"Leathery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... arms around the Indian's neck, or as nearly around as she could reach, and stood on tiptoe to plant a kiss on his leathery cheek. Huntington too leaped on him, seizing his shoulder and hand, and dragging him farther into the room. Then he broke away, and ran for a bottle; and the two men clicked glasses and drank in silence. And two ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... in the middle, it is sufficiently cooked, and should be served with the greatest expedition, as it will begin to sink rapidly. An omelet souffle, left in the oven two or three minutes over time, will be quite spoilt, and become tough and leathery. ...
— The Skilful Cook - A Practical Manual of Modern Experience • Mary Harrison
... is gunning somewhere in the backwoods. Down the stony winding road saunters one of the natives in a two-piece suit. Overalls and a hickory shirt constitute his entire outfit. He grows a beard to save himself the labor of shaving. His leathery feet scarcely feel the sharp stones of the highway. Here is a picture worth preserving, for the "cracker" type is becoming a rarity, almost extinct. Set your pointer at "8" and take his full length. If you wish a close-up of his head, set ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... he began, his leathery face wrinkling in a smile. "Ye didn't expect me, an' I didn't neither. I'm glad ye're about well o' that arrer wound. I kerried a arrerhead under my shoulder blade sever'l years oncet, ontel Preacher ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... minutes more went by. Clare sat hungry and sleepy on the grass by the roadside. Before he knew, he was on his feet, startled by a terrible noise. The lion had opened his great jaws, and his brown leathery sides, working like a pair of bellows, had sent from his throat a huge blast, half roar, half howl. When Clare came to himself he knew, though he had never heard it before, that the fearful sound was the voice of the lion. He did not know that all it meant was, that his majesty ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... home. In approaching the door, his toe kicked something which felt and sounded soft, leathery, and distended, like a boxing-glove. It was a large toad humbly travelling across the path. Oak took it up, thinking it might be better to kill the creature to save it from pain; but finding it uninjured, he placed it again among the grass. He knew what this direct ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... large quarry, with a number of small excavations which fill with water, and are pumped by most ingenious Chinese pumps worked by an endless chain, but there are two powerful steam pumps at work also. About four hundred lean, leathery-looking men were working, swarming up out of the holes like ants in double columns, each man carrying a small bamboo tray holding about three pounds of stanniferous earth, which is deposited in a sluice, ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... savagely at the leash until his face bulged, burst upon the scene with impressive dramatic effect! It was difficult to decide, without due consideration, which was the more interesting. Bildad, a huge, gnarled old Viking, with matted gray hair, bushy eyebrows, a flowing beard, and leathery face, a fierce-looking giant, was appalling to behold, but so was Caesar Napoleon, an immense bulldog, cruel, bloodthirsty, his massive jaws working convulsively, his ugly fangs gleaming, as he set his great body against the leash, and gave evidence of a sincere desire to make free lunch ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... the fashion that cowboys can," said Dave, and then he invited Sid Todd to sit down with them, which the cowboy did. He was a man of about forty, tall and leathery. His eyes were bubbling over with good humor, but they could become very stern when the occasion demanded it. Laura had become well acquainted with him during her former visit to the ranch, and knew that the Endicotts trusted him implicitly. While ...
— Dave Porter at Star Ranch - Or, The Cowboy's Secret • Edward Stratemeyer
... into the night. It made his leathery face a mesh of wrinkles. "A bitter feast Yolner we hold," he said. "'Twas a madness of the king's, that he would guest with his brother across the water. Now the other ships are blown from us and the fire is drenched out and we lie alone in ...
— The Valor of Cappen Varra • Poul William Anderson
... of the ammonia and it brought a tinge of color to the tanned and leathery cheeks ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Death Valley - or Diamond X and the Poison Mystery • Willard F. Baker
... they can see near and distant objects equally well, and their sight is very acute. The sparrow-hawk discerns the small birds which are its prey at an incredible distance. No tribe of birds possesses an outward ear, except those which seek their food by night; these have one in the form of a thin, leathery piece of flesh. The inside ear, however, is very large, and their ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... place from a little screened gallery reserved for the attendants of the tables. The building was pervaded by a distant muffled hooting, piping and bawling, of which he did not at first understand the import, but which recalled a certain mysterious leathery voice he had heard after the resumption of the lights on the night of his ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... of 1875 that tanned John Barclay's face gave it a leathery masklike appearance that the succeeding years never entirely wore off. For he lived in the open by day, riding among his fields in three townships, watching the green carpet of March rise and begin to dimple in ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... sand in which she deposits them and here they develop. If no further provisions were made the eggs of the turtle would dry completely and never hatch. Accordingly it becomes necessary for the turtle to enclose each egg in a tough, leathery membrane, known as the shell. Because the egg is thus encased it is necessary for it to be fertilized before being laid. Accordingly the male must place the sperm cells within the body of the female. These cells ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... asked Tom curiously, for he had noted that the man, while aged, was rugged and hearty, and his skin was tanned a leathery brown, showing that he was much ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton
... joined together at the back of the head; besides which they have leaf, or lance-shaped appendages in front. A membrane of various forms is also often attached to the nose, in one species the shape of a horse-shoe. The bodies are always covered with hair, but the wings consist of a leathery membrane. Another singularity in one genus is the extremity of the spine being converted into two jointed, horny pieces, covered with skin, so as to form a box of two valves, each having an independent motion. ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... pipe. The root of the tongue is furnished on both sides with a loose fringe which we will call the first strainer. The upper jaw is thin and flat and rests on the lower like a lid, and it is beautifully fringed along both sides with small, leathery points, close set, like the teeth of a very fine saw. This is the second strainer. To work the machine you dip the point into dirty water full of water-fleas, draw back the tip of the tongue a little, and suck in water till the lower jaw (the pipe) is full, then close the point again with the tip ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... something suddenly thrust between his teeth. It was hard as well as cold. He tasted it, rolled it over his tongue, and found it not painful. Then came something else. His head was being hurriedly fitted with a leathery contrivance. But neither was this painful, save only as it touched his twisted ears, and he therefore experienced no increasing alarm. Then, with this adjusted, he was introduced to something else—a something held ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... music. And the Mazurkas—I refuse positively to discuss at the present writing such a fertile theme. I am fatigued already, and I feel that my antique vaporings have fatigued you. Next month I shall stick to my leathery last, like the musical shoemaker that I am—I shall consider to some length the use of left-hand passage work in the Hummel sonatas. Or shall I speak of Chopin again, of the Chopin mazurkas! My sour bones become sweeter when I think ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... the leathery, pulpy body of the monster, but with no other effect than the sudden snapping of the inch line like thread. It was subsequent to this that, as the diver stayed his steps in the unsteady current, his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... a rock by a short stumpy stalk, sometimes sealed firmly to a loose stone, you may find an object in form and structure resembling an elongated, coreless pineapple, composed of a leathery semi-gelatinous, semi-transparent substance, dirty yellow in colour. It is the spawn case or the receptacle of the ova (if that term be allowable), and the cradle of what is commonly known as the bailer shell (CYMBIUM AETHIOPICUM) the "Ping-ah" of the blacks, one of the most singular and interesting ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... fertile in expedients, crushed the cooling fruit and applied them to the sprained foot; rendering the application still more grateful by spreading them upon the large smooth leaves of the sapling oak; these he bound on with strips of the leathery bark of the moose-wood, [FN: "Dirca palustris,"—Moose-wood. American mezereon, leather-wood. From the Greek, dirka, a fountain or wet place, its usual place of growth.] which he had found growing in great abundance near ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... the use of which they did not understand, like queer-smelling, soft, yellow balls which Necia said were oranges and good to eat, although the skins were leathery and very bitter, nor were they nearly so pleasant to the nose as the toilet soap, which Necia would not allow them even to taste. Then there was a box of chocolate candies such as the superintendent at St. Michael's sent them every spring, and an atomizer, which Necia had filled with Florida Water. ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... wayside weeds as he walked. He refused our offer to take him in, alleging that he was out for exercise and to reduce his flesh—an ancient jibe at his bony frame which made him for an instant show a leathery smile. ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... jungle consists mostly of jand (Prosopis spicigera), a near relation of the Acacias, jal or van (Salvadora oleoides), and the coral-flowered karil or leafless caper (Capparis aphylla). All these show their desert affinities, the jand by its long root and its thorns, the jal by its small leathery leaves, and the karil by the fact that it has managed to dispense with leaves altogether. The jand is a useful little tree, and wherever it grows the natural qualities of the soil are good. The sweetish fruit of the jal, known as pilu, is liked by the people, and ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... he said, leading me into a dark plain room at the end of the florid vista. It was square and brown and leathery: no "effects"; no bric-a-brac, none of the air of posing for reproduction in a picture weekly—above all, no least sign of ever having been ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... the process of oxidation to be due to a microscopical fungus (mycoderma aceti), possessing the power of condensing oxygen and conveying it to the fermentable substance. This organism, which is a true bacterium, as the fermentation proceeds, forms a leathery membrane (slightly differing according to the substance fermenting) on the surface of the liquor, which constitutes the so-called mother of ...
— The Production of Vinegar from Honey • Gerard W Bancks
... no!" roared Uncle Paul. "Fry! That is wild west-country ignorance, madam! Are you not aware, madam, that the action of boiling fat upon albumen is to produce a coagulate leathery mass of tough indigestible matter inimical to the tender sensitive lining of the most important organ of the human frame, lying as it does without assimilation or absorption upon the epigastric region, and producing an irritation that may ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... with the leathery complexion and the belt to match, and the untidy hair and the big feet? I like her face. And why does she sit at a table with all those strange-looking men? And who are all the men? And who is the fur-lined grand ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... trunks. The ground was carpeted, as usual, by Lycopodiums, but it was also encumbered with masses of vegetable debris and a thick coating of dead leaves. Fruits of many kinds were scattered about, amongst which were many sorts of beans, some of the pods a foot long, flat and leathery in texture, others hard as stone. In one place there was a quantity of large empty wooden vessels, which Isidoro told us fell from the Sapucaya tree. They are called Monkey's drinking-cups (Cuyas de Macaco), and ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... April, May and June feeding upon the leaves of the pecan. They are ravenous feeders, and if present in sufficient numbers, considerable damage is done. The caterpillars are from two to two and a half or three inches in length when fully extended, gray and striped, leathery in appearance, very closely resembling the back of the tree upon which they rest when not feeding. Having attained its full growth as a caterpillar, it ties together two or three leaves with strands of silk, thus making a loose cocoon within which it pupates. The pupa is dark brown, ...
— The Pecan and its Culture • H. Harold Hume
... and pistils numerous, the former yellow in upper flowers; usually absent or imperfect in lower pistillate flowers. Leaves: Exceedingly variable; those under water usually long and grass-like; upper ones sharply arrow-shaped or blunt and broad, spongy or leathery, on ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... city almost a year now. But the city had not digested Ben. He was a leathery morsel that could not be assimilated. There he stuck in Chicago's crop, contributing nothing, gaining nothing. A rube in a comic collar ambling aimlessly about Halsted Street, or State downtown. You saw him conversing hungrily with the gritty and taciturn Swede who was janitor for the ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... see the light on the wreck of the Plymouth Adventure. Now and then the boys struggled with the heavy oars and rowed until exhausted but they knew they could be making no headway against the current which had gripped the derelict raft. They ate sparingly of flinty biscuit and leathery beef pickled in brine and stinted themselves to a few swallows of water from the wooden breaker or ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... after you have read the volume, forever, for you, will the smoke of martyr-fires hover about the Piazza Signoria, and from the gates of San Marco you will see emerge that little man in black robe and cowl—that homely, repulsive man with the curved nose, the protruding lower lip, the dark, leathery skin—that man who lured and fascinated by his poise and power, whose words were whips of scorpions that stung his enemies until they had to silence him with a rope; and as a warning to those whom he had hypnotized, they burned ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... the plan of the whole growth of the next season. They are scaly and covered, especially towards the apex, with a sticky varnish. The scales are opposite, like the leaves. The outer pairs are wholly brown and leathery, the succeeding ones tipped with brown, wherever exposed, so that the whole bud is covered with a thick coat. The inner scales are green and delicate, and somewhat woolly, especially along the lapping edges. There are about seven pairs of scales. The larger ...
— Outlines of Lessons in Botany, Part I; From Seed to Leaf • Jane H. Newell
... horrible to be believable. As though it were a bearer of death stripped to the very essentials. A mouth that split the head in two, rows of teeth, serrated and pointed. Leathery, claw-tipped wings, longer claws on the limbs that tore at ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... to look far for him." General Gomez's leathery countenance lightened into a smile. "He happens to be right here in Cubitas." Calling Judson to him, he said: "Amigo, take Mr. O'Reilly to Colonel Lopez; you will find him somewhere about. I am sorry we are not to have this young fellow for a soldier; he looks like a real man and—quite ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... was as brown as sole-leather, and the texture of the skin seemed leathery as well. There was a hawklike nose dominating the unfeminine face. The shallows below the cheekbones were deep, as though she had suffered the loss of her back molars. The eyebrows were straggly; the eyes themselves ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... moments the door of the waiting-room opened again and an inspector appeared on the threshold, a dried-up looking man with a leathery complexion. He looked at the permit through his spectacles, and turned curious eyes towards the medals on the breast of the veteran. He shook his head deprecatingly, and called out an ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... difficult to get rid of it. Mealy-bugs also occasionally make a hurried visit to camellias when making their growth, as well as aphides. But the leaves once formed and advanced to semi-maturity are too hard and leathery for such insects, while they will bear scale being rubbed off them with impunity. But really well-grown camellias, as a rule, are wholly free from insect pests, and their clean, dark, glossy leaves are only of secondary ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... it lifted. Even when he was hauling in his wet and dripping line with a struggling fish at the end of it a recurrent memory of what he had seen would suddenly come upon him, and he would groan in spirit at the recollection. He looked at Matt Abrahamson's leathery face, at his lantern jaws cavernously and stolidly chewing at a tobacco leaf, and it seemed monstrous to him that the old man should be so unconscious of the black cloud ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... faces and tanned leathery white ones you can imagine what a pink rosebud she seemed to be; and it wasn't like that she stopped at that, for she could sing like a nightingale and talk to beat the band; and her laugh itself was like music, sounding long afterwards ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... yourself? All those snow places bristle with grass widows and girls who have outstayed their market and have to get a hustle on! Sending a man out there alone is like driving a new-born lamb into a pack of wolves!" Lady Staines with her eye on the heavily built and rather leathery lamb beside her gave a sardonic chuckle. Winn ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... celebrated for the saltness of its waters and the leathery qualities of its clams. This island is said to have been so named on account of its resemblance in shape to an inverted cone, but the attrition of the ocean has materially changed the conic base. Researches in the direction of the apex have not ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various
... eunuchoid the striking feature is the incomplete, irregular, or absent hair development. Below thirty it is chubby and ruddy, and rather childish in its texture; after thirty, there is an effect of premature senility: the skin is yellowish, leathery, and wrinkled as the faces of old women are wrinkled: the upper lip is traversed by vertical wrinkles, and wrinkles come around corners of the mouth. The expression ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... when he told it, propped up on his pillows, with the blankets drawn up under his chin, and his lean, leathery face, a little softened by his fever, fronting the long, benevolent visage of Father Bates. The Father had a deckchair, and sprawled in it at length, listening over his deep Boer pipe. A faint, bitter ghost of an odor tainted the still air from the mangroves beyond the town, ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... we are not fooled through a well cared for, fine and elegant hand. Everybody, I might say, knows the convincing quality that may lie in the enormous leathery fist of a peasant. For that, too, is often harmoniously constructed, nicely articulated, appears peaceful and trustworthy. We feel that we have here to do with a man who is honest, who presents himself and his business as they are, who holds fast to whatever he once gets hold of, and who ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... we were to dry a slice of apple, it would shrink down into a little leathery shaving; and this, when thrown into the fire, would burn with a smudgy kind of flame, give off very little heat, and soon smoulder away. A piece of raw potato of the same size would shrink even more, but would give a hotter and cleaner flame. A leaf of cabbage, or a piece of beet-root, ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... to his feet and dragged up his prisoner. The man was a heavy-set, bowlegged fellow of about forty, hard-faced, and shifty-eyed—a frontier miscreant, unless every line of the tough, leathery countenance told a falsehood. But he had made his experiment and failed. He knew what manner of man his captor was, and he had no mind for another lesson from him. He slouched to his horse, under propulsion of the revolver, and led the animal into ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... anterior leathery or chitinous wings of beetles, serving as coverings to the secondaries, commonly meeting in a straight line down the middle of dorsum in repose: also applied to ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith
... simmer into soup stock, wastes neither time nor fuel and will be the base of more than one or two nourishing dinners; prove, by mathematical demonstration, that a mold of delicious blanc-mange or Spanish cream or simpler junket costs less and can be made in one-tenth of the time required for the leathery-skinned, sour or faint-hearted pie, without which "father'n the boys wouldn't relish their dinner;" that an egg and lettuce salad, with mayonnaise dressing, is so much more toothsome and digestible than chipped beef as a "tea relish," as to repay her ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... vent to this bit of paradox, Johann inhaled as much smoke as his leathery lungs could contain and relapsed into silence. Vjera, the Polish girl, glanced at the tobacco-cutter and went on with her work. The insignificant girl beside her giggled vacantly. Dumnoff did not seem to ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... trees had fallen, presenting a tangled wilderness of leathery, five-foot-wide strips. Webs of roots, tough and gnarled, whitish in color, curled in all directions to catch the feet and baffle the eye. It was an appalling underbrush. And it was an underbrush, moreover, in which there was ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... at supper the night before, consisted of Grandma Watterby, her son Will, a man of about forty-five, and the daughter-in-law, Emma, a tall, silent woman with a wrinkled, leathery skin, a harsh voice, and the kindest heart in the world. An Indian helped Mr. Watterby run the farm. In addition there were two boarders, a man and his wife who had come West for the latter's health and who, for the sake of the glorious air, put up with many ...
— Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil - The Farm That Was Worth a Fortune • Alice B. Emerson
... feather-broom in his hair, and holding a big knife without a handle between his teeth, he would creep nearer and nearer, crouching low and advancing by little leaps and bounds, with ferocious grimaces which gradually gave place to a look of disappointed appetite, as a closer scrutiny showed how tough and leathery his victim was. Jean could not help laughing at this buffoonery, trivial and ill-bred as it was. His aunt had never got clearly to the bottom of the little farce that dogged her heels, but more than once, turning her head sharply, she had found ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... the sneer which seemed to be on his leathery countenance most of the time, "I notice you got in a little ahead of us. Congratulations! I ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... Leaves: Large, entire, alternate, veiny, oblong or obovate, the upper ones seated on stem; lower very large ones diminishing toward base into long petioles; at first rich, dark purple, afterward pale bluish gray. Fruit: 4 seed-like little nuts, leathery, wrinkled when mature. Preferred Habitat - Alluvial ground, low meadows, and along streams. Flowering Season - March-May. Distribution - Southern Canada to South Carolina and Kansas, west to Nebraska; ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... vigor, properly nurtured and protected against fungous disease by modern "spraying," is a thing of beauty in its form and color. See those deep red Baldwins shine overhead in the frosty air of early fall; note the elegance of form and striping on the leathery-skinned Ben Davis; appreciate true apples of gold set in green enamel on a tree of the sunny Bellefleur! These in the fall; but it is hardly full summer before the closely set branches of Early Harvest are as beautiful as any orange-tree, or the more upright Red Astrachan ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... perfectly right. O Mrs. Bolton!" She stopped laughing and began to cry; she put away Mrs. Bolton's carefully offered hand, she threw herself upon the bony structure of her bosom, and buried her face sobbing in the leathery folds of ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... picking up the seeds of rebellion among the fertile rocks. The vago, or poor Indito, was drafted wherever caught. Guerrilla fugitives rejoined their leader. The little band grew slowly, but in appearance merited Mendez's contemptuous epithet of brigand thieves. Fluttering yellow rags revealed only leathery-hided bones. Sandals sloughed away. There were a few machetes, and one or two venerable musketoons. But the commoner weapon was a heavy wooden staff, used for trudging up the steep paths. Imagine a Mexican abandoning his horse! But pursuers often tracked "the brigand thieves" by their ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... married a certain Mr. PARDOE, a barrister practising on the Archester Circuit, and established herself in town. Shortly afterwards she became the rage. Her beauty, her wit, her music, her dinners, her diamonds, were spoken of with enthusiasm. All the elderly roues, whose leathery hearts had been offered up at hundreds of shrines, became her temporary slaves. She coaxed them, cajoled them, and fooled them, did this innocent daughter of a simple-minded Dean, to the top of their various bents. She schemed successfully against countless rivals, in order to maintain ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 14th, 1891 • Various
... you think," said Mrs. Makely, who had a leathery insensibility to everything but the purpose possessing her, "that we ought at least to go and say ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... looked behind him at the blank boards of the unpainted door. Just as slowly he turned back to Casey. A slow grin split his leathery face. ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... a man act so?" he says. "There's my fellow-man. Look at him! I'm sorry for him. Most of him had hard luck to be born, and yet when he gets in my way I just walk all over him. I can't help it. He's leathery and he's passive, my fellow-man. He goes to sleep in the middle of the road. When I ketch one of him, I kicks a hole in his trousers first, and then it occurs to me, 'My sufferin' brother! This is too bad!' Why, Pete Hillary was one of the dumbdest and leatheriest, and here's the Mayor's pink sojers ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... rose at the thought of being able to land on the morrow. I was even able to do justice to the abominable food set before us at dinner—greasy sausages and a leathery beefsteak, served on dirty plates and a ragged table-cloth that looked as if it had been used to clean the boiler. But the German Jew had recovered from his temporary indisposition, the cadaverous Persian had disappeared on deck, and the Armenian children had squalled ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... was that of the most leathery imperturbability. In calm theological reasoning, he could demonstrate, in the dryest tone, that, if the eternal torment of six bodies and souls were absolutely the necessary means for preserving the eternal blessedness of thirty-six, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... closely did the bones press into the dry, fever-yellowed skin. Of one leg, only the stump was left; this creature had been forced to hop or crawl his way through the isuan swamps. The head, too, was no more than a skull, with great sunken dark-rimmed eyes, discolored fangs and loose, leathery lips. There had been no hair on this death's head; it had long been bald, and now, washed, clean for the first time in months or even years, it was to hold the brain of Dr. Ralph Swanson, Earth's one-time leader ...
— The Passing of Ku Sui • Anthony Gilmore
... water of the ponds plants vegetated; some were leathery and gray, and others long, soft, and transparent. But from the very heart of these poor and sad algae there rose into the very blue of the sky itself, green lance-like stalks whose rose and white umbels challenged the ardent day with their grace; water-lilies slept on their leaves as ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes
... a sign? Goldarn your skins!" Uncle Ethan pounded the pan with his paddle and scraped two or three crawling abominations off his leathery wrist. ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... and as she poured two or three drops of the liquid into the glass the interested eyes saw the egg grow white and hard, and at last become tough and leathery. "This," she said, "is just what happens when people drink anything that contains alcohol. The brain is a substance like the white of an egg. The alcohol acts upon it in the same way it has acted upon the white of this egg—it cooks it! The brain ...
— Katie Robertson - A Girls Story of Factory Life • Margaret E. Winslow
... without stumbling over a sultan or two. When we would take our baths in our tents there would be sultans and warriors peeping in modestly from all sides. There was not a secret of our inner life that remained intact. Even the ladies, from the banana-bellied little girls of five and six up to the leathery-limbed old matrons, inclusive, were not above a feminine curiosity in things which doubtless interested them, but didn't concern them. The standing army of the Ketoshians sat around all day wearing out the grass and being ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... his work. The fisherman alongside was tall and surly looking, a leathery-faced individual with a marked scowl. He heaved half a dozen salmon up on the Blackbird. Then he climbed up himself. He towered over Jack MacRae, and MacRae was not exactly a small man. He said something, ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... they should be so dry that water cannot be pressed out of the freshly cut pieces, they should not show any of the natural grain of the fruit on being broken, and yet not be so dry as to snap or crackle. They should be leathery and pliable. ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... upon the bright green daisy-sprinkled bank, in all the glory, as a fisherman would term it, of a noble tench of nearly four pounds' weight—a great slimy fellow, with tiny golden scales and dark olive-green back, huge thick leathery fins, and a mouth that looked as though the great fish had lived upon pap all its lifetime. He had been a cowardly fish in the water, and yielded himself up a prisoner with very little struggling—nothing like that displayed by a perch about a quarter his size, ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... Drood. Just in the deep dark before the dawn, when the blood in men's veins was coldest, and the life in their hearts was weakest, a dreadful cry wailed out through the dark wood, and there came the sound as of leathery wings flapping heavily to and fro above where the king lay sleeping. Men started up about their ashen fires, their faces blanching at the terror that cried in the dark, and they heard the wailing twice repeated, while none dared try to ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... body down to one of the small, quiet towns on the edge of one of the many blue lakes where the domed houses were like bright joyful jewels. They got the leathery, well-preserved body ...
— To Each His Star • Bryce Walton
... and claret roofs of the hamlet of Maidieres, there was nothing to be seen but a grassy slope, open fields, a reddish ribbon of road, a wreck of a villa burned by a fire shell, and a wood. The autumn had turned the leaves of the trees, seemingly without exception, to a leathery brown, and in almost all lights the trunks of the trees were a cold, purplish slate. Such was the forest which, battle-areas excepted, has cost more lives than any other point along the line. The wood had been contested trench by trench, literally foot by foot. It was at once the key ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... arm looked down at the tired little bundle it was supporting. A wistful tenderness was in the leathery face. To the rest of the world he was a man of iron. To this wee bit of humanity he was a ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... that her three masts were gone close down to the deck. Her side was streaked in places with rust, and in others a green scum overspread her; but it was no more than a glance that I gave at any of those matters; for I had spied something which drew all my attention—great leathery arms splayed all across her side, some of them crooked inboard over the rail, and then, low down, seen just above the weed, the huge, brown, glistening bulk of so great a monster as ever I had conceived. The bo'sun saw it in the same instant and cried ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... Fig. 1). It is formed of a coagulable, semi-fluid exudation from the mucous membrane. On being brought to the surface and into contact with the inspired air, this substance grows thick and tough, or leathery, as we find it. It is the obstruction in the respiratory canal which this foreign matter causes that gives rise to the labored breathing, and the ringing, brassy cough, together with the crowing or whistling inspiration characteristic of croup. Before recovery can take place this membrane must ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... ground. There was, in fact, no evidence of decrepitude anywhere about him. The thatch of coal-black hair was only moderately streaked with gray, and it streamed in profuse ringlets to his shoulders. His black eyes were still keen; the leathery face, with its imperious features, was ruddy. He carried his six-foot-three ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... way which gave it a most facetious expression; while a very bright small pair of eyes had also a sort of constant laugh in them, though the rest of his features looked as if they could never smile. His complexion had a very leathery look, and his figure was tall and lanky in the extreme. I could not have said whether he was an old or a young ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... shorter jointed stem (or "column"). The body is covered externally with an armour of closely-fitting calcareous plates (fig. 62), and its upper surface is protected by similar but smaller plates more loosely connected by a leathery integument. From the upper surface of the body, round its margin, springs a series of longer or shorter flexible processes, composed of innumerable calcareous joints or pieces, movably united with one another. The arms are typically five in number; but they generally ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... white-washed room of inconceivable cleanness, surrounded by test-tubes and mixing jars, Eliot spent the best part of the day handling the germs of the deadliest diseases; making cultures, examining them under the microscope; preparing vaccines. He went home to the brown velvety, leathery study in his Welbeck Street flat to write out his notes, or read some monograph on inoculation; or he dined with a colleague and talked ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... stop to all the cheerfulness; and often, before he knew what he was about, he would be struggling and kicking and screaming and flinging himself upon one or the other of his comrades, while Fuss—as we must call her for convenience—laughed till she shook, and tears of joy ran down her ugly leathery cheeks. Then Florio, ashamed, miserable, and unhappy, would creep off to a corner and weep as if his little ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... shape of events happening visibly before our eyes, is a rarer phenomenon. And it seems to be occurring whenever a string of Laraghmenians come plodding up their winding mountain-path under the burden of heavy creels filled with earth, or oftener with slippery brown sea-wrack and leathery weed. For it is in this way that whatever scanty foothold their starveling crops may find, has been fashioned and maintained in the stony little fields. Year by year, as the blustery days of late autumn darken into winter, the steep-ledged path is wetted all along with sea-water, ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... "Signora, if my devotion—" I knew both voices—the woman's was not to be mistaken. Aurelia was there—the divine Aurelia—close at hand. Without thinking what I did, I took a strong breath and stepped forward to my task. I reached the statue of the faun, which leered and writhed its leathery tongue at me; and in the bay which opened out beyond it I found Aurelia ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... if I wasn't afraid of prosing, I might tell another story about an old boot in a pieman's loft, contracting there between sun and oven an unseemly, dry-seasoned curl and warp. You've seen such leathery old garretteers, haven't you? Very high, sober, solitary, philosophic, grand, old boots, indeed; but I, for my part, would rather be the pieman's trodden slipper on the ground. Talking of piemen, humble-pie before proud-cake for me. This notion of being lone and lofty is ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... for a sort of official sackcloth, and then (when this method caused some murmurs) that they should at least turn out their pockets. Colonel Morris, the officer in charge, was a short, active man with a grim and leathery face, but a lively and humorous eye—a contradiction borne out by his conduct, for he at once derided the safeguards and ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... on one of the benches in the Morals Court. The years had made a coarse mask of her face. There was nothing to see in her eyes. Her hands were red and leathery, like a man's. They had done a ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... (after taking as much of it as you want) put the rennet water into a bottle and cork it tightly. It will keep the better for adding to it a wine glass of brandy. If too large a proportion of rennet is mixed with the milk, the cheese will be tough and leathery. ...
— Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches • Eliza Leslie
... know of no jelly more agreeable or refreshing. The leaf is about six inches long, narrow and pointed, deeply serrated, and the margins ciliated; the middle part smooth, semi-transparent, and of a leathery consistence. The ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... 'Twas next the scene Of vague (and viscous) vegetations; Queer fissures gaped, with oozings green, And moist, unsavoury exhalations,— Faint wafts of wood decayed and sick, Till, where he meant to carve his Motto, Strange leathery fungi sprouted thick, And made it like an ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... God; His ponderous oars to slender spindles turns, 90 And pours o'er massy wheels his foamy urns; With playful charms her hoary lover wins, And wields his trident,—while the Monarch spins. —First with nice eye emerging Naiads cull From leathery pods the ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... and around them there scuttled formless blobs of matter, one of which Roger brought up into his vessel by means of a tractor ray. Held immovable by the beam it lay upon the floor, a strangely extensile, amoeba-like metal-studded mass of leathery substance. Of eyes, ears, limbs, or organs it apparently had none, yet it radiated an intensely hostile aura; a mental effluvium concentrated ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... stands alone. "He is the only artist who could ever paint a wrinkle," says Ruskin. All his portraits have the warts on. And the thought has often come to me that only a Rembrandt—the only Rembrandt—could have portrayed the face of Lincoln. Plain, homely, awkward, eyes not mates, sunken cheeks, leathery skin, moles, uncombed hair, neckcloth askew; but over and above and beyond all a look of power—and the soul! that look of haunting sorrow and the great, gentle, compassionate ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... have in the matter of cosmopolitan dispersion; for while it was quite impossible for rats, mice, or squirrels to cross the intervening belt of three hundred leagues of sea, their little winged relation, the flitter-mouse, made the journey across quite safely on his own leathery vans, and with no greater difficulty than a ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... still quite generally grown in most tropical climes. In the Scriptures it is mentioned with the vine, fig, and olive, among the pleasant fruits of the promised land. It is about the size of a large peach, of a fine golden color, with a rosy tinge on one side. The rind is thick and leathery. The central portion is composed of little globules of pulp and seeds inclosed in a thin membrane, each seed being about the size of a red currant. It is sub-acid, and slightly bitter in taste. The rind is strongly astringent, and often ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... night, Carrie came home with a dull glow in her leathery cheeks, and her eyes alight with resolve. They had what she ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the aimless popinjay of adult age can never learn to take a man's place among rough-and-ready workers. Even in spite of Willoughby's personal resemblance to Dixon, there was a suggestion of latent physical force and leathery durability in the bullock driver, altogether lacking in the whaler, and equiponderated only by a certain air of refinement. How could it be otherwise? Willoughby, of course, had no horse—in fact, like Bassanio, all the ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... insects having (like the Hemiptera) a jointed beak, but in which the fore-wings are either wholly membranous or wholly leathery, The Cicadae, frog-hoppers, and Aphides, are ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... Granma Wandon took sick. We knew it was all over for her. She faded painlessly into death. She knew she was going, said so calmly and happily. She made Millie and Granma Gregory promise they'd be good to me. I wept and wept. I kissed her leathery, leaf-like hand with utter devotion ... she could hardly lift it. Almost of itself it sought my face and flickered there for ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... a thorn from the leathery sole of his bare foot. The prick of the thorn had cleaned his mind of any merely fanciful fears. A surpassing lot of berries was there for the bold to take. His brother stared not too boldly through the fence ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... smoking a cigarette in his landlord's shop, and imparting an air of distinction and an agreeable aroma to the close leathery atmosphere. Crowl cobbled away, talking to his tenant without raising his eyes. He was a small, big-headed, sallow, sad-eyed man, with a greasy apron. Denzil was wearing a heavy overcoat with a ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... how pleasant it is to dream in the shadow of the mango-tree! The tree is about sixty feet high, and the shadow beneath its bluish-grey leathery leaves is close and dense. The pulp of the fruit is golden yellow and juicy, rich in sugar and citric acid. It is difficult to describe the taste, for it is very peculiar; but it ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... one of those leathery egotists that nothing will make a dint in, and she came back with, "But we don't speak the language, and they don't speak English, and how are we to manage if the yacht doesn't ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... color in the woodland undergrowth. Tall torches touched with the crimson of the sunset sky are made of the shell-bark hickory whose inner bud scales enlarge into enormous, leathery bracts, often crimsoning into rare brilliance. Circles of creamy white here and there among the hazel brush mark the later blossoms of the sweet viburnum. Sweeping curves like sculptured arms bearing thickly clustered hemispheres of purplish white are ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... am English!" he vowed, as he swam for the shore, and he stood by the sea's edge repeating his assertion with a leathery pair of lungs until the cutter had ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... but it was brief and futile. When it was over his captors became visible once more. They were singular little beings about four feet tall, with strange, wise, leathery ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... graceful tread, as she easily kept pace with the horse, I could not realise that in a few more years she would probably be no more graceful and beautiful than the women at work in the fields—coarse, clumsy shapes, with frowzy hair, leathery faces, ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... We had a glimpse of a vast red pit as it opened its mouth to bleat and bellow again; we had a breath from the pit, and then the monster heeled over like a ship, dragged forward along the ground, creasing all its leathery skin, rolled again, and so wallowed past us, smashing a path amidst the scrub, and was speedily hidden from our eyes by the dense interlacings beyond. Another appeared more distantly, and then another, and then, as though he was guiding these animated lumps of provender to their pasture, a Selenite ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... omelet, and the old trader cooked an excellent turtle-steak, while Martin prepared a junk of jaguar meat, which he roasted, being curious to taste it, as he had been told that the Indians like it very much. It was pretty good, but not equal to the turtle-eggs. The shell of the egg is leathery, and the yolk only is eaten. The Indians sometimes eat them raw, mixed with farina. Cakes of farina, and excellent coffee, concluded their repast; and Barney declared he had never had such a satisfactory "blow out" in his life; a sentiment ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... being killed, or been kept too long after death, they spent considerable time looking at the pretty pictures in the cookery book: Marcella told of Wullie's feasts in the beach-hut. Louis remembered restaurant celebrations. But they were always too hungry to care much what they ate; the most leathery damper, the most difficult mutton was pleasant eaten out of doors in the faint ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... great damage in fields and gardens, especially to crops of lettuces, cabbages, or turnips. Their track is perceived by the shining and slimy substance which they leave behind them. There are several kinds of these little animals. The white and brown leathery kind often even destroy the strong stems of young cabbage, and other similar plants. The destruction of them has been suggested to be effected by the use of tar-water, sprinkled over the ground; and also by having recourse to lime, in the ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... to face the speaker, a tall, hawk-nosed man whose sallow, leathery face was set in the lines of the ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... broad brim of a grey hat he insists on wearing. The soft hat and his lank hair make him womanish in profile, in spite of a body to which a blue jersey does full justice, and the sea-boots; but when he turns his face to you, with his light eyes and his dark and leathery face, you feel he is strangely masculine and wise, and must be addressed with care and not as most men. He rarely smiles when a foolish word is spoken or when he is contradicted boldly by the innocent. He spits at his feet ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... his fist on my collar and jerked me out upon the hard road. We rolled down the embankment, but he was on the top. It seemed an abominable episode, a piece of bad faith on the part of fate. I ought to have been exempt from these sordid haps, but the man's hot leathery hand on my throat was like a foretaste of the other collar. And I was horribly afraid—horribly—of the sort of mysterious potency of the laws that these men represented, and I could think ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... until all the unripe thoughts which it contained came to full growth. The pleasant Sun Tavern in Noerten is not to be despised, either; I stopped there and found dinner ready. All the dishes were excellent and suited me far better than the wearisome, academical courses of saltless, leathery dried fish and cabbage rechauffe, which were served to me in Goettingen. After I had somewhat appeased my appetite, I remarked in the same room of the tavern a gentle man and two ladies, who were about to depart. The cavalier was clad entirely in green; ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... tell by his teeth," suggested a leathery individual, stroking his bony jaw knowingly. "I used to be up on the game myself, but I'm a little out of practice jest ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... owe to the pencil and weird imagination of the artist. "Talk of Fuseli and his wind-bag, there is real vivid imagination enough in this to make a whole academy of Fuselis. It is just an Egyptian darkness, with breaking through it, above a bog-hole, some black bulrushes, and above them a bending, leathery goblin exulting over some drowned traveller, the meteor lamp he carries casting a downward flicker on the dark water. Such darkness, such wicked speed, such bad, Puck-like malice, such devilry, Hoffman and Poe together could not have better devised. Many a May exhibition ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... woman was a gnarled and leathery personage who could don, at will, an expression of great virtue. She possessed a small music-box capable of one tune, and a collection of "God bless yehs" pitched in assorted keys of fervency. Each day she took a position upon the stones of Fifth Avenue, where she crooked her legs under her ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... the lawyer whose bungling defense had done so little to stave off my conviction, was almost like a premonition of further disaster. Before I could rise from my seat on the cot he was shaking hands with me and twisting his dry, leathery face into its ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... agriculturists, who watched the dancers with old, old time-worn smiles, or stood, or sat on their heels yarning, with their pipes, outside, where two boilers were slung over a log-fire to boil water for tea; and there were leathery women, with complexions like dried apples, who gossiped—for the first time in months perhaps—and watched the young people, and thought at times, no doubt, of other days—of other days when they were girls. (And not so far distant either, in some cases, for women dry quickly ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... win the prize, what is it?" questioned Lewis Barrow, a tall, lanky youth with a rather leathery face. He came from the far West, and knew much more about firearms than did ...
— The Rover Boys at Colby Hall - or The Struggles of the Young Cadets • Arthur M. Winfield
... mouth of beating, flailing wings that whipped the thin air above him; of curved claws; and of long, horrible tails that might have belonged to giant rats. And the demoniac cries that the thin air brought him were no more suggestive of devils unleashed than were the leathery wings and the ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... seller was crying his wares along the platform, and just before we started from Laroche breakfast was preparing on board the train; I thought a basket of French grapes—the grapes that grow in the open air, not the leathery hot-house grapes filled with lumps of glue that we eat in England—would pass the time. I got out and bought a basket from him. On journeys like these one has to resort to many various little expedients. Alas! The grapes were decaying; only the bunch on the top was eatable; nor was that one ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... so with the greatest propriety," returned the rector. "My conscience sided with you all the time. You found me out. I've got a bit of the muscle they call a heart left in me yet, though it has got rather leathery.—But what do they mean when they say you are setting the ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... have been behind it if it had been longer, accessible, Mr Wegg sits down on a box in front of the fire, and inhales a warm and comfortable smell which is not the smell of the shop. 'For that,' Mr Wegg inwardly decides, as he takes a corrective sniff or two, 'is musty, leathery, feathery, cellary, gluey, gummy, and,' with another sniff, 'as it might be, strong of old pairs ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... tall, spare, bony man, with a dry, brown, leathery skin, lean legs and arms, a stringy neck, almost no chin, a hooked nose, deep set little greeny-gray eyes and intensely black, harsh, stiff, curly hair and very bushy eyebrows. He wore old, worn, faded garments ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... Fabbo path and struck off to our left for several miles, over ground that had been cleared by burning, which showed in many directions the crimson fruit of the wild ginger, growing half-exposed from the earth. This is a leathery, hard pod, about the size of a goose-egg, filled with a semi-transparent pulp of a subacid flavour, with a delicious perfume between pine-apple and lemon-peel. It is very juicy and refreshing, and is decidedly the best wild ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... One dreams of coffee after dinner in the open air, as described in "In Memoriam;" one longs for the cool, the hush, the quiet. But try the country on a July night. First you have trouble with all the great, big, hairy, leathery moths and bats which fly in at the jasmine-muffled lattice, and endeavour to put out your candle. You blow the candle out, and then a bluebottle fly in good voice comes out too, and is accompanied by very fair imitations of mosquitoes. Probably they are only gnats, but in blowing ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... leathery face stolid, but his eyes glinting. When Blake had finished, he remarked shortly: "Must be the same man. Let's see ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... rains and the melting of the "robin snows" soften the leathery lichens and their painted circles on the trees and rocks vary from olive gray and green to bright red and yellow. They revel in the moist gray days. And the mosses which draw a tapestry of tender velvet around the splintered rocks in the timber quarries and strangely veil ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... Desmond buttered a leathery triangle of toast with elaborate precision. "You may as well encourage that notion, old chap. It simplifies things. ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... into the radicle, there is a projection or heel which varies in shape, but its outline is too angular in our former figure (Fig. 61). The radicle first protrudes from a small hole at one end of the tough, leathery, winged fruit. At this period the upper part of the radicle is packed within the fruit parallel to the hypocotyl, and the single cotyledon is doubled back parallel to the latter. The swelling of these three parts, and especially the rapid development of the thick heel ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... causeway. Then a hideous, evil-eyed "stingaree," with slowly-waving outspread flappers, and long, whip-like tail, follows, intent upon the cockles and soft-shell clams which he can so easily discover in the sand when he throws it upwards and outwards by the fan-like action of his thin, leathery sides. Again more mullet—big fellows these—with yellow, prehensile mouths, which protrude and withdraw as they swim, and are fitted with a straining apparatus of bristles, like those on the mandibles of a musk duck. ...
— The Colonial Mortuary Bard; "'Reo," The Fisherman; and The Black Bream Of Australia - 1901 • Louis Becke
... standing by the stove, turning the bacon in its sizzling grease, with a knack which told of much experience in camp cookery. The face which the lean and grizzled plainsman turned toward his friend was seamed by a thousand tiny wrinkles in the leathery skin, the result of years of exposure to ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... India-rubber tree (F. elastica) is not indigenous to Ceylon, it is now very widely diffused over the island. It is remarkable for the pink leathery covering which envelopes the leaves before expansion, and for the delicate tracing of the nerves which run in equi-distant rows at right angles from the mid-rib. But its most striking feature is the exposure of its roots, masses of which appear ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... and "buckin'-rolls," and listened to all the range gossip without adding so much as an opinion. They never talked politics nor told which candidates received their two votes. They kept the same two men season after season,—leathery old range hands with eyes that saw whatever came within their field of vision, and with the gift of silence, ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower
... mats of these leathery little Polypodys growing with rock-selaginella on the great boulders of the river woods. As these are to be split up for masonry, the experiment of transferring the polypody is no sin, though it savours somewhat of the process ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... and a certain effectiveness of manner was a necessary condition to political pre-eminence, is passing away, political control falls more and more entirely into the hands of a barristerish intriguing sort of person with a tough-wearing, leathery, practical mind. The sort of people who will work the machine are people with "faith," as the popular preachers say, meaning, in fact, people who do not analyze, people who will take the machine as it is, unquestioningly, shape their ambitions to it, and—saving their ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... leathery leaves, as a protection against the force of the tropical raindrops. The direct influence of the rain cannot be the cause of this power of resistance, for the leaves, while they were still thin, would simply have been torn to ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... Weight 138 lbs., a gain of 5 lbs. a day for 2 days. Pulse 80 at 7 A.M. (his own statement), at 2.30 P.M. pulse 100, temp. 99.4 degrees. Bowels acted at 12 midnight, 3.30 A.M. and about 11 A.M. Went that day to have his photograph taken. The throat was better. Tongue dry and leathery. It was plain to me that he was taking too much food. He was having a mixed diet and taking much and often. He said his "mouth was coming to pieces," and in fact the mucous membrane was glazed and peeling; also the lips. On the ninth ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... morning we examined several we had knocked down. They measured twenty-eight inches across the wings, which were of a leathery consistency, the bodies being covered with grey hair. We found their stomachs filled with the pulp and seeds of fruits, with the remains of ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... back in a rocking-chair with his feet perched upon the mantelpiece and a large glass of rum arid water within reach of his great leathery hand. Opposite him, in a similar chair and with a similar glass, was no less an individual than our old acquaintance, Von Baumser. As a mercantile clerk in the London office of a Hamburg firm the German was thrown into contact ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... domestic life; and yet he thought Mrs. Glegg's household ways a model for her sex. It struck him as a pitiable irregularity in other women if they did not roll up their table-napkins with the same tightness and emphasis as Mrs. Glegg did, if their pastry had a less leathery consistence, and their damson cheese a less venerable hardness than hers; nay, even the peculiar combination of grocery and druglike odors in Mrs. Glegg's private cupboard impressed him as the only right thing in the way of cupboard smells. I am not sure that ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... of a nut as "a fruit consisting of a kernel or seed enclosed in a hard woody or leathery shell that does not open when ripe, as in the hazel, beech, oak, chestnut." Technically speaking, it is a hard, indehiscent, one-seeded dry fruit resulting from a compound ovary. In horticultural language the fruit ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various |
