"Cracking" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from papa, you ass! and his jolly friends,' said the young lady, vigorously cracking a hunting-whip, which she habitually carried in her hand. 'I'm as good judge of horseflesh ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... she said at last, "that means something that one has not, and that is to come—is it so?" "Something that one never has, and that never comes," muttered the old man, wearily cracking the flints in two; "something that one possesses in one's sleep, and that is farther off each time that one awakes; and yet a thing that one sees always, sees even when one lies a dying they say—for ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... but that was not what happened. As soon as the drover returned, the cattle were rounded up in a hollow between two sand-hills. For a time the dust increased to such an extent that nothing could be seen; but by the shouting and whip-cracking it was evident that the men were ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... resemble brooms, and planted on pedestals of chalk, and a few other points, do not edify me. The French Opera, which I have heard to-night, disgusted me as much as ever; and the more for being followed by the Devin de Village, which shows that they can sing without cracking the drum of one's ear. The scenes and dances are delightful; the Italian comedy charming. Then I am in love with treillage and fountains, and will prove it at Strawberry. Chantilly is so exactly what it was when ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... Tai-yue was bent upon cracking melon seeds, saying nothing but simply pursing up her lips and smiling, when, strange coincidence, Hsueeh Yen, Tai-yue's waiting-maid, walked in and handed her mistress ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... cracking and snapping all around us; we thought it was dangerous and were afraid to be in the woods. Still we thought we would run the risk and follow the deer. They ran but a little ways, stopped and waited until we came in sight, then ...
— The Bark Covered House • William Nowlin
... sure I will give this youngster a slight injection. Pity you hadn't held him with the double arm-lock instead of cracking him over the head. Herr Kapitan Schwalbe won't want to be troubled with a ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... feel the cold, and made little cracking noises as if they were shivering. Jeanne lay shaking with cold; twice she got up to put more logs on the fire, and to pile her petticoats and dresses on the bed, but nothing seemed to make her any warmer. There were nervous twitchings in ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... of renovation, which is but the challenge of the infinitely precious principle of duration, one is still moved to say that the prime result of one's contemplative strolls in the dusky alleys of such a place is an ineffable sense of disrepair. Everything is cracking, peeling, fading, crumbling, rotting. No young Sienese eyes rest upon anything youthful; they open into a world battered and befouled with long use. Everything has passed its meridian except the brilliant facade of the cathedral, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... artist did not obey her command, she pressed the button herself. The cracking of her bones could be heard as she wrapped herself up ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... dear boy, keep your papers in order. I find a dissertation on 'The Commerce of Carthage' stuck in my large paper copy of 'Dibdin's Decameron,' and an 'Essay on the Metaphysics of Music' (pray, my dear fellow, beware of magazine scribbling) cracking the back ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... full-breasted pigeon, with his head thrown back, and was continually in the act of wriggling his long chin into his ample neckerchief. He could not ask you how do you do, or say in answer to that question, "I thank you, sare, very well," without stamping prettily with his foot, as if cracking a snail, and tossing his chin into the air as if he were going to balance a ladder upon it. Then, though his features were compressed into a small, monkeyfied compass, they were themselves, individually, upon a magnificent scale. It was as if there ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... wagonmaster the teams were doubled, two of the wagons being left in the valley till the others should reach the summit, when the teams were to be brought back. When they came to the long and hard pull, the drivers gave us a good sample of army wagoning, their yelling and cracking of whips keeping up a continual chorus, and at specially hard points the quartermaster and wagon-master joined in the music like the baying of a pack of hounds, while the horses seemed to be stimulated to almost ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... Catherine, her voice cracking with rising hysteria. "A girl! . . . For eight generations the first-born has been a son. And the ninth is a girl! The daughter of a foreign dancing-woman! . . . God has indeed taken your punishment into His ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... brought all his weight to bear upon it. There was a dull, cracking sound and a sort of rasping. ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... we pulled into Quito, she did what she'd done before—vanished. Sarah never believes me when I say how relieved I felt to be quit of her. But it was not to be. I got to my 'dobe house and managed a cracking fine dinner my cook had ready for me. She was mostly Spiggoty and half Indian, and her name was Paloma.— Now, Sarah, haven't I told you she was older'n a grandmother, and looked more like a buzzard than a dove? Why, I couldn't bear to eat with her around where I could look at ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... him for a friend: 'I beg your pardon, I thought I knew you—but I'm glad I don't.' It was humor in the Southern orator, John Wise, to liken the pleasure of spending an evening with a Puritan girl to that of sitting on a block of ice in winter, cracking ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... over and has cracked. If you get an opportunity of walking over a clay field during a dry summer, you will find similar but much larger cracks, some of which may be two or three inches wide, or even more. Sometimes the cracking is so bad that the roots of plants or of trees are torn by it, and even buildings, in some instances, have suffered through their foundations shrinking away. {11} We can now understand why some of our model bricks cracked. The cracks were caused ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... in the other arm, being thus encumbered—for it did not occur to him that he could throw away his bundle, he was so poor—he tripped and fell. His foot caught; it is unknown in what,—in a twisted tie, or perhaps in a crevice of the cracking earth. ...
— A Lost Hero • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward and Herbert D. Ward
... care? You can't care! What is it to you that a drunken beast slinks back into hell again? Do you think you are Samaritan enough to follow him and try to drag him out by the ears?... A man whose very brain is already cracking with it all—a burnt-out thing with ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... that something had happened in his favor, and was quick to respond. With his first jump of relief the deacon suddenly revived, his hopes came fast again, his blood retingled, he gathered himself, and, cracking his lines, he shot forward, and three minutes later he had passed the squire as though he were hitched to the fence. For a quarter of a mile the squire made heroic efforts to recover his vanished prestige, but effort was useless, and finally concluding that he was practically ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... the strain and tension that I could feel the beating of my horse's heart beneath me. The suspense was finally broken by one or two shots in rapid succession, and as the sound died away, the voice of Juan Leal rang out distinctly: "Cuidado por el toro!" and the next moment there was a cracking of brush and a pale dun ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... coat, sallied forth into the street. His first destination was intended to be the Governor's mansion, and, as he walked along, certain thoughts concerning the Governor's daughter would keep whirling through his head, so that almost he forgot where he was, and took to smiling and cracking jokes to himself. ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... he perceived that the roadway was now a crying mass of wagons, teams, and men. From the heaving tangle issued exhortations, commands, imprecations. Fear was sweeping it all along. The cracking whips bit and horses plunged and tugged. The white-topped wagons strained and stumbled in ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... silence as of death reigned in the mine; then there was a sharp cracking explosion, followed—or rather, prolonged—by another like thunder, and, while a flash of fire seemed to surround them, filling the air, firing their clothes, and scorching their limbs, the whole mine shook with a deep continuous roaring. The men knew that ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... the scrub and desert in front of the troops. The enemy's scouts, however, were never disclosed in the radii of the electric beams. In fact, the first notice we had that the dervishes were about to inspect our environment was the impetuous incoming of our friendlies from Jebel Surgham and the cracking of snipers' guns in the bush mingled with the buzzing of bullets overhead. A battalion rose quietly from the ground, for the troops slept clear of the hedge, and went forward a few paces to man the zereba. On learning what was actually ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... silence of our conflicting glances was unbroken for several seconds, and then words came uncontrollably from my mouth and I managed to snap that nerve-cracking tension. ...
— The Homicidal Diary • Earl Peirce
... monarch her master: that she had thoughts which his brains could never master, and was the better of the two; quite separate from my lord although tied to him, and bound as almost all people (save a very happy few) to work all her life alone. My lord sat in his chair, laughing his laugh, cracking his joke, his face flushing with wine—my lady in her place over against him—he never suspecting that his superior was there, in the calm resigned lady, cold of manner, with downcast eyes. When he was merry in his cups, he would ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... round and borrowed some pins, and pinned up my shirt tail as well as I could. I then went into the dance, and told the fiddler to play me a jig. Che, che, che, went the fiddle, when the banjo responded with a thrum, thrum, thrum, with the loud cracking of the bone player. I seized a little Sambo gal, and round and round the room we went, my money and my buttons going jingle, jingle, jingle, seemed to take a lively part with the music, and to my great satisfaction every eye seemed to be upon me, and I ...
— Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green, a Runaway Slave, from Kentucky • Jacob D. Green
... But a cracking sounded in the direction of the rocks; and the most elevated of them, after rocking to and fro, rebounded to the bottom. In fact, if they were immovable on the side of the Barbarians—for it would have been necessary to urge them up an incline plane, and they were, ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... saying; "but all the same I don't think you are. After you've shown me, it's just like that egg Columbus stood up on end, after cracking the shell a bit—as easy as jumping off a log, once you know how. But now we're in here, I hope we find out the truth ...
— The Saddle Boys of the Rockies - Lost on Thunder Mountain • James Carson
... strong. But with a heavy axe and a stout arm there is no need for that. I had begun this weapon," continued the youth, as if he were musing aloud rather than speaking to his companion, "with intent to try its metal on the head of the King; but I fear me it will be necessary to use it in cracking a viking's headpiece before ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... be found to have acquired a beautiful color, often even more brilliant than that of a companion fruit left on the vine. Enclosing the fruit while on the vine and about half grown in paper bags has been recommended, and it often results in deeper and more even coloring and prevents injury from cracking, but the fruit so ripened, while more beautiful, is not so well flavored as that ripened in the sun. But Americans are said to taste with their eyes, so that in this country, fruit of this beautiful color will often out-sell that which is of better flavor ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy
... him sair, that day, I trow, Wi' Sir George Hearoune of Schipsydehouse; Because we were not men enow, They counted us not worth a louse. Sir George was gentle, meek, and douse, But he was hail and het as fire; And yet, for all his cracking crouse[147], He rewd the raid ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... there was only one left to laugh at all his companions. Two nights more passed, and he saw nothing; but on the third he came rushing from the garden to the other two before the house, in such an agitation that they declared—for it was their turn now—that the band of his helmet was cracking under his chin with the rising of his hair inside it. Running with him into that part of the garden which I have already described, they saw a score of creatures, to not one of which they could ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... night had ceased—the snapping of the leafless branches, the cracking of the earth, and the heaving of the rocks: the Spirits of the Frost had finished their work; and just as the grey forehead of dawn appeared beyond the cold hills, Antoine cried out gently: "Angelique . . . Ah, mon Capitaine . . . Jesu" . . ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... me while my hair was being dressed. I trembled to such a degree from head to foot, and the rustling of the curl-papers as the man twisted them in my hair almost drove me distracted, for it sounded like a forest cracking and rattling in a storm. After the performance, my limbs ached as if I had been beaten across them with an iron bar, and I could scarcely stand or support myself for exhaustion and fatigue. This, however, was only ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... we nearer the scarlet-runner state of existence, Mrs. Molly?" he asked me before I had finished tying the blouse, in the nicest voice in the world, fairly cracking with friendship and good humour and hateful things like that. Why I should have wanted him to get huffy over that letter is more than I can say. But I did; and ...
— The Melting of Molly • Maria Thompson Daviess
... increases as we reach Rohri and Sukhar, where passengers are transferred by ferry across the Indus; the country seems a veritable furnace, cracking and blistering with heat. At Sukhar our train glides through some rich date-palms, the origin of which, legend says, were the date-stones thrown away by the soldiers of Alexander the Great. They seem to have taken root in congenial soil, anyway, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... junk-shops, pawnbrokers' cellars, and old women's garrets seemed all to have disgorged themselves here. A huge stack of calico comforters, their tufts gray with dust and cobwebs, lay on top of two old ploughs, in one corner: kegs of nails, boxes of soap, rolls of leather, harnesses stiff and cracking with age, piles of books, chairs, bedsteads, andirons, tubs, stone ware, crockery ware, carpets, files of old newspapers, casks, feather-beds, jars of druggists' medicines, old signboards, rakes, spades, school-desks,—in ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... them all to keep them busy the whole day, and they soon got to work at them, and such a popping and cracking began, as frightened all the cats and dogs about ...
— Aunt Fanny's Story-Book for Little Boys and Girls • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... couple of hot pitaties." And when he accepted the invitation without much alacrity, as if he had something else on his mind, she picked for him out of the steam two of the biggest potatoes, whose earth-coloured skins, cracking, showed a fair flouriness within; and she shook a little heap of salt, the only relish she had, on to the chipped white plate as she handed it to him, saying, "Sit you down be the fire there, and git ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... duel! He must have a fight with someone to prove his courage. It was a disgrace that he had no enemies, but he would try to make some when he returned to the Peninsula. Continuing these vagaries of his imagination, excited by the cracking detonations, he pretended an affair of honor. His adversary wounded him with the first shot and he fell. He still had his pistol in his hand; he must defend himself while stretched on the ground; and to the great scandal of his mother and of Mammy Antonia who thought ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Father Antonio that Seraphina had been carried away to her own apartments in a fainting condition. The excellent man was almost incoherent with distress and trouble of mind, and walked up and down, his big head drooping on his capacious chest, the joints of his entwined fingers cracking. I had met him in the gallery, as I was making my way back to Carlos' room in anxiety and fear, and we had stepped aside into a large saloon, seldom used, above the gateway. I shall never forget the restless, swift pacing of that burly figure, while, feeling utterly ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... was so pleased with Jane for cracking up the doctor, that she gave her five shillings; and, after that, used to talk to her a great deal more than to the cook, which judicious conduct presently set ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... before within the walls of Grosville Park. Nor had the lips of any English girl ever dealt there with a poetic diction so unchastened and unashamed. Lady Grosville might well feel as though the solid frame of things were melting and cracking round her. ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... game. Some like one, some another. Soccer is a cracking good game, and can be played any time that the ground ...
— Owen Clancy's Happy Trail - or, The Motor Wizard in California • Burt L. Standish
... late, and it is doubtful if Chester, thoroughly aroused as he was, would have released his victim anyhow. There was a sound of cracking glass, as Duval's head was forced against the window pane, and Chester, hearing it, released his hold and ...
— The Boy Allies in the Trenches - Midst Shot and Shell Along the Aisne • Clair Wallace Hayes
... broncos had come to an end, there was a two-mile race, for a first and a second prize, put up by the two ranch owners. In this race nine of the cowboys started, amid a wild yelling and the cracking of numerous pistols,—for the average cowboy is not enjoying himself unless he ...
— Dave Porter at Star Ranch - Or, The Cowboy's Secret • Edward Stratemeyer
... feathers on the ground. Rome has robbed men of their souls and has fed hell with them to its surfeit. And now, in her turn, her grasping hands have withered at the wrists, her insatiable lips are cracking upon her loosening teeth, and the mistress of the world is the sport ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... busy in camp with the packing for the voyage, had shared in the gloom of my temporary defeat. But now, as I plunged past them, I could see them leaping into the air and cracking their heels together with delight. They had wet every plank of her with their sweat, and they were as proud as I. In the light of the following days, their delight ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... he tasted with his own lips the bitterness which makes the most wretched death sweeter by comparison than bread and honey to the hungry. At the end of it, when he stole away a madman, he felt within his own soul the cracking and upheaving of some immensity, and saw or felt the opening of abysses from which rose fearful exhalations of crime, shapes of corruption, things without shape that provoked to rage, pain and madness. He was not without cunning, since he closed the doors softly, stole away in ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... substance for the slender red stem of dogwood, which is growing out of the soil they have made. The fallen leaves of the surrounding trees follow the pioneer work of the mosses. The rain and the cracking frosts are other agencies. By and by the organic will triumph over the inorganic, the cell over the crystal, the plant over the rock, and where now the fossils ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... together; secondly, organic substance of armour which grows into its proper shape at once for good and all, and can't be mended at all, if broken, (as of insects); thirdly, organic substance of skin, which stretches, as the creatures grows, by cracking, over a fresh skin which is supplied beneath it, as in bark of trees; fourthly, organic substance of skin cracked symmetrically into plates or scales which can increase all round their edges, and are connected by softer skin, below, as in fish and reptiles, (divided with exquisite lustre ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... explain the raps by a theory that the 'medium' produces them through cracking his, or her, knee-joints. It may thus be argued that Sister Anthoinette discovered this trick, or was taught the trick, and that the tradition of her performance, being widely circulated in Montalembert's quarto, and by ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... and Albert put on their skates and stretched out at full speed across the lake that spread its floor of dark glass within a stone's throw of the vicarage, he had a sense of never having lived before. The spaciousness of the house and the pleasant evenings spent cracking nuts and eating apples in front of the blazing fire-place were also revelations that filled his mind with many new thoughts. Why was his own home ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... they never would've got onto us if it hadn't been for your stupid tricks. Slugging a cop on the dome. Cracking up a car. You ...
— Out Like a Light • Gordon Randall Garrett
... mocking enemy. It hated them. They hated it. Its eyes were red with gloating over them. Their eyes were red and bloodshot with the fury of their battle. Its voice was hoarse with the roar of its laughing at them. Their voices were thick and their lips were cracking with the hot curses they hurled back ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... keep only two stablemen; one to take care of the horses and one to act as groom. I'm off. I've a cracking good hunter, if you'd like a leg up. We'll all ride out to Chevy Chase Sunday. By- by, ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... reading a book with a parasol open. Couldn't sink if you tried: so thick with salt. Because the weight of the water, no, the weight of the body in the water is equal to the weight of the what? Or is it the volume is equal to the weight? It's a law something like that. Vance in High school cracking his fingerjoints, teaching. The college curriculum. Cracking curriculum. What is weight really when you say the weight? Thirtytwo feet per second per second. Law of falling bodies: per second per second. They all fall to the ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... street nor the number of that Paris appartement. We were deep in our plans for mountaineering, and except that I noted the wheezy little lift of Mrs. Upgrove's letter, I remember literally nothing about that excursion but the familiar odour of the Paris asphalt, the snapping and cracking of the Gallic horsewhip, and the smoke of my own cigarette which blew into my eyes as I threw it away on ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... at the rug. Too well he realized that Cappy had the whip hand and was fully capable of cracking the whip; ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... strings, it is fascinating. The Scherzo is again of the Beethoven order in its contagious comicality. The piano has the lion's share of it at first, but toward the last the other instruments leave off embroidery and take to cracking jokes for themselves. The Andante is a genuinely fine piece of work. It ranges from melting tenderness to impassioned rage and a purified nobility. The piano part is highly elaborated, but the other instruments have a scholarly, a vocal, individuality. ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... around in the dark. They could hear the sounds of several horses feeding and the barking of the dogs. Then, quite unexpectedly, came the cracking of a board, a yell of alarm from Nat ...
— Dave Porter in the Far North - or, The Pluck of an American Schoolboy • Edward Stratemeyer
... and again; but at last it stood a proud and hideous fact, like a gray prison, towering above the bare, undecorated brick stores and the frame houses on the prairie around it, new, raw, and cheap, from the tin statue on the dome to the stucco round its base already cracking with the sun. Piles of lumber and scaffolding and the lime beds the builders had left still lay on the unsodded square, and the bursts of wind drove the shavings across it, as they had done since the first day of building, when the Hon. Horatio Macon, who had worked for the appropriation, ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... absolutely around you. If you have that power of eye-contrio which is so necessary to the full enjoyment of scenery, you will see nothing but the water. You will certainly hear nothing else; and the sound, I beg you to remember, is not an ear-cracking, agonizing crash and clang of noises, but is melodious and soft withal, though loud as thunder. It fills your ears, and, as it were, envelops them, but at the same time you can speak to your neighbor without ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... he ran around the rough rim, and I had to perform with the agility of a contortionist to avoid dead snags of trees and green branches. When I got to the point from which I had calculated George had done his shooting I found no one. My yells brought no answers. But I heard a horse cracking the rocks behind me. Then up from far below rang the sharp spangs of rifles in quick action. Nielsen and Edd were shooting. I counted seven shots. How the echoes rang from wall to wall, to die hollow and faint in the ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... earth seems to reel and the mountains to shake, and the rivers are lashed into foam and fury. Then the poet sees the Maruts approaching with golden helmets, with spotted skins on their shoulders, brandishing golden spears, whirling their axes, shooting fiery arrows, and cracking their whips amid thunder and lightning. They are the comrades of Indra, sometimes, like Indra, the sons of Dyaus or the sky, but also the sons of another terrible god, called Rudra, or the Howler, a ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... of a hand which was at once given him, he sometimes caught it without asking leave, he kissed it once and again. I, the while, alone in a corner, avoided a sight which irritated me; stifling my sighs, cracking my fingers with grasping my wrists, plunged in melancholy, covered with a cold sweat, I could neither ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... terrified to notice the direction in which he had drifted—even if he had possessed the ordinary knowledge of a backwoodsman, which he did not. He was helpless. In his bewildered state, seeing a squirrel cracking a nut on the branch of a hollow tree near him, he made a half-frenzied dart at the frightened animal, which ran away. But the same association of ideas in his torpid and confused brain impelled him ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... bade farewell to all, and the little crowd cheered lustily against the whine of the blizzard as, with cracking whip and hoarse shouts, they were wrapped in the cloudy winding ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... fairies often go hunting, and faint sounds of fairy horns, the baying of fairy hounds, and the cracking of fairy whips are supposed to be heard on these occasions, while the flight of the hunters is said to resemble in sound ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... were as bright and tidy as possible, then got into a light suit and went down to the post house. A quarter of an hour later a cloud of dust along the road betokened the approach of the Dak Gharry, and two or three minutes later it dashed up at full gallop amid a loud and continuous cracking of the driver's whip. The wiry little horses were drawn ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty
... double bridle, should be sewed to the bridle; it is safer for leading, and it is only the curb bit which you wish to have the power of changing. The reins should be thin and supple, they will last the longer for it; for reins break from being stiff and cracking, and suppleness of reins is essential ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... not be generally known in the United States, but while the Southern and some of the Northern newspapers are making a target of Miss Wells, the young colored woman who started this English movement, and cracking their jokes at the expense of Miss Florence Balgarnie, who, as honorable secretary, conducts the committee's correspondence, the strongest sort of sentiment is really at the back of the movement. Here we have crystallized ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... their fatigue was, it had not affected the appetite of these vigorous walkers. On the contrary, the food, which had to last for two more days, was very welcome. The damp had not reached the biscuits, and for several minutes it could be heard cracking under the solid teeth of Dick Sand and his companions. Between Hercules's jaws it was like grain under the miller's grindstone. It did not ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... of the rifle smashing up. It struck the man under the chin and there was a sharp cracking sound as his jawbone snapped. For a fraction of a second there was an expression of stupefied amazement on his face then his eyes glazed and he slumped to the ground with his ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... of egg and ink in a bottle, so that the composition may be well shaken up when required for use. Apply to the kid with a piece of sponge and rub dry. The best thing to rub dry with is the palm of the hand. When the kid shows symptoms of cracking, rub in a few drops of sweet oil. The soles and heels should be ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... PRESSURE.—There was a remarkable occurrence at the mills of the Combined Locks Paper Company at Combined Locks, Wis., on Saturday. From some unknown cause there was an upheaval of rock upon which the mills are located, throwing the mill walls out of place, cracking a great wall of stone and cement twenty feet thick and making a saddle-back several hundred feet long and six inches high in the bed rock beneath the mill. An artesian well two hundred feet away on the bluff has dried up. The damage to the ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... and I heard Jack's voice calling for me to come out. The cover-bows were bent far over, and the canvas pressed in on the side to the southwest till it seemed as if it must burst. The front end of the top had gone out and was cracking in the wind. I crept forward, and us I did so I felt the wagon rise up on the windward side and bump back on the ground. I concluded we were doomed to u wreck, and called to Ollie to get out as fast us he could. I supposed a hard ...
— The Voyage of the Rattletrap • Hayden Carruth
... twenty-five years old and with brains enough—supposedly—to keep out of the feeble-minded class, it strikes me you indulge in some damned poor pastimes," went on dad disagreeably. "Cracking champagne-bottles in front of the Cliff House—on a Sunday at that—may be diverting to the bystanders, but it can hardly be called dignified, and I fail to see how it is going to fit a man for ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... vindicated, took so firm a hold of his mind that he felt chilled through and through. Hopeless of obtaining more news, he remounted, and traversed the woods afresh, calling Pierre with all his might, whistling, cracking his whip, and snapping the branches that the whole forest might reecho with the noise of his coming; then he listened for an answering voice, but he heard no sound save the cowbells scattered through the glades, and the wild cries of the swine ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... time, and by constant scraping, the clay wall would eventually have been pulled down; but before that event came to pass, a loud flapping and fluttering, and cracking and clattering, was heard among the tops of the trees; and in an instant afterwards the broad, shadowy wings of the old male hornbill were swashing about the ears of the four-footed robber, where the long cutlass-like beak, armed at its edges, at once interrupted ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... artificial drainage against the accumulation of water under the concrete. Tile drains are better and cheaper than excessively deep foundations. The thorough tamping of the sub-base is essential to avoid settling and subsequent cracking of the concrete slab. This is a part of sidewalk work which ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... mistaken source of the Sublime, which seems to have been sometimes resorted to, both in poems and pictures; namely, in the sympathy excited by excruciating bodily suffering. Suppose a man on the rack to be placed before us,—perhaps some miserable victim of the Inquisition; the cracking of his joints is made frightfully audible; his calamitous "Ah!" goes to our marrow; then the cruel precision of the mechanical familiar, as he lays bare to the sight his whole anatomy of horrors. ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... others Jogpas. When they saw us approaching they generally bolted, driving their sheep or yaks in front of them. Nevertheless, we came upon two Tibetan women, very dirty, and their faces smeared with black ointment to prevent the skin from cracking in the high wind. They were dressed in long sheepskin garments, worn out and filthy, and their coiffures were so unwashed that they emitted a sickening odour. I ordered them not to come too near us, for although these females ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... were several other speakers, but no words penetrated to his brain. He felt as if he must stifle. He felt the globe of earth cracking, breaking in two under his feet, and for the first time in his life he was acutely aware of the division of humanity. All through his career he had taken his middle-class position for granted; he tacitly agreed that there were employees and employers; but in his own case his camaraderie ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... summit, a hundred yards away, and made for it. We rushed up the stairs to the top of this scaffolding, and stood there, above the vast outlying world, with hair flying and ruddy blankets waving and cracking in the fierce breeze. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... had an awful time in an ice gorge. He could hear it cracking and grinding below as though warning him of danger. He succeeded in climbing on a cake which saved him from being carried under, and made his way to clear water on the ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... others, that it would be a capital place to crack nuts. So, boy-like, they had to try it, and standing at the base of the spire, would fill the cracks as far as they could reach with good English walnuts, and then stand back for the steeple to return to an upright position, cracking the nuts. As the great clock in the tower struck, the jar caused the spire to lean in the opposite direction. The boys now got their nuts, and then put in more, that the operation might be repeated, for they ...
— Harper's Young People, August 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... aloft the signal's streaming, Hark! the farewell gun is fired; Women screeching, tars blaspheming, Tell us that our time's expired. Here's a rascal Come to task all, Prying from the custom-house; Trunks unpacking, Cases cracking, Not a corner for a mouse 'Scapes unsearched amid the racket, Ere we sail ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... led off, another put in its place, and the postilions were cracking their whips, when out of the darkness a knot of mounted men rode into the lamplight. There were at least a dozen of them, and at their head rode a man who at the sight ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... filled his pipe and lit it, and in doing so his eyes fell upon the little wallet from which she had taken her tweezers. He picked it up and quickly shouted to her; but the dogs were barking with furious delight, she was cracking her whip, and she had ridden too far for her to hear him through the noise. It would have been sheer folly to have run after her; so, with a shrug of his shoulders, Stafford put the little wallet in his pocket, waded the stream and, after a moment or two of consideration, made for the inn ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... covered with a strip of coarsely woven crash lined with several pieces of paper. This is glued to the back to make it hard and solid and to prevent it from cracking, or "breaking," ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... ringmaster, Briggs by name, was cracking his whip in the middle of the ring, mighty lord of all he surveyed, although, to his chagrin, there was no clown present to receive the attention. In those good old days the circus carried but one clown. He was the most overworked man in the ring, but he had the satisfaction of knowing that he ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... ground strokes should be hit with a short, snap of the wrist—as though you were cracking a whip. There is no time and no reason to employ ...
— Squash Tennis • Richard C. Squires
... slope up from the bank of the river are dented and broken as if some giant in the past had smashed them with his hammer, cracking some and punching deep holes in others. It was in one of these holes, or caves, that ...
— Bumper, The White Rabbit • George Ethelbert Walsh
... the brick wall, which was none too thick. Besides this, a small pane of the window was open; so that the crunching of the wheels as they turned on the freshly-laid metalling, the encouragements of the drivers to their horses, and the cracking of the whips, could be distinctly heard. Even the steps of the passers-by were audible, and a word here and there ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... reflected Maggie. It had ended in that. A mound of earth, cracking a little, and sunken. She lay there, her nervous fingers motionless and her stammer silent. And could there be a more eloquent monument of what she was...? Then she remembered herself, and signed herself with the ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... by the newly spilt blood of strong men, swarm so thickly that another torture is added. Half the nationalities of Europe lie groaning together, each calling in his native tongue for water, or for help to loosen a bandage which in the shimmering heat has become unbearable. And as the rifle cracking rises to the storm it always does every few hours, more men will be brought in and laid on that gruesome operating table. The very passageways have been already invaded by men lying on long chairs, because there are no more beds. Even they are happy; they have crept to a place where they can gasp ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... away to talk with some friends Estelle told "the rest" that was "nothing." The championship secure, Joe had paid all Terry's bills, had supported Terry and his wife for a year, had relapsed into old habits and "pulled off a job" of safe-cracking because, the prize-fighting happening to pay poorly, he would have had a default on the payments for a month or so. He was caught, did a year on the Island before his "pull" could get him out. And all the time he was in the "pen" he so arranged it with his friends ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... with the house rocking frightfully, now came from outside the peal as of a thousand thunders, accompanied by the clang of bell, the crash of falling walls, the sharp cracking and splitting of woodwork, and the yelling and shrieking of people ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... discharge their seeds. Thus, a certain fungus has the property of ejecting its seeds with great force and rapidity, and with a loud cracking noise, and yet it is no bigger than a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 540, Saturday, March 31, 1832 • Various
... which would certainly have been put out by arrows had I not thought of my spectacles. These I fastened as strongly as I could upon my nose, and, thus protected, I went boldly on, while the arrows struck my glasses without even cracking them. ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... over the landscape. A rumbling, cracking noise is heard among the mountains. Shadows of clouds sweep across the scene. Ruodi, the fisherman, comes out of his cottage. Werni, the huntsman, descends from the rocks. Kuoni, the shepherd, enters, with a milkpail on his shoulders, followed by ...
— Wilhelm Tell - Title: William Tell • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... high revel. But when the winter came, how cold must he have been, for all the wood with its stifling smoke that he burned in his crude stone hall. And Madame the Countess, his wife, and her train of highborn young women—imagine the cracking chilblains on the hands of the ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... and loins strained almost to cracking, the men worked cheerfully. Their General had ridden forward with his staff: they knew that close by the head of the pass their camp was already being marked out for them, and before sleeping they would be ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... than to enjoy a nearer view of such a conflagration. My wish was destined to be fulfilled today, as my road lay between a burning forest and a burning rost. {40} The intervening space was not, at the most, more than fifty paces broad, and was completely enveloped in smoke. I could hear the cracking of the fire, and through the dense vapour perceive thick, forked columns of flame shoot upwards towards the sky, while now and then loud reports, like those of a cannon, announced the fall of the large trees. On seeing my guide enter this fiery gulf, I was, I must confess, rather frightened; but ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... goaded by the tongue-lashings of their wives, these enervated drudges were usually out of sorts. Bursts of ill temper, in the form of invective, hair-pulling, ear-pulling, pinching, caning, "nape-cracking," or "chin-smashing," were part of the routine, and very often I was the scapegoat for the sins of other boys. When a pupil deserved punishment and the schoolmaster could not afford to inflict it because the culprit happened to be the pet of a well-to-do family, the teacher's anger was almost sure ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... earthen jar, with one onion chopped, and one quart of potatoes peeled and sliced; the vegetables and seasoning will cost about five cents; add one pint of water, put on the cover of the jar, and cement it in place with a paste of flour and water, which you must grease a little to prevent cracking; then put the jar into a moderately hot oven, and bake it about four hours. With the addition of bread and butter it makes a hearty meal, ...
— Twenty-Five Cent Dinners for Families of Six • Juliet Corson |
