"Dwindling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... historic and climatic causes that many years of instruction and culture were necessary for it to become a strong, healthy, and laborious democracy, conscious of both its rights and its duties. As for the aristocracy, it was dwindling to death in its crumbling palaces, no longer aught than a finished, degenerate race, with such an admixture also of American, Austrian, Polish, and Spanish blood that pure Roman blood became a rare exception; and, moreover, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... are much raised in Berkshire) are good for hardly anything to eat,—a fair-sized quarter dwindling down to almost nothing in ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... escaped well nigh five hundred, and they were all drowned, and so lost. Another company escaped by land, and thought to pass through Sclavonia; and the peasants of that land fell upon them, and killed many, so that the remainder came back flying to the host. Thus did the host go greatly dwindling day by day. At that time a great lord of the host, who was from Germany, Garnier of Borland by name, so wrought that he escaped in a merchant vessel, and abandoned the host, whereby ...
— Memoirs or Chronicle of The Fourth Crusade and The Conquest of Constantinople • Geoffrey de Villehardouin
... gray-bearded, helmeted warriors holding mailed blonde women in their arms, of queens with golden ornaments on their arms leaning over parapets and agitating their scarves, of women throwing themselves into the sea upon which ghastly barks were dwindling, of oldish men and young girls conversing teasingly through a window by a lilac-bush, that were Wagner. There were books with stories of magical swans and hordes of gold and baleful curses, of phantasmal storm ships and hollow hills and swords lodged in tree-trunks awaiting their ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... that the least departure from this order would destroy the effect. But Nature produces her effects at random, and seems only to increase the beautiful illusion by that infinite variety of decoration in which she revels, binding tree to tree in a tangle of anaconda-like lianas, and dwindling down from these huge cables to airy webs and hair-like fibres that vibrate to the wind of ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... The dwindling away of the race is, however, inevitable. A few anecdotes may perhaps throw unaccustomed light upon attributes not generally understood, and show that the Australian aboriginal, uncouth savage as he is, is not altogether devoid ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... history we know that the development of cold storage in the eighties (which we may regard for the present purpose as equivalent to an increased demand for Australian mutton) caused considerable perturbation in the woollen and worsted industries of Yorkshire. They were faced with a dwindling supply and a soaring price of merino wool; and the adaptability with which they met the situation, and won prestige for the crossbred tops, and yarns and fabrics, to which they largely turned is a matter of just pride in the trade to-day. The fact, however, that this alteration ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... just verging above the crimson horizon of his pulpit.—"Awake, thou that sleepest!" Why, the text is quite opposed to DOZINESS! But what of this, if the preacher be addicted to drawling, the weather unobligingly sultry, and you yourself have gradually been dwindling from an uncongenial state of wakefulness into a sleepy calm? 'Tis too much ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various
... scanty resources dwindling fast. One by one his old commissions were paid and disappeared down the hopper of household expenses. He took to thinking of what would happen when the commissions were all paid, and to haunting Fisher's office. Fisher was his contractor client and owed him five hundred dollars. But ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... one-sixtieth) of a second. With the stronger light there is a more rapid and a greater loss of the initial intensity of the impression or effect of stimulus, and though each successive effect remains as long, or longer, in dwindling intensity, you get want ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... second worry presented itself, one fully as serious. The provisions were dwindling, the seed-sacks shrinking fast, and, estranged from Lounsbury, they had nowhere to ask credit ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... beauty, the cards of life's eager game. We gather them up joyfully; but, alas! how rapidly their fictitious beauty fades, and what miserable pasteboard affairs they become to us, as, one by one, we lay them down, and see our treasures dwindling away from us with them, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... we sighted a dark, distant ridge, thirty miles away, and the course was corrected by its bearing. Our extravagant hopes of finding a permanently calm region had been dwindling for the last few miles, as a hard bottom, a few inches under the surface, had become evident. They were finally dispelled by a south-west wind springing up during ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... turn his hand to whatever came readiest. I knew one in particular, whose brother is at this moment serving as colonel in the army in India, a man more fitted for a gay London life than a residence in the colonies. The diggings were too dirty and uncivilized for his taste, his capital was quickly dwindling away beneath the expenses of the comfortable life he led at one of the best hotels in town, so he turned to what as a boy he had learnt for amusement, and obtained an addition to his income of more than four hundred pounds a year ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... Gera, Saalfeld, to Coburg, is our next day's journey. Up one fork of the Leipzig Pleisse, then across the Leipzig Elster, these streams now dwindling to brooks; leading us up to the water-shed or central Hill-countries between the Mayn and Saale Rivers; where the same shower will run partly, on this hand, northward by the Elster, Pleisse or other labyrinthic course, into the Saale, into the Elbe; and partly, on the ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... apparelled, and with a beard curled and plaited into a thousand ringlets. On the other side, plying her industry with unruffled defence, walked Ylga, once again fan-girl, and so still second lady in this dwindling kingdom. ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... of conjugal difficulties between Arthur and his queen. But unfortunately these last are not confined to Arthurian experience; and, as we have seen, Arthur's fights with the Saxons, except the last when they joined Mordred, are of ever-dwindling importance for the Romance. ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... and son, and Frank Merrick stood on the gravel-bed outside the little wooden box doing duty as station at Ransome, New Mexico. The transcontinental flier which had dropped them, was dwindling in the distance. Jack Hampton, whom the chums and Mr. Temple had crossed the country from New York to join, was in the center of the group. Greetings had been exchanged, they had all slapped each other on the back indiscriminately and enthusiastically, and now Bob Temple stood ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... Rangers were they when they arrived at Washington's headquarters; shoes worn out, clothes in tatters. There they found a dwindling army. The battles of the Brandywine and Germantown had been fought in their absence, and the British were in Philadelphia, planning for a hilarious winter. What remained of the American army must ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... the first, much of the second. Kygpton itself was a world as large as your entire solar system, with a diameter roughly of four billion miles. Our ancestors knew that Kygpton was dying, that the store of our most precious element Sthalreh was dwindling. But already our ancestors had mastered the forces of our universe, had made inventions that are beyond your understanding, had explored the limits of our universe in space-cars that were propelled by the free energies in ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... this policy, many of them converted to Christianity through your efforts, might very well class your Easter anthems and their great teaching with the newspaper canard relative to a "growing spirit of justice in South Africa"; for our bitter experience proves that spirit to be at best but a dwindling one. ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... our forefathers, and a great deal wiser! "Such a craze, however, is too widely diffused, and falls in with too obstinate a preconception [17] in the human race, which has in every age hypochondriacally regarded itself as under some fatal necessity of dwindling, much to have challenged public attention. As real paradoxes (spite of the idle meaning attached usually to the word paradox) have often no falsehood in them, so here, on the contrary, was a falsehood which had in it nothing paradoxical. ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... the Fatherland by reason of its dwindling birth rate. The cradles of Germany are empty to-day; it is your duty to see that they are filled. You bachelors, when your leave comes, marry at once the girl of your choice. Make her your wife without delay. The ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... inheritance would be gathered up by Catholics. "Are this belief and friendship," asks the Abbe Etienne, "an indication of the speedy reunion of the children of Mahomet with the great Christian family? We have much reason to think so, when we behold Islamism everywhere dwindling away and giving place to the true faith." Damascus, so sacred in Mussulman estimation, and so intolerant that no Christian could pass within its gates except bareheaded, and on paying a capitation tax, now beholds with pleasure the celebration of Catholic rites. So great ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... Town it was quite evident that our sheep were not flourishing. They were, in fact, dwindling daily. Something had to be done, so my father hired a farm about ten miles away, in the direction of Kabousie. I volunteered my services as caretaker of the flock, and to my intense gratification ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... whose lives were out of chime, or to inaugurate the existence of new republics. One face I shall never forget. It was that of the self-made temporary dictator of a little country whose importance was dwindling to the dimensions of a footnote in the history of the century. I had been acquainted with him personally in the halcyon day of his transient glory. Like his picturesque land, he won the immortality of a day, was courted and subsidized by competing states ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... Adamites, [Footnote: The rise of these oddities is nearly contemporary with Wycliffe and is, like his career, about one hundred years previous to the Reformation proper: the sects are of various longevity. Some, like the Calvinists, have, while dwindling rapidly in numbers, kept their full doctrines for now four hundred years, others like the Johanna Southcottites hardly last a lifetime: others like the Modernists a decade or less: others like the Mormons near a century, their close is not yet. I myself ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... 12th a hard frost set in, and until Christmas a strong gale from the southeast blew. No succour could reach the town. The garrison were dwindling fast, and ammunition falling short. It required fully 4000 men to guard the walls and forts, while but 2500 remained capable of bearing arms. It was known that the archduke soon intended to make an ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... world. My own initiations were rapid, as became an old sailor, and so, it seemed, were Miss Mavis's, for when I mounted to the deck at the end of half an hour I found her there alone, in the stern of the ship, her eyes on the dwindling continent. It dwindled very fast for so big a place. I accosted her, having had no conversation with her amid the crowd of leave-takers and the muddle of farewells before we put off; we talked a little about the boat, our fellow-passengers and our prospects, ...
— The Patagonia • Henry James
... the flea probably started on its downward course as a comparatively large insect, probably larger than the Ornithomyia. That insect has been able to maintain its existence, without dwindling like the Leptus into a mere speck, through the great modification in organs and instinct, which adapt it so beautifully to the feathery element in which it moves. The bush-tick, wingless from the beginning, and diverging in another ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... fever; yet he was, unhappily, with them rather than with Fanny. God knew there was fever enough in his brain! But the winter night was cooling it—a minor image of the final office of death; the choking hunger for Savina was dwindling. He hoped that it wouldn't be repeated. He couldn't answer for himself through many such attacks. Yes, his first love, though just as imperative, had been more ecstatic; the reaching for an ideal rather than the body ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... aspect of the Thames Valley in English history dwindles with the dwindling of military energy in our civilisation, and passes with the passing of a governing class that was ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... commissariat of his army. Thus the difficulties of the Imperial treasury increased. Justinian became more and more unwilling to loosen his purse-strings for the sake of a province which showed an ever-dwindling return. The pay of the soldiers got more and more hopelessly into arrear. They deserted in increasing numbers to the standard of the brave and generous young king of the Goths. Hence, it came to pass, that in the ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... fatal blow at the heart of France. France held her head up still, bleeding from many wounds, but defiant still; and the German High Command, aghast at their own losses—six hundred thousand casualties—already conscious, icily, of a dwindling man-power which one day would be cut off at its source, rearranged their order of battle and shifted the balance of their weight eastward, to smash Russia. Somehow or other they must smash a way out ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... bushes and grasses consisted of globules, glossy spheres of scarlet that ranged in size from pinheads to the bulk of large pumpkins. The branches of the vegetation were formed from strings of the globules set edge to edge and tapering in size like graduated beads strung upon wire, dwindling in bulk until the tips of the branches were as fragile as the fronds of maidenhair fern. The bulk of the shrubbery was head-high, and so dense that Powell could see for only a couple of yards into the thicket ...
— Devil Crystals of Arret • Hal K. Wells
... sir," replied Colin Camber, drawing toward him a piece of newspaper upon which rested a dwindling mound of shag. "This is most disturbing, of course. But since I have not rendered myself amenable to the law, it leaves me moderately unmoved. Upon your second point, Mr. Harley, I shall beg you, to enlarge. You tell me that Don Juan ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... of Kent, her train borne by Lady Flora Hastings, and her coronet by Viscount Morpeth; the Duchess of Gloucester, her train borne by Lady Caroline Legge, and her coronet by Viscount Evelyn. (The royal generation next that of George III. was fast dwindling away when these three ladies represented the six daughters and the wives of six of the sons of the old King and Queen. But there were other survivors, though they were not present to-day. The Queen-dowager; Princess Augusta, an aged woman ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... of the Daily Mail; unable to talk a foreign language; and with no knowledge of the sciences which are of military use."[15] To this may be added the fact that these young dullards, the supply of whom is dwindling, are, on joining the service, encouraged and accepted rather with reference to their sporting and social qualities than to their ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... way beneath your foot, to lose the use of an organ will be to let the alpenstock slip out of your starting fingers. And the excitement, and be sure the happiness, of existence will be to protract the struggle as long as possible, to push as far as you can along the dwindling path, to keep the supports and the alleviations of your labour about you as skilfully as you can, and in the fuss and business of the little momentary episodes of climbing to forget as long and as fully as may be the final and absolutely unavoidable plunge. [A pause, during ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... tops below the clear warble of the purple finch proclaimed that under the fronds twilight had fallen. The vast green surface of the hills was streaked here and there with irregular peaks of darkness dwindling eastward. The ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... Continent, nor in the solemn problems of Hindustan; it is not the Yellow peril nor the Black peril nor any danger in the wide circuit of colonial and foreign affairs. No, it is here in our midst, close at home, close at hand in the vast growing cities of England and Scotland, and in the dwindling and cramped villages of our denuded countryside. It is there you will find the seeds of Imperial ruin and national decay—the unnatural gap between rich and poor, the divorce of the people from the land, the want of proper discipline and training in our youth, the exploitation ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... her grandfather's old friend, but the ache and tedium of life did not return upon her. Her sense of duty and natural affection were very strong. She told herself that if it were her lot to watch for many years beside this dwindling flame, it was a lot of God's giving, not of her own seeking, and therefore good. The letters that came to her from Beechhurst and Caen breathed nothing but encouragement to love and patience, and Harry Musgrave's ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... another cheer at this, and the men stood fast as ever—a dwindling party, hard beset, of the defenders of the mess-room veranda, their breast-work for the most part consisting of the bodies ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... glue, and I could not swallow them. The roof of our cabin having been taken off, the Breens gave us a shelter, and when Mrs. Breen discovered what I had tried to hide from my own family, that I could not eat the hide, she gave me little bits of meat now and then from their fast-dwindling store. ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... the dwindling ruins are now very scanty, and in point of architecture present nothing worthy of an antiquary's (p. 010) research. They are washed by the streams of the Monnow, and are embosomed in gardens and orchards, clothing the knoll ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... have been so hard to find; but obviously the transportation of the whole party to a place of safety, with the limited means at our disposal, was going to be a matter of extreme difficulty. There were twenty-eight men on our floating cake of ice, which was steadily dwindling under the influence of wind, weather, charging floes, and heavy swell. I confess that I felt the burden of responsibility sit heavily on my shoulders; but, on the other hand, I was stimulated and cheered by the attitude of the men. Loneliness is the penalty of leadership, but the man who ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... for the timely occupation provided for them, would have spent the cold months in that state of half-starved torpor peculiar to the indigent agricultural labourer when he has nothing to do—at that bitter season when father and mother and shivering little ones watch wistfully the ever-dwindling sack of maize, as day by day two or three handfuls are ground between the stones of the hand-mill and kneaded into a thick unwholesome dough, the only food of the poorer peasants in the winter. But now every ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... borders of the land, the pleasure craft will be there, coming and going, and the swift great passenger vessels, very big and steady, doing thirty knots an hour or more, will trace long wakes as they go dwindling out athwart the ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... in huts, the reek of which strikes you like a blow in the face; so long as they will cluster round dead bodies during their tangis or wakes; so long as they will ignore drainage—just so long will they remain a blighted and dwindling race, and observers without eyes will talk as though there was something fateful and mysterious in their decline. One ray of hope for them has quite lately been noted. They are caring more for the education of their children. Some three thousand of these now go to school, not always ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... hidden by the deep pit and the heap of sand that the fall of the cylinder had made. Anyone coming along the road from Chobham or Woking would have been amazed at the sight—a dwindling multitude of perhaps a hundred people or more standing in a great irregular circle, in ditches, behind bushes, behind gates and hedges, saying little to one another and that in short, excited shouts, and staring, ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... contrary, he entertained hope, hope that he might win. If he did win, he told himself, Johnson was enough of a white man to accept the defeat and leave the horse where he was. Yet his chips were steadily dwindling; the cards persistently refused to come his way; only once thus far had he held a winning hand. But he played on, becoming ever more discouraged, until, suddenly awaking to an unexpectedly good hand, he ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... schoolroom passage—a long, lamp-lit vista, hung with old Chinese wall-paper, the running pattern of buds and flowers, large out of all proportion to the bridges, palms, pagodas and groups of little purple and blue-clad men and women disposed, in dwindling perspective, upon its once white surface. Half-way along the passage, their backs towards her, Mary and Mrs. Cooper, the cook—a fair, mild middle-aged, and cow-like person, of ample proportions—stood conversing in ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... ground floor; as one window was brightly illuminated and two others more faintly, it might be supposed that there was a single lamp in one corner of a large apartment; and a certain tremulousness and temporary dwindling showed that a live fire contributed to the effect. The sound of a voice now became audible; and the trespassers paused to listen. It was pitched in a high, angry key, but had still a good, full, and masculine note in it. The utterance was voluble, too voluble even to be quite distinct; a stream ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mighty distance, so that they were lost in the upward space of the night, and did seem to me presently but as a constant, glimmering fire, that did shape a shining Peak into the blackness of the heavens, dwindling into the utmost height. And ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... out his hand and Helen hastily slipped her own into it. Silently they returned to their own camp site, the girl carrying in her free hand the wand tipped with the bluebird feather. Several times they paused and looked back. There was nothing but the glow of the dwindling fire and the sweep of sand, covered sparsely with ragged bushes. New stars flared out; the spirit of the night descended upon the desert. As the world seemed to draw further and further away from them, these two beings, strange to the vastness engulfing ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... they isolated the Maximalists by every means in their power. They did not admit even one Maximalist into the membership of the Executive Committee at Petrograd, even when our party represented at least one-third of all the Soviet members. Afterwards, when the Petrograd Soviet, by a dwindling majority, passed the resolution for the transfering of all power into the hands of the Soviet, our party put forth the demand to establish a coalition Executive Committee formed on a proportional basis. The old presiding ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky
... degrading 'pessimism as to the essential dignity of man,'[3] the world which we have been to a certain extent disregarding has been changing its character for us. In a number of ways, whilst we have not been perceiving it, its objective grandeur has been dwindling; and the imagination, when again called to the feat, cannot reinvest it with its old gorgeous colouring. Once the world, with the human race, who were the masters of it, was a thing of vast magnitude—the centre of the whole creation. ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... the successive stages through which they have naturally and inevitably passed? Neither then is ethic and the moral law. It is not man's creation, it is not his handiwork. It is no mere provincialism of this dwindling sphere of ours, but a fact and a law supreme, holding sway beyond the uttermost star, valid in infinity and eternity, at this hour, the sovereign law of life for whatsoever or whomsoever lives and knows, the adamantine foundation ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... seeing me, he reversed his movement precipitately, flew straight back to the old tree, and alighted in the entrance to the cavity. As I approached, he did not so much seem to move as to diminish in size, like an object dwindling in the distance; he depressed his plumage, and, with his eye fixed upon me, began slowly to back and sidle into his retreat till he faded from my sight. The shrike wiped his beak upon the branches, cast an eye down at ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... dwindling trunk and wolfish jaw Revolving sullen things, But most the blind unequal law That ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... some resentment at the idea that I was, after all, an outsider and not allowed a part in the real drama that was going on. My happiness was further damped by the fact that luck ran steadily against me, and I saw my bonus dwindling very rapidly. I suppose I may as well be frank, and confess that my bonus, to speak strictly, vanished within six months after I first set foot in "Mon Repos," and I found it necessary to make that ...
— A Man of Mark • Anthony Hope
... that. One perhaps was ursine chiefly, another feline chiefly, another bovine chiefly; but each was tainted with other creatures,—a kind of generalised animalism appearing through the specific dispositions. And the dwindling shreds of the humanity still startled me every now and then,—a momentary recrudescence of speech perhaps, an unexpected dexterity of the fore-feet, a pitiful attempt ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... all the facts in both cases, and so did Ernest Seton, who had visited us in the country as well as in our city home. Fuller not only knew the ins and outs of my houses; he was also aware that my royalties were dwindling and that my wife was forced to get along with one servant and that we ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... of cattle, and the sale of their hides and tallow, offer so easy a subsistence, that the population think of no other, and in consequence are poor, degenerate, and dwindling. Their whole education consists in bullock hunting. In this view, unjust and violent as may be the aggressions of the American arms, it is difficult to regret the transfer of the territory into any hands which will bring these fine countries into the general ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... himself was very different from his representation. He was a tall and stately person, scrupulously dressed, with a drawn, thin face, and a nose which was grotesquely curved and long. His complexion was of a dead pallor, which was more startling by contrast with a long, dwindling beard of vivid red, which flowed down over his white waistcoat with his watch-chain gleaming through its fringe. Such was the stately presence who looked stonily at us from the centre of Dr. Huxtable's hearthrug. Beside him stood a very young man, whom I understood to be Wilder, the private secretary. ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... be tedious and pitiful to tell of all the little intensifications, shade by shade, of the conflict of their individualities. They fell out, dear lady! they came to conflict of words. The stress of perpetual worry was upon them, of dwindling funds and the anxious search for work that would not come. And on Ethel lay long, vacant, lonely hours in dull surroundings. Differences arose from the most indifferent things; one night Lewisham lay awake in unfathomable amazement because she had convinced him she did not care a ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... Bronson—the two other surgeons—died of their wounds, served to increase the reputation in which this rebel-convict stood in Bridgetown. It may have been no more than the fortune of war. But the townsfolk did not choose so to regard it. It led to a further dwindling of the practices of his free colleagues and a further increase of his own labours and his owner's profit. Whacker and Bronson laid their heads together to devise a scheme by which this intolerable state of things ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... that was preposterous in Miss Livingstone's conduct as a rule that it is not quite fair to explain her attitude either by this exaggeration or by an equally hectic scruple about her right to take care of her guest, such a right dwindling curiously when it has been given in the highest to somebody else. These pangs and penalties may have visited her in their proportion, but they did not take the importance of motives. She rather ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... would have taken a ball in his breast." He recognized at once that "all was over," yet for a short time longer he retained the management of affairs. But his majority in Parliament was steadily dwindling, and evidently with him also "all was over." In his despair he caught with almost pathetic eagerness at what for a moment seemed a chance to save his ministry by treating with the States secretly and apart from France. He was a man not troubled with convictions, ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... chemical fertilizers are coming into increasing use in the larger and more economically advanced producing countries. Brazil, particularly, is showing in late years a tendency toward their adoption to make up for the dwindling supply of the so-called natural manures. As the coffee tree grows older, it requires ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... occasion to make much moan about this state of affairs. I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the Customs. That was all. But, nevertheless, it is anything but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect is dwindling away; or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum. Of the fact there could be no doubt; and, examining ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was living on earth, it is true; but all the ordinary earth desires had died within him. The spiritual life, however, did not die. Day by day it grew stronger and braver; so it came to pass that his sympathies, instead of dwindling and becoming small and narrow, widened, until once more he loved and once more ...
— Daddy's Girl • L. T. Meade
... forth in this history, is come to be regarded as a very dangerous individual. It is astonishing with what facility we gain bad repute from association with a certain class of men and things. Our country is a stalwart oasis, rising in reproachful greatness over the old and dwindling dependencies around it; but our Pierce government is a waste in its centre, contaminating and casting the blight of intrigue upon those connected with it. It builds bulwarks for itself, and breaks them down with the mere fog of its own breakers. It, like a dauntless boy, seizes the helm of State, ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... Brilliant, dewless mornings, blinding middays, afternoons held breathless in the remorseless torrent of light. The caravan crawled along the river's edge at a footspace, the early shadows shooting far ahead of it, then dwindling to a blot beneath each moving body, then slanting out behind. There was speech in the morning which died as the day advanced, all thought sinking into torpor in the monotonous glare. In the late afternoon the sun, slipping down the sky, peered through each wagon's puckered canvas opening ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... tempest had passed and its activities were dwindling into the renewed whirlwinds of the dance, Gard resumed his seat, his head beginning to swim a little. At last his doubting eyes were as if unsealed. A Vandal tribe, a great and powerful Vandal tribe, still lived ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... a belt of timber touched by the light shone with a curious silvery luster. Though it was some distance off, probably a day's journey allowing for the difficulty of the march, Vane gazed at it earnestly. The trees were bare—there was no doubt of that, for the dwindling ranks, diminished by the distance, stood out against the snow-streaked rock like rows of thick needles set upright; their straightness and the way they glistened suggested ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... out-buildings, divided the work among them. The woman's husband, Xavier Archambault, employed at the Fall as assistant to look after the bridge and dam, helped at odd moments in the business of the estate, thus making in all six servants, a rather large contingent for a dwindling concern; and Ringfield, listening to these wonders, could not fail to observe that their united wages must reach ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... with which I once held him fast as ever hound held hare, never again should HE at least come on errand disgraceful to the honour of Christian king or noble and virtuous maiden. But I—my hours are fast dwindling into minutes—yet, while I have life and breath, something must be ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... again, one after the other, all the doors we had half-opened, and look at each other, on the wrong side of the threshold, with dwindling hope in our eyes. ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... mechanically he moved to the window and stood looking out, though in reality seeing nothing. He was thinking—thinking hard. The course he had decided to adopt was the right thing—as to that he had no sort of doubt. He had no regular income, and such remnant of capital as he still possessed was dwindling alarmingly. Men had made fortunes at places like Johannesburg, starting with almost literally the traditional half-crown, why should not he? Not that he expected to make a fortune; a fair competence would satisfy him, a sufficiency. ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... times past, founded and endowed schools for the education of the natives of the forest; nor would we dampen the faith and hopes of those philanthropists who still believe in the redemption of that dwindling race by the aids of science and civilization; but we confess our inability to perceive any general results, flowing from the attempts of that character, at all adequate to the pains and outlay bestowed on the experiment. And we think we cannot be alone in this opinion. We believe that those results, ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... hand.] Dear young lady, you are about to become the wife of one of the best. There are not many of us left; we are a dwindling band, Miss Eden— ...
— The Gay Lord Quex - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur W. Pinero
... of the slain wheeled abruptly and, lashed by the easterly gale, fled out over the open sea, triangular formation dwindling rapidly in ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... rhapsodist in words and ideas is a dwindling factor at the present day, and a new presentation of fact is occasionally to be met with in the printed page. The best "book of travel" within the knowledge of the writer, and perhaps one of the slightest in bulk ever written in the English language, is Stevenson's "Inland Voyage"—here were ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... impend To witness Time a fickle friend, And Youth a dwindling fire,— I must adore till all years end My first love, ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... of his capacity. On December I he broke down the bridges in his rear over the Raritan, and marched through Jersey with a dwindling army. At Princeton he had but three thousand men; destroying every boat, he wisely put the broad Delaware between his army ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... had been since a boy whose dreams burned city-ward. Feeling each day a day of adversity and giving no hint, he recognized, yet refused to admit, the dawn of defeat when defeat was far past its dawning. Upon the world of allied assailants that pressed him back—back—ever back on dwindling millions and then shrinking hundreds of thousands he turned a fierce and unsurrendering face. To himself he said even now that his ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... finally transform the opposition into reconciliation, the evil disappearing in good. Therefore, every being must at length be saved from misery, if not by redemptive atonement then by absolvent annihilation, and one absolute heaven finally absorb the dwindling hells. ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... region was clothed with a dense forest, so thickly matted, that in some places it was scarcely possible to penetrate it. It grew thinner, however, as they advanced, dwindling by degrees into a straggling stunted vegetation, till, at the height of somewhat more than 13,000 feet, it faded away altogether. The Indians, who had held on thus far; intimidated by the strange subterraneous sounds of the volcano, ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... weaver! How will he laugh outright When he sees his dwindling flax field All full of ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... a misnomer, socially and politically a dwindling superstition. That is the chief lesson one learns—and one has barely time to take it in—between Queenstown and Sandy Hook. Ocean forsooth! this little belt of blue water that we cross before we know where we are, at a single hop-skip-and-jump! From north to south, perhaps, it may still ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... is of it," said Evelyn, reassuringly, to herself, although at the same time she felt uneasiness enough to send her out into the hall to a gable window over the porch, which commanded a view of the camp. Nothing stirring was to be seen, except the dwindling flame of the evening camp-fire, burned every night for cheer, not for warmth. Evelyn crept to a side window. As she reached it a white figure could be seen hurrying ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond
... Avenue. At the next corner they lay motionless in a blockade, while the motor shuddered; then they dodged through an opening where the mud-guards missed by an inch and were whirling west toward Broadway. At 109th Street a bicycle officer stared in amazement at the dwindling number beneath the rear axle, then ducked his head and began to pedal. He overhauled the speeding machine as it throbbed before the doors of Mercy Hospital, to be greeted by a grinning chauffeur who waved him toward the building and ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... in the young nation as few then foresaw or even dreamed of. At this era, when the Adams Administration was about to close, Jefferson, in spite of his known liberal, democratic views, was one of the most popular of political leaders, save with the Federalists, now dwindling in numbers and influence. He it was who was put forward on the Republican side for the Presidency, while Adams, still favored by the Federalists and himself desiring a second term of office, became the Federalist candidate. Associated with the latter in the contest was Charles C. Pinckney, ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... appear. The case-forms of the different declensions are beginning to run into one another: the plural, for example, of insignis is no longer insignes, but, as in Italian, insigni; and the case-inflexions themselves are dwindling away before the free use of prepositions, which was already beginning to show itself in the ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... the books too much, or for being oneself a fool. In my case it does not matter which was my trouble. The trouble itself was the fact. The condition of the fact was mine. For me the life, and light, and sparkle of human intercourse were dwindling. ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... now become rare birds. The dwindling of his visitors had at first scarcely attracted his notice; it had been so gradual, like the rest. But at last Dutton found himself alone. The old solitude of his youth had re-knitted its shell around him. Now that he was unsustained by the likelihood of some one looking ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... The night is fresh, silent, exquisite, the eternal song of the cicalas fills the air. We can still see the red lanterns of my new family, dwindling away in the distance, as they descend and gradually become lost in that yawning abyss, at the ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... of Patagonia been also dwindling, though, there, if anywhere, still lies the Cape of Bad Hope for the apostles of human degeneracy. Pigafetta originally estimated them at twelve feet. In the time of Commodore Byron, they had already grown downward; yet he said of them that they were "enormous goblins," seven feet high, every ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... service gradually diminished; the edifices were found to be too large, and in many instances what had been the sanctuary, where art had exhausted itself in embellishment, partitioned off from the rest of the church, was kept for their dwindling congregations, while the vast aisles and roomy naves went slowly to ruin, or became deserted solitudes. As for the idea of building new religious edifices, the old ones were already too numerous for them, or if, as was not unfrequent, a new sect started into spasmodic life, and its ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... on top of one of the highest hills in London, and entrenches itself as a fortress against the poverty and squalor that are creeping up the hill towards it. Around the square there are still gardens and crescents and roads of consideration, but ever dwindling in social status as one goes down the hill, till the consideration vanishes in the degradation of cheap boarding-houses and the homes of Jews of the ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... matter to simmer for the present. But that did not mean that Bill would wear "blinders," or that he would sleep with his head under his tarp for fear of finding out what black-hearted renegade had sacrilegiously borrowed Jake. Black-hearted renegade, by the way, was but the dwindling to mild epithets after Bill's more colorful vocabulary had been ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... my great relief, there came Lady Auriol swinging along on the other side of the pavement. The cafe, you must know, forms a corner. To the left, the park and the tram terminus; to the right, the street leading to the post office and then dwindling away vaguely up the hill. It was along this street that Lady Auriol came, short-skirted, flushed with exercise, rather dusty and dishevelled. I stood and waved an arresting hand. She hesitated for a second and then crossed the road and met us outside ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... the last of a long line of estancieros once rich in land and cattle, but for generations the Canada Seca estate had been dwindling as land was sold, and now there was little left, and the cattle and horses were few, and only a small flock of sheep kept just to provide the house with mutton. His poor relations living scattered ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... was low, so low that it seemed but a little higher than the water level, but it bore an amazingly abundant growth. The river seemed to flow through a channel cut in the dense, solid vegetation. Great cypress trees towered up from the water, enormously thick at the roots and rapidly dwindling above. Between their rough trunks cypress scrub, sturdy cabbage palms, mangrove, custard apple and other varieties of tropical trees found space to grow; and between the trunks of the smaller trees was a tangle of palmetto, saw grass, ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... which to lay his head, or for a bite or a sup of wine. John and James would give their boats to Judas belike, and he'd bring home about as much fish as would—— But I'm thinking of your father. What will he be saying to all this, and his business dwindling all the while, and we beggars?—the words with which my wife roused me this morning. Of course, says she, if the stone that never was cut out of the mountain with hands is going to be slung and send the Romans toppling, I've naught to say against sharing, but the Kingdom had better ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... familiar reminiscences my dwindling interest vanished, and I noticed again, through the window, the house fronts of the place I knew once, when Poplar was salt. The lost sailor himself was insignificant. What was he? A deck hand; one who tarred iron, and could take a trick at the wheel when ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... supply will come to an end; but even now it is well understood how the crisis will be met. As the final period draws nearer, families will become smaller and smaller, and in the last Martian century no children will be born; so the diminishing water supply will suffice for the needs of the dwindling population. Thus the race will gradually die out naturally, and become extinct long before the conditions of our world can make life a terror. There will, therefore, be no self-slaughter, nor murderous extermination, amongst ourselves—we shall ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... countrymen, and run all hazards abroad, rather than starve at home. Government winked at those emigrations, and every year brought fresh strength to Carolina, insomuch that the lands in Ireland were in danger of lying waste for want of labourers, and the manufacturers of dwindling into nothing. ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... as we meet with in the Nile Valley, but actual running brooks, coursing and babbling between the trees, spreading out here and there into pools of water, and in places forming little cascades like those of our own streams, but dwindling in volume as they proceeded, owing to constant drains made on them, until they were for the most part absorbed by the soil before finally reaching ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... the dam' fool," said Mr. Blithers to the chauffeur. A moment later the pedestrian leaped nimbly aside and the car shot past, the dying wail of the siren dwindling away in the whirr of the wheels. "Look where you're going!" shouted Mr. Blithers from the tonneau, as if the walker had come near to running him down instead of the other way around. "Whoa! Stop 'er, Jackson!" he called to the driver. ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... in the afternoon and come back long after dark, damp with the dew and fog. He kept growing paler and weaker and more silent. Some days he did not speak more than a dozen words, but always kind and pleasant. He was just dwindling away; and when the picture was almost done a fever took hold of him. The doctor said it was malaria, but it seemed to me more like a trouble in the throat, a kind of dumb misery. And one night, in the third quarter of the moon, just after the tide turned to run out, he ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... hardest, and gave little heed to these things. She saw her own chances of success dwindling farther into the distance, and was surprised to see how little she cared, for a curious callousness had come over her of late. Selfish ambition—selfish, because it often persists in living when all other things are dead—seemed to have died in her at last. ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... The candle stood on the counter, its flame solemnly wagging in a draught; and by that inconsiderable movement the whole room was filled with noiseless bustle and kept heaving like a sea: the tall shadows nodding, the gross blots of darkness swelling and dwindling as with respiration, the faces of the portraits and the china gods changing and wavering like images in water. The inner door stood ajar, and peered into that leaguer of shadows with a long slit of daylight like ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... jumps up for a relic. We stood upon the road where Buonaparte (defended by high banks) sent on, but didn't lead, 6,000 of his old Imperial Guard. They charged along the road up to La Haye Sainte, dwindling as they went by the incessant fire of 80 pieces of Artillery, many of them within a few yards, till their number did not exceed 300. Then Napoleon turned round to Bertrand, lifted his hand, cried out, "C'est tout perdu, ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... neither very tactfully nor clearly that he was on the way to dwindling into an undisciplined soldier. But it did not matter in the least. For Stella Croyle was not listening. All this was totally unimportant. Men always went about and about when they had difficult things to say to women. Her eyes never left his face and she would know ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... still looking at this dwindling figure, which stood as a mere grey blot touched with a white flame against the great green wall of the steep down behind him. And as he stared over the top of the down behind the innkeeper, there appeared an army of black-clad ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... dwindling interest, saw Ashton-Kirk's hand clench, and saw a gleam shoot into his eyes. Then he saw him bend toward Tobin, his elbows on his knees, his clenched hands beneath ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... comparison such men of the world. My own initiations were rapid, as became an old sailor, and so it seemed were Miss Mavis's, for when I mounted to the deck at the end of half an hour I found her there alone, in the stern of the ship, looking back at the dwindling continent. It dwindled very fast for so big a place. I accosted her, having had no conversation with her amid the crowd of leave-takers and the muddle of farewells before we put off; we talked a little about ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... might of fire, in slow decay The scented tears of glowing nectar fall; Lower and lower droops the candle tall And ever dwindling ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... we can look to, we can cherish in the past, As the fleeting days that numbered them are dwindling to their last, Like the roses in the autumn that are severed from their stem, Like the dew-bespangled petals when we ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... which seemed to have already overtaken Bosnia and Herzegovina; when gallant little Montenegro was already shut out from the sea by the octopus-like grip of Dalmatia crouching along her western shore; when Turkey was dwindling down to almost ineptitude; when Greece was almost a byword, and when Albania as a nation—though still nominally subject—was of such unimpaired virility that there were great possibilities of her future, it was imperative ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... river only a dwindling sight of lonely sails was to be seen, heading toward Chesapeake Bay and then to sea. But anyone with eyesight good enough might have seen ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... engaged in eight pitched battles and in many skirmishes. Great numbers had been slain on both sides, but the Danes ever received fresh accessions of strength, and seemed to grow stronger and more numerous after every battle, while the Saxons were dwindling rapidly. Wide tracts of country had been devastated, the men slaughtered, and the women and children taken captives, and the people, utterly dispirited and depressed, no longer listened to the voices of their leaders, and refused again to ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... the dwindling embers. His mind, no longer diverted by the events of the day, recurred with melancholy persistence to a theme which even they, although fraught with novelty and presage of danger, had not altogether ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... to the little dependency of Lullington. The church calls itself the smallest in Sussex but this depends upon what constitutes a church. The existing building is actually the chancel of a former church, perhaps another proof of a dwindling population. ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... ear. The boys cheered again, everybody drank a drop of the cider, and from under a cloud of blue smoke, that hung flat as a pancake above them in the still air, all moved onward. Presently the party separated into three groups, each having a gunner to lead it, half a dozen boys to sing, and a dwindling jar of cider for the purposes of the ceremony. The divided choirs clashed their music, heard from a distance; the guns fired at intervals, each sending forth its own particular detonation and winning back a distinctive echo; then the companies separated widely and decreased to mere ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... the realm was thrown on the owner. If he failed in making out a satisfactory history of every ingot he was liable to severe penalties. This Act was, as might have been expected, altogether ineffective. During the following summer and autumn, the coins went on dwindling, and the cry of distress from every county in the realm became ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... back I saw those bent and dwindling figures still standing in the mud. The woman continued to pluck at her dress; the man gazed at the horizon with the same dull vacancy. They had the weary humility of the figures in Millet's "Angelus," without their inspiration, and in their eyes was ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... All that the coming of this strange man meant to her rushed suddenly over her. He was a man, obviously, who moved in the world, her world, since he apparently travelled extensively and his father was wealthy enough to run a racing stable as a hobby and was a member of the dwindling class of ancienne noblesse. It was characteristic of her that she put first what she did. How could she bear to meet one of her own order in the position in which she was? She who had been proud Diana Mayo and now—the mistress of an Arab Sheik? ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... wave of bitterest disappointment passed over Wilbur as he saw his $30,000 dwindling to nothing. Then the instincts of habit reasserted themselves. The taxpayer in him was stronger than the freebooter, after all. He felt that it was his duty to see to it that the girl had her rights. Kitchell must be made aware of the situation—must be told that Moran, the daughter, the Captain's ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... scored a goodly score And showed some splendid cricket, but their deeds Were not colossal, and our own brave Tennant Proved himself all as good a man as they. * * * * * Through them we greet our Mother. In their coming, We shake our dear old England by the hand And watch space dwindling, while the shrinking world Collapses into nothing. Mark me well, Matter as swift as swiftest thought shall fly, And space itself be nowhere. Future Tinleys Shall bowl from London to our Christ Church ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... the pigmy vessel as it dipped to the larger stretch of the bay, dwindling with the glint of two blades that flashed with clock-like regularity in the afternoon sun. Soon it reduced to a speck and was out of sight. Clark turned to his office, still contemplating the dignity ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... eating-house; knives and forks played but intermittently, and Mary, sitting at the end of the oilcloth-covered table, felt intuitively that she was the centre of the brewing storm. Oh, why hadn't she been contented to stay at home and make over her clothes and share the dwindling fortunes of her aunts, instead of coming ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... 16,000,000,000 board feet a year. Some authorities believe that our reserves will last only sixteen years unless measures to protect them are put into effect at once. At the present rate of cutting long-leaf pine trees, our outputs of naval stores including turpentine and rosin are dwindling. We cannot afford to increase our export of southern yellow pine unless reforestation is started on all land suitable for that purpose. Our pine lands of the southern states must be restocked and made permanently productive. Then they ...
— The School Book of Forestry • Charles Lathrop Pack
... sea. The animals and insects living on these modified plants, would themselves be in some degree modified by change of food, as well as by change of climate; and the modification would be more marked where, from the dwindling or disappearance of one kind of plant, an allied kind was eaten. In the lapse of the many generations arising before the next upheaval, the sensible or insensible alterations thus produced in each ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... whiskers bristling, and his eyes malignant. The daybook is banged, the bottles rattled, the counter thumped, and then he is off again with five doors slamming behind him. We can trace his progress when the black mood is on him by those dwindling slams. Perhaps it is that McCarthy has labelled the cough mixture as the eye-wash, or sent an empty pillbox with an exhortation to take one every four hours. In any case the cyclone comes and goes, and by the next meal all ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... a fiddle, a pair of saddlebags, a plug horse, and the eternal truth. There was the din of conflict by day on the hustings; there was the sound of revelry by night in the cabins. The mid-night stars twinkled to the music of the merry fiddle, and the hills resounded with the clatter of dwindling shoe soles, as the mountain lads and lassies danced the hours away in the good old time Virginia reel. I rode among the mountain fastnesses like the "Knight of the woeful figure," mounted on my prancing "Rozenante," everywhere ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... unrecognizable fragments as many of them were, were popular with the onlookers. Each as it marched by, was hailed with a new roar. Of course there were many tears. There was hardly anybody in all that crowd, over fifty years old, in whom the sight of these fast dwindling ranks did not stir memories of some personal bereavement. The old ladies on the porch no longer used their handkerchiefs chiefly for waving. Queed saw one of them wave hers frantically toward a drooping little knot of passing ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... present day is about equal to that of France, but that, when we analyse the facts, the fertility of the old native-born American population of mainly Anglo-Saxon origin is found to be lower than that of France. This element, therefore, is rapidly dwindling away in the United States. The general level of the birth-rate is maintained by the foreign immigrants, who in many States (as in New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Minnesota) constitute the majority ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... like the bison and the wild pigeon, the pearl-bearing molluscs may be greatly diminished in numbers or even exterminated by the greed of man and his fearfully destructive methods of harvesting nature's productions. In fact, the fisheries have been dwindling in yield for some time, and most of the fine pearls that are marketed are old pearls, already drilled, from the treasuries of Eastern potentates, who have been forced by necessity to accept the high prices offered by the West for ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... before him was anxiety, uncertainty. He had cut himself adrift; he was on the great stream. Whither would it lead him? Well—was it not the great stream? Had not all mankind, for all the ages, been floating on it? Or was it but a desert-river, dwindling away beneath the fiery sun, destined to lose itself a few miles on, among the arid sands? Were Arsenius and the faith of his childhood right? And was the Old World coming speedily to its death-throe, and the Kingdom of God at hand? Or was ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... becoming less conspicuous. It gradually dwindles until it disappears; beyond this point it either becomes reversed, or else the type has ceased to be a possible one. In our shorthand we have started with A a, and have watched the characteristic a dwindling to zero. When it vanishes we have reached a type which may be specified as A; beyond this point the type would be A - ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... the Prophet. His fame, bruited far and wide, soon aroused the jealousy of many of the neighboring chiefs and medicine men. They saw their power dwindling away and their authority diminishing. They took steps to check the advancing tide of fanaticism, but were at once adroitly met by the introduction of an inquisition into witchcraft, which had been almost universally believed in by the tribes, ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... His resources were dwindling. He needed funds for the many secret agents in his employ—needed yet more funds for the purchase and support of his lands in the South. And the minister of Great Britain had given plain warning that unless this expedition up the Missouri could ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... conviction has for some time been gaining ground with the great majority of the leading American newspapers, that a decisive victory by either of the two belligerent groups of Powers is no longer to be expected. With the exception of a continually dwindling minority which even to-day still promise their readers the 'ultimate victory' of the Entente Powers, the verdict of the American Press on the probable result of the war is 'a draw,' 'a stalemate.' Only a few newspapers, to which belong those of the Hearst Syndicate, confess to the belief in 'a ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... lame weaver, How will he laugh outright When he sees his dwindling flax-field All full of flowers ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... high dark buildings of the arsenal came the whirr of many wheels, the thudding of weights, and the buzz and babel of human toil. Beyond, the dwellings of the workingmen, smoke-stained and unlovely, radiated away in a lessening perspective of narrowing road and dwindling wall. ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... established order. Feudal communities and dwarf republics exist side by side in the northern Caucasus,[1382] attended by that primitive assertion of individual right, the blood feud.[1383] Often the two forms of government are combined, but the feudal element is generally only a dwindling survival from a remote past. The little Republic of Andorra, which for a thousand years has preserved its existence in the protection of a high Pyrenean valley, is a self-governing community, organized strictly ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... said that there was a difference this morning when I got up and looked out. The sandy paths were dry, showing that there had been no fresh rain in the night. Moreover, the hillsides were open to view, the silver rills that veined the rugged steeps were dwindling, there was a blue sky, and great ranges of wooded or desolate mountains were in clearly cut outline—the first time since the wet period set in. Over the shoulder of the huge pyramid to the east there was actual sunshine, and the fleecy clouds ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... servant's keener sight, trained by long stormy nights of watching, was following in its dwindling, mysterious course that misty vision in which he thought to recognize ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... the park, all thoughts of festivity had faded. As summer-flies are scattered by rain, so did this congregation, late noisy and happy, in sadness and melancholy murmurs break up, dwindling away apace. With the set sun and the deepening twilight the park became nearly empty. Adrian and Ryland were still in earnest discussion. We had prepared a banquet for our guests in the lower hall of the castle; and thither Idris and I repaired to receive ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... watched them go: the doctor walking across the cliffs with resolute stride, the detective making for the path over the moors with bent head and slower step, as though his feet were clogged by the weight of his thoughts. Thalassa watched their dwindling forms until they disappeared, and then stood still, in a listening attitude. The sound of the lawyer stirring in the study overhead seemed to rouse him from his immobility. He closed the door, and stood looking up ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees |
