"Shrunken" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stood there long up on the wooded hillside, listening to the soughing of earth and sky, and there was nothing else to hear. Then there might come a faint little rustling, a curled and shrunken leaf rolling and rustling down over the frozen branches. It was like the sound of a little spring. Then the soughing of earth and sky again. A gentleness came over me; a mute was ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... over sixty, rather tall, in a brown silk skirt, and a white burnouse that showed the shrunken slimness of her arms, came eagerly forward. She was still rather pretty, with small refined features, large expressionless blue eyes, and long whitish-yellow ringlets down her cheeks, in the ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... and followed me when I led the way. The skipper and the doctor were both lying upon their faces, and as I raised the former and turned him over, it is difficult to say which shocked me most, whether the startling ease with which I lifted his wasted body, or the sight of his withered, drawn, and shrunken features—which were so dreadfully altered that for a moment I was doubtful whether it really was or was not the body of Captain Harrison that I held in my arms. I passed him up out of the boat without difficulty, ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... But although Winnipeg has shrunken to a tenth of its original size, its rivers still remain worthy of the great basin into which they once flowed. The Saskatchewan is longer than the Danube, the Winnipeg has twice the volume of the Rhine. 400,000 square miles of continent shed their waters into Lake Winnipeg; a lake as changeful ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... these precarious fields of endeavour. The liquor he drank—whenever and wherever he could get it—had bloated his face out of all wholesome contour and had given to his stomach, a chronic distention, but had depleted his frame and shrunken his limbs so that physically he was that common enough type of the hopeless alcoholic—a meagre rack of a man burdened amidships by an unhealthy ...
— The Thunders of Silence • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... pale faces, over which the sombre light shed the same dull heavy colour; with, here and there, a gaunt arm thrust forth: its thinness hidden by no covering, but fully exposed to view, in all its shrunken ugliness. There were some who, lying on their backs with upturned faces and clenched hands, just visible in the leaden light, bore more the aspect of dead bodies than of living creatures; and there were others coiled up into strange and fantastic postures, ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... on her lap: she nods to us without disturbing herself. Like the pioneer, this woman is in the prime of life; her appearance would seem superior to her condition, and her apparel even betrays a lingering taste for dress; but her delicate limbs appear shrunken, her features are drawn in, her eye is mild and melancholy; her whole physiognomy bears marks of a degree of religious resignation, a deep quiet of all passions, and some sort of natural and tranquil firmness, ready to meet ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... hat in his hand, he stood within the shadow of the doorway and waited for the earnest voice to fall silent. Mahaley was dying, this he saw when his glance wandered to the shrunken figure beneath the patchwork quilt; and at the same instant he realized how small a part was his in Mahaley's life or death. He should hardly have known her had he met her last week in the corn field; and it was by chance only that he knew her now ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... sound, except the liver, which had its tunic inflamed, its substance indurated and filled with blood. The vestiges of inflammation in the coat of the liver were traced in every instance already related, while at the same time the liver, in all, appeared shrunken. The diminution of size in the liver, after death, cannot at present be well explained; for it is very certain that such a diminution is not an attendant of this disorder, during most of its stages, but that on the ...
— Cases of Organic Diseases of the Heart • John Collins Warren
... coat over it; and, finally, no man of any pretension to fashion wore nankeen trousers. Well-dressed men wore charming fancy materials or immaculate white, and every one had straps to his trousers, while the shrunken hems of Lucien's nether garments manifested a violent antipathy for the heels of boots which they wedded with obvious reluctance. Lucien wore a white cravat with embroidered ends; his sister had seen that M. du Hautoy and M. de Chandour ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... he saw was not nice. Smoke's face, wherever the skin showed, was black and purple and scabbed from repeated frost-bite. The cheeks were fallen in, so that, despite the covering of beard, the upper rows of teeth ridged the shrunken flesh. Across the forehead and about the deep-sunk eyes, the skin was stretched drum-tight, while the scraggly beard, that should have been golden, was singed by fire and ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... was transfigured as he made this announcement. His sound eye gleamed, his shrunken form seemed to expand and fill, and his harsh sallow features took on an expression which was almost ecstatic. It was his great moment, the moment for which he had lived for twenty years, and it compensated him ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... in the forest, shrunken and starkly, Burnt by his slayers (so men have said, darkly), With the half-crazy sheep-dog, who cowered beside there, And yelled at the silence, and ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... the qui vive!" Hardly were the words out of Senior's mouth than he stumbled headlong forward, the ground opening at his feet, and a narrow ribbon of cold grey water, silently sliding under its shrunken banks, caught Acton's eye. Senior had plumped cleanly into this. Luckily, it was not very deep, and he scrambled out to the other side drenched to the skin, and showing clearly enough, where he had broken through the snow on both sides, that all the ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... give him time to reply; he extended his shrunken hand, on which glittered the ring of the general of the order. The baron drew back in surprise; and then, immediately afterwards, bowing with the profoundest respect, he exclaimed,—"Is it possible that you are ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... steep part of the mountain, I found a dead ox the Jayhawkers had left, as no camp could be made here for lack of water and grass, the meat could not be saved. I found the body of the animal badly shrunken, but in condition, as far as putrefaction was concerned, as perfect as when alive. A big gash had been cut in the ham clear to the bone and the sun had dried the flesh in this. I was so awful hungry that I took my sheath knife and cut ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... a shower of petitions was flung from the steps where the crowd was collected, and over the heads of the gendarmes in brown. A general cry, as for justice, rose up; and one old ragged woman came forward and burst through the throng, howling, and flinging about her lean arms, and baring her old shrunken breast. I never saw a finer action of tragic woo, or heard sounds more pitiful than those old passionate groans of hers. What was your prayer, poor old wretched soul? The gendarmes hemmed her round, and hustled her away, but rather kindly. The Padishah went on quite impassible—the ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... goad to growth, Stood shrunken; Youth and Age appeared as one; Like Winter Summer; good as labour sloth; Nor was there answer wherefore beamed the sun, Or why men drew the breath to carry pain. High reared the ploughshare, broken lay the wain, Idly the flax-wheel spun Unridered: starving ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... then the two outer of these were aborted, leaving two nearly equal digits. In the series of the horse, where we can trace the change more clearly, we find the earliest form five-toed, but the outer and inner digit shrunken so as to become of little use. This condition of the creature in the early Tertiaries gives us the beginning of the equine series, and shows that far away as the creature is now from ourselves, it originated from the main stem of mammalian ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... his appearance shocked her. His eyes were hollow, his tall form looked meager and shrunken. He was growing to be an old man. She ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... cattle-man with drooping grizzled mustache, came shambling up to the steps. His weather-beaten chaps were much too short for his lengthy limbs, the collar of his faded flannel shirt lacked an inch of meeting at the throat, its sleeves were shrunken until his hairy hands hung down like tassels. He was loose and spineless, his movements tempered with the slothfulness of the far Southwest. His appearance gave one the impression that ready-made garments are never long enough. He ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... it closer and rocked it against her shrunken breast a second and older woman appeared in the doorway, a witch-faced slattern who inquired ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... man laid the flute on his knees, where his shrunken little hands still caressed it. "Do? why I'd die if you dragged me away from ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... going to pull through. His wife had been allowed in to see him, and tears rolled down her shrunken cheeks as she told about it. He had been four days and nights blocked up in a little tunnel, with no food or water, save for a few drops of coffee which he had shared with other men. He could still not speak, ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... films of age, through the films of coming death, and through the gathering darkness, old Hagar saw and knew, and with a scream of joy her shrunken arms wound themselves convulsively around the maiden's neck, drawing her nearer, and nearer still, until the shriveled lips touched the cheek of her who did not turn away, but returned ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... home at Newstead Abbey. Byron was old enough to know what had befallen him. "It was a change from a shabby Scotch flat to a palace," a half-ruined palace, indeed, but his very own. It was a proud moment, but in a few weeks he was once more in lodgings. The shrunken leg did not improve, and acting on bad advice his mother entrusted him to the care of a quack named Lavender, truss-maker to the general hospital at Nottingham. His nurse who was in charge of him maltreated him, and the quack tortured him to no purpose. At ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... eyes, and thin brown hair and beard. His expression is serious and thoughtful. EYOLF wears a suit cut like a uniform, with gold braid and gilt military buttons. He is lame, and walks with a crutch under his left arm. His leg is shrunken. He is undersized, and looks delicate, ...
— Little Eyolf • Henrik Ibsen
... a large house, formerly a house of state, lives Mr. Tulkinghorn. It is let off in sets of chambers now, and in those shrunken fragments of its greatness, lawyers lie like maggots in nuts. But its roomy staircases, passages, and antechambers still remain; and even its painted ceilings, where Allegory, in Roman helmet and celestial linen, sprawls among balustrades ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... indifferently discoursed of carving up his broken flesh, and thus piecing out his abbreviated days. Who was it, that in capacity of Surgeon, seemed enacting the part of a Regenerator of life? The withered, shrunken, one-eyed, toothless, hairless Cuticle; with a trunk half ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... sclero-gliosis of the periphery of the cord. The theca is greatly distended over a variable extent of the cord; the cerebro-spinal fluid is increased in quantity and is under considerable tension; and the cord itself presents a shrunken appearance. Sometimes there is thickening of the arachno-pia and matting of the nerve roots. The condition appears to begin in the lower part of the cord, and to spread up, usually as far as the ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... sewing, rewiring and connecting up the disrupted organism. Later, developed a hitch in the left arm. Strang could lift it so far, and no farther. Linday applied himself to the problem. It was a case of more wires, shrunken, twisted, disconnected. Again it was cut and switch and ease and disentangle. And all that saved Strang was his tremendous vitality and the ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... of her child, with a love grown fierce by years of hopeless hope and unrequited longing. Once again those arms, thin and weak with age, grew strong; and in the resurrection of a mighty passion, all the old womanhood and motherhood of the parent renewed their youth, and filled out the shrunken and decrepit form until she stood majestic in the strength of heaven. To those who had been wont to see Amanda's mother bent and crushed with years and sorrow, the woman that now stood in the firelight would not have been recognised as Mrs. Stott. Once the fairest ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... Horses, cuirasses, sabres, helmets, men, Impinge confusedly on the pointed prongs Of the English kneeling there, whose dim red shapes Behind their slanted steel seem trampled flat And sworded to the sward. The charge recedes, And lo, the tough lines rank there as before, Save that they are shrunken. ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... undetermined constituents than do poorly filled nuts. Highest quality of the kernels is directly associated with highest oil content and highest degree of filling. Nut kernels that are poorly filled are often hollow, shrunken, shriveled, and chaffy. When eaten they may taste sweet, but are lacking in the oily flavor characteristic of the particular species of nut eaten. It is only in the best filled nuts that highest quality, flavor, ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... rested on its side under the left thigh. This inclined the body somewhat to the right, so that the right arm rested naturally upon the table for support when not employed. These limbs, especially below the knees, were shrunken and distorted. The shoe of the right foot whose upturned sole rested on the left leg just above the ankle, was many sizes too small for a ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... difficult if fantastically beautiful country. Where rock outcropped and in the sands of bright rapid streams we looked for signs of that gold, so stressed as though it were the only salvation! But the rocks were silent, and though in the bed of a shrunken streamlet we found some glistening particles and scraping them carefully together got a small spoonful to wrap in cloth and bestow in our pouch of treasures, still were we not sure that it was wholly gold. It might be. We worked for an hour for just ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... strange draught, as if one swallowed fire. The blood coursed richly through my shrunken veins; I felt filled with a different life. I arose and left that bed of torture, but came back to it as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... am locked up," said Hilary. "For another, because I have not made my hands and face acquainted with soap and water since I was aboard the cutter; my hair is full of bits of straw and dead leaves, and my clothes are soaked and shrunken, and muddied and torn. Altogether, I am not fit ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... entered the room she saw Bennett sitting bolt upright in his bed, staring straight before him, his small eyes, with their deforming cast, open to their fullest extent, the fingers of his shrunken, bony hands dancing nervously on the coverlet. A week's growth of stubble blackened the lower part of his face. Without a moment's pause he mumbled and muttered with astonishing rapidity, but for the most part the words were undistinguishable. ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... The shrunken face of the good man kindled visibly, and he clasped his hands with force. A silence ensued, during which the others looked at him, the Greek through tears. At length ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... their new-born babes—and all the time the invisible mass is being celebrated beyond, behind the iconostasis. On the ground, on mats, whole families are seated in circle, as if they were in their homes. A thick deposit of white chalk on the defaced, shrunken walls bears witness to great age. And over all this is a strange old ceiling of cedarwood, traversed by ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... old, now that his armour of business had dropped from him, as he sat there, with the fur rug drawn over his chest, and his loose lower lip hanging slightly away from his shrunken gums. A sudden pity, the first I had ever dared feel for the president of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad, shot through my heart. The gay old bird, I told myself, was ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... alone; other people, sometimes strange people, were there. We had no cosy talk; often she was too weak to do more than pat my hand; her loud and almost constant cough terrified and harassed me. I felt, as I stood, awkwardly and shyly, by her high bed, that I had shrunken into a very small and insignificant figure, that she was floating out of my reach, that all things, but I knew not what nor how, were corning to an end. She herself was not herself; her head, that used to be held so erect, now rolled or sank upon the pillow; ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... a tone of daze. In two strides he had left Amber and was kneeling by Rutton's side. The most cursory examination, however, sufficed to resolve his every doubt: the hanging head and arms, the livid face with its staring yet sightless eyes, the shrunken figure seeming so pitifully slight and unsubstantial in comparison with its accustomed strong and virile poise, hopelessly confirmed ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... Wilson and his "Encyclical," and protested emphatically against his way of filling every gap in his arrangements by wedging into it his League of Nations. "Can we harbor any illusion as to the net worth of the League of Nations when the revised text of the Covenant reveals it shrunken to the merest shadow, incapable of thought, will, action, or justice?... Too often have we made sacrifices to the Wilsonian doctrine."[215] ... Another press organ compared Fiume to the Saar Valley and sympathized with Italy, who, relying on the solidarity ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... shoulder and she saw in the hand a long, slim blade. The lips of the warrior were drawing closer to those of the woman, but they never touched them, for suddenly the man straightened, stiffly, a shriek upon his lips, and then he crumpled like an empty fur and lay, a shrunken heap, upon the floor. Tara of Helium stooped and wiped her ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... erect still, that he might give her, Eva, one look, the like of which I had never seen on mortal face, and which will never leave my heart or hers until we die. Then as he saw her sink shudderingly down and the delicate woman reappear in her pallid and shrunken figure, he turned his eyes on me and I saw,—good God!—a tear well up from those orbs of stone and fall slowly down his cheek, fast growing hollow under the ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... me to—". She looked up; she had been sitting on the doorstep with her face in her hands. Dick stood there with his cap off. He forgot that he was to inquire the way to Newbury Street, when he saw the tears on her shrunken cheeks. Dick could never bear to see ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... over the shrunken figure in the revolving chair. "Your son asked you to send for me? Then he's as bad, as cruel, as ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... of the two men clad in black looked up. Hitherto he had maintained a strict silence, his eyes fixed on the floor. The face that was lifted to the morning light was not a pleasant one. It was pasty, colourless, and shrunken as though from long fasting, but the eyes glittered in their dull sockets like a pair of black diamonds. "Fanatic" was written large all over him. He was a monk released from his vows for the performance of special duties. His tidings were ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... seems to stop with their disaster is going on with smooth indifference, and that a little time will carry them so far from any fateful event that when they gather courage to face it they will find it curiously shrunken in the perspective. Nothing really stops the world but death, and that only for the dead. If we live, we must move on, we must change, we must outwear every motion, however poignant or deep. Cornelia's shame ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... field the future offers us! How much it may be! How much, perhaps, we resolve it shall be! What a shrunken heap the harvest is! Are you satisfied with what ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... at the door that was shrunken and warped from the heat till it barely held together, and there was no measure to ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... the next; but until this moment the athlete had been to me a mere and incredible tradition. In the afternoon I had seen his lean knees totter under the captain's fire. Now, at midnight—the exact time by my watch—it was as if his shrunken limbs had expanded in his clothes; he seemed hardly to know his own flushed face, as he caught sight of it in ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... Very small and shrunken did she look when he took her out at the door leading to rooms over a stationer's shop. The sisters were somewhat better off than formerly, though good old Miss Ray was half ashamed of it, since it was chiefly owing to the liberal allowance from Mrs. Brownlow for the chaperonage in which she ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... quick and unexpected, Granny Thornton shrank back as though she had received a blow. Her eyes rolled in her head, and she seemed to be trying to reply; but the words would not come. She gasped and choked, and clutched at her throat with her shrunken hands. ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... unprofitable task, to take one of these doleful creatures, and set fancy resolutely at work to brighten the dim eye, and darken the silvery locks, and paint the ashen cheek with rose-color, and repair the shrunken and crazy form, till a dewy maiden shall be seen in the old matron's elbow-chair. The miracle being wrought, then let the years roll back again, each sadder than the last, and the whole weight of age and sorrow settle ...
— Edward Fane's Rosebud (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and the sun descending brightly, with rocks and banks to dwell upon. The stems of mottled and dimpled wood, with twigs coming out like elbows, hung and clung together closely, with a mode of bending in, as children do at some danger; overhead the shrunken leaves quivered and rustled ripely, having many points like stars, and rising and falling delicately, as fingers play sad music. Along the bed of the slanting ground, all between the stools of wood, there were heaps of dead brown leaves, and sheltered mats of ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... money to visit their homes on holidays. But the poor students came in such numbers that there were not enough rich families to provide for all, so that some of them suffered privation. You could pick out a poor student in a crowd, by his pale face and shrunken form. ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... could not make out whether it was a man or a woman. She had never seen any one so old, and the eyes in the shrunken face were like burning holes—caverns ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... old head in its brown wig was still shaking with fatigue, but under the prickle of white on his shaven jowl the purplish color came back in mottled streaks. He sipped the sherry breathlessly, the glass trembling in his veined and shrunken hand. "Well," he demanded, "how do you two like this ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... on with strips of cloth; for everywhere through the sand projected ridges of vertical, sharp stone—the black basalt named by the Arabs Hajar Jehannum, or "Rock of Hell." As for their uniforms, though now dry as bone, the way in which they were shrunken and wrinkled told that not long ago they had been drenched in ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... no longer beautiful and fresh as the morning, but blackened, crisped, scorched and shrunken, with all her wealth of silken hair burned to ashes, with all her clear loveliness of complexion gone forever. And there lay Jason Fletcher, unburned,—so carefully had she covered him as she fled,—but senseless, and to ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... about as fit for our purpose as another, we at once know which, and which only, we ought in the case before us to employ, which will prove the exact vesture of our thoughts. It is the first characteristic of a well-dressed man that his clothes fit him: they are not too small and shrunken here, too large and loose there. Now it is precisely such a prime characteristic of a good style, that the words fit close to the thoughts. They will not be too big here, hanging like a giant's robe on the limbs ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... then as now, people wassailed or wailed—oh, 'twas pretty much the same in all ages. But when we come to the most unmistakable facts, all this sheen of gilded armor and egret-plumes, of gemmed goblet and altar-lace, lute, mandolin, and lay, is cloth of gold over the ghastly, shrunken limbs of a leper. Pass over the glory of knight and dame and see how it was then with the multitude—with the millions. Almost at the first glance, in fact, your knight and dame turn out unwashed, scantily linened, living amid ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... greatly changed in the three years since I had last seen him. His tall figure was bent He was excessively emaciated. Two piercing eyes glowed in his thin face. His nose, which seemed to have grown longer, descended over his shrunken lips. ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... last glimmer of life beside the deathbed of his son, the old Duc had practically ceased to be. A mute, shrunken figure, he merely existed; his mind vanished, his memory gone, a wreck whom Nature fortunately remembered at last, and finally took away from the invalid chair which had been ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... to this discouraging observation. There are times when speech is worse than useless. He stood by the window, looking over at that shrunken figure on the groat old-fashioned four-post bed, with its voluminous drab damask curtains, its cords, fringes, tassels, and useless decorations—the nerveless, helpless figure of wasted youth, the wreckage of an ill-spent ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... Putney Bridge up stream is a string of club houses, boat houses, and little wooden buildings that do duty for both, and here, on sloping banks sometimes washed by brimming tides, sometimes broad and flat by a shrunken stream on which no racing boat will set its dainty keel, London gathers on March afternoons to wait for the return of the practising crews, and to watch the blue-scarved oarsmen in and out of the boathouses and the balcony windows. There is somewhere an air of the sea-side ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... which had long ago fallen into disuse, was almost hidden by the thick tangle of undergrowth which ran riot at that corner of the old park. It was partly covered by the shrunken half of a lid, above which a rusty windlass creaked in company with the music of the pines when the wind blew strongly. The full light of the sun never reached it, and the ground surrounding it was moist and green when other parts of the park were ...
— Lady of the Barge and Others, Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... The nuns were all assembled to look at her, and take warning by her sad fate. Such a picture of misery I never saw before. She seemed to have suffered even more than the old lady I saw in the cellar. It was but a moment, however, that we were allowed to gaze upon her shrunken ghastly features, and then she was hid from our sight forever. The nuns, except two or three, were sent from the room, and thus the murder was consummated. What else can ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... were administered. They created the most deadly sickness, without changing the symptoms or alleviating the pain. It soon became evident that the princess was dying. The livid complexion, glassy eyes, and shrunken nose and lips, showed that some agent of terrific power was consuming her life. A chill perspiration oozed from her forehead, her pulse was imperceptible, and ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... as were thought handsome fifty years ago; an elephant of a writing-desk, staring with plush and gilding, almost covered the table. Altogether, the room was as desolate as its occupant; more could not be said. Lobelia seemed smaller and more shrunken than ever amid all this tasteless display; she seemed conscious of it, too, as she gazed piteously at Peggy. She had been crying, in a furtive, frightened way; and, gazing at her, Peggy felt that it must be years ago that she ...
— Peggy • Laura E. Richards
... some authors contained within its walls at one time, one million two hundred thousand inhabitants; could maintain an army of one hundred thousand foot, ten thousand horse, with a navy of five hundred armed vessels. Little now remains of a place once so populous and so powerful, save the shrunken modern city of Syracusa, containing about nine thousand inhabitants, and a few almost unintelligible ruins scattered among vineyards, olive-groves, and fields of corn, or over the high wastes of the barren ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... hopped and twittered in a green cage. Kit's perambulator occupied one corner, while Kit herself, seated at the table in a high chair, was busily engaged in ironing out some ragged doll-garments with a tiny bent flat-iron. Anna regarded her pitifully—the small shrunken figure and sunken chest, and the thin white face with its halo of red curls. But Kit was almost too absorbed with her endeavour to get the creases out of a doll's petticoat to heed her scrutiny. She only paused to nod at Malcolm in a ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... libations are said to be the actual fluids that have issued from the corpse". In the next four quotations "a different notion is introduced. It is not the deceased's own exudations that are to revive his shrunken frame but those of a divine body, the [god's fluid][42] that came from the corpse of Osiris himself, the juices that dissolved from his decaying flesh, which are communicated to the dead sacrament-wise under the form ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... who allows his impulses to get the best of him. Most everyone noticed the young man and his cardigan jacket, for the latter had arrived at the stage of droopiness and jaded-across-the-shoulders look that the cheap knit jacket of commerce acquires after awhile, and it had shrunken behind and stretched out in front so that the horizon, as you stood behind the young man, seemed to be bound by the tail of this garment, which started out at the pocket with good intentions and suddenly decided to rise above the young man's ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... in the dreary sitting room with only the reddish illumination of one lamp was almost unendurable. Her grandfather sat with broad wasted hands gripping his shrunken knees, his eyes gazing stonily out above a nose netted with fine blue veins and harsh mouth almost concealed by the curtain of beard. Edward rose uneasily and returned, casting a swelling and diminishing shadow—obscurely unnatural like ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... shrunk and left the space empty. This shrinkage of the pith is a process which takes place in many plants even when living, and instances will at once occur, in which the stems of various species of shrubs when broken open exhibit the remains of the shrunken pith, in the shape of thin ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... had not even filled her leisure with the ruminant joy of unchecked tenderness. Her blooming full-pulsed youth stood there in a moral imprisonment which made itself one with the chill, colorless, narrowed landscape, with the shrunken furniture, the never-read books, and the ghostly stag in a pale fantastic world that seemed to be vanishing ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... look of emaciation, if not of suffering, there was that about this solitary being, however, which said that time, and not disease, had laid his hand heavily on him. His form had withered, but it was not wasted. The sinews and muscles, which had once denoted great strength, though shrunken, were still visible; and his whole figure had attained an appearance of induration, which, if it were not for the well known frailty of humanity, would have seemed to bid defiance to the further approaches of ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Charley was tempted to follow, and the men, regardless of consequences, accompanied him. He had not gone far when he came upon two children who had evidently been let fall by those who were carrying them. Both were dead, and their shrunken little forms showed that they had died from starvation. The top of the hill was reached. Charley at length stopped and looked round, but neither Arabs nor blacks were anywhere visible. Though, had he consulted his own feelings, he would have gone on still farther, he remembered his ...
— Ned Garth - Made Prisoner in Africa. A Tale of the Slave Trade • W. H. G. Kingston
... that Jeanne Lange had said had prepared her for a change in her brother, she was immeasurably shocked by his appearance. He had always been slim and rather below the average in height, but now his usually upright and trim figure seemed to have shrunken within itself; his clothes hung baggy on his shoulders, his hands appeared waxen and emaciated, but the greatest change was in his face, in the wide circles round the eyes, that spoke of wakeful nights, in the hollow cheeks, and the mouth that had ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... disappeared from the fire. In place of the decanters, were boxes containing "lozengers," as they were commonly called, sticks of candy in jars, cigars in tumblers, a few lemons, grown hard-skinned and marvellously shrunken by long exposure, but still feebly suggestive of possible lemonade,—the whole ornamented by festoons of yellow and blue cut fly-paper. On the front shelf of the bar stood a large German-silver pitcher of water, and scattered about were ill-conditioned lamps, with wicks ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... fallen tree-tops. All the sleep I obtained was snatched from the intervals which divided these labors. It was so harassed with frightful dreams as to afford little rest. I remember, before I left this camp, stripping up my sleeves to look at my shrunken arms. Flesh and blood had apparently left them. The skin clung to the bones like wet parchment. A child's hand could have clasped them from wrist to shoulder. "Yet" thought I, "It is death to remain; I cannot ...
— Thirty-Seven Days of Peril - from Scribner's Monthly Vol III Nov. 1871 • Truman Everts
... sunlight infested their window-panes, the room grew oven-like, and he was obliged at last to go into the back parlour and lie down. He lay there in his shirt sleeves quite exhausted, hardly able to breathe; the arm once so strong and healthy was shrunken to a little nothing. He seemed quite bloodless, and looking at him Esther could hardly hope that any climate would restore him to health. He just asked her what the time was, and said, "The race is being run ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... with a baby on her lap. She nods to us, without disturbing herself. Like the pioneer, this woman is in the prime of life; her appearance would seem superior to her condition: and her apparel even betrays a lingering taste for dress. But her delicate limbs appear shrunken; her features are drawn in; her eye is mild and melancholy; her whole physiognomy bears marks of a degree of religious resignation, a deep quiet of all passion, and some sort of natural and tranquil firmness, ready to meet all the ills ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... humiliations—ah, in a moment, how they had grown shrunken, and wizened, and old! For out of the radiance of revelation, as Christ of old spoke to His disciples, so now the spirit of Alleghenia spoke to ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... to the patch of rock and brush that was to be their last resting-place before making a dash for the beleaguered town, they struck upon the trail going north and south, and in two places scared off vultures from the carcass of an unfortunate ox, shrunken and dried in the sun till little but the bones ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... before my eyes, if I am deceived in thinking we shall have fine weather in a few hours; but," continued he, looking round with concern, "what pale faces, what suffering and misery you have undergone. I am a'most done myself," the large tears rolling down his pale shrunken cheeks, "and, but for the lives under my care, I must have given way long ere this. Ye have need to pray yet for succour; we are aye in a mickle mess, shortened in our hands, with work for twenty men, it is not to be expected as nature 'll stand it out. The men are fairly done, and, but for that ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... sleeping under the same roof when he passed away alone. Dickens told me that, looking on him as he lay in his coffin, he wondered that the figure he had known in life as one of such noble presence could seem so shrunken and wasted; but there had been years of sorrow, years of labor, years of pain, in that now exhausted life. It was his happiest Christmas morning when he heard the Voice calling him homeward to ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... chamber with elastic and contractile walls, which can be expanded, with God as its guest, illimitably, but which without God shrinks and shrivels until every vestige of the Divine is gone, and God's image is left without God's Spirit. One cannot call what is left a soul; it is a shrunken, useless organ, a capacity sentenced to death by disuse, which droops as a withered hand by the side, and cumbers nature like a rotted branch. Nature has her revenge upon neglect as well as upon extravagance. Misuse, with her, is as mortal ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... had committed what in a Colonial Cabinet is the one unpardonable crime—it had encountered a commercial depression, with its concomitant, a shrunken revenue. When Hall and Atkinson succeeded Grey with a mission to abolish the land-tax, they had at once to impose a different but more severe burden. They also reduced—for a time—the cost of the public departments by the rough-and-ready ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... Aun' Jinkey nursed Miss Lou into a slow, languid convalescence, till at last she was able to sit in an easy-chair on the piazza. This she would do by the hour, with a sad, apathetic look on her thin face. She was greatly changed, her old rounded outlines had shrunken and she looked frail enough for the winds to blow away. The old, fearless, spirited look in her blue eyes had departed utterly, leaving only an expression of settled sadness, varied by an anxious, expectant gaze, suggesting a lingering hope that some one might come or something happen to ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... begging a copper from the passer-by. One cannot but desire that their extinction in these parts, which is certain, may be also speedy. I cannot easily imagine two more pitiable objects than those I afterwards saw at Albany in Western Australia: a native man and woman begging, standing with their shrunken limbs in rags that barely covered them. The cricket ground is in the "reserve," a part between the north terrace and the northern suburb, which belongs to the community and cannot be built on. It is separated from the north terrace by the river ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton
... believe that. It would be the old question of revolt against the edifice men have built. You thought you could storm it, and it would capitulate; but when the winter rigours came, when passion died and self got shrunken to a meagre thing, you would seek the shelter of ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... to him, and very respectfully helped him off with his peruke first, and then his coat, laying them one on the other in a corner. My Lord's head looked very thin and shrunken when that was done, as it were a bird's head. Then his man came up again with a black silk cap to put his hair under, which was rather long and very grey and thin; and he did it. And then his man disposed ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... looked in, and passed sentence without more ado: "Oh, you poor, miserable, shrunken little thing. We can't keep a dog like that—it ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... personality, counts for so much in the orator of the market place. The speaker must be alive to his audience, he must convince by his presence no less than by his arguments. And Mr. Burns is so obviously alive. He warms the shrunken, anaemic vitality of followers, and overpowers the protests of enemies ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... hung about her, her hands and wrists were shrunken, her flesh was soft and flabby, and she had dark shadows in her face. Nursing her child seemed to draw all strength from her, and her nervous depression increased; she was too weary and ill to think of the future, and for a whole week her physical condition ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... can urge the plea— Freemen conquerors of the free? When blood returns to the shrunken vein, Shall the wound of the Nation bleed again? Well may the wars wan thought supply, And kill the kindling of the hopeful eye, Unless you do what even kings have done In leniency—unless you shun To copy Europe in her worst estate— ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville |
