"Piles" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the table with the indifferent look of the habitual player upon his cleanly chiselled face. But it was plain that his good fortune stayed at his elbow tonight, for opposite to him the croupier was arranging with extraordinary deftness piles of bank-notes in the order of their value. The bank was winning heavily. Even as Ricardo looked Wethermill turned up "a natural," and the croupier swept in the ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... upstairs and along passages with glimpses through open doors of rooms full of clerks and desks, until they came to a certain room into which Mark was shown—a small room with a considerable litter of large wicker trays filled with proofs, packets and rolls of manuscripts of all sizes, and piles of books and periodicals, in the midst of which Mr. Fladgate was sitting with his back to the light, which was admitted through windows ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... footsteps. This universal absence of barriers gives an air of vastness to the landscape, so that really, in a little French province, you have more of the feeling of being in a big country than on our own huge continent, which bristles so unconsciously with prohibitory rails and stone-piles. Norman farmhouses, too, with their mossy roofs and their visible beams making all kinds of triangles upon the ancient plaster of their walls, are very delightful things. Hereabouts they have always a dark little wood close beside them; often a chenaie, as the term is—a ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... the belief in enchantment still remained everywhere unshaken, and faith in the world of spirits still held men's minds in so close a bondage that thousands were, according to their own conviction, given up as a prey to the devil; while, at the command of religion as well as of law, countless piles were lighted, by the flames of which human society was to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... rather tend to abstract the mind from worldly themes. I delighted to loll over the quarter-railing, or climb to the maintop, of a calm day, and muse for hours together on the tranquil bosom of a summer's sea; to gaze upon the piles of golden clouds just peering above the horizon, fancy them some fairy realms, and people them with, a creation of my own;—to watch the gentle undulating billows, rolling their silver volumes, as if to die away on those ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... property to be protected and made accessible that its immediate appropriation by Congress should be beyond question. Nevertheless, half that amount has twice been asked for in measures introduced by Senator S. H. Piles, but in neither case did the appropriation pass both houses. It is to be hoped that the present Congress will give the full amount of $50,000, which will enable the surveys to be completed over ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... afterwards, that in this place particularly they have been damned up by the Blue ridge of mountains, and have formed an ocean which filled the whole valley; that continuing to rise they have at length broken over at this spot, and have torn the mountain down from its summit to its base. The piles of rock on each hand, but particularly on the Shenandoah, the evident marks of their disrupture and avulsion from their beds by the most powerful agents of nature, corroborate the impression. But the distant finishing which nature has given to ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... had piles and piles of corn lined up in a ring for de corn shuckin's. De gen'ral pitched de songs and de Niggers would follow, keepin' time a-singin' and shuckin' corn. Atter all de corn was shucked, dey was give a big feast wid lots of whiskey ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... wandered into the room where he expected to find his mother, she saw that his eyes were red with crying, and she knew that his heart was as sad as her own. But she said brightly, "Arthur, I want you to help me. See, here are piles of your things, and I want you to help me to count them over, and to put down how many there are of each; that is what we call an inventory, and you must have an inventory, of course." Arthur was quite pleased with ...
— Left at Home - or, The Heart's Resting Place • Mary L. Code
... adequate idea of the stern majesty of the law. In front of a big book-case, in a big chair, behind a big table, and before a big volume, sat Mr. Nupkins, looking a full size larger than any one of them, big as they were. The table was adorned with piles of papers; and above the farther end of it, appeared the head and shoulders of Mr. Jinks, who was busily engaged in looking as busy as possible. The party having all entered, Muzzle carefully closed the door, and placed himself behind his ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... ranged with delight over the treasures of jolly autumn. On all sides he beheld vast store of apples; some hanging in oppressive opulence on the trees; some gathered into baskets and barrels for the market; others heaped up in rich piles for the cider-press. Farther on he beheld great fields of Indian corn, with its golden ears peeping from their leafy coverts, and holding out the promise of cakes and hasty-pudding; and the yellow pumpkins lying beneath them, turning up their fair round bellies to ...
— The Legend of Sleepy Hollow • Washington Irving
... had sheep to guard. So, for the fourth time, Chad, with Jack at his heels, trudged up to the point of a wooded spur above the cabin, where, at the foot of a giant poplar and under a wilderness of shaking June leaves, were three piles of rough boards, loosely covering three hillocks of rain-beaten earth; and, near them, an open grave. There was no service sung or spoken over the dead, for the circuit-rider was then months away; so, unnoticed, Chad stood behind the ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... the vast work that the order of the Patrons has accomplished for its members exists at present in a detached and scattered form among the different granges, and in piles of yet unused documents at the national head-quarters. The full history of the movement is promised, and in good time will ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... with boxes, barrels, arms, bales and piles of goods, with tools, provisions, rafts and broken bits of lumber, for he decided to bring away as much of the wreck as he could, for the boards would be very useful in the construction of houses. Weeks were spent in this arduous toil, and their efforts ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... attention, each man looking straight before him at the empty parade ground, where the cinder piles showed purple with evening. On the wind that smelt of barracks and disinfectant there was a faint greasiness of food cooking. At the other side of the wide field long lines of men shuffled slowly into the narrow wooden shanty that was the mess hall. Chins down, chests out, legs twitching and tired ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... new and better appliances for carrying out our plan of country life. Since the work was being done by contract, I contented myself with seeing that it was done thoroughly. Meanwhile Merton was busy with the cart, drawing rich earth from the banks of the creek. I determined that the making of great piles of compost should form no small part of my fall and winter labor. The proper use of fertilizers during the present season had given such a marked increase to our crops that it became clear that our best prospect of growing rich was in making ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... their imprisonment were assigned to them. It was a night of Egyptian darkness. Soldiers with drawn swords guarded them, as, by the light of a lantern, they picked their way through the rank weeds of the castle garden, and over piles of rubbish, to a stone tower, some thirty feet square and sixty feet high, to whose damp, cheerless, and dismal apartments they were consigned. "Where are you conducting us?" inquired a faithful servant who had followed the fortunes of his royal master. The officer replied, "Thy master has been ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... importance; we are not interested in Harry's love affairs, but in his scrapes, adventures, duels at home and abroad. He fights people by mistake whom he does not know by sight, he appears on parade with his face blackened, he wins large piles at trente et quarante, he disposes of coopers of claret and bowls of punch, and the sheep on a thousand hills provide him with devilled kidneys. The critics and the authors thought little of the merry medley, but the public enjoyed it, and defied the reviewers. ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... go with you both. No! I will win for him a nobler name, Than captive crescents, piles of turbaned heads, Or towns retaken from the Tartar, give. In me he shall be greatest; my report Shall through the ages win the quires of heaven To love and honour him; and hinds, who bless The poor man's patron saint, shall not forget How she was fathered ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... have no knowledge besides their names. The people are for the most part tawny, strong, and big, but very lazy. They eat on beds, or tapestry spread on the ground. They burn most of their dead, and their wives glory in being thrown into the funeral piles, and there consumed to ashes. The Great Mogul is a Mahometan, and esteemed the richest King in the world in jewels; one of his thrones is said to have cost five millions sterling. Their commodities are silks, cottons, callicoes, muslins, sattins [sic], carpets, gold, silver, ...
— A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies - A Private Tutor for Little Masters and Misses • Unknown
... The boys hurdled over piles of food and ammunition, wended their way through scores of stacks of ordnance, and finally over a gang-plank to the vessel. There they saluted and reported to the officer of the day, who directed them to go at ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll
... impossible. Before them, twisted and torn and piled about in muddy confusion, the timbers of the mine suddenly showed in a perfect barricade, supplanted from behind by piles of muck and rocky refuse which left no opening to the chamber of the stope beyond. Harry's carbide went high in the air, and he slid forward, to stand a moment in thought before the obstacle. At place after place ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... of a steamer, and near at hand there came now and again the coughing roar of the whistles of yet other river boats. Slow smoke issued also from steamers tied up at the levee, where, under low wooden canopies, lay piles and rows of brown-cased cotton bales, continually increased in number by other bales brought up in long drays, each drawn by a single mule. Above the hot wharves rose the slope of close stone riprapping, fence against Father ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... discovered to be silver or copper, and heaped upon it every kind of valuable, such as golden cups and vases, toilet utensils, necklaces, pectorals, bracelets, leglets, earrings and beads that seemed to be cut from precious stones, piles of ring money, and a hundred other things such as have been prized by mankind ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... who slunk away in the salt marshes of the Adriatic and builded the palaces of powerful Venice on her deep-sunk piles, so these wretched hunted blacks builded power until they became masters of the mainland, controlling traffic and trade-routes, compelling the bushmen for ever after to remain in the bush and never to dare ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... armed overseers the laborers were reducing the beach to order, sorting out the flotsam into two piles. Once they gathered about a find, and the sound of excited speech reached Ross as an agitated clicking. The armored men came up, surveyed the discovery. One of them shrugged, and ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... City of Palaces, to measureless halls, and arches, and domes, soaring one above another, till their flashing ruby summits are lost in the burning void, high overhead. On! through and through these mountain-piles, into countless, limitless corridors, reared on pillars lurid and rosy as molten lava. Far down the corridors rise visions of flying phantoms, ever at the same distance before us—their raving voices ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... sorted his things into smaller piles: a pile to be thrown away, a pile to be given away, a ...
— If You Touch Them They Vanish • Gouverneur Morris
... Opening, but an old-fashioned virgin forest—we found delightful of a warm summer's day. One thing that we saw in it was characteristic of the country. Some of the nearest farmers had drawn their manure into it, where it lay in large piles, in order to get it out of the way of doing any mischief. Its effect on the land, it was thought, would be to ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... observing the movements on the walls; endeavoring to discover whether the various little groups of men and women in the ballium meant any thing more than usual, Sir Nigel did not notice various piles or stacks of straw and wood which were raised against the wall in many parts where the shadows lay darkest, and some also against the other granaries which were contained in low, wooden buildings projecting from the wall. Neither he nor his friends, nor even the men-at-arms, ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... adopted for keeping up the roads is very interesting. Everywhere along the fine highways I travelled over there were at intervals piles or pens of crushed stone and other material for filling up any hole or break. For each mile or so a Filipino is employed—he is called a caminero—and his whole duty is to take a wheelbarrow and a few tools and keep that ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... Card, black ditto in Silver, best Sword Blades, Shoe and Knee Chapes of all Sizes, Files of all Sorts, freezing Punches, Turkey Oyl Stones, red and white Foyl, moulding Sand, Borax, Saltpetre, Crucibles and Black Led Potts, Money Scales, large ditto to weigh Silver, Piles of Ounce Weights, Penny Weights & Grains, Coral Beeds, Stick ditto for Whistles, Forgeing Anvils, Spoon Teats, plain ditto, small raizing Anvils for Cream Potts, fine Lancashire Watch Plyers, Shears and Nippers, Birmingham ditto, with sundry other Articles, ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 4: Quaint and Curious Advertisements • Henry M. Brooks
... scoff, as it were, lingering on her lips, while her mother disserted on all the excellences of the chamber. Then they were summoned to tea. The gardener's wife was quite a leading spirit, and had prepared everything; the curtains were drawn, and the room lighted; an urn hissed; there were piles of bread and butter and a pyramid of buttered toast. It was wonderful what an air of comfort had been conjured up in this dreary mansion, and it was impossible for the travellers, however wearied or chagrined, to be insensible to the convenience and ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... the boat to a stake and rushed over the sand-dunes to the beach. They explored their domain from end to end within an hour. Not a tree obscured the endless panorama of sea and bay and waving grass on the great solemn marshes. Piles of soft, warm seaweed lay in long, dark rows along the ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... paraffin casks which were lashed on deck broke loose, washed backward and forward, and gradually filled with water; so that the outlook was not altogether agreeable. But it was worst of all when the piles of reserve timber, spars, and planks began the same dance, and threatened to break the props under the boats. It was an anxious hour. Sea-sick, I stood on the bridge, occupying myself in alternately making libations to Neptune and trembling ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... Alec hacking and hewing at the trap, but did not consider it anything out of the ordinary. This queer creature was always hacking and hewing at the trees. He had often seen his handiwork piled up in long straight piles. Once for mere amusement he had scattered a pile in ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... heirs under the civil law. Consequently at the present day the traveller who visits French Canada sees the whole country divided into extremely long and narrow parallelograms each with fences and piles of stones as boundaries ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... stream, and midway between the mouth and the big rapids, there is a straggling village, called Ranggul, the houses of which, made of wattled bamboos and thatched with palm leaves, stand on piles, amid the groves of cocoa-nut and areca-nut palms, varied by clumps of smooth-leaved banana trees. The houses are not very close together, but a man can call from one to the other with ease; and thus the cocoa-nuts thrive, which, as the Malays say, grow not with pleasure beyond the sound ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... despondency come over her, imagination, not content with the cloud of to-day, summons from the deep, dark piles, that are charged with storm and tempest. Let her once begin, with high credit, to borrow trouble, and the future shall be well nigh drained of its myriad sorrows. She becomes fancy-bankrupt. An incident of recent occurrence, ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... found his way forward, over the bales of cotton and piles of hay, followed by Fred and Harry, and entered into conversation with the crew. He had not been long there when an old weather-beaten seaman put his head up the fore hatchway. "Ah! Tom Pulling. I thought that I had caught sight of the face of an old shipmate," exclaimed ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... week when it stays at home and receives friends. Tea, with a little bread and butter and cake, served in the most informal way, is the only refreshment. The rooms are full, busy, bright,—everything as easy and joyous as if a monstrous supper, with piles of jelly and mountains of cake, were waiting to give the company ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of shuffling, plodding feet bellowing protest at the hurry, or welcome at sight of the piles of hay that one or two of the men were already pitching into the corral for their consumption. And in less than five minutes they were housed ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... of electric lights under their opal shades in Heldon Foyle's office became dim before the growing of the dawn. The superintendent, a cigar between his lips, was working methodically over half-a-dozen piles of papers. At the other side of the table Green puffed furiously at an old brier as he compiled from the documents Foyle handed him a fresh list of witnesses and their statements to be submitted to ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... should), but also to horizontal pressure when excavating is being done or masonry being constructed within the space which they circumscribe. Polygonal or curved perimeters may be circumscribed with equal facility by joining the piles, the sides of one serving as a guide to that of its neighbor, and special pieces being adapted to the angles. Preliminary studies will give the dimensions, form, and strength of the iron to be employed. The latter, in fact, will be rolled to various ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... generally nocturnal in its habits, secreting itself during the day in hollow trees, or crevices in rocks, or wood-piles. At night it ventures forth in quest of its food, which consists chiefly of grasshoppers, worms and other insects, wild fruit and such small animals in the shape of frogs, mice and birds as it can capture. The poultry yard often offers ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... the green shaven meadows, the pastoral summer buzz, the weir-fall's thundering white, amid the breath and beauty of wild flowers, she was a bit of lovely human life in a fair setting; a terrible attraction. The Magnetic Youth leaned round to note his proximity to the weir-piles, and beheld the sweet vision. Stiller and stiller grew nature, as at the meeting of two electric clouds. Her posture was so graceful, that though he was making straight for the weir, he dared not dip a scull. Just ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... increased under Apollonius' diligent hand; the orders were twice as many as they had formerly been. The postman brought great piles of letters into the house. Apollonius accepted an advantageous offer made by the owner and leased the slate quarry. He understood the management of the works from his stay in Cologne, and he employed a former acquaintance from that city whom he knew to be an expert in the business and reliable ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... pillars. The presidio was a relic of Spanish dominion and its founders had built it well, copying, with such materials as they could get, stately models the Moors had left in the distant Peninsula. A part had fallen and blocks of sun-baked mud lay about in piles, but the long, white front, with its battlemented top and narrow, barred windows stood firm. In spite of the ruinous patio, the presidio was the finest ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... positive compulsion," he remarks, "but your work here will probably cease. Here——" he pushed the neat slips of paper towards us—"are your tickets for London, and a small but sufficient supply of money,"—he indicates two piles of coins and paper on either hand of him—"for a day or so there." He proceeds in the same dry manner to inform us we are invited to call at our earliest convenience upon our doubles, and upon the Professor, who is to investigate ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... piles and piles of old sermons. It don't seem as though he needs to spend as much time in his study, as Mrs ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... in 1703. It was far from a promising site for a new capital, the dreary wastes, dark forests, and marshes where wild ducks and geese found a favorite feeding place. It was exposed to frequent floods, and piles were needed before a building could be erected. But when this autocrat had made up his mind, objections were brushed aside. Peter collected 40,000 men, soldiers, Cossacks, Kalmucks, Tartars and such natives as could be found, and put them to work. At first he provided neither tools nor shelter, ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... are condemned for having a Pap, or Teat about them, whereas many People (especially antient People) are, and have been a long time troubled with naturall wretts on severall parts of their bodies and other naturall excressencies, as Hemerodes, Piles, Childbearing, &c. and these shall be judged only by one man alone and a woman, and ...
— The Discovery of Witches • Matthew Hopkins
... packet of letters, and he spread them out on the table at which he was sitting, methodically, in little heaps, clearing a space among the piles of drafts and ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... at the front door, and bowed most respectfully. "Why," observed I, looking at the piles of mortar, lime, and bricks, standing about in all directions, "we shall be smothered with dust and lime for ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... got up, opened a drawer, and showed me piles of such letters. Among these I read one from a priest, who seemed convinced that before long Zola would be a convert. I asked him what ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... weeding these decorous vegetables. They raised their heads and took one good stare as the big wagon rattled past, then they lowered them again, and went on with their work, laying the pig-weeds, which they pulled out of the ground, in neat little piles along the ...
— Eyebright - A Story • Susan Coolidge
... aspiration on the part of the worshippers, unless there was some easier mode of access in another direction. Immediately on the shore of the Potomac, and extending back towards the town, lay the dismal ruins of the United States arsenal and armory, consisting of piles of broken bricks and a waste of shapeless demolition, amid which we saw gun-barrels in heaps of hundreds together. They were the relics of the conflagration, bent with the heat of the fire, and rusted with the wintry rain to which they had since been exposed. The brightest ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... hardlie. At his comming thither, he might perceiue how the Britains were readie on the further side to impeach his passage, and how that the banke at the comming foorth of the water was pight full of sharpe stakes, and so likewise was the chanell of the riuer set with piles which were couered with ...
— Chronicles (1 of 6): The Historie of England (3 of 8) • Raphael Holinshed
... of timber used for piles in wharves and other marine structures are constantly being destroyed or seriously injured by marine borers. Almost invariably they are confined to salt water, and all the woods commonly used for ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... of which, where the forgotten candles burned dimly over the long and lengthening wicks, sat several men—some, with faces brightly haggard, gloating over their unhallowed gains—others, dark, sullen, silent, fierce, gazing furtively at their piles of lost money. Here rattled the dice-box, and yonder fell the dirty cards—all were busily engaged—all were motionless, save their hands and eyes—all were hushed, save when they uttered solitary words ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... gather up a few pieces when they slipped out of his trembling hands to roll on the moss. Laboriously, seriously, he kept at it with the doggedness of a drunken man. Apparently he had forgotten the others. Failing to learn the value of the coins by taking up each in turn, he arranged them in several piles, and began to estimate ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... only post in a field five hundred metres wide. At night, a very dark night, I missed colliding with an enormous factory chimney (a matter of inches), glided over a line of telegraph wires, passed at a few metres' height over a field littered with huge piles of sugar beets, and settled, comme une fleur, in a little cleared space which I could never have judged accurately had I known what I ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... with patches of wood, that looked like a wide-spread park, till at some miles distance it rose up the slopes of a volcanic mountain—the Lamongan. On the sides of this huge volcano, the woods became thicker and more continuous, till they reached the bare piles of ashes and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... the personal annals of these pictured worthies, as well as all the rest of his progenitors; and ample materials were at hand in many chests of worm-eaten papers and yellow parchments, that had been gathering into larger and dustier piles ever since the dark ages. But, to confess the truth, the information afforded by these musty documents was so much more prosaic than what Kenyon acquired from Tomaso's legends, that even the superior authenticity of the former could not reconcile him to its dullness. What especially delighted ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Rasselas, "does not very strongly lead me to survey piles of stone, or mounds of earth; my business is with man. I came hither not to measure fragments of temples, or trace choaked aqueducts, but to look upon the various scenes of the present world. . . . To judge rightly of the present we must oppose it to the past; for ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... the platform of birth-sacks which was the first camping-ground of the White Butterfly's family is razed to the ground; naught remains but the round marks of the individual pieces that composed it. The structure of piles has disappeared; the prints left by the piles remain. The little caterpillars are now on the level of the leaf which shall henceforth feed them. They are a pale orange-yellow, with a sprinkling of white bristles. The head is a shiny black and remarkably powerful; it already gives signs of the coming ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... if the professor taught you to distinguish good and bad; but if not, where is the use of your learning? It would scarcely help you, would it, to be told to arrange coins in piles, the best coins at top and bottom and the worst in the middle, unless you were first taught ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... of the chieftains were neither large architectural piles, nor frowning fortresses. They bore the name of raths when used for dwellings; of duns when constructed with a view to resisting an attack. In both cases, they were, in part under ground, in part above; the whole circular ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... its title—"John Bull and his coal piles (i.e., coaling stations) rule the world"; show why this statement contains a great deal ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... their spacious houses they built themselves huts; instead of dainty fare they lived on the herbs of the field and coarse bread; their soft beds they exchanged for heaps of straw and rushes, and their tables were piles of turf. In very truth you may well believe that they were like those philosophers of old of whom Jerome tells us in his second book ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... porter. His movements, at first stealthy, become almost homely as he feels that he is secure. He opens the bag and takes out a bunch of keys, a small paper parcel, and a black implement that may be a burglar's jemmy. This cool customer examines the fire and piles on more coals. With the keys he opens the door of the bookcase, selects two large volumes, and brings them to the table. He takes off his topcoat and opens his parcel, which we now see contains sheets of foolscap paper. His ...
— What Every Woman Knows • James M. Barrie
... books that he was obliged to sleep in the passage, he was compelled to move, and he took lodgings at London House, in Aldersgate Street, an ancient palace of the bishops of London, but at that time the residence of Mr. Samuel May, a wealthy druggist. Here he lived, says Oldys, 'in his bundles, piles, and bulwarks of paper, in dust and cobwebs,' until the 6th of August 1725, when he died, and was buried in ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... "tippit," which we suppose to be tepid, but that by half-past eight it would be in a noble state. Ever since the smoke has poured forth in enormous volume, and the furnace has blazed, and the women have gone and come over the bridge, and piles of wood have been carried in; but we observe a general avoidance of us by the establishment which still looks like failure. We have had a capital dinner, the dessert whereof is now on the table. When we arrived, at nearly seven last night, all the linen in the house, newly ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... which she carried on her operations kept her mind in balance. Once or twice Susan peeped out from the parlour door, and something like an echo of laughter rang out into the hall after one of those inspections. Nettie took no notice either of the look or the laugh. She built in those piles of baggage with the rapidest symmetrical arrangement, to the admiration of Smith, who stood wondering by, and did what he could to help her, with troubled good-nature. She did not stop to make any sentimental reflections, or to think of the thankless office in which ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... something worth seeing. The Boston Post, for example, has the largest single printing press in the world. It was built in 1906 by the Hoe Company of New York and is guaranteed to print, count, fold, and stack into piles over ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... see any face distinctly, but there seemed to be a great many people, leaning over the parapets, looking down the river. He stopped and looked over too. The sun glared on the foul water eddying in and out among the piles and barges. Some men were rowing in a boat, furiously. Another boat followed close. A voice close by Gethryn ...
— In the Quarter • Robert W. Chambers
... child whose bricks fall down Re-piles them o'er and o'er, Came ruin and the rain that burns, Returning as a wheel returns, And crouching in the furze and ferns He ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... is cold all the time. She piles covers over herself at night so that the weight alone would be enough to make her ill. She sleeps with the heat turned on in her room. She complains all day of cold when not complaining of other things. She puts such a strain on her stomach ...
— Nerves and Common Sense • Annie Payson Call
... and a prison on each hand: I saw from out the wave her structures rise As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand: A thousand years their cloudy wings expand Around me, and a dying glory smiles O'er the far times when many a subject land Looked to the winged Lion's marble piles, Where Venice sate in state, throned on ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... search of him, making her way with difficulty through the piles of boxes. What could be in them all? Edmund must have been buying for years. Every now and then as she stooped to look at the labels pasted upon them, she caught names well known to her. Orbatelli, Via dei Bardi 13, Firenze; ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in horror! O ill not all ill! In the worst of the worst may be fierce Hope still. To-morrow with dawn will come many a wain, And bear away loads of human pain, Piles of pale beds for the 'spitals; but some Again will awake in home-mornings, and some, Dull herds of the war, again follow the drum. From others, faint blood shall in families flow, With wonder at life, and young oldness in woe, Yet hence may the movers of great ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... intentions, while a glance about the decks of the "Chesapeake" told how little fitted she was to enter into action. Her crew was a new one, never exercised at the guns, and had been mustered to quarters only three times. On the gun-deck lay great piles of cumbrous cables, from the coiling of which the men had been summoned by the call to quarters. On the after-deck were piles of furniture, trunks, and some temporary pantries. What little semblance of order there was, was due to ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... Pike (fish) ezoko. Pike (tool) pikilego. Pike (weapon) ponardego. Pile up amasigi. Pile (logs) sxtiparo. [Error in book: stiparo] Pile (support) paliso, subteno. Pile (heap) amaso—ajxo. Pile (electric) elektra pilo. Piles hemorojdo. Pilfer sxteleti. Pilferer sxtelisto. Pilgrim pilgrimanto. Pilgrimage pilgrimo—ado. Pill pilolo. Pillage rabegi—ado. Pillar kolono. Pillory punejo. Pillow kapkuseno. Pillow-case kusentego. Pilot piloto, gvido. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... where its foundations may yet be traced in the grass, and they read the inscription on the monument lately raised by the parish to the memory of the first Jesuit missionary to Canada, who died at Sillery. Then there seemed nothing more to do but admire the mighty rafts and piles of lumber; but their show of interest in the local celebrity had stirred the pride of Sillery, and a little French boy entered the chapel-yard, and gave Kitty a pamphlet history of the place, for which he would ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... was very amusing to see Eloise and Theresa unpack the hampers; and Ella and Nora, finding it so, made no move to join Daisy in her distant watch. The men were busy running to and fro with the unpacked eatables, and keeping up the fire, and setting piles of plates everywhere, and laying glasses all round the tablecloth for they would not stand up and putting wine in coolers, that is to say, in pails of ice water. Daisy felt alone again, left out of the play. She looked at Nora and Ella in the distance that is, just ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... reverence. As we ascended the plateau (twelve hundred by sixteen hundred yards), and rode within the shadow of the pyramids, our feeling was deepened by the view of the barren waste stretched before us,—yellowish sand and piles of debris accentuating the solitude of the place, while the inscrutable Sphinx and other ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... Commons, Monday, May 5.—Next year is my Jubilee—mine and Mr. Punch's. Pup and dog, have known House of Commons for nigh fifty years. Of course not so intimately as within the last eight or nine years; but ever since I took my seat on piles of bound volumes at feet of the MASTER, have kept one eye ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 17, 1890. • Various
... if our heavenly Father gave to us after this mode, we should have only coarse, shapeless piles of provisions lying about the world, instead of all this beautiful variety of ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... flats stretched brown and bare until they melted into the confused and fantastic rock piles of twisted and pictured desert stone. In the other direction an irregular streak of light green trailed along, marking the winding of the river bound by twisted cottonwoods and vivid patches of corn fields. Through the shimmer ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... the way to lay the city flat; To bring the roof to the foundation, And bury all which yet distinctly ranges, In heaps and piles ...
— The Tragedy of Coriolanus • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... tomb, I shrank back trembling, and dared not venture in. Nor did my courage altogether come back when the shutters were thrown open, and the wintry sunlight streamed in upon dusty floors, and cobwebbed ceilings, and piles of mysterious objects covered in a ghostly way with large white sheets, looking like heaps of ...
— Monsieur Maurice • Amelia B. Edwards
... on the boulevards, the arc lights twinkled sleepily, their long night vigil nearly finished. The barren tree tops which skirted the park, made a lace work against the frosty, winter's sky, and here and there, chance rays of light threw piles of rubbish in the big lot into unlovely relief. The same kindly, grimy, disorderly neighborhood of the day before and the year before, and yet the spirit of Christmas cast a halo over the whole and beautified it ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... busy. Milly and Sulie and Nancy seeded and chopped and baked, and polished silver, and got out piles of linen, and made up beds, and were all beautifully ready and swept and garnished when Uncle Rodman arrived from ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... heart of the valley, as if to complete the picture, lay a big old-fashioned farmstead, with many gray outhouses and a large red dwelling-house. At the gables stood two tall, spreading pear trees; at the gate were a couple of young birches; in the grass-covered yard were great piles of firewood; and behind the barn were several huge haystacks. The farmhouse rising above the low fields was as pretty a sight as a ship, with masts and sails, towering above the broad surface of ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... their best attire, and of that happy and, I may say, beautiful race, which is spread over this highly-favoured portion of England. The tables were tastefully arranged in the open air[204]—oranges and gingerbread in piles decorated with evergreens and Spring flowers; and all partook of tea, the young in the open air, and the old within doors. I must own I wish that little commemorations of this kind were more common among us. It ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... pretty serge were half a dozen white embroidered aprons, and below them piles and piles of underlinen, all beautifully embroidered, silk stockings, little shoes, plenty of gloves, handkerchiefs, also embroidered with Florence's name. In short, a complete ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade
... flat, rue Richer, where he had lived for a number of years, the young journalist was coming and going busily: cupboards, drawers, wardrobes, were opened wide, garments, piles of linen, were spread about in all the rooms. On the dining-room table a large travelling bag lay open: into this, with the aid of his housekeeper, Jerome Fandor was feverishly packing the spare things he required, ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... consistent disciples of any one school of thought. What we call our opinions are mere bundles of incoherent formulae, arbitrarily stitched together because our reasoning faculties are too dull to make inconsistency painful. Of the vast piles of books which load our libraries, ninety-nine hundredths and more are but printed echoes: and it is the rarest of pleasures to say, Here is a distinct record of impressions at first hand. We commonplace ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... luggage. The saloon was nothing more than a glass case on deck, inside of which, below the windows, a bench upholstered in red plush ran around the sides. At irregular intervals the bench was heaped with disorderly piles of luggage. ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... iron piles, driven deep in the ground below the river bottom, are perhaps the most common in use. The piles are sawed off below the surface of the water and a platform built upon them, which in turn serves as the ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday
... celebrated as the seat of learning and culture. Verona had an amphitheatre of marble, whose remains are among the most striking monuments of antiquity, capable of seating twenty-two thousand people. Ravenna, near the mouth of the Padus (Po), built on piles, was a great naval depot, and had an artificial harbor capable of containing two hundred and fifty ships of war, and was the seat of government after the fall of the empire. Padua counted among its inhabitants five ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... channel, and around them swarmed the little ant-men in never-resting activity. The golden valley opened out to us in a vista of green curves, and the cleft of it was packed with tents, cabins, dumps and tailing piles, all bedded in a blue haze of ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... of Velvet will appear of two Distinct kinds of Blackness, the one far Darker than the other, of which Disparity the Reason Seems to be, that in the Less obscure part of the Velvet, the Little Silken Piles whereof 'tis made up, being Inclin'd, there is a Greater part of each of them Obverted to the Eye, whereas in the other part the Piles of Silk being more Erected, there are far Fewer Beams Reflected Outwards from ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... was jolting over the cobble-stones of the narrow main street of Chagmouth. It stopped outside the Post Office, for the principal reason that if it went any farther it would be impossible for it to turn round, and the girls, dismounting, took their satchels or piles of books, said good-bye to one another, and scattered to their respective homes. Beata and Romola crossed the bridge that spanned the brook, skirted the harbour, climbed a flight of steps cut in the solid rock, and reached a house which stood on the top of a high crag overlooking the sea. It ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... looked away over the Russian and Lutheran churches to the sea, we watched a house which was being built with some interest. The town stands either on massive glacial rocks, or, in other parts that have been reclaimed from the sea, on soft sand; in the latter case the erection has to be reared on piles. For the foundation of the house mentioned, long stakes, about twenty feet in length, were driven into the ground. Above this pile a sort of crane was erected, from which hung a large heavy stone caught ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... their town are built upon piles, or pillars, four or five feet above the ground: Upon these is laid a floor of bamboo canes, which are placed at some distance from each other, so as to leave a free passage for the air from below; ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... his drawer, and as he did so his eyes fell upon his half-written article for the Modernist and on the piles of correspondence beside it. A sense of bitter helplessness overcame him, a pang not for himself so much as for his cause. He realized the inevitable effect of the story in the diocese, weighted, as it would be, with all the colourable ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... for the other buildings were already deserted by their would-be salvors, who had filled the streets with piles of books and valuables waiting to be carried away. Then occurred a terrible phenomenon, which had once before in such disasters paralyzed the efforts of the firemen. A large wooden warehouse in the ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... can't spend half a dollar here if you try. The flossiest kind of thing they got is only ten cents a order. They'll smother you in whipped cream f'r a quarter. You c'n come in here an' eat an' eat an' put away piles of cakes till you feel like a combination of Little Jack Horner an' old Doc Johnson. An' w'en you're all through, they hand yuh your check, an', say—it says forty-five cents. You can't beat it, so wade right in an' spoil ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... window-curtains, whose harsh green age had not softened, were drawn. The mahogany sideboard, the threadbare carpet, the small horsehair sofa, the gilt mirror, standing on a white marble chimney-piece, said clearly, 'Furnished apartments in a house built about a hundred years ago.' There were piles of newspapers, there were books on the mahogany sideboard and on the horsehair sofa, and on the table there were various manuscripts,—The Gipsy, Act I.; The Gipsy, Act III., Scenes iii. ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... had gone to dinner or to play, Piggy, with much wiggling of his toes, with much hard breathing, and with many facial contortions, wrote a note. He gave it to the Pratt girl to deliver. When the first bell was ringing that noon, Piggy was piling up the primary urchins in wiggling, squealing piles at "crack the whip." During the fifteen minutes that followed, he was charging up and down the yard, howling like a Comanche, at "pull-away." But run as he would, yell as he would, and wrestle as he would, Piggy could ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... specimens may be taken at the appropriate season in almost any or every locality. Beginning with the latter part of May or first of June, in the Northern states, plasmodia are to be found everywhere on piles of organic refuse: in the woods, especially about fallen and rotting logs, undisturbed piles of leaves, beds of moss, stumps, by the seeping edge of melting snow on mountain sides, by sedgy drain or swamp, nor less in the open field where piles ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... close of a long day's journey, while the twilight gave a mysterious hue to a scene in itself singular and stately.—Glistening spire on spire; massive piles, which in the deepening haze might be either prisons or palaces; vast ranges of buildings, gloomy or glittering as the partial ray fell on them; with the solemn beauty of the Invalides on one wing, the light and lovely elegance of the St Genevieve on the other, and the frowning ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... a steady down-pour, and the streets of Liverpool, always black and dirty, looked dirtier and blacker than ever on the day when Neil McPherson walked restlessly up and down the entrance hall of the North-western Hotel, now scanning the piles of baggage waiting to be taken to the Germanic, and then looking ruefully out upon the rain ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... to the piles of flour and sugar barrels, the boxes of crackers and of hams, of figs and raisins, the hampers of wine and ale, which were profusely piled on the quarter-deck ready for lowering ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... hour of midnight was tolled forth by the neighbouring clocks of Saint Michael's and Saint Alban's. Scarcely had the strokes died away, when Leonard seized a light and set fire to the pile. Ten thousand other piles were kindled at the same moment, and in an instant the pitchy darkness was converted into light as bright ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... dissolved, about forty warriors came to the house where he was, and tying a rope around his neck, led him off to another village, five miles distant. Here again he was severely beaten with clubs & the pipe end of the tomahawk, & then tied to a post, around which were piles of wood. These were soon kindled, but a violent rain falling unexpectedly, extinguished the flames, before they had effected him. It was then agreed to postpone his execution, until the next day, and being again beaten and much wounded ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... quick glance about to see what was happening. She noticed Margy and Mun Bun, well up on the beach, digging holes and making little piles of sand. But down near the inlet, where a boat was tied, Rose was ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Cousin Tom's • Laura Lee Hope
... familiar to the world through matter-of-fact reports of attack and counter-attack, capture and recapture. Each had a tale to tell of systematic bombardment, of crumbling walls, of wild hand-to-hand fighting, of sudden evacuation and occupation. Now they were nothing but useless piles of brick and glorious names—Thiepval, Pozieres, La Boiselle, Guillemont, Flers, Hardecourt, Guinchy, Combles, Bouchavesnes, ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... at his desk, in his Washington office, surrounded by piles of papers covering the desk, spilling off onto the floor and decorating his lap. He was staring at the papers as if he expected them to leap up, dance round him and shout the solution to all his problems at him in trained choral voices. They ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... bottles of brandy or whisky, several loaves of bread and some dried venison. Around this rude table, seated upon fragments of rock, lugged thither for the purpose, were some eight or ten men of the band, in various stages of intoxication. Along the walls were piles of bearskins, some of which served as couches for six or seven men, who had thrown themselves down upon them in a state ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... old Bonanza. The same old moon looked down; The same old landmarks seemed to yearn to me; But the cabins all were silent, and the flat, once like a town, Was mighty still and lonesome-like to see. There were piles and piles of tailings where we toiled with pick and pan, And turning round a bend I heard a roar, And there a giant gold-ship of the very newest plan Was tearing chunks of pay-dirt ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... above. Past the window streams an endless sunny panorama (for the house fronts the chief thoroughfare between country and town),—relics of summer equipages in faded grandeur; great, fragrant hay-carts; vast moving mounds of golden straw; loads of crimson onions; heaps of pale green cabbages; piles of gray tree-prunings, looking as if the patrician trees were sending their superfluous wealth of branches to enrich the impoverished orchards of the Poor Farm; wagons of sea-weed just from the beach, with bright, moist hues, and dripping ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... other end being a chair and another player standing by that. At the word "Start," the articles are handed one by one by the captain to the first player in the line, and passed as quickly as possible without dropping to the player by the chair. As they come to him he piles them on the chair (without dropping any) until all are there, and then returns them with equal speed until the basket is filled again. The side which finishes first is the winner. If an article is dropped ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... centre; here, as always, one huge block upheld in the air by only lesser blocks. The Gray Lake itself, under this strange sentry on the hill, was in long-passed ages a little Venice; houses built on piles lined its shores, set far enough out into the lake for safety, ever ready to ward off attack from the land. This miniature Venice of Lough Rea is the type of a whole epoch of turbulent tribal war, when homes were everywhere clustered within the defence of the waters, with ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... rose masses of rock, some fashioned in wondrous beauty, others in forms weird and fantastic; some gray and rugged, some tinted with intermingling shades of color, and others sparkling in the sunlight as though studded with gems innumerable. Here and there were piles of rock, crimson and green and golden, resembling the moss-grown, ivy-covered castles of the olden time. Farther on were mountains covered with heavy forests of pine, through which the winds sighed and whispered mysteriously, while ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... opened a mahogany folding-door which he shut after him and announced to his master the arrival of the delegates. Egremont was seated in his library, at a round table covered with writing materials, books, and letters. On another table were arranged his parliamentary papers, and piles of blue books. The room was classically furnished. On the mantelpiece were some ancient vases, which he had brought with him from Italy, standing on each side of that picture of Allori of which ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... Poyntz the sovereignty of the Hill, she was attacked by some severe malady which appeared complicated with spinal disease, and after my return to L—— I sometimes met her, on the spacious platform of the Hill, drawn along slowly in a Bath chair, her livid face peering forth from piles of Indian shawls and Siberian furs, and the gaunt figure of Dr. Jones stalking by her side, taciturn and gloomy as some sincere mourner who conducts to the grave the patron on whose life he him self had conveniently lived. It was in the dismal ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and impracticable wisdom in a garret. There is the limbo of departed fashions, aged trifles of a day and whatever was valuable only to one generation of men, and which passed to the garret when that generation passed to the grave—not for safekeeping, but to be out of the way. Peter saw piles of yellow and musty account-books in parchment covers, wherein creditors long dead and buried had written the names of dead and buried debtors in ink now so faded that their moss-grown tombstones were more ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... above it, and all around us, the great, soft, kind mountains stood up in the sun to guard her and watch over her, in her sleep. The shabby cross and the little posy and the magnificent brown mountains were all so much more kind and loving than our piles of marble and fussy flowers arranged for show, that when I came down the hill, I didn't feel sorry ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... one saloons and gambling dives that Pan had seen could not in any sense compare with this one. This was on a big scale without restraint of law or order. Piles of gold and greenbacks littered the tables where roulette, faro, poker were in progress. Black garbed, pale hard-faced gamblers sat with long mobile hands on the tables. Bearded men, lean-faced youths bent with intent gaze over their cards. Sloe-eyed Mexicans in their high-peaked sombreros ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... The Federal officers rushed from their tents and made off in the darkness; but the soldiers, who were lying on the line of railroad, leaped to their feet and opened a heavy fire on their invisible foes. Against this the cavalry, broken up in the camp with its tents, its animals, and its piles of baggage, could do little, for it was impossible to form them up in the ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... woolen frocks, buckskin breeches, long stockings, and clouted brogans with pewter buckles, and the older boys in shirts of brown tow, waistcoat and breeches of butternut-colored woolen homespun, surrounded by piles of white hickory shavings, are whittling out with keen Barlow jack-knives implements for home use: ox-bows and bow-pins, axe-helves, rakestales, forkstales, handles for spades and billhooks, wooden shovels, flail staff and ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... projected themselves in sharp relief. In the gloomy bottom of the crater, whose dimensions are vast enough to swallow Mont Blanc body and bones, could be distinguished a magnificent group of cones, at least half a mile in height and glittering like piles of crystal. Towards the north several breaches could be seen in the ramparts, due probably to a caving in of immense masses accumulated on the summit of ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... one. The natives of Kigongo warned us not to attempt it, as the water was over our heads; but I had only to give a hint to the men, and we set on our way. Even the water—we were getting quite amphibious—was better than the horrible filth and piles of decaying vegetation which were swept against the ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... very different building from what Mrs. Cliff had proposed to herself when she decided to add a dining-room to her old house. It was so different indeed, that after having gone two or three times to look upon the piles of lumber and stone and the crowds of men, digging, and hammering, and sawing on the corner lot, she had decided to leave the whole matter in the hands of Mr. Burke, the architect, and the contractor. And when Willy Croup endeavored to explain to her what was going ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton
... right in among the houses and fire through the doors, and sometimes a number of them would make a rush against one; but nothing short of bursting the doors into splinters would have given them an entry, so firmly did the piles of earth hold them in their places. In the middle of the fifth day a cloud of dust was seen across the plain from the direction in which we came. No one had a doubt that it was a party sent to our relief, and every ...
— Through Russian Snows - A Story of Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow • G. A Henty
... through the town, while the people wept and prayed, and through the gates of the palace-yard, and through the piles of bones and skulls, till he came to the door of Kerkuon's hall, the ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley
... more of a place for guns and fishing-tackle than for books. It was Humfrey's usual living room when alone, and was of course full besides of justice books, agricultural reports, acts of parliament, piles of papers, little bags of samples of wheat, all in the orderly disorder congenial to the male kind. All this was as usual, but the change that struck her was, that the large red leather lounging chair, hitherto a receptacle for the overflowings of the table, was now wheeled beside the fire, ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... asleep by eight or nine, unless there has been a good catch of fish, when the little houses on the edge of the cove are full of weary men still ripping away at the cod, that are brought in huge piles dwindling very fast after they are spread out to dry. Daddy gets batches of newspapers, by the uncertain mail, but finishes by nine and requests to be permitted to snore in peace. I write hurriedly for an hour or two, and finally succumb to the drowsiness you ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... Hare out shopping—saw piles of lace, heaps of silk, pyramids of riband, and all other female gear. What a multiplicity of pretty things we women require to render us what we consider presentable! And how few of us, however good-looking we may chance to be, would agree with the poet, that "loveliness needs not the foreign ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... 1854, Lake Zurich being very low on account of the unusual dryness of the summer, dwellers on the shore of the lake found, in the mud, wooden piles which had been much eaten away, also some rude utensils. These were the remains of an ancient village built over the water. Since this time more than 200 similar villages have been found in the lakes of Switzerland. They have been called Lake Villages. The piles ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... anger overturn this magnificence, and make Troy topple down. Look, for all the cloud that now veils thy gaze and dulls mortal vision with damp encircling mist, I will rend from before thee. Fear thou no commands of thy mother, nor refuse to obey her counsels. Here, where thou seest sundered piles of masonry and rocks violently torn from rocks, and smoke eddying mixed with dust, Neptune with his great trident shakes wall and foundation out of their places, and upturns all the city from her base. Here Juno in all her terror ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... Mr. Lawrence where they might find Obadiah Jones, who was interested in a coal, lumber, and real estate business. Our hero, accompanied by his two chums, found the man in his office, a small, dingy coop of a place surrounded by huge piles of lumber. He was a short, stout, bald-headed individual, wearing large spectacles, and he looked up rather uninvitingly ...
— Dave Porter At Bear Camp - The Wild Man of Mirror Lake • Edward Stratemeyer
... big as a barn, the full size of the building, except for the end cut off to make the offices. Negroes worked here; negro men, mostly wearing red undershirts. They sat in long rows, with quick fingers stripping the stems from the not unfragrant leaves. These were stemmers, it was learned. Piles of the brown tobacco stood beside each stemmer, bales of it were stacked, ceiling-high, at the farther end of the room, awaiting their attentions. The negroes eyed the visitors respectfully. They were heard to laugh and joke over their ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... passed, and Bandar, where there is sleeping-accommodation to be had. From Kalipoetjan he will make his way to Tjilatjap by native canoe, crossing the Kinderzee, a large lagoon, in eight or nine hours, and passing some villages built on piles. There is also a curious cave and some edible swallow-nests to be seen. In travelling by this route it is necessary to take a servant to interpret with the natives. From Tjilatjap the railway runs to Djokja. This town is about 25 miles from the Boro-Boedoer temple; the road is bad, and ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... and wagons, hitched everywheres, feeding out of the wagon-troughs and stomping to keep off the flies. There was sheds made out of poles and roofed over with branches, where they had lemonade and gingerbread to sell, and piles of watermelons and green corn ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Leaving aside the question of elements for the moment, we might first try to classify the bits of color. We could sort out a pile of reds, a pile of blues, a pile of browns, a pile of grays, etc., but the piles would shade off one into another. The salient fact about colors is the gradual transition from one to another. We can arrange them in series better than we can classify them. They can be serially arranged in three different ways, ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... his remedies are at least harmless, but his pedantry and utter want of judgment betray themselves everywhere. He piles his prescriptions one upon another, without the least discrimination. He is run away with by all sorts of fancies and superstitions. He prescribes euphrasia, eye-bright, for disease of the eyes; appealing confidently ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... him to the village undertaker, and there he had to mind the shop and do all the chores. He slept under the counter among piles of empty coffins. The undertaker's wife beat him often, and whenever he was not at work he had to attend funerals, which was by no means amusing, so that he found life no better than it had been at the workhouse. ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... sanguine hope. Life has few difficulties in the morning, at least, none which we cannot conquer; and a private secretary to a minister, young and prosperous, at his first meal, surrounded by dry toast, all the newspapers, and piles of correspondence, asking and promising everything, feels with pride and delight the sense of powerful and responsible existence. Endymion had glanced at all the leading articles, had sorted in the correspondence the grain from the chaff, and had settled in his mind ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... preventive institutions and beneficent legislation; above all, by the diffusion of national education, to lift a race upon a level of culture hardly attained by a class in earlier times, is as lofty a task as to accumulate piles of ecclesiastical splendor. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley |
