"Piles" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thing which caused Patrasche any uneasiness in his life, and it was this: Antwerp, as all the world knows, is full at every turn of old piles of stones, dark, and ancient, and majestic, standing in crooked courts, jammed against gateways and taverns, rising by the water's edge, with bells ringing above them in the air, and ever and again out of their arched doors a swell ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... the land he had loved and sung in early youth, he broke his harp and set forth. While the CHRISTIAN Powers were protocolizing or worse—while the CHRISTIAN nations were doling forth the alms of a few piles of ball in aid of the CROSS struggling with the Crescent; he, the poet, and pretended sceptic, hastened to throw his fortune, his genius, and his life at the feet of the first people that had arisen in the name of the nationality and ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... a muffled roll Of elemental passion, broke the spell, And down on Simcoe fell the sudden rain, Veiling the gloomy landscape from our sight. Throughout the changeful day, alternate cloud And sunshine left their traces on our hearts, Until the evening reared its dreamy piles Of cloud-built chateaux steeped in gorgeous tints, That from celestial censers are outpoured When the grand miracle of sunset draws Our souls, all yearning with a joy divine, To share the fleeting glory, ere it goes To glean new splendors for the ruby morn. 'Tis ever thus with true impassioned ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... had been ship wrecked. They would not believe we had taken the trip for any other reason. They helped us very kindly and would not let us drink all the iced water we wanted and sent us in to bathe in a place surrounded by piles to keep out the sharks and by a roof to shelter one from the sun. Corinto proved to be all that Amapala was not; clean, cool with very excellent food and broad beds of matting. I liked it better than any place ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... angry red glare on the western horizon, though the light was beginning to fade, when he reached the end of the new line and found a crowd of men distributing piles of gravel and spiking down the rails which ran back, gleaming in the sunset, lurid, straight and level, across the expanse of grass, until they were lost in the shadowy mass of a bluff. Near the men stood ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... rigging. Then twenty-five empty paraffin casks which were lashed on deck broke loose, washed backward and forward, and gradually filled with water; so that the outlook was not altogether agreeable. But it was worst of all when the piles of reserve timber, spars, and planks began the same dance, and threatened to break the props under the boats. It was an anxious hour. Sea-sick, I stood on the bridge, occupying myself in alternately making libations to Neptune and trembling for the safety ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... so," said Mr. Parmalee. "I hope he's gone through piles of agony, for I don't like a bone in his body, if it comes to that. But, I repeat, it was not your husband who stabbed you on the stone terrace that dismal night. ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... several aquatic towns between Pesth and the point at which the Drava (or Drau), a noble river, empties its waters into the Danube. Apatin is an assemblage of huts which appear to spring from the bosom of the current, but as the steamer approaches one sees that these huts are built upon piles driven firmly into the river-bed, and between these singular habitations are other piles upon which nets are stretched. So the fisherman, without going a hundred yards from his own door, traps the wily denizens of the Danube, prepares them for market, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... the tricks of the lumber trade in a few days. He would pull heavy logs out of the forest into the open, lift the lighter ones with his trunk and pile them up, one on top of the other. He had such a good sense of symmetry that his piles were ...
— Kari the Elephant • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... into eight-foot lengths, rolled on the ox-sleds with levers, and then hauled home to the yard in front of the wood-house, where they lay in four huge piles till March, when all hands turned to, with axes and saws, and ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... sea-stores, such as new rope and spare anchors. In one corner of it (in the corner at which I entered it) a flight of worn stone steps led downwards into the bowels of the earth. "Aha!" I thought; "so that's how you reach your harbour!" Then I crept up to one of the piles of boxes ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... became more frequent every minute now; there were batteaux and rafts being unloaded at landing places, heavily guarded by Continental soldiery; canoes at carrying places, brush huts erected along the trail, felled trees, bushes cut and lying in piles, roads being widened and cleared, and men everywhere going cheerily ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... Front, as the business part of San Francisco was then known. Here the lights were burning all night, the first streaks of dawn finding the merchants still at their counting-house desks. I remember the dim lines of warehouses lining the insecure wharves of rotten piles, half filled in—that had ceased to be wharves, but had not yet become streets,—their treacherous yawning depths, with the uncertain gleam of tarlike mud below, at times still vocal with the lap and gurgle of the tide. I remember the weird stories of disappearing men found afterward imbedded ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... that twilight room, flanked with piles of expended briefs, and surrounded with neatly docketed packets of attested copies, notices, affidavits, and other engines of legal war—little Toole having expended his congratulations, and his private knowledge of Sturk's revelations, fell upon the ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... midshipmen marched down Maryland Avenue in brigade formation they passed many a heap of faggots and many a tar-barrel that had been placed there by the boys of the town to kindle into bonfires with which to welcome the returning victors. But to-night the faggot-piles and the tar-barrels lay unlighted. In the dark this material for bonfires that never were lighted looked like so many spectral reminders of ...
— Dave Darrin's Third Year at Annapolis - Leaders of the Second Class Midshipmen • H. Irving Hancock
... was being built with some interest. The town stands either on massive glacial rocks, or, in other parts that have been reclaimed from the sea, on soft sand; in the latter case the erection has to be reared on piles. For the foundation of the house mentioned, long stakes, about twenty feet in length, were driven into the ground. Above this pile a sort of crane was erected, from which hung a large heavy stone ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... overlooked this simple little discovery of how to make a neophyte initiate himself. It was too good to be true. We held a war dance of pure delight, and we whistled some more. We got behind stone walls, and whistled. We climbed embankments, and whistled. We slid behind blackberry bushes and ash piles and across ditches and over hedge fences, and whistled. We were so happy we could hardly pucker. Think of it! There was Ole Skjarsen, the most uncontrollable force in Nature, following us like a yellow pup with his dinner three days overdue. ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... of Horembebi; while the second court, and all the open spaces and ruined parts of the upper end of the Temple, were encumbered by sheepfolds, goat-yards, poultry-yards, donkey-sheds, clusters of mud huts, refuse-heaps, and piles of broken pottery. Upon the roof of the portico there stood a large, rambling, ruinous old house, the property of the French Government, and known as the "Maison de France" . . . Within its walls the illustrious ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... too soon, for the other buildings were already deserted by their would-be salvors, who had filled the streets with piles of books and valuables waiting to be carried away. Then occurred a terrible phenomenon, which had once before in such disasters paralyzed the efforts of the firemen. A large wooden warehouse in the centre of the block of offices, ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... bustle and hurry at Furness Hall. The ponds were dragged for fish; the poultry yard was scoured for its finest birds; the keepers were early afield, and when they returned with piles of hares and rabbits, these were seized by the cook and converted into huge pies and pasties. Two sheep were slaughtered, and the scullions were hard at work making confections of currants, gooseberries, plums, and other fruits from the garden. In the great hall the tables were laid, and when ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... honorable man yields, in an hour of weakness, to temptation, his first step toward atonement is confession. Say to me, Yes, I have been tempted, dazzled: the sight of these piles of gold turned my brain. I am ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... thousands, and elaborate arrangements are made for their education by special sight-seeing trains, by appreciative guides, and by courses of lectures. The Canal staff is also housed by the State—in wooden structures, built upon piles, and protected by mosquito-proof wire screening. The accommodation for bachelors is somewhat meager; but married couples are treated very liberally, and their quarters are brightened by pretty little gardens. The rates of pay are high, and there are numerous concessions which to one of Indian ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... to her "den," a little room opening on to the verandah. There was a writing-table in the window covered with correspondence in neat little piles, for Myra was on all the charity committees in the county, and the rest of the room was given up to a profusion of fishing tackle, shooting gear, and books. Sholto followed us, every now and then rubbing his great ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... 5.—Next year is my Jubilee—mine and Mr. Punch's. Pup and dog, have known House of Commons for nigh fifty years. Of course not so intimately as within the last eight or nine years; but ever since I took my seat on piles of bound volumes at feet of the MASTER, have kept one ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 17, 1890. • Various
... capacity of schemes of revenue. (Though the Budget is an annual affair, a good many of its features are necessarily continuing.) After all this has been taken into account there must be remembered that Lloyd George was planning still further expenditure. He had therefore to get piles of money from somewhere or other and to make sure of it in increasing ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... directions in serving; you just tell the chambermaid that she is to follow the waitress, and pass the sauces and the vegetables. And you have already explained carefully to the latter that she must not deal plates around the table like a pack of cards, or ever take them off in piles either. (That much at least you do know.) You also make it a point above everything that the silver must be very clean; Sigrid seems to understand, and with the optimism of youth, you approach the dinner hour without misgiving. The table, set with your wedding silver ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... style of place," said Gilbert, as they walked towards the house; "but I think show-places, as a general rule, excel in ugliness. I daresay the owners of them find a dismal kind of satisfaction in considering the depressing influence their dreary piles of bricks-and-mortar must exercise on the minds of strangers; may be a sort of compensation for being obliged to live in such a ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... a large room, one corner of which was partitioned off for the editor's sanctum. A middle-aged man was directing papers in the larger room, while piles of papers were ranged on shelves at the sides ...
— Risen from the Ranks - Harry Walton's Success • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... the bramble and vine, Piles up to a climax the praise of good wine; For in Judges we read—look it up, as you can— 'It cheereth the heart, both of God and of man;' And everywhere lightness, and brightness, and health, Gild the true temperance texts with their wealth, Giving strong drink to the ready to perish, ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... be made to assume various forms—to fall in cascades, to spurt in fountains, to boil in eddies, or to flow tranquilly along a uniform bed. It may, moreover, be caused to set complex machinery in motion, to turn millstones, throw shuttles, work saws and hammers, and drive piles. But every form of power here indicated would be derived from the original power expended in raising the water to the height from which it fell. There is no energy generated by the machinery: the work performed by the water in ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... to smile. With wonderful rapidity and skill she opened one of the cupboards, and, from the piles of linen, picked out a checkered red and white tablecloth with which she covered the table. In a moment she had arranged places ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... have unearthed piles of gold, one village association alone getting in L750 in gold ($3,750). Old stockings have come out and one agricultural laborer brought nine sovereigns to one of our Secretaries one night, and asked her to invest it to help the soldiers. She said, "Why did you bring it to me?" ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... dead and heavy closeness of the air, the huge piles of clouds which assembled in the western horizon, and glowed like a furnace under the influence of the setting sun—that awful stillness in which nature seems to expect the thunder-burst, as a condemned soldier waits for the platoon fire which is to stretch him on the earth, all ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... money at the head of the stairs, with piles of tickets before him; and as he rose, gravely respectful, the janitor and some loiterers took off their hats while I passed. I entered the little bare dressing-room; my throat was parched as fever, my hands were ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... behindhand. The direct roads to the university site were as yet impracticable, for the Cascadilla ravine and the smaller one north of it were still unbridged. The grounds were unkempt, with heaps of earth and piles of material in all directions. The great quantities of furniture, apparatus, and books which I had sent from Europe had been deposited wherever storage could be found. Typical was the case of the large Holtz electrical ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... filmy, shimmering horizon. Form and colour have disappeared in light-irradiated vapour of an opal hue. And yet instinctively we know that we are not at sea; the different quality of the water, the piles emerging here and there above the surface, the suggestion of coast-lines scarcely felt in this infinity of lustre, all remind us that our voyage is confined to the charmed limits of an inland lake. At length the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... man turned on his heel and disappeared without a word. Crawshay glanced once more at the dismantled instrument, then followed Robins on to the deck, carefully locking the door behind him. A grey, stormy morning was just breaking, with piles of angry clouds creeping up, and showers of spray breaking over the ship on the weather side. He chose a sheltered spot and stood for a few moments breathing in the strong salt air. Notwithstanding his success, he ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... turned loose everything that would hurl a projectile large or small. By the time the gas cloud had cleared, or, to be more accurate, passed on to the rear of the British line and spent itself, the only Germans to be seen were in the piles of dead and wounded in front of the British most advanced trenches. The first time this occurred did not teach the Germans its lesson sufficiently well. A second time the Germans did not follow their gas cloud so closely. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... the southern land That lies along the ocean's strand. The leader of the helmets, he Who leads his ships o'er the dark sea, Harald, whose high-rigged masts appear Like antlered fronts of the wild deer, Has laid his ships close alongside Of the foe's piles with daring pride." ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... seemed one of those wealthy, rather faddy men whom one encounters sometimes in the best hotels, men who move up and down the country aimlessly during the spring and summer and in winter go abroad for a few months; men with piles of well-battered and be-labelled baggage whose home is always in hotels and whose chief object in life is to dress in the fashion of the younger generation, to be seen everywhere, to give cosy little luncheon and dinner-parties, and be the "fairy" uncle ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... they had to content themselves with unfinished and unfurnished rooms; and as the muleteers did not arrive with their baggage, they had neither bedding, nor a change of clothing. But they had a blazing fire, and provisions from the market, with a sharpened appetite, and slept comfortably on piles of shavings, covered with the clothes they had ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson
... carpenters had gone, and the painters had gone, but they had left great messes and piles of stuff that had been swept out of the house, and heaps of the sawed-off ends of boards, and some good boards, and piles of broken laths and plaster and the little pieces that they had sawed off the laths, and some broken saw-horses, and a ...
— The Doers • William John Hopkins
... sort of counter where the druggist quickly compounded prescriptions, which the surgeons as hastily seized and personally administered. Carpenters were set at work; but of course shelves, etc., could not be magically produced, so we placed boards across barrels, arranging in piles the contents of the boxes for ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... pear, the blossom of which is very beautiful of different colors, some pink, some yellow & some red. Here the earth has felt a shock at no very distant period, & by a convulsive throe, these enormous piles of volcanic rocks were upheaved; I went out and climbed upon the top of one of these mountains of red stone sat down, & looked with wonder about, & thought of the dreadful scene which it must have once presented. Then came the question, what has ...
— Across the Plains to California in 1852 - Journal of Mrs. Lodisa Frizzell • Lodisa Frizell
... mounted, from which either shot or shell could be thrown with effect into any of the lanes or passes near. It is probably needless to add that the interior arrangements of this house of God had undergone a change as striking as that which affected its exterior. Barrels of gunpowder, with piles of balls of all sizes and dimensions, now occupied the spaces where worshippers had often crowded; and the very altar was heaped up with spunges, wadding, and other implements necessary in ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... this time he must jerk it back before it got beyond him. He set himself doggedly to the task, calling in his assistants one by one, going through the work in those outer rooms, where at tables long rows of busy young girls, with colored pencils, scissors and paste, were demolishing enormous piles of newspapers and magazines. And vaguely, little by little, he came to a realization of how while he had slumbered the life of the country had swept on. For as he studied the lists and the letters of his patrons, Roger felt confusedly that a ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... the costume used by hunters and backwoodsmen; namely, a loose hunting shirt, short trousers or breeches, and gaiters; were moving about unconcernedly, while a few of them, musket on shoulder, were on guard over the piles of stores. ...
— With Wolfe in Canada - The Winning of a Continent • G. A. Henty
... were shot out sprawling into the lost drainage wandering on the erratic floor. What those Arabs suffered on deck I cannot tell you. I never went up to find out. At Bougie they seemed to have left it all to Allah, with the usual result. It was clear, from a glance at those piles of rags, that the Arab is no more native to Algeria than the Esquimaux. I was much nearer home than the Arabs. That shining coast which occasionally I had surprised from Oran, which seemed afloat on the sea, was ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... of the flowers. There were other odours in the place, warm succulent and Parisian, which ranged from fried fish to burnt sugar; and there were many things besides: little tables for the post-prandial coffee; piles of luggage inscribed (after the initials or frequently the name) R. P. Scudamore or D. Jackson Hodge, Philadelphia Pa., or St. Louis Mo.; rattles of unregarded bells, flittings of tray-bearing waiters, conversations with the second-floor windows of ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... than all externals. Our Lord gathers all the conceivable treasures of earth, jewels and gold and dignities, and scenes of sensuous delights, and everything that holds to the visible and the temporal, and piles them into one scale, and then He puts into the other the one name, God; and the pompous nothings fly up and are nought, and have no weight at all. Is that not true? Does it need any demonstration, any more talk ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... laugh at himself. His fury was foolish, a mere generalization of discontent from very little data. Still, it was a relief to be out in the purring night sounds. He had passed from the affluent stone piles on the boulevard to the cheap flat buildings of a cross street. His way lay through a territory of startling contrasts of wealth and squalor. The public part of it—the street and the sidewalks—was equally dirty and squalid, once off the boulevard. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... still remained everywhere unshaken, and faith in the world of spirits still held men's minds in so close a bondage that thousands were, according to their own conviction, given up as a prey to the devil; while, at the command of religion as well as of law, countless piles were lighted, by the flames of which human society was ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... sickened. The silence of the night was interrupted only by the low moaning of the wounded that came regularly to us. It was hideous in its terrible monotony. The moon had risen, throwing fantastic lights and shadows over the desolate landscape and the heaped-up dead. These grotesque piles of human bodies seemed like a monstrous sacrificial offering immolated on the altar of some fiendishly cruel, antique deity. I felt faint and sick at heart and near swooning away. I lay on the floor ...
— Four Weeks in the Trenches - The War Story of a Violinist • Fritz Kreisler
... and his mother had only his work to offer in payment. The proposition always took the tanner in what he called a "jubious time." Spring is the season for stripping the trees of their bark, which is richer in tannin when the sap flows most freely, and the mule was needed to haul up the piles of bark from out the depths of the woods to the tanyard. Then, too, Jubal Perkins had his own crops to put in. As he often remarked in the course of the negotiation, "I don't eat tan bark— nor yit raw hides." Although the mule was a multifarious ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... the invaluable toy which the young girl had tantalisingly placed close to his hand: then he forced himself to look all round the coffee-room: at Polly, at the waitresses, at the piles of pallid buns upon the counter. But, involuntarily, his mild blue eyes wandered back lovingly to the long piece of string, on which his playful imagination no doubt already saw a series of knots which would be equally tantalising to tie ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... said Dan, bobbing like a young seal at home. "She'll break about once every ha'af hour now, 'les the swell piles up good. What's her reg'lar time when she's at work, ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... cleaned out, and filled to the brim with water. Great quantities of heavy stones had been accumulated on the most exposed points of the walls, in readiness to hurl upon any who might try to climb. Huge sheaves of arrows and piles of crossbow bolts, were in readiness, and in all, save the number of men, Wortham had for weeks been prepared for ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... probably the best rocket-fuel man in the world. He had a little of his sandy hair left, not much, and his forehead was permanently creased from frowning. "I'm afraid that new benzoic derivative is a failure, Chief. It piles up corrosion in the tubes too fast. They'd be clogged halfway ...
— The Big Tomorrow • Paul Lohrman
... torrents, like a shout of nations, Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God! God! sing ye meadow-streams with gladsome voice! Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds! And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow, And in their perilous fall shall ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... the square, provisions and stock, alive and dead, were being offered for sale, for the most part by natives of the country. Here were piles of vegetables and fruits grown in the gardens, sacks of various sorts of grain, bundles of green forage from the irrigated lands without the walls, calabashes full of curdled milk, thick native beer and trusses of reed for thatching. ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... the first, second, and third. The modern sophistry could only succeed where, as in Athens, clever volubility was indigenous, and where, moreover, the long series of philosophical systems that had come and gone had accumulated huge piles of intellectual rubbish. Against the Epicurean quietism, in fine, everything revolted that was sound and honest in the Roman character so thoroughly addressing itself to action. Yet it found more partisans than Euhemerism and the sophistic school, and this was probably the reason why the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the foot of the wall—the Brenta or the Bacchiglione, I know not which, for both water Padua. The banks of this watercourse were adorned with old houses and long walls, and trees, too, overhung the banks; some rather picturesque rows of piles, from which the fishermen cast their lines with that patience characteristic of them in all countries; huts with nets and linen hanging from the windows to dry, formed under the sun's rays a very pretty subject for ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... guy-rope snap with a sound like a pistol-shot, and a great stone swung to a boom and weighing tons should begin running amuck through piles of cement, machinery, and men, and some one of the working gang, seeing the danger, should, with the quickness and sureness of a mountain-goat, spring straight for the stone, clutching the end of the guy and bounding off again, twisting the bight ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... gathered and shucked, and afterwards husked and put into the granary. During the winter the felled trees were sometimes cut for firewood, and those remaining in the spring were "junked," as it was called, and rolled into immense piles and burned, after which a crop of rye or wheat was sown, and hacked in with hoes, the roots of the trees preventing the movement of the harrow. The process of "junking" was a tedious one, as the burnt logs soon covered the axe-handle with smut, drying up the skin of the hands so ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 5, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 5, May, 1886 • Various
... force, wherewith the gin, Erected in two barges upon Po, And raised by men and wheels, with deafening din Descends upon the sharpened piles below, With all his might he smote the paladin With either hand; was never direr blow: Him the charmed helmet helped, or — such its force — The stroke would have divided man ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... the houses of Iala, close clustered on both banks of the steaming river. They stood on piles of wood driven into the mud, like houses on stilts, and their high-pointed bamboo roofs stood out over the river ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... nights. When, the water covering every place, not a dry spot could be found where they might stretch their weary bodies, they laid themselves down upon their baggage, thrown in heaps into the waters. Piles of beasts, which lay every where through the whole route, afforded a necessary bed for temporary repose to those seeking any place which was not under water. Hannibal himself, riding on the only remaining elephant, to be the higher from the water, contracted a disorder in his eyes, ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... scene of barbaric splendor that the gay roof covered. The walls displayed exquisitely wrought weapons, and rare fabrics interwoven with gleaming gold and silver threads. Piles of rich furs were heaped in the corners, amid a medley of gilded drinking-horns and bronze vessels and graceful silver urns. Across the back of the booth stretched a benchful of sullen-looking creatures war-captives to be sold as slaves, ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... and a fallen tree blown down by the storm with roots overgrown by moss and dry yellow needles. Here there was a fragile wooden bridge over the stream, and just opposite on the other bank there was a little barn for drying maize, standing on four low piles, and looking like the hut on hen's legs in the fairy tale; a little ladder ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... fit and wise, Not faiths with rigid eyes, Not wealth in mountain piles, Not power with gracious smiles, Not even the potent ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... Little by little others come and fit themselves to the preceding ones. I grow keenly wakeful. I get up and snatch paper and pencil from the table behind my bed. It was as if a vein had burst in me; one word follows another, and they fit themselves together harmoniously with telling effect. Scene piles on scene, actions and speeches bubble up in my brain, and a wonderful sense of pleasure empowers me. I write as one possessed, and fill page after ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... entire a heathen as to be insensible to the beauty of those relics of Greek art, of which men much more learned and enthusiastic have written such piles of descriptions. I thought I could recognise the towering beauty of the prodigious columns of the Temple of Jupiter; and admire the astonishing grace, severity, elegance, completeness of the Parthenon. The little Temple of Victory, with its fluted Corinthian ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... whose tail I am convinced is a trowel. I know of no naturalist who has mentioned this, but such negative evidence is of little weight. The beaver, as everybody knows, is a builder, who cuts down trees and piles log upon log until he has raised a solid, domed cabin from seven to twenty feet in diameter, which he then plasters over with clay and straw. If he does not turn round and beat the work smooth with his tail, then I require to know for what purpose he carries ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... of the energy that had gone to build this wonderful city; the deep sea-soaked wooden piles hidden beneath; the exhaustless art treasures—churches, pictures, sculptures—no less built on obscure human labor, though a few of the innumerable dead hands had signed names. What measureless energy petrified in these palaces! Carpaccio's pictures floated ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... teacher was very kind about letting the little girl come to her room whenever she wanted to, and curl up in the big rocking-chair and watch Mrs. Boardman as she sat by the window in her low sewing-chair and did the piles of mending which ...
— Ruby at School • Minnie E. Paull
... as she reached the low wooden jetty crawling, like some giant but rather dilapidated black many-legged insect, out over the stream. Its rows of solidly driven piles were intact, but the staging they supported had suffered damage from the rush of river floods, let alone from neglect and age. Handrails were broken down, planks rotted and wrenched away leaving gaps through which the cloudy greenish blue water ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... mould, the stall of that significant fungus, the Chinaman. Many great doors are shut and clamped and grown gray with cobweb; many street windows are nailed up; half the balconies are begrimed and rust-eaten, and many of the humid arches and alleys which characterize the older Franco-Spanish piles of stuccoed brick ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... to frame the reflected blueness of the sky. A fleecy pink cloud drifted high above, trailing the delicate colouring of its image under the floating leaves and the silvery blossoms of the lotus. A little house, perched on high piles, appeared black in the distance. Near it, two tall nibong palms, that seemed to have come out of the forests in the background, leaned slightly over the ragged roof, with a suggestion of sad tenderness and care in the droop of their ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... the mouth of a very small stream about two miles lower down the creek on the same side. Their method is, to place in the bed of the stream, which is quite narrow, and seldom or never so deep as a man's middle, though running with great force, two or three separate piles of stones, which serve the double purpose of keeping off the force of the stream from themselves, and of narrowing the passage through which the fish have to pass in coming up from the sea to feed; thus giving the people an opportunity of striking them with their spears, and ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... ten o'clock that night. The piles of dirty ice and rubbish on MacDougal Street turned to fairy mountains. The dead horse in Minetta Lane might have been an Indian mound in miniature. An occasional drunken man or woman, exuding loathsome, broken sentences, reeled past Officer Foley who stood in the shadows opposite ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... out upon the street into heaps of brick and red dust. Stumps of building still stood, blackened down their surface, as if lightning had visited them. Wire that had once been telegraph and telephone crawled over the piles of wreckage, like a thin blue snake. The car grazed a large pig, that had lost its pen and trough and was scampering wildly at each fresh detonation from ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... as before, with long stakes or piles, those piles grew all like trees, and were by this time grown so big, and spread so very much, that there was not the least appearance, to any one's view, of ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... didn't appear to be paying the least attention to what was going on about her. With her nose to the ground she ran this way and ran that way as if hunting for a trail. She peered into old hollow logs and looked under little brush piles, and so, in course of time, she came to the ...
— The Adventures of Prickly Porky • Thornton W. Burgess
... mangrove-swamp, they headed for the sea. Another half-mile brought them to a handkerchief-sized beach, much like that on the other side of the swamp. where Gavin had found the hidden path. Here, on mangrove-wood piles, was a short pier with a boathouse at its ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... in their rear. This drew people to the spot, who thus accidentally found themselves in front of the troops, merely at first as spectators; but, as their numbers increased, their indignation rose. They retired a few steps, and posted themselves on and behind large piles of stones, large and small, collected in that place for a bridge, which was to be ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... look out at the piles of shells, I think of the most recent figures furnished me by the Ministry of Munitions. Last year, when the Somme offensive began, and when I was writing England's Effort, the weekly output of eighteen-pounder shells was 17-1/2 times what it was during ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... move forward in obedience to the mahout's command, and feel the tug of the weight attached, than he started off in a panic at a tremendous pace, dragging the body through the lanes between the piles of sleepers, upsetting them, and sending them flying in all directions, as the dead ox caught against the corners; and, helter-skelter, he made for the nearest jungle about 300 yards distant. Fortunately some wood-cutters were there, who yelled and screamed ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... of railways, and I had got past Whitechapel Church, and was—rather inappropriately for an Uncommercial Traveller—in the Commercial Road. Pleasantly wallowing in the abundant mud of that thoroughfare, and greatly enjoying the huge piles of building belonging to the sugar refiners, the little masts and vanes in small back gardens in back streets, the neighbouring canals and docks, the India vans lumbering along their stone tramway, and the pawnbrokers' shops where hard-up ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... are going to live in cities! We are going to fight in wars! We are going to eat three times a day Without the natural cause! We are going to turn life upside down About a thing called gold! We are going to want the earth, and take As much as we can hold! We are going to wear great piles of stuff Outside our proper skins! We are going to have ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... and faithful. Is not his measure full? Who deserves it more? We were sad to-day. One said, "King is dead." "Yes," answered the other, and we were silent. Memory was busy. We could not talk. In his office, where yet he wears the harness of the law, surrounded by musty, well-thumbed books, and piles of papers with hard judicial faces, we sat and mused. Perhaps we thought of the past, when those to whom eternity is a reality were with us and joyous. At such times the mind turns quickly back to youth's joys, nor lingers along the ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... were evidences of bloody conflict. Singly, in groups and in hideous crimson-splashed piles lay Catholics and Huguenots together, peaceful enough ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... magic change! How friends flocked to see the wonderful nursery which the expectant mother had been so happy in preparing; how they peeped into the bureau drawers, and admired the piles of rare lace and snowy lawn, which were to enfold the delicate limbs of ...
— The Big Nightcap Letters - Being the Fifth Book of the Series • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... certainly in the most frightful of literary confusions. Masses of loose papers, letters, bills, poems, drifted over the tables; books stood in piles upon the floor; newspapers ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... keep my head clear." Le Gardeur, however, refused nothing that was offered him. He drank with all, and drank every description of liquor. He was speedily led up into a large, well-furnished room, where tables were crowded with gentlemen playing cards and dice for piles of paper money, which was tossed from hand to hand with the greatest nonchalance as the game ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... disaster was revealed. All night, by the flames from the sheds in the yard, which were of wood and still burning, rescue parties had worked frantically. Two of the long buildings, nearest to the fuse department, had collapsed entirely. Above the piles of fallen masonry might be seen, here and there, the black mass of some machine or lathe, and it was there the search parties were laboring. Luckily the fuse department had not gone double turn, and the night shift in the machine-shop ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... near-sighted eyes which she obstinately refused to admit were anything but perfect in their vision, was of the last description. The secretary stood open always, and was of a consistently immaculate order. The neat little piles of papers and account-books in the various pigeon-holes were arranged so precisely they looked as if they had never been touched since first put in their places, and yet the owner spent many industrious moments, nearly every day, working with them. The piano, which sat almost ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... stream, now spread in shining pools, Now leaping in cascades, now dashing on, A line of foam along its rocky bed, Bordered by giant trees with densest shade. Here, day by day, the city bring their dead; Here, day by day, they build the funeral-piles; Here lamentations daily fill the air; Here hissing flames each day taste human flesh, And friendly watchmen guard the smoldering pile Till friends can cull the relics from the dust. And here, just finished, rose ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... cloth was delightful, Milly thought. First of all, they put a heavy stone on each corner of the cloth to keep it down, and prevent the wind from blowing it up, and then they put the little plates all round, and in the middle two piles of ...
— Milly and Olly • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... passengers stepped from the train, when Blake lifted his head for a clear view of the big electric derricks, the vast orderly piles of structural steel, floor beams, and planking, the sheds containing paint, machinery, and other stores, the gorged coal- bins, and all the other evidences of a vast ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... elevations of the surface were studded with turreted ant-hills, either forming single sharp cones from three to five feet high, and scarcely a foot broad at their base, or united into a row, or several rows touching each other, and forming piles of most remarkable appearance. The directions of the rows seemed to be the same over large tracts of country, and to depend upon the direction of the prevailing winds. I found Verticordia, a good sized tree, ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... of war, mankind, wearied with slaughter, will take a few moments' repose, and then their venomous hatred will be displayed in petty and private bickerings. Some, indeed, will every now and then raise piles of wood and fagot, and burn those alive who disagree with them in religion; others will attempt the solution of inexplicable riddles; and those born for darkness will dare to struggle for light; their imaginations ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... prescribed limit, we must commence again. At this moment intellect has seized upon the seven-league boots of the fable, which fitted everybody who drew them on, and strides over the universe. How soon, as on the decay of the Roman empire, may all the piles of learning which human endeavours would rear as a tower of Babel to scale the heavens, disappear, leaving but fragments to future generations, as proofs of pre-existent knowledge! Whether we refer to nature or to art, to knowledge or ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... which I took to be the main street because of the stores and piles of goods and the medley of signs, what with the hubbub from the many barkers for saloons and gambling games, the constant dodging among the pedestrians, vehicles and horses and dogs, in a thoroughfare that was innocent of sidewalk, I really had scant opportunity to gaze; certainly ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... oak presses and dressers and shelves all aglow with much polishing, and bright with crockery and pewter; its great hanging rack under the ceiling, laden with hams and sides of bacon and a hundred and one odds and ends of household use; and the great table in the corner weighted now with piles of currant-cake—Aunt Jeanne's gache had a name in ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... character. A hospital tent had been hurriedly erected and an old house and barn utilized. Of course, I saw nothing of it or its work until the evening after the battle, when I went to see the body of our dead colonel and some of our Scranton boys who were wounded. Outside the hospital were piles of amputated arms, legs, and feet, thrown out with as little care as so many pieces of wood. There were also many dead soldiers—those who had died after reaching the hospital—lying outside, there being inside scant ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... he is not ignorant; he knows more than any one I ever saw,—why, he has read piles of books I never even heard of,—and his family is one of the best and oldest in this country. His grandfathers or great-grandfathers were both ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... said. "In another year or two the freedom may be gone, and the prairie shut off in little squares by wire fences. Then one will be permitted to ride along a trail between rows of squalid homesteads flanked by piles of old boots and provision-cans. We will have exchanged the stockrider for the slouching farmer with a swarm of unkempt children and a slatternly, ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... are old, yet in good repair. It belongs to the King of Denmark, as Duke of Holstein, and he keeps a garrison there at the mouth of a river running into the Elbe, like that of Stadt. The late King of Denmark built there a blockhouse in the great river upon piles, to the end he might command the ships passing that way, but the Elbe being there above a league in breadth, the ships may well pass notwithstanding ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... the depth of their contempt for the charlatanism of the shop-front, the kind of advertisement which feasts the eyes at the expense of the stomach, to which your modern restaurant almost always has recourse. Here you beheld no piles of straw-stuffed game never destined to make the acquaintance of the spit, no fantastical fish to justify the mountebank's remark, "I saw a fine carp to-day; I expect to buy it this day week." Instead of the prime vegetables more fittingly described by the word primeval, ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... direct line but perpendicular. The rampires are framed and fashioned with pieces of timber laid along on the ground, very well and cunningly joined together after their fashion. This enclosure is in height about two rods. It hath but one gate of entry thereat, which is shut with piles, stakes, and bars. Over it and also in many places of the wall there be places to run along and ladders to get up, all full of stones, for the ...
— The Mariner of St. Malo: A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier • Stephen Leacock
... youngest, Susan, bit nervously at her lips; Mary cleared her throat and showed signs of returning to the attack, but Dreda was already tired of the subject, and made a diversion by leaping from her seat and approaching the table where piles of blue-covered exercise books were neatly arranged at intervals of ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... it was very wide, and the current at that particular point very full, strong, and violent, bringing down with its waters trunks of trees, and other lumber, which much shook and weakened the foundations of his bridge. But he drove great piles of wood into the bottom of the river above the passage, to catch and stop these as they floated down, and thus fixing his bridle upon the stream, successfully finished this bridge, which no one who saw could believe to be the work but of ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... second and better one for my habitation. He was my hewer of wood and drawer of water. Also it was he who—since I professed no eagerness to get away—did the conventional thing that castaways do: erected a flag-staff, and hauled piles of brushwood up to the topmost lip of our volcano, for a bonfire to be lit if any ship should be sighted, lest it might pass in the night. I had resigned the binoculars to him, but he never brought report of ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... in June, 1880, this claimant filed an application for pension in the Pension Bureau, alleging that about the 10th day of February, 1863, in unloading a barrel it fell upon him, producing a hernia, shortly after which he was affected by piles. ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... with brown bark which yields a permanent blue-black dye, used for tanning . . . used by Maoris for colouring mats and baskets. Wood a yellowish brown colour and close-grained; very durable for fencing and piles." ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... not. But them steps are harder than the stool of repentance, and you had better walk in the drawing-room, and rest yourself. There's pictures, and lots and piles of things there, you can pass ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... they advance; the continuous falling and crashing of the trees as other thousands of hands ply the axes along the lines, that creep, slowly, but visibly, on through the Forest that no foot had ever trodden—the thud of the multitudinous machines driving the piles in the marshy spaces; the whole innumerable sounds falling on the ear like the roaring of a great ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... he did stand around the Central Plaza along with thousands of other idlers, watching the robot dump trucks assemble the piles of discarded equipment. The crowd cheered loudly as an enormous crane was knocked over ...
— The Junkmakers • Albert R. Teichner
... consignments were made directly from the Antilles, sent to them, unopened, long, light boxes from which, when the lid was removed, arose a faint odor, a dust of arsenic through which gleamed the piles of insects, impaled before being shipped, the birds packed closely together, their wings held in place by a strip of thin paper. They must all be mounted—the insects quivering upon brass wire, the humming-birds with their feathers ruffled; they must be cleansed and polished, ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... star palely shone. All was quiet, deserted; nothing stirring on the leaf-carpeted slope; no sound save the distant singing of the slaves. The river lay bare from shore to shore, save where the Westover landing stretched raggedly into the flood. To its piles small boats were tied, but there seemed to be no boatmen; wharf and river appeared as barren of movement and life as did the long expanse of ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... of the same piece of Black Velvet be stroak'd Opposite ways, the piece of Velvet will appear of two Distinct kinds of Blackness, the one far Darker than the other, of which Disparity the Reason Seems to be, that in the Less obscure part of the Velvet, the Little Silken Piles whereof 'tis made up, being Inclin'd, there is a Greater part of each of them Obverted to the Eye, whereas in the other part the Piles of Silk being more Erected, there are far Fewer Beams Reflected Outwards from the Lateral parts of each ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... mounds of broken stone, charred and crumbling brick, fire-scarred timbers, and huge contorted masses of rusting steel like the decaying bones of superhuman monsters. From the great height and extent of the piles of debris, and from the occasional sight of the splintered cornice of a roof or of some battered window-frame or door, I knew that this had once been a city, one of the world's greatest; but no other recognizable feature remained amid the gray ...
— Flight Through Tomorrow • Stanton Arthur Coblentz
... and joiners' sheds, wherein any new mechanical contrivance was put to the test. For more than eighteen years the vicinity of the house resembled a builder's yard, in the centre of which the Duke lived and moved and had his being, enjoying, in his way, the piles of bricks and mortar surrounding him. After he had decided upon the erection of a new building he had a model of it made for his inspection, and if approved of, ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... spirits, whom bold and desperate adventure brought thither from every quarter, it had found in perpetual wars and incursions on its neighbors its after sustenance and means of growth and in conflict with danger the source of new strength; like piles, which the blows of the rammer serve to fix into the ground. Wherefore Numa, judging it no slight undertaking to mollify and bend to peace the presumptuous and stubborn spirits of this people, began to operate upon them with the sanctions ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... the light craft, Distin leaned forward, threw back the blades of the sculls, dipped, and took hold of the water, and then was jerked backwards as the boat struck with a crash on one of the old piles of the ancient bridge, ran up over it a little way, swung round, and directly after capsized, and began to float down stream, leaving its human freight ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... come over her, imagination, not content with the cloud of to-day, summons from the deep, dark piles, that are charged with storm and tempest. Let her once begin, with high credit, to borrow trouble, and the future shall be well nigh drained of its myriad sorrows. She becomes fancy-bankrupt. An incident of recent occurrence, ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... will give you an idea of my perseverance with difficulties. Follow the example, and you'll soon conquer those young limbs. Now, good morning to you, Price, good morning!' and Philip was hastily bowed out of the stuffy little sanctum, with its piles of MSS. and its odours ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell
... to a staked-off piece of hillside and surveyed his purchase, which consisted of a patch of ground, six holes, six piles of dirt and a log hut. The holes showed that the claims bad been ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... Water Works Company, for conveying the water from Kingston-upon-Thames to the metropolis, and it was necessary that the contractor, Mr. Brotherhood, should get possession of Egmont Villa, to enable them to erect the tower on the Fulham side. Here the piles and timbers of the old Bishop's Ferry, used for the conveyance of passengers across the river from Putney to Fulham, before the old bridge was built, were discovered. It was subsequently considered desirable to pull the villa down; and there now remains no trace of the house in which Hook lived ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... to come forth and worship. I find a sweetness in the aching dreariness of Sabbath afternoons in genteel suburbs—in the evil-laden desolateness of waste places by the river, when the yellow fog is stealing inland across the ooze and mud, and the black tide gurgles softly round worm-eaten piles. ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... then soaked in water for about twenty-four hours, after which they are heaped in large piles upon a fire until nearly dry, and thoroughly steamed; this process renders them sufficiently tractable to be reduced by pounding in a heavy mortar. Thus, broken into small pieces they somewhat resemble ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... were placed bottom upwards on two upright piles of stones, about four feet from the ground. This is done to allow the air to pass under them, and to prevent them from rotting. They are about seventeen feet long and rather more than two feet wide, decked over, except a hole in the centre in which the rower sits, and round this there ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... the most miserable habitations I ever beheld. Such scenes I never before dreamed of. Ah! why am I such a stranger to the poor of my native town? I have passed their doors thousands of times; I have admired the huge black piles of building, with their lofty chimneys breaking the sun's rays,—why have I never ventured within? How dwelleth the love of God in me? How cordial is the welcome even of the poorest and most loathsome ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... in this spirit that in this fiscal year we are cutting back our production of enriched uranium by 25 percent. We are shutting down four plutonium piles. We are closing many nonessential military installations. And it is in this spirit that we today call on our adversaries to ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Lyndon B. Johnson • Lyndon B. Johnson
... the middle and at either end were shallow baskets, full of flowers; between these towered tall epergnes, filled to overflowing with crackers in gilded and colored paper. Then there were mountains of decorated cakes, pyramids of iced fruits, piles of sandwiches, and, less prominent, a whole host of symmetrically disposed plates, bearing sweetmeats and pastry: buns, cream puffs, and brioches alternating with dry biscuits, cracknals, and fancy almond cakes. Jellies were quivering in their glass dishes. ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... a raised platform, with a long table in their front, covered with papers, with what seemed to be the property taken from the condemned at the moment—watches, purses, and trinkets; and among those piles, very visibly the fragments of a dinner—plates and soups, with several bottles of cognac and wine. Justice was so indefatigable in France, that its ministers were forced to mingle all the functions of public and private life together; and to be intoxicated in the act of passing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... perceived," wrote Stewart, "that our delay had been of important advantage to the enemy, who had lined the northern edge of the shoals near the Crown batteries, and the front of the harbour and arsenal, with a formidable flotilla. The Trekroner (Three Crowns) Battery"—a strong work established on piles, whose position will be given—"appeared, in particular, to have been strengthened, and all the buoys of the Northern, and of the King's Channels had been removed." Nelson, however, was, or feigned to be, less impressed. "I have just been reconnoitring the Danish line ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... which the germ is taken into the system. The most effective method of fighting flies is by preventing their breeding. Their favorite places for this are horse-manure, but they will breed in almost any mass of fermenting organic material. Manure piles and stables should be screened, and the manure removed at least once in seven days. Garbage-pails should be kept tightly covered. Fly-paper and fly-traps should be used. Houses should be screened, and, in particular in the pantry, the food itself should be screened. Flies ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... whose imposing architecture singularly contrasts with the unassuming habits of their present occupants. In some parts its general air is dreary and dim; monastic and theurgic. In those lonely narrow ways—long-drawn prospectives of desertion—lined with huge piles of silent, vaulted, old iron-grated buildings of dark gray stone, one almost expects to encounter Paracelsus or Friar Bacon turning the next corner, with some awful vial of Black-Art elixir ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... herself, grew interested in the preparations for her departure to her husband's house, which had been fixed for a day in November, when the religious ceremony should take place. There were cedar chests to be filled with piles of linen, woven by the slaves. One very handsome oak marriage chest was full of silks and gauzes of much price, brought on the ships which sailed up the Tiber from the port of Ostia, on their ...
— Virgilia - or, Out of the Lion's Mouth • Felicia Buttz Clark
... young man from Mr. Kipling with his old-fashioned injunction, "Keep ye the law." There are certain laws which Mr. Wells proclaims on the housetops that he sees no necessity for keeping, and so Mr. Kipling is buried under piles of opprobrium—"the tumult and the bullying, the hysteria and the impatience, the incoherence and the inconsistency," and so on. As for Mr. Bernard Shaw, we all know his own view of the relation in which he stands to ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... power of the Roman Empire. The barbarian tribes beyond must, indeed, have been impressed with the skill of the Roman soldier. For in ten days the bridge was completed: timber had been hewn from the forest, brought to the banks of the Rhine, worked into shape, piles driven into the bed of the river, beams laid across. And Caesar led his army in triumph to the other side. They stood for the first time in the land of the Germans, near the modern town of Coblenz, and after eighteen days on the farther side, they returned to Gaul, destroying ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... myself seasoned to any conceivable horrors of Slavery, but it seemed as if the visible presence of that den of sin would choke me. Of course it would have been burned to the ground by us, but that this would have involved the sacrifice of every other building and all the piles of lumber, and for the moment it seemed as if the sacrifice would be righteous. But I forbore, and only took as trophies the instruments of torture and the ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... cleared them in the afternoon, and encamped near the northern entrance of the bay, at a spot which had recently been visited by a small party of Esquimaux, as the remains of some eggs containing young, were lying beside some half-burnt fire-wood. There were also several piles of stones put up by them. I have named this bay after my friend, Captain David Buchan, of the Royal Navy. It appears to be a safe anchorage, well sheltered from the wind and sea, by islands; the bottom is sandy, the shores high, and composed of red ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... red paintings which you see imitated. Through a window we had a peek at the famous portrait of old Tsu Hsu and she looks just as she did when I saw it exhibited in New York. The strange thing about it is that it is still owned by the Hsu family. Huge rolls of costly rugs and curtains lie in piles round the room and everything is covered with this fine dust so thick that it is not possible to tell the color of a table top. Cloissonne vases, or rather images of the famous blue ware stand under the old lady's portrait, and everything is going to rack and ruin. Meantime ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... doing anything with the slashings, except to get them out of our way, while we were working. Now we gathered them into piles among the trees, placing them to take advantage of what little wind was still blowing, and touched them off with the arc torch. Soon we had the branches of the trees burning, and then the soft outer wood of the trunks. It actually began to get ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper
... the thinking mind the whole world is enveloped in mystery, and every thing is full of type and portent. To such a mind the necromantic tower of Toledo will appear as one of those wondrous monuments of the olden time; one of those Egyptian and Chaldaic piles, storied with hidden wisdom and mystic prophecy, which have been devised in past ages, when man yet enjoyed an intercourse with high and spiritual natures, and when human ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... cilibrated lady, was ingaged, widout riferences, as housekeeper at the palace. 'All in one day,' says the Imperor, 'she puts up new lace windy-curtains in the palace and joins the anti-tobacco society, and whin I feels the need of a smoke I must be after sneakin' out to these piles of lumber in the dark.' So there in the dark me and the Imperor sat, and I told him of me travels. And when they say the Imperor was an incindiary, they lie. 'Twas that night the fire started that burnt the city. 'Tis my opinion that it began from a ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... Brer Rabbit, don't you know you mustn't eat Zora's cotton? Naughty, naughty Brer Rabbit." And then she would show it where she had gathered piles of fragrant weeds for it ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... derangements are hereditary—one of the parents or near relation being afflicted. Physical or bodily weakness is often hereditary, such as scrofula, gout, rheumatism, rickets, consumption, apoplexy, hernia, urinary calculi, hemorrhoids or piles, cataract, etc. In fact, all physical weakness, if ingrafted in either parent, is transmitted from parents to offspring, and is often more strongly marked in the latter than in ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... are set in his head so that he may go forward, and while he is healthy and alert he does not trouble to look behind him. If the beginnings of European civilization are rightly traced to certain tribes of amphibious dwellers on the coast of the Mediterranean, who reared the piles of their houses in the water, and so escaped the greater perils of the land, then some sort of rudimentary navigation was the first condition of human progress, and sea-power, which defies the devastators of continents, ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... old woman's garrulity, and with a bosom bursting with anguish, Alonzo paid for his ale without drinking it, bade her good night, and slowly proceeded to the church-yard. The moon, in full lustre, shone with solemn, silvery ray, on the sacred piles, and funeral monuments of the sacred dead; the wind murmured mournfully among the weeping willows; a solitary nightingale[A] sang plaintively in the distant forest; and a whippoorwill, Melissa's favourite ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... dear to us, was drawing near. When they reached the little landing, no one else was there. No house was in sight of it, and the solitude was broken only by the tide that softly caressed the barnacled piles of the wharf and the weed-covered rocks on either side. No boat was visible adown the wide reach that separates Southport Island from the mainland, and up it came a light sea breeze that barely rippled the flowing tide and whispered through the brown and scarlet leaved ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... knife, if they are the open salts. In the most stylish circles great favor is shown to ample silver salieres with their accompanying salt spoons or shovels. Salt, thus taken, should be deposited upon the left hand rim of the plate. The custom followed by so many of depositing little piles of salt on the tablecloth is very annoying to the hostess, as giving her table a shabby look during the removal of courses. Salt is the only condiment placed upon the table at a dinner; the others ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... idiot. She was always asking me to come, and the truth is, she is a handsome and fascinating woman, and will have adoration. Look at Ward Dyckman. He is only twenty-six, and he is wild about her, but he has piles of money." And ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... where it was for a great many years—probably at least a hundred, if one might judge by the dates on a few of the coins which I examined, and which formed part of the treasure. The man who accumulated the store must have been an individual of a very enterprising nature, for there were great piles of strong, solid wooden cases packed to the brim with doubloons and pieces-of-eight; two hundred and eighty-five gold bricks, weighing about forty pounds each, every brick encased in the original raw-hide wrapper ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... forgotten candles burned dimly over the long and lengthening wicks, sat several men—some, with faces brightly haggard, gloating over their unhallowed gains—others, dark, sullen, silent, fierce, gazing furtively at their piles of lost money. Here rattled the dice-box, and yonder fell the dirty cards—all were busily engaged—all were motionless, save their hands and eyes—all were hushed, save when they uttered solitary ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... any hour, and many pairs of eyes gleamed. Miss Amelia arranged the procession into decorum, and then, with Sara at her side heading it, she led it away, leaving the Last Doll sitting upon a chair with the glories of her wardrobe scattered about her; dresses and coats hung upon chair backs, piles of lace-frilled petticoats lying ...
— A Little Princess • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... drawer. There were little coats, of many a form and pattern, piles of aprons, and rows of small stockings; and even a pair of little shoes, worn and rubbed at the toes, were peeping from the folds of a paper. There was a toy horse and wagon, a top, a ball,—memorials ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin |
