"Tapering" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... inexhaustible supply of firewood. Besides the trees I have mentioned, there is the xanthorea, or grass-tree, a plant which cannot be intelligibly described to those who have never seen it. The stem consists of a tough pithy substance, round which the leaves are formed. These, long and tapering like the rush, are four-sided, and extremely brittle; the base from which they shoot is broad and flat, about the size of a thumb-nail, and very resinous in substance. As the leaves decay annually, others are put forth above the bases of the old ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... trees and covered with snow, over which the setting sun threw a crimson tinge. Below was the river, hoarsely murmuring, and immediately upon the other side, the clustering Maryland village, with a church spire tall and tapering against the northern sky. About the village was another village of tents, and upon a hilltop frowned a line of guns. Dusk as it was, the Confederate batteries unlimbered, and there opened an artillery duel, shells screaming from north to ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... etc., see Riggs' "Tahkoo Wahkan", Chapter VI. The Ta-sha-ke—literally, "Deer-hoofs"—is a rattle made by hanging the hard segments of deer-hoofs to a wooden rod a foot long—about an inch in diameter at the handle end, and tapering to a point at the other. The clashing of these horny bits makes a sharp, shrill sound something like distant sleigh-bells. In their incantations over the sick they ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... The danger was too real to give Pete the nightmare; there was nothing spooky to him in the glittering knife blade, and only ghosts and the supernatural could give Big Pete the nightmare. Calmly he looked at the hand grasping the power of death with its strong tapering fingers. Suddenly and in a firm, commanding voice he gave the ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... I seated myself among some bales and contemplated the town's frontage. Over one end of it rose, tapering like a walking-stick, a factory chimney, while at the other end, as well as in the middle, rose belfries, one of which had a gilded steeple, and the other one a steeple either green or blue, but looking black in the moonlight, and shaped like ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... the fourth of marble. The base measures three hundred and twenty feet, and the fourth story one hundred and fifty-seven feet (narrow stairways leading upward), which indicates a gradual decrease and tapering in size. A massive cloister runs around the lower story, and the fourth story is occupied by the marble cenotaph of Akbar, directly over the crypt which contains his tomb. The cenotaph is engraved with ninety-nine names of the deity. This story is surrounded by a white marble cloister, ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... an atlas, that I had difficulty in recognizing them as they now appeared. Mexico and Central America seemed almost as broad as that part of the United States from San Francisco to Washington; the whole tapering down from Canada to Cape Horn almost in the ...
— Zarlah the Martian • R. Norman Grisewood
... aristocratic nose, large dark eyes, hair caught back by tortoise-shell combs under a peculiar head-dress, having a gleam of gold directly on the top. Her gown was of dark green, with white puffs let into the sleeves below the elbows; around her tapering waist was a narrow belt of jewels; the front of her corsage was also trimmed with jewels. But the most distinctive feature of her costume consisted in a floating scarf of old-rose, worn like the frontispiece lady in some volume of 'Keepsake' or 'Token.' Imagine ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... boys of the South did many deeds of the most desperate valor. There is much of romance about service on the blue ocean which is not to be found in routine duty along the yellow muddy streams that flowed through the territory claimed by King Cotton. The high, tapering masts, the yards squared and gracefully proportioned, the rigging taut, and with each rope in its place, of an ocean-frigate, are not seen in the squat, box-like gunboats that dashed by the batteries at Vicksburg, or ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... Vixen was a giantess, it may be as well to state that her height was five feet six, her waist twenty-two inches at most, her shoulders broad but finely sloping, her arms full and somewhat muscular, her hands not small, but exquisitely tapering, her foot long and narrow, her instep arched like an Arab's, and all her movements instinct with an untutored grace and dignity. She held her head higher than is common to women, and on that score was found ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... the morning, how had she ever travelled in the right train and descended at the right station? How could she remember such trifles when her thoughts were fixed on such distant compelling dreams? The pale oval face, the black hair brushed back from the forehead, the thin hands with long tapering fingers, the black dress, the slender upright body—this figure against the cold bright winter sunlight was a picture that remained always from that day in ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... about as slender as it is possible for a mountain to be. Compared, or contrasted, with a nearby and characteristic mountain of the range, it was as a lady's finger to a telescoped giant's thumb. High Peak, as the tapering sugar-loaf of earth was called, was located west of Hollyhill, close to the town. In fact the portion of the city inhabited by the main colony of miners' families was built on the sloping ground that formed a ...
— Campfire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains - or, A Christmas Success against Odds • Stella M. Francis
... lolled, immortal Bottom, propped on a bed of asphodel and moly that seemed to curd the moonshine; and at his side, Titania slim and scarlet, and shimmering like a bride-cake. The sky was dark above the tapering trees, but here in the secret woods light seemed to cling in flake and scarf. And it so chanced as our two noses leaned forward into his retreat that Bottom's head lolled back upon its pillow, and his bright, simple eyes ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... piers, the small arches intended for the roadways were constructed, each being 15 feet to the springing of the arch, and 9 feet wide. Upon these arches the masonry was carried upwards, in a tapering form, to a height of 53 feet above the level of the road. As these piers were to carry the immense weight of the suspension chains, great pains were taken with their construction, and all the stones, from top to bottom, were firmly bound together with iron ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... tightly as a girl in her corset, and wearing tilted to one side his flat and waxed cap, which gave him the appearance of a porter in an English Hotel. His exaggerated mustache, long and straight, tapering indefinitely on both sides and ending in a single blond hair, so thin that the point could not be seen, seemed to weigh on the corners of his mouth and pulling down his cheeks, impressed on the lips a ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... pointed, had even at an early age begun to show signs of turning gray. His nose was aquiline, his bearing was distinguished, and his manners were stamped with a high breeding that befitted the 'Cavalier' lineage. His hands were delicate and white, by no means thin, and the fingers tapering. His gestures were not many, but swift, graceful, and expressive; the tone of his voice was low; his figure was willowy and lithe; and in stature he seemed tall, but in reality he was a little below six feet ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... warm current of air and the bright sunlight, she moved them with a wider and bolder sweep. The heavy, unwieldy body, thinned by the expulsion of those currents driven upward to give flying-power to the wings, had taken on a slim and tapering grace. She had reached her fairy perfection. She was ready now for flight and light and love and freedom and the uncharted pathways of the air, ready to carry out the design of the Creator who had fashioned ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... 6 inches in length and 18 inches in breadth, tapering slightly towards the lower end. It bears a sword with straight guard in the centre of the stone, and the name James Ridoch on the blade. In the spaces on either side are a number of trade emblems—a square, an axe, an adze, a mallet and chisel, a millrind, an axe-pick of the kind used ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... discovered a face even more beautiful than that of the portrait I had just replaced on the wall. I must also mention that she seemed conscious of her charms, for with an air of much grace and dignity, she raised her jeweled fingers, so tapering, and smoothed the glossy black hair over her polished brow, while the diamonds of her bracelets sparkled through the white ruffles that hung from ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... anatomy, spindleshanks[obs3], lantern jaws, mere skin and bone. middle constriction, stricture, neck, waist, isthmus, wasp, hourglass; ridge, ghaut[obs3], ghat[obs3], pass; ravine &c. 198. narrowing, coarctation[obs3], angustation[obs3], tapering; contraction &c. 195. V. be narrow &c. adj.; narrow, taper, contract &c. 195; render narrow &c. adj; waste away. Adj. narrow, close; slender, thin, fine; thread-like &c. (filament) 205; finespun[obs3], gossamer; paper-thin; taper, slim, slight-made; scant, scanty; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... wreckage of a locomotive accident and see in the debris, select from the snarl of tangled wheels and driving-arms and axles a ready picture of the nature of the accident and how much of the wreckage offered possibilities for repair. Again, the engineer sees in a tree, with its tapering trunk, the symbol of all tower construction, just as he sees in the shape of a man's arm the pattern to follow when devising a cast-iron lever for an automatic machine. He sees things, does the engineer; sees objectively; ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... and among them but one single sailing vessel—a Liverpool barque of 1,000 tons, loading wool. She looked lost, abandoned, out of place, and my heart went out to her as my eyes travelled from her shapely lines and graceful sheer, to her lofty spars, tapering yards, and curving jibboom, the end of the latter almost touching the stern rail of an ugly bloated-looking German tramp steamer of 8,000 tons. On that very spot where I stood I, when a boy, had played at the foot of lofty trees—now covered by hideous ill-smelling wool stores—and ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... produced by an exaggeration of the infantile type of larynx. The epiglottis will be found long and tapering, its lateral margins rolled backward so as to meet and form a cylinder above. The upper edges of the aryepiglottic folds are approximated, leaving a narrow chink. The lack of firmness in these folds and the loose tissue in the posterior portion ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... plaything in this abandoned land. At midday a blot of black lay at the root of every sage brush. At evening each filigreed ridge, each solitary cone rising detached in the sealike circle of its loneliness, showed a slant of amethyst at its base, growing longer and finer, tapering prodigiously, and turning purple as the ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... medium though heavy is never timid, and at times is masterly. Delacroix inspired many of his landscape backgrounds, as Ingres gave him the proportions of his female figures. You continually encounter variations of Ingres, the sweet, serene line, the tapering feet and hands. Some critics have discerned the toe forms of Perugino; but such mechanical measurements strain our notion of eclecticism. Certainly Moreau studied Bellini, Mantegna, and Da Vinci without ever attaining ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... unoccupied—those that were close to each other. Now, what could two idle hands do, when one belonged to a man deeply in love, the other to a young woman who for some time had ill-treated her lover and exhausted her severity? Before the end of the first part, the long unoccupied, tapering fingers of the treble were imprisoned by those of the bass, without the least disturbance in the musical effect—and the old ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Then further back, higher than the candelabrum, and much higher than the altar, rose the Moloch, all of iron, and with gaping apertures in his human breast. His outspread wings were stretched upon the wall, his tapering hands reached down to the ground; three black stones bordered by yellow circles represented three eyeballs on his brow, and his bull's head was raised with a terrible effort as if in ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... glance at the compact clusters of nuts, nestling beneath the graceful tufts of long leaves that crowned each straight and tapering trunk; but he had so recently learned from experience, the hopelessness of undertaking to climb a cocoa-nut tree, that he was not at present disposed to renew the attempt. Max, however, who greatly valued himself upon his agility, and professed to be ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... song Rosamund had just been singing, faded; the peculiar almost intellectually delicate atmosphere of Greece was gone; and he saw for a moment the umber mystery of Stamboul, lifted under tinted clouds of the evening beyond the waters of the Golden Horn; the great rounded domes and tapering speary minarets of the mosques, couchant amid the shadows and the trailing and gauzy smoke-wreaths, a suggestion of dense masses of cypresses, those trees of the night which only in the night can be truly themselves, guarding the innumerable graves ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... faster boats to sail on bluer seas into more prosperous and happy havens than belong to this too substantial world. Each sketches out the boat of his desire, and fits her with wondrous comfort and conveniences. He glances, approving head thrown back, up her tall, tapering, well-oiled masts, silver-topped with golden trucks. He paints her in rival colours, rigs her with silken sails, names her after a sweetheart, and sails away to lands fairer than any of the isles of the Pacific—those isles of dreams where ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... the right nipple, Ajax struck; right through, From front to back, the brass-tipp'd spear was driv'n, Out through the shoulder; prone in dust he fell; As some tall poplar, grown in marshy mead, Smooth-stemm'd, with branches tapering tow'rd the head; Which with the biting axe the wheelwright fells, To bend the felloes of his well-built car; Sapless, beside the river, lies the tree; So lay the youthful Simoisius, felled By godlike Ajax' hand. At him, in turn, The son of Priam, Antiphus, ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... us, as we entered the great court, was the peculiar South Russian taste for filling in the line of roof between the numerous domes with curving pediments and tapering turned-wood spirelets surmounted by golden stars and winged seraphs' heads surrounded by rays. The effect of so many points of gold against the white of the walls, combined with the gold of the crosses, ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... poverty, given its high population growth and unequal distribution of income. MACAPAGAL-ARROYO averted a fiscal crisis by pushing for new revenue measures and, until recently, tightening expenditures. Declining fiscal deficits, tapering debt and debt service ratios, as well as recent efforts to increase spending on infrastructure and social services have heightened optimism over Philippine economic prospects. Although the general macroeconomic outlook has improved significantly, the Philippines ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Strolling through the workroom with the foreman, John automatically, and without knowing what he was doing, picked up a square piece of the bark, and fashioned it with two or three deft cuts of his penknife into a smooth tapering cork. His companion picked it out of his hand and examined it with the eye of an expert. "This is not the first cork which you have cut by many a hundred, Mr. Hardy," he remarked. "Indeed you are wrong," ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... being upwards of six or seven feet long, with bodies of about equal thickness, but they differed greatly in the shape of their heads, and still more so in the form of their tails, that of the black snake being round and tapering to a fine point, while the thick rattle of the other was clearly discernible as they writhed and twisted round and round, its sound never ceasing while the deadly struggle continued; that and the angry hiss emitted by both alone broke the ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... northern part of the town are many religious temples, with their tall towers like slender pyramids, tapering to a point. They are curious things, and surprisingly well preserved. The interiors of these temples are uninteresting. Nofuhl says the religious rites of the Mehrikans were devoid of character. There were many religious ...
— The Last American - A Fragment from The Journal of KHAN-LI, Prince of - Dimph-Yoo-Chur and Admiral in the Persian Navy • J. A. Mitchell
... sticks and branches, nearly flat, and bound together with twining vines. The spacious interior is lined with hair and moss, so minutely woven together as to exclude the wind. The female lays two eggs of a brownish red color, with many dots and spots, the long end of the egg tapering to a point. The parents are affectionate, attend to their young as long as they are helpless and unfledged, and will not forsake them even though the tree on which they rest be enveloped in flames. When the Eaglets are ready ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography [July 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... a tapering finger in the pitcher of blood, touched the swaying bag of sugar, and laying the hand against his forehead said, in ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... of a Gothic church is the spire, raising its tapering form far above the town or village and forming a prominent landmark, denoting the location of the House of God. Although found occasionally in other styles, the spire is essentially Gothic, and one of ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath
... that my Baltimore friends vaunted not its capabilities in vain. I cannot remember having seen elsewhere so promising a "ducking-point." Imagine a low, marshy peninsula, verging landward into stunted woods, full of irregular water-courses and stagnant pools—tapering off seaward into a mere spit of sand, on which reeds and bent-grass scarcely deign to grow, towards the extreme point, just where the neck is narrowest, are the "blinds"—ten or twelve in number—a long gunshot ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... differentiated, thus affording individual preference an infinitely greater scope. The stamp of sex is no longer confined to the pelvis and the chest, but is impressed on every part of the body. The women's feet become smaller and more daintily shaped than the men's, the limbs more rounded and tapering and less muscular, the waist narrower, the neck longer, the skin smoother, softer, and less hairy, the hands more comely, with more slender fingers, the skeleton more delicate, the stature lower, the steps shorter, the gait more graceful, the features more delicately ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... had seen everything he would look into her eyes and say, "Well?" It would be all so like a wonderful story, a day of magic!... Martin Cosgrave sprang from the bench and went to the edge of the platform, staring down the long level road, with its two rails tapering almost together in the distance. Not a sign of a train. Would it never come in? Had anything happened the boat? He walked up and down with energy, holding the lapel of his coat, saying to himself, "I ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... peeped in the gardens; the first broods of the year's ducklings launched forth, like heartstrong adventurers, into the shallows by the cottage walls. In the sunny glades the big, fleshy buds of the chestnut and the light-green, tapering sprouts of the sycamore expanded under the influence of increasing warmth. Finches and sparrows, on the lookout for flies, hovered above the ankle-deep drifts of leaf-mould in the lane below the trees, or crossed and re-crossed between the ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... part in the plan of the universe, flower and insect added its mite to the life and the loveliness of the summer. From the sunshine and the soil-water the long leaves manufactured food for the growth of the plant. Prettily notched, daintily tapering, and arranged in star-like whorls about the stem, they enhanced the beauty of the flowers above them and attracted the observer to the exquisite order governing their growth. When the leaves were arranged in whorls of four, the floral spires were quadruple, ...
— Some Summer Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... belong to the peasant class: of that she felt assured. The shrunken, tapering hand had never worked at peasant's work. The profile turned towards her was delicate to effeminacy. The man's clothes were shabby and old-fashioned, but they were a gentleman's garments, the cloth of a finer ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... world should stand to him for a symbol, as it were, of the easeful and luxurious side of a life dedicated to art—of a world-wide fame; the society of princes, kings; the gloss of velvet; the dull glow of gold.—And again, tapering vistas opened up, through which he could peer into the future, happy in the knowledge, that he stood firm in a present which made all things possible to a holy zeal, to ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... his chair and hid a yawn behind tapering pink finger-nails. "'Slife, you had a cursed run of the ivories to-night, Kenn! When are you for your revenge? Shall we say to-morrow? Egad, I'm ready to sleep round the clock. Who'll take a seat in my ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... powdered and boiled in water, and should entirely evaporate on a piece of glass when heated, leaving no stain. This can only be accomplished practically by distillation. The crude article was melted and poured into upright, thick wooden boxes five feet high and ten inches square at the bottom, tapering upwards; when cold the earthy matters would be found in the lower portion by subsidence, leaving about three feet apparently pure. This was broken off and placed into two kettles of suitable form and dimensions, having furnaces; the ...
— History of the Confederate Powder Works • Geo. W. Rains
... which is essential,) and re-dissolve the dry mass in as little water as possible: next take an instrument which is used by chemists for dropping liquids, known by the name of a separating funnel, having a pear-shaped body, tapering to a fine sharp point, and a neck capable of being stopped with the finger or a cork, which may contain a liquid once or more; fill it with the liquid about one-quarter part, and the other three parts must be filled with the very ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... unbelievable, not yet to be credited by his jarred brain. How incredibly blind he had been! What an idiot of sorts! Why, the marks of sex sat on her beyond any possibility of doubt. Every line of the slim, lissom figure, every curve of the soft, undulating body, the sweep of rounded arm, of tapering waist-line, of well-turned ankle, contributed evidence of what it were folly to ask further proof. How could he have ever seen those lovely, soft-lashed eyes and the delicate little hands without conviction coming home to him? And how could he ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... at losing her lover, yet not so sad as she would have been had she really given, him her whole heart unconstrainedly; she shed a few tears as the vessel left the quay, then turning homewards she mentally counted the weeks which were to elapse ere she should again see the tapering masts of the "Glenalpine." She made her preparations for her wedding methodically and without excitement, and, following her suitor's instructions, bought furniture according to her taste for the little cottage he had rented in anticipation ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... to me is the finest mass of form and color to be seen in our American woods. As I had a commission from an artist to procure a spray of these blooms for her, I at once began to search the tree-top with my eyes. The bole, or stem, rose sixty feet, tapering but slightly, to where some heavy and gnarled limbs put forth, their extremities lost in masses of peculiarly dark, rich foliage. At first I could distinguish no flowers, but at length here and there a suppressed glow of orange shot with a redder tinge ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... sixteen feet long, made in two pieces, neatly spliced together in the middle, and all painted a smooth, glistening, hopeful green. The line that hung from the tip of it was also green, but of a paler, more transparent colour, quite thick and stiff where it left the rod, but tapering down towards the end, as if it were twisted of strands of horse-hair, reduced in number, until, at the hook, there were but two hairs. And the hook—there was no disguise about that—it was an unabashed bait-hook, ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... tiled roofs of buildings. Farther still were the walls of a great town, huge earthworks crowned with plastered fortifications, and a gate, with a curious roof to it, running out at each end into horns carved of wood. At some distance, out of a grove to the right, rose a round tapering tower of mouldering brickwork. The rest of the nearer country seemed laid out in low plantations of some green-leaved shrub, with rice-fields interspersed ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... then there have been assaults timorous and assaults head-long—by Bierce, by Dreiser, by Phillips, by Fuller—by Mary MacLanes and by Upton Sinclairs—by ploughboy poets from the Middle West and by jitney geniuses in Greenwich Village—assaults gradually tapering off to a mere sophomoric brashness and deviltry. And all of them like snow-ballings of Verdun. All of them petered out and ineffectual. The normal, the typical American book of today is as fully a remouthing of old husks as the normal book of Griswold's day. The whole ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... not only in her eyes, which were of uncertain hue, veiled or laughing like the sky of her Paris, but in her voice, in the folds of her dress, in everything, even to the long curl that shaded her straight, graceful statue-like neck and attracted you by its tapering shaded point, deftly curled over a ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... allowed for in the building of dams. Nay, for my own part, I would venture to affirm that not only metre but even rhyme itself was not without suggestion in outward nature. Look at the pine, how its branches, balancing each other, ray out from the tapering stem in stanza after stanza, how spray answers to spray in order, strophe, and antistrophe, till the perfect tree stands an embodied ode, Nature's triumphant vindication of proportion, number, and harmony. Who can doubt the innate ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... became occupied with Kate's beauty. He thought he had never seen her so bewitching or in such good spirits. From his six feet and an inch of vantage his eyes followed her sloping shoulders and tapering arms and rested on her laughing, happy face—rose-colored in the soft light of the candles—a film of lace looped at her elbows, her wonderful hair caught in a coil at the back: not the prevailing fashion but one most becoming to her. What had not this admixture of Scotch ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... not more species of bananas native to Queensland, and they form a conspicuous feature of the jungle. With remarkable rapidity one of the species shoots up a ruddy symmetrical, slightly tapering stem—smooth and polished where the old leaf-sheaths have been shed—to a height of 20 and 30 feet, producing leaves 15 feet long and 2 feet broad, small and crude flowers, and bunches of dwarf fruit containing little but ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... seamed with lines by the inward conflict which forever raged in his soul. His chin was pointed but firm, and his lips were set; around his mouth were marked the tiny, almost imperceptible lines which mean cruelty. His nose was aquiline, his ears large at the top, tapering almost to a point at the lobe, and his forehead unusually high and broad. His hair was soft, and his skin, although dark, suffered ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... the once "Emperor of the Mexicans" holding a large crucifix, and several of the boy soldiers who executed them crowded eagerly into the corners of the picture. More impressive to the incredulous is the plain, tapering, wooden coffin in which the chief body was placed, the bottom half covered with faded blood and on one of the sides the plain, dull-red imprint of a hand, as if the corpse had made some post-mortem effort to rise from the grave. The portrait of the transplanted scion of Austria ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... sergeant came to tell him that firing was to be heard behind a hill in face of the camp. He mounted a horse and rode up the slope, to find the company firing on a line of Zulus eight hundred paces away to their front. This line was about a thousand yards long, and shaped like a horn, tapering towards the point. It advanced slowly, taking shelter with great skill behind rocks, and opened a quite ineffective fire on the soldiers. Meanwhile the two guns were shelling the Zulu centre with great ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... made by the small garden spider, and the size of this is perfectly evident (Fig. 7). You now see a quartz fiber far finer than this, or, rather, you see a diffraction phenomenon, for no true image is formed at all; but even this is a conspicuous object in comparison with the tapering ends, which it is absolutely impossible to trace in a microscope. The next two photographs, taken by Mr. Nelson, whose skill and resources are so famous, represent the extreme end of a tail of quartz, and, though the scale is a great deal larger than that used in the other ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various
... country is not particularly interesting. Dom and date palms are the principal trees, the latter having a single tapering stem, the former dividing into branches. The sycamore (Ficus sycamorus) is also tolerably common, as are several species of acacia. The acacia seyal, which furnishes the gum arable of commerce, is "a gnarled and thorny tree, somewhat like a solitary hawthorn ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... edifice indeed—over a hundred stories high, rising in sweeping setbacks to a point where its tapering top was lost in the shimmering noonday sky. It was, Alan knew, the ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... satyr-like leg of the table, till they reached the floor, extending elastically, and strangely enlarging in all proportions as they approached the ground, where the feet and buckles were those of a well-shaped, full grown man, and the figure tapering upward until it dwindled to its original fairy dimensions at the top, like an object seen in ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... tapering and well-kept, though somewhat too thin, Mme. de Bargeton amiably pointed to a seat by her side, M. du Chatelet ensconced himself in an easy-chair, and Lucien then became aware that there was no ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... objection to going farther out, but neither had they any object in doing so, since the fish-life on which they fed as they journeyed was the more abundant where the sea began to shoal. With their slim, sleek, rounded bodies, thickest at the fore flippers and tapering finely to tail and muzzle, each a lithe and close-knit structure of muscle and nerve-energy, they could swim with astounding speed; and therefore, although there was no hurry whatever, they went along at the ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... been splintered by a blow from a tomahawk, so that in no respect at all did it resemble that useful and ornamental organ. There was an enormous breadth, too, between the eyes, or rather temples, the face tapering down to the chin so rapidly that the contour from the front suggested the ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)
... all!" and smiling wanly she rose to return to the house. When they reached his boat, Falkner took her hand,—a hand with finely tapering fingers, broad in the palm and oval,—a woman's hand, firm to hold, gentle to caress. The fingers tightened about his slowly. He looked into the blue eyes; they were dry and shining. And in those shining ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... me, as I noticed its broad flat head, shaped something like an old-fashioned pointed shovel, with the neck quite small behind, but rapidly increasing till the reptile was fully, as Morgan said, thick as his wrist; and then slowly tapering away for a time before rapidly running down to where I could see five curious-looking rings at the end of ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... and well-thewed lad for his age. His muscle fiber had drawn strength from the ax and the log-pole, but as yet it had not become heavy with decades of hard labor. He still stood slender and gracefully tapering from shoulders to waist and just now there was something trance-like in his earnestness which made wild prophecies seem almost inspired. The hard-headed father eyed ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... in us still, for the arterial and nervous systems are trees, the roots of one in the heart, of the other in the brain. Has not our body its trunk, bearing aloft the head, like a flower: a cup to hold the precious juices of the brain? Has not that trunk its tapering limbs which ramify into hands and feet, and these into fingers and toes, after the manner of the twigs and branches ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... contrast broke upon my view. Half encircled by a bend of the river, a beautiful city lay glittering in the fresh morning sun; its bright new dwellings set in cool green gardens ranging up around a stately dome-shaped hill which was crowned by a noble marble edifice whose high tapering spire was radiant with white and gold. The city appeared to cover several miles; and beyond it, in the background, spread a fair rolling country, checkered by symmetrical lines of fruitful husbandry. The unmistakable ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... the edges of the sea, I often come on a girl with her petticoats tucked up round her, standing in a pool left by the tide and washing her flannels among the sea-anemones and crabs. Their red bodices and white tapering legs make them as beautiful as tropical sea-birds, as they stand in a frame of seaweeds against the brink of the Atlantic. Michael, however, is a little uneasy when they are in sight, and I cannot pause to watch them. This habit of using the sea water for washing causes a good ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... or the broad broken charcoal line (see illustration, page II.), as with the fine pen stroke (see illustration, page III.), the delicate silver-point (see illustration, page IV.), or the supple and tapering stroke produced by the camel's hair brush (see illustration, page V.). But when one comes to broad washes, large masses of light and shade, the expression of atmosphere, of bloom, of light, he is wanting in proportion ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... after his return, he was seated, disconsolate, gluing garnets and carbuncles on to a broad tapering bit of lambskin, when Ucatella came to him and said, ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... while I am a manufactory of gunpowder in this quiet old-world Sabbath circle of dear good souls, with their stereotyped interjections, and orchestra of enthusiasms; their tapering delicacies: the rejoicing they have in their common agreement on all created things. To them it is restful. It spurs me to fly from rooms and chairs and beds and houses. I sleep hardly a couple of hours. Then ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... air, her chin propped on her hand, that hand never extended to any man, that no one had ever grasped—for I had only grasped her shoulder once—that generous, fine, somewhat masculine hand. I knew well the peculiarly efficient shape—broad at the base, tapering at the fingers—of that hand, for which there was nothing in the world to lay hold of. ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... which a gaunt raven flew and croaked ominously, and a little beyond rose the various buttes, mauve and terra-cotta colored, from whose sides and at whose bases projected the petrified trees. There lay the giant trees, straight and tapering—no branching as in our trees of to-day. The trunks are often flattened, as though they had been under great pressure, often the very bark seemed to be on them (though it was petrified bark), and on some we saw marks of insect tracery like those made by the borers of to-day. Some of the trunks ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... porcelain or ivory. It was small and soft, a mere featherweight, a puff-ball of a hand—not quick and thrilling, not a speaking hand, but one to be fondled and dressed in rings, and to leave a rosy blur in the brain. The fingers were short and tapering, dimpled at the base, with nails as smooth as rose-leaves. Ralph lifted them one by one, like a child playing with piano-keys, but they were inelastic and did not spring back far—only far enough to show ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... 430 of this Journal, page 207, there is some mention of the patented rolling process for tapering bar-iron by machinery. This important invention is not of American origin, as persons unacquainted with the facts might imagine: it was first practised at the Mersey Steel and Iron Company's works ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... Gorgeous processions, songs of birds, Sunrise that fullest feeds and freshens most the soul, The heaving sea, the waves upon the shore, the musical, strong waves, The woods, the stalwart trees, the slender, tapering trees, The liliput countless armies of the grass, The heat, the showers, the measureless pasturages, The scenery of the snows, the winds' free orchestra, The stretching light-hung roof of clouds, the clear cerulean and the silvery fringes, The high-dilating ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... and drive My blood from hands and face back to the heart. Cry over ridges and down tapering coombs, Carry the flying dapple of the clouds Over the grass, over the soft-grained plough, Stroke with ungentle hand the hill's rough hair Against its usual set. Snatch at the reins in my dead hands and push me Out of my saddle, blow my labouring pony Across the track. You ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... look down upon the streak of frothing water far below. The gorge was spanned by the usual Western trestle bridge, an openwork fabric of timber just wide enough to carry the single track rising out of the chasm on tapering piers that looked ethereally fragile in that wilderness of towering trees and tremendous slopes of rock. The chunk of axes and ringing of hammers jarred through the roar of the stream, and he could see men clinging in mid-air to little stages slung about the piers, ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... from the tree were six or eight inches long, fat in the middle, and tapering at both ends. The skin was a pale chartreuse ...
— Cum Grano Salis • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the proud, patrician face was pure as some bending lily frozen on its graceful, rounded stem: and the tapering fingers with daintily curved, polished nails would have suited better the lace and velvet of royal robes than the rough home-spun sleeves folded back ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... celestial Rishis. Possessed of every article of enjoyment, and endued with great energy, he blazes with the effulgence of the midday sun. Sportive damsels of the most delicate features and endued with splendour of complexion, having deep bosoms, tapering thighs and full and round hips, decked with celestial ornaments, gladden him with their company while he rides on a delightful and excellent car possessed of the effulgence of the sun and equipped with every article of enjoyment, for thousands and thousands of Kalpas. That man who having ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... University she had visited court rooms, jails and reformatories. Criminals were not new to her. But these men lacked utterly the markings of the average city criminal. Their eyes lacked the keen alertness, their fingers the slim tapering points of the professional crook. Suddenly, as she pondered, there came to her mind a paragraph from one of her text-books ...
— Triple Spies • Roy J. Snell
... "Little, tapering fingers," he said, "spoiled by work. They could be made very white, very soft and beautiful. Have you ever considered what a truly fascinating thing a girl's ...
— Sue, A Little Heroine • L. T. Meade
... unless in cases where the cap is dark, then the stem of those plants are apt to be of the same color, tapering upward as in the specimen (Fig. 11); stuffed, then hollow, inclined to ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... a gull, new painted, new washed, cargoed and stoked, the Roumania reared three red smoke-stacks, and sat proudly with the gang-plank flung out from her mighty hip and her nose tapering toward the blue harbor ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... fourth of an inch before breaking. The diameter decreases rapidly both at the top and bottom, but is maintained throughout the greater portion of the length with a fair degree of regularity. The slender tapering point in which the hairs terminate is nearly black: but, owing to its fineness as compared with the main trunk, the quantity of blackness is not sufficient to affect greatly the general color. The number of hairs growing upon a square inch is about ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... some other plan. As good luck would have it, I now thought of the brass buttons on my coat. Some of these I quickly tore off. Then I hacked my knife with a sharp flint stone until I had made a saw of it, and with this saw I cut a little groove along the tapering point of the ivory harpoon-head; and into this groove, which was about a quarter of an inch deep, I set the buttons, which I had squared with the knife, and then wedged them firmly. I had now only to grind all these bits of brass down even, ...
— Cast Away in the Cold - An Old Man's Story of a Young Man's Adventures, as Related by Captain John Hardy, Mariner • Isaac I. Hayes
... in December, with her entire fortune—a modest L300 in gold, and life promised to be all labdanum. Disliking the houses in Damascus itself, the Burtons took one in the suburb El Salahiyyah; and here for two years they lived among white domes and tapering minarets, palms and apricot trees. Midmost the court, with its orange and lemon trees, fell all day the cool waters of a fountain. The principal apartments were the reception room, furnished with rich Eastern webs, and a large dining ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... appearance of that hand. It was one of unusual beauty—the sort of hand that Titian or Vandyke loved to draw: long, finely-shaped, full of quiet power, and fuller, perhaps, of a subtle sort of refinement, which seems to express itself in the form of tapering fingers with filbert nails and a well-turned wrist. It was not the hand of a working-man, not even of a skilled artizan, whose hand is often delicately sensitive: it was a gentleman's hand, and as such it piqued Percival's curiosity. But Mackay was of a reserved disposition, ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... preoccupied Paul, she leaned across the cloth, scarcely whiter than her pale face, and gazed at him with wonder—was it more than that? With a slight movement of her tapering hand she dismissed the liveried servant stationed behind her, and stayed on, with food and wine untouched. And Paul knew ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... which the boy was especially proud: "To my friend, Mr. Wilbur Cowan, from his friend, Eddie—Spike—Brennon, 133 lbs. ringside." It was a spirited likeness of the hero, though taken some years before, when he was in the prime of a ring career now, alas, tapering ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... narrow wont: her embroidery had slipped to the floor, as she rose, and she was treading it under her feet—bruising and grinding it passionately, as if it were some safe, unnoticed outlet to the fear and anger that might smother her. She had flung out her hands desperately, the dainty tapering fingers working with strenuous, nervous motions—but now they were tightly clenched in the rose-leaf palms, and she stood bracing herself, like a statue of defiance. There was an added pallor on the beautiful ivory face—so still she was she scarcely seemed to breathe—yet ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... and with the quick skill of woman, rolled down the stocking on her right leg. Modestly daring, she stretched out her foot and slightly lifted her dress. On the outer side of the tapering limb was an ugly bruise, ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... the lake, sprinkled with lights of farms and villages. As the keen evening air stole down from forest and mountain to greet them, the vehicle turned into the quiet village street. Minks saw the big humped shoulders of La Citadelle, the tapering church spire, the trees in the orchard of the Pension. Cudrefin, smoking a cigar at the door of his grocery shop, recognised them and waved his hand. A moment later Gygi lifted his peaked hat and called 'bon soir, bonne nuit,' just ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood |
