"Smudge" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stopped work and went back to their smudge to give the bees a chance to rest, and to find out if mud really drew the poison out of the little lumps that covered them, the tree had been cut nearly half through. Any Nature-lover would have known that a beaver had been at work, while everyday folks would have suspected ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... degrees I learned the names of John Chitling's patrons, the separate ways to their houses, which always seemed divided by absurd distances, and the faces of the negro cooks who met me at the kitchen steps and relieved me of my burden. In the beginning I was accompanied on my rounds by a fat, smudge-nosed youth some six or eight years my senior, who smoked vile tobacco and enlivened the way by villainous abuses of John Chitling and the universe. For the first months, I fear, my outlook upon ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... of the traplike stair-opening came the head of Mrs. Kantor, disheveled and a smudge of soot across her face, but beneath her arm, triumphant, a violin of one string ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... one of the apartments to superintend the cooking of the eggs. It was a mere den, with an earth floor. A fire of twigs was kindled against the farther wall, and a little girl, half-naked, carrying a baby still more economically clad, was stooping down to blow the smudge into a flame. The smoke, some of it, went over our heads out at the door. We boiled the eggs. We desired salt; and the woman brought us pepper in the berry. We insisted on salt, and at length got ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... picture in the papers," he said. "If you'll allow me to say so, it's a particularly good likeness and well reproduced. Of course, in your case, they'd take particular care not to print the usual kind of smudge." ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... grammars by the side of the kitchen fire, and did not raise their eyes as the Seeker burst into the room. Constance sat down, and gasped and quivered for a while. Then she looked down complacently at the little black bow with its smudge of red ...
— Prudence of the Parsonage • Ethel Hueston
... predicted for Peter; For, of a morning in spring when lay the mist in the valleys— "See," quoth the folk, "how the witch breweth her evil decoctions! See how the smoke from her fire broodeth on woodland and meadow! Grant that the sun cometh out to smother the smudge of her caldron! She hath been forth in the night, full of her spells and devices, Roaming the marshes and dells for heathenish magical nostrums; Digging in leaves and at stumps for centipedes, pismires, and spiders, Grubbing in poisonous ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... Monsieur Thuran, "you see the fate that awaits us all unless we are picked up within a day or two. That there is little hope of that is evidenced by the fact that during all the days we have drifted we have seen no sail, nor the faintest smudge of smoke ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... he might secure a measure of protection from those terrible mosquitoes which still buzzed angrily about his head. In an hour chance favored him, as he reached a low ridge much rockier than usual in that region. He would have built a little smudge fire to protect himself from the mosquitoes, but it would be sure to draw the lurking sharpshooter, and instead he found a nook in the ridge, under the low boughs of a great oak. Then he took a light blanket which ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... as our guides did on the portage, submit to fate and walk along in heroic silence, like Marco Bozzaris "bleeding at every pore,"—or do as Damon and I did, break into ejaculations and a run, until you reach a place where you can light a smudge and hold your ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... port and slipped astern. Paris closed up, telescoped its panorama, became a mere blur, a smoky smudge. But it was long before the distance eclipsed that admonitory finger of ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... These tricks are not wise, my friend. The audience likes to see a dead man in all his beauty and splendor. If you smudge his face and spoil his armor they will show their displeasure by not letting you kill him. And when your turn comes, they will remember it against you and ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw
... fruiting the old leaves fall, and for a brief interval the shadows of branches and twigs, intricate, involved, erratic, might be likened to unschooled scribblings, with here a flourish and there a blot and many a boisterous smudge. Soon—it is merely a question of days—the swelling buds displace millions of leaf-sheaves, pale green and fragile, which fall and, curling in on themselves, redden, and again the yellow sand is littered, while overhead fresh foliage, changing rapidly from golden, glistening brown to rich dark ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... from the lookout and made a long and careful study of the slight, black smudge which was low down on ...
— Tom Swift and his Undersea Search - or, The Treasure on the Floor of the Atlantic • Victor Appleton
... among the reeds, and to this spot I accordingly made my way. As it happened, we arrived in the very nick of time, for we had scarcely taken up a position among the reeds, in a situation that enabled me to command a view of a good wide stretch of water, when I saw a faint smudge against the clear sky southward, which rapidly resolved itself into a big flight of wild duck heading directly for the end of the pond near where I was ambushed; and I had only time to pass my rifle ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... she broke in lightly. "You see I remembered Mr. Templeton getting this smudge of ink on it. He called my attention to it, the dear, precise old banker that he is, and wanted to give me a clean one. Did Mr. Thornton get frightened and bring ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... had finished, she hastened to change the altar-cloth, taking the greatest care not to smudge the beading. Then she arranged the cross, the candlesticks, and the vases symmetrically. Abbe Mouret had gone to lean against the wooden screen which separated the choir from the nave, by the side of Brother Archangias. Not ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... a night in that grass, burning some of it for a smudge to keep mosquitoes at bay, and an hour after dawn, reaching rising ground again, realized that we had our ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... a nice clean man," declared Grace, "for there wasn't a smudge on that little note, and I have noticed since that the paper is a fine quality. Oh, I am perfectly sure he is a very nice young man," and the bright-eyed, pink-cheeked girl laughed at ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis
... men tell us, and grow black in the face with the vehemence of telling, that the Sycamore Ridge of the sixties—a gray smudge of unpainted wooden houses bordering the Santa Fe trail, with the street merging into the sunflowers a block either way from the pump,—is the town that now lies hidden in the elm forest, with its thirty miles of paving and its scores ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... bell rang a second time the King shouted angrily, "Smudge and blazes!" and at a third ring he screamed in a fury, "Hippikaloric!" which must be a dreadful word because we don't know what ...
— Ozma of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... it," replied the latter. "It will do, so paint it on, Rob; and all of you be careful not to smudge it. It'll be dry by to-morrow morning, for this fantail rides high ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... or smudge which we ourselves could endure was sufficient in the earlier part of that evening to prevent serious annoyance from the same cause; but later a respite ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... bullets, and he had been the mark of D'ri: with him a rifle was never a plaything. Five others lay writhing in the grass, bereft of horse, deserted by their comrades. The smudges were ready, and the nets. D'ri and I put on the latter and ran out, placing a smudge row on every side of the Hermitage. The winged fighters were quickly driven away. Of the helpless enemy one had staggered off in the brush; the others lay groaning, their faces lumpy and one-sided. A big sergeant had a nose of the look ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... facing a delegation of his fellow-citizens, to wit: Cap'n Aaron Sproul, first selectman of the town; Hiram Look, Zeburee Nute, constable; and a nervous little man with a smudge of smut on the side of his nose—identity and occupation revealed by the lettering on ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... outside made a widening slit in the darkness. It was like sitting in a theatre watching the curtain go up on a nightmare. He could see the banisters, the glow from the hall beneath, and something black with a white smudge at the end of it lying stretched out from the head of the stairs. His body crawled out of bed. He himself wanted to hide under the clothes, but his body would not let him. It carried him on against his will. ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... visitors; while their caudal appendages were not allowed a moment's respite from duty. The men relieved themselves of bitter and revengeful sentiments toward their unwelcome visitants by deep and hearty curses, until a little later, worn and weary, in the camp-fire "smudge" they slept despite their discomforts. It is not really known, but it is supposed, that the two long eared animals might have done good work that night had they been wise enough to also raise their voices in protest; the mosquitoes of these mountain fastnesses being as yet ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... And then the joints will be all raked out roughly, and the brick-work smeared, you know. I have quite a new idea about that. I mean to go in for letting the workmen have the use of all the rooms, with liberty to smudge them as much as they like; and so at the end we shall have a sort of antique ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... local character, it pleased him that it should be so. He would not for the world have his gentle, woolly-minded, unprofitable cottagers transformed into "hustlers"; it would wound his eye to see the smoke of any commercial chimney, the smudge of any dividend-paying factory, staining the pure tints of the sylvan landscape. He had truly learned to ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... and uncomfortable at the best, unseaworthy death-traps in a storm. As she lay rolling in a flat calm with flapping sails, a few hundred miles from England, a smear appeared on the western horizon. The smear grew to a smudge, the smudge to a shape, and soon there steamed up alongside the Sirius, a steamer which had successfully crossed the Atlantic, and was now on her return to England. The captain of the Tyrian determined to send his mails on board. Howe accompanied them, took a glass ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... on the warm earth before their cabin, their backs propped comfortably against a log, watching the sun sink behind a distant sky-line all notched with purple mountains upon which snow still lingered. Beside them a smudge dribbled a wisp of smoke sufficient to ward off a pestilential swarm of mosquitoes and black flies. In the clear, thin air of that altitude the occasional voices of what bird and animal life was abroad in the wild ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... two hours MacRae was the owner of two motor launches under British registry. Payment in full left him roughly with five thousand dollars working capital, enough by only a narrow margin. At sunset Vancouver was a smoky smudge on a far horizon. At dusk he passed in the narrow mouth of Squitty Cove. The Bluebird was swinging about to go when her sister ship ranged alongside. Vincent Ferrara dropped his hook again. There were forty trollers in the Cove. MacRae called to them. They came in skiffs ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... That once transfixed it, can no longer touch. No land is safe from its sting, blood-drain, or clutch— For it takes Protean shapes; 'tis, therefore, clear, Since good Saint George has failed to re-appear To mortal sight, save in the King's escutch— Worn off at edge and blurred with Tudor smudge— Freedom must drive ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... was sighted, a mere smudge on the horizon, we saw the flash of her guns and heard faintly the thud of the explosions. She was getting in some practice with her four-inch guns on the enticing targets ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... shrubbery, and stood there thinking for a time. She was a queer-looking little figure as she stood thus in her short holland overall, her stout bare legs, brown as berries, slightly apart, her head thrown back, her hair awry, a smudge on her cheek, ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... She was planting the last aster in the row. She went on scooping out the hole for it, slowly and deliberately, with her trowel, and patting the earth about it with wilful hands. There was a little smudge of grey earth above the crinkles ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... knew that he would not long delay his return, and so slipped quickly from under her blanket and hurried down to the water-hole to bathe her hands and face and set herself in order. Her flying fingers found her little mirror; there wasn't any smudge on her face, after all, and her hair wasn't so terribly unbecoming that way; tousled, to be sure, but then, nice, curly hair can be tousled and still not make one a perfect hag. It was odd about his mare being named Helen. He must ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... and thrust out a hand which still had ground into the knuckles oil and smudge acquired while helping put up ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... the East River, and, at rare intervals, a significant glimmer of bunting disclosed the owner's presence aboard for an hour or two. That was all, however; and the cliff-watchers at Shotover House and the Fells looked seaward in vain for the big Siwanoa, as yacht after yacht, heralded by the smudge on the horizon, turned from a gray speck to a white one, and crept in from ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... would reach the City, and uttered a little murmur of vexation when she was told that it was a half-hour late. The next instant she was asking herself why this delay should seem annoying to her. Then, toward the close of the afternoon, came the City itself. First a dull-gray smudge on the horizon, then a world of grimy streets, rows of miserable tenements festooned with rags, then a tunnel or two, and at length the echoing glass-arched terminal of the station. Lloyd alighted, and, remembering ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... the Sirdar that the ridge was unoccupied and that several thousand Dervishes could be seen flying into Omdurman. Pending the answer, we waited; and looking back northwards, across the front of the zeriba, where the first attack had been stopped, perceived a greyish-white smudge, perhaps a mile long. The glass disclosed details—hundreds of tiny white figures heaped or scattered; dozens hopping, crawling, staggering away; a few horses standing stolidly among the corpses; a few unwounded men dragging off ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... the climate has been able to stand the shock. It is always an unusual season. I do know, however, that bringing up a crop of oranges is as anxious an undertaking as "raising" a family. Little black smudge pots stand in rows in the groves, ready to be lighted at the first hint of frost. The admonition of the hymn applies to fruit growers as ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... first idea. But see!" Barker drew aside the curtain, and showed that the long, diamond-paned window was open to its full extent. "And look at this!" He held the lamp down and illuminated a smudge of blood like the mark of a boot-sole upon the wooden sill. "Someone has stood ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... by one, stabbing the dusk with their beams, steady, conspicuous. One only, far in the distance, seemed ill-defined—a faint smudge against the twilight. ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... like trees, with willowy trunks of trees as thick as a man's arm. Here we refreshed ourselves with drinking-coconuts, while a cowboy rode a dozen miles to the nearest telephone and summoned a machine from town. The town itself we could see, the Lakanaii metropolis of Olokona, a smudge of smoke on the shore-line, as we looked down across the miles of cane-fields, the billow-wreathed reef-lines, and the blue haze of ocean to where the island of Oahu shimmered like a dim ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... for a few minutes, and returned made up as a fat old Irish woman, with a smudge of dirt on my face. ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... sitting squarely in the middle of the floor, teasing the Sarah-cat with a wishbone. Joseph and Rusty were both curled up in her lap. A warm plummy odor filled the whole house, for Priscilla was cooking in the kitchen. Presently she came in, enshrouded in a huge work-apron, with a smudge of flour on her nose, to show Aunt Jamesina the chocolate cake ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... was a sudden attempt to twist his blade around Cleggett's; followed by a direct thrust, as quick as light, which grazed Cleggett's shoulder; a little smudge of ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... attention to the other panel. He ran his fingers over it, his eyes following them. What was that? A finger-print? Upon the left side half way up a tiny smudge was visible. Barney examined it more carefully. A round, white figure of the conventional design that was burned into the tile bore ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... lake. This idea was borne out by an odd blotchiness, for sometimes there would be half a mile or more of seeming moorland, then a sharply defined change (or it seemed sharply defined from that bird's-eye point of view). A vivid greenness marked these changes, which merged into a dun coloured smudge and again into the brilliant green; then the moor would begin ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... fickle, certainly; but this change seemed to have been very, very sudden! And there was a word or two, prettily written in another hand, on a small slip of paper—'Perhaps you had better send back the book'; and Caldigate, as he read it, thought that he could discern the almost-obliterated smudge of a wiped-up tear. He wrote a cheerful letter to Mrs. Shand, in which he told her that though he had not been absolutely engaged to marry Hester Bolton before he started for Australia,—and consequently ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... the term, which is called the fox- hunt, and in which the novices, riding astride of chairs, are made to run the gauntlet through the 'fellows' who are armed with blackened corks, and who, without moving from their places, attempt to smudge the faces of the youngsters as they hop past. These 'foxes' are young students who have just joined, and who are not admitted to the rank of fellows until they have fought a certain number of times. They are raised ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... the door-bell, I trembled for Mary Ellen, remembering where I had last seen her, but the admirable girl promptly opened the door to us, clad in the drabbest of her cellar-cleaning garb, a smudge of soot on her ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... mark by the Martian's name. He wiped the smudge of ink off his hand and said, "You both know, of course, that Perimeter D is reserved for couples who have intermarried and ...
— Blind Spot • Bascom Jones
... whole interior of the ship is, at such times, simply an oven, the air of which is too hot to breathe! Under such circumstances with what eagerness does the long-enduring seaman scan the polished surface of the sleeping ocean in search of the little smudge of faint, evanescent blue, the cat's-paw that betrays the presence of some wandering eddy in the stagnant air which, even though it be too feeble and insignificant to move the ship by so much as a single inch, may at least afford his fevered body ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... concentrated into a swarm and, leaving the trenches, began to move in a slanting direction toward a patch of woods far over to our left. Some of them, I think, got there, some of them did not. Certain puff-balls of white smoke, and one big smudge of black smoke, which last signified a bomb of high explosives, broke over them and among them, hiding all from sight for a space of seconds. Dust clouds succeeded the smoke; then the dust lifted slowly. Those ants were not to be seen. They had altogether vanished. It was ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... away his book, dampened the smudge-fire, without which the mosquitoes made the swamp almost unbearable, took his cudgel and lunch, and went to the line. He sat on a log, ate at dinner-time and drank his last drop of water. The heat of June was growing intense. Even on the west of the swamp, where ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter
... half way. A grave, smooth-shaven man appeared; his chin and upper lip had the mottled smudge that shows in so many of those conscientious ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... Presently, a smudge of brown smoke soaring above the horizon broad on the port bow showed that the unsuspecting quarry was approaching; and a minute or two later her masts, fine as spiders' webs, began to rise against the warm, golden glow of the western sky, then her funnel appeared, and finally her bridge ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... my schooner, they could find no excuse to board us. Besides, as I have said, I was greatly helped by the weather, which continuing hazy, though happily never so thick as to oblige me to stop, delivered me to the sight only of such vessels as passed close, and offered me as a mere smudge to ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... of the state, and there are many Kentuckians in its population. Nourished by railroads, a division headquarters of the great A. and P., near the soft-coal beds, with a tin-plate factory, a carpet factory, a carriage factory, and a dozen other mills and factories, Torso is a black smudge in a flat green landscape from which many lines of electric railway radiate forth along the country roads. And along the same roads across the reaches of prairie, over the swelling hills, stalk towering poles, bearing many fine wires glistening in the sunlight and singing the importance of Torso ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... of a Standard Oil director in a passing limousine, and one of the season's prettiest debutantes, who was walking; and because he was only twenty-four, and his mother was very, very ambitious for him, he wondered if the tear smudge on the face of his companion had been evident from the sidewalk, and decided that it must ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... stars of Pisces; and behind, over the black jungle, glowed the Southern Cross. But night after night, as I watched on the beach, the sight which moved me most was the dull speck of emerald mist, a merest smudge on the slate of the heavens,—the spiral nebula in Andromeda,—a universe in the making, of a ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... only minutes had passed since he had tooled his scout into the rack. Ahead, he could see the smudge of the Black Fleet's smoke on the horizon. Not so very far away, but a lot could happen in the distance still separating dirigible and ...
— Raiders Invisible • Desmond Winter Hall
... illustrated supplement that the Novoe Vremya publishes once a week. There was a photograph of a long-fronted building with a flag flying over it, labelled 'The new standard floating over Buckingham Palace.' The picture was not much more than a smudge, but the flag, possibly touched up, was unmistakable. It was the eagle of the Nemetskie Tsar. I have a vivid recollection of that plainly-furnished little room, with the inevitable gilt ikon in one corner, and the samovar hissing and gurgling ...
— When William Came • Saki
... horizon appeared a smudge of smoke, which grew and spread until those with glasses could perceive beneath it the low, dark lines of a man-of-war. It was true then! Some had permitted themselves to doubt the story spread so industriously by Monsieur Pelletan and his friend, the notary—the proprietor of the Grand Hotel Splendide ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... a justifeid man: but how it is suppressed, we know nott—of a man justified, which is extant to this day.—(In the margin,) with a smudge?] Note: This booke was printed 1584, at Edinburgh, by Tho. Utrover: (in ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... man's pointing finger. "There's only one kind of boat makes a smudge like that," he declared; "and it's a destroyer. Safe and well out of a glorious adventure. Faith, we're the lucky devils; and by this and by that, I'll enlist aboard that destroyer, now that ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... sum and centre of it; a blue world that slid through degrees of latitude and longitude, but held us, its inhabitants, at ever the same distance from realities. The past was miles away at the end of the white path astern; the future did not yet so much as smudge the forward horizon; we were adrift, lost ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... he is!" cried Will, with mock seriousness, while the artist made a vermilion smudge on his canvas as the ground plan ...
— Will of the Mill • George Manville Fenn
... which he had yet to encounter. The comparatively broad stream up which he had been steaming came to an end, and his further progress must be through Cypress Bayou, a canal just forty-six feet wide..[??-second period a smudge?] The broadest gunboat was forty-two feet wide, and to enter that narrow stream made retreat out of the question: there could be no turning round to fly. The levees rose on either side of the narrow ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... Underwood saw nothing. But when he saw anything he saw everything. His eye was caught by the green smudge on her ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... began to peel off here and another piece there, and then the nose cracked, and then an ear dropped off, and then one of the eyes began to get mushy and watery looking, and finally it was a mere smudge, a false-face, a scarecrow. My father spent a lot of money trying to fix it up, but what good did it do? By the time he had the nose cobbled the ears were loose again, and so on. In the end he gave it ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... dismounting, "is little more than a dim trail. Sorry I didn't think about it sooner, but we ought to have built a smudge fire where this road intersects the cattle trail. In case the doctor doesn't reach there by noon, I sent orders to fly a flag at the junction, and Joel to return home. But if the doctor doesn't reach there until after darkness, he'll ...
— Wells Brothers • Andy Adams
... up, frowning a little. Then she smiled. Miss Galt had a complete layout on the desk before her—scrap books, cuts, copy, magazines. There was a little smudge on the end of her nose. Grace Galt was writing about magnetos. She was writing about magnetos in a way to make you want to drop your customer, or your ironing, or your game, and go downtown and buy that particular kind of magneto at once. Which ...
— Personality Plus - Some Experiences of Emma McChesney and Her Son, Jock • Edna Ferber
... my focus, raised it to my eye, pointing it out over the starboard quarter and sweeping it slowly and carefully to right and left. For a minute or two I saw nothing; then, as I swept the tube along what I judged to be the line of the horizon, a tiny smudge of radiance—so dim as to be scarcely more than a suggestion—seemed to float athwart the lenses and was gone again. There is probably nothing in ordinary life much more difficult than to pick up and retain in the lenses of a telescope, levelled by hand, a spark of light so minute ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... Oh, my dear! that smudge in the corner was caused by Singapore's black tongue. He is trying to send you an affectionate kiss. Poor Sing thinks he's a lap dog—isn't it a tragedy when people mistake their vocations? I myself am not always certain that I was ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... of a feeling of physical sickness, and Frederick groaned aloud. As the dreadful moment of contact approached we shut our eyes tight and each gripped the other's hand. How long we remained like this I cannot tell, for we were both afraid to look and see the my smudge on the pavement indicating a hero's end; but eventually, by mutual arrangement, we opened our eyes, and then we saw—not a smudge, but Coleopteron still advancing quite unconcerned. It was ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various
... had to learn in campercraft. The Mosquitoes were always more or less of a plague. At night they forced the boys into the teepee, but they soon learned to smudge the insects with a wad of green grass on the hot fire. This they would throw on at sundown, then go outside, closing the teepee tight and eat supper around the cooking fire. After that was over they would cautiously ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... him a little, but he had paddled steadily, keeping in touch with the south bank. By-and-by daylight came like a glow in a ground glass globe. The shores made on each side of the river a dark smudge, in which one could detect hints of columnar forms and shadows of twisted branches high up. The mist was still thick on the water, but a good watch was being kept, for as Iamb' Itam approached the camp the figures of ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... the dust cloud of the herd, and was surprised to find it smaller than he had ever seen it, and farther away. Indeed, he could only guess that the faint smudge on the horizon was the dust he had followed for more days than he could count. He was not afraid, but he was hungry and he thought his mother would maybe wonder where he was, and he knew that the point-riders had already stopped pushing the herd ahead, and that the ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... straw under our buffalo robes, and our clothes as pillows. The men had to make their couch under the carriage with whatever cloaks we didn't want, to keep the dew off them; and by lighting a large "smudge" to keep off the mosquitoes, we all slept pretty well, though Mother Earth is very unrelenting. If, however, we wanted to change our position we were sure to awake. The following morning, Tuesday, the men had a bathe in the river, which we very much envied them; though, ...
— A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba • Mrs. Cecil Hall
... intervals to the burning piles in order to create a continuous dense smoke. When daylight appeared we noticed the ground covered with a beautiful blanket of frost, and decided two men smoking pipes would have been as effective treatment as the smudge. ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... the battling sea-things which fought for the corpse of their comrade. To them it must have seemed a miracle that I should be able to stand at thrice the range of the most powerful javelin-thrower and with a loud noise and a smudge of smoke slay one of their number with ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... countenance, and, with one voice, they exploded into a boisterous fit of laughter. Lady Feng as well could not help feeling amused, and smilingly she upbraided her. "You stupid wench!" she said; "Have you by gorging lost your eyesight that you recklessly smudge ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... for the cow-boy camp below the cliff. Half a dozen men lounged round a smudge fire. The old man paused to sort out the scene; the box of a gramaphone laid out for a card table, a bottle of whiskey in the centre, two empty bottles with candles stuck in the necks for lights, a dull smudge fire, four rough fellows sprawling ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... he gazed carefully at both sides of his messmate's cheeks. "You're scorched horribly, and the whisker shoots are all gone—No, there's about half of one left; and you'll have to shave that off, Dick, so as to balance the other bare place. No, no; it's all right; that's not hair, only a smudge of sooty cinder off your burnt cap. I say, you do look ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... four entered Joe's dressing tent at the circus grounds. And some time after that four men, whose faces were black from the smudge of machine oil and grease and whose clothes carried like ...
— Joe Strong The Boy Fire-Eater - The Most Dangerous Performance on Record • Vance Barnum
... Child by Raphael. In the possession of Frederick Fairlie, Esquire." "Copper coin of the period of Tiglath Pileser. In the possession of Frederick Fairlie, Esquire." "Unique Rembrandt etching. Known all over Europe as THE SMUDGE, from a printer's blot in the corner which exists in no other copy. Valued at three hundred guineas. In the possession of Frederick Fairlie, Esq." Dozens of photographs of this sort, and all inscribed in this manner, were completed before I left Cumberland, and hundreds more ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... Trina again. She would never be the same to him, never so radiant, so sweet, so adorable; her charm for him would vanish in an instant. Across her forehead, her little pale forehead, under the shadow of her royal hair, he would surely see the smudge of a foul ordure, the footprint of the monster. It would be a sacrilege, an abomination. He recoiled from it, banding all his strength ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... his hands blue-black with the smudge from a refractory typewriter ribbon which he was vainly endeavoring to adjust. It took some time for him to get his hands clean again, and Claire sharpened her pencils while she waited. But there really proved ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... up against the wall of the ravine, and was small and dirty as to interior. A fire burned in a big stone fireplace at one end, filling the room with a suffocating smudge. ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor
... to haste, and the rusty little tramp began to drive forward for all she was worth. She cleared the three-mile limit safely and then turned south. Not a craft was in sight; not a smudge of smoke discolored ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... daughter of Snettishane, a prominent chief in the tribe, by a half-breed mother, and to him the Factor fared casually one summer day to open negotiations of marriage. He sat with the chief in the smoke of a mosquito smudge before his lodge, and together they talked about everything under the sun, or, at least, everything that in the Northland is under the sun, with the sole exception of marriage. John Fox had come particularly to talk of marriage; Snettishane ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... beginning of his fourth month of solitude, the mucker saw a smudge of smoke upon the horizon. Slowly it increased in volume and the speck beneath it resolved itself into the hull of a steamer. Closer and closer ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... you are wise; you are rich beyond comparison. You are noble; you are generous; you are the prince among nations." He smiles a calm smile, and thinks you a very sensible fellow. But you add, "Oh, my lord, if I may venture to say so, there is a smudge on your nose, which I make bold to attribute to the settlement of a black on your intelligent countenance." He is not angry. He is not even contemptuously amused. He responds, "My friend, you are wrong. There is never a smudge on my immaculate face. No blacks fly in London. The ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... glass that hung against the rough wall, over a draped dressing-table which had apparently once been boxes. Yes, she did look tired and draggled. Her wild-rose color was nearly gone, and there were big circles under her eyes. And there was a smudge on her face that nobody had told her a thing about. And her hair was mussed too much to be becoming, even to her, who looked best with it tossed a little. And there was not a sign of water to wash in anywhere, and the room had no furniture except ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... fifty of them, from all the battleships, now skimmed over the water, and a moment later soared in the air. Flying on beyond the French ships, a smudge of smoke came into view, then another, and then many more. Ships of all kinds, Jack could see, dreadnoughts, cruisers, torpedo boats and scout ships, advancing ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... furling the sail. Then he straightened and swept the sea with keen, puckered eyes. It was a scrutiny that was rewarded. Ahead, across the horizon sky, floated a dark smudge, like the smoke-trail of a steamer, and beneath it was a black speck. It was no ship, but land, he knew. It was the expected landfall, the volcanic island, there ahead, and he, of all of the ship's company, first perceived it from his ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... dapple, smear, smutch, brand, defacement, blemish, stain, discoloration, speck, mark, smudge, flaw, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... was a landscape. This afternoon it was an inglorious smudge. It is now on its way back to the landscape condition, and will have revived all its glories by to-morrow. It was noon when I rang ...
— The Romance Of Giovanni Calvotti - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... have tea first and see your mother afterward," observed Uncle Geoffrey; but I would not take this prudent counsel. On the stairs I came upon Jack, curled up on a window-sill, with Smudge, our old black cat, in her arms, and was welcomed by both of them with much effusion. Jack was a tall, thin girl, all legs and arms, with a droll, freckled face and round blue eyes, with all the awkwardness ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... beautiful skins, and accompanied by three savages as wild-looking, seemingly as fierce, and certainly as avaricious as he was himself. These auxiliaries, through various little circumstances, were known among us that same afternoon, by the several appellations of Smudge, Tin-pot, and Slit-nose. These were not heroic names, of a certainty, but their owners had as little of the heroic in their appearance, as usually falls to the lot of man in the savage state. I cannot tell the designation of the tribes to which these four worthies ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... of course, then," Michael said to himself, observing these, "and quite pretty if that smudge of grime ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... blotting-paper sky and the great flat greenish smudge of the sea had been taking on a darker tone, without any change in their colouring and texture. Evening was coming on over the North Sea. Black uninteresting hummocks of land appeared, dotting the duskiness of water and clouds ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... fifth night of the waning of the moon—and the night was dark. No birds were singing. The lichi tree by the tank looked like a smudge of ink on a background a shade less deep. The south wind was blindly roaming about in the darkness like a sleep-walker. The stars in the sky with vigilant unblinking eyes were trying to penetrate the darkness, in their effort to fathom ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... who defends our leafy tabernacle From bold intrusion of the travelling crowd,— Who but the midge, mosquito and the fly, Which past endurance sting the tender cit, But which we learn to scatter with a smudge, Or baffle by a veil, or ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the boys sat in the protecting smudge of the campfire, the sound of paddles was heard up the river. The swish and splash came on steadily for a moment and ...
— Boy Scouts in Northern Wilds • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... a properly prudent hesitation, clicked brokenly. Miss Francis looked as though she'd added insomnia to her other abstentions, otherwise she had not changed, even to her skirt and the smudge on her left nostril. "If youve come about the icebox youre a week late. I fixed it ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... cried, and there was a little explosion; a cork spurted out and struck the ceiling; there was smoke and the crackling of glass. He turned round and faced me, a smudge of ink on one of his cheeks, and that customary nervous ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... to make the agreement good and to allay his feelings. When requested to sign the document the camel man, who had sounded each coin on the doorstep, and to his evident surprise found them all good, gaily dipped his thumb into the inkstand and affixed his natural mark, a fine smudge, upon the valuable paper, and licked up the surplus ink with his tongue. The man undertook to provide the necessary camels and saddles, and to take me across the Salt Desert in a north-easterly direction, ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... disappeared. The boat shrugged uneasily with the movement of the oars, the rowlocks made of loops of twisted osier creaked, but one could not perceive that one was going forwards. The hills lost their solidity, becoming mere holes in the grey blue of the sky, a bright planet made a light smudge on the ruffled water in which the stars could not reflect. As we crept forwards into the river and the mountains closed in, the water became more calm, and the stars came out one by one beneath us, while in the ripple of our wake the ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... kept her eyes half shut, and turned the looking-glass hind-before. Although it was a warm day, she hung a cloak over her shoulders. But her arms peeped out of the loose sleeves, and at least a foot of skirt was visible. As she walked along the corridor and down the stairs, she seemed to smudge the place with colour, and, directly she entered the dining-hall, comet-like she drew all eyes upon her. Astonished titterings followed in her wake; even the teachers goggled her, afterwards to put their heads together. In the reception-room Marina remarked at ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... in the following account from my sister of her visual peculiarities: 'When I think of Wednesday I see a kind of oval flat wash of yellow emerald green; for Tuesday, a gray sky colour; for Thursday, a brown-red irregular polygon; and a dull yellow smudge for Friday.'" ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... agitation and almost illegible, and at the bottom of the paper there was a dirty smudge that might have been a tear stain or a finger ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... bobbing, faggot, log; cinder &c (products of combustion) 384; ingle, tinder, touchwood; sulphur, brimstone; incense; port-fire; fire-barrel, fireball, brand; amadou^, bavin^; blind coal, glance coal; German tinder, pyrotechnic sponge, punk, smudge [U.S.]; solid fueled rocket. [fuels for candles and lamps] wax, paraffin wax, paraffin oil; lamp oil, whale oil. [liquid fuels] oil, petroleum, gasoline, high octane gasoline, nitromethane, petrol, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... horrid smudge for so small a paper, and the king sat on the edge of the bed and watched ...
— American Fairy Tales • L. Frank Baum
... that was mighty bright of you, showing old Peter the smudge of black on the bell rope, which proved that Ward was the fellow who jerked it," he said, giving his chum a whack of genuine boyish approval on ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... slow progress out across the murky waters for a moment, making a pretense of mopping his forehead with his handkerchief meanwhile. It was loaded below the water-mark! It hung so low in the water that it looked a mere smudge upon the face of it, a ribbon of sail flapping from ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... on watch had seen smoke. Far off on the horizon appeared a smudge from the funnels of some passing steamer. It was too far away however to discover their signal or even to see their island. He had watched it hopefully until it finally disappeared over the rim of the ocean. That was the only sign of a vessel that ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and the Treasure Cave • Ross Kay
... was no flat-iron in Simon's Bay, only a little smudge of smoke off Cape Hangklip to show that Mr. Davies, the second-class engine-room artificer, was giving her all she could carry. At the Admiral's house, the ancient and retired bo'sun, who had seen many Admirals come and go, brought out his paint and brushes and gave a new coat of pure raw ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... the ground, rolling over twice, each time clawing at the earth, and then remained still, about four feet from me, in a sort of sitting position. I called to him, "Are you hurt badly, Jock?" but no answer. He was dead. A dark, red smudge was coming through his tunic right under the heart. The blood ran down his bare knees, making a horrible sight. On his right side he carried his water bottle. I was crazy for a drink and tried to reach this, but for the ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... be no loitering of the shadows. The gloomy isles have changed from black to purple and from purple to blue, and as the imperious sun flashes on the mainland a smudge of brown, blurred and shifting, in the far distance—the only evidence of the existence of human schemes and agitations—the only stain on the celestial purity of the morning—betokens the belated steamer for ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... know whether the journey was a comfortable one, and likely to convert the stranger to steam travel, that is quite another matter. The description of the excursion which history has handed down to us is very naive. In the first place the pitch-pine fuel sent a smudge of smoke and cinders back over all the passengers and if it did not entirely choke them it at least encrusted them thickly with dirt, particularly the ones who sat outside. The umbrellas they opened to protect themselves were soon demolished, ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... of flying trees, then came the grandstand, a mere smudge of color, a sea of dimly seen faces and a roar that was like that ...
— The Girl Aviators' Motor Butterfly • Margaret Burnham |
