"Dwindling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that were his cattle straying over them, and beyond these the home landing and the masts of the Golden Rose. The sun was near its setting; the men had left the fields; over all things were the stillness and peace, the encroaching shadows, the dwindling light, so golden in its quality, of late afternoon. When he crossed the bridge over the creek, the hollow sound that the boards gave forth beneath his horse's hoofs had the depth and resonance of drumbeats, and the cry of a solitary heron in the marsh seemed louder than its wont. He passed ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... soared in a wild outburst. Give the eagle the throat of the lark, and after he has struck down his prey in the centre of the sky and sent the ragged feathers and the slain body falling down to earth, what would be the song of the eagle rising again and dwindling out of sight in the heart of the sky? What terrible pean would he send whistling down to the dull earth far below? And such was the music that came before the coming of Dan Barry. It did not cease, as usual, at a distance, but it came closer and closer, and it swelled ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... overhead the men poured forth from their quarters armed and bristling, to be greeted by a volley of gunshots, the thud of bullets, and the dwindling whine of spent lead. They leaped from shelter to find themselves girt with a fitful hoop of fire, for the "Stranglers" had spread in the arc of a circle and now emptied their rifles towards the centre. The defenders, however, maintained surprising order considering the suddenness of their ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... surroundings. He looked about him awfully. The candle stood on the counter, its flame solemnly wagging in a draught; and by that inconsiderable movement the whole room was filled with noiseless bustle and kept heaving like a sea: the tall shadows nodding, the gross blots of darkness swelling and dwindling as with respiration, the faces of the portraits and the china gods changing and wavering like images in water. The inner door stood ajar, and peered into that leaguer of shadows with a long slit of ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... Life he felt had no further happiness to offer him. He hated Miriam, and there was no getting away from her whatever might betide. And for the rest there was toil and struggle, toil and struggle with a failing heart and dwindling courage, to sustain that dreary duologue. "Life's insured," said Mr. Polly; "place is insured. I don't see it does any harm to ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... through the changes we are relating. What if these capacities had, by simple nourishing food, cleanly care-taking, and brighter, kindlier associations, been trained into full working order? Left alone or ill-tended they were daily dwindling, and the depreciation was going on not solely at the expense of little Ginx, but of the whole community. To reduce his strength one-half was to reduce one-half his chances of independence, and to multiply the prospects of his continuous application ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... water is dwindling. Organized and juvenile crimes cost the taxpayers millions of dollars each year, making it essential that we have improved enforcement and new legislative safeguards. The denial of constitutional rights to some of our fellow Americans on account of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... his seat by the window, and drummed with impatient fingers on the sill. He was small, like his brother, but of a compact, sturdy build. His chin, instead of dwindling to a point, was square and stubborn, and his eyes looked straight ahead at the thing he wanted, and neither saw nor cared for what lay outside. He had been trying ever since leaving the cemetery to bring ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... of the modern and real immensity of the unfathomed Skies. But suddenly the vast meaning of my words rushed into my mind; I felt myself dwindling, falling through the blue. And yet, in these silent seconds, there thrilled through me in the cool sweet air and night no chill of death or nothingness; but the taste and joy of this Earth, this orchard-plot of earth, floating unknown, ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... two other surgeons—died of their wounds, served to increase the reputation in which this rebel-convict stood in Bridgetown. It may have been no more than the fortune of war. But the townsfolk did not choose so to regard it. It led to a further dwindling of the practices of his free colleagues and a further increase of his own labours and his owner's profit. Whacker and Bronson laid their heads together to devise a scheme by which this intolerable state of things should be brought to an end. But ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... rapidly dwindling category of older hackers with FORTRAN, or even assembler, as their language of choice. They often prefer to be known as {Real Programmer}s, and other hackers consider them a bit odd (see "{The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer}" in Appendix A). ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... the pearl-bearing molluscs may be greatly diminished in numbers or even exterminated by the greed of man and his fearfully destructive methods of harvesting nature's productions. In fact, the fisheries have been dwindling in yield for some time, and most of the fine pearls that are marketed are old pearls, already drilled, from the treasuries of Eastern potentates, who have been forced by necessity to accept the high prices ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... the great fight went on, and at every cast of the spear Odysseus and his men added another to the list of the slain. Seeing their numbers dwindling fast, the wretched remnant of the wooers lost heart altogether and huddled together like sheep at the end of the hall. To complete their discomfiture a terrible voice was suddenly heard in the air, and a gleam as from ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... them, and the sorrows that lie lurking on every man's path. He saw more distinctly what Christ came to do; and how he did it by complete self-abnegation, and by descending to the level of the lowest. But he had no delight in standing up in his pulpit in full face of his dwindling congregation. Language seemed poor to him; and it had grown difficult to him to put his burning thoughts into words. As the bitter experience of daily life seared his very soul, he found that no smooth, fit expressions of his self-communing rose to his lips. It pained him to face ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton
... the fourth century, at Rome, that the strong modern opposition to homosexuality was first clearly formulated in law.[265] The Roman race had long been decaying; sexual perversions of all kinds flourished; the population was dwindling. At the same time, Christianity, with its Judaic-Pauline antagonism to homosexuality, was rapidly spreading. The statesmen of the day, anxious to quicken the failing pulses of national life, utilized this powerful Christian feeling. Constantine, Theodosius, and Valentinian ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Tatho gorgeously apparelled, and with a beard curled and plaited into a thousand ringlets. On the other side, plying her industry with unruffled defence, walked Ylga, once again fan-girl, and so still second lady in this dwindling kingdom. ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... their colours can we trace, Lost in the mazy distance of the race Till at Salara's far-off bridge descried, Like coursing butterflies, they seem to glide; Then, dwindling farther, in the lengthening course, Mere floating specks supplant both man and horse; Till, having crossed the Columbarium gray, They swerve, and back retrace their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... not praise me, Gaultier, at the ball, Ripe lips, trim boddice, and a waist so small, With clipsome lightness, dwindling ever less, Beneath the robe of pea-y greeniness? Dost thou remember, when, with stately prance, Our heads went crosswise in the country-dance; How soft, warm fingers, tipped like buds of balm, Trembled ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... he fought Lee did not know. He was aware that the girl was screaming—and that he was hurling clutching figures away—figures that came pouncing back. Then the roaring in his head was a vast uproar. The fighting, scrambling dark shapes all seemed dwindling until they were tiny points of white light—like stars in ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings
... Knossos to a close had already happened. The Cretan wares which filtered into Egypt after 1400 B.C. were the products of the Minoan decadence, when the survivors of the Empire of the Sea-Kings—a broken and dwindling race—were still trying to maintain a slowly failing tradition of art under the new masters, perhaps the Mycenaeans of the mainland, who, driven forth themselves by the pressure of Northern invaders, had crushed in their turn the gentler ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... on that morning tide When they flee away from the dwindling lands Will feel the clutch of mother hands And the soul ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... reply; "we are quite as strong as our forefathers, and a great deal wiser! "Such a craze, however, is too widely diffused, and falls in with too obstinate a preconception [17] in the human race, which has in every age hypochondriacally regarded itself as under some fatal necessity of dwindling, much to have challenged public attention. As real paradoxes (spite of the idle meaning attached usually to the word paradox) have often no falsehood in them, so here, on the contrary, was a falsehood which had in it nothing paradoxical. It ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... citadel would prove offensive to the estates, while it could hardly be agreeable to the King; and yet it is not certain that he could have accomplished his purpose in any other way. Moreover, the achievement was one of a projected series by which he meant to re-vindicate his dwindling authority. He was weary of playing the hypocrite, and convinced that he and his monarch were both abhorred by the Netherlanders. Peace was impossible—war was forbidden him. Reduced almost to a nullity by the Prince ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the besieged were, unfortunately, dwindling. One had been shot through the head, two others had been wounded, and Lisle himself had received a bullet in his shoulder. There were now but two unwounded men; but the other four were all capable of using their rifles, at a pinch. It ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty
... perhaps, a mimic moon, but no other light unless his path chanced to lie through Herzogstrasse. In that street a couple of windows on the first floor showed bright and unabashed, and the curious passer-by could detect upon the blind the shadows of men growing to monstrous giants and dwindling to pigmies according as they approached or retired from the lamp ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... them. In and around the spaceport center, a multitude of the fellows they were never to see again had paused long enough in their own affairs to mesh thoughts in a final projection of encouragement that reached after the dwindling ship like a gesture ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... dreamed of. At this era, when the Adams Administration was about to close, Jefferson, in spite of his known liberal, democratic views, was one of the most popular of political leaders, save with the Federalists, now dwindling in numbers and influence. He it was who was put forward on the Republican side for the Presidency, while Adams, still favored by the Federalists and himself desiring a second term of office, became ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... solicitor to whom my father was now assistant. Stillwood, Waterhead and Royal dated back to the Georges, and was a firm bound up with the history—occasionally shady—of aristocratic England. True, in these later years its glory was dwindling. Old Mr. Stillwood, its sole surviving representative, declined to be troubled with new partners, explaining frankly, in answer to all applications, that the business was a dying one, and that attempting to ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... His resources were dwindling. He needed funds for the many secret agents in his employ—needed yet more funds for the purchase and support of his lands in the South. And the minister of Great Britain had given plain warning that unless this expedition up the Missouri could be stopped, no further ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... were dwindling to a shadow. For two months the siege of Queretaro continued, steadily growing closer. During this trying time Maximilian showed the best elements of his character. He was gentle and cheerful in demeanor, and brave in action, not hesitating to expose himself to ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... convex. I had never seen it thus—had never been so far above its surface before. A huge grey ball down there which was our Earth. Outlines of sea and land. Then continents and oceans, enveloped by patches of cloud area. A grey ball, changing to a glowing, vaguely dull red; then silver. Dwindling—gleaming brighter silver on one side where the sunlight ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... little river, dwindling into a creek of perplexed channel before the trail is found that ties the two great valleys together. One cannot miss it now, for when I last passed over it it was being paved, or macadamized, and a steam-roller was doing in a few days what the moccasined or sandalled feet ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... He wore the prescribed conventional air, subject in half a minute to a rapid blinking of the eyelids. His wife could have been inimically imagined fascinated and dwindling. A spot of colour came to her cheeks. She likewise ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... escaped well nigh five hundred, and they were all drowned, and so lost. Another company escaped by land, and thought to pass through Sclavonia; and the peasants of that land fell upon them, and killed many, so that the remainder came back flying to the host. Thus did the host go greatly dwindling day by day. At that time a great lord of the host, who was from Germany, Garnier of Borland by name, so wrought that he escaped in a merchant vessel, and abandoned the host, whereby he incurred ...
— Memoirs or Chronicle of The Fourth Crusade and The Conquest of Constantinople • Geoffrey de Villehardouin
... felt more and more that his love must be dwindling to make him act as he did. I thought it all over wearily enough and asked myself whether I had done everything I should to hold my husband's love. I had kept him in at nights. I had cut down his smoking. I had stopped his playing cards. What more was there ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... only a dwindling sight of lonely sails was to be seen, heading toward Chesapeake Bay and then to sea. But anyone with eyesight good enough might have seen a ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... Nutter's Lane had now become rare birds. The dwindling of his visitors had at first scarcely attracted his notice; it had been so gradual, like the rest. But at last Dutton found himself alone. The old solitude of his youth had re-knitted its shell around him. Now that he was unsustained by the likelihood ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... hold on to the capital loses it, since he sacrifices profits from which more would have come. Running his antiquated engine, the unenterprising man has to content himself with small returns and, in the meanwhile, sees his actual productive fund dwindling by the deterioration of the ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... liberally for the commissariat of his army. Thus the difficulties of the Imperial treasury increased. Justinian became more and more unwilling to loosen his purse-strings for the sake of a province which showed an ever-dwindling return. The pay of the soldiers got more and more hopelessly into arrear. They deserted in increasing numbers to the standard of the brave and generous young king of the Goths. Hence, it came to pass, that in the spring ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... if you take it by the card, but the spirit of joy or the spirit of sorrow has the power to multiply its potentialities amazingly. Both these spirits walked by Evander's side during his second day at Harby. The one that went in sable reminded him that his horizon was dwindling almost to his feet; the other, in rose and gold, hinted that it is better to be emperor for a day than beggar for a century. And truly through all that day Evander esteemed himself happier than an emperor. For he had discovered ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... a misnomer, socially and politically a dwindling superstition. That is the chief lesson one learns—and one has barely time to take it in—between Queenstown and Sandy Hook. Ocean forsooth! this little belt of blue water that we cross before we know where we are, at a single ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... not the worst. I have said that there was a difference this morning when I got up and looked out. The sandy paths were dry, showing that there had been no fresh rain in the night. Moreover, the hillsides were open to view, the silver rills that veined the rugged steeps were dwindling, there was a blue sky, and great ranges of wooded or desolate mountains were in clearly cut outline—the first time since the wet period set in. Over the shoulder of the huge pyramid to the east there was actual sunshine, and the fleecy clouds were high. ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... late.... I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the Customs. That was all. But, nevertheless, it is anything but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect is dwindling away, or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of phial; so that at every glance you find a ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... a mirror now, And in it a long perspective I could trace Of my begetters, dwindling backward each past each All with the kindred look, Whose names had since been inked down in their place On the recorder's book, Generation and generation of my ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... some penniless Yankee, who presently turns the very ground he stands upon into wealth, and departs a lord of riches at the end of a few years, leaving the sleepy population, among whom he has amassed them, floated still farther down the tide of dwindling prosperity.... ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... accomplished little; and La Rochelle had made good use of the respite to strengthen its works. Every effort to gain a lodgement in its neighborhood had signally failed. The end of December came, and with it cold and discouragement. Anjou's army was dwindling away. The King of Spain and the Pope recalled their troops, as if the battle of the third of October had ended the war, and Santa Fiore, the pontifical general, sent to Rome twenty-six standards, taken by the Italians at Moncontour—a present from Charles the Ninth, which Pius accepted with ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... strange about each; in each Moreau had blended this animal with that. One perhaps was ursine chiefly, another feline chiefly, another bovine chiefly; but each was tainted with other creatures,—a kind of generalised animalism appearing through the specific dispositions. And the dwindling shreds of the humanity still startled me every now and then,—a momentary recrudescence of speech perhaps, an unexpected dexterity of the fore-feet, a ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... extension of twenty-five days in which to meet them. Thus pressed, Raoul looked into his affairs and asked for the accounts, and it then appeared that the receipts of the newspaper covered only two-thirds of the expenses, while the subscriptions were rapidly dwindling. The great man now grew anxious and gloomy, but to Florine only, in whom he confided. She advised him to borrow money on unwritten plays, and write than at once, giving a lien on his work. Nathan followed this advice and obtained thereby ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... guests in the park, all thoughts of festivity had faded. As summer-flies are scattered by rain, so did this congregation, late noisy and happy, in sadness and melancholy murmurs break up, dwindling away apace. With the set sun and the deepening twilight the park became nearly empty. Adrian and Ryland were still in earnest discussion. We had prepared a banquet for our guests in the lower hall ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... great planet-wide drought. The Canal Builders—men with machines recognizable as steam-shovels and derricks, digging and quarrying and driving across the empty plains with aqueducts. More cities—seaports on the shrinking oceans; dwindling, half-deserted cities; an abandoned city, with four tiny humanoid figures and a thing like a combat-car in the middle of a brush-grown plaza, they and their vehicle dwarfed by the huge lifeless buildings around them. She had not the least doubt; ...
— Omnilingual • H. Beam Piper
... first, ever since she had left him on the path from the hilltop till his interview the next day, he had looked on her possession as an 'option,' to the acceptance of which circumstances seemed to be compelling him. But ever since, that asset seemed to have been dwindling; and now he was almost beginning to despair. He was altogether cold at heart, and yet highly strung with apprehension, as he was shown into the ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... steam-railway system to scrap and get rid of, stations, signals, fences, rolling stock; a plant of ill-planned, smoke-distributing nuisance apparatus, that would, under former conditions, have maintained an offensive dwindling obstructive life for perhaps half a century. Then also there was a great harvest of fences, notice boards, hoardings, ugly sheds, all the corrugated iron in the world, and everything that was smeared with tar, all our gas works and ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... raised in Berkshire) are good for hardly anything to eat,—a fair-sized quarter dwindling down to almost nothing in ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and stood looking out, though in reality seeing nothing. He was thinking—thinking hard. The course he had decided to adopt was the right thing—as to that he had no sort of doubt. He had no regular income, and such remnant of capital as he still possessed was dwindling alarmingly. Men had made fortunes at places like Johannesburg, starting with almost literally the traditional half-crown, why should not he? Not that he expected to make a fortune; a fair competence ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... centuries of ancient grudge. Often in Roman literature Praeneste is mentioned as the typical country town. Her inhabitants are laughed at because of their bad pronunciation, despised and pitied because of their characteristic combination of pride and rusticity. Yet despite the dwindling fortunes of the town she was able to keep a treaty with Rome on nearly equal terms until 90 B.C., the year in which the Julian law was passed.[166] Praeneste scornfully refused Roman citizenship in 216 B.C., when it was offered.[167] This refusal Rome never forgot nor forgave. No Praenestine families ...
— A Study Of The Topography And Municipal History Of Praeneste • Ralph Van Deman Magoffin
... use of an organ will be to let the alpenstock slip out of your starting fingers. And the excitement, and be sure the happiness, of existence will be to protract the struggle as long as possible, to push as far as you can along the dwindling path, to keep the supports and the alleviations of your labour about you as skilfully as you can, and in the fuss and business of the little momentary episodes of climbing to forget as long and as fully as may be the final and absolutely unavoidable plunge. [A pause, ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... not make me forget that my position was still very awkward. My stock of money was dwindling, and I could not expect to live in the Admiral's house for ever; while, as long as we remained at Rochelle, Henry of Beam's generous promise was ...
— For The Admiral • W.J. Marx
... horizon of his pulpit.—"Awake, thou that sleepest!" Why, the text is quite opposed to DOZINESS! But what of this, if the preacher be addicted to drawling, the weather unobligingly sultry, and you yourself have gradually been dwindling from an uncongenial state of wakefulness into a sleepy calm? 'Tis too much for beldame Nature, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various
... is of it," said Evelyn, reassuringly, to herself, although at the same time she felt uneasiness enough to send her out into the hall to a gable window over the porch, which commanded a view of the camp. Nothing stirring was to be seen, except the dwindling flame of the evening camp-fire, burned every night for cheer, not for warmth. Evelyn crept to a side window. As she reached it a white figure could be seen ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond
... submerged beneath the Turkish flood more than eight centuries ago, has retained little individuality except in its religion, and nothing of its native speech but a garbled vocabulary embedded in a Turkified syntax. Yet even this dwindling rear-guard has been overtaken just in time by the returning current of national life, bringing with it the Greek school, and with the school a community of outlook with Hellenism the world over. Whatever the fate of eastern ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... the nearer houses beginning to stand out sharp and black against the red glow beyond. It was a barn behind a huge frame house that was afire, the dry hay burning like powder, and by the time they reached it the flames were already dwindling. The hose was lying like a python all about the streets, while upon the neighbouring roofs were groups of firemen with helmets and axes; some were shouting into the street below, and others were holding the spouting nozzles of the hose. "Ah," exclaimed an old man, standing near to Ida and ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... of nine or ten years are dragged from their squalid beds at two, three, or four o clock in the morning and compelled to work for a bare subsistence until ten, eleven, or twelve at night, their limbs wearing away, their frames dwindling, their faces whitening, and their humanity absolutely sinking into a stone-like torpor, utterly horrible ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... worked her hardest, and gave little heed to these things. She saw her own chances of success dwindling farther into the distance, and was surprised to see how little she cared, for a curious callousness had come over her of late. Selfish ambition—selfish, because it often persists in living when all other things are dead—seemed to have died in her at last. Had she overcome it? Or was it that ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... blew. Lake Linderman was no more than a narrow mountain gorge filled with water. Sweeping down from the mountains through this funnel, the wind was irregular, blowing great guns at times and at other times dwindling to a strong breeze. ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... something new. A track now led across the desert. It had sunk deep into the alkali, and the soft edges had closed over it like snow, so that the wheel marks and the hoof marks and the prints of men's feet looked old. Almost in a straight line it led to the west. Its perspective, dwindling to nothingness, corrected the deceit of the clear air. Without it the cool, tall mountains looked very near. But when the eye followed the trail to its vanishing, then, as though by magic, the Ranges drew back, and before them denied ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... "I don't know, Stephen. We're short of money, you know, and the fund is dwindling every day. Don't you think it's a little extravagant to have a turkey for two people? And somehow I don't feel a bit Christmassy. I think I'd rather spend it just like any other day and try to forget that it is Christmas. Everything would ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... She summed up the whole town and its possibilities; and she wondered what opportunities the world out beyond Panama had for her. She recalled two trips to Philadelphia and one to Harrisburg. She made out a list of openings with such methodical exactness as she devoted to keeping the dwindling lodge insurance from disappearing altogether. Hers was no poetic outreach like that of the young genius who wants to be off for Bohemia. It was a question of earning money in the least tedious way. Una was facing the feminist ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... knew all the facts in both cases, and so did Ernest Seton, who had visited us in the country as well as in our city home. Fuller not only knew the ins and outs of my houses; he was also aware that my royalties were dwindling and that my wife was forced to get along with one servant and that we used the street ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... said. All very well, but I needed money. While I had been making with Eleanore those long and delightful explorations of the harbor and ourselves, at home my father's bank account had been steadily dwindling, and all that I had been able to make had gone ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... been part of the money of the realm was thrown on the owner. If he failed in making out a satisfactory history of every ingot he was liable to severe penalties. This Act was, as might have been expected, altogether ineffective. During the following summer and autumn, the coins went on dwindling, and the cry of distress from every county in the realm ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... after some hesitation marched up the river, crossing at Kingston. The loyalists however had plucked up heart. The insurgents' column, in the advance to London, was cut in two. Wyatt at the head of the leading section made a desperate effort to reach Ludgate with ever dwindling numbers; but when he arrived at the City gates, though he did indeed in his own words "keep touch," his small and exhausted following was in no condition for prolonged fighting. He was taken prisoner without difficulty. Many of his followers were captured. ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... Richard repeated, but the power which had upheld him was dwindling fast. He knew, knew beyond question that in a few more moments the truth would be shaken out of him unless he could devise some means of slackening the strain. And then ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... I saw those bent and dwindling figures still standing in the mud. The woman continued to pluck at her dress; the man gazed at the horizon with the same dull vacancy. They had the weary humility of the figures in Millet's "Angelus," without their inspiration, and in their eyes was ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... the last of a long line of estancieros once rich in land and cattle, but for generations the Canada Seca estate had been dwindling as land was sold, and now there was little left, and the cattle and horses were few, and only a small flock of sheep kept just to provide the house with mutton. His poor relations living scattered about the ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... part of the century had inspired millions with high hopes of social regeneration and rekindled the beacon fires of faith in the world. The Saint-Simonians had, as an organized body, disappeared; the Fourierists were a dwindling sect, discouraged by the failure of the one great trial of their system, the famous Brook Farm experiment, in the United States; the Owenite movement had never recovered from the failures of the experiments at ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... last days' march. The path of his life was growing desolate and gloomy; the vegetation was dwindling; the great groves diminished into sparse, miserable lichens. From the murky abyss came an icy breath; he saw it in the distance, he walked without escape toward its gorge. The fields of dreams with ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... and on; he paid less and less attention to it, and it became increasingly obvious that opposition to the proposition was dwindling. Cries of, "Vote! Vote!" began to be heard from its supporters. Prince Ganzay rose from his desk and came ...
— Ministry of Disturbance • Henry Beam Piper
... alike of their would-be friend, the enemy, is a factor in the German subduing process the world outside must appreciate. But the Belgians are paying the price. Their resources are diminishing day by day. The world's benevolence is dwindling and they are facing an immediate future wherein life's necessities will have to be defined in terms of the irreducible minimum. The whole nation, we are told, is growing so thin on the small ration that can be provided, that ...
— No. 4, Intersession: A Sermon Preached by the Rev. B. N. Michelson, - B.A. • B. N. Michelson
... good finish for what had been a most exciting day; and, now that the faithless lantern was burning itself out, and dwindling away down below, and that the fire in my sleeve was put out, I had to remain in darkness. I stumbled along the rampart of the wall until I could get down into one of the streets, where, having roused the people, I was able to purchase another light, and reach home again in safety. After the ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... to me like a ship with its countless pilgrims, Vanishing in the far-away blue of the sky, Its sailors' song becoming fainter and fainter in the air, While I sink in the bosom of the endless night, fading away from myself, dwindling ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... People's Bank failure was one of those uncompromising summers that arrive in May and depart only with the last leaf in October. The river dwindling to a feeble stream staggered between distant banks, and the countryside lay parched and panting beneath ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... the doctor took his fee, gave the Captain's hand a cordial grip, expressive of sympathy and kindliness, and went his way, feeling assured that a good deal hung upon that little life which he had left slowly ebbing away, like a narrow rivulet dwindling into dryness under a ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... taking it "as he would have taken a ball in his breast." He recognized at once that "all was over," yet for a short time longer he retained the management of affairs. But his majority in Parliament was steadily dwindling, and evidently with him also "all was over." In his despair he caught with almost pathetic eagerness at what for a moment seemed a chance to save his ministry by treating with the States secretly and apart ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... her face in the pillow and began sobbing quietly to herself. It was cowardly of him to take advantage of his superior strength! She had experienced very real terror all the same, so terrible had that quaint mask of Fontan's become. And her anger began dwindling down as though the blow had calmed her. She began to feel respect toward him and accordingly squeezed herself against the wall in order to leave him as much room as possible. She even ended by going to sleep, her cheek tingling, her eyes full ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... Town it was quite evident that our sheep were not flourishing. They were, in fact, dwindling daily. Something had to be done, so my father hired a farm about ten miles away, in the direction of Kabousie. I volunteered my services as caretaker of the flock, and to my intense gratification this offer was accepted. The farm had no homestead, so ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... especially the Anglo-American part of the population—if there results an undermining of the physique, not only in adults, but also in the young, who, as I learn from your daily journals, are also being injured by overwork—if the ultimate consequence should be a dwindling away of those among you who are the inheritors of free institutions and best adapted to them; then there will come a further difficulty in the working out of that great future which lies before the American nation. ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... music, but his money was fast dwindling away, and the body could not be sustained by sweet sounds. But the poor unknown violinist, who was only another atom in the surging life of the great city, could earn nothing. He was on the verge of starvation, but he would not go back to Christiana. ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... you, more bold, Ne'er quit your gain for fiercest heat or cold: Fire, ocean, sword, defying all, you strive To make yourself the richest man alive. Yet where's the profit, if you hide by stealth In pit or cavern your enormous wealth? "Why, once break in upon it, friend, you know, And, dwindling piece by piece, the whole will go." But, if 'tis still unbroken, what delight Can all that treasure give to mortal wight? Say, you've a million quarters on your floor: Your stomach is like mine: it holds no more: Just as the slave who 'neath the bread-bag sweats No larger ration than ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... in possibilities, as Sturgis had told Pell; and though the hot season lasted interminably and caused one's spirits, as well as one's hopes, to droop, there were enchanting spring days and bright, colorful, dwindling autumns when the air was keen and clear, and life was a song with youth for ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne
... Sunday after Trinity we marched out from another small village in the hot afternoon. This one was a model village, snug in the fields, and dwindling daily. The German shells are dropping there every day. In the course of another six months if the fronts of the contending armies do not change, that village will be a litter of red bricks and unpeopled ruins. As it is the women, ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... that could be expected of them. There was only a tiny fragment of the meteorite left, and it was dwindling swiftly. But our time was passing ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... The land was low, so low that it seemed but a little higher than the water level, but it bore an amazingly abundant growth. The river seemed to flow through a channel cut in the dense, solid vegetation. Great cypress trees towered up from the water, enormously thick at the roots and rapidly dwindling above. Between their rough trunks cypress scrub, sturdy cabbage palms, mangrove, custard apple and other varieties of tropical trees found space to grow; and between the trunks of the smaller trees was a tangle of palmetto, saw grass, jungle vine, Virginia creeper and the ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... The dwindling away of the race is, however, inevitable. A few anecdotes may perhaps throw unaccustomed light upon attributes not generally understood, and show that the Australian aboriginal, uncouth savage as he is, is not altogether devoid ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... point in his familiar reminiscences my dwindling interest vanished, and I noticed again, through the window, the house fronts of the place I knew once, when Poplar was salt. The lost sailor himself was insignificant. What was he? A deck hand; one who tarred iron, and could take a trick at the wheel ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... sooner than the rest of the audience; but they, too, were becoming a little restless, and it would not be long ere they fully awoke. One thing I saw with perfect clearness and some terror, and that was that Barber himself realized that his power was dying within him. He appeared to be dwindling, shrinking down; in his eyes were suffering and a terrible panic—the distress of a beaten man appealing for mercy. The catastrophe must fall ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... at this dwindling figure, which stood as a mere grey blot touched with a white flame against the great green wall of the steep down behind him. And as he stared over the top of the down behind the innkeeper, there appeared an army of black-clad and marching men. ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... up to the tip of the chamber; slightly convex and crisscrossed by millions of fine lines like those upon a spectroscopic plate, but with this difference—that within each line I sensed the presence of multitudes of finer lines, dwindling into infinitude, ultramicroscopic, traced by some instrument compared to whose delicacy our finest tool would be as a crowbar to ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... Come along, Pyrrhias, and be put up. Quick's the word. The attendance is dwindling; there will be small competition. Well, who buys ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... profound loneliness. As he raised himself with another sigh, the top of the window tipped off his cap, which fell into the water. He cared little for the loss, but stood watching the cap as it floated slowly away with the current, and compared its receding form with his dwindling joys. The current, which was not strong there, carried the cap straight to the knoll several hundred yards off, on which stood the smoking-box of old Sam Ravenshaw, and ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... and looked east. The dust-cloud was dwindling every minute. And without hope, she cast another glance towards the corrals. Evidently, the men agreed that it was unnecessary for two of them to stay in the heat of the sun to prevent her from getting at a horse. Hastings had ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... father before him, for the passage of every generation had made recovery more difficult. Of course he should really have become a soldier; but soldiering in those days was an expensive calling. As a baronet—even as an Irish baronet—a good deal would have been expected of him, far more than the dwindling means of Roscarna could possibly supply, and since every career seemed closed to him but one of provincial dissipation he is scarcely to be blamed for ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... young lady, you are about to become the wife of one of the best. There are not many of us left; we are a dwindling band, Miss Eden— ...
— The Gay Lord Quex - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur W. Pinero
... every country. Paintings are growing smaller, as if to keep in proportion with the small modern salons. That this is due to the great influence of M. Meissonier there is no doubt, but no diminution of his own fame accompanies the dwindling of his pictures. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... which can be acquired only in the unviolated sanctuaries of nature, "where man is distant, but God is near"—will not rashly assert his right to extirpate a tribe of harmless vegetables, barely because their products neither tickle his palate nor fill his pocket; and his regret at the dwindling area of the forest solitude will be augmented by the reflection that the nurselings of the woodland perish with the pines, the oaks, and the beeches that sheltered them. [Footnote: Quaint old Valvasor had observed the subduing ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... plan of having clergymen trained In the very heart of the Street of Ink To paint their parish magazines pink. So generous laymen may haply decide That it may be worth their while to provide Each KENNEDY BELL with stepping-stones To rise to the height of a KENNEDY JONES. But others, a small and dwindling crew, Possibly fit, but certainly few, And cursed with a most pronounced capacity For suffering from inept vivacity, Would gladly be reckoned as unenlightened Could they keep one class of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... sculptured marbles in pilastered colonnades, are fit abodes for the nobles who reared them five centuries ago, of whose refined and costly living we read in the pages of Dante or of Folgore da San Gemignano. And though the necessities of modern life, the decay of wealth, the dwindling of old aristocracy, and the absorption of what was once an independent state in the Italian nation, have obliterated that large signorial splendour of the Middle Ages, we feel that the modern Sienese are not unworthy ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... Steam guns in the towers, thermit projectiles from the cannon far away: now this.... And the concealing cloud of Death Mist was rising still, headed straight up toward the zenith. It looked like a tiny, dwindling pearl. ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... and parcel of the musical vocabulary, intelligible alike to people of every nationality. I need hardly say that increasing intensity of sound will suggest vehemence, approach, and its visual synonym, growth, as well as that decreasing intensity will suggest withdrawal, dwindling, and placidity. ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... time with the dwindling firelight playing about him, his manhood and his desires locked in a grim struggle, wondering at the hold this forest elf had gained upon him, wondering how it was that she had stolen into his heart and head and taken such utter possession of him. ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... exultation of the glory of Bar-Wul-Yann was gone, yet still the pink cliffs glowed, the fairest marvel that the eye beheld-and this in a land of wonders. And soon the twilight gave place to the coming out of stars, and the colours of Bar-Wul-Yann went dwindling away. And the sight of those cliffs was to me as some chord of music that a master's hand had launched from the violin, and which carries to Heaven of Faery the tremulous ...
— Tales of Three Hemispheres • Lord Dunsany
... and without warning, Catia had swept in and dominated him completely, dominated him with her oozy layer cake, and her two sorts of lemonade, and with her Princeton grenadier of a hat. Beside it all, he felt himself dwindling into insignificance, despite the hind-side-before waistcoats of the visiting clergymen and his mother's gown of stiff black satin. It was a positive relief to him when he could turn his back upon the whole hot, chattering function, and, with Catia's ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... was clear and cold, and the snow had crept nearer the belt of dwindling pines that looked like matches tufted with moss. They grew in size as they rolled down the tremendous slopes, until they towered above the track in tall, dark spires. The mist had gone; rocks and trees and glistening summits were sharply cut, ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... from. How can you call him husband who forcibly snatched you from Jivaji to whom you had been sacredly affianced? I shall never forget that night! In the wedding hall we sat anxiously expecting the bridegroom, for the auspicious hour was dwindling away. Then in the distance appeared the glare of torches, and bridal strains came floating up the air. We shouted for joy: women blew their conch-shells. A procession of palanquins entered the courtyard: but ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore
... ran straight ahead, close to the shore of the mainland, and if the Follow Me's exploit proved successful she was due to increase her dwindling lead by a good mile unless the Adventurer accepted the challenge and followed her example. For a minute Steve hesitated. Then: "If she can do it, we can," he muttered, and slowly turned the wheel, his eyes darting to the chart. "No depth shown here," he ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... well-known charity school, in connection with Dartmouth college, may have, in times past, founded and endowed schools for the education of the natives of the forest; nor would we dampen the faith and hopes of those philanthropists who still believe in the redemption of that dwindling race by the aids of science and civilization; but we confess our inability to perceive any general results, flowing from the attempts of that character, at all adequate to the pains and outlay bestowed on the experiment. And we think we cannot be alone in this opinion. ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... tender care, and to console them as it may for the inevitable parting near at hand. Now, within three or four days of the end, the kitchen is as scrupulously and vigilantly perfect as it could be in the height of the season; and our dwindling numbers sit down every night to a dinner that we could not get for much more love or vastly more money in the month of August, at any shore hotel in America. It is true that there are certain changes going on, but they are going on delicately, almost silently. A strip of carpeting ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... by the bed when he reached out his arm for the telephone. The squeaking of a valve—what? Carl's hand, infinitely gentle, on his chest, bringing up the soft blankets, and his good clean oxygen dwindling, dwindling— ...
— Martyr • Alan Edward Nourse
... marked in their haggard faces, they set to work in the shelter of the dwarfed pines around them, and packed one sledge with all they felt to be necessary to take on this forlorn hope expedition, and with it the last of their dwindling store of food. ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... its works; and if anything grows too weak or stupid to take care of itself, she gives it its due deserts by letting it die and disappear. So, you plant or you animal, are you among the strong, the successful, the multiplying, the colonising? Or are you among the weak, the failing, the dwindling, the doomed? ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... and it was at this moment that the Admiral hove in sight round the corner of the deck-house. When Miss Dorn looked up, Mr. Masterson was gone; the crowd, still laughing, was dwindling; and there stood her uncle. He had on what she termed his "quarter-deck expression." Before he could speak she had ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... a word. He was too disgusted with himself to speak. He clenched his fists, and put his teeth together, and held his breath. In the silence he could hear the dwindling sound of Rocco's footsteps ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... of gray-bearded, helmeted warriors holding mailed blonde women in their arms, of queens with golden ornaments on their arms leaning over parapets and agitating their scarves, of women throwing themselves into the sea upon which ghastly barks were dwindling, of oldish men and young girls conversing teasingly through a window by a lilac-bush, that were Wagner. There were books with stories of magical swans and hordes of gold and baleful curses, of phantasmal storm ships and hollow hills and swords lodged in tree-trunks awaiting their wielders, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... they are past hope; the whites have just refused their taxes - I mean the council has refused to call for them, and if the council consented, nobody would pay; 'tis a farce, and the curtain is going to fall briefly. Consequently in my History, I say as little as may be of the two dwindling stars. Poor devils! I liked the one, and the other has a little wife, now lying in! There was no man born with so little animosity as I. When I heard the C. J. was in low spirits and never left his house, I could scarce refrain from going ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... signs of life or thought, the popular composer then wrote to him at length on the subject, offering him fifty pounds for the job, half of it on account. Lancelot was in sore straits when he got the letter, for his stock of money was dwindling to vanishing point, and he dallied with the temptation sufficiently to take the letter home with him. But his spirit was not yet broken, and the letter, crumpled like a rag, was picked up by Mary Ann and straightened out, and carefully placed ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... were dry and dwindling when Stanley's father, seeking an opening for his son, put him and money into them. From that moment they had never looked back, and now brought Stanley, the sole proprietor, an income of full fifteen thousand pounds a year. He wanted ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... liable to cease when it fails. They belong to the permanent, invisible order of things. Suppose one loses his body. Then there is no force whereby earth can hold its child any longer to its breast. It flies on at terrific speed, dwindling to a speck in unknown distances, and leaving the man amid infinitudes alone. But there are other attractions. There was One uplifted on a cross to draw all men unto him. Love has finer attraction for souls than gravitation ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... crowning difficulties to the theory of special design, furnishes the best possible evidence in favour of hereditary descent; seeing that this irregularity then becomes what may be termed the anticipated expression of progressive dwindling due to inutility. Thus, for example, to return to the case of wings, we have already seen that in an extinct genus of bird, dinornis, these organs were reduced to such an extent as to leave it still doubtful whether ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... to transport the Spanish troops, at once and without parole, back to their own country. Secretary Alger was no unskillful politician, and he was right in believing that this device, though unconventional, would make a strong appeal to an army three years away from home and with dwindling hopes of ever seeing Spain again. On the 15th of July a capitulation was agreed upon, and the terms of surrender included not only the troops in Santiago but all those in that military district—about ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... development of cold storage in the eighties (which we may regard for the present purpose as equivalent to an increased demand for Australian mutton) caused considerable perturbation in the woollen and worsted industries of Yorkshire. They were faced with a dwindling supply and a soaring price of merino wool; and the adaptability with which they met the situation, and won prestige for the crossbred tops, and yarns and fabrics, to which they largely turned is a matter of just pride in the trade to-day. The fact, however, that this alteration in the supply ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... could be termed an unusually large accumulation of wealth. For larger accumulations existed upon the earth. A descendant of a man once known as John D. Rockefeller possessed an accumulation of great size, but which, as a matter of fact, was rapidly dwindling as it passed from generation to generation. So, let us travel ahead another one hundred years. During this time, as we learn from our historical and political archives, the socialists began to die out, since they at last realized the utter futility of combating the balance of power. The account, ...
— John Jones's Dollar • Harry Stephen Keeler
... the sea, and the other, more smooth and undulating, towards a fair scene of inland beauty, straggled the little hamlet of Pont-y-fro. Jos Hughes's shop was the very last house in the village, the road beyond it merging into the rushy moor, and dwindling into a stony track, down which a streamlet trickled from the peat bog above. The house had stood in the same place for two hundred years, and Jos Hughes looked as if he too had lived there for the same length of time. His quaintly cut blue cloth coat adorned with large brass buttons, his knee breeches ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... walking up and down in a small grassy path, which was sprinkled with snowdrops. The "side-garden" was a ruined, over-grown square, planted in miniature box, which the elder Gay had laid out after one of his visits to Italy. Now, with its dwindling maze and its unpruned rose-bushes, it resembled a picture which has been blotted out until the original intention of the artist is no longer discernible. Yet the place was exquisite still. Spring had passed ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... come to Saturn. It is nearly as large as Jupiter, and has a huge ring of planetary matter revolving round it in addition to seven moons. Further and further we go, and the planets behind us are disappearing, and even the Sun is dwindling down to a mere speck; still we hurry on, and at last alight on another planet, Uranus, about sixty times larger than our Earth; we see moons in attendance, but they have scarcely any light to reflect; the Sun is only a star now; but we must hasten on deeper and deeper into ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... the Nile Valley, but actual running brooks, coursing and babbling between the trees, spreading out here and there into pools of water, and in places forming little cascades like those of our own streams, but dwindling in volume as they proceeded, owing to constant drains made on them, until they were for the most part absorbed by the soil ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... abandoned state. And the saddening, sickening thought often recurs to me, that, however desolate The Sahara may have been in past ages, it is now getting worse instead of better. Ghadames, and many oases of Fezzan, are dwindling away to nothing, the population lessening, and dispersing under the curse of the ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... had yonder infidel Ilderim, or whatsoever he is called, again in the gripe with which I once held him fast as ever hound held hare, never again should HE at least come on errand disgraceful to the honour of Christian king or noble and virtuous maiden. But I—my hours are fast dwindling into minutes—yet, while I have life and breath, something must be ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... intervals, and that the least departure from this order would destroy the effect. But Nature produces her effects at random, and seems only to increase the beautiful illusion by that infinite variety of decoration in which she revels, binding tree to tree in a tangle of anaconda-like lianas, and dwindling down from these huge cables to airy webs and hair-like fibres that vibrate to the wind of ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... glance at the dwindling figure on the cliff, and then went silently below and stood in a pleasant reverie before the smashed door. He came to the same conclusion regarding the desperate nature of his character as the others; and the nervous ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... they are able to perform in marriage," said my lady, with a sigh. "I fear he has lost large sums; and our property, always small, is dwindling away under this reckless dissipation. I heard of him in London with very wild company. Since his return, letters and lawyers are constantly coming and going: he seems to me to have a constant anxiety, ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... disguised are equally founded on fact and will be recognized by the dear but fast dwindling fraternity of good old-timers. The mother of the boy still lives her steadfast beautiful creed on the Upper Missouri; and the old frontiersman still lives on the Saskatchewan, one of the most picturesque and heroic figures in the West to-day. I may say that both missionaries support ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... the others seemed like figures in a fever; yet he was, unhappily, with them rather than with Fanny. God knew there was fever enough in his brain! But the winter night was cooling it—a minor image of the final office of death; the choking hunger for Savina was dwindling. He hoped that it wouldn't be repeated. He couldn't answer for himself through many such attacks. Yes, his first love, though just as imperative, had been more ecstatic; the reaching for an ideal rather than the ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... not alone compose the surplus labor army. There are the skilled but unsteady and unreliable men; and the old men, once skilled, but, with dwindling powers, no longer skilled. {3} And there are good men, too, splendidly skilled and efficient, but thrust out of the employment of dying or disaster-smitten industries. In this connection it is not out of place to note the misfortune of the workers in the British iron trades, who are suffering because ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... one after another they thanked him and so went cheerily down the Pass. Shere Ali watched them as they went, wondering that men should take such a journey and endure so much discomfort for their faith. He watched their dwindling figures and understood how far he was set apart from them. He was of their faith himself, nominally at all events, but Mecca—? He shrugged his shoulders at the name. It meant no more to him than it did to the White People who had cast him out. But that chance meeting lingered in his memory, ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... agreed: "an' 'twas Little Pony, easterly shore," he added, his voice dwindling away, "that Tom ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... is about equal to that of France, but that, when we analyse the facts, the fertility of the old native-born American population of mainly Anglo-Saxon origin is found to be lower than that of France. This element, therefore, is rapidly dwindling away in the United States. The general level of the birth-rate is maintained by the foreign immigrants, who in many States (as in New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Minnesota) constitute the majority ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... clothes one day and a tattered blanket the next, and sit smoking crowded in huts, the reek of which strikes you like a blow in the face; so long as they will cluster round dead bodies during their tangis or wakes; so long as they will ignore drainage—just so long will they remain a blighted and dwindling race, and observers without eyes will talk as though there was something fateful and mysterious in their decline. One ray of hope for them has quite lately been noted. They are caring more for the education of their children. Some three thousand ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... inhabitants of Patagonia been also dwindling, though, there, if anywhere, still lies the Cape of Bad Hope for the apostles of human degeneracy. Pigafetta originally estimated them at twelve feet. In the time of Commodore Byron, they had already grown downward; yet ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... near. On seeing me, he reversed his movement precipitately, flew straight back to the old tree, and alighted in the entrance to the cavity. As I approached, he did not so much seem to move as to diminish in size, like an object dwindling in the distance; he depressed his plumage, and, with his eye fixed upon me, began slowly to back and sidle into his retreat till he faded from my sight. The shrike wiped his beak upon the branches, cast an eye down at me and at his lost mouse, and then ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... the steamer came in, Baptista saw her husband rush down to meet it; and soon after there appeared at her door four tall, hipless, shoulderless girls, dwindling in height and size from the eldest to the youngest, like a row of Pan pipes; at the head of them standing Heddegan. He smiled pleasantly through the grey fringe of his whiskers and beard, and turning to the girls said, 'Now come ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... head, and said he did not know. I asked him if he had heard of the Griffin, but he said no. I broke away from him and went for miles along the bank eastward, seeing the rare trees of the marshes dwindling in the distance, and up against the horizon a distant spire, which I thought might be the Spire of March. For March and the Griffin were not twenty miles away. And still the great ditch stood between me ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... though he did not feel energy enough to answer. Then, as he watched two sleek, brown ponies with their yellow-clad riders dwindling among the rocks, his memory cleared suddenly, and he realised that the first great journalistic chance of his life was slipping away from him. It was a small fight, but it was the first of the war, and the great public ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... constant successes, it became evident to Rebecca, considering these things, that their position was but a precarious one, and that, even although they paid scarcely anybody, their little capital would end one day by dwindling into zero. "Gambling," she would say, "dear, is good to help your income, but not as an income itself. Some day people may be tired of play, and then where are we?" Rawdon acquiesced in the justice of her opinion; and in truth he had remarked that after a few nights of his little suppers, &c., ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of the house is plain now. It was once the residence of a country squire, whose family, probably dwindling down to mere spinsterhood, got merged in the more territorial name of Donnithorne. It was once the Hall; it is now the Hall Farm. Like the life in some coast town that was once a watering-place, and is now a port, where the genteel ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... those two young Englishmen at the head of the faithful few charged out on the guns. But for Jenkyns the glorious end had come, and sword in hand he fell, some seventy paces out, a lasting honour to the great Civil Service of India. Yet on went Hamilton and his dwindling band, and taking no denial, stayed not by bullet nor sword nor bayonet, again captured the guns. And then began again the dreadful heart-straining struggle of desperate men set to a task too great. Again with splendid effort they dragged the guns ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... differences rather than similarities in the community life. Sectarianism is very largely maintained by churches in small places. Where church competition is severe, and especially when church support is dwindling, the Church advertises its distinctiveness and enters upon a life-and-death grapple with its neighbor institutions. Of course this develops sectarianism and forbids the wide outlook in its teaching that is required of a ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... Tasso drew his inspiration from the beauty surrounding him. Returning, we may climb the heights above Castellamare, and looking down among the boughs and leaves, see the crisp water glistening in the sun; and clusters of white houses in distant Naples, dwindling, in the great extent of prospect, down to dice. The coming back to the city, by the beach again, at sunset; with the glowing sea on one side, and the darkening mountain (Vesuvius), with its smoke and flame, upon the other, is a sublime conclusion to the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... whirr of many wheels, the thudding of weights, and the buzz and babel of human toil. Beyond, the dwellings of the workingmen, smoke-stained and unlovely, radiated away in a lessening perspective of narrowing road and dwindling wall. ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... right to make the man in the moon trustee for that part of the accumulations which rises above the optics of sublunary bankers; whilst the Ceylon pillar is constantly unweaving its own granite texture, and dwindling earthwards. It is probable that each of the parties will have reached its consummation about the same time. What is to be done with the mustard- seed, Ceylon has forgotten to say. But what is to be done with the half-crown and its surplus, nobody can doubt after reading my last will and testament. ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... Yedinstvo. A very small and dwindling group, composed almost entirely of the personal following of Plekhanov, one of the pioneers of the Russian Social Democratic movement in the 80's, and its greatest theoretician. Now an old man, Plekhanov was extremely patriotic, too conservative even for the Mensheviki. After the Bolshevik ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... in horrified amazement: its size was that of a rickety baby under three, while its wizened face was that of a spell-struck creature of no assignable age, or the wax image of some dwindling life wasting away before the witch-kindled fire of a diabolical hatred. The tiny hands and arms were pitiably thin, and showed under the yellow skin sharp little bones no larger than a chicken's; and at her wrists ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... not only sharing the wealth, but the fame which the publication of these gems was bound to bring. But he had to explain that he was poor, and that he could not bring out the poems without financial aid. The money which had been given Edgar to set out in the world with, was already dwindling, but he managed to subscribe a sum which Thomas declared would be sufficient, with the little he himself could add, for the printing of a modest edition, in a ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... town of cheap fashion, a town of glass and stucco. The pungent odour of the eucalyptus trees, the light breeze stirred not the foliage, sheared into mathematical lines. It was like yards of baize dwindling in perspective; and between the tall trunks great plate-glass windows gleamed, filled ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore |
