"Elastic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... little nonchalance. Not a moment, however, did he neglect any warning from quarter soever, but from peaceful feeder was instantaneously wind-like fleer, his great horns thrown back over his shoulders, and his four legs just touching the ground with elastic hoof, or tucking themselves almost out of sight as he skipped rather than leaped over rock and gully, stone and bush—whatever lay betwixt him and larger room. Great joy it was to his two guardians to see him, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... wretched, hungry-looking, down-upon-his-beam-ends old fellow, that I could not refuse to inspect his wares. And then his boots filled me with pity. For such a little man he had the biggest boots I ever saw—baggy, elastic sides, and toes turned up, with the after part of the uppers sticking out some inches beyond the frayed edges of his trousers. As he sat down and drew these garments up, and his bare, skinny legs showed above his wrecked boots, ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... favourite object; and I have often admired the taste displayed in the marking of a chief's leg, on which I have seen a cocoa-nut tree correctly and distinctly drawn; its roots spreading at the heel, its elastic stalk pencilled as it were along the tendon, and its waving plume gracefully spread out on the broad part of the calf. Sometimes a couple of stems would be twined up from the heel and divide on the calf, each bearing a ...
— The Cannibal Islands - Captain Cook's Adventure in the South Seas • R.M. Ballantyne
... pleases! I detect this seriousness also in our own Wieland: even the wanton sportiveness of his humor is elevated and impeded by the goodness of his heart; it has an influence even on his rhythm; nor does he ever lack elastic power, when it is his wish, to raise us up to the most elevated planes of beauty and ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... and thence by the aorta and the carotids to the brain, whence it emerged by the fissures of the skull into the outer air. No sooner was it free (though still attached, as I felt with some uneasiness, by a thin elastic cord to the pia mater) than it gathered itself together (into what form I could not say), and with incredible speed shot upwards, till it reached what seemed to be the floor of heaven. Through this it passed, I know not how, and found itself ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... or GUM ELASTIC, is a product of the milky juices of several tropical and sub-tropical plants found in the West Indies, Central and South America, West Africa, and India; there is evidence that its properties were partially known to the Spaniards in the West Indies early in the 17th century; ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... eyelids beginning to droop. At a word from Carmena, Farley led him to a cool dark inner room. He curtly pointed out a rude bed-frame across which had been stretched a rawhide. Lennon fell asleep the moment he lay down upon the elastic bed. ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... left him, he drew his 'Boston wrapper' still closer around him, hitched up his mittens, and with elastic step breasted a wintry storm that might have repelled even the more elastic movement of juvenility, and wended up the avenue. Although I cannot irreverently say ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... and force of the fall is considered. But the rock where the water strikes probably suffers less erosion than it would were the descent less than half as great, since the current is outspread, and much of its force is spent ere it reaches the bottom—being received on the air as upon an elastic cushion, and borne outward and dissipated over a surface more ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... daughter dined together very pleasantly. Clarissa had been almost happy by her father's unwonted tenderness, and Mr. Lovel was in tolerable spirits, in spite of that dreary afternoon's labour, that hopeless task of trying to find out some elastic quality in pounds, ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... dawn when I was roused by a little arm round my neck, and waked to think I had one of Raphael's cherubs by my side. Fingers of waxen softness were ruthlessly at work upon my eyes, and the little form that met my touch felt lithe and elastic, like a kitten's limbs. There was just light enough to see the child, perched on the edge of the bed, her soft blue dressing-gown trailing over the white night-dress, while her black and long-fringed eyes shone through the dimness of morning. She ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... a dreadful angle to his body, and the clatter of his heels against the door made the noise which had broken in upon our conversation. In an instant I had caught him round the waist, and held him up while Holmes and Pycroft untied the elastic bands which had disappeared between the livid creases of skin. Then we carried him into the other room, where he lay with a clay-colored face, puffing his purple lips in and out with every breath—a dreadful wreck of all that he had ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... places completely covered with a variety of yellowish-green moss, varying from a couple of inches to a foot and a half in thickness; and yielding to the pressure of the foot or the body as comfortably as a feather bed, if not more so, being elastic in nature. A large square of this had been cut up from some other part of the island and placed on the already moss-grown and cushioned ground, serving as a mattress, while two smaller pieces served as pillows. A sumac tree at the head of the improvised ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... to do but to have a new date painted on the sign, and to draw on his reserve fund, but at bottom he was vastly perturbed. He had counted on a running start, and every week of delay was a vicious handicap. If he had remotely imagined how elastic a contractor's agreement could be, he would certainly have thought twice about ordering so many changes—he would have steered a middle course, and been satisfied with half the improvement—but as it was, ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... to be the subject of this letter—the arrangement of our first ideal room in such a museum. As I think of it, I would fain expand the single room, first asked for, into one like Prince Houssain's,—no, Prince Houssain had the flying tapestry, and I forget which prince had the elastic palace. But, indeed, it must be a lordly chamber which shall be large enough to exhibit the true nature of thread and ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... one another. Their bodies, immersed in the water, would have presented an entrancing sight to any one who might have looked down upon them from the bench in the garden on the high bank and watched the exquisite play of their muscles under their thin elastic skin. Pink tones lost themselves in the skin-yellow pearl of their bodies. But pink triumphed in their faces, and in those parts of ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... person this dark look was directed. Then he saw beneath a thick clump of linden-trees, which were nearly divested of foliage, Madame de Villefort sitting with a book in her hand, the perusal of which she frequently interrupted to smile upon her son, or to throw back his elastic ball, which he obstinately threw from the drawing-room into the garden. Villefort became pale; he understood the old man's meaning. Noirtier continued to look at the same object, but suddenly his glance was transferred from ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... stopped to greet it,—the only green thing upon a rock ledge or a sandy stretch,—had walked over it in forest avenues beneath tall and stately pines, and had slept comfortably upon its spicy, elastic rugs, liking it from the first. But on one of my winter tramps I fell in love with this ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... the rare gifts in a manner o' speaking. My gran'mother died a month later an' left me a pair o' jet earrings and a jet bracelet to match—one o' them stretchin' ones, on elastic, ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... dollars he was adding to an unreckoned sum of about two thousand, merely as extra fortification against a growing sense of gloom. He wished to brace his flagging spirits with the gay wine of possession, and he was glad, when the money came, that it was in an elastic-bound roll, so bulky that it was pleasantly uncomfortable in his pocket ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... from the prison above. Gazing through the aperture, they perceived not many feet below what had once been the castle ditch, now dry, and forming a portion of the archduke's gardens. With a joyous heart and an elastic bound, Ibrahim reached the soft turf beneath. The more timid and helpless Hassan lowered himself by clinging to a remaining iron bar, and with the aid of his companion was soon on his feet, enjoying, with many thanks to Allah, the fresh air of heaven and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... idle wailing compelled her still to pursue her daily course of labour, and she pursued it with the same constancy and punctuality as she had ever done. But the exquisitely chiselled face, the majestic gait, the elastic step—the beauty and glory of youth, unshaken because unassaulted by death and sorrow—where were they? Alas! all the bewitching charms of her former being had gone down into the grave of her mother and sister; and she, their support and idol, seemed no more now than she really was—a wayworn, solitary, ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... be the weight and slender and elastic the form of the man who can sleep many nights comfortably in a seventy-pound canoe without injuring it. Cedar canoes, after being subjected to such use for some time, generally become leaky; so, to avoid this disaster, the canoeist, when threatened with wet weather, is forced to the disagreeable ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... there is indication of concentrated vertical support, then the capital is a necessary termination. I know how much Gothic, otherwise beautiful, this sweeping principle condemns; but it condemns not altogether. We may still take delight in its lovely proportions, its rich decoration, or its elastic and reedy moulding; but be assured, wherever shafts, or any approximations to the forms of shafts, are employed, for whatever office, or on whatever scale, be it in jambs or piers, or balustrades, or traceries, without ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... linked in a strap of elastic metal, resembled only superficially a watch, he now saw. Rather it had the appearance of some delicate electric switch. Rectangular in shape, it was divided into two halves by a band of white crystal. In each of these halves ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... natural courtesy would lead him right in the long-run. He seemed all sunshine, with his bright blue eyes and great fair moustache and brown face; the closely fitting uniform showed off his erect figure and; elastic gait, and the whole impression was fresh and exhilarating in the extreme. I was sorry he had gone. I would have liked to talk with him about boating and fishing and shooting; about athletics and horses and tandem-driving, and many things I used, to like years ago at college, ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... such grotesque attitudes as his figure assumed I never saw even in one of Aubrey Beardsley's finest pictures; and once, as his leg and right arm verged on the edge of one of the outside eddies, I hoped to see these members elongated like a piece of elastic until they snapped off; but, with a superhuman struggle, he got them free, with the loss only of one of his fingers, by which time the current had blown him across the room and directly in front of my fender. To keep from going up the chimney, he tried to brace himself against this with his ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... resolutions and combinations that are formed during the process of the vinous and acetous stages of fermentation, are interesting, beyond comparison, to the brewer, malt and molasses distillers, vintager, cider and vinegar maker, &c. The elastic fluids and volatile principles that are extricated and escape, formerly so little attended to, are now better understood. The method of commodiously saving, and advantageously applying them, and other volatile ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger
... the necessaries of life. Legs are all well enough; they are handy to have around the house, and all that; but a man must attend to his stomach, if he has to walk about on the small of his back. Now, I'm going to make you an offer. That leg is Fairchild's patent; steel-springs, india-rubber joints, elastic toes and everything, and it's in better order now than it was when I bought it. It'd be a comfort to any man. It's the most luxurious leg I ever came across. If bliss ever kin be reached by a man this side of the tomb, it belongs to the ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... face was still swollen and puffy, but her elastic spirits had sufficiently recovered to enable her to make repeated attempts to converse with her taciturn companions, and to run in and out of their cubicles to play lady's-maid as usual, in such useful, unostentatious ways as carrying water, folding nightgowns, and tying hair ribbons. This morning ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... of Time; glance, if thou hast eyes, from the near moving-cause to its far-distant Mover: The stroke that came transmitted through a whole galaxy of elastic balls, was it less a stroke than if the last ball only had been struck, and sent flying? O, could I (with the Time-annihilating Hat) transport thee direct from the Beginnings to the Endings, how were thy eyesight unsealed, and thy heart set flaming in the Light-sea of celestial ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... inspiring than the dreary Gare du Nord, nothing less inviting than the glimpse of Paris to be caught through its open doorways; but had the whole world laughed him a welcome, the young Russian's step could not have been more elastic, his courage higher, his heart more ready to pulse to the quick march of his thoughts, as he strode down the gray platform and out into ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... melancholy! If the young ladies were energetic before, their sympathy and solicitude now knew no bounds. Such a man as the curate—such a dear—such a perfect love—to be consumptive! It was too much. Anonymous presents of black-currant jam, and lozenges, elastic waistcoats, bosom friends, and warm stockings, poured in upon the curate until he was as completely fitted out with winter clothing, as if he were on the verge of an expedition to the North Pole: verbal bulletins of the state of his health were circulated ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... permanent manner. Sharper claws, stronger muscles, swifter feet and tougher hides determine the survival value of lower animals. With man, however, the finer intellect, the readier adaptability to environment, the greater susceptibility to improvement, and the elastic capacity for co-ordination, were the qualities which determined his career. Tribes which are weak in these qualities give way and perish before tribes which are strong in them, whatever advantages the former may possess in physical structure. The finest savage ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... produce were four rams and one ewe with similar fleeces; and in 1833 there were rams enough of the new sort to serve the whole flock of ewes. In each subsequent year the lambs were of two kinds; one possessing the curled elastic wool of the old Merinos, only a little longer and finer; the other like the new breed. At last, the skillful breeder obtained a flock combining the fine silky fleece with a smaller head, broader flanks, and more capacious chest; and ...
— The Principles of Breeding • S. L. Goodale
... also a transient phenomenon in the eternal pageant of Destiny. In the days when he hoped to marry Elizabeth, he sought to impress and charm her, and at the same time to take off something of his burthen of forty years, by wearing the last fancy of the contemporary buck, a costume of elastic material with distensible warts and horns, changing in colour as he walked, by an ingenious arrangement of versatile chromatophores. And no doubt, if Elizabeth's affection had not been already engaged by the worthless Denton, ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... yet found the key, might very naturally gravitate toward any one presenting Pollen's appearance of security; his attitude of complacence in the face of feminine authority. But was he complacent? Mrs. Ennis had her doubts. He was very vain; underneath his urbanity there might be an elastic hardness. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... elastic that they always recovers themselves. I didn't show you that; but you might turn the backs of them chairs nearly down to the ground, and they will come straight again. You let me send you a set for your wife to look at. If she's not charmed with ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... support of General Taylor upon those who favored the abolition of slavery. In a speech at Cleveland, Ohio, in October of that year, he said: "Freedom insists on the emancipation and development of labor; slavery demands a soil moistened with tears and blood—freedom a soil that exults under the elastic tread of man in his native majesty. These elements divide and classify the American people into two parties," and he proceeded to argue as if the Whigs and Democrats were thus divided, when he knew that both were in the absolute control ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... very elastic step for her age, she went to the parlor, followed by M. Galpin and the janitor. They had put the new patient in there, and, sunk upon a bench, he looked the picture of utter idiocy. After having looked at him for a minute, ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... made, and are still in progress, which appear to show that these premature explosions may be to a great extent obviated, if not altogether prevented, by lining or coating the rough surface of the interior of the shell with a smooth and elastic coating. ...
— Ordnance Instructions for the United States Navy. - 1866. Fourth edition. • Bureau of Ordnance, USN
... know to have first appeared in Italy. In | the well-paved streets of the Italian cities, driving was universal, while elsewhere in Europe walking or riding was the custom, and at all events no one drove for amusement. We read in the novelists of soft, elastic beads, of costly carpets and bedroom furniture, of which we hear nothing in other countries. We often hear especially of the abundance and beauty of the linen. Much of all this is drawn within the sphere of art. We note with admiration the thousand ways in which art ennobles luxury, ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... be a high priest, for there are a dozen girls here and in the city who believe themselves enshrined in that elastic heart." ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... to M'Nab, and he eagerly agreed. At my suggestion, the half-caste unhitched and tried Fancy, while I mounted the black horse, and turned him across the plain. I tried him at all paces; but never before had I met with anything to equal that elastic step and long, easy, powerful stride. To ride that horse was to feel free, exultant, invincible. His gallop was like Marching Through Georgia, vigorously rendered by a good brass band. All that has been written of man's noblest friend— from the dim, uncertain time when ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... been difficult to keep in the palmiest days of monastic enthusiasm; and they may well have thought that freedom from monastic restraint, coupled with a pension, was a welcome relief, especially when resistance involved the anger of the prince and liability to the penalties of elastic treasons and of a praemunire which no one could understand. So, one after another, the great abbeys yielded to the persuasions and threats of the royal commissioners. The dissolution of the Mendicant Orders and of the Knights of St. John dispersed the last remnants of the papal army as an organised ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... add to the colored-edition impression of the whole country. A redwood, as perhaps you know, is a tremendous big tree sometimes as big as twenty feet in diameter. It is exquisitely proportioned like a fluted column of noble height. Its bark is slightly furrowed longitudinally, and of a peculiar elastic appearance that lends it an almost perfect illusion of breathing animal life. The color is a rich umber red. Sometimes in the early morning or the late afternoon, when all the rest of the forest is cast in shadow, these massive ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... within reach of the bread, planted his spear behind him as a support, holding it with both hands, and then, grinning mightily at his own cunning in keeping his body leaning back out of reach, he lifted one leg, and with his long elastic foot working, stretched it out and tried to take the piece of bread with ...
— The Dingo Boys - The Squatters of Wallaby Range • G. Manville Fenn
... did not enter the heart of the wanderer. Somehow the world did not appear half so attractive in his eyes as it had looked when he stole forth from his father's gate in the cold gray of the morning twilight. His step, therefore, was less elastic and his bearing less assured now than then, and at length he sat down under a large beech-tree by the roadside, to reflect upon the situation. He began to feel very weary, and the sudden transition from action to repose induced a drowsiness that in a ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... through that sweet wilderness, she felt more and more the influence of his elastic temperament. Miriam was an impressible and impulsive creature, as unlike herself, in different moods, as if a melancholy maiden and a glad one were both bound within the girdle about her waist, and kept in magic thraldom by the brooch that clasped ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... superciliously with a cynical air of contempt, stood forward with a firm and elastic step before his silent worshippers. He was a stalwart savage, in the very prime of life, tall, lithe, and active. His figure was that of a man well used to command; but his face, though handsome, was visibly marked by every ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... in a professional career with a more vigorous and elastic constitution than Mr. Paine's. Endowed with an iron frame and nerves of lignum vitae, he very naturally felt in youth that his fund of physical energy was inexhaustible; but, like thousands of other professional men in this fiery and impatient age, he finds himself in the autumn ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... in death which so many of his victims displayed. They triumphed even in their death. Louis and Vergniaud, Marie Antoinette, and Madame Roland, felt that they were stepping from life into glory, and their step was light and elastic. Robespierre was sinking from existence into infamy. During those fearful hours, in which nothing in life was left him but to suffer, how wretched must have been the reminiscences of his career! He, who had so constantly pursued one idea, must then have felt ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... How could he have strained his eyes after other women, as if a second glance were ever needed when it was really she! The perfectly graceful figure, the trimness and neatness of it, the beautiful womanly poise of the head, the quick elastic step, he could have sworn to her among ten thousand. His heart gave a bound at the sight of her, but he had the English aversion to giving himself away, and so he walked quickly forward to meet her with an impassive face, but ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... liquid, distilled from the dew found on certain plants at early dawn, has that wondrous power. Every day the effect is perceptible; the limbs become strong, the muscles vigorous, the cheeks fill out, the roses return, the eyes grow bright, the step elastic, the—' ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... the heartache, but she forebore to ask any questions. "Cheer up, Waity," she cried. "You never can tell; we may have a thankful Thanksgiving, after all! Who knows what may happen? I'm 'strung up' this afternoon and in a fighting mood. I've felt like a new piece of snappy white elastic all day; it's the air, just like wine, so cool and stinging and full of courage! Oh, yes, we won't give up hope yet awhile, Waity, not until we're ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the sharp edge of her sorrow, together with her fears, wore gradually away. She had the elastic spirit of eighteen. And she was impatient of this new heartache, which possessed none of the romantic qualities of the old. A doubt of her father's death, fostered by Dallas, grew until it became a conviction. He had been ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... minute atoms, the magnetical effluvia of the earth, with other innumerable particles sent out from the bodies of the celestial luminaries, and causing, by their influence, the idea of light in us. The third sort is its characteristic and essential property, I mean permanently elastic parts. Various hypotheses may be framed relating to the structure of these later particles of the air. They might be resembled to the springs of watches, coiled up and endeavoring to restore themselves; to wool, which, being compressed, has an elastic force; to slender wires of different ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... spent upon the thing when its price is high than when it is low, while the opposite is true in the latter case. This distinction is of considerable importance in connection with many problems (e.g. of taxation); and the terms, elastic demand and inelastic demand, are worth remembering. We may thus express the above conclusions by saying that the demand for sewing-cotton is highly inelastic, and that the demand for coal miners is more elastic than ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... was Fay's unconscious answer; "but you will soon get rested with this lovely air." And then she kissed her affectionately, and went up the beach with her old elastic step, and Margaret watched her sadly until ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... careful preliminary arrangements, suitable and elastic organisation of transport, the collection of material at railhead, the training of platelaying gangs provided by the troops, the utilisation of the earthwork of the enemy's line for our own railway, luck as regards the weather and the fullest use of sea transport, ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... is a good man, but nothing more," he said of him. Czerny admired the young pianist with the elastic hand and on his second visit to Vienna, characteristically inquired, "Are you still industrious?" Czerny's brain was a tireless incubator of piano exercises, while Chopin so fused the technical problem with the poetic idea, that such a nature ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... were borrowed from his mother also. His ordinary boots, heavy and clumsy, with hobnails as big as peanuts, seemed to him very ill-suited for the soft, swift, noiseless tread of a scout, so he had replaced them with an old pair of elastic-side boots intended for female wear. The elastics were clean gone, and his feet would have come out at every step had not, luckily, the tabs remained. These he had lashed together, fore and aft, round his ankle, for, being a riverside boy, he was ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... wonder of this thing was still lying like a thrall upon him, and yet he knew that the joy of life was burning once more in his veins. He caught sight of himself in a mirror, and he was amazed. The careworn look had gone from his eyes, the sallowness from his complexion. His step was elastic, he felt the firm, quick beat of his heart, even his pulses seem to throb to a new and a wonderful tune. These moments whilst he waited for her were a joy to him. The atmosphere was fragrant with the perfume of her favourite roses, a ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... with a wild journey through central Italy, which he makes as the chief engineer of Caesar Borgia. The biographer, putting together the stray jottings of his manuscripts, may follow him through every day of it, up the strange tower of Sienna, which looks towards Rome, elastic like a bent bow, down to the sea-shore at Piombino, each place appearing as fitfully as in a fevered dream.... We catch a glimpse of him again at Rome in 1514, surrounded by his mirrors and vials and furnaces, ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... commonplace sophistries! L'homme se pique! as old Montaigne said; Man is his own sharper! The conscience is the most elastic material in the world. To-day you cannot stretch it over a mole-hill, ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... as it begins to learn its new lesson. The little hands of the calyx clasp tightly in the bud, round the beautiful petals; in the young flower their grasp grows more elastic—loosening somewhat in the daytime, but keeping the power of contracting, able to close in again during a rainstorm, or when night comes on. But see the central flower, which has reached its maturity. The calyx ...
— Parables of the Cross • I. Lilias Trotter
... painting a picture, or conducting an experiment. Such statements are, however, understatements. The habits of mind involved in habits of the eye and hand supply the latter with their significance. Above all, the intellectual element in a habit fixes the relation of the habit to varied and elastic use, and hence to continued growth. We speak of fixed habits. Well, the phrase may mean powers so well established that their possessor always has them as resources when needed. But the phrase is also used to mean ruts, routine ways, with loss of freshness, ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... note of sorrow or even of despair is perceptible in these sentences, there is no sign that the virile and elastic spirit of the writer is broken. But there are manifest signs of an increasing tendency towards mental detachment from the world which had used him so ill. With the happiest of men the almost certain prospect of extinction at the end of a dozen years usually tends to foster the growth of a conviction ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... and all variety of manner, group, and costume, some on foot, some on horseback, and some on cars; the gayest show of holiday attire contrasting with the every-day rags of wretchedness; the fresh cheek of health and beauty making gaunt misery look more appalling, and the elastic step of vigorous youth outstripping the tardy pace of feeble age. Pedestrians were hurrying on in detachments of five or six—the equestrians in companies less numerous; sometimes the cavalier who could boast a saddle carrying a woman on a pillion behind him. But saddle ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... conquest of nature. To this problem the machine was the answer. The second problem was the building of an organization capable of handling the new mechanism of production—an organization large enough, elastic enough, stable enough and durable enough—to this problem ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... that bear struggled fiercely to free itself, and often did the shaken hunter fear that he had miscalculated the strength of his ropes, but they stood the test well, and, being elastic, acted in some degree like lines of indiarubber. At the end of that time the bear fell prone from exhaustion, which, to do him justice, was more the result ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne
... the origin of aristocracy, it has an injurious effect on the moral and physical character of man. Like slavery it debilitates the human faculties; for as the mind bowed down by slavery loses in silence its elastic powers, so, in the contrary extreme, when it is buoyed up by folly, it becomes incapable of exerting them, and dwindles into imbecility. It is impossible that a mind employed upon ribbands and ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... and other subsidiary food crops. This has trenched somewhat largely on my space; and although the volume has been swelled to an unexpected size, I am reluctantly compelled to omit some few Sections, such as those treating of elastic and other Gums, Resins, &c.; on tropical Fruits; and on textile substances and products available for cordage and clothing. The latter section, which includes Cotton, Flax, Jute, &c., and embraces a wide and important range of plants, I propose issuing in a separate volume at an ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... her woe and promised that he would take better care of her. But his military engagements were not elastic. He dared not neglect them. They took more and more of his evenings and invaded his days. Besides, he was poor company for Kedzie's mood. He had little of the humming-bird restlessness, and he ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... a framework of cartilages joined by elastic membranes or ligaments, and joints. These cartilages move freely toward and upon each other by means of attached muscles. Also the larynx as a whole can be moved in various directions by means of extrinsic muscles joined to ...
— The Child-Voice in Singing • Francis E. Howard
... of the physical world—his interest in them as diversified and fresh, his impressions as sharp and distinct, his rendering of them as free and true and forcible, as little weakened or confused by imitation or by conventional words, his language as elastic and as completely under his command, his choice of poetic materials as unrestricted and original, as if he had been born in days which claim as their own such freedom and such keen discriminative sense of what is real in feeling and image—as if he had never ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... very well. She was a wonderfully preserved woman, and being of an elastic temperament, a day away from home always sufficed to smooth out the wrinkles which her husband's peculiar method of loving and cherishing her tended to confirm. And she was especially buoyant just ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... able, as some moths are, to find my way out of it by chemical or mechanical means; therefore I must leave a way open for myself. In order, however, that my enemies may not take advantage of this, I will close it with elastic bristles, which I can easily push asunder from within, but which, upon the principle of the arch, will resist all pressure from without." Surely this is asking rather too much from a poor caterpillar; yet the whole of the foregoing must be thought out ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... and kinds—fragments of silk (plain and ribbed), of plush, of ribbon both wide and narrow; small sprays of marguerites, a rose or two, some poppies, and a bunch of violets; a few made bows in velvet and silk; some elastic, some satin, some feathers, a wing here and there ... the miscellaneous assortment of odds-and-ends always appropriated (or, in the modern military slang, "won") by assistants in the millinery. Some had been ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... dog." About 72 per cent of the cleaned wheat as milled is recovered in the higher grades of flour, and about 2 or 3 per cent as low grades, a large portion of which is sold as animal food. The high grades are characterized by a lighter color, more elastic gluten, better granulation, and a smaller number of debris particles. Although the lower grade flours contain a somewhat higher percentage of protein, they are not as valuable for bread-making purposes because the gluten is not as ...
— Human Foods and Their Nutritive Value • Harry Snyder
... many of the boys tried to do so, and many were the earnest inquiries for him day by day. It then became more fully apparent than ever, that, although Edwin was among them without being of them, no boy in the school was more deeply honored and fondly loved than he. Even the elastic spirits of boyhood could not quite throw off the shadow of gloom which his ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... that when you put on a Cluthe Truss, there's no belt, band or elastic around the waist, no springs, no legstraps, nothing that can pinch, squeeze or bind, nothing that can cut, chafe or in ...
— Cluthe's Advice to the Ruptured • Chas. Cluthe & Sons
... Altogether, though highly ornate, the metaphors are original. Of course, the idea is eminently oriental. Eastern rhetoric being fond of spinning out metaphors and similes, which, in the hands of Eastern poets, become highly elastic. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... ever trode the plains of Flanders than the brave Ghurkas. Short and swarthy with that peculiar elastic step and well set-up figure which can only be obtained by a rigorous course of physical setting up drill of the old style with "thumbs behind the seams of the trousers," the Ghurkas are in a class by themselves. Their ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... and on these elastic terms that I first met you, Jane, and this chapter shall be sacred to you! Jane the long-eared, Jane the iron-jawed, Jane the stubborn, Jane donkeyer than other donkeys,—in a word, MULIER! It may be that Jane has made her bow to the public before this. If she ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... palate. These were devoured by the wholesale in their season, and little mouths grew oozy-green as those of happy beasties in June, from much champing and chewing. Did we lose our appetite for the delectable dinner-pail through such literal going to pasture? I think not. Tastes were elastic, in those days; and Nature, so ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... was evident proof that these molluscs could not have lived in a climate like that of places in which they now occur, instancing Nautilius pompilius, which now lives in the seas of warm countries; also the presence of exotic ferns, palms, fossil amber, fossil gum elastic, besides the occurrence of fossil crocodiles and elephants both in ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... removed after the cleaning and wiped, and also the inside of the ground joint. The surface of the stopcock should then be smeared with a thin coating of vaseline and replaced. It should be attached to the burette by means of a wire, or elastic band, to ...
— An Introductory Course of Quantitative Chemical Analysis - With Explanatory Notes • Henry P. Talbot
... was alone. The pupils were playing on the lawn upon which the window of the study opened. There they ran, and leaped, and shouted, all feeling and enjoyment, without an atom of the leaden care of life to press upon the light elastic soul; and there stood I, young enough to be a playmate brother, separated from them and their hearts' joyousness by the deep broad line which, once traversed, may never be recovered, ground to the earth by ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... a good sword, and a blade of great value is carefully handed down through many generations. The sheiks and principal people wear silver-hilted swords. The scabbards are usually formed of two thin strips of elastic but soft wood, covered with leather. No Arab would accept a metal scabbard, as it would destroy the keen edge of his weapon. The greatest care is taken in sharpening the swords. While on the march, the Arab carries his weapon slung on ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... conscience," replied Hard. "My conscience is as elastic and pleasantly disposed as an Irishman's. Bunker Hill casts no blight ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... anything so monstrous should exist in this profusion and prodigality of blessings! The herbs, elastic with health, seem to partake of sensitive and animated life, and to feel under my hand the benediction I would bestow on them. What a hum of satisfaction in God's creatures! How is it, Sidney, the smallest do ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... his mind in every allurement of action, fulfilling all the duties and enjoying all the pleasures that she had proposed to him. He imagined her happy and healthful, journeying gaily by his side in the fresh morning, with rosy cheek and elastic step; he imagined her delighting him by her promised songs, enlivening him by her eloquent words, in the mellow stillness of evening; he imagined her sleeping, soft and warm and still, in his protecting arms—ever happy and ever gentle; girl in years, and woman ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... a beaded belt held two large Colt's revolvers and a hunting knife, while he carried, in addition to the inevitable dog whip, a smokeless rifle of the largest bore and latest pattern. As he came forward, for all his step was firm and elastic, they could see that fatigue ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... without even looking at them during the process. (*25) Another had such a delicacy of touch that he made a wire so fine as to be invisible. (*26) Another had such quickness of perception that he counted all the separate motions of an elastic body, while it was springing backward and forward at the rate of nine hundred millions of times ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... a very good length," said Mother Blossom. "We shan't need her again till after lunch, shall we, Miss Florence? I want her to go uptown and get some elastic for ...
— Four Little Blossoms at Oak Hill School • Mabel C. Hawley
... With elastic step he set out for the wholesale district imbued with a spirit of rosy optimism. The Western was first on his list. The chances were he would have to go no farther. A short talk with Mr. Eby, the resident manager, convinced ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... and untutored old age! They are Popes always to their heretics. Such was and is Victoria; she never changed in her views of other people. In contrast she was, as regards herself, of a temperament so elastic that impressions endured hardly a moment beyond the blow, and pleasures passed without depositing any residuum which might form a store against evil days. If Krak had cut her arm off, its perpetual ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... days when brick side-walks were as elastic as India rubber beneath your feet; shop windows were an exhibition of transparencies to amuse children and young people, and the world in prospect was one long pleasure excursion. Then you drank the bright effervescence in your glass of soda-water, and now you must swallow ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... only that the two are not brought close together. The joint is contrived by driving three pegs into the end of the log, and by bending them, they are made to enter opposite holes in the part that is to be joined on; and as the pegs cross and bend against each other, they form a sort of elastic connexion, which strongly retains the two together. When it is used, they sit astride and move it along by paddling with their hands, keeping their feet upon the end of the log, by which they probably guide its course. Such are the shifts to which the absence of ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... Spanish name is Cana espina. The most common species grows to a height of about 60 feet, with a diameter varying up to eight inches, and is of wonderful strength, due to its round shape and the regularity of its joints. Each joint is strengthened by a web inside. It is singularly flexible, light, elastic, and of matchless floating power. The fibre is tough, but being perfectly straight, it is easy to split. It has a smooth glazed surface, a perfectly straight grain, and when split on any surface, it takes a high polish by simple friction. Three cuts with the bowie-knife are sufficient to hew ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... wandering eyes and her tremulous lips offering themselves to him; in his grasp he felt her cold hands; her breath floated about him. Against his bosom were pressed hidden curves of firm elastic plumpness, the existence of which he ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... cupboard, where the old Khansamah awaited her, armed with his daily hissab,[1] she slipped into the drawing-room, sat down at her bureau, and leaned her head on her hand; honestly hoping that Theo might leave the house without coming to her. For all that, the sound of his elastic step brought a light into her eyes. She did not rise, or look round; and he came and stood ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... I forget, and it matters little. We were walking together. How light the air was!—cool and rapturous like snow-chilled wine that is drunk beneath the rose at thirsty Teheran. The ground on which we trod, too, how strangely elastic! The pine-trees give out how good a smell! Is my heart beating at all, or only so fine and quick that I cannot count ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... and heroic facts, working directly on practice; with new heroes, things unvoiced before;—the German Plutarch (now that we have exhausted the Greek and Roman and British Plutarchs), with a range, too, of thought and wisdom so large and so elastic, not so much applying as inosculating to every need and sensibility of man, that we do not read a stereotype page, rather we see the eyes of the writer looking into ours, mark his behavior, humming, chuckling, with under-tones and trumpet-tones ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the grass on the slope before the house, and it was growing thick again, dark green above the yellow of its stubble, and the young generation of robins was foraging in it for the callow grasshoppers. Some boughs of the maples were beginning to lose the elastic upward lift of their prime, and to hang looser and limper with the burden of their foliage. The elms drooped lower toward the grass, and swept the straggling tops left ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... felt the lapse of hours. For what wears out the life of mortal men? 'Tis that from change to change their being rolls: 'Tis that repeated shocks, again, again, Exhaust the energy of strongest souls, And numb the elastic powers. Till having used our nerves with bliss and teen, And tired upon a thousand schemes our wit, To the just-pausing Genius we remit Our worn-out life, ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... we remounted and pursued our way down the Duntu chasm. As we advanced, the hills shrank in size, the bed became more level, and the walls of rock, gradually widening out, sank into the plain. Brisk and elastic above, the air, here soft, damp, and tepid, and the sun burning with a more malignant heat, convinced us that we stood once more below the Ghauts. For two hours we urged our mules in a south-east direction down the broad and ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... and boiling from it the salt that has dripped into it for years. To-day Mrs. W. made tea out of dried blackberry leaves, but no one liked it. The beds, made out of equal parts of cotton and corn-shucks, are the most elastic I ever slept in. The servants are dressed in gray homespun. Hester, the chambermaid, has a gray gown so pretty that I covet one like it. Mrs. W. is now arranging dyes for the thread to be woven ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... Belgian—there is within each party considerable freedom of opinion in respect of all political questions which do not spring directly from the principles on which the party is based. It is claimed, however, for the single transferable vote that it is more elastic than the most complex of list systems, that it more freely adapts itself to new political conditions, and that in small constituencies returning, say, five or seven members, it yields better results. Moreover, this system, based as it is upon the direct representation of the electors, ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... the rear of Souville toward Verdun the surprising thing was how few soldiers you saw and how little transport within range of German guns; which impressed you with the elastic system of the French, who are there and are not there. Let an attack by the Germans develop and soldiers would spring out of the earth and the valleys echo with the thunder of guns. ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... sun just touching her naked feet, was a girl. A girl of fifteen or sixteen, naked, except for a kilt of gaily-striped material reaching from her waist to her knees. Her long black hair was drawn back from the forehead, and tied behind with a loop of the elastic vine. A scarlet blossom was stuck behind her right ear, after the fashion of a clerk's pen. Her face was beautiful, powdered with tiny freckles; especially under the eyes, which were of a deep, tranquil blue-grey. She half sat, half lay on her left side; whilst before her, quite ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... that the traveller was seeking some dwelling-place, and that he would naturally turn either up the road to Turrifs or toward the hills; instead of that, he made again for the birch wood, walking fast with strong, elastic stride. Trenholme followed him, and they went across acres of ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... phenomena are more general, but not a whit more explicable, than the former. We have now fewer causes to seek for, but not one of these few has been discovered. When we have resolved electricity or gravitation into the presence of an elastic medium, it is a mere figure of speech to say, that we have discovered the cause of the electric phenomena or of gravity. That is just as far off as ever; for we have yet to discover the principle whence flow necessarily all the phenomena ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... be lightly rubbed with olive oil; except in very special cases "friction" between hand and skin is to be avoided. The hand should move the skin to and fro over the muscles and bones beneath, and should be always elastic, so as to go easily in and out of the hollows, and avoid violent contact with projecting bones in the case of emaciated patients. The good rubber should know anatomy so far as to understand where bones and muscles lie (See Diagram, page 216). An intelligent moving ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk |
