"Perpendicular" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... those at the head-waters of the Missouri, are not reached by the heated Wind River, and are impassable in winter. Even Cadotte's Pass, through which Governor Stevens located the line of the proposed road, is outside of the heat stream, so sharp and perpendicular ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... on alone and the ways were, at first, as deserted as though they had never been fashioned for human usage. Between Coal City and Viper lay a distance of ten miles but they were zig-zag and semi-perpendicular miles with torrential waters to be forded. She meant to ride only about four of them before abandoning her mule for the detour on foot. But when she had left the town only a little way two horsemen came up behind her. She knew neither of them, and they were ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... sense, to a surface that is horizontal or level in all directions; a line may be level, a floor is flat; flat is also applied in a derived sense to any plane surface without irregularities or elevations, as a picture may be painted on the flat surface of a perpendicular wall. Plane applies only to a surface, and is used with more mathematical exactness than flat. The adjective plain, originally the same word as plane, is now rarely used except in the figurative senses, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... careful dentist to the stumps of his farm. It is beautifully stumpless, and slopes verdantly, or varied with yellow harvest, down to the lake and up to the forest primeval. He has preserved a pretty grove of birch and maple as shelter, ornament, partridge-cover, and perpendicular wood-pile. Below his house and barns is the lovely oval of the lake, seen across the fair fields, bright with wheat, or green with pasture. A road, hedged with briskly-aspiring young spruces, runs for a mile northward, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... the detour to the birthplace of Lafayette made us about ten hours late. We were met by the prefect, the mayor and the president of the Chamber of Commerce. We visited a church built on the top of a rock, the ascent to which was by three hundred perpendicular steps, two feet wide. It was said that these steps were built in this way as an opportunity for penance, it being a very hard operation to climb to the top. Some of our people made the ascent, myself among the number. When we reached the top ...
— A Journey Through France in War Time • Joseph G. Butler, Jr.
... rolled up the graded driveway Gwynne had built for the old San Francisco house that before his day had been approached by an almost perpendicular flight of wooden steps. They were late and the company had assembled: the Thorntons, Trennahans, and eight or ten young people, all of whom would be chaperoned by the married women to the dance ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... dreadful place. The cavern was tolerably light, though the sun was unfortunately enveloped in clouds. His disc was invisible, but we could clearly distinguish his situation through the watery barrier. The fall of the cataract is nearly perpendicular. The bank over which it is precipitated is of concave form, owing to its upper stratum being composed of lime-stone, and its base of soft slate-stone, which has been eaten away by the constant attrition of the recoiling waters. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... Carlisle lies the site of another remarkable military enclosure, which overlooks the fertile valley, between the Twin and Miami Rivers. Two deep ravines fortify the north and south sides, while an almost perpendicular bluff fortifies the east. The wall which is partly of earth and partly of stone is 3,676 feet in length, and encloses a ...
— Mound-Builders • William J. Smyth
... and his son-in-law Mortimer; and old Northumberland; and that sprightly Scot of Scots, Douglas, that runs o' horseback up a hill perpendicular,— ...
— King Henry IV, The First Part • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... beaming looks upon the crowd, in which there was a latent expression of discomposure and anxiety, for which I couldn't account, until, as the open back of each chariot presented itself, I saw the immense difficulty with which the pink legs maintained their perpendicular, over the uneven pavement of the town: which gave me quite a new idea of the ancient Romans and Britons. The procession was brought to a close, by some dozen indomitable warriors of different nations, riding ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... (so called from their appearance) are situated on the south side of the lake, toward the east end, and are really quite a natural curiosity; they form a perpendicular wall 300 feet high, extending about twelve miles, with numerous projections and indentations in every variety of form, and vast caverns, in which the entering waves make a tremendous sound. The Pictured Rocks of Lake Superior have ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... on the plank road towards Fredericksburg. His rear guard made a short stand at the crossroads, but withdrew after a few rounds; and Anderson took up a position near Mine Road, where numerous ravines, perpendicular to the river, afforded excellent ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... why the Iliad, though greatly altered, has undergone much fewer alterations than the Odyssey. The true reason I believe is this. The Iliad demanded my utmost possible exertions; it seemed to meet me like an ascent almost perpendicular, which could not be surmounted at less cost than of all the labor that I could bestow on it. The Odyssey on the contrary seemed to resemble an open and level country, through which I might travel at my ease. The latter, therefore, betrayed me into some negligence, which, ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... cliff. We carried our luncheon with us, so there was no necessity for haste, and every now and then we sat upon the thick carpet of pine needles to rest, and also study the marvelous coloring of the cliffs across the river. The walls of the canon are very high and very steep—in many places perpendicular—and their strata of brilliant colors are a marvel to everyone. It was a day to be remembered, and no one seemed to mind being a little tired when we returned late in the afternoon. The proprietor of the little log hotel that ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... Edington, who appears to have appreciated the great talent for architecture shown by young Wykeham. Edington himself was no mean builder, and he had already begun to rebuild the west front of the cathedral, and to transform the nave from the Norman to the Perpendicular style, a transformation that was to be completed by Wykeham when he succeeded his old ...
— Winchester • Sidney Heath
... one of the most strenuous days I ever had in the islands, as the road—and what a road!—constantly led up and down the steepest slopes. It seemed to me we were climbing perpendicular mountains all day long, and I had many an opportunity of admiring the agility of my companions. I am a fair walker myself, but I had to crawl on my hands and knees in many spots where they jumped from a ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... little life along shore, in these lower waters. There are two lines of ever-widening, willowed beach of rock and sand or mud; above them, perpendicular walls of clay, which edge either rocky terraces backed by grand sweeps of convoluted hills,—sometimes wooded to the top, and sometimes eroded into palisades,—or wide-stretching bottoms given over to small farms or maybe dense tangles ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... the whole range of the Cordilleras, along the south-west coast of South America, from the Straits of Magellan to the Rio Negro. Their habitations are almost invariably on overhanging ledges of high and perpendicular cliffs, where they both sleep and breed, sometimes in pairs, but frequently in colonies of twenty or thirty together. They make no nest, but lay two large white eggs on the bare rock. The young ones cannot use their wings for flight until many months ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... do whatever you say," she replied; and clinging to the arm of the almost perpendicular seat, she was able to sustain herself there amidst the tossing and ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... eyots and the rising hills; the level meadows and the little villes, with their antique perpendicular Gothic churches, which form the points around which they have clustered for centuries, even as groups of boats in the river are tied around their mooring-posts; the bridges and trim cottages or elegant mansions with their flower-bordered ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... near noontime, so I began to retrace my way. I walked up through the pasture and passed the "Great Ledge." This ledge was on the side of a steep hill. One side of it was perpendicular thirty feet. It was covered with crisp, gray moss. In the chinks and crannies on the top, short grass was growing in ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. 1, Issue 1. - A Massachusetts Magazine of Literature, History, - Biography, And State Progress • Various
... streak to be studied), and which is furthermore white while that of A is bright red. B and B' are adjustable along a scale of degrees, which is not shown in the figure, so that the arc of eye-movement is variable at will. W is a thin, opaque, perpendicular wall extending from E to C, that is, standing on a radius of the perimeter. At E this wall comes to within about 4 mm. of the cornea, and when the eye is directed toward B the wall conceals the ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... a rough T, and was now busy in fitting a smaller stick into the angle between them, by manipulating which, the cross one could be either cocked up or depressed to any extent. He had cut notches, too, in the perpendicular stick, so that, by the aid of the small prop, the cross one could be kept in any position for an ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... one thousand six hundred and ninety-three miles from its confluence with the Mississippi. It rises to the west of the Black mountains, across the northern extremity of which it finds a narrow rapid passage along high perpendicular banks, then seeks the Missouri in a northeastern direction, through a broken country with highlands bare of timber, and the low grounds particularly supplied with cottonwood, elm, small ash, box, alder, and an undergrowth ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... a difficult and dangerous climb in the dark night; but, however, he managed with the help of bushes and shrubs to reach nearly to the top. But alas the last step was too steep for the little boy; it was a sheer, perpendicular wall. Our hero looked round in despair; big drops gathered in his eyes; but he would not let them fall. He stood quite still, clinging to the rock and unable to move either forward or backward. It seemed like the climax of a bad dream. Suddenly ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... canyon below. Generally instant death is their portion, though I recall an instance, while on an expedition against the hostile Indians thirty years ago, where a number of mules of our pack-train, loaded with ammunition, tumbled nearly five hundred feet down an almost perpendicular chasm, and yet some of them got on their feet again, and soon rejoined their companions, without ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... being placed side by side,—family graves. And sometimes, instead of the simple loculus, or coffin-like excavation, there is an arch cut out of the tufa, and sunk back over the whole depth of the grave, the outer side of which is not cut away, so that, instead of being closed in front by a perpendicular slab of marble or by tiles, it is covered on the top by a horizontal slab. Such a grave is called an arcosolium, and its somewhat elaborate construction leads to the conclusion that it was rarely used in the earliest period of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... door slid back, he slid aside, and I stepped out on deck. I was still weak from my prolonged immersion. A puff of wind caught me,—and I staggered across the moving deck to a corner of the cabin, to which I clung for support. The schooner, heeled over far out from the perpendicular, was bowing and plunging into the long Pacific roll. If she were heading south-west as Johnson had said, the wind, then, I calculated, was blowing nearly from the south. The fog was gone, and in its place the sun sparkled crisply on the surface of the water, I turned to the ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... with a nave and aisles, visibly in the form of a cross, though with its arms clipped down to the trunk, with a separate chancel, with a large square short tower, and with a bell-shaped spire, covered with lead and irregular in its proportions. Who does not know the low porch, the perpendicular Gothic window, the flat-roofed aisles, and the noble old grey tower of such a church as this? As regards its interior, it was dusty; it was blocked up with high-backed ugly pews; the gallery in which the children sat at the end of the church, and in which two ancient musicians ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... occupied was a sort of long omnibus on eight wheels, and with no compartments in the interior. It was supplied with two rows of seats, perpendicular to the direction of the train on either side of an aisle which conducted to the front and rear platforms. These platforms were found throughout the train, and the passengers were able to pass from one end of the train to the other. It was supplied ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... voice hailed us in Yiddish. Facing about, we beheld a middle-aged man with huge, round, perpendicular nostrils and a huge, round, deep dimple in his chin that looked like a third nostril. Prosperity was written all over his smooth-shaven face and broad-shouldered, ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... pulling, and, standing up in the boat, began to examine the surroundings with keen interest. They were close to the great crag "shaped like a giant's helmet," as Valdemar Svensen had said. It rose sheer out of the water, and its sides were almost perpendicular. Some beautiful star-shaped sea anemones clung to it in a vari-colored cluster on one projection, and the running ripple of the small waves broke on its jagged corners with a musical splash, and sparkle of white foam. Below them, in the emerald ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... covered head. Her woman companion passed the permission on, and the hunter made it audible by a grunt of assent. La Hontan backed nimbly out, and seized the waiting man by the leg. The main portion of the baron was in the darkening April woods, but his perpendicular soles stood behind ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... a deeply interesting volume might be written on the symbolic import of the primary relations and dimensions of space—long, broad, deep, or depth; surface; upper, under, above and below, right, left, horizontal, perpendicular, oblique:—and then the order of causation, or that which gives intelligibility, and the reverse order of effects, or that which gives the conditions of actual existence! Without the higher the lower would want its intelligibility: ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... courage he clambered up the almost perpendicular rock, and his curly hair and sunburned face soon appeared above the edge of the nest. The next moment he leaned over, seized the young birds in spite of their angry cries, transferred them one after the other to his bag, and throwing ...
— Harper's Young People, November 11, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... that on the coast of Antrim, taken and magnified rather more than twenty times in height, and some five or six times in breadth, and then placed on the ridge of a hill nearly nine hundred feet high. Viewed sideways, it assumes, as described by M'Culloch, the form of a perpendicular but ruinous rampart, much gapped above, that runs for about a mile and a quarter along the top of a lofty sloping talus. Viewed endways, it resembles a tall massy tower,—such a tower as my friend, Mr. D.O. Hill, would delight to draw, and give delight by drawing,—a ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... manure and a deep forking in the early spring. Then, raking the surface smooth, I set a line along its length on one side. A man took a spade, sunk its length in the soil, and pushed it forward strongly. This action made an almost perpendicular wedge-shaped aperture just back of the spade. The asparagus plant, with its roots spread out fan-shape, was sunk in this opening to a depth that left the crown of the plant between three and four inches below the surface. Then the spade was drawn out, and the soil left to fall ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... turn his eyes another way; and, as he wore the helmet of invisibility, the Gorgons knew not in what direction to follow him; nor did he fail to make the best use of the winged slippers, by soaring upward a perpendicular mile or so. At that height, when the screams of those abominable creatures sounded faintly beneath him, he made a straight course for the island of Seriphus, in order to carry ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... leaning of the earth (23 1/2 degrees) that occasions summer and winter, and the different length of days and nights. If the earth turned round itself in a position perpendicular to the plane or level of the circle it moves in round the Sun, as a top turns round when it stands erect on the ground, the days and nights would be always of the same length, twelve hours day and twelve hours night, and the season would ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... precipitate to be scaled. The overtopping main peaks were too distant to be used by our bowmen. The only approach was across a narrow neck of land which was intersected by a deep moat, crossed only by a narrow drawbridge and against which abutted the perpendicular walls of great ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... universe and the solar orb. Everybody who has read a masonic "Monitor" is well acquainted with the usual explanation of this symbol. We are told that the point represents an individual brother, the circle the boundary line of his duty to God and man, and the two perpendicular parallel lines the patron saints of the order—St. John the Baptist and ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... 55. fledge . . . steep. Probably a recollection of what he had seen in the Lakes, for on June 29, 1818, he writes to Tom from Keswick of a waterfall which 'oozes out from a cleft in perpendicular Rocks, all fledged with Ash and ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... by the Romans after them, to be an almost necessary part of a liberal education; principally, doubtless, from the development which it produced in the upper half of the body, not merely to the arms, but to the chest, by raising and expanding the ribs, and to all the muscles of the torso, whether perpendicular or oblique. The elasticity and grace which it was believed to give were so much prized, that a room for ball-play, and a teacher of the art, were integral parts of every gymnasium; and the Athenians went so far as to bestow ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... water could not be obtained. Hydraulic claims are usually in hills. The water is led along on the hill at a height varying from fifty to two hundred feet above the bed-rock, to the claim at the end or side of the hill, where the water, playing against the dirt, soon cuts a large hole, with perpendicular or at least steep banks. At the top of the bank is a little reservoir, containing perhaps not more than a hundred gallons, into which the water runs constantly, and from which the hose extends down to the bottom of the claim. The hose is of heavy duck, sometimes double, ...
— Hittel on Gold Mines and Mining • John S. Hittell
... whale. The ropes attached to the harpoon, used to be about 200 fathoms in length, and some instances occurred, that all the lines belonging to six boats, were fastened together and ran out by one whale, the animal descending in nearly a perpendicular line from the surface. Instead of going prepared to bring home a ship load of oil, it was customary to bring only the blubber, and instead of trying the oil out and putting it into casks on board, the fat of the whale was cut up into suitable pieces, pressed hard in tubs carried out for the ...
— A Narrative of the Mutiny, on Board the Ship Globe, of Nantucket, in the Pacific Ocean, Jan. 1824 • William Lay
... so? A. Because they were the two most ancient Christian patrons of Masonry; and, since their time, in every well-regulated and governed Lodge there has been a certain point within a circle, which circle is bounded on the East and the West by two perpendicular parallel lines, representing the anniversary of St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist, who were two perfect parallels, as well in Masonry as Christianity, on the vertex of which rests the Book of the Holy Scriptures, supporting Jacob's Ladder, which is said to reach the watery clouds, ...
— The Mysteries of Free Masonry - Containing All the Degrees of the Order Conferred in a Master's Lodge • William Morgan
... them had the headloads without which a negro woman seems hardly complete in the road, varying in dimensions from a huge basket of yams or bananas to an ounce vial. How such a slight thing manages to keep its perpendicular with their careless, swinging gait, is something marvellous, but they manage it to perfection. Almost every group, in addition, had a well-laden donkey—comical little creatures, looking hardly bigger under their huge hampers than well-sized Newfoundland dogs, and hurrying ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... sir; but the construction of your dam is a disgrace to civilisation—a murderous construction, sir. Do you see that it is at least twelve feet, perpendicular, sir? and how do you ever expect that salmon can climb over that barrier? I suppose a specimen of the true "salmo salar" has never been caught in these waters since you blocked up the passage with your villainous ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... the algebraic notation, which has been adopted in most countries. It has the advantage of being unmistakably clear, and also more concise. Here the perpendicular lines of squares (called files) are named with the letters a-h, from left to right, always from the point of view of White, and the horizontal lines of squares (called ranks) with numbers 1-8 as before, only with the distinction that the rank on which the White pieces stand ...
— Chess Strategy • Edward Lasker
... pilifera, and during the fine weather it makes a collection of honey intended to be absorbed by its own larvae, if it had not the misfortune to be watched by one of these intriguing Coleoptera. Wherever in Provence there is a perpendicular wall, natural or artificial, a little cliff, a sloping ditch, or the wall of one of those caves which the people of the country use for putting their tools in, the Anthophora hollows out galleries, at the bottom of which he builds a certain number ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... away from an electric fan. Talk about your Adirondacks and your Catskills! There's more solid comfort in the borough of Manhattan than in all the rest of the country together. No, siree! No tramping up perpendicular cliffs and being waked up at 4 in the morning by a million flies, and eating canned goods straight from the city for me. Little old New York will take a few select summer boarders; comforts and conveniences of homes—that's the ad. that I answer ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... Ye wilds, that look eternal; and thou cave, Which seem'st unfathomable; and ye mountains, So varied and so terrible in beauty; Here, in your rugged majesty of rocks And toppling trees that twine their roots with stone[145] In perpendicular places, where the foot Of man would tremble, could he reach them—yes, Ye look eternal! Yet, in a few days, Perhaps even hours, ye will be changed, rent, hurled Before the mass of waters; and yon cave, 10 Which seems to lead into a lower world, Shall have its depths ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... adult female cranium are intermediate between those of the child and the adult man; they are softer, more graceful and delicate, and the apophyses and ridges for the attachment of muscles are less pronounced,... the forehead is ... more perpendicular, to such a degree that in a group of skulls those of the two sexes have been mistaken for different types; the superciliary ridges and the glabella are less developed, often not at all; the crown is higher and more horizontal; ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... possession of the government, it was," he continued, "what often happened in great revolutions, where extreme measures are adopted in the fury of the moment, and the State resembles an agitated pendulum which swings from side to side for some time ere it can acquire its due and perpendicular station. Or it might be likened to a storm or hurricane, which, passing over a region, does great damage in its passage, yet sweeps away stagnant and unwholesome vapours, and repays, in future health and fertility, its immediate ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... cool and dewy, fit for any Sunday—whence the eyes and mind of Cosmo turned to the remnants of night that banded the street, and from them he sank into metaphysics, chequered with the champing clank of the bits, the voices of the ostlers, passengers, and guard, and the perpendicular silence of the coachman, who sat like a statue in front ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... without. The height is not more than three yards from the ground; but it has evidently sunk in the earth considerably. The sides incline inwards, leaving the covering stones projecting like a cottage roof, and the great stone at the back has also lost its perpendicular; nevertheless, there are none displaced of this chamber. It appears, by several broad slabs which lie scattered about, that there must have been more compartments of the temple: an outer court existed, and a narrower part at the entrance, ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... the place was in such a ruinous condition, that I could scarce believe I was not among the Arabs in Egypt, or the ruins of Persepolis. Without the town, in a fine beautiful lawn stands a most irregular high and rude rock, perpendicular on all sides, and under one side of it are ruins of a house, which I suppose was inhabited by the first Seigneur in the province. I looked in, and found the ruins full of miserable inhabitants, I fancy many families; ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume II (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... part of the house; overlooking, on one side, a small courtyard, barricadoed by walls and battlements of stout masonry, along which were ridges of long rank grass waving in all the pride of uncropped luxuriance. Another window overlooked the dark-flowing Irk, lazily rolling beneath the perpendicular rock on which the college was built—the very site of the once formidable station of Mancunium, the heart and centre of the Roman power in that ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... Christian Europe that are not screened in this manner by trees planted between the stream and them. But as he drifted farther down, before he reached the bridge, the west front would have burst upon him, quite new, exceedingly rich and proud, a strict example, one may believe, of the Perpendicular, and of what was for the first time, and for a moment only, a true English Gothic. It would have stood out before him, catching the sun of the afternoon in its maze of glass. It would have seemed a thing to endure; within his lifetime it ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... with its angles typifies the just angles of the building, with the sharpness of its molding, the regularity of it, and with the truth of its lines to the horizontal and perpendicular, the uprightness and equal height of all the walls, we might now without more ado let down—it would rest in its place with its own weight. But even here there shall not fail of lime and means to bind it. For as human beings ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... was about two feet deep, and ran slowly along by a perpendicular clayey bank on the side where they were, and, deliberately undressing, Bob let himself down into the river, and then began to grope along by the side, stooping from time to time to thrust his hand into ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... river or of the eyot. One of these flocks dropped from the invisible regions to the lawn on the river bank on which I stood. Without exaggeration I may say that I saw them fall from the sky, for I was looking upwards, and saw them when first visible as descending specks. The plunge was perpendicular till within ten yards of the ground. Soon the high-flying crowds of birds drew down, and swept for a few minutes low over the willows, from end to end of the eyot, with a sound like the rush of water in ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... surprise me to see the Folly coming down wing-and-wing from under the land, and passing out to sea, with a six-knot breeze, while we lay as still as a cathedral, with not enough to turn the smoke of the galley-fire from the perpendicular." ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... with the figures showing elevations, will give you a better idea of it than a long verbal description. It is an extraordinarily desolate scene. A few wild goats scramble over the rocks, or rush down the nearly perpendicular cliff; occasionally a solitary bird raises its harsh note; the wind howls fiercely; and as you lie under the lee of a mass of lava, taking in the scene and picking out the details as the rising sun brings them out one by one, presently the mist begins to pour ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... table linen—extra, sixpence?" asked Betty, bending her knee in what might have been called a perpendicular courtesy. Had she been sure that her customers were of high rank, she would have saluted them with a low bow, omitting to mention the extra charge for the linen. But as Frances and Nelly were not escorted by a gentleman, she was ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... of the neighbourhood had latterly come to drink, so that the surface was everywhere indented with footmarks, in addition to the cracks in the surrounding baked mud, into which the fish tumbled in their progress. In those holes, which were deep, and the sides perpendicular, they remained to die, and were carried off ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... was a work of Nature in her mood of majestic playfulness, formed on the perpendicular side of a mountain by some immense rocks, which had been thrown together in such a position as, when viewed at a proper distance, precisely to resemble the features of the human countenance. It seemed as if an enormous ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... then? Well—!' Nobody needed to be braver. He had great good-nature too, though of hot temper and so full of multifarious veracities; a substratum of inarticulate good sense withal, and much magnanimity run wild, or run to seed. A big-limbed, swashing, perpendicular kind of fellow; haughty of face, but jolly too; with a big, not ugly strut;—captivating to the French Nation, and fit God of War (fitter than 'Dalhousie,' I am sure!) for that susceptive People. Understood their Army also, what it was then and there; and how, by theatricals and otherwise, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... stool, rises, at a sudden angle, the stiff corselet, disproportionately long and almost perpendicular. The end of this bust, round and slender as a straw, carries the hunting-trap, the grappling limbs, copied from those of the Mantis. They consist of a terminal harpoon, sharper than a needle, and a cruel vice, with the jaws ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... recognised: also in walking on a wall or roof, in looking directly up to a roof, or to the stars in the zenith, because, then, all standards disappear: on walking into a round room, where there are no perpendicular lines of light and shade, as when the walls and roof are covered with a spotted paper without regular arrangement of spot:—on turning round, as in waltzing, or on a wheel; because the eye is not then allowed to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 268, August 11, 1827 • Various
... arenaria)[16] which bind the loose sands together, and prevent them from being dispersed over the adjoining grounds. On the opposite coast fancy might often recognise those very cliffs to which our story alludes; perpendicular, bare, and almost inaccessible, with rents and chasms, where little difficulty would be found in pointing out the exact ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... process, requiring much skill and capital. First, let me explain what a lode really is. The American term is "ledge," and it is not inappropriate or inexpressive. Imagine then a ledge, or kerbstone, continuing to unknown depths in the earth at any angle varying from perpendicular to nearly horizontal. This kerbstone is totally distinct from the rocks which enclose it; those on one side may be slate, on the other, sandstone; but the lode, separated usually by a small band of soft material known to miners as "casing," or "fluccan," preserves always an independent ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... ascended to the summit of Aurasium with the rest of the army, not wishing to stand siege in the fort and have provisions fail his forces. And finding a high place with cliff's on all sides of it and concealed by perpendicular rocks, Toumar by name, he remained quietly there. And the Romans besieged the fortress of Zerboule for three days. And using their bows, since the wall was not high, they hit many of the barbarians upon the parapets. And by some chance it happened that all the leaders ...
— History of the Wars, Books III and IV (of 8) - The Vandalic War • Procopius
... contrariwise, slope up from left to right, with a single exception in the case of the letter Z, in which, if rule I be followed, the sloping line (in this case made with a down stroke) will be the only one possible to accent. III, Always accent the directly perpendicular lines, except in the N, where these lines seem originally to have been made with an up stroke of the pen; and the first line of the M, where the perpendiculars originally sloped in towards the top of the letter (see 2). On the round letters [3] the accents should occur ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown
... wedged between the congregated escarpments far below, the little town lying immediately under our feet, as the streets around St. Paul's when viewed from the dome. We say to ourselves we can never get there. The feat of descending those perpendicular cliffs seems impossible. It does not do to contemplate the road we have to take, winding like a ribbon round the upright shafts of the Causse. Follow it we must. We are high above the inhabited world, up in cloudland; there is nothing to do but descend as best we can; so ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... man to feel this life in himself as his own. God wills that he should do so, that man may live as of himself according to the laws of order, which are as many as there are precepts in the Word, and may dispose himself to receive the love of God. But still God perpetually holds with His finger the perpendicular above the scales, and regulates, but never violates by compulsion, man's free decision. Man's free will is from this: that he feels life in himself as his, and God leaves him so to feel, that reciprocal conjunction may take ...
— The Gist of Swedenborg • Emanuel Swedenborg
... laborious scramble over large, rough stones, but the ascent of the other threatened to be difficult. It rose in front, a wall of splintered crag, seamed by deep gullies, for the strata was tilted up nearly perpendicular. All the gullies were climbed by expert mountaineers, but this needed a party and a rope, and the other way, round the shoulder of the great rock, was almost as hard. Festing knew the easiest plan was to descend a neighboring hollow, from which ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... footprints of the two men were here very clearly impressed in the thin but soft soil, and they all took care not to trample on the tracks. They followed the prints closely, and found that they led straight to the edge of a cliff forming a sheer precipice, almost perpendicular, at the foot of which the sea, some two hundred feet below, was ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... condition of the knee is characterized by the partly flexed condition of the region. It is best observed by standing to one side of the horse (Fig. 33). Instead of the forearm and cannon regions appearing perpendicular or in line, they are directed forward. This condition may exist in varying degrees. Some individuals show it to a slight degree, the condition being accompanied by a weakness or shakiness of the knee when standing at rest. Sometimes, ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... from Motiers-Navers to Boudry, on your way to Neufchatel," said the young professor of botany, "you follow a road between two walls of rocks of immense height; they reach a perpendicular elevation of five or six hundred feet, and are hung with wild plants, the mountain basil (thymus alpinus), ferus (polypodium), the whortleberry (vitis idoea), ground ivy, and other climbing plants ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... With regard to errors of adjustment, not only the possibility, but the certainty of their existence in every imaginable form, in all instruments, must be contemplated. Human hands or machines never formed a circle, drew a straight line, or executed a perpendicular, nor ever placed an instrument in perfect adjustment, unless accidentally, and then only during ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... rejoinder, and not a word more passed between them. He followed her through what seemed to be an endless maze, and paused before a towering rock, which, smooth and perpendicular as a wall built by man, ran round the vale and seemed to reach to heaven. Pushing aside the thick brushwood, Marie stood beside the rock, and by some invisible movement, a low door flew open and disclosed a ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... intelligence. The squares were well guarded, the garrison ever alert. Spaniards were not birds of prey to fly up those perpendicular heights, and for beings without wings the thing was impossible. He followed Fleming through the darkness, and was soon convinced that the impossible was true. The precious squares were in the hands of the enemy. Nimble as monkeys, those yellow ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the west of Garland, with it between us and the Mercutians. The few lights of the town could be seen plainly. The country beneath us seemed fairly level. To the west, half a mile away, perhaps, I could make out a sheer, perpendicular wall of rock. We seemed to be flying parallel with it and ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... of Lorraine is a cross with two horizontal lines or bars across the upper half of the perpendicular beam. —Translator's Note. ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... side and then on the other. He uses, as a rule, the left hand side. He grasps the blade right hand at the top, left hand a foot or more down, and then reaching the paddle forward, he digs it into the water with a strong, firm grip, keeping it perpendicular and drawing it aft. When the paddle is abreast his erect body, he suddenly turns the blade so as to bring the flat against the body of the canoe. This acts at once as a lee board and a rudder. With these graceful movements the canoe is managed ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... Pennsylvania lay awash while the battle thundered about her and scores of blue-jackets clambered over her rails from her perpendicular decks and clung to her slippery sides. We could hear them singing "Nancy Lee" as ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... was, and watched him with her mouth twisted to one side and three perpendicular creases between her eyebrows. When he was out of sight, she glanced at Evadna—once more ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... which the old shrew had given me pursued me everywhere. More than once, while climbing the almost perpendicular ladder to my loft, feeling my clothing caught on some point, I trembled from head to foot, imagining that the old wretch was hanging to the tails of my coat ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... Ladies' Wishing Chair, composed of blocks in the Great Causeway, wishes made while seated here being certain of realization. To the west of the Wishing Chair a solitary pillar rises from the sea, the "Gray Man's Love." Look to the mainland, and the mountain presents a deep, narrow cleft, with perpendicular sides, the "Gray Man's Path." Out in the sea, but unfortunately not often in sight, is the "Gray Man's Isle," at present inhabited only by the Gray Man himself. As the island, however, appears but once in seventeen years, and the Gray Man is never seen save ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... expanded along the equatorial belt. The surface is only moderately smooth. The body is ornamented with a very handsome design of incised lines, which consists of a scroll pattern, divided into four sections by perpendicular lines. The design covers the upper part of the body, the lower part being plain. ...
— Illustrated Catalogue of a Portion of the Collections Made During the Field Season of 1881 • William H. Holmes
... powerful fancy for him: the mean phrase is good enough, even although the phantom of Lenorme roused in her all the twilight poetry of her nature, and the presence of Liftore set her whole consciousness in the perpendicular shadowless gaslight of ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... excellent trail opened up around the face of a high cliff. The trail was level and quite broad and led upward and in the general direction I wished to go. The cliff arose for several hundred feet on my right, and on my left was an equal and nearly perpendicular drop to the bottom ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... building, which stood up by day gloomy, many-windowed, and forbidding on the huge promontory, crossed by wall and works, and with sentries between the convict establishment and the mainland. The other three sides had the waves, which washed the nearly perpendicular precipices, for warders, and it was only here and there that an active man well acquainted with the cliffs could descend to the sea, and such an acquaintanceship was not likely to be made by the wretched men marched out, fettered and guarded, to the great quarries day ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... house or settlement will be seen one or more granaries, in which rice is stored (Plate XIV). Four poles form the support for a rectangular base from which the sides of the structure slope out at an angle of about 25 degrees from the perpendicular until they meet the roof. The sides and roof are of bamboo beaten flat, the latter covered with a ...
— The Wild Tribes of Davao District, Mindanao - The R. F. Cummings Philippine Expedition • Fay-Cooper Cole
... a very different ornament from that just described. It consists of a perpendicular line drawn on the forehead, generally of a red or yellow color, and a white line on each side of it, which unite at the bottom with the middle ...
— Dr. Scudder's Tales for Little Readers, About the Heathen. • Dr. John Scudder
... usual,—and letting them go for a few minutes,) came to our rescue. Forbidding as was his aspect, we were very glad to feel a little of his giant power. Of this one I had, of course, a better view than I had had of any other of the species. It had, like the rest, two chimneys in front, like perpendicular tusks, with a ladder between them. The ladder was for the purpose of ascent,—the ascent for the purpose of elevation,—and the elevation for the purpose of "look out." The top of the ladder, in short, rendered the same service as the top of a ship's mast at ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... is broken before long by a peculiar and suggestive cry. We do not hear it yet ourselves, but Stalker, our black cat and familiar, has caught the well-known accents, and with a characteristic crooning noise, and a stiff, perpendicular erection of tail, he sidles towards the door, demanding, as plainly as possible, to be let out. Yes, it is the cats-meat man. 'Ca' me-e-et—me-yet—me-e-yet!' fills the morning air, and arouses exactly thirty responsive feline voices—for there is a cat to every house—and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... of a dictionary if necessary) spell correctly; you can be sure that you understand the meaning of every word you use. If it is hard for you to write in a straight line, use the lined guide that comes with nearly all stationery; if impossible to keep an even margin, draw a perpendicular line at the left of the guide so that you can start each new line of writing on it. You can also make a guide to slip under the envelope. Far better to use a guide than to send envelopes and pages of writing that slide up hill and ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... was well pleased with this homage, which, she said, was greater than his offence. The guards, whose business it was to proceed to a verification, believed the culprit to be the devil, because never in their wits had they seen an "I" so perpendicular as was the old man. He was marched in triumph through the town to the palace of the duke, to whom the guards and others stated the facts. In that period of ignorance, this affair was thought so much of that the town voted the erection of a column on the spot where the old fellow gained ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac |
