by, I had the satisfaction of seeing the tiny artist at work. It was the female, unassisted by her mate. At intervals of two or three minutes she would appear with a small tuft of some cottony substance in her beak, dart a few times through and around the tree, and alighting quickly in the nest, arrange the material she had brought, using her ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... was cold without, and hot in the room where they sat, and the color on his cheeks resembled dabs of vermilion on buffers of old white leather; the tufts of hair above his ears had dwindled to mere cottony scraps. ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... just to keep those children from completing the work of destruction. Six little motherless ones—only think—and as bad as they can possibly be; for poor Lucilla was no manager. Isn't it strange, the influence those little cottony women get over their husbands? You and I might try forever to establish such absolute despotism, all in vain. It is your whimpering sort that rule with the waving of a pocket-handkerchief; but poor, dear little woman, she is powerless now; ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... again, and signing to his men to follow, they all began to tramp up the steep track leading toward the Hoze, with the rabbits scuttling away among the furze, and showing their white cottony tails for a moment as they ...
— Cutlass and Cudgel • George Manville Fenn
... produced from his resting place on a top shelf. At first glance he appeared to consist entirely of a very gaunt, cadaverous head and a sizable hump, but on being spread out he was found to possess a dark brown, unwholesome-looking body made of thick, cottony cloth. ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... behind us came a "Whr-r-rong !" and out over the sunny fields a shell went milling away to send back a faint report and show a puff of cotton above the trenches to the right. It was a bit short—the next fell better. Another nod, another "Whr-r-row?/" from somewhere behind us, and this time the cottony puff was just short of the clump of trees where the Russians had concealed their battery. I picked up the spot through the glass and— one might have known !—there was One of those eternal peasants calmly swinging his scythe about fifty ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... form that attacks the vine, and kills or maims the plant terribly, by sucking the vital juices on their way up into the fresh-forming foliage. The 'American blight' on apple trees is yet another member of the same family, a wee creeping cottony creature that hides among the fissures of the bark, and drives its very long beak far down into the green sappy layer underlying the dead outer covering. In fact, almost all the best-known 'blights' and bladder-forming insects are aphides of ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... were, so to speak, the mere outlying flakes, the feathery curls, of the balmy cirro-cumulus, whose huge bulk arose out of the bowels of the ship itself. Up and down, in and out, here and there, into every chink and crevice, rolled the blue-white incense-cloud, dense as the cottony puff at the mouths of the guns in Vernet's "Siege of Algiers." Or you might say that these were but the flying-buttresses, the floriated pinnacles, the frets, and the gargoyles of a great frowzy cathedral lying vast ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... wooden floors laid down. The winters are bitter here, and before these Chinese houses can be made comfortable according to Western ideas, much must be done to them. Some foreigners put in glass windows in place of the thick, cottony paper windows of the Chinese. The paper windows shut out the cold, it is true, but, being opaque, they also shut out the sunlight. And how gorgeously they are furnished! Such ebony chairs, such wonderful carved tables! Now and then we ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... quaint three-lobed leaves, shaped like a grebe's foot, were still small, and the flowerstocks, thick as corn in a field, were crowned with pyramids of buds, cream and rosy-red like the opening dropwort clusters, and at the lower end of the spikes were the full-blown singular, snow-white, cottony flowers—our ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... danger from the spears and arrows was less, a new peril presented itself. This was from the blow guns. The curious weapons shot small arrows, tipped with tufts of a cottony substance in place of feathers, and could be sent for a long distance. The barbs were not strong enough to pierce the tough fabric of the gas bag, as a spear or arrow would have done, but there was more danger from them to our ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton
... as if she spoke to my soul, very quietly and very earnestly, seeking to give the truth. "Something cottony in that cloth of yours," she said. "I know there's something horrible in being swung round by things like that, but they did swing me round. In the old time—to have confessed that! And I hated Clayton—and ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... chairs, their dingy crimson plush backs protected by elaborate thread antimacassars, seemed to hold and reflect the misfortunes of their owner. Jeremy picked up an ostrich egg, painted with a clump of viciously green coconut palms and a cottony surf; he put it down with an absent smile and impatiently fingered a volume of "The Life of Harriet Atwood Newell." She was one of the missionaries who had gone out on the Caravan, with Augustine Heard, to India, but forbidden ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer |
