"Bit by bit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... French with lime, cutting their rigging to make their vessels helpless, and defeating the crews with great slaughter. Eustace, having lost the weather gage, with which he had started out that morning, could only bring his fleet into action bit by bit. Hubert's whole fleet fought together and won ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... the passage of time. But he said nothing. Partly he wanted to read in peace, and partly he did not want to admit his mistake. Bit by bit he was assuming the historic privileges of the English master of the house. He had the illusion that if only he could maintain a silence sufficiently august his error of fact and of manner would cease ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... He taught and preached to the multitudes. He was a preacher, proclaiming the Gospel of the Kingdom. He was a teacher, bit by bit, line upon line, patiently teaching and explaining to them about the Father's love, and about the true life and how to live it. Three words are used several times to characterize that Galilean ministry, teaching ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... of the Princess," said Allerdyke. "And you say she'll be here to-morrow night. In the meantime no doubt you police gentlemen'll get more news about this last affair at Hull, and perhaps Miss Lennard'll find those references about the Frenchwoman, and maybe we shall mop things up bit by bit—for mopped up they'll have to be, or my name isn't what it is! Fullaway," he went on, rising from his chair, "I'll have to leave you—yon man o' mine'll be arriving from Yorkshire with my things before long, and I must go down to the hotel ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... river, which was overflowing its banks and was bordered on both sides by dense forests, the army seemed doomed. A single overmastering thought began to take possession of Napoleon's mind—that of his personal safety. He appeared to take a momentous decision—the determination to sacrifice his army bit by bit that he might save its head. This resolution once formed, he became strong and courageous, his head was clear, and his invention active. Oudinot was summoned, with his eight thousand men, to drive out Tchitchagoff; and orders ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... Bit by bit the plan was perfected. Mr. Thurston took a sudden interest in his orphan wards to the extent of writing to the school where they were attending and asking when it closed for the summer. When he was informed that school closed the last week in May, he invited the two girls, Genevieve ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... cease? Bit by bit, the sensational story of Morgianna got out into the village, and she became the object of the greatest interest. Captain Lane adopted her, and when she became old enough to accompany him, he seldom went away without her. Morgianna loved the good old man, ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... much of the civil government in operation in the United States that this account can be made much more concise than if we had started at the top instead of the bottom and begun to portray our national government before saying a word about states and counties and towns. Bit by bit the general theory of American self-government has already been set before the reader. We have now to observe, in conclusion, what a magnificent piece of constructive work has been performed in accordance with that general theory. We have to observe the building up of a vast empire ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... treasure. The place is full of secret chambers, tombs, and passage-ways cut through the rock, deep under the surface. I believe Ward has stumbled on some vault where the priests used to hide their loot. I believe he's getting it out bit by bit and going ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... "the bag and the bracelet are somewhere about, but who can tell where? If we could only find them, all could be set straight, and poor Jane's character completely cleared; but then it ain't the Lord's will, so far, that it should be so. One thing's clear, however; the tangle's being undone for us bit by bit, and what we've to do is just to be patient and to keep our eyes and ears open; but, please, not a word to anybody. And now, William, I must ask you to let me have this Bible to take to poor Jane; it was her mother's, and is full of her own marks under her favourite verses. You ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... as one who dreams and is but half conscious that it is a dream. He read it again and again, each time grasping bit by bit the realization of its contents and ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... Bit by bit the story came out, and to Irene's great grief it forged another link in the chain of evidence already so strong against the cheery stranger. "I don't want him to go to jail," she sobbed. "He's ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... minutes it dawned on me what a traitor I was, and bit by bit I eased myself up on my elbows. "I must go and tell someone these Germans are here," I thought, and turned back the clothes. After throwing the small sand bags on the floor that kept my bad leg in position, I next ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... all the great pictures and some of the lesser ones, and Albert was waking, through her influence, to the world of art. This morning they were on their way to the Transfiguration to study the scornful sister. They were taking the picture bit by bit, color by color, face by face. There are advantages in this analytical study, yet there is a chance of losing the spirit of the whole. So Mae thought and said: "I know that sister now, Edith, better than you ever will." This was while ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... at first, and he left the church with a very clear impression of the clergyman put carefully away beside his appreciation of Leh Shin's assistant. He had caught just a glimpse of the personality of the man, and was busy building it up bit by bit, working out his idea by first trying to fathom the temperament that dwelt in the spare body and drove and wore him hour ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... that in your pipe and smoke it. If you go to Newcastle, I go there to fight you. If you go to any of the places in this country represented by us, our Member will be there to fight. We are in Parliament to do our best for the people we represent, bit by bit as we can. We are not there to plunge the country into a revolution and run the risk of a foreign invasion. There isn't one of us Englishmen here who'll agree with you or side with ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... epitaph of Ronsard, piqued, it is said, that the Guises had given him only a little pavillon in the Forest of Meudon, whereas the presbytery was close to the chateau. From that time legend has fastened on Rabelais, has completely travestied him, till, bit by bit, it has made of him a buffoon, a veritable clown, a vagrant, a glutton, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... too young to be tied down to the regular routine of school discipline; and if older when boarded away, the other obstruction to salutary progress began to operate grievously against me. I acquired bit by bit the common education—reading, writing, and arithmetic. So far as I remember, grammar was not much taught at any of these schools, and the spelling of words was very nearly as little attended to as the meaning which ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... lonely beach we flit, One little sandpiper and I, And fast I gather, bit by bit, The scattered driftwood, bleached and dry. The wild waves reach their hands for it, The wild wind raves, the tide runs high, As up and down the beach we flit, ...
— Graded Memory Selections • Various
... thin, somewhat uncertain face at its most convinced) But not indomitable energy. Some day, bit by bit, it'll blow away, and his rather impressive talent with it, and leave only a wisp of a man, fretful ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... And its perfect fabric hangeth Threatening ruin o'er my head, With terrific pride and grandeur. Darker grows the air around me, Chained, my feet proceed no farther, Even the seas retire before me. What, here fly me not nor startle, Are the wild beasts, which to rend me Bit by bit come on to attack me. Mercy, mighty Lord, oh, mercy! Pardon, gracious Lord, oh, pardon! Holy baptism I implore, That in grace I may depart hence. Mortals, hear, oh, mortals hear, Christ is living, ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... interested that he turned his chair round and kept eying my supper-card to find out who I was, and at last remembered seeing me in 'The New Boy'—and a rotten part it was, too—but he remembered it, and he told me to go on and tell him more about your play. So I recited it, bit by bit, and he laughed in all the right places and got very much excited, and said finally that he would read it the first thing this morning." Marion paused, breathlessly. "Oh, yes, and he wrote your address on his cuff," she added, ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... apparent that though the Tiger could gain little on her rival in actual headway, she was gradually pulling over closer to the quarter of the Revenge. Hawkes, who was an excellent seaman, humored the craft to starboard, bit by bit, without ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... call of this sky scraper standing in the heart of the great city. From the mines of Minnesota to the swamps of Louisiana came goods to serve its need. Long, long ago, in olden days, the churches grew slowly bit by bit, as one man carved a door post here and another fitted a window there, each planning his own part. Not so with the sky scraper. It grew in haste. Its parts were made in factories scattered the country over. ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... time before Mrs. Drabdump was sufficiently calm to explain that though she had overslept herself, and though it would have been all the same anyhow, she had come up to time. Bit by bit the tragic story was forced from her lips—a tragedy that even her telling could not make tawdry. She told with superfluous detail how—when Mr. Grodman broke in the door—she saw her unhappy gentleman lodger lying on ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... here, that information can only be obtained bit by bit, here a little and there a little; and it is absolutely necessary to note everything down immediately if you would not forget it, at least if you would be correct. The Moors and Arabs have no patience, beyond a few minutes, in giving information, unless it be something ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... urge his own suit."—This, an axiom of the most archaic law, gets evaded bit by bit till the professional advocate takes the place of the plaintiff. "Njal's Saga", in its legal scenes, shows the transition period, when, as at Rome, a great and skilled chief was sought by his client as the supporter of his cause at the Moot. In England, ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... a worse stage yet in which the banks had given place to Big Business which was increasingly controlling Parliament. The plutocracy that had bit by bit eaten into our aristocracy and gained ascendancy in the Govemment was not, like our ancient aristocracy, trained for the business and was utterly uninformed especially in foreign affairs. The one remaining hope, the permanent officials, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... your Bible knowledge in this manner, bit by bit, is what you would not anticipate. The whole acquires a solidity and compactness not to be attained by any other method. You will find at the end of many days, not only that the structure has attained to symmetry and ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... it out of her, bit by bit. And maybe, even if she isn't Frieda Hammer, Pansy troop could ...
— The Girl Scouts' Good Turn • Edith Lavell
... "There is no accounting for it. I was never sick in my life. Something's gone wrong with my brain. A cancer, a tumour, or something of that nature,—a thing that devours and destroys. It's attacking my nerve-centres, eating them up, bit by bit, cell by cell—from ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... Bit by bit the porter drifted back and gave Hubert his form, now stamped and become his ticket. The porter having finished with him, he passed on and, after many wanderings, found the door of the room where his sentence would be passed. Bracing himself up and clearing his throat, he prepared ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 30, 1917 • Various
... communicating what they want to say and of concealing it. Their object is to dress it up so that it may look learned or deep, in order to give people the impression that there is very much more in it than for the moment meets the eye. They either jot down their thoughts bit by bit, in short, ambiguous, and paradoxical sentences, which apparently mean much more than they say,—of this kind of writing Schelling's treatises on natural philosophy are a splendid instance; or else they hold ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Bit by bit the story, to which I had not given much attention when I heard it, so casually, carelessly was it told, recurred ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... wiles set himself to comfort her—in vain; to question her—in vain at first; but by degrees she allowed him to learn that it was for him she mourned; and so they proceeded on the old, old plan, the man extorting from the woman bit by bit just so much as she wanted all along to say, and would have poured in a stream ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... had come back from Poona where five of Carlin's seven brothers had been present at her marriage. There were weeks in Hurda now, while Skag's equipment for jungle work arrived bit by bit. They lived some distance from the city and back from the great Highway-of-all-India, in Malcolm M'Cord's bungalow, a house to ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... to exhibit benevolence, as not divinely benevolent, but merely weak and capricious, like a boy who fondles a kitten and the next moment sets a dog at it. And not only does his moral character fall from him bit by bit, but his dignity disappears also. The orderly processes of the stars and the larger phenomena of nature are suggestive of nothing so much as a wearisome court ceremonial surrounding a king who is unable to understand or to break away from it; whilst the thunder and whirlwind, ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... Henry employed Mr. Marrier in order to listen to Mr. Marrier. He turned on Mr. Marrier like a tap, and nourished himself from a gushing stream of useful information concerning the theatrical world. Mr. Marrier, quite unconsciously, was bit by bit remedying Edward ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... "wild men" or "wild boys" in the Chinese Empire is shown by recent reports. Macgowan says the traders kidnap a boy and skin him alive bit by bit, transplanting on the denuded surfaces the hide of a bear or dog. This process is most tedious and is by no means complete when the hide is completely transplanted, as the subject must be rendered mute by destruction of the vocal cords, made to use all fours ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... depths with awful forests of huge plants, swarming with horrible things and monsters faintly espied. However, the watery mist was quickly falling. It became at last no more than a fine muslin drapery; and bit by bit this muslin vanished, and Paris took shape and ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... road, a sair road, but I did it, and by seven o'clock I was at the edge o' the muirlands. There was a braw mune, and a the glens and taps stood out as clear as midday. Bit by bit, for I was gey tired, I warstled ower the rigs and up the cleuchs to the Gled-head; syne up the stany Gled-cleuch to the lang grey hill which they ca' the Hurlybackit. By ten I had come to the cairn, ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... not explain to Miss Toms the mysterious assurance that she had of the way that her former world was drawing near to her again. She could see now that never for a moment since her arrival in Skeaton had it let her alone, slowly invading her, bit by bit driving in upon her, forcing ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... regions, but with the loving and patient exploration of the world that lies at your gates; the "ebb and flow and ever-during power" of which your own existence forms a part. You are to push back the self's barriers bit by bit, till at last all duration is included in the widening circles of its intuitive love: till you find in every manifestation of life—even those which you have petulantly classified as cruel or obscene—the ardent self-expression of that Immanent Being whose spark burns ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... vengeance For the public insult offered To my pride, among his people Scattering murder, rapine, horror. Then a bloody pirate, I The wide plains of the sea ran over, Argus of its dangerous shallows, Lynx-eyed where the reefs lay covered; In that vessel which the wind Bit by bit so soon demolished, In that vessel which the sea As a dustless ruin swallowed, I to-day these fields of crystal Eagerly ran o'er, my object Being stone by stone to examine, Tree by tree to search ...
— The Wonder-Working Magician • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... put at the top of each letter are the dates on which the letter is commenced, and, as each letter is written bit by bit, it is usually several days before it is sent off; as a rule I forget to put the date at the end on which the letter is despatched. Father said that one of my letters was heavily censored lately, but the censor was ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack
... abridged the confession of the Princess, who carefully repeats every word known to the reader. This iteration is no objection in the case of a coffee-house audience to whom the tale is told bit by bit, but it is evidently ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... gown, came trailing into the room where everybody waited for her, Veronica hid herself behind Uncle Anthony's big chair. When her father told her to come out of that and say good-night and be quick about it, she came slowly (she was not in the least afraid of Bartie), showing herself bit by bit, honey-coloured hair, eyebrows dark under her gold, very dark against her white; sorrowful, transparent, lucid eyes. A little girl with a straight white face. A little, slender girl in a straight white frock. She stood by Anthony's ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... drawn to confession, but she knew that when Aunt Jane once set herself to ask questions, there was no use in trying to conceal anything. So she made answers, chiefly 'Yes' or No,' and her aunt, by severe and diligent pumping, had extracted bit by bit what it was most essential should be known, before the gong summoned them. Dolores would rather have been a solitary prisoner, able to chafe against oppression, than have been obliged to come down and confront everybody; ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... o'clock the lines were hot. A wrecking train was on its way from the east, another from division headquarters to the west. Ceaselessly headquarters demanded new information, and bit by bit the terrible tragedy was told even as the men and women in it died and the few souls from the prairies around Bleak House Station fought to save lives. Then a new word crept in on the wires. It called ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... bit by bit Peter doled out another portion of the white cake, venturing at the same time ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... pride and stateliness, and Amyas's English taciturnity, kept the two apart somewhat; but they soon began, if not to trust, at least to like each other; and Don Guzman told Amyas, bit by bit, who he was, of what an ancient house, and of what a poor one; and laughed over the very small chance of his ransom being raised, and the certainty that, at least, it could not come for a couple of years, seeing that the only De Soto who had a penny to spare was a fat old dean ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... great and wonderful people, at the ambitions they will put away for one reason or another before they grow into ordinary men and women. Mankind as a whole had a like dream once; everybody and nobody built up the dream bit by bit, and the ancient story-tellers are there to make us remember what mankind would have been like, had not fear and the failing will and the laws of nature tripped up its heels. The Fianna and their like are themselves so full of power, and they are set in a world so fluctuating and dream-like, ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... showed a very vivid imagination, and exhibited an unaccountable savage sort of pessimism. Her intervals of absence had been occupied in this way from the first. The astounding slanders she had circulated concerning the teacher's private life came back, bit by bit, to his ears for a year afterwards, and her character sketches of previous teachers, and her own relations—for she spared nobody—would have earned a white woman a long and well-merited term of imprisonment for criminal libel. She had ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... whenever their master was away, by talking to them on trivial subjects in her pleasant homely way. She taught Molly to read and write, but tried honestly to keep her back in every other branch of education. It was only by fighting and struggling hard, that bit by bit Molly persuaded her father to let her have French and drawing lessons. He was always afraid of her becoming too much educated, though he need not have been alarmed; the masters who visited such small country towns as Hollingford forty years ago, were no such great proficients in their ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... make on the subjects. In this case even she had paid no attention; and yet, the moment that strong keynote had been struck, which vibrated through her whole being, this echo suddenly woke up and resounded as if it had been thundered in her ears—"Brown!" She began to remember bit by bit—and yet what had she to do with Brown? He had not defrauded her; she had never seen him; she knew nothing about his delinquencies. Then there came another note faintly out of the distance of the years: her husband's image, I need not say, had come suddenly into her sight ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... through life, and feels no pang at the remembrance of the ambrosial curls of his youth. Most young people, I dare say, think it will be a dreadful thing to grow old: a girl of eighteen thinks it must be an awful sensation to be thirty. Believe me, not at all. You are brought to it bit by bit; and when you reach the spot, you rather like the view. And it is so with graver things. We grow able to do and to bear that which it is needful that we should do and bear. As is the day, so the strength proves to be. And you have heard people tell you ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... minute until I think how it goes." Reddy began a reflective strumming, bringing back, bit by bit, a plaintive little air that carried a subdued heart throb. "I've got it," ...
— Grace Harlowe's Golden Summer • Jessie Graham Flower
... visited. On entering the lower room of the house, the visitors saw that there was not a scrap of furniture; the woman, fever-stricken, sat on an orange-box before a low fire; and to prevent the fire from going quite out, she was pulling her seat to pieces for fuel bit by bit. The visitors looked upstairs. There was no furniture there— only a bit of straw in a corner, which served as the bed of the woman's four children. In another case a woman, who was said to be too weak to apply for relief, was visited. Her husband had been ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... hesitated. 'I have received a telegram,' she said at length; and so she allowed to escape her bit by bit the information that her architect, whose name she seemed reluctant to utter, had travelled from England to Nice that week, partly to consult her, partly for a holiday trip; that he had gone on to Monte Carlo, ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... for if sorrow could break the human heart I doubt if many of us would be alive to smile at next year's joys. However that may be, I do believe that young Josiah thought that he was partly responsible for his mother's death. He turned up at the funeral with a boy seven years old; and bit by bit we learned that he was separated from his wife and that the court had given him custody of ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... grave public human judgment and not secrecy and closed doors. All this means time and development. It comes not complete by instant revolution of a day, nor yet by the deferred evolution of a thousand years—it comes daily, bit by bit and step by step, as men and women learn and grow and as children ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... through The restless streams will hurry by; And round the lands, with endless roar, The white waves fall upon the shore, And bit by bit devour the dry. ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... By slow degrees, and bit by bit, each came to know and understand the other under the influence of new lights and feelings. But their thoughts about themselves, and their joy at meeting in such peculiar circumstances, had to be repressed to some extent in the presence ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... of it so far," he declared, "is free quarters here. The rent's paid up to the end of the year. I've had to sell the furniture bit by bit to keep alive. It was a cheap lot, cheap and showy, and it fetched jolly little. Morry always did like to have things that looked worth more than he gave for them. Even his jewellery was sham—every bally bit of it. There wasn't a real pearl or a real diamond amongst the ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... going too fast. The reader will get it better if we turn it into pictures bit by bit as we go on. Let the reader therefore imagine himself seated before the curtain in the lighted theatre. All ready? Very good. Let the music begin—Star Spangled Banner, please—flip off the lights. ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... grass-tangled ruins that he seemed to have stumbled upon two years ago. He spoke of those places as a scholar removed from vanity, as a Seeker walking in humility, as an old man, wise and temperate, illumining knowledge with brilliant insight. Bit by bit, disconnectedly, each tale called up by some wayside thing, he spoke of all his wanderings up and down Hind; till Kim, who had loved him without reason, now loved him for fifty good reasons. So they enjoyed themselves in high felicity, abstaining, as the Rule demands, from evil words, covetous ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... window ledge. I had failed to put the extinguisher on the lighter, and the wick had gone on burning. As I watched the red spark crawling almost imperceptibly along the yellow wick, there dawned in my mind the first glimmering of the idea of a slow match and a delayed report. Bit by bit it took form, and the means of my revenge was made clear to me. I went back to ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... hint, and bit by bit his resolution was formed. Milton, going by one Monday morning on his way to the seminary, stopped beside the fence where Brad was plowing and waited for him to come up. He had a real interest ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... a cake from the plate and fed it to him, bit by bit. She felt happier than she had for a long time, since her children ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the self-denial of it, had exalted his shabbiness into something fine,—had idealized it,—until he'd come to take a kind of religious pride in it. Skinner and his wife had watched their little bank account grow, bit by bit, from ten dollars up. It had become an obsession with them. They had gone without many little things dear to their hearts that it might be fattened. Surely, it was a greedy creature! But, unlike most greedy creatures, it gave them a great deal of comfort. It ...
— Skinner's Dress Suit • Henry Irving Dodge
... greatest obstacle he had to overcome was in getting a phonograph that could "hear" far enough. At the beginning of the experiments the actor had to talk directly into the horn, which made the right kind of pictures impossible to get. Bit by bit, however, a machine was perfected which could "hear" so well that the actor could move at his pleasure within a radius of twenty feet. That is the machine that is being used now. This new combination of the ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... cliffs themselves, until even the Breton fisherman, looking lovingly from his boat as he makes for the harbor of Morlaix, hardly can say where the crags end, and where the church begins. The teeth of the winds of the sea have devoured, bit by bit, the fine sculpture of the doorway and the thin cusps of the window tracery; gray moss creeps caressingly over the worn walls in ineffectual protection; gentle vines, turned crabbed by the harsh beating of the fierce ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... the two young aunts had managed to win their little nephew's confidence. It had not come quite directly, for poor Godfrey was not one of those lucky little children who grow up with the happy belief that every one is friendly to them, and so open their glad hearts to all the world. Bit by bit they had learned the story of his short little life which there was no one but himself to tell them. His mother was only a name to him, and he knew little about his father, who was always kind, Godfrey said, but hardly ever saw ...
— Two Maiden Aunts • Mary H. Debenham
... Whose hand was it had thrown that cord about the throat and drawn it tight? What motive lay behind? Fearsome and compelling must the motive be to drive a man to such a crime! Would Simmonds be able to divine that motive, to build the case up bit by bit until the murderer ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... forced to keep the peace. In America they were always at war, which ended invariably to the detriment of Spain.* The strife begun by the Papal Bull of 1493, in which Pope Alexander VI. divided the territories discovered and to be discovered between Portugal and Spain, went on, till bit by bit Spain was stripped of the provinces of Matto Grosso, Rio Grande, and Guayra, and found herself drawn into the numerous disputes about the Colonia del Sacramento, which cost so much blood to both contending Powers. Perhaps the most curious and interesting incident of the long ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... need to detail all that was said during the next hour. Bit by bit we added to the girl's knowledge of the world into which she had emerged, and bit by bit there unfolded in her mind a corresponding image of the world from which she had come. And when, for an experiment, we took her out on the front porch and showed her the stars, we were ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... brought under bit by bit, and even in the case of Islam the alien power which could not be crushed was evidently curbed. The Crusades became hopeless, but they also became needless. As these fears faded the princes of Europe, who had come together to face them, were left facing each other. They ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... Machines," and another, "The World of the Unborn," as a starting point and helping himself with a few sentences from A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, he gradually formed Erewhon. He sent the MS. bit by bit, as it was written, to Miss Savage for her criticism and approval. He had the usual difficulty about finding a publisher. Chapman and Hall refused the book on the advice of George Meredith, who was then ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... I made him talk to me about himself. It was not easy, for these English men are stupidly reticent, but I dragged his story out of him bit by bit—or at least as much of it as I could—and I can tell you, my good Andre, that never have I admired a man so much as I do this Mr. Clyffurde . . . for never have I met so unselfish a one. I declare that if I were only a few years younger," she ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... possible—rather a "large order." The difficulty was to get to Missy, for the road thither was spattered with bullets, and shells were bursting all along it. However, by dint of careful work we moved out bit by bit, cutting through the gardens and avoiding the road, and taking advantage of a slight slope in the ground by which we could sneak to the far side of the little railway embankment ...
— The Doings of the Fifteenth Infantry Brigade - August 1914 to March 1915 • Edward Lord Gleichen
... when you've proved yourself what Tom's son should be, this is what I offer thee. There's the mill; I'm old and done, and while there's one of the old stock forward I would not turn it over to be moiled and muddled by a limited company. Saving, starving, scheming, I built it bit by bit, and to-day there's no cotton spun in Lancashire to beat the Orb brand. There'll be plenty of good men under thee, and I'm waiting to make thee acting partner. Ay, it's old and done I'm growing, and, Ralph Lorimer, ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... insulted, fooled! I will kill him, I will tear him bit by bit! Yes, there was always in his manner a contempt he could not hide and which I would not see. Oh! I shall die of this! Fool that I am," she went on laughing, "he is coming; I have one night in which to teach him that, married or not, the man who has ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... case, the best rule is to incise the neck of the sac directly upwards, i.e. in a line parallel with the linea alba, and also to cut it very cautiously bit by bit, in every case, if possible, with the finger inserted as a guide to the position of a vessel and a protection to ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... carriages being at that time over White Moss Common. The late Dr. Arnold, of Rugby and Foxhowe, used to name the three roads from Rydal to Grasmere thus: the highest, "Old Corruption"; the intermediate, "Bit by bit Reform"; the lowest and most level, "Radical Reform." Wordsworth was never quite reconciled to the radical reform effected on a road that used to be so delightfully wild and picturesque. The spot which the three friends rather infelicitously named "Point ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... to protect the canvas, one of the Fairburn men had got a grip of it, and in a second the thing had been torn from its supporting poles, amid mingled cheers and execrations. The canvas itself was pulled hither and thither by the opposing gangs, each striving to retain possession of it. Bit by bit the banner was torn to pieces, the men fighting savagely for even the smallest shred of it, each man pocketing his piece as a trophy, till at length there was nothing ...
— With Marlborough to Malplaquet • Herbert Strang and Richard Stead
... pushed his researches further. He has not limited himself to studying, bit by bit, the voluminous report of the trial of 1808, which fills a whole cupboard; to comparing and opposing the testimony of the witnesses one against the other, examining the reports and enquiries, disentangling the real names from the false, truth from error—in a word, ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... was found out that there were trout in these streams above falls which would be absolutely impassable to any fish. How could they get there? It was a riddle. The only possible answer was that the fish must be older than the falls, that the stream had worn away its bed, bit by bit, until an impassable barrier from below had been created, but that the trout had gone on in the upper creeks, developing in their own way, for hundreds ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... not be frank with me, and tell me what you owe? I will give you a cheque for it. I don't want to drag it out of you bit by bit. Tell me a sum that will make you free, and I will give it to you. I want you to have a perfect six months, and how can you if you are bothered ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... lines of defences, and the way in which these supplement each other shows that the work in all essentials was designed as a great whole; it did not grow up bit by bit. There are of course many evidences of alterations and rebuilding at later times; the buildings in the middle ward, on the south side, seem to be later additions; the hall appears to have been enlarged, and the tracery of the windows ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little
... Bit by bit we were provided with our uniforms, and we began to fancy ourselves as the real thing. We began to make new friends, and we were drawn closer to those we knew. We came from all over the world. At the call men had come home ...
— The 23rd (Service) Battalion Royal Fusiliers (First Sportsman's) - A Record of its Services in the Great War, 1914-1919 • Fred W. Ward
... felt the unconvincing ring of his tone, lacking the full and complacent self-assurance usual to it, for as if groping for something to make good the lack he sought backward through his memories and unfolded bit by bit the tale of his experiences. Scotch born of drunken parents, he had been reared in the slums of American cities and the forecastles of American ships. A waif, newsboy, loafer, gang-fighter and water-front pirate, ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... Bit by bit they began to recover something of their scattered property. The remains of the flannel had been taken by the cyclone and wrapped round and round a slender cocoa-nut tree, till the trunk looked like a gaily bandaged leg. The box of fish-hooks had been jammed into ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... first hospital bed you ever made, the first bed-bath you gave, the first massage? You had to be taught bit by bit, detail by detail. You did not look upon the finished whole, but gave almost painful attention to each step that led to the made bed, the completed bath, or the given massage. Your fingers were ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... motion which is unexplained, which is portentous, which betrays everything. Presently her great hidden facts have passed into the possession of the reader whole, so to speak—not broken into detail, bit by bit, not pieced together descriptively, but so implied and suggested that at some moment or other they spring up complete and solid in the reader's attention. Exactly how and where did it happen? Turning back, looking over the pages again, I ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... the stealthy, unconcerned approach of a great snake three feet long at least, winding along the gully by the roadside. Half fascinated and altogether fearful, you watch her pass by till she disappears bit by bit in an incredibly small fissure in the vineyard wall, leaving you breathless. Or all day long you will lie under the olives waiting for the coolness of evening, listening to the sound of everlasting summer, the piping of a shepherd, the little lovely song of a girl, the lament ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... they lightened, bit by bit, the enormous weight of the ocean depths. When the city was finally reached, not only would it be ensured against sudden destruction but the Quabos themselves would have become accustomed to the difference in pressure. Had they gone ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... zero before us—this is what is demanded of us. Involution is as natural as evolution. We sink gradually back into the darkness, just as we issued gradually from it. The play of faculties and organs, the grandiose apparatus of life, is put back bit by bit into the box. We begin by instinct; at the end comes a clearness of vision which we must learn to bear with and to employ without murmuring upon our own failure and decay. A musical theme once exhausted, finds its due refuge and ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... or I should have rolled all the way down again, and I should have knocked against the stones at the bottom, and perhaps been killed. But I wanted to get up to the very top of the big round mound, so I lay down flat on my face, and took hold of the grass with my hands and drew myself up, bit by bit, till I was at the top. Then I sat down on the stone in the middle, and looked all round about. I felt I had come such a long, long way, just as if I were a hundred miles from home, or in some other country, or in one of the strange ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... make the blood of the tamest among us boil with indignation, and, as the dreadful truth, bit by bit, dawned on our gallant fellows, their impatience became almost beyond control. My master was in sad peril of another arrest by reason of ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... rejoined the prince imperturbably; "but you can dictate the billet-doux, and I will translate it bit by bit." ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... to Stage, her whole manner changed: as if the prayer had already begun to be fulfilled, she has found the mysterious locks which, she bit by bit lets out, must be those of Orestes—the Chorus, like sailors in a storm, can only invoke the gods: if the day has come, from a small seed a mighty trunk may grow—Electra then discovers foot-prints [as ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... faced him, undisturbed, apparently not surprised. His scrutiny of Phelps's face was frank and searching. "Yes," he repeated, "bit by bit the guilty man is revealing himself ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... sort, the sense of which was not hard to read, in spite of their recondite phraseology, reached him from every quarter. He feared to set them aside. The origins of his power were too much tainted for him to advance boldly on an independent policy. Thus it was that bit by bit he deliberately forfeited all title to the help of Italy when the same whirlwind that dashed him to earth, cleared the way for the final ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... Bit by bit he told the story— How he'd wandered all around Since he left his Kansas homestead And the folks near North Pole mound; How he'd traveled all through Texas With the roving fever on, Camping oft ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... man. I'll never hear the end o' this. I guess I'll go an' sleep for'ard this voyage, and lie low. Be keerful you don't let on I'm aboard, an' after she's home I'll take the ship again, and let the thing leak out gradual. Come to life bit by bit, so to speak. It wouldn't do to scare her, George, an' in the meantime I'll try an' think o' some explanation to tell her. You might ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... not, however, lost. Two years after Carlyle's visit to London, it came out, bit by bit, in Fraser's Magazine. Through the influence of Emerson, it was issued, as a book, at Boston, in the United States, and Carlyle got some money for his production. It was eventually published in England, and, strange to say, has had the largest sale in the "People's ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... Lucy's nature going on below the little commonplaces and vanities and affections of her life which she herself would never have been able to explain. It implied the gradual abandonment of certain ambitions, the relinquishment bit by bit of an arid and ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... And bit by bit the story was told her. It was a very simple story. Ten years ago was the time, a garrison town in Cyprus the place. Now and then he asked her whether she could possibly forgive him, and she answered, "I have already forgiven you, Henry." She chose ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... red. The skin, like every other part of the body, is made up of tiny animal cells. In the outer coat they become quite flat like little scales and then wear off; and their places are taken by the newer cells that are growing from beneath. The skin grows from beneath, and bit by bit it sheds its old outer coat. This is how it keeps itself nice and new on the outside and "grows away" the marks of ...
— The Child's Day • Woods Hutchinson
... grassless church-yard. With women at the windows that opened on its mouldy level, peeling potatoes, picking chickens, and doing other household offices, the place was like something out of Dickens, but something that yet had been cleaned up in sympathy with the restoration of the church, going on bit by bit, stone by stone, arch by arch, till the good monk Rahere (he was gay rather than good before he turned monk) who founded the Cistercian monastery there in the twelfth century would hardly have missed anything if he had returned to examine the church. He would have had the advantage, ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... a sheet of manuscript. Francisco took the hint. From that day he camped on Buckley's trail. Bit by bit he gathered proofs, some documentary, some testimonial. No single item was of great importance. But, as a whole, Robert had assured him, it was weaving a net in which the blind boss might one day find himself ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... then showed me the exact position of the body, the spot where the paper lay, the canceling hammer, and the blood-marks. After I had been shown everything, I stood and thought over the matter in connection with the surroundings, and endeavored to re-enact the scene of the murder in my own mind. Bit by bit, I brought out some of the surroundings to my own satisfaction, and when I went back to the private office, I had a well-defined theory in my mind. Not that I had so narrowed down my suspicions, as to fix them upon any particular individual—I had not yet gone so far—but my ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... nights, thinking of luckier friends by moor and stream, and listening for the whistles from certain railway stations, veritable "horns of Elf-land, faintly blowing.'' Then, a ghostly passenger, I have taken my seat in a phantom train, and sped up, up, through the map, rehearsing the journey bit by bit: through the furnace-lit Midlands, and on till the grey glimmer of dawn showed stone walls in place of hedges, and masses looming up on either side; till the bright sun shone upon brown leaping streams and purple heather, and the clear, sharp northern air streamed ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... notion of getting such wages in a place with such surroundings quite dumb-founded me; and he had the things too; for by-and-by I found napery and china in a big chest that I used for a table out of doors; and bit by bit I made great improvements at Barragong. He gave me one of the huts for myself, and I was a thought frightened to sleep there my leafu' lane at first, but I put my trust in my Maker, and He watched over me. I cooked in my own hut, and settled up the master's. He began to think ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... preeminently a gardener, is none other than Priapus himself, god of gardens and of drunkenness, a divinity who must have been pure and serious in his origin as is the mystery of birth, but who has been degraded bit by bit through license of manners and ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... Bit by bit she reveals herself in Tom's random diaries. As in the printing of a photograph the lights and darks come sparsely out, and unawares the delicate outline, so by a word here, a phrase elsewhere, we ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... certainly be better to send a sucking pig to the gaoler. Against such pricks, my boy, there is no kicking. This is like a cold bath: if a man enters slowly, bit by bit, his teeth chatter: if he springs in at once, it is even pleasant. Let us ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... cushions, Fleda amused herself a great deal; and it was an especial pleasure when he would sit down by her and read and talk about them. Still a greater was to watch the sea, in its changes of colour and varieties of agitation, and to get from Mr. Carleton, bit by bit, all the pieces of knowledge concerning it that he had ever made his own. Even when Fleda feared it she was fascinated; and while the fear went off the fascination grew deeper. Daintily nestling among her cushions she watched with charmed eyes the long rollers that came up in detachments ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... I am going to do with you, madame? I shall only unfold my plans bit by bit, and watch your face to see if I have chosen well. I am going to take you first to the Petit Trianon, and we are going to walk leisurely through the rooms. I am not going to worry you with much sight-seeing and tourists and lessons of history, but I want you to glance ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... beautiful symmetry of the sea-bird's breast. No perceptible shrinkage can, however, occur if the body is properly made and packed; and here is shown the vast superiority of the made body of well-wrapped tow over that made of loose cotton inserted in the skin, bit by bit. ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... higher, mile after mile, always between the shadows of the high mountains, I was glad I did not live in the Alps. The villages on the slopes, the people there, seemed, as if they must gradually, bit by bit, slide down and tumble to the water-course, and be rolled on away, away to the sea. Straggling, haphazard little villages ledged on the slope, high up, beside their wet, green, hanging meadows, with pine trees behind and the valley bottom far below, and rocks right above, on both sides, seemed ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... but he'll no' ken what's happened to him, because he didna break up gradual and first lose his boat an' then his hoose, an' then hae his wee grandson taken away when he was for tellin' him a bit story before he gangs tae his bed.—It's yon losing yer grip bit by bit and kennin' that yer losin' it ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... course the occasion of much parliamentary discussion, the feeling of the house being in favour of a larger vote. The chancellor of the exchequer, Mr. Gladstone, hoped by this "bit by bit" preparation for the war to show his majesty the czar British desire for peace; and expected to conciliate him by showing how few regiments we were willing to raise, and the modicum of expense wo contemplated. All who knew the habit ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... shan't know yet. You must hear the whole story first, from beginning to end. I want to tell you the thing bit by bit, just as ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Italian • Various
... silent to avoid casting his ignominy in his face, amid her despair at feeling the walls of the house crumble and fall, bit by bit, upon her. ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... Norah and I made it out between us. Not all at once, but bit by bit, as things occurred to us or ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... long the awful state endure, So making a great effort to secure A calmer mood, by sad experience taught, Why, what a fool I've been, at length I thought, To have forgotten like an arrant dunce I've but to press the knob to have at once The gas jet lit; so groping bit by bit, I reached it, pushed the knob, but no gas lit; Terrific noise above I heard instead, I'd set th' alarum crashing overhead! What should I do? the neighbourhood would be Aroused, and perhaps as terrified as me. I'd no idea how to stop the thing Which now distractingly began ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... victims. Both horses propped immediately, and the lasso-men sat back to take the strain. It came, but the horses knew their work and lay back, almost sitting on their tails, till the bucking, bellowing animals on the end of the ropes ceased their first efforts to escape. Then, bit by bit, as carefully as an angler plays a game fish, the beasts were drawn out of the mob, while Sax, Vaughan, and Calcoo kept ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... my face and hands, I would show thee a skin that was stained at birth with the olive and veins whose blood flows unmixed through generations without end. These wrinkled feet have flattened the face of the earth bit by bit. Bear witness those who left me here behind to die! My eyes have looked upon things seen and unseen. I am old. To youth is given folly; to the old, wisdom. To-night my wisdom shall suckle thy folly, for the heavens have shown me ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... applying it to the head he placed some of it in her mouth to be swallowed. Then, kneeling on a sheep skin, with her face to the east, and holding the bag of medicine in her hand, she recited a prayer, bit by bit, after the chanter. The prayer being finished, she arose, put some of the medicine into her mouth, some on her head, and took her seat in the south, while the shaman went on with the ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews
... a second time in the belly of the convulsed horse and carried it high up in the air through half the length of the arena. The third horse was ripped open in a trice. The wretched animal actually caught his feet in his own entrails and dragged them from his body bit by bit. In this condition he was beaten and given the spurs and was forced to await a second attack by ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... with his friend Mr. Tupman, and called upon to find bail for good behaviour for six months? Then in conclusion how my friend would have turned to that incident in the double-bedded room at Ipswich, at the Great White Horse, and how my learned friend, with that skill which he possesses, would, bit by bit, by slow degrees, have extricated from that miserable man the confession that he had been found in that double-bedded room, a spinster lady being there at the same time. Ladies and gentlemen, what would ...
— The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick - A Lecture • Frank Lockwood |
