"Skeleton" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... aisles, an eastern Lady chapel and other chapels; and on the south, a chapter-house and cloister court. The nave is modern (by Street, 1877), imitating the choir of the 14th century, with its curious skeleton-vaulting in the aisles. Besides the canopied tombs of the Berkeleys with their effigies in chain mail, and similarly fine tombs of the crosiered abbots, there are memorials to Bishop Butler, to Sterne's Eliza (Elizabeth ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... dropped them there, forgetting them altogether. A find of value and one to save her a deal of trouble: skeleton keys are so exasperatingly slow, particularly when used by inexpert hands. But how to bring herself to make use of these? All's fair in war (and this was a sort of war, a war of wits at least); but one should fight with one's own arms, not pilfer the enemy's and turn them against ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... said Hiram, "and I'll take this case off your hands and see that the livin' skeleton don't get away until we decide to bury him or put him in a show where he can earn an honest livin'. Skeletons ain't what they used to be for a drawin'-card, but I know of two or three punkin circuiters ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... were partially closed. Then they opened wider and wider. His mouth opened too. On his skeleton features there came a look of panic fear. He was evidently struggling to speak. At ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... from him in their habits of thinking, and who can thus prepare for him infusions of history and science that will leave some solidifying deposit, and save him from a fatal softening of the intellectual skeleton. Among such serviceable writers, Mr. Lecky's History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe entitles him to a high place. He has prepared himself for its production by an unusual amount of well-directed reading; he has chosen his facts and quotations with much ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... said that the gravity of the events that surround us demands a greater force than is provided by this bill. The regular army is a mere skeleton. The present force will scarcely defend our frontier from Indian incursions; but it forms a nucleus capable of any re-enforcement demanded by the exigencies of the times. I do not contemplate, in ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... stretched toward him. His cheeks burned with shame to recall that it had not been a week since he had looked under the bed at night before getting in to make sure nobody was hidden there. What was the use of blinking the truth? He was a born coward. It was the skeleton in the closet of his soul. His schooldays had been haunted by the ghost of dread. Never in his life had he played truant, though he had admired beyond measure the reckless little dare-devils who took their fun ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... by La Tour's enemy had been carried to the upper floor, and the woman sent with a soldier's wife to the barracks; yet Madame La Tour continued to walk the stone flags, feeling that small skeleton on her bosom, and the pressure of ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... roads and miles of skeleton tent frames, and nearer Bill recognized with a quickly beating heart the squat, ugly quarters and class buildings of the ...
— Battling the Clouds - or, For a Comrade's Honor • Captain Frank Cobb
... Melville, two generations ago, witnessed the bodies of slain Happar warriors, wrapped in palm-leaves, carried to banquet at the Ti. At another time, at the Ti, he "observed a curiously carved vessel of wood," and on looking into it his eyes "fell upon the disordered members of a human skeleton, the bones still fresh with moisture, and with particles of flesh clinging to ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... by Mr. Fellowes came up first. "We have found," he said, looking pale and grave, "a skeleton. Yes, a perfect skeleton, but no more—no remains except a ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to think what the nonsenseorship would do to our suppressed desires? A little while ago suppressed desires were one's own affair. One fondled them in the skeleton closet of his consciousness and was as proud of them as anyone with a haunted house is of his right, title and interest in ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... the nerve-worn and sleepless, or thinkers standing with hands to the eyes on some crag above the multitude, see things thus in skeleton outline, bare of flesh? In Surbiton the skeleton is wrapped ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... gentlemen were present and Number Twenty-one, the Sessions Judge of Duri, a Scot, kept staring with looks of amazement and alarm at Burker, who rode as Number Four on his flank, making an odd file into a skeleton section. I was certain that ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... if some hidden fire were devouring her; the flesh that had covered her body with graceful curves melted away in the flames that burned within her. The sharp angles and dark hollows of her skeleton began to show beneath her pale, flabby flesh. Poor "Maja Desnuda"! Her husband pitied her, attributing her decline to the struggles and cares she had suffered when ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the clergyman, his cousin the lieutenant and Miss Sophonisba went quietly about dusk to the old house. They went down into the cellar, and the drag which the sailor had constructed brought up some bleached bones, and at the second cast a skeleton hand and a skull. As the latter was disengaged from the drag something fell glittering from it upon the cellar floor: two coins rolled to different corners. Mr. H——, picked them up. One was a Spanish piece, the other ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... whisper of the truth coming to his lips. He heard the scurrying flight of a starved wood-rat, a flutter of loose papers, and then the silence of death fell about him. The door of Nada's little room was open and he entered through it. The bed was naked and there remained only the skeleton of things that ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... Reeve, "Democracy and Monarchy in France," vol. i, pp. 213-220. For a very striking caricature published after the iron chest in the Tuileries was opened and the evidences of bribery of Mirabeau fully revealed, see Challamel, "Musee," etc. Vol. i, p. 341, is represented as a skeleton sitting on a pile of letters, holding the French crown in one hand and a purse of gold ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... again," thought Prosper. "The place is a skeleton, the husk of a house. Well, there must be a corner left which will keep the rain out. We shall have more before day, if I am ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... him, and caused Mrs. Middleton to be conducted to visit the ladies of his zenana. He conducted the Bishop into his library, which contained books in various European languages; also on medicine and anatomy, this being his favourite study, to assist him in which he had an ivory skeleton. He returned the visit in great state, with six elephants, two of enormous size, going before him, and accompanied by his troops, with a wild, horrid dissonance of cannon and native music. Two thousand ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... was a stiff, tall, bony man, of about fifty-five, and for this worthy I wrote an advertisement for a wife. He was thin, and shy, and emaciated—a breathing skeleton, in the receipt of some hundred and twenty pounds a-year; a martyr to the rheumatism, and a radical. He required but little; a moderate fortune; tolerable person; good education; perfect housewifery; implicit obedience; and, finally, wound up the list of requisites from mere lack of breath, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 265, July 21, 1827 • Various
... the pictured, storied Rhine begins. A skeleton itinerary is given at the end of this chapter which allows some digression here for observations of a ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... heart. Indian fighting was something far too scientific for his martial education and too much for his skeleton command. In the gathering dusk his face looked white and drawn, and old Wilkins, breasting his way up the slope, puffed hard, as he begged for news. There was still another despatch, however, which was evidently adding to the major's perturbation, ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... and musicians would be all the more like men if they were less like mops. But it does appear to be a deep and essential difficulty that men have an abiding terror of their own structure, or of the structure of things they love. This is felt dimly in the skeleton of the tree: it is felt profoundly in the ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... particles of her remains, as the greater portion was burnt by the Huguenots in 1562. On a previous occasion (1412) the tomb had been violated by Jean, Duc de Berry, who wished to remove both the saint's head and her two rings. Whilst he was making the attempt, however, the skeleton is said to have withdrawn its hand so that he might not possess himself of the rings. A greater curiosity which the church contains is a footprint on a stone slab, said to have been left by Christ when He appeared to Ste. Radegonde in her cell. This ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Troubletonians with his undeceivable eye, and leaned toward us with outstretched fingers. Mr. Riley rose to his whole gaunt height at a jerk, and laid his hand on the official's arm with a fierce, bony gripe, which seemed to startle him as if it were the clutch of a skeleton. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... the equivalent of a vertebrate. Two web-footed legs were drawn up close against the cigar-shaped body. The vast, rather narrow, inflated wings could not have been held or moved in flight without a strong internal skeleton and musculature. Theorists later argued that she must have come from a planet with a high proportion of water surface, a planet possibly larger than Earth though of about the same mass and with a similar atmosphere. She could rise in Earth's ...
— The Good Neighbors • Edgar Pangborn
... cattle, and even of human beings were often carried on the saddlebows to add another element of terror. A framework was sometimes made to fit the shoulders of a Ghoul which caused him to appear twelve feet high. A skeleton wooden hand at the end of a stick served to greet terrified Negroes at midnight. For safety every man carried a small whistle and a brace ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... half-buried in undergrowth and known only to the head muleteer. It was a spot far removed from the beaten tracks of the travellers. In times past a great southern kaid had set his summer-house there: its skeleton, changed from grey to pink in the rosy light of sun-setting, stood before us, just across a tiny stream fringed by rushes, willows, and oleanders. When the Court Elevated by Allah left Marrakesh ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... gasped. "I THOUGHT there was something mighty familiar even about the skeleton of you! Oh, Peter, Peter, where did you get this, and how could you ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... and so incessantly had he failed in the object that he had about given it over, except as a thing of chance. The hero might be discovered in his day, or he might not. God only knew. Such his state of mind, there need be no lingering upon the effect of Malluch's skeleton recital of the story of Balthasar. He heard it with a bewildering satisfaction—a feeling that here was the solution of the trouble—here was the requisite hero found at last; and he a son of the ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... the pompous black pyramid at the Louvre is only a skeleton now; all the flags have been miraculously whisked away during the night, and the fine chandeliers which glittered down the Champs Elysees for full half a mile, have been consigned to their dens and darkness. Will they ever be reproduced for other celebrations ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Hudson Bay Post, of their months of trapping, their desperate war with the Woongas, the discovery of the century-old cabin and its ancient skeletons, and their finding of the birch-bark map between the bones of one of the skeleton's fingers, on which, dimmed by age, was drawn the trail to a ...
— The Gold Hunters - A Story of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds • James Oliver Curwood
... me a couple of months ago. I was a skeleton then," said Percival, as he opened the door for her. "A shell-fish diet is not one which I should recommend to ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... with the fog and the smoke from the Antwerp fires, seemed to cover the whole sky. And under that sullen mantle the dark flames of the petrol still glowed; to the right, as we looked back, was the blazing skeleton of the ship, and on the left Antwerp itself, the rich, old, beautiful, comfortable city, all but hidden, and now and then sending forth the boom of an exploding ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... a damaged or imperfect skin may yield a good skeleton and in the case of something very rare both the skin and skeleton may be mounted separately. This process is one calling for a skilled operator as all claws, nails or hoofs should remain on the skin while their bony cores ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... sharp watch ahead for Mexican scouts or skirmishers. But the bare country in its winter brown was lone and desolate. The trail led straight ahead, and it would have been obvious now to the most inexperienced eye that an army had passed that way. They saw remains of camp fires, now and then the skeleton of a horse or mule picked clean by buzzards, fragments of worn-out clothing that had been thrown aside, and once a broken-down wagon. Two or three times they saw little mounds of earth with rude wooden crosses stuck upon them, to mark ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Every man has a skeleton in his cupboard, but I had more; I had a whole carcase lying near my house, and this occupied my mind as much as my labour. As I thought of it, so the harder I worked, but to no purpose, and presently, for a spell of breathing, ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... a mile away the bearded occupant on duty was finishing his tea. The skeleton of a herring lay on the side of his plate, the centre of which the boatman was scouring with a piece of bread (preparatory to occupying it with damson jam), when the telephone bell rang. A man of economical habits, he put the bread in his mouth, and, rising from the ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... Imperial crown and with her hair braided in pigtails like a German backfisch, is whirling in the tango with a skeleton partner. Her face is livid with terror and fatigue, her limbs are drooping, but she is held by inexorable bony claws. On the feet of the skeleton are dancing pumps, a touch which adds to the grimness. This ghoulish dance does not lack ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... best plans that has been proposed for omnivorous people is that which has been worked out by Dr. J. H. Tilden. Its skeleton is, fruit once a day, starchy food once a day, flesh or other protein with succulent vegetables once a day. I shall make up menus for a few days based on ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... along the banks. I was now a mile or so from the trail, and coming quite near where I expected to find the game. Passing cautiously by a clump of willows I noticed something white on the dead grass, which, upon investigation, proved to be a human skeleton in a perfect state of preservation. I picked up the skull, looked it over, and picked off the under jaw which was filled with beautiful teeth. Putting these in my pocket and replacing the skull, I moved carefully forward, expecting ...
— In the Early Days along the Overland Trail in Nebraska Territory, in 1852 • Gilbert L. Cole
... antediluvian vertebrate; its flying-buttresses arched round like ribs, its piers shaped themselves into limbs, and the sound of the organ-blast changed to the wind whistling through its thousand-jointed skeleton. ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... blind to what this all means, but you may possibly see some connection between this sudden act of sacrifice on X's part and the work of the arrow. At all events, I thought you ought to know that Mr. X's closet holds a skeleton which he will doubtless take every pains to keep securely locked from general view. Holmes says that his last word to the disappointed girl was in the way of warning. No mention of this break in their plans was to be made without ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... has lands and gold, mother, The queen has lands and gold, While you are forced to your empty breast A skeleton babe to hold,— A babe that is dying of want, mother, As I am dying now, With a ghastly look in its sunken eye, And famine ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... half-covered frame of the church caught Kermode's eye. Something was wrong with it. The skeleton tower looked out of the perpendicular; and on his second glance its inclination seemed to have increased. The snow, however, was clogging the front of his sled and he set to work to scrape it off. While he was thus ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... inflict punishment on the miscreant in accordance with the law, but also that they did not desire that the miserable man should die in a hole like a starved dog, and that then they should go after him to take out his wretched skeleton. There was something in that idea so horrid in every way, that all agreed that active steps must be taken. The warders of the prison felt that they would all be disgraced if they could not take their prisoner alive. Yet who would ...
— Aaron Trow • Anthony Trollope
... Skeleton leaves in their hands for racquets (All in a ring around Brownies and elves in their bright green jackets ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various
... his eye resting professionally upon Dan's splendid proportions. What a "subject" to cut up! What a skeleton ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... nominally of parts of three corps, but the column in the field consisted of one division of the Twenty-third Corps, under the immediate command of General Stoneman, one of the Fourth Corps under Brigadier-General Thomas J. Wood, and the skeleton of the Ninth Corps under General Parke. [Footnote: Id. p. 455.] We had also Colonel Garrard's division of cavalry. Another division of the Twenty-third Corps under Brigadier-General Milo S. Hascall was left as the garrison of Knoxville, with the heavy artillery organization under Brigadier-General ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... servant, as it happened, having just spied a spot on his master's velvet sleeve, and silently engaged rubbing it out—the American expressed his regrets that the San Dominick had no boats; none, at least, but the unseaworthy old hulk of the long-boat, which, warped as a camel's skeleton in the desert, and almost as bleached, lay pot-wise inverted amidships, one side a little tipped, furnishing a subterraneous sort of den for family groups of the blacks, mostly women and small children; who, squatting on old mats below, or perched above in the dark dome, on the elevated seats, ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... buildings, giving place to stone. Over its streets hung a wire network, raised high on lofty poles, which would have destroyed the beauty of a much fairer city. Back of the city rose the somber forest over which at intervals towered the blasted skeleton ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... part of the armies operating against Richmond is left behind. The enemy, knowing this, may, as an only chance, strip their lines to the merest skeleton, in the hope of advantage not being taken of it, while they hurl everything against the moving column, and return. It cannot be impressed too strongly upon commanders of troops left in the trenches not to allow this to occur without taking advantage of it. ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... commander-in-chief in war is to find out the decisive point and to have the bulk of his forces there in time. If he can do that on the half-dozen occasions which make the skeleton of a war he has fulfilled his mission. He never need do anything else, for all the rest can be done by his subordinates. Not every commander fulfils this simple task because not every one refuses to let himself be distracted. All sorts of calls ...
— Lessons of the War • Spenser Wilkinson
... fourth day, as the troops were passing over a plain of sand which stretched away to the horizon all round, without a shrub to break the monotony, only here and there a block of rock, or the skeleton of a camel, showing where some wretched overtried animal had sunk under the too great presumption upon his wonderful powers of endurance, the scouts gave notice of Arab approach, and a figure could be seen coming over the summit of a sand-hill, thus proving that the ground, ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... very soon, thou wilt be ashes, or a skeleton, and either a name or not even a name; but name is sound and echo. And the things which are much valued in life are empty and rotten and trifling, and [like] little dogs biting one another, and little children quarrelling, laughing, and then straightway ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius
... have got a Skeleton of my own at last: Bronchitis—which came on me a month ago—which I let go on for near three weeks—then was forced to call in a Doctor to subdue, who kept me a week indoors. And now I am told that, every Cold I catch, ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... driven away an encircling collection of sand-dwelling scavengers, and what he was on his knees studying intently was an almost clean-picked skeleton of one of his own race. But there was something odd—Dalgard brushed aside a tendril of weed which cut his line of vision and so was able to ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... the cage to his left was little more than a skeleton when Talib first entered the prison. He lay huddled up in a corner, with his hands pressed to his empty stomach and the sharp angles of his bones peeping through his bed-sores, motionless, miserable, but, let us hope, only half conscious of his misery. Talib saved a small ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... Wells, bought by Lord Waldegrave in the 'thirties or 'forties, and then gradually turned by Frances, Lady Waldegrave, into a big country-house, but a house too big for the piece of ground in which it was set. The skeleton of the roadside villa was alleged by the local critics to show through the swelling flesh that overlaid it. Here was a chance for the satirist, and so I ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... by Viswamitra of great intelligence Galava was filled with such anxiety that he could not sit or lie down, or take his food. A prey to anxiety and regret, lamenting bitterly, and burning with remorse, Galava grew pale, and was reduced to a skeleton. And smitten with sorrow, O Suyodhana, he indulged in these lamentations, "Where shall I find affluent friends? Where shall I find money? Have I any savings? Where shall I find eight hundred steeds of lunar whiteness? What pleasure can I have in eating? What happiness can be mine in objects ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... pecuniary reward, Walter and Mr. Summers were making their way to a magistrate's when their attention was attracted by a crowd. A workman, digging for limestone, had unearthed a big wooden chest. The chest contained a skeleton! ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... fatherland, to humanity, and to the students. Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch, I read in the paper the biography of an American. He left all his vast fortune to factories and to the exact sciences, and his skeleton to the students of the academy there, and his skin to be made into a drum, so that the American national hymn might be beaten upon it day and night. Alas! we are pigmies in mind compared with the soaring thought of the States of North America. Russia is the play of nature but not of mind. If I were ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... vanished altogether, and he stood before a dark porch and a gate beyond which he caught a pale glimmer. And by the porch stood a terrible shape: a hooded skeleton bearing a scythe, with white sockets of fire which had no eyes in them but which were so terrible that no mortal could look on them and live. And here he heard a voice saying: "He who would cull the white poppy must look into the eyes of its guardian and take the scythe from the bony hands." And ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... operates through the dead. Thus in New Caledonia the rain-makers blackened themselves all over, dug up a dead body, took the bones to a cave, jointed them, and hung the skeleton over some taro leaves. Water was poured over the skeleton to run down on the leaves. They believed that the soul of the deceased took up the water, converted it into rain, and showered it down again. In Russia, if common report may be believed, it is not long since the peasants of any district ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... dark figure corresponded with each other. The apartments, choaked up with lumber, scarcely admitted his body, though of the skeleton order. Perhaps leanness is an appendage to the science, for I never ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... who have studied these matters most exhaustively, it is mainly to them we must go for information. In a little book on the skeleton and the form of the nose, Dr. Salvator Ottolenghi comes to the somewhat curious result that the bones of the criminal nose offer many anomalies of a pre-human or bestial character; but the nose itself is straight and long, or, in ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... again we read the same story, which varied only in detail: the mother in the three black rooms; the sagging porch overflowing with pale and sickly children; the over-worked mother of seven, still nursing her youngest, who is two or three months old. Worn and haggard, with a skeleton-like child pulling at her breast, the women tries to make the investigator understand. The grandmother helps to interpret. "She never sleeps," explains the old woman, "how can she with so many children?" She works up to the last moment before her ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... not be perfect. It is sufficient to take of the flesh, and, afterwards, to dry perfectly, without taking them to pieces. The whole skeleton should be placed in a box with cotton or with very dry and fine sand. If it is too long, it could be separated ...
— Movement of the International Literary Exchanges, between France and North America from January 1845 to May, 1846 • Various
... spectacle; the shoulder-blades protruded, so that you might put your hand sideways under the scapula, and every bone of the vertebrae, and every process was clearly defined through the skin of the poor skeleton. The punishment commenced, and the lad received his three dozen without a murmur, the measured sound of the lash only being broken in upon by the baying of Snarleyyow, who occasionally would have flown at the victim, had he not been kept off by one of the marines. During the punishment, ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... are concerned, of disembowelling the victim's name, and leaving it a skeleton of consonants, is a formal concession which in effect concedes nothing. Nor is there any reason why it should; for the only valid objection to the medium of dialogue is in cases where its form might mislead the reader into ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman
... interest at a picture in a work on paleontology, a book which by some chance had accompanied a few selected works that I had brought with me from England. The picture that so interested him, I saw as I drew nearer, represented the skeleton of a prehistoric mammoth with a man standing by its side, the latter figure placed in the picture, no doubt, for the purpose of showing relations of size. As I stepped up close to Arthur's side, he turned a page in the book and disclosed a still more startling representation, ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... and uproar; and to my joy the old man, evidently oblivious to the facts of the situation, was lifting up his voice and calling his dogs. They were good dogs: they went back; otherwise the malicious old rascal would have had my skeleton. Again the traditional bloodhound did not materialize. Other pursuit there was no reason to fear; my foreign gentleman would occupy the attention of one of the soldiers, and in the darkness of the forest I could ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... therefore made the first river before I allowed a halt for breakfast. On our route we passed the spot where, on the 29th ultimo, we had been compelled to kill the horse; the native dogs had already made it a perfect skeleton and ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... creed, however mistaken, earnestly held of old. A firm interior conviction is the starting-point of all outward worship. But if the modern living worshipper is without creed and conviction; if he be a scoffer at heart, or at least a doubter; what a hollow, horrid skeleton thing is his religion,—all the more horrid, the grander its dress! That is not worship, ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... utter vowels, we articulate consonants. If we utter a single vowel-sound and interrupt it by a consonant, we get an articulation. Consonants, then, not only give speech its articulation or joints, but they help words to stand and have form, just as a skeleton keeps the animal from falling into a shapeless mass of flesh; therefore, consonants are the bones of speech. The consonant is the distinguishing element of human speech. Man has been defined in various ways according to various ...
— The Child-Voice in Singing • Francis E. Howard
... told us a story of Hunter's first lecture. Being unknown to fame, no one had come to hear him. On entering the hall, he found only Sandy McTavish, the old custos. He was not daunted, however. Bidding the old man sit down, he brought a skeleton from a cupboard, and having placed it in front of him, he began to lecture to it and Sandy. First one student by chance looked in, and, seeing what was going forward, beckoned to another. In the course of a few minutes another ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... away from the window with a feeling of depression that was terrible, and, try how I would, to keep from thinking, I kept on seeing the fierce-looking lancers of Ny Deen making furious charges at perhaps a mere skeleton of a regiment of foot, which grew gradually less and less, till the men scattered, and ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... about an hour to climb these rocks; he did not wish to enter the park surrounding the mansion until night had fallen; he waited before starting on his road, until the sun should be setting. The colonel had thrust the skeleton of John out of the passage. It was thus, near these human remains, in a profound and wild solitude, in the midst of a veritable chaos of enormous masses of granite thrown up by the convulsions of nature, that ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... some time ago, that I had written to some of my friends in America, desiring they would send me such of the spoils of the moose, caribou, elk and deer, as might throw light on that class of animals; but more particularly, to send me the complete skeleton, skin and horns of the moose, in such condition as that the skin might be sewed up and stuffed, on its arrival here. I am happy to be able to present to you at this moment, the bones and skin of ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... all the bills I see in the streets, nor can the war telegrams divert my first attention from the advertising columns of the daily papers. I repeat, let no man think I have disclosed the weaknesses of the neighborhood, nor rashly open that closet which contains the secret skeleton of his dwelling. My carpets have been altered to fit all sized odd-shaped apartments from parallelopiped to hexagons. Much of my furniture has been distributed among my former dwellings. These limbs have stretched ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... the Campagna to the mountain of Albano, its broken and disjointed arches resembling the vertebrae of some mighty monster. With the ruins of temples and tombs strewing the plain for miles around it, it might be called the spine to the skeleton of Rome. ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... reagent to cause the deposit of gold on its base, and in each case these substances whether woodchips, leather, or even dead flies, were found to be so absolutely impregnated with gold as to leave a golden skeleton when afterwards burned. Timber found in the Ballarat deep leads has been ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... older. In telling the facts, the mother dwells much on this and the bearing which her chagrin during pregnancy may have had upon the girl's physical and mental development. She was born, then, after a troubled pregnancy, a weak and sickly child, "almost like a skeleton.'' ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... one-ey'd Man, was that very Night to be married to Orcan. At this unexpected ill News, poor Zadig was perfectly thunder-struck: He laid his Disappointment so far to Heart, that in a short Time he was become a mere Skeleton, and was sick almost to death for some Months afterwards. At last, however, by Dint of Reflection, he got the better of his Distemper; and the Acuteness of the Pain he underwent, in some Measure, contributed towards ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... was full and strong, accustomed to command. The body was that of an invalid. A blanket covered him to the waist, above that the flesh was sickly white, spotted with red nodules, and hung loosely over the bones. There seemed to be nothing left of the man except skin and skeleton. ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... going up into the Ark. There he sate, swaying his long stick, now talking to this horse, and now to that cow. To the old bull he addressed a long speech; and every now and then he broke off to rate the farm-servants for their neglect of things. "What a bag of bones was this heifer! What a skeleton was that horse! Why, they must have been fairly starved on purpose; nay, they must have been in the pinfold all the time he had been laid up. But he would teach the lazy rogues a different lesson as soon as he could ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... child," he said—it was to Nannie—"and look quite like Peter Bond again. The sea-voyage made me hearty, and a good appetite, freely indulged, plumped me up to my usual size, so that you would scarcely believe me the same man who left you two months ago, with the skeleton limbs losing themselves in the folds of my wide garments. Every thing is so new and strange to me, too, that I have plenty of amusement in watching my neighbors; and I often forget that I am as great a lion to them, until I ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... a city now; hardly a skeleton of a city. Rumour is correct, for the wonderful Cloth Hall is gone. There is a fragment left of the facade, but no repairing can ever restore it. It must all come down. Indeed, any storm may finish its destruction. The massive square belfry, two hundred and thirty feet high ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... of literary art may be said to be structure. So strong in the American mind is the demand for system and completeness, that the logical element of style, which is its skeleton, is not rare among us. But this is only the basis; besides the philosophical structure of a statement which comes by thought, there is an artistic structure which implies the education of the taste. So, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... defeated by him at Gomenal even more easily than Blake had been at Espinosa. The latter, again defeated by the indefatigable Soult, at Reynosa, was obliged to take refuge, with what hardly could be called even the skeleton of an army, in the seaport of St. Ander. Thus the whole of the Spanish left was dissipated; and the French right remained at liberty to march ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... horse and leaned eagerly forward. Sammie listened, but was again too late. The dead leaves rustled close by over the sunken graves; the tall, bare trees waved their skeleton arms, while the breeze died away to a long, weary sigh and ...
— The Daughter of a Republican • Bernie Babcock
... mouth, and he fell dead. The most strange part of the story is to come. We buried him in the church of San Gennaro. In doing so, we took up his father's coffin; the lid came off in moving it, and the skeleton was visible. In the hollow of the skull we found a very slender wire of sharp steel; this caused surprise and inquiry. The father, who was rich and a miser, had died suddenly, and been buried in haste, owing, it was said, to the heat of the weather. Suspicion once ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... knowing, even while I struggled, that I must be overcome? I lived upon an earth whose diminished population a child's arithmetic might number; I had lived through long months with death stalking close at my side, while at intervals the shadow of his skeleton-shape darkened my path. I had believed that I despised the grim phantom, and ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... retouched the work in a still later age, and a third abstract by Januarius Nepotianus is mentioned. This last writer cut out all the padding which Valerius had so largely used ("dum se ostentat sententiis, locis iactat, fundit excessibus"), and reduced the work to a bare skeleton of facts. ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... "Yes, sir; Skeleton Island they calls it. It were a main place for pirates once, and a hand we had on board knowed all their names for it. That hill to the nor'ard they calls the Fore-mast Hill; there are three hills in a row running south'ard—fore, main, ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the skeleton of a tall man was discovered in a volcanic layer which is supposed to have belonged to a later period. The dwelling in which it was found showed a distinct advance in civilization. It was constructed of rocks joined together by means of clay, ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... nobody'll recognise you like that. Now come, Meg, you won't refuse? I 'd do it myself, and do it well; only I might be discovered, but you wouldn't. Who'll think of Meg Drummond turning into the ghost? You must clasp your skeleton hands and say very mournfully, "Dry my locks, sweet maid of England!" That's all. She'll be sure to go out into the grounds, and the rest of us will be close by, ready to catch her up if she swoons; and she 'll never guess ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... parent-form, the Gallus bankiva. With ducks, the crest of the sternum is affected in the same manner as in the foregoing cases: the furcula, coracoids, and scapulae are all reduced in weight relatively to the whole skeleton: the bones of the wings are shorter and lighter, and the bones of the legs longer and heavier, relatively to each other, and relatively to the whole skeleton, in comparison with the same bones in the wild-duck. The ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... Findon—speak easily and unexpectedly of Phoebe and the child? Clearly what would have been simplicity itself at first was now an awkwardness. Lord Findon would be puzzled—chilled. He would suppose there was something to be ashamed of—some skeleton in the cupboard. And especially would he take it ill that Fenwick had allowed him to run on with his diatribes against matrimony as though he were talking to a bachelor. Then the lie about the picture. It had ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... is fixed The sunshiny world and the shadowy betwixt, His Today with a pale wond'ring face stood alone, And over the border Tomorrow had flown. So after went he, his accounts as he could To settle and make his loose reckonings good, And left us his tomb and his skeleton under,— Two boons to his race,—to sit down on and ponder. Heaven help him! Yet heaven, I fear, he hath lost. Here lies his poor dust; but where cries his poor ghost? We know not. Perhaps we shall see by-and-by, When out of our coffins ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... applied to the hard calcareous support or skeleton of many species of marine zoophytes. The coral-producing animals abound chiefly in tropical seas, sometimes forming, by the aggregated growth of countless generations, reefs, barriers, and islands of vast extent. The "red coral" (Corallium ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... Neither spoke—they worked breathlessly. With marvellous skill they peeled off the heavy skin, and with amazing dexterity carved great masses of bleeding meat clean from the bones. When they had finished, only a great skeleton remained. Outside the cave, eager, whining, the starving dogs obediently crouched. When they had completed the task of dressing, Ootah lifted his hand and the canines, with howling avidity, fell upon ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... glances. One said, "Ah, God! this is bad," and the other, "It is not possible;" and then, when the landlady's back was turned, introduced themselves with a skeleton key into the then vacant bedroom and studio of their fair countrywoman, who was absent sketching. "Thou observest," said Mr. Pedro, refugee, to Miguel, ex-ecclesiastic, "that this Americano is all-powerful, and that this ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... the largest of the numerous traditionary birds of Tigara. Its enormous size and strength enabled it to seize and bear to the interior the whales on which it used to feed. Even to-day when the older inhabitants find the skeleton of a whale, back from the coast in the interior of the country, they declare it was the victim of a Metigew[e]k at some remote time of ...
— Short Sketches from Oldest America • John Driggs
... never found him till the next spring, and all they found was—HIS SKELETON, with the grass growing through it," ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... squeezed out a sob or two. The piece was written in the style of a tragic serial story: abstract phrases, bureaucratic epithets, academic periphrases. No movement, not a sound unrehearsed. From beginning to end it was clockwork, a set problem, a scenario, the skeleton of a play, with not a scrap of flesh, only literary phrases. Timid ideas lay behind discussions that were meant to be bold: the whole spirit of the thing was hopelessly ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... was bound to prove startling any way one looked at it. The prominence of the family, the baldness of its skeleton, and the gleeful eagerness with which it danced into full view left but little for meddlers to covet. A crash was inevitable; it was the clash that Grover & Dickhut were trying to avert. Old Wharton, ...
— The Purple Parasol • George Barr McCutcheon
... passion for miscellaneous information, and it aided me so much in my reading, that I cannot pass it by without a tribute to its memory. How often have I paused in its dark galleries in awe before the tremendous skeleton of the Mammoth—how small did that of a great elephant seem beside it—and recalled the Indian legend of it recorded by Franklin. And the stuffed monkeys—one shaving another—what exquisite humour, which never palled upon us! No; that was the museum for us, and the time ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... last getting out of the lane, found myself upon the road, along which I had come about two hours before; the house of the miller was at some distance on my right. Near me were two or three houses and part of the skeleton of one, on which some men, in the dress of masons, seemed to be occupied. Going up to these men I said in Welsh to one, whom I judged to be the principal, and who was rather a ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... his Rajput pride, and pride in his Rajput heritage, were wounded to the quick. If all English girls felt that way, he would see them further, before he would propose to another one, or 'confess' to his adored Mother, as if she were a family skeleton or a secret vice. Instantly there sprang the thought of Aruna—her adoration, her exalted passion; Aruna, whom he might have loved, yet was constrained to put aside because of his English heritage; only to find himself put aside by an English girl on account of his ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... of deer. The smaller animals included the rabbit, water-rat, mouse, raven, pigeon, lark and a small type of duck. Everything was broken into small pieces so that no single skull was found entire and it was, of course, impossible to obtain anything like a complete skeleton. From the fact that the bones of the hyaenas themselves had suffered the same treatment as the rest we may infer that these ferocious lovers of putrid flesh were in the habit of devouring those of their ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... distressed. He begged that Friend Isaac would not come to see him in prison, for he could not look him the face. His anguish of mind was so great, that when the trial came on, he was emaciated almost to a skeleton. Old Mr. Hopper went into court and stated the adverse circumstances of his early life, and his exemplary conduct during nine years that he had lived in his family. He begged that he might be fined instead of imprisoned, and offered to pay the fine himself. The proposition was ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... might present myself at your door, armed with one of society's unfair skeleton-keys—a letter of introduction—I prefer to approach you as I now do: simply as a young man who honestly feels entitled to at least five minutes of your time, and as many minutes more as you care to grant because of your interest in the subject to ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... ruin—yet what ruin! from its mass Walls, palaces, half-cities, have been reared; Yet oft the enormous skeleton ye pass, And marvel where the spoil could have appeared. Hath it indeed been plundered, or but cleared? Alas! developed, opens the decay, When the colossal fabric's form is neared: It will not bear the brightness of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... many. While supper was in progress the rooms of the guests had been rifled of money and jewelry to the amount of thousands of dollars. The thief had entered the apartments by means of a skeleton key, for most of the doors had ...
— Polly of Lady Gay Cottage • Emma C. Dowd
... it was!" muttered the young lady, as the remains of what had been a carry-all were pulled up beside the platform by the skinny skeleton of what might once have been a ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various
... windows of the grid's control building. As he looked, a lighted window darkened from someone moving past it inside. There was an enormous stillness, broken only by faint, faint noises of the wind in the metal skeleton. ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... was only one room, and them wasn't half enough room in it to work your elbows when the seven little tables and forty-nine chairs were occupied. There was not room for an ordinary-sized steward to pass up and down between the tables; but our waiter was not an ordinary-sized man—he was a living skeleton in miniature. We handed the soup, and the "roast beef one," and "roast lamb one," "corn beef and cabbage one," "veal and stuffing one," and the "veal and pickled pork," one—or two, or three, as the case might be—and the ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... but oh! how changed. His plump, olive-coloured countenance had shrunk to that of a skeleton still covered by yellow skin, in which the dark eyes rolled bloodshot and unnaturally large. His tonsure and jaws showed a growth of stubbly grey hair, his frame had become weak and small, his soft and delicate ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... associated facial changes and postures of the body not essential to the sign, which emotional changes and postures are at once the most difficult to describe and the most interesting when intelligently reported, not only because they infuse life into the skeleton sign, but because they may belong to ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... raised altogether on aristocracy, finds the substratum giving way, and democratic ideas seated even upon the summit of the edifice, there must be, as is said, "a rattling of old bones," and a shaking of the skeleton of what ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... as the old man said: "The Chateau de Nesville is a mass of cinders; Morteyn, a stone skeleton. Pierre is dead. There are many dead there—many, many dead. The Prussians burned Saint-Lys yesterday; they shot Bosquet, the letter-carrier; they hung his boy to the railroad trestle, then shot him to pieces. The Cure ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... upon her mother—this would alone make flight impossible. Yet could she conceive life such as this prolonging itself into the hopeless years, renunciation her strength and her reward, duty a grinning skeleton at her bedside? It grew harder daily. More than a year ago she thought that the worst was over, and since then had known the solace of self-forgetful idealisms, of ascetic striving. It was all illusion, the spinning ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... ninety miles distant, with the trap and connecting wood-block still attached to one of its hind legs. It had evidently dragged both around in the snow for many a mile, during a period of intense cold, and it is, therefore, not surprising that it was a 'walking skeleton' when finally secured." ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... the tailor to strip the skeleton of the Prince Albert from his back, but dashed out of the ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... have curious windows, breaking out irregularly all over the house, some even in the roof, set in their own little peaks, opening lattice-wise, and furnished with twenty small panes of lozenge-shaped glass. The architecture of these edifices (a visible oaken framework, showing the whole skeleton of the house,—as if a man's bones should be arranged on his outside, and his flesh seen through the interstices) is often imitated by modern builders, and with sufficiently picturesque effect. The objection ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hard student all my life, at school and at college, and moreover I have had a natural sympathy with my fellow-men, and so I am blessed with a brain and heart entire. But see here." And he lifted up his cloak, and lo! underneath, a skeleton, save just here! "See, here are the limbs I never used, and therefore they have deserted me. All the solace I now have consists in teaching the young children to avoid a similar doom. I sometimes ...
— A Lecture on Physical Development, and its Relations to Mental and Spiritual Development, delivered before the American Institute of Instruction, at their Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting, in Norwich, Conn • S.R. Calthrop
... shrunk to a mere politician. He was a brave soldier of humanity, but he had no sense of art, and I could not stand the dirty mob around him with its atmosphere of filthy German tobacco and vulgar tirades against tyrants. The last time I saw him he was almost deaf, and worn to a skeleton by consumption. He dwelt in a vast, bright silk dressing-gown, and said that if an Emperor shook his hand he would cut it off. I said if a workman shook mine I should wash it. And so we parted, and he fell to denouncing me as a traitor and a persifleur, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... not an unusual thing to hang spies, and not unfrequently those mistaken for spies, but to hang them on a regularly constructed gibbet was not usual; and therefore while Lemon insisted that the black and skeleton-like object that loomed against the horizon was a gallows, he still entertained some doubt upon the subject, and determined to satisfy himself ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... in these Lectures to attempt a historical survey of Christian Mysticism. To attempt this, within the narrow limits of eight Lectures, would oblige me to give a mere skeleton of the subject, which would be of no value, and of very little interest. The aim which I have set before myself is to give a clear presentation of an important type of Christian life and thought, in the hope that it may suggest to us a way towards the solution of some difficulties which ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... the southeastern declivity of the western mounds led to a burial chamber in which we found the well-preserved skeleton of an old man, apparently a priest. The body was laid on the floor, at full length, and at his head, which pointed southward, had been placed, not mortuary offerings of food in bowls, but insignia of his priestly office. Eight small ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... night class in millinery. She learned to manipulate troublesome coils of wire and pincers, and to evolve a strange, ghostly skeleton—thing called a "frame," but when this was finally covered with crinoline and tedious rows-on-rows of straw braid, drab drudgery was over ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... Patagonia. They had been long on the way, and the southern winter had come round, and they had to delay further to make more particular inquiry into Doughty's desertion. An ominous and strange spectacle met their eyes as they entered the harbour. In that utterly desolate spot a skeleton was hanging on a gallows, the bones picked clean by the vultures. It was one of Magellan's crew who had been executed there for mutiny fifty years before. The same fate was to befall the unhappy Englishman who had been guilty of the same fault. Without the strictest discipline it was impossible ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... well as their subjects, into fragments. Osteology treats of the skeleton, myology of the muscles, angiology of the blood vessels, splanchology the digestive organs or department of ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye |
