"Eggshell" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with the two mechanics I had brought with me from Patricroft to erect the steam hammer. I took share and share alike in the work. The Lords were introduced to me, and I proceeded to show them the hammer. I passed it through its paces. I made it break an eggshell in a wine-glass without injuring the glass. It was as neatly effected by the two-and-a-half ton hammer as if it had been done by an egg-spoon. Then I had a great mass of white-hot iron swung out of the furnace by a crane and placed upon the anvil block. Down ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... at me, I'll smash your head like an eggshell!" His voice was low but terrific. There was a tone m it that made his own blood stop in his veins. "If you think I'm going to roll around on this ground with a hyena like you, you've mistaken your man. I'll kill you, but I won't fight with such ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... yet, for indeed, until I felt my foot on the rock, I had but small hopes of reaching shore safely in that cock boat of theirs. After feeling that great ship so helpless against the waves, it seemed impossible that a mere eggshell could ...
— Orange and Green - A Tale of the Boyne and Limerick • G. A. Henty
... Jamaica would doubtless have made one Slave State the more in the original Union, and would have been one of the fiercest afterward in the secession. We may well believe that nothing but the knowledge that she would be crushed like an eggshell by the mighty power of England, hindered her in 1834 from heading her sister islands in a revolt against the impending abolition of slavery, and thus giving the world twenty-seven years earlier the spectacle ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... your wines. No blue ruin or heavy wet. In the days of the great Caesar all feasts began with eggs and ended with fruits, cream and apples; hence the proverb, ab avo usque ad mala, and the man who did not crush his eggshell or put his folded napkin on his left knee, was considered a fool. As we have not eggs we will do our best with the napkins. No melancholy subjects at this table. So here's luck." And ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... enemy had found and struck it down, and with its hard, sharp little beak had drilled a hole in one of the upper plates of its abdomen, and from that small opening had cunningly extracted all the meat. Though still alive it was empty as a blown eggshell. Poor queen and mother, you survived the winter in vain, and went abroad in vain in the bitter weather in quest of bread to nourish your few first-born—the grubs that would help you by and by; now there will be no bread for them, and for you no populous city in the flowery earth and ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... fur, leather, shagreen[obs3], hide; pelt, peltry[obs3]; cordwain[obs3]; derm[obs3]; robe, buffalo robe [U.S.]; cuticle, scarfskin, epidermis. clothing &c. 225; mask &c. (concealment) 530. peel, crust, bark, rind, cortex, husk, shell, coat; eggshell, glume[obs3]. capsule; sheath, sheathing; pod, cod; casing, case, theca[obs3]; elytron[obs3]; elytrum[obs3]; involucrum[Lat]; wrapping, wrapper; envelope, vesicle; corn husk, corn shuck [U.S.]; dermatology, conchology; testaceology[obs3]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... pushing the engineer aside, he flashed a torch on the wreck. Wedged in the gearing of the shattered gear-wheel was a pair of engineer's overalls. They had jammed tight in the teeth and the resistless driving of the engine had cracked the great gear-wheel like an eggshell. Held solid by its base in the bolted concrete there had not been a half-inch's play and, since something must give, and the opposing wheel had stood, the enormous casting had smashed. The engineer and his helpers were pottering about, trying guiltily to remove the cause of the ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... nonsensicalness, a latent peril resulting from such a large number of automatons in unquestioned positions, that should all logically indicate this: If Germany once broke, it would collapse somewhat like an eggshell. It would be a formidable eggshell but with ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... knees, groggy-headed and bleary-eyed. His hand closed over the whip. The stock was heavily loaded with lead, and it was a terrible weapon when held reversed. One blow from it could crush a skull like an eggshell. ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... transparent glass slips lay whole files of meerschaum pipes, furnished with clear curved-amber mouthpieces: fishes' heads, lobster-claws holding an eggshell, horses' heads, cows' hoofs; rich cigar-holders of meerschaum, all over silver stars and gold bands. Heaps and heaps and lots and lots of every kind, as far as he could see; and all this was multiplied in two enormous mirrors, in which, yonder, far back among all this smoking-gear, he saw his ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... Smugg! Yet he had breakfasted—Mary and an eggshell testified to that effect. He reappeared at 11.30, confused and very warm (he had exceptional powers in the way of being warm). We said nothing, and he began to bleat Horace. In a minute of silence I happened to hear what it was: it referred to a lady of the name of Pyrrha; the learned may ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... directly above their heads. His powerful tail was raised high to one side, and as he passed close above them he brought it down in one terrific sweep that crushed a green warrior's skull as though it had been an eggshell. ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... long bout of illness; his mind clear, but inert; his limbs painless, but so languid that they hardly seem to belong to him; and when he regards their attenuated proportions with the same sort of feeble interest that is evoked by eggshell china—they are not useful, still it would be a ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... is there a reproduction of form, outward and inner conformation of body, organs, and cells, but the habitual actions of the parent are also reproduced. The chicken on emerging from the eggshell runs off as its mother ran off before it; yet what an extraordinary complication of emotions and sensations is necessary in order to preserve equilibrium in running. Surely the supposition of an inborn capacity for the reproduction of these intricate actions can alone explain ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... some kind; pieces of cats' bones and skulls, feathers, hair, earth, or clay, which ought to be from a grave; teeth of men and of snakes, alligators or other beasts; vegetable gum, or other sticky stuff; human blood, pieces of eggshell, etc., etc. This mixture is curiously like that in the witches' caldron in Macbeth, which, among other equally toothsome matters, contained frogs' toes, bats' wool, lizards' legs, owlets' wings, wolfs' teeth, witches' mummy, ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... specimens of spar and coral and a profusion of plants everywhere. It was all neat, respectable, even dignified, superior. There was no such other room in the village. In the village? There were not many at that time even in the town. Sooner than part with the eggshell china or the Indian shawl the Miss Dexters had suffered the pains of poverty and hunger; these cherished reminders of an absent father and an artistic youth could never be lost or borne away by the hands of a stranger. And how glad those foolish ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... Texans are stubborn. But I do not need any information from you. I shall crush the Alamo, as my fingers would smash an eggshell." ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... doctor in a low voice, "metaphors literally fail me. It is inadequate to say that the skull was smashed to bits like an eggshell. Fragments of bone were driven into the body and the ground like bullets into a mud wall. It was the ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... was struck off some ten paces. The buccaneer threw himself upon the Gascon; raised his gun like a club; he seized the chevalier by the collar and cried, "Your life is mine; I am going to break your head like an eggshell." ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... mate, with a laugh at this questioner's innocence. "Why, the drifting ice behind us, pressed forward with a power of millions of tons, will force us against the fixed ice, and then we shall either be lifted right out of the water, or go, as I said, like an eggshell." ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... must be lonely," the old blacksmith said, taking Norah's small brown hand, and holding it for a moment in his horny fist very much as if he feared it were an eggshell, and not to be dropped. "Master Jim's growing a big fellow, too—goin' to be as big a man as his father, I believe. Well, good-bye, missy, and don't forget to come in next time ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... The contents had gone to the bottom, and near the center the frail sides, seen plainly in the torchlight, were actually crushed inward like a shattered eggshell. ...
— The River of Darkness - Under Africa • William Murray Graydon
... not perforate an eggshell, and fill it with oil, and put it on the mouth of the lamp, because it drops, even though it be of pottery. But Rabbi Judah "allows it." "But if the potter joined it at first?" "It is allowed, since it is one vessel." A ...
— Hebrew Literature
... effectually to seal the interior against the intrusion of greasy particles; it can then remain as long as may be necessary thoroughly to cook it, without imbibing any more of the boiling fluid than if it were enclosed in an eggshell. The other method is, to rub a perfectly smooth iron surface with just enough of some oily substance to prevent the meat from adhering, and cook it with a quick heat, as cakes are baked on a griddle. In both these cases there must be the most rapid application ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... fast boat, we were soon opposite the town, when we were obliged to re-embark on board one of a fleet of Tanka boats, which put out from the shore as soon as our buttons were discovered. Tanka means eggboat; they resemble an eggshell divided longitudinally, and are peculiar to Macao, the shoalness of the water preventing a landing in larger vessels. Were captured by A-ti, a laughing Chinese nymph, with a splendid set of the whitest teeth, and landed safely on the Praya, after ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... shot. The whole charge took the canoe about six feet behind the bow, and doubled her up like an eggshell. Before the smoke had cleared she had foundered, and the second canoe had paused to pick up some of the wounded men. The others, as much at home in the water as in the woods, were already striking ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a fluffy chicken when it first sidles out of its eggshell into the wide, wide world; and said: "Oh, I do hope I haven't a smudge on the ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... afterwards another ant got on the tree, and made the same journey and the same discovery, but she spoke of it cautiously and indefinitely, and as she was one of the superior ants and very much respected, they believed her, and when she died they erected an eggshell as a monument to her memory, for they cultivated a great respect for science. I saw," said the little mouse, "that the ants were always running to and fro with her burdens on their backs. Once I saw one of them drop her load; she gave herself a great deal of trouble in trying to raise it again, ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... the rowboat in their path, or whether they were simply reckless and heartless, it was impossible to tell. In any event, there was no shifting of the helm, no slackening of speed. Swift and relentless as doom the motor craft drove into the rowboat and crushed it like an eggshell. ...
— The Radio Boys at the Sending Station - Making Good in the Wireless Room • Allen Chapman
... thing in an eggshell. No doubt you are acquainted with the situation over the line. You know, excepting one or two big concessions, no Americans own land on the Mexican side. The land is all farmed under leases and sub-leases. If a ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... "there is not enough to blow a lady's curl aside. If you wait, sir, till the land-breeze fills your sails, you will wait another moon. I believe I've got my eggshell out of that nest of gray-caps; but how it has been done in the dark, a better man than ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Gell at his eggshell of a house and pretty garden, which he planted himself ten years ago, and calls it the Boschetto Gellio. He was very agreeable, with stories of Pompeii, old walls, and ruined cities, besides having a great deal to say on living ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... immersion, as effectually to seal the interior against the intrusion of greasy particles; it can then remain as long as may be necessary thoroughly to cook it, without imbibing any more of the boiling fluid than if it were inclosed in an eggshell. The other method is to rub a perfectly smooth iron surface with just enough of some oily substance to prevent the meat from adhering, and cook it with a quick heat, as cakes are baked on a griddle. In both ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... to a man out at Lido. She was built for the race two years ago, but her owner fell sick and was unable to start. He has not got strong again, and wants to sell his boat, which is far too light for ordinary work. They say she is almost like an eggshell, and you and I will be able to send her along grandly. She cost four ducats, but he will ...
— The Lion of Saint Mark - A Story of Venice in the Fourteenth Century • G. A. Henty
... north-eastern provinces was once more swinging in the wind. The boors of Drenthe and Friesland rose again. They had already mustered in the field at an earlier season of the year, in considerable force. Calling themselves "the desperates," and bearing on their standard an eggshell with the yolk running out—to indicate that, having lost the meat they were yet ready to fight for the shell—they had swept through the open country, pillaging and burning. Hohenlo had defeated them in two enchanters, slain a large number of their forces, and reduced them for a time ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the moment her bows passed beyond the pier, the sea struck her, and tossed her like an eggshell, and the deck, from stem to stern, was drenched in a moment, and running with floods as if she had been under water. For a few moments H. and I both enjoyed the motion. We stood amidships, she in her shawl, I in a great tarpauling which I had borrowed of Jack, and ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... physician said, plastering his patient's head in a workmanlike manner. "But you've a good, solid cranium as I've often told you. Not much to get hurt above the ears—mostly bone all the way through. Not easy to crack, like some of these eggshell heads." ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... bridge vanished; the twelve-inch armoured conning-tower cracked like an eggshell; the barbette collapsed like the crust of a loaf, and the big 9.2 gun lurched backwards and lay with its muzzle staring helplessly at the clouds. The deck crumpled up as though it had been burnt parchment, and the ammunition ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... road, they never once left the track, and went flying on down the grade towards the next station, eight miles distant, the coach bouncing over the loose stones and small obstacles, and surging from side to side, as an eggshell would in the rapids of Niagara. Not satisfied with the break-neck rate at which they were traveling, Bob pulled out his revolver and fired in rapid succession, at the same time yelling in a ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... strength behind a blow he whirled up the heavy Winchester, struck out and felt the solid walnut stock smash fair and square on the conical helmet. Like an eggshell the bronze helm broke and the six-pointed star above went spinning off into the dust. As a tree sways before it falls beneath a forester's ax, so the dark Jarmuthian giant tottered, while the wide dusty plain of Poseidon echoed with a ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... as there is no vigorous and sovereign inner law, he is incapable of breathing its air; for he will be drunken with it, maddened, morally slain. The man who guides his life by inner law, can no more live servile to outward authority than can the full-grown bird live imprisoned in the eggshell. But the man who has not yet attained to governing himself can no more live under the law of liberty than can the unfledged bird live without its protective covering. These things are terribly simple, and the series of demonstrations old and new that proves them, increases daily under our ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... communion, that whoso toucheth it with one lip only, and thereafter sweareth falsely, cannot be called a perjurer, since perjury is breaking an oath. But breaking half an oath, as he doth who toucheth the Bible or crucifix with one lip only, is no more perjury than breaking an eggshell is breaking an egg, the shell being a part, and the egg being ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... man, much stronger than myself, and if I am upon an equal footing with you, could crush me as easily as an eggshell.' ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... detached timbers of the gig floating about on the water, and the shock they had experienced, told the tale with sufficient significance. They had been "fluked" by the bull-whale, whose fan-shaped tail-fins, striking the boat in an upward direction, had shattered it as easily as an eggshell, tossing the fragments, along with the contents, both animate and inanimate, several feet ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... hermit, "and we are fitted out for longish voyages and rough weather. Besides, it is not so much of an eggshell as you suppose. I made it myself, and took care that it should be fit for the work required of it. The wood of which it is made, although light, is very tough, and it is lined with a skin of strong canvas which is fixed to the planks with tar. This ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... with this," he said, hoarsely. His eyes were gleaming, and in the dim light his mouth was set like a steel trap. "I'm going to have a little chat with you first, and then down this comes on the top of your skull, and it'll smash you like a bloomin' eggshell. Your time's ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... began to lift. Getting some idea of what now was happening, Rob undertook to make back toward the shore, where they could hear the surf roaring heavily. Perhaps it was lucky they did not succeed in this attempt, for the boat would no doubt have been crushed like an eggshell on the rocks. Instead, they began to float down parallel with the coast, carried on the crest of the big tide-bore which every day passes down the east coast of Kadiak between the long, parallel islands which make an inland channel many miles in extent. As the boys called now they could ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough
... of recollection as far as some naturalists and their disciples, when they point out that the chicken begins to pick up grain as soon as it comes out of the shell; that it even knows the proper movements of head and body for gaining its end. It could not have learned this in the eggshell; hence it must have done so through the thousands and thousands of creatures from which it is descended (so says Hering, for example). We may call the phenomenon before us something resembling memory, but we shall never arrive at a real comprehension of human nature if we do not take into ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... yards of Wetzel they saw a swarthy-faced and athletic savage squeeze through the narrow crevice. He had not straightened up before the axe, wielded by the giant hunter, descended on his head, cracking his skull as if it were an eggshell. The savage sank to the earth without even a moan. Another savage naked and powerful, slipped in. He had to stoop to get through. He raised himself, and seeing Wetzel, he tried to dodge the lightning sweep of the axe. It missed his head, at which it had been aimed, but struck just over ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... in size from an eggshell holding a minute plant to boxes filling all the available space about the window. The soil may be in pots for individual plants or groups of plants or in boxes for collections of plants. You may raise your flowers ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... and night now, for at any moment they might expect an encounter with a huge iceberg. In the antarctic these great ice mountains attain such bulk that they could crush the most powerful ship like an eggshell. It behooves all mariners venturing into those regions, therefore, to keep a most careful ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... the chilled grapefruit and the eggshell cup of morning coffee are a gastronomic feat not always easy to hurdle, raise not your digestive eyebrows. At precisely fifteen minutes past seven six mornings in the week, seven-thirty, Sundays, Mrs. Lipkind ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... added, in the forefront of the battle. As regarded the present accident, she said her father had repeatedly told the authorities these particular shells were not safe to handle. Apparently the safety-bolt was missing from all of them, making them when loaded as brittle as an eggshell. This young lady and her mother were certainly very anti-Boer in their sympathies, though terribly afraid of allowing their feelings to be known. All that day and the next they spent in the laager, looking after the injured pere ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... made from specimens received from the J. Steckler Seed Co., New Orleans, La. The original tree stands in the garden of H. J. Pharr, Olivier, La.; the place was formerly owned by Oscar Olivier. The variety was first propagated by William Nelson, and catalogued as Frotscher's Eggshell, by Richard Frotscher, in 1885. The variety is precocious, productive, and succeeds over ...
— The Pecan and its Culture • H. Harold Hume
... head of one sturdy badmash cracked like an eggshell under the butt of the bold tar's musket; a second received the terrible hook square in the teeth; and a third, no other than Parmiter himself, was caught round the neck at the next lunge of the hook, and flung, with a mighty heave, full into the midst of the ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... the morning, when it was beginning to grow light, and everybody was still asleep, the cock waked up the hen, fetched the egg, and made a hole in it, and they ate it up between them, and put the eggshell on the hearth. Then they went up to the needle, who was still sleeping, picked him up by his head, and stuck him in the landlord's chair-cushion, and having also placed the pin in his towel, off they ...
— Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm • Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
... admitted that it was worth while coming, and let me record in advance that when we got to Vienna, and they served us an equally delicious beer in long thin glasses as delicate as an eggshell, Bee grew so enthusiastic in the process of beer drinking that Jimmie grew absurdly proud of his pupil, and professed to think that she was "coming round after all." But Bee declared that it was ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... the officers ordered the bands to play, and their music did much to quell panic. It was a heart-breaking sight to us tossing in an eggshell three-fourths of a mile away, to see the great ship go down. First she listed to the starboard, on which side the collision had occurred, then she settled slowly but steadily, without ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... of it for good and all," he assured his wife. "But I know the man who could take up the whole jing-bang of that Crookes crowd in one hand and"—his large fist swiftly knotted as he spoke the words—"scrunch it up like an eggshell, ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris |
