"Floating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... resistance, and every other substantial appliance of ancient hospitality. Barrels of mighty ale were broached, and their nut-brown contents widely distributed, and the health of the bride and bridegroom was enthusiastically drunk in a brimming wassail cup of spicy wine with floating toast. Titus Tyrconnel acted as master of the ceremonies, and was, Mr. Coates declared, "quite in his element." So much was he elated, that he ventured to cut some of his old jokes upon the vicar, and, strange to say, without incurring ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... you know how many stars There are shining in the skies? Do you know how many clouds Ev'ry day go floating by? God in heaven has counted all, He would miss one ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various
... haunts of Commercial and Kearney streets; the low-lying Mission road was a quagmire; along the City Front, despite of piles and pier and wharf, the Pacific tides still asserted themselves in mud and ooze as far as Sansome Street; the wooden sidewalks of Clay and Montgomery streets were mere floating bridges or buoyant pontoons superposed on elastic bogs; Battery Street was the Silurian beach of that early period on which tin cans, packing-boxes, freight, household furniture, and even the runaway crews of deserted ships had been cast away. There were dangerous and unknown ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... of Friedwald at the distant venerable pile of stone; the majestic turrets and towers softly floating in a dreamy mist; the setting, fresh, woody, green. Long he looked at this inviting picture and then ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... heroism around M. de La Fayette, and animated anew the national guard, who were devoted to him. At this recital Bailly did not hesitate to proclaim martial law, and to unfurl the red flag, the last resource against sedition. On their side, the mob, alarmed at the aspect of the red flag floating from the windows of the Hotel-de-Ville, despatched twelve of their number as a deputation to the municipality. These commissioners with difficulty made their way to the audience-hall, through a forest of bayonets, and demanded that three citizens who had been arrested should be given up ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... Mr. Downing's at Newburg, opposite, a brother-in-law, and the author of fruit treatises, etc.) the splendid magnolias, which resemble deepest-dyed beakers, whence the fragrance arose almost palpable, it was so strong and sweet, and I looked to see rainbow-colored clouds floating from out the flowers—these, with the white blossoms of the orchards and the spray-like, snowy beauty of the Dogwood; in the early morning the sunlight, streaming down the mountains into the bosom of the river, kisses flashing and fiery, yet most gentle and tender, ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... passed through the duct into the intestine, immediate relief is experienced until another commences to pass, and the larger the concretion, the greater is the pain. If the stools be washed, the gall-stones may be seen floating ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... the old gentleman," continued Hugh; "and after meeting him, do you take any stock in the stories that have been floating around town about his being the clever rascal who disappeared from Wall Street ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... last my consciousness became confused. It often happens thus. So real is this search for some truth outside of me, that it seems as if my soul were a thing apart from me, a thing which left me to go alone on its dim and perilous way. I behold it as it were a shadow floating away from me out into that abyss of shadows which are the thoughts of many men long dead. And on this occasion the silence into which the Searcher went forth was vaster and more obscure than ever before, filled with unfathomable darkness as a clear night might ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... for that end, I communicated the same to my comrades, who approved it. 'Brethren,' said I, 'you know there is a great deal of timber floating upon the coast; if you will be advised by me, let us make several rafts that may carry us, and when they are done, leave them there till we think fit to make use of them. In the meantime we will execute the design to deliver ourselves ...
— Fairy Tales From The Arabian Nights • E. Dixon
... which was gallantly extended, so as to save her from bumping against the iron, requires no particular description. She was dressed in very gay-coloured clothes—had a vast quantity of different-hued ribbons floating like meteors on the troubled air—from the top and both sides of her bonnet; while a glistening pink silk cloak was in correct keeping with a pair of expansive cheeks, where the roses had very much the upperhand of the lilies. While Mistress Wilson, ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... her soft white silk robes and her floating veil. Her cheeks, now blushing rosy red, now pale as the veil that shaded them, betrayed how intense was her emotion. The bridesmaids came after her with jaunty steps, vain in their important office—Louisa Dobede, Augusta and Kate Herbert, ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... the European portions of the city, although the population of the latter is by no means devoid of a native element. Both together cover an area as extensive as Paris, though the population is only 120,000, of which 100,000 are congregated in the native, or Sart, quarter. There is a floating element of Kashgarians, Bokhariots, Persians, and Afghans, and a resident majority of Kirghiz, Tatars, Jews, Hindus, gypsies, and Sarts, the latter being a generic title for the urban, as distinguished ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... brother, and I only meant that lately so many things are stirring in the Forest that it seems more like the Forest wasn't a scrap set off by itself. I seem to have lots of scraps floating in my mind lately—things I've heard, and all are taking on meaning now. I remember someone saying, I guess it was the Bishop, that in a drop of ocean water, there was all that went into the ocean's making, except size. That didn't ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... natural effect was also to throw them together. MTutor paused and took up a position by his pupil's side. "What a foolish scene considered philosophically," he said; "and yet how many human interests in solution, and floating adumbrations of human fate! I have been dancing," Mr. Derwentwater continued, with some solemnity and a full sense of the superior position involved, "with, I verily believe, the most ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... his silent face, which the gaslight rendered pale. And to escape these curious manifestations the count posted himself in front of a stationer's, where with profound attention contemplated an array of paperweights in the form of glass bowls containing floating ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... of a quest, despair. Smart of a sullen wrong. Where may they hide them yet? One hour, yet one, To find the mossgod lurking in his nest, To see the naiads' floating hair, ...
— Silverpoints • John Gray
... this Lumawig decided to go back to the sky to live, but before he went he took care that his wife should have a home. He made a coffin of wood [103] and placed her in it with a dog at her feet and a cock at her head. And as he set it floating on the water, [104] he told it not to stop until it reached Tinglayen. Then, if the foot end struck first, the dog should bark; and if the head end was the first to strike, the cock should crow. So it floated away, and on and on, until it came ...
— Philippine Folk Tales • Mabel Cook Cole
... was beginning to assume a deeper note, and at times a floe would thrust one of its extremities into the bank as a pig thrusts its snout into the earth, and there remain motionless before once more beginning to sway, tearing itself free, and floating away down the river as another such floe glided ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... or that the habits of an animal would in time materially alter its anatomy, as in the case of the abnormal length of the hind toe and nail of the Jacana. It is not that the habit of running over floating leaves induced the change, but that an all-wise Creator so fashioned it that it might run on those leaves in search of its food. I accept the development theory to the extent of the multiplication of species, or perhaps, more correctly, varieties in genera. We see ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... its own. No longer my deaf ears; I heard, in my dream, as well as you can hear. Yes; the same water-music, singing over and over again the same horrid song: "Fool, fool, no Cristel for you; bid her good-bye, bid her good-bye." I saw her floating away from me on those hideous waters. The cruel current held me back when I tried to follow her. I struggled and screamed and shivered and cried. I woke up with a start that shook me to pieces, and cursed your interesting river. Don't write to me about it again. Don't look ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins
... farther end of Croisic, a dainty little peninsula in Brittany; it was far from the port, and so inaccessible that the coast-guard seldom thought it necessary to pass that way. To float in ether after floating on the wave!—ah! who would not have floated on the future as I did! Why was I thinking? Whence comes evil?—who knows! Ideas drop into our hearts or into our heads without consulting us. No courtesan was ever more capricious nor more imperious than conception is to artists; we must grasp ...
— A Drama on the Seashore • Honore de Balzac
... on the artificial retina which looks upon us through the optician's lens for a few seconds, and fixes an image that will outlive its original. It questions the light of the sun, and detects the vaporized metals floating around the great luminary,—iron, sodium, lithium, and the rest,—as if the chemist of our remote planet could fill his bell-glasses from its fiery atmosphere. It lends the power which flashes our messages in thrills that leave the lazy chariot ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... sailors, who buoyed a lodestone and observed it set towards the north. There is reason to believe that the magnet was employed by the priests of the Oracle in answering questions. We are told that the Emperor Valerius, while at Antioch in 370 A.D., was shown a floating needle which pointed to the letters of the alphabet when guided by the directive force of a lodestone. It was also believed that this effect might be produced although a stone wall intervened, so that a person outside a house or prison might convey intelligence ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... which covered the port. He knew only that the sun, evidently very near, was many times its usual size and of infinitely greater brilliance. And he was painfully aware of the fact that the fantastically enlarged and blazing body had seared his eyeballs and caused the floating black spots which ...
— Vulcan's Workshop • Harl Vincent
... western tribes have their wolf hero and progenitor, or their coyote, or their raven, or their dog. It is possible, and even certain in some cases, that the animal which was the dominant totem of a race became heir to any cosmogonic legends that were floating about. ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... a Greek village, the enlivening sound of the song, the guitar, and followed by bursts of merriment, broke upon the ear; and the frequent clapping of hands, and the strain of the romaika, or the Italian waltz, which came floating over the water, told of the merry joyous inmates, who are ever seen to prefer the dance and song, to the pipe and coffee-cup; the twinkling feet, and sparkling smile, to the grave nod and solemn demeanour of their former tyrants. A little below Jene Keni, near one of the ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... and never rose to the surface. The imperial stick and the green leather cap lay floating on the waves, but the Emperor himself had disappeared so quietly, so beyond all tracing, that if these souvenirs of him had not remained on top of the water, one would hardly have believed ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... of the wind—to draw air into her flattened lungs. She became partly dazed. The darkness before her eyes was not all occasioned by the blood that pressed like a stone mask on her face. She had a sense that she was floating, sailing, drifting, reeling, even while being borne swiftly as a thunderbolt. Her hands and arms were immovable under the weight of mountains. There was a long, blank period from which she awakened to feel ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... matter in what way it was launched, exploded, not on striking the object aimed at, but several hundred yards from it, its action upon the atmospheric strata was so terrific that any construction, warship or floating battery, within a zone of twelve thousand square yards, would be blown to atoms. This was the principle of the shell launched by the Zalinski pneumatic gun with which experiments had already been made at that epoch, but its results were multiplied ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... absurd he would feel to arouse people at daybreak for a mere nothing. It was while he paused there indecisively that a sight met his eye which spurred hesitancy to immediate action. Around the bend far up the stream came sweeping a tangle of wreckage—trees, and brush, and floating timber—and swirling along in its wake was a small lean-to which he recognized as one that had stood on the bank of the river at Melton, the village located five miles above Freeman's Falls. If the water were high enough to carry away this ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... bareheaded, dressed in a white sweater, and waders which reached his waist. He walked on the bank, only entering the water when forced. He had a queer basket strapped on his hip, and with a small rod he sent a long line spinning before him down the creek, deftly manipulating with it a little floating object. He was closer Elnora than her mother, but Mrs. Comstock thought possibly by hurrying she could remain unseen and yet warn the girl that a stranger was coming. As she approached the bridge, she caught a sapling and leaned ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... last all the measurements were decided upon. The ship would be 693 feet long, 83 feet broad, and 58 feet from keel to upper deck; weighing altogether 13,000 tons. With room in its iron shell for 5000 people, the Great Eastern would be a floating town, containing more inhabitants than many flourishing communities in England. The frame, or skeleton, consisted of 'bulkheads,' or huge webs of iron stretching for 400 feet lengthwise of the ship, and crossed by similar bulkheads from side ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... point, as I came out upon a ledge which overlooked the valley, I perceived my horse's shadow floating on the phantom ocean far below me, a dark equestrian statue encircled with a triple-ringed halo of fire. In all my mountain experiences I had never ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... for Berlin this morning. We shall probably never know under what circumstances he issued his cheque for fifty thousand pounds! Doesn't it seem just awful, with all this money floating about, that poor Sir Richard is nearly stranded for ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... was then in session in the Capitol, and also the Legislature of Virginia, a fact indicated by the State flag of Virginia floating from the southern end of the building, and the new flag of the Confederacy from the northern end. This was the first time I had seen the latter, which had been recently adopted, and I examined it with some interest. The design was exceedingly plain. Simply a white banner, with a red field ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... notes of a bird's song Echoes through the trees, It brings to remembrance the songs Of the blackbirds at Petit Trianon: Chiming, reverberating, floating down From the tops of the tall cedars As from an invisible, ...
— A Little Window • Jean M. Snyder
... movements among his array of test-tubes, he turned a white solution to a wine color, and a light yellow solution to a dark brown. He dropped a piece of litmus paper into an acid, when it changed instantly to red, and on floating it in an alkali it ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... it floating, and within his heart of fire, Beating in a Frenchman's bosom, rose at once a fierce desire, That the riven flag thus resting on the broad St. Lawrence tide Should, for years to come, betoken how France humbled ...
— Fleurs de lys and other poems • Arthur Weir
... and pasturage taken together form only about one and a half per cent, of the area. The population is scarce—little more than one to the English square mile—and settled chiefly along the banks of the rivers. The peasantry support themselves by fishing, hunting, felling and floating timber, preparing tar and charcoal, cattle-breeding, and, in ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... property of Lepsius, who had received it from the owner, Miss Westcar: hence it is known as the Westcar papyrus. It was written probably in the XIIth Dynasty, but doubtless embodied tales, which had been floating for generations before, about the names of the early kings. It shows us probably the kind of material that existed for the great recension of the pre-monu-mental history, made in the time of Seti I. Those ages of the first three dynasties were as long before that recension as we are after ...
— Egyptian Tales, First Series • ed. by W. M. Flinders Petrie
... between Mrs. Murray's room and that of her daughters. That ruined fruitcake had accomplished its work, the severe nervous headache had come and obliged her to go up to her room and lie down, while the girls supposed her to be still in the dining-room; so the talk came floating in to her while she lay on her bed pressing her aching temples. What a revelation was this! Was it possible that she was the person meant? One daughter blaming her, and the other excusing her. She almost forgot about her head in this new pain. The first ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... trying to realize the heavenly scenes that it believed were about to burst upon its vision. The quiet, sunlit water, the trees still bare but bourgeoning, the songs of birds, the blue sky across which fleecy clouds were peacefully floating, the breezes that kissed his fevered cheek, the fragrance of the bordering evergreens, and the electric air that entered his lungs so long accustomed to the poisonous fetor of his cell, were well calculated to foster his delusion, ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... "Go up to the field and send some one for help." Then he turned his attention again to his strokes, and raising his head once, saw an open river before him with nothing in sight between him and the opposite bank save, farther down stream, a floating oar. He had made some allowance for the current, and when in another moment he had reached what seemed to him to be near the scene of the catastrophe, yet a little farther down stream, he trod water ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... person in the box quite oblivious of Lady Dolly. He looked steadily over her animated shoulders at the play, wholly involved in an effort to keep its current and direction through the floating debris of constrained sayings with which it was encumbered; to know in advance whither it was carrying its Mrs. Halliday, and how far Lord Ingleton would accompany. When Lord Ingleton paused as it were to beg four people to "have ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... soaring high, Making man up turn his eye Just to learn what shape of love, Raineth music from above,— All the sunny cloudlets fair Floating on the azure air, All the glories of the sky Thou leavest unreluctantly, Silently with happy breast To ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... health and the continual provocation of romantic scenes, he became tormented with the desire to work. He enjoyed a strenuous idleness full of visions, hearty meals, long, sweltering walks, mirth among companions; and still floating like music through his brain, foresights of great works that Shakespeare might be proud to have conceived, headless epics, glorious torsos of dramas, and words that were alive with import. So in youth, like Moses ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which now had Flowers their fill, Ran all in haste to see that silver brood, As they came floating on the Christal Flood; Whom when they sawe, they stood amazed still, Their wondring eyes to fill; Them seem'd they never saw a sight so fayre, Of Fowles, so lovely, that they sure did deeme Them heavenly borne, or to be that same payre Which through the Skie draw Venus silver ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... looked that the mist changed to shapes of shadowy men and women, and his heart began to beat with the fear and the joy of the sight. And his hands, that were always restless, began to pluck off the leaves of the roses on the little branch, and he watched them as they went floating down into the valley in a ...
— Stories of Red Hanrahan • W. B. Yeats
... quite easy, you may be sure,' replied Fotis. 'My mistress never runs any risks. A cup of water from a spring, with some laurel leaves and anise floating in it, is all that she needs. I have seen her do it ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various
... meet me when I arrived in Germany. The country around here is of the most picturesque description; vast woods, cultivated uplands in perpetual variety, with the winding shore of the bay and the many quiet inland lakes. Even the floating mists of autumn lent to the landscape a some what picturesque, something strange to the islander. Everything here is on a larger scale than on the island. Beautiful was it without, glorious was it within. I wrote here a new little story. The Girl with the Brimstone-matches; ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... Y And call the distance Q Then dare we thus the gods defy I think we dare, don't you? Our floating power expressed in ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... the open air, and without ever seeing any human creature, except a boatman, who brought him twice a year biscuit and fresh water, and twigs wherewith to make baskets. Six years after this, he saw a vessel split and wrecked at the bottom of his rock. All on board perished, except one girl, who, floating on a plank, cried out for succor. Martinianus could not refuse to go down and save her life: but fearing the danger of living on the same mountain with her till the boatman should come, as was expected in two months, resolved to leave her there to subsist on his provisions ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... framed her mouth with both hands and sent a long, clear call floating out across ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... made any one happy, even with no Golden River to seek for. Level lines of dewy mist lay stretched along the valley, out of which rose the massy mountains,—their lower cliffs in pale gray shadow, hardly distinguishable from the floating vapor, but gradually ascending till they caught the sunlight, which ran in sharp touches of ruddy color along the angular crags, and pierced, in long level rays, through their fringes of spear-like pine. Far above, shot up red splintered ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... western Pacific, in that labyrinth of coral reefs and low, palm-rimmed isles floating between the blue of heaven and the deeper blue of sea, known to the pajama-clad, ear-ringed traders as "the Group," and to the outer world as Micronesia—here, one burning morning there arrived a visitor from "Home," who descended, not from some tubby bark or slant-masted ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... banishment, to the West Indies. The ship lay for a long time, with many others similarly situated, a helpless prey to the pestilence. Through that terrible autumn, the prisoners sat waiting for the summons of the ghastly Destroyer; and, from their floating dungeon. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Massingbird proved himself as little given to ceremony as Jan could be. The dinner hour, he had been told, was seven o'clock; and he arrived shortly after six. Lucy Tempest and Mary Elmsley were in the drawing-room. Fair, graceful girls, both of them, in their floating white bride's-maid's robes, which they would wear for the day; Lucy always serene and quiet; Mary, merry-hearted, gay-natured. Mary was to stay with them for some days. They looked somewhat scared at the early entrance of John Massingbird. Curious tales ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... her kitchen, instantly furnishing it in her imagination with copper vessels gleaming like gold, dreaming of its hearths all ablaze, the room filled with girls with rolled up sleeves, their rebocillos thrown back, their braids floating behind, and she in the center, seated in a great chair, giving orders and breathing in the savory ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... were embarked on thirteen Tigris barges, the prisoners were stripped of all their money and then of their clothes; after that they were thrown into the river. Five or six priests were stripped naked one day, smeared with tar, and dragged through the streets. For a whole month corpses were observed floating down the River Euphrates, hideously mutilated. The prisons at Biredjik are filled regularly every day and emptied every night—into the Euphrates." ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... down; at the right instant he made the one effort for which he had husbanded his strength. He gathered his legs up under him, and he stood. The water was only half-way up his thigh, and he stood. "Now for you, my friend!" he cried. Paul came by, quite inanimate now to all appearance, floating broadside to the current. Leaning forward, the Captain caught him by the leg, throwing his own body back in an intense strain of exertion. He lost his footing and fell. "I must let him go," he thought, "or we shall both be done for." But ...
— Captain Dieppe • Anthony Hope
... the Lady Capilla floating through the mazy dance that night, with all those wigs fighting for their old places in ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... that the Turks were very good to them. None of them wishes to extend the feasts that are everywhere being prepared for them. All want to return to Germany; and when I saw them march away, the German men beneath the Arabian sun, I saw fame and achievement like shadows floating over them. I was seized by pity for those who were at the goal, whose great hour was the way to the goal, and they knew it not. Behind the little comfort company there floated three figures—the three German soldiers whose bodies lie ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... intimate lady friends, and after dinner threw himself upon a lounge for a short siesta, when, suddenly springing up from a disturbed slumber, he exclaimed: "I believe I am going to be murdered!" Whereupon he related his dream. He said he thought himself in a little boat, floating upon a stream, and accompanied by two men, who, in spite of his convulsive efforts to near the shore, persistently allowed him to float down the stream to the falls below, over which his boat was madly hurled, when, by his imaginary fall, he was awakened with a strange and premonitory ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... conduct to a climax, by taking it into his head that he would go to India. Why should he go to India, except to harass me? To be sure he had nothing to do with any other part of the world, and had a good deal to do with that part; being entirely in the India trade, whatever that was (I had floating dreams myself concerning golden shawls and elephants' teeth); having been at Calcutta in his youth; and designing now to go out there again, in the capacity of resident partner. But this was nothing ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... Therefore, he ordered one of the beavers to go down to the bottom of the deep and bring up some earth if he could, as evidence that he did go to the bottom. So the beaver obeyed, and he went down, but the water was so deep the beaver died before he reached the bottom, and therefore, he came up floating as a dead beaver. Ne-naw-bo-zhoo drew him up into his canoe and resuscitated the beaver by ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... companions. He now began to endure fearful pangs from hunger. One evening he entered an encampment that had just been abandoned by the natives, and around the fire there were some fish bones, which he greedily picked. Next day he saw two small fish floating dead upon a pool, and they made a delicious feast; but, in spite of these stray morsels, he was rapidly sinking from hunger, when suddenly he was met by a native tribe. The black men were exceedingly kind; one carried his bundle for him, another supported his feeble frame, and gently they led the ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... General Foster was obliged to telegraph Grant that things had grown worse rather than better since his visit. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. ii. pp. 71, 72.] Many animals were dying daily. The weather was still intensely cold, and floating ice combined with high water, in the Holston had twice broken the pontoon bridge at Knoxville. Food for man and beast was all eaten out on the north side of the Holston River, and he proposed to move most of the troops to the south and east of the French Broad, ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... the purple mist drew into mist, As thought melts into endless thought, and round The rim of the sheer world was heard a sound, Floating through palpitating amethyst. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... among the rarest of fossils, due, no doubt, to their aerial habits removing them from the ordinary dangers of flood, bog, or ice which overwhelm mammals and reptiles, and also to their small specific gravity which keeps them floating on the surface of water till devoured. Their remains were long confined to Tertiary deposits, where many living genera and a few extinct forms have been found. The only birds yet known from the older rocks ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... the middle of the next year, leaving behind him some histrionic debts (chiefly, we fear, of a certain Mademoiselle Lorenz) for which he had confidingly made himself security. Stranded, by want of floating or other capital, at Wittenberg, he enters himself, with help from home, as a student there, but soon migrates again to Berlin, which had been his goal when making his hegira from Leipzig. In Berlin he remained three ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... helpless terror the waves on which he tossed to and fro grew calm; then they seemed to divide, and he felt himself going down, down into infinite depths. The sullen roar died away; the darkness was flooded with golden light, and through its ethereal waves he was still floating downward more gently than ever a roseleaf floated to earth on the evening's breath. Through the waves of golden light there came to him a faint, distant murmur ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... of her diligence, and the windows were open to the summer sunshine. Susannah sat with a large pan of red gooseberries beside her; she was picking them over one by one. Somewhere in the outer kitchen the hired boy had been plucking a goose, and some tiny fragments of the down were floating in the air. One of them rode upon a movement of the summer air and danced before Susannah's eyes. She put her pretty red lips beneath it and blew ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... fascinated. He saw fishes large and small unconsciously touch the quivering tentacles, which on the instant twisted round them and dragged them in to the rending beak below the hideous eyes. And then he saw another similar monster come floating in on similar quest, and in a moment they were locked in deadly fight—such a writhing and coiling and straining and twisting of monstrous fleshy limbs, which swelled and thrilled, and loosed and gripped, with venom past believing—such a clamping ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... many languages, and howls in the common tongue, as if all the fiends of the pit had broken loose. We took off our hats in obedience to the demand; but the clamor did not wholly subside, and was mingled with singing and horrible laughter. Floating about in each vat, we at first saw twenty or thirty human heads. The women could be distinguished from the men by the manner of dressing the hair. Each wore a loose woolen gown. Each had a little table floating before him or her, which he or she pushed about at pleasure. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Acts, and, until the last amending Land Act of 1909, were chargeable—the Estate Duties Grant, hi the first instance, the Agricultural Grant in the second instance—with the increasingly heavy losses incurred in floating Land Stock below par. In 1908-09 the sums so withdrawn amounted to L90,000. That liability was removed by Mr. Birrell's Act, and they now remain chargeable only with any arrears in the annuities paid by the purchasing tenants. ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... to alter and revise some of them, Clare would not allow any change, save orthographical and grammatical corrections. There was at this time an impression on Clare's mind that his verses were the product of intuition; and that the songs came floating from his lips and pen as music from the throat of birds. So he held his own orthodoxy more orthodox than that of the schools. In which view poor John Clare was decidedly wrong, seeing that his music was not offered gratis like that of the skylark ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... united could make, were sent forth by the terrific brute, who threw himself headlong on the gallant knights; but they nimbly skipped out of the way; and, as his face lay submerged in his own blood, they again thrust their swords into his back and sides, while thousands of bubbles, floating up from the surface of the pool of Wood, showed that, at length, he had breathed out ...
— The Seven Champions of Christendom • W. H. G. Kingston
... preoccupied with her mauve toque and her embroidered velvet gown than with the bride, or even with her little Ella, who had specially come back from school at Paris for the occasion, who was childishly delighted with her long crook with the floating blue ribbon, and was probably the only person present whose enjoyment was quite fresh and without ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... through the water. When a bird was hooked they hauled in the line, still from shelter, till it was alongside. This was the ticklish moment. The hook, merely a hollow and acute-angled triangle of sheet-copper floating on a piece of board at the end of the line, held the bird by pinching its curved beak into the acute angle. The moment the line slacked the bird was released. So, when alongside, this was the problem: to lift the bird out of the water, straight up the side of the ship, without ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... its wake unseen, its course unguided. Suddenly at sunset the fog folded its gray draperies, spread its wings, and floated off to the southwest, where that night it rested at Death's Door and sent two schooners to the bottom; but it left behind it a released dug-out, floating before a log fortress which had appeared by magic, rising out of the water with not an inch of ground to spare, if indeed there was any ground; for might it not be a species of fresh-water boat, anchored there for ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... our finances, and that they would not take us any distance at a reasonable charge, we determined to walk the whole fifty miles in the day, and half-way down the mountains, sauntering listlessly accordingly left Bourg d'Oisans at a few minutes before five in the morning. The clouds were floating over the uplands, but they soon began to rise, and before seven o'clock the sky was cloudless; along the road were passing hundreds of people (though it was only five in the morning) in detachments of from two to nine, with cattle, sheep, pigs, and goats, picturesque enough ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... full of water, and forced to move along, they are of necessity precipitated in rain, being fully distended with moisture from the regions where they have been floating; hence they bump each other heavily and burst with ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... would have averted raged only the fiercer as the dark years went by. If the Statutes of Labourers were powerless for their immediate ends, either in reducing the actual rate of wages or in restricting the mass of floating labour to definite areas of employment, they proved effective in sowing hatred between employer and employed, between rich and poor. But this social rift was not the only rift which was opening amidst the distress and misery of the time. The close of William Langland's poem is the prophecy ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... Pacific. I found the image running loose in my mind, without a halter. It suggested itself as an illustration of the will, and I worked the poem out by the aid of Mitchell's School Atlas.—The spores of a great many ideas are floating about in the atmosphere. We no more know where all the growths of our mind came from than where the lichens which eat the names off from the gravestones borrowed the germs that gave them birth. The two match-boxes were just alike, but ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... off. Soon the noise of the waterfall behind Casa Felice died away, the spectral facade faded and only the plash of the oars and the tinkle of fishermen's bells above the nets, floating here and there in the lake, were audible. The distant lights of mountain villages gleamed along the shores, and the lights of the stars gleamed ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... me to examine it, with a view to discover a good harbour, I proceeded in the search; and on the 16th, being then in the latitude of 48 deg. 45', and in the longitude of 52 deg. E., we saw penguins and divers, and rock-weed floating in the sea. We continued to meet with more or less of these every day, as we proceeded to the eastward; and on the 21st, in the latitude of 48 deg. 27' S., and in the longitude of 65 deg. E., a very large seal was seen. We had now much ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... displacement, seventy-five thousand horse-power, and on her trial trip had steamed at a rate of twenty-five knots an hour over the bottom, in the face of unconsidered winds, tides, and currents. In short, she was a floating city—containing within her steel walls all that tends to minimize the dangers and discomforts of the Atlantic ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... of the open sea. The ocean in the spaces between the foam was slimy in appearance. The waves, seen through the twilight in indistinct outline, somewhat resembled plashes of gall. Here and there a wave floating flat showed cracks and stars, like a pane of glass broken by stones; in the centre of these stars, in a revolving orifice, trembled a phosphorescence, like that feline reflection, of vanished light which shines in the eyeballs ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... from pipes and an apparatus which I leave for William's scientific description: terrace before Belvidere House—well-dressed groups parading on it: groups all over the gardens, mantles, scarves, and feathers floating: all the commonalty outside in fields at half-price. We soon espied Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton, and joined company, and were extremely happy, and wished for you and dear Honora. Sun shining, no wind. Presently we met the Solicitor-General: he started back, and made me such a bow as made ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... belladonna, and what not. I do not know that I derived the slightest benefit from any of these prescriptions, or from any other therapeutic agency, unless I except the good effects for a few days of bitters, and of cold shower-baths from a tank in which ice was floating. ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... them of huge proportions, which you did not understand, have since been completed in preparation for this moment. On the floor of the Exchange my brokers have been ostentatiously idle, but others, not known to act for me, have been buying Coal and Ore. They have pretty well gathered in the floating supply." ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... may be a bluish haze rather than a deep, fleecy white. In consequence it becomes impossible to see the interior of the chamber for the aqueous humor and the condition of the iris and pupil. The aqueous humor is usually turbid, and has numerous yellowish-white flakes floating on its substance or deposited in the lower part of the chamber, so as to cut off the view of the lower portion of the iris. The still visible portion of the iris has lost its natural, clear, dark ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... in the Cape de Verde islands, not to mention others. It is the destruction of forests, and not a supposed cooling of the globe, which has rendered the southern part of Iceland more accessible to the dreadful cold which is too often produced by those masses of floating ice which are intercepted and detained by ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 564, September 1, 1832 • Various
... that night. Worse than Mel could ever remember it. As always, it was a dream of space, black empty space, and he was floating alone in the immense depths of it. There was no direction. He was caught in a whirlpool of vertigo from which he reached out with agonized yearning for ...
— The Memory of Mars • Raymond F. Jones
... Immediately the boy sat up again; all his sleepiness gone. The pure, gay, delicate spirit of childhood was darting at ideas dimly perceived in the delicious moonlight of romance which silvered his brain, where may airy and beautiful figures were moving: The Fianna with floating locks chasing the flying deer; shapes more solemn, vast, and misty, guarding the avenues to unspeakable secrets; but ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... sea he seldom rose before ten o'clock in the morning. The 'Orient' had the appearance of a populous town, from which women had been excluded; and this floating city was inhabited by 2000 individuals, amongst whom were a great number of distinguished men. Bonaparte every day invited several persons to dine with him, besides Brueys, Berthier, the colonels, and his ordinary household, who ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... past may be reconstructed, but it has handed on to us the men themselves who set up the monuments and made the history. Her great monarchs are not any longer mere names deprived of appropriate forms, and floating colourless and shapeless in the imagination of posterity: they may be weighed, touched, and measured; the capacity of their brains may be gauged; the curve of their noses and the cut of their mouths may be determined; ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... the water around her was too shallow to float even a plank. To add, if possible, to our difficulties and to our anxiety, the weather became suddenly colder, the thermometer fell to zero, masses of floating ice came in with every tide and tore off great sheets of the vessel's copper as they drifted past, and the river soon became so choked up with icy fragments that we were obliged to haul the boats back and forth with ropes. In spite of weather, water, and ice, however, the vessel's cargo was slowly ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... grumbled the other man, "or these gusts'll have us over. An' don't let that old oar o' yourn range about so. I can't git no hold o' the water." The boat lifted suddenly on a wave and sank again in the trough, the sail flapped, and a great cold splash of salt water came aboard, floating the fish to the stern, against Banks's feet. Chauncey, grumbling heartily, began to bail with a square-built wooden scoop for which he reached far ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett
... which shelter its children. These tiny caterpillars will feed on the leaves till winter, then by some witchery of nature survive the frost and snow and zero weather, sheltered only by this filmy, flimsy home, finish their growth in the spring, waxing fat on the young leaves and by late May be floating ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... curtain falls by its own weight, and the air is suddenly changed. A hushed, half-rhythmic sound, as of a world breathing in its sleep, makes the silence alive. The light is not dim or ineffectual, but very soft and high, and it is as rich as floating gold dust in the far distance, and in the apse, an eighth of a mile from the door. There is a blue and hazy atmospheric distance, as painters call it, up in the lantern of the cupola, a twelfth of a ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... markedly pyramidal; in fact, there are, broadly speaking, three pyramids, —of the arch, the canopy, and the grouping. A second, much less symmetrical example of this type, is given by another Botticelli in the Academy,—"Spring." Here the central female figure, topped by the floating Cupid, is slightly raised above the others, which, however, bend slightly inward, so that a triangle, or pyramid with very obtuse angle at the apex, is suggested; and the whole, which at first glance seems a little ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... past, wondering at the storms that heaved them so high, when life to many seemed smooth as a sea of glass. Then I thought how sweet the haven of eternal repose must be to the wave-worn mariner; how much sweeter to one who had had a tempestuous voyage, than one who had been floating on a tranquil current; and the closing verse of an old hymn came ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... measures thou dost steal, a glorious hymn! All the joys of earth and heaven in the singing meet, and flow Richer, sweeter, for the wailing of an undertone of woe. How I linger, how I listen for each mellow note that falls, Clear as chime of angels floating downward ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... was radiant, more beautiful than ever, and astonishingly grand. So was Bridgie! The little sister gazed from one to the other with kindling eyes. Black dresses with tails to them; fluffy gauze boas with ends floating to the knees; hats that were not hats, but crinkled, brimless things like the Surbiton ladies wore in the afternoons, and so light and gauzy that they might have been blown ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... day was inclining toward the evening, tiny rose-tinted cloudlets hung high in the heavens, and seemed not to be floating past, but retreating into the very depths ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... feeling of the most agonising distress; it lay upon me like a heavy burden; I could not breathe; I was obliged to get out of my carriage into the open air. But my anguish continued to increase until it became actual physical pain. Soon I seemed to hear the strains of a solemn chorale floating in the air; the sounds continued to grow more distinct; I realised the fact that they were men's voices chanting a church chorale. "What's that? what's that?" I cried, a burning stab darting as it were through my breast "Don't ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... health. Most of the natives of India who accompanied the embassy suffered from low fever and dysentery. Forty persons died during the first week's stay at Bekaneer. La Fontaine's description of the floating sticks might be aptly applied to Bekaneer. "From afar off it is something, near at hand it is nought." The external appearance of the town is pleasant, but it is a mere disorderly collection of ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... reach. Again, a well-known ethnologist, Mr. Westropp, informs me that he observed in Vienna a bear deliberately making with his paw a current in some water, which was close to the bars of his cage, so as to draw a piece of floating bread within his reach. These actions of the elephant and bear can hardly be attributed to instinct or inherited habit, as they would be of little use to an animal in a state of nature. Now, what is the difference between such actions, when performed by an uncultivated man, and by one ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... windows round and square, great and small, on the same line, with shutters and without, some with glass and some without any. It is as old as the mountains and rivers. The roofs project about six feet, spreading their shadows over the black water, in which old shoes, rags, and dead dogs are floating. If you look upward you will be sure to see the face of some old Jew at the windows in the roof, with his gray beard and crooked nose, or a child who is risking his neck. Properly speaking, it is a ...
— Waterloo - A sequel to The Conscript of 1813 • Emile Erckmann |
