"Vapor" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... frolicked about our dwelling I used to stop suddenly, and with a fearful awe watch the smoking of the unknown fires. While the vapor was visible I was afraid to go very far from our wigwam unless I went ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... the gold, and presently saw it enveloped in a most beautiful violet light. This grew more intense, until, at times, it was blinding, while, at the same moment, the interior of the tube seemed to have become charged with a luminous vapor of a ...
— The Moon Metal • Garrett P. Serviss
... drum. The air was calm, and the sky serene, except a few clouds, such as are frequently observed. The noise proceeded from a small cloud which had a rectangular form, and appeared motionless all the time that the phenomenon lasted. The vapor of which it was composed was projected in all directions at the successive explosions. The cloud seemed about half a league to the northeast of the town of L'Aigle, and must have been at a great elevation in the atmosphere, for the inhabitants of two hamlets, a league distant ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... the soul cradles and soothes me as though I were an Indian yoghi, and everything, even my own life, becomes to me smoke, shadow, vapor, and illusion. I hold so lightly to all phenomena that they end by passing over me like gleams over a landscape, and are gone without leaving any impression. Thought is a kind of opium; it can intoxicate us, while still broad awake; it can make ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... evil genii whom the great king confined in bottles and cast into the sea. In that collection of chronicles which the Feringhis style the Arabian Nights, you have read of the fisherman who found a bottle in his net and opened it to see a quantity of dark vapor issue forth, which, assuming great proportions, presently took form, coalesced into the gigantic figure of a terrible genii, who announced to his terrified liberator that during his captivity, he had sworn to kill whomsoever ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... to the Greek chop-house with the dingy green walls, the smoked ceiling, the glass partition that separated the guests from a kitchen lined with shining copper pans, where a cook in a white paper cap wafted himself about in clouds of vapor, lit by occasional flashes of light and ever curling flames, like a soul expiating its sins in a prescribed but savory purgatory. He sat in his chosen seat, ignored his neighbors with his customary nonchalance, and returned to his room, as if nothing were about to happen. But he ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... our chairs and commenced our final ascent, about one quarter of a mile, over broken pieces of lava. Then we arrived at the halting-point and gazed on the near crater, inhaling the sulphurous fumes, hearing the rumble, and seeing the clouds of vapor as they issued forth, with a mixture of bright yellow sulphur. The volcano is now inactive, the last eruption having taken place in 1772, when forty villages were destroyed. At this time the side of the crater towards us was broken. It ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... In short, it was a real Colorado day, and these young people were off on a real Colorado picnic. How exceptionally characteristic the occasion might prove to be, no one suspected, simply because no one payed sufficient heed to a shred of gray vapor that hovered on the brow of the Peak. Amy Lovejoy, to be sure, remarked that there would be wind before night, and another old resident driving by, waved his hat toward the Peak, and cried, "Look out for hurricanes!" But no one was ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... The vapor was of a light blue, just above the tree-top's, and it rose only a few feet more, when it dissolved in the clear atmosphere. But it showed that a camp-fire was burning beneath, though it may have been kindled many hours before, and those ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... of any organ, unless it was the spleen, which was not then remarkably enlarged. I was myself disposed to attribute his symptoms to the spleen, and possibly to the want of animal food; but he himself attributes its commencement, if not its continuance, to the inhalation of the vapor of arseniuretted and sulphuretted hydrogen gases, to which he was subjected during some chemical experiments on the ores of cobalt, to which he has been for a long time turning his attention; a circumstance which I had not ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... phenomenon. In the late afternoon of each day, a hot steam would collect over the face of the river, then slowly rise, and floating over the length and breadth of this wretched hamlet of Ehrenberg, descend upon and envelop us. Thus we wilted and perspired, and had one part of the vapor bath without its bracing concomitant of the cool shower. In a half hour it was gone, but always left me prostrate; then Jack gave me milk punch, if milk was at hand, or sherry and egg, or something to bring me up to normal again. We got to dread the steam so; it was the climax ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... on their journey, October 11, the party stopped to trade with the Indians, their stock of provisions being low. They were able to purchase a quantity of salmon and seven dogs. They saw here a novel kind of vapor bath which is thus described ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... navigating the river she had the most terrific appearance when she was making her passage. The first steam-boats used dry pine for fuel, which sends forth a column of ignited vapor many feet above the flue and whenever the fire is stirred a galaxy of sparks fly off, and in the night have a very beautiful and brilliant appearance. This uncommon light first attracted the attention of the crews of other vessels. ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... forgetting her cunning, Madame Clemenceau threw off the veil and showed herself the direct offspring of the infernal regions. Her voice sounded like the hiss of fiery serpents, and her frame quivered as if she stood in a current of consuming vapor. Her eyes, too, wore that painful expression of depth of agony as though her disappointment were excruciating. With his pardon, love, protection and fortune, she might have defied Von Sendlingen and his league, but, alone, she was a stormy petrel flapping its insignificant pinions in the ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... it were like a wind in the desert, crying aloud: "Araxes! Araxes!" and wailing past, sank with a profound echo into the deep recesses of the vast Egyptian tomb. Moonlight and the Hour wove their own mystery; the mystery of a Shadow and a Shape that flitted out like a thin vapor from the very portals of Death's ancient temple, and drifting forward a few paces resolved itself into the visionary fairness of a Woman's form—a Woman whose dark hair fell about her heavily, like the black ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... nodded, and opened his mouth to speak, when the front door swung wide and a man appeared in the light. A rush of frost, turned to vapor by the heat of the room, swirled about him to his knees and poured on across the floor, growing thinner and thinner, and perishing a dozen feet from the stove. Taking the wisp broom from its nail inside the door, the newcomer brushed the snow from his moccasins and high German socks. He would ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... the mysterious in man; two authors who, a half century apart, sail the same seas and come home to write not so much of them as what they dream when they remember their experiences. Each man, as he writes, transcends the sea, sublimates it into a vapor of pure imagination, in which he clothes his idea of man, and so doing gives us not merely great literature, but sea narrative ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... down a sixty-foot drop in a spot of great beauty. Our third camp was on the Induruga River, in a beautiful but malarious spot; our fifth was on the Thika Thika River, where it was so cold in the morning that the vapor of our breathing was visible; and our sixth on a wind-blown hill where a whirlwind blew down our mess tent and scattered the cook's fire until the whole grass veldt was in furious flames. It took a hundred men an hour to put ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... same moment, the medium drew a vapor pistol from her dress, and, as the ghost of Long Sin leaped at Elaine, Savetsky darted forward and shot a stream of vapor full in ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... best cultivated lands. (* Steam-boats are established from the Havannah to Matanzas, and from the Havannah to Mariel. The government granted to Don Juan O'Farrill (March 24th, 1819) a privilege on the barcos de vapor.) The roads are nowhere worse in the rainy season than in this part of the island, where the soil is of friable limestone, little fitted for the construction of solid roads. The transport of sugar from Guines to the Havannah, a distance of twelve ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... the Marchioness were to fail to make her appearance! They could not bear to think of this, and amused themselves for a little while by blowing upon the cold panes and writing their names and the Marchioness' in the vapor. But, at last—oh, at last, there she was! The fingers began to talk almost before they knew it. In some respects it proved to be a remarkable conversation, for it touched upon many and various topics, ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... then there came a vague vibration in the earth and air, quickly changing into a violent pulsation, and an oncoming rush that caused me to start back, as though it had a force to draw me down. When such vapor as rose to my height from this rapid train had passed me, and was skimming away over the landscape, I looked down again, and saw him refurling the flag he had shown while the ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... at the shortness of human life, which is compared to a hand's breadth or to the vapor, which appears in the morning is seen but a little while and then vanishes away to be seen no more; and thinking that the pioneers stopped but so short a time to enjoy the fruits of their toil and the labor of their hands, I would exclaim again in language similar to that of the good man of old, ...
— The Bark Covered House • William Nowlin
... was a silvery globe, faintly luminous in the moonlight. From its top rose a faint cloud of vapor which circled around the globe and descended toward the earth. The globe hovered like a giant humming bird above the cabin and Carnes barely stifled an exclamation. The door of the cabin opened and Major Trowbridge, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... lo! from high Hymettus to the plain, The queen of night asserts her silent reign. No murky vapor, herald of the storm, Hides her fair face, nor girds her glowing form. With cornice glimmering as the moonbeams play, Where the white column greets her grateful ray, And, bright around with quivering beams beset, Her emblem sparkles ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... upon them from the sea. The land-breeze had been holding back the wall of vapor, damming it in a dun bank to southward. The breeze had let go. The fog had ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... short,—stretching out their necks and sniffing the air, their hairy sides heaving with the strain of trotting against the blast, and the smoke of their breath steaming upwards in the frosty air like white vapor. The way lay now through a narrow defile bordered with tall pines,—and as the terrified animals, recovering, shook the tinkling bells on their harness, and once more resumed their journey, the road was comparatively sheltered, and the wind ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... doses, repeated every two hours. When the cough is dry and hard, with no expectoration, it arises from irritation of some of the branches of the pneumogastric nerve, which this remedy will relieve. It may, however, be aided by inhaling the hot vapor of vinegar and water, or vapor from a decoction of hops, to which vinegar ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... public and private, abroad and in our bosom, to hope that we shall end this controversy without the sharpest, the sharpest conflicts; to flatter ourselves that popular resolves, popular harangues, popular acclamations, and popular vapor will vanquish our foes. Let us consider the issue. Let us look to the end. Let us weigh and consider before we advance to those measures which must bring on the most trying and terrific struggle this ...
— Tea Leaves • Various
... steam to be condensed, and over which the water is allowed to fall in a continuous rain. By this arrangement there is evaporated from the outside of the condenser a weight of water which goes away in a cloud of vapor, and is nearly equal to that which is condensed, and is returned as feed into the boiler. The same water is pumped up and used outside the condenser, over and over, needing no more to supply the waste than would be needed as ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... prevent the rise of the water. But we are also told that "God made a wind to pass over the earth." All that the wind could do, however, would be to convey to the atmosphere the moisture it took up in vapor; and this could not have lowered the water a yard. The highest mountain, Kunchinginga, is more than twenty-eight thousand feet high; the flood prevailed one hundred and fifty days, and abated two hundred ...
— The Deluge in the Light of Modern Science - A Discourse • William Denton
... fourth cause of loss arises from the worm of the still. However careful in keeping the surrounding water cool, there is always one portion of vapor not condensed. This is made more sensible in the winter, when the cold of the atmosphere makes every vapor visible; upon examination, it will be seen that the running stream of liquor is surrounded with it. In my description ...
— The Art of Making Whiskey • Anthony Boucherie
... thick as pea soup, as George called out a little later. First the outlines of the shore were blotted out as though by an impenetrable curtain. Then even the boats, close as they were, began to go, until it was no longer possible to distinguish them from the sea of gray vapor around. ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel
... whatever causes, or the eclampsia from uraemic poisoning, are often readily controlled when immersed in hot water or given a hot vapor bath or corn sweat. If the convulsions of children are accompanied by a high temperature, put them into water of 100 deg. and then gradually cool it down to 68 deg. or 70 deg., and then keep them in a room of the same temperature, with little ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various
... puffing vigorously, feeling with relief his blood resume its usual rate of circulation. His head seemed to clear of a thick vapor. The startling recollection of the anger in his fiancee's eyes was fading rapidly from his mind. Now he only saw her, blushing, recoiling, fleeing—he laughed out a little, this time not angrily, but with relish. "Ain't she the ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... Rudimental palms and pines of mushroom growth stood there motionless, sending forth no soft and soul-like murmurs into the lurid reek; for as yet leaves and flowers and blue skies and pure breezes were not,—nothing but whiffs of mephitic and lethal vapor ascending, as from a vast charcoal brazier. No lark or linnet or redbreast or mocking-bird could live, much less warble, in those carbonic times. The world, like a Mississippi steamer, was coaling, with an eye to the needs of its future ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... speaking. The effect of that undiminished voice, calm, slow, resonant, issuing from that disintegrating vapor, stirred the hair on the captive ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... crowd followed the gesture of the Egyptian, and beheld with dismay a vast vapor shooting from the summit of Vesuvius in the form of a gigantic pine-tree; the trunk, blackness—the branches fire!—a fire that shifted and wavered in its hues with every moment, now fiercely luminous, now of a ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... seen. I flew around and over and under them, watching at close hand the play of light and shade over their great, billowing folds. Sometimes I skirted them so closely that the current of air from my propeller raveled out fragments of shining vapor, which streamed into the clear spaces like wisps of filmy silk. I knew that I ought to be savoring this experience, but for some reason I couldn't. One usually pays for a fine mood by a sudden and unaccountable ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... others for us, have examined various objects which yielded under the given circumstances a dark spot with the given property, and found that they possessed the properties connoted by the word arsenic; they were metallic, volatile, their vapor had a smell of garlic, and so forth. Next, we, or others for us, have examined various specimens which possessed this metallic and volatile character, whose vapor had this smell, etc., and have invariably found that they were poisonous. The first observation we judge that we may extend to all substances ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... that the mist was gradually growing lighter; saw water visible fifty feet from the island. Presently a breeze sprang into being, the most welcome wind Roger had ever known. Before it the fog thinned, grew filmy, dispersed in shreds of trailing vapor. Noirmont Point and St. Aubin's village came gradually into distinct view, and with them a man walking ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... a smaller room, enclosed by heavy quartz. Inside that room was the great bank of mercury-vapor rectifiers. From them lashed a blue-green glare that splashed against his face and shoulders, painting him in angry, garish color. The glass guarded him from the terrific blast of ultra-violet light that flared from the pool of shimmering molten ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... you have access to a room where gasoline is stored, remember that gas vapor accumulating in a closed room will explode after a time if you leave a candle burning in the room. A good deal of evaporation, however, must occur from the gasoline tins into the air of the room. If removal of the tops of the tins does not expose enough gasoline ...
— Simple Sabotage Field Manual • Strategic Services
... course of your pilgrimage. Aim your deeds by my honorable endeavors, and show yourselves scions worthy of so flourishing a tree, lest, as the birds Halcyones, which exceed in whiteness, I hatch young ones that surpass in blackness. Climb not, my sons: aspiring pride is a vapor that ascendeth high, but soon turneth to smoke; they which stare at the stars stumble upon stones, and such as gaze at the sun (unless they be eagle-eyed) fall blind. Soar not with the hobby,[1] lest you fall with ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... terribly realistic, too, with the vast volumes of smoke rising up in billows, and here and there what seemed to be a red tongue of fire shooting through the appalling waves of black vapor. ...
— The Boy Scouts with the Motion Picture Players • Robert Shaler
... "The spectroscope has plainly shown that there's water vapor in what little air there is. Must be precious little. If the air was as humid as the earth's, we couldn't see the surface ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... were stealing out through the trees, changing shape every instant, but always advancing: now presenting the appearance of an aligned regiment of huge, shadowy men, now nothing but a wall of semi-solid vapor. And still, with eyeballs straining in their sockets, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... from the 'Ju' kiln, as large as a bushel measure. In it was placed, till it was quite full, a bunch of white chrysanthemums, in appearance like crystal balls. In the middle of the west wall, was suspended a large picture representing vapor and rain; the handiwork of Mi Nang-yang. On the left and right of this picture was hung a pair of antithetical scrolls—the autograph of Yen L. The lines ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... narrow pass high up in the sierra, the little Jaime would shout with joy as he beheld, lying at his feet, the valley of Soller, the Garden of Hesperrides of the island. The mountains, dark with their pine trees, and dotted with little white houses, lifted their crests bound about in turbans of vapor. Below, surrounding the village and stretching down the valley as far as the sea, were orange orchards. Spring burst over the happy land with an explosion of color and perfume. Wild flowers grew among the rocks; branches ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... inmates of the cottage. The air was mild, balmy, and refreshing; in the east, clouds, which might be likened to the retreating masses of a discomfited army, hung around the horizon in awful and increasing darkness. At a little elevation above the cottage, the thin vapor was still rushing towards the east with amazing velocity; while in the west the sun had broken forth and shed his parting radiance on the scene below, aided by the fullest richness of a clear atmosphere and a freshened herbage. Such moments belong only to the climate of America, ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... vapor veils the sky, And darkens on the dewy slopes; Chill airs on rustling wings flit by, Sad as the sigh o'er buried hopes: I tread the cloistered walk alone, Between the shadow and the light, While from the church tower thronging down ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... gale, and the pinnace pitched heavily; but the sun was now beginning to break through the masses of lurid cloud, and the air was becoming less and less charged with vapor. ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... the room between the assaults of the enraged wind, while from the altar came the responses in a low, Gregorian chant, and through it all the clinking of the censer chains added intermittent notes. Aloft streamed the vapor of the incense, wavering with the air currents, now lost in the deep twilight of the sanctuary, and now faintly revealed by the glow of the candles, perfuming the air ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... a misty morning when Tom and his companion approached the fort. The air was damp with vapor, and the American flag, with its glorious stars and stripes, drooped heavily. The fortress was on the very outskirts of civilization, on an elevated point of land, commanding an extensive prospect on every side. Richly diversified prairies, rarely pressed by the white man's foot, ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... common everyday objects look like UFO's because of some odd quirk in the human mind. A star or planet that has been in the sky every day of the observer's life suddenly "takes off at high speed on a highly erratic flight path." Or a vapor trail from a high-flying jet—seen a hundred times before by the observer—becomes a ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... mountain-range, I think it not out of place to describe its extent and situation, for, as is well known, it encompasses a great part of the earth with its continuous chain. Beginning 53 at the Indian Ocean, where it faces the south it is warm, giving off vapor in the sun; where it lies open to the north it is exposed to chill winds and frost. Then bending back into Syria with a curving turn, it not only sends forth many other streams, but pours from its plenteous breasts into the Vasianensian region the Euphrates and the Tigris, ...
— The Origin and Deeds of the Goths • Jordanes
... from his horse and tore away a bed of green moss through which filaments of blue smoke stole; and deep in the forest mould, spreading like veins in an autumn leaf, fire ran underground, its almost invisible vapor curling up through lichens and the brown carpet ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... general think they must go abroad for vapor-baths; but a very simple one can be made at home. Place strong sticks across a tub of water, at the boiling point, and sit upon them, entirely enveloped in a blanket, feet and all. The steam from the water will be a vapor-bath. ...
— The American Frugal Housewife • Lydia M. Child
... time is! Where are the years that David lived, and where are those which Methuselah passed in this world? their whole duration seems, at this distance, in the words of St. James, 'Even as a vapor that appeareth for a little ...
— Fanny, the Flower-Girl • Selina Bunbury
... the range. A mere thirteen hundred yards! His own missile carried a small atomic warhead. At that range it would present no danger to him. But what if it triggered the enemy warhead? He and the ship would be converted into vapor within microseconds. Even a partial, low-efficiency explosion might leave the ship so weakened that it could not stand the stresses of return through the atmosphere. Firing on the enemy warhead at this range was not much different from playing Russian ...
— Pushbutton War • Joseph P. Martino
... stop? Will she turn aside? Will she espy the dark form in the deep shade of the orange, and, with one piercing scream, wheel and vanish? She draws near. She approaches the jasmine; she raises her arms, the sleeves falling like a vapor down to the shoulders; rises upon tiptoe, and plucks a spray. O Memory! Can it be? Can it be? Is this his quest, or is it lunacy? The ground seems to M. Vignevielle the unsteady sea, and he to stand once more on a deck. And she? As she is now, if she but turn toward the orange, the ...
— Madame Delphine • George W. Cable
... light sort of ethereal fluid, which evaporates easily, and, combined with vapor or moist air, is used for the purpose of portable gas ...
— The Youth's Companion - Volume LII, Number 11, Thursday, March 13, 1879 • Various
... cold bracing winds from the glaciers. Her lips had recovered their fulness, her eyes their brightness; the lid no longer drooped, and the eye itself seemed to swim in that continual and luminous mist which rises like a vapor from the burning heart, and is condensed into tears on the eye, whose fire absorbs these tears, that always rise, and never flow. There was more strength in her attitudes, more pliancy in her movements; her step was light and lively as a child's. Whenever we entered the yard of the house on our ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... with inflammable materials, and stood motionless, with his arms crossed, to watch through the door of the shed the rapidly spreading flame, the soaring smoke, the struggle and mingling of the noiseless wreaths of black vapor from the various combustibles with the ruddy light, the victory of the fire and the leaping flames as ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... land of Russia appears to us when the mists of prehistoric time first begin to lift. Half-formed figures appear, rising, vanishing, showing large through the vapor; stirring, interwoven, endlessly coming and going; a phantasmagoria which it is impossible more than half to understand. At that early date the great Russian plain seems to have been the home of unnumbered tribes of varied race and origin, made ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... asked Grace Harlowe, as they neared the range, pointing to a thin spiral of vapor rising from ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders on the Great American Desert • Jessie Graham Flower
... long and anxiously, but the horizontal streak of vapor gradually faded without bringing the craft into view. The tug had steamed in the opposite direction, or there had been a change of mind and the fires were banked or allowed to ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. He appears to migrate westward daily, and tempts us to follow him. He is the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night of those mountain-ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which were last gilded by his rays. The island of Atlantis, and the islands and gardens of the Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial paradise, appear to have been the Great West of the ancients, enveloped in mystery and poetry. Who has not seen in imagination, when looking into the sunset sky, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... of Indian medical practice, which relied mainly on charms and incantations. It was administered by placing the patient in a tightly closed lodge and pouring water on heated stones, thus producing a dense vapor which induced copious sweating, after which he was ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... fun-loving men and women slid down the toboggan planks, or jumped from the spring boards, while spectators in the gallery enjoyed the aquatic sports. Elegantly appointed bathrooms in the hotel offered at one's pleasure the double spray plunge, vapor, ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... exercise. Unclean diseases cannot be prevalent with them because they often clean their bodies by bathing in wine, and soothe them with aromatic oil, and by the sweat of exercise they diffuse the poisonous vapor which corrupts the blood and the marrow. They do suffer a little from consumption, because they cannot perspire at the breast, but they never have asthma, for the humid nature of which a heavy man is required. They cure hot fevers with cold potations of water, but slight ones with sweet ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells
... on a raw and gusty evening in the month of November, a few years subsequent to our last war with Great Britain, and the cold and vapor-laden winds, which form such a drawback to the coast-clime of New England, were fitfully wailing over the drear and frost-blackened landscape, and the wayfarers, as if keenly alive to the discomforts of all without, were seen everywhere hurrying forward to reach ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... and I have hated them still more since you have shown me with what ease they might acquire universal respect." Further than this I defy any person with whom I was then acquainted, to say I was ever dazzled for an instant with splendor, or that the vapor of the incense I received ever affected my head; that I was less uniform in my manner, less plain in my dress, less easy of access to people of the lowest rank, less familiar with neighbors, or less ready to render service to every person when I had it in my power so to do, without ever once being ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... punch, started from the floor, never reached its mark. Blaine saw a tiny puff of pinkish vapor that spurted from the bosom of that metallic garment. He was coughing and gasping; helpless. Muscles refused to do his bidding. With a moan he dropped into the pilot's seat, knowing that Antazzo's will compelled him. That gas ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... little bug, and will gather in a crowd under big flat stones in damp places. If the stone is suddenly overturned, the bombardiers at once begin a cannonade like the explosion of a grain of gunpowder, and throw out a puff of whitish vapor resembling smoke. The bombardiers of South America, China, and other warm countries, are much larger than those found in England, and the fluid they eject, which causes the tiny explosion, is capable of making a black stain, and leaving ...
— Harper's Young People, July 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... necessarily alter in bulk; and cracks, or open spaces, form in them in all directions. These cracks must be filled up with solid matter, or the rock would eventually become a ruinous heap. So, sometimes by water, sometimes by vapor, sometimes nobody knows how, crystallizable matter is brought from somewhere, and fastens itself in these open spaces, so as to bind the rock together again with crystal cement. A vast quantity of hollows are formed ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... to embark who had intended to go, but the many who were compelled to go contrary to their wishes. The boilers of the Caucasus were under full pressure; a slight smoke issued from its funnel, whilst the end of the escape-pipe and the lids of the valves were crowned with white vapor. It is needless to say that the police kept a close watch over the departure of the Caucasus, and showed themselves pitiless to those travelers who did not satisfactorily ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... considerable amount of warmth to those bodies with which it comes in contact. Thus the products of the combustion of gas (which are principally steam) serve a useful purpose in lighting, by keeping at the ceiling level a certain stratum of heated vapor, which holds up, as it were, the carbonic acid and exhalation from the lungs given off by those using the room. The obvious inference, therefore, is that if we take off these products from the level of the ceiling, we shall take off ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 514, November 7, 1885 • Various
... sounded again; the beam of radiance disappeared as quickly as it had come. In an instant, the blue violet glare of the relux plate had subsided to an angry red. The violent arcing had stopped, and the metal was cooling rapidly. A heavy purplish vapor in the crucible condensed on the walls into black, ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... go through fire and water to get into a theatre which he is told is crammed to the point of suffocation, whereas he won't deign to enter one where he is sure to find a comfortable seat. Now the charm of the CENTRAL PARK GARDEN consists in this: that the visitor can take his vapor bath in the Seventh Avenue cars on his way to the Garden, and can enjoy the sweet consciousness of being jostled and sat upon in the search for amusement, while he is still certain of finding pure air and plenty of room at the ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various
... Worlds wax and wane, suns flame and glow and die; Through shoreless space their scattered ashes float, Unite, cohere, and wax to worlds again, Changing, yet changless—new, but ever old— No atom lost and not one atom gained, Though fire to vapor melt the adamant, Or feldspar fall in drops of summer rain. And in the atoms sleep the germs of life, Myriad and multiform and marvelous, Throughout all vast, immeasurable space, In every grain of dust, in every drop Of water, waiting but the thermal touch. Yea, in the womb of nature slumber ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... in suites of from three to a dozen, according to the extent and splendor of the residence, the atmosphere soon becomes close and characterized by an unpleasant odor, suggesting its diminished vitality; for which reason pastilles are burned, or eau de Cologne reduced to vapor in a heated censer, whenever visits are anticipated. It was a question with me, whether or not the advantage of a thoroughly equable temperature was counterbalanced by the lack of circulation. The physical depression ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... because thereby the theory is excluded, or at least made extremely improbable, that the phenomenon of refraction is to be ascribed to, a ring of vapor surrounding the sun for a great distance. Indeed, such a refraction should cause a deviation in the observed direction, and, in order to produce the displacement of one of the stars under observation itself a slight proximity of the vapor ring should be ...
— The Einstein Theory of Relativity • H.A. Lorentz
... neither man, nor animal, nor earth, nor tree. Then appeared a vast expanse of water on which divine beings moved in brightness. "They said 'earth!' and instantly the earth was created. It came into being like a vapor; mountains rose above the waters like lobsters and were made. Thus was the earth created by the Heart of Heaven." Next came the creation of animals; but the gods were disappointed because the animals could neither tell their names nor ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... claim of wrought renown Which not the North shall care to slur; A Modern lived who sleeps in death, Calm as the marble Ancients are: 'Tis he whose life, though a vapor's wreath, Was charged with the lightning's burning breath— Stonewall, stormer ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... make up for it by a Turkish bath, but cannot get the same results, although it is true he can accomplish a great deal in this way. The great objection to Turkish and Russian bath establishments is to be found in the unsatisfactory ventilation usual in such places. As a rule the Russian or vapor bath is to be preferred to the Turkish, or dry, hot air. Especially if one is not very strong the steam bath is preferable. If one is vigorous, however, and has a strong heart, the dry hot air room will be very effective. Naturally the ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... the whirling figures came back to him: the vapor of dust in the room, the loud voices of men at the bar, trying to be heard above the din of the music and the dancing. There came back to him the memory of a drunken cowboy, nudging the violinist's elbow as he played, and shouting: "Give us Dixie—give us a ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... in itself is a bad conductor. Just so in Prof. Carnelley's experiment: The heated glass vessel will convey heat to the ice only at those points where it touches the ice; at those points at once a formation of vapor takes place, which prevents an intimate contact between the glass and the ice, so that they do not really touch each other, consequently the heat can pass into the ice but slowly, having to work its way through the thin layer ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... had on a crown Wrought of gilded thistledown, And a scarf of velvet vapor, And a raveled-rainbow gown; And his tinsel-tangled hair, Tossed and lost upon the air, With glossier and ...
— Riley Child-Rhymes • James Whitcomb Riley
... Alps descend, jutting like promontories, heaving like islands from the misty breadth below; and here and there are towers half lost in airy azure, and cities dwarfed to blots, and silvery lines where rivers flow, and distant, vapor-drowned, dim crests of Apennines. The city walls above us wave with snapdragons and iris among fig-trees sprouting from the riven stones. There are terraces over-rioted with pergolas of vine, and houses shooting forward into balconies and balustrades, from which a Romeo might launch ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... the sons of Tosti Godwinsson, and Arkill the great Thane, and Hereward himself. Below them were knights, Vikings, captains, great holders from Denmark, and the Prior and inferior officers of Ely minster. And at the bottom of the misty hall, on the other side of the column of blue vapor which went trembling up from the great heap of burning turf amidst, were housecarles, monks, wild men from the Baltic shores, crowded together to hear what was done in that parliament ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... into the cloud layer; floating wisps of gray vapor streamed past the orbiting Cavour. Finally Alan broke through, navigating now on manual, following as best he could Cavour's old computations. He guided the craft into a wide-ranging spiral orbit three thousand feet above the surface of Venus, and adjusted his viewscreens ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... and thinking power!" He caught his wife's arm. "See! see, Sidonie, my dear! See her enhancing in magnitude so fastly approaching!" As he spoke a puff of white vapor lifted from the object and spread out against the blue, the sunbeams turned it to silver and pearl, and a moment later came the far-away, long, wild ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... turret, and a great square tower situated at the other extremity of the same front, commanded a view of the north, and from this side the rock descended perpendicularly, forming an imposing precipice of three hundred feet. When Gilbert's first glance plunged into the abyss where a bluish vapor floated, which the rising sun pierced with its golden arrows, the spectacle transported him. To have a precipice under his window, was a novelty which gave him infinite joy. The precipice was his domain, his property, and ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... to smoke his pipe vehemently, and to send forth short, frequent and angry puffs; but when pleased, he would inhale the smoke slowly and tranquilly, and emit it in light and placid clouds; and sometimes, taking the pipe from his mouth, and letting the fragrant vapor curl about his nose, would gravely nod his head in token of ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... or diminution of the waters. Even the drifts became less, and a vacant sea at last spread before him on which nothing moved. An awful silence impressed him. In the afternoon rain again began to fall on this gray, nebulous expanse, until the whole world seemed made of aqueous vapor. He had but one idea now—the coming of the evening boat, and he would reserve his strength to swim to it. He did not know until later that it could no longer follow the old channel of the river, and passed far beyond ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... at the end of the gun, drip onto the specimen and cause stains which might prove indelible. The second tube contains a small amount of iodine crystals which are vaporized by the heat of the breath, augmented by the warmth of the hand cupped around the tube containing the iodine. This vapor is blown onto the specimen (fig. 420). Glass wool serves to hold the calcium chloride ...
— The Science of Fingerprints - Classification and Uses • Federal Bureau of Investigation
... a breath comes at me from an open window; or if a swirl of wind puts its cold fingers down my neck do I lift my collar. Yet the presence of a thoroughly hard-headed person provokes a sneeze. There is a chilly vapor off him—a swampish miasma—that puts me in a snuffling state, beyond poultice and mustard footbaths. No matter how I huddle to the fire, my thoughts will congeal and my purpose cramp and stiffen. My conceit too will ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... expanding and cracking the rocks by its heat, helps in another way to make soils. It warms the water that has been grinding soil on the beach or along the river banks and causes some of it to evaporate. This vapor rises, forms a cloud and floats away in the air. By and by the vapor forms into rain drops which may fall on the top of some mountain. These rain drops may wash loosened particles from the surface or crevices of exposed rocks. These drops are joined by others until, by and by, they ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich
... a sight such as you may possibly not have an opportunity of again witnessing." In half an hour we were within the church-walls. The place was already thronged, and the air close almost to suffocation. Never can one forget that peculiar heat, the sort of indescribable vapor, that arose, and the perspiration that streamed down the faces of all present, each of whom, from the oldest to the youngest, carried a lighted candle. After many vigorous efforts, and occasional collisions with the flaring tapers, the wax or tallow dropping at intervals upon our cloaks, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... two feet high and four feet square, mounted on big wheels, and fitted with a high oval chimney. A halo of kitcheny smell floated about it, and the open door of its fire-box, in which brands were burning furiously, and a jet of vapor from somewhere, gave it quite the appearance of an odd steam engine. Beside the contre-torpilleur stood the two cooks, both unusually small in stature. One was about thirty-two or three years old, chunky, and gifted with short, strong, hairy ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... before him. It came from afar, and it went to afar, and still it shone where his hand might touch it. It turned like a wheel, from the gulf to the height and around again. He followed its round—ocean and climbing vapor, cloud, rain, and far mountain springs, descent and the mother sea. The mind, expanding, ceased to examine radius by radius, but held the whole wheel. Alexander sat ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... home across the rocking billows, and one day the Queen Elene, as she was now titled, lifted her eyes and beheld the gaunt castle of King Theophile cutting the sky. A mist seemed to hang all its turrets with fog and vapor. Elene remembered the shining happy little castle of her vanished kingdom, and her heart was bitter with tears, but ...
— The Faery Tales of Weir • Anna McClure Sholl
... thereof into the face of each warrior, from the eldest to the youngest; while they, putting their hand funnel-wise round their mouths, draw into the sinuosities of the brain that more than Delphic vapor of prophecy; which boy presently falls down in a swoon, and being dragged out by the heels and laid by to sober, enter another to puff at the sacred cigarro, till he is dragged out likewise; and so on ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... black front of the engine came rocking toward them, gathering impetus on the sharp grade. Had Scottie missed his trick? But when the thunder of the iron on iron was deafening Andrew, and the engine seemed almost upon them, there was a cloud of white vapor that burst out on either side of it and the brakes were jumped on; the wheels skidded, screaming on the tracks. The engine lurched past; Andrew caught a glimpse of Scottie, a crouched, masked form in the cab of the engine, with ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... shadows of the evergreens. It was one of those hazy, calm, dissolving days of Indian summer, when everything is so quiet that the faintest kiss of the wave on the beach can be heard, and white clouds seem to faint into the blue of the sky, and soft swathing bands of violet vapor make all earth look dreamy, and give to the sharp, clear-cut outlines of the northern landscape all those mysteries of light and shade which impart such tenderness ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the smoke and the dust and vapor, Truth through the litter of lies and rubble of dreams, Mutable yet immutable; changed, and the shaper Of all that light in ...
— Perpetual Light • William Rose Benet
... have tried to find the time of rotation of this planet on its axis. Some have reached one conclusion, some another, while the wisest have only doubted. The great Herschel claimed that the planet was so enveloped in vapor or clouds that no permanent features could be seen on its surface. The best equipped recent observers think they see faint, shadowy patches, which remain the same from day to day, and which show that the planet always presents the ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb |
