"Quicksilver" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Egyptian, who was Chief of the Cairo Police and had forty men under him, a sharper named Ali, for whom the Master of Police used to set snares and think that he had fallen therein; but, when they sought for him, they found that he had fled like zaybak, or quicksilver, wherefore they dubbed him Ali Zaybak or Mercury Ali of Cairo. Now one day, as he sat with his men in his hall, his heart became heavy within him and his breast was straitened. The hall-keeper saw him sitting with frowning face and said to him, "What ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... pardon, sir," said Gluck at length, after watching the water spreading in long quicksilver-like streams over the floor for a quarter of an hour; "mayn't I take ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... barren rows were the only evidences of the lentil and garlic gardens in happier days, and the location of pastures might be guessed by the skeletons that whitened the uplands. Through fringes of leafless palm trees, stone-rimmed pools, like splashes of quicksilver or facets of sapphire, ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... "there is not a quicksilver mine in all Siberia. There is gold and silver, but I don't believe there is a place where quicksilver is found. Anyhow there is not one that is worked. They have ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... "seeing people," quite as a matter of course. It used to give me a sharp pain at my heart; but I begin to take his way for granted now. "There's something about O'Farrell that eludes me—slips away like quicksilver. One is charmed with his voice ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... wits of a fox, and the blood which raced in his veins was volatile as quicksilver. The same glance which showed him the gray automobile stealing softly across the network of car-lines of one of the city's main thoroughfares revealed a roundsman crossing ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... waves hardly enter at all, but are thrown back from the surface; and so a steel knife or a silver spoon are very bright, and are clearly seen. Quicksilver is put at the back of looking-glasses because it reflects so many waves. It not only sends back those which come from the sun, but those, too, which come from your face. So, when you see yourself in a looking-glass, the sun-waves have first played ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... elusive—could attract a man like Roger Trenby. The fact remained, however, that Nan had succeeded where hitherto she herself had failed, and Isobel's dreams of a secure future had come tumbling about her ears. She realised bitterly that love is like quicksilver, running this way or that at its own sweet will—and rarely into the channel we have ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... like a sheet of quicksilver before me, with a reflected moon shining brightly in the center of it. It was shallow, for in many places I saw low sandbanks protruding above the water. Everywhere upon the still surface I could ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... enough! How in the world did ever she get here? I knew she'd left the Turon, and that old Mullockson had dropped a lot of his money in a big mining company he'd helped to float, and that never turned out gold enough to pay for the quicksilver in the first crushing. We'd heard afterwards that he'd died and she'd married again; but I never expected to see her brought down so low as this—not but what we'd known many a woman that started on the diggings with silks and satins and a big house and plate-glass ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... from them, or be recognised by its smell when burning. This gave rise to the sulphur theory, while the presence of mercury was inferred doubtless from the resemblance of the more commonly molten metals, silver, tin, and lead, to quicksilver. The properties of each metal were then put down to the presence of these substances. The list of seven metals is that of the most ancient times—gold, electrum, silver, copper, tin, lead, iron; but it is clearly recognised that electrum is an ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... its edge—on which the acid with which it is charged has no effect. The jar is charged with sulphuric acid, (common oil of vitriol) diluted in eight parts its bulk of water. The zinc plates of the battery have been amalgamated with quicksilver, and when the battery is set into the jar of acid there should be no action percieved upon them when the poles F, G, are not in contact. Should any action be percieved, it indicates imperfect amalgamation; this can be easily ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... than any of the rest was a rivulet that came through a valley which divided two of the mountains, and running through the vein of a rock, made a most agreeable murmur with its fall, appealing, as it was dashed and sprinkled into drops, like so much quicksilver.' ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... Quick-silver Ore which is like unto Sinople (or Vermilion) and the best Gold Ore you can get; grind of each a like quantity both together, before they partake of any fire, poure an Oyl of Mercury, upon it made per se, of common, purified and sublimed Quicksilver, set it a month to digest, you have an Extract rather Celestial than Terrestrial; distil this Extract gently, as in Balneum Mariae, the Flegme ascends over, the Oyl remaining at bottom, being heavy, which in a moment ...
— Of Natural and Supernatural Things • Basilius Valentinus
... thinking: my eyes are so weak, so imperfect, that they do not even distinguish hard bodies, if they are as transparent as glass! If a glass without quicksilver behind it were to bar my way, I should run into it, just like a bird which has flown into a room breaks its head against the windowpanes. A thousand things, moreover, deceive a man and lead him astray. How then is it surprising that he cannot perceive a new body ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... and then, the silence of the house, the solitude of the room, has pressed on me with a weight I found it difficult to bear, and recollection has not failed to be as alert, poignant, obtrusive, as other feelings were languid. I attribute this state of things partly to the weather. Quicksilver invariably falls low in storms and high winds, and I have ere this been warned of approaching disturbance in the atmosphere by a sense of bodily weakness, and deep, heavy mental sadness, such as some would call PRESENTIMENT,—presentiment ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... spiritualized was it, so crystalline the touch, Davos forgot his manners and slipped through the gateway, through the dark garden, toward an open window in which burned a solitary candle. The mystery of this window and the quicksilver dartings of the music—gods, what a touch, what gossamer delicacy!—set his heart throbbing. He forgot his sick nerves. When the trumpet blows, the war-horse lusts for action—and this was not a trumpet, but a horn of elf-land. He moved as closely as he dared to the window, and the music ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... tell me all about it, and possibly I may be of service to you. I have helped a good many young men through adventures that looked difficult enough beforehand. Perhaps you may have heard of me. I have more names than one; but the name of Quicksilver suits me as well as any other. Tell me what your trouble is, and we will talk the matter over, and see what ...
— The Gorgon's Head - (From: "A Wonder-Book For Girls and Boys") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... their smaller stature. They were strong, wholesome, healthy. Christopher knew the quality of that health—hearts that pumped like machines—obedient muscles under satin skins. One of the women whirled in a series of handsprings, like a blue balloon—her body as fluid as quicksilver. If he could only borrow one-tenth of that endurance for Anne—he might keep her ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... secret Presence through Creation's veins Running Quicksilver-like eludes your pains; Taking all shapes from Mah to Mahi and They change and perish ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... on board the ships, others were shut up under a guard in the fortress, and others were allowed to take their departure. Besides two richly-laden galleons and a dhow with dry goods in the harbour, we found in the fort twenty thousand dollars, a vast quantity of quicksilver, three or four hundred slaves who had been lately landed, and were to have been sent into the interior, and sixty thousand pounds' worth of silk, cables, anchors, and other naval stores,—the whole not being of less value than ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... Hill" sells at $5,000 per foot, cash down; "Wild Cat" isn't worth ten cents. The country is fabulously rich in gold, silver, copper, lead, coal, iron, quicksilver, marble, granite, chalk, plaster of Paris (gypsum), thieves, murderers, desperadoes, ladies, children, lawyers, Christians, Indians, Chinamen, Spaniards, gamblers, sharpens; coyotes (pronounced ki-yo- ties), poets, preachers, and jackass rabbits. I overheard a gentleman say, the other ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... done, or any proceedings in parliament that might look like contrition, but was willing to submit the points to the decision of colleagues; that Lord John would submit no point to colleagues 'affecting his personal honour'—to such degrees of heat can the quicksilver mount even in a cabinet thermometer. If such quarrels of the great are painful, there is some compensation in the firmness, patience, and benignity with which a man like Lord Aberdeen strove to appease them. Some of his colleagues actually thought ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... to bestow? Was ever mortal spirit, in its high endeavor, Fathom'd by Being such as thou? Yet food thou least which satisfieth never; Hast ruddy gold, that still doth flow Like restless quicksilver away; A game thou hast, at which none win who play— A girl who would, with amorous eyen, E'en from my breast a neighbor snare, Lofty ambition's joy divine, That, meteor-like, dissolves in air. Show ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... atmosphere formed in the receiver by alkohol only supports the attached barometer about one inch in winter, and about four or five inches in summer; that formed by water, in the same situation, raises the mercury only a few lines, and that by quicksilver but a few fractions of a line. There is therefore less fluid evaporated from alkohol than from ether, less from water than from alkohol, and still less from mercury than from either; consequently there is less caloric employed, and less cold produced, which quadrates exactly with the results ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... encouraging appeal, in the midst of which Loman, knowing full well every one had heard every word, became completely disconcerted, and let the ball go through his fingers as if it had been quicksilver. ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... That like a feasted Mammoth, leisured and slow, Turned its back on their warped bones. Even thus, Momentous with reproach, her grave regard Made me feel mean, cashiered of rank and right, My limbs that twelve good years had nursed were numbed And all their fidgety quicksilver grew stiff, Novel and fevering hallucinations Invaded my attention. So daylight When shutters are thrown back spreads through a house; As then the dreams and terrors of the night Decamp, so from my mind were driven ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... collected from the palaces and from the various officials, and were carried thither and stored in huge quantities. Artificers were ordered to construct mechanical crossbows, which, if any one were to enter, would immediately discharge their arrows. With the aid of quicksilver, rivers were made—the Yangtsze, the Yellow River, and the great ocean—the metal being made to flow from one into the other by machinery. On the roof were delineated the constellations of the sky, on the floor the geographical divisions of the earth. Candles were made from the fat of the ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... went round like wild fire and half an hour later the price of Estuaries was running up like quicksilver dipped in ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... inconveniences observable during the experiment, was the heat endured by the men who attended the fires. To enable a correct judgment to be formed on this point, one of the Commissioners (Dr. Mitchel) descended and examined, by a thermometer, the temperature of the hold, between the two boilers. The quicksilver, exposed to the radiant heat of the burning fuel, rose to one hundred and sixteen degrees of Fahrenheit's scale. Though exposed thus to its intensity, he experienced no indisposition afterwards. The analogy ...
— Fulton's "Steam Battery": Blockship and Catamaran • Howard I. Chapelle
... soon evident that Sir Robert belonged to the first class and Mrs. Sykes to the second. Its brilliant blue skies, and sunshine, and warmth, the lovely flowers, the good opera and better restaurants, the infectious gayety of the people, as light about the heart as the heels, with enough Gallic quicksilver in their veins to give them a genius for being and looking happy, and, lastly, the warmth of his reception, and a hospitality as refined as limitless, delighted this most amiable of baronets. He had brought good letters, and was admitted to that inner Creole circle which few strangers ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... he repeated over and over. There was a flickering look about the eyes that made Brent catch his breath. It seemed for just a passing second that they had been converted into little balls of trembling red quicksilver; that was the only thing to which he could liken those eyes just then—red quicksilver. But this passed so quickly that it might have been a reflection from the lamp. At any rate, Dale was continuing: "Why, Brent, I can't go to jail! Nor I can't run away! Miss Jane says I'll ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... is crushed by heavy stamps, or hammers, and then mixed with water and quicksilver. This curious metal, quicksilver, or mercury, is fond of gold and hunts out every little bit, the two metals mixing together and making what is called an amalgam. This is heated in an iron vessel, and the quicksilver goes off in steam or vapor, leaving ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... Tredyddlum and Polwheedle Copper Mines (which were as yet under water), besides singing as good a second as any professional man, and besides the Tredyddlum Office, had a Smyrna Sponge Company, and a little quicksilver operation in view, which would set him straight with the world yet. Filby had been everything a corporal of dragoons, a field-preacher, and missionary-agent for converting the Irish; an actor at a Greenwich fair-booth, in front of which his father's attorney ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... head and scanned critically the reflection of his own face in a somewhat disconsolate mirror that misdecorated a panel of the breakfast room. Old as the glass was, somewhat bereaved of its quicksilver lining at the edge, it had not got over its habit of telling the truth. Ordinarily little exception could have been taken to the mirrored face; it was intellectual; no sign-manual of cardinal sin had been placed upon it; it was neither low, ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... lighter than cork, the cork will sink in it as does iron in water; in the second instance, if we change the liquid to one heavier than iron, the iron will float on it as does cork on water, and exactly as an ordinary flat-iron will float on quicksilver, bobbing up and down like a cork in a tumbler of water. If, therefore, solutions of known but varying densities are compounded, it is possible to tell almost to exactitude the specific gravity of any stone dropped into them, by the position they assume. Thus, if we take a ...
— The Chemistry, Properties and Tests of Precious Stones • John Mastin
... great against the sky—the moon had risen. The twilight trembled as the yellow rays struck into its depths, and deepened, dying into purple shadows. Across the plain zigzagged the pools of a level stream, as if a giant had spilled handfuls of quicksilver here and there. ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... infinitum, without any possibility of its arriving at a concluding idea. The number of fractions bring it no nearer the last division, than the first idea it formed. Every particle eludes the grasp by a new fraction; like quicksilver, when we endeavour to seize it. But as in fact there must be something, which terminates the idea of every finite quantity; and as this terminating idea cannot itself consist of parts or inferior ideas; otherwise it would be the last ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... worlds would she have had him guess the swift message ready to leap out toward him. He seemed to be drawing her soul to his unconsciously. Tingling in every nerve, athrob with an emotion new and inexplicable, she drew a long slow breath and turned her head away. A hot shame ran like quicksilver through her veins. She whipped herself with her own scorn. Was she the kind of girl that gave her love to a man who did not ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... and Alan, leaping back to get his distance, ran upon the others like a bull, roaring as he went. They broke before him like water, turning, and running, and falling one against another in their haste. The sword in his hands flashed like quicksilver into the huddle of our fleeing enemies; and at every flash there came the scream of a man hurt. I was still thinking we were lost, when lo! they were all gone, and Alan was driving them along the deck as ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... one great noon, when the blue abyss of day seemed to yawn over the world more deeply than ever before, a sudden change touched the quicksilver smoothness of the waters—the swaying shadow of a vast motion. First the whole sea-circle appeared to rise up bodily at the sky; the horizon-curve lifted to a straight line; the line darkened and approached,—a monstrous wrinkle, an immeasurable fold of green water, moving swift as a cloud-shadow ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... "Quicksilver? I should think it was quick! See it run back, now the tube is cool. But father called it something else the other night. ...
— Classic Myths • Retold by Mary Catherine Judd
... there is no excuse—none. And I am astonished how a boy of thy sense could think of such nonsense. Birth, Morton, what the devil does that signify so long as it is birth in another country? A foreign damsel, and a Spanish girl, too, above all others! 'Sdeath, man, as if there was not quicksilver enough in the English women for you, you must make a mercurial exportation from Spain, must you! Why, Morton, Morton, the ladies in that country are proverbial. I tremble at the very thought of it. But as for my consent, ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... top of this hill one may discerne Our Lady Church Steeple at Sarum, like a fine Spanish needle. I would have the height of these hills, as also Hackpen, and those toward Lambourn, which are the highest, to he taken with the quicksilver barometer, according to the method of Mr. Edmund Halley in Philosophical Transactions, No. ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... Secretary of War, and ex-Representative G. W. McCrary was to have been Attorney-General. But this was not satisfactory to the agents of the New Idria Company, as Mr. McCrary had on one occasion expressed a favorable opinion on the claim of William McGarrahan to the quicksilver mine of which the New Idria had obtained possession. So a pressure was brought to bear upon the President, the result of which was the transposition of Devens and McCrary. The soldier was made Attorney-General, and the country ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... stood the chimney and fireplace, with a high buffet of dark wood on each side. The floor of the room was not dirty, although about its upper parts spiders had run their cobwebs in every direction. In the centre of the ceiling, hung a quicksilver globe, a common ornament in those days, but the major part of it had lost its brilliancy, the spiders' webs enclosing it like a shroud. Over the chimney piece were hung two or three drawings framed and glazed, but a dusty mildew was spotted over the glass, so that little ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... nor did we get any information touching its towns and villages, about the division of the land, the religion of the natives, their policy, wars, rivers, vessels, or fisheries; what commodities they have, what manufactures, what minerals whether gold, silver, tin, iron, lead, copper or quicksilver. In the first place, in making further landings we should have been troubled by the rainy season, which might have seriously interfered with the use of our muskets, whereas it does no harm to the weapons of the savages; secondly, we should first have been obliged to seek practicable paths ...
— The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606-1765 • J. E. Heeres
... quarters were paralyzed and useless, and that all danger was out of the question. He sank down again on his elbows, and as he rested his now powerless limbs, I saw the blood welling out of a wound in the loins, as it shone in the moonlight, and trickled off his sleek-painted hide, like globules of quicksilver. As I looked into his countenance, I saw all the devil alive there. The will remained—the power only had gone. It was a sight never to be forgotten. With head raised to the full stretch of his neck, he glared at me with an expression of such malignity, ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... long-tongued, swivel-eyed chameleon, the Romans are at hand. (A cry of terror from the women: they would fly but for the spears.) Not even the descendants of the gods can resist them; for they have each man seven arms, each carrying seven spears. The blood in their veins is boiling quicksilver; and their wives become mothers in three hours, and are slain ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... There are few members in town, and most of them no friends to the committee; so that there is not the least apprehension of any violence following the Report. I dare say there is not; for my uncle, who is my political weather-glass, and whose quicksilver rises and falls with the least variation of parliamentary weather, is in great spirits, and has spoken three times in the House within this week; he had not opened his lips before since the change. Mr. Pultney has his ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... the manifold products of the East, Europe had only rough woolen cloth, arsenic, antimony, quicksilver, tin, copper, lead, and coral to give; and a balance, therefore, always existed for the European merchant to pay in gold and silver, with the result that gold and silver coins grew scarce in the West. It is hard to say what would have ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... young people were slow to realize their real feelings. They had at first looked at each other mockingly. They were hardly at all alike. He was quicksilver, she was still water. But it was not long before quicksilver tried to appear more at rest, and sleeping water awoke. Georges would criticise Aurora's clothes, and her Italian taste—a slight want of feeling for modulation and ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... surrender the new Government of Gloria had absurdly demanded. There were questions of tariff, of duties, of smuggling, all sorts of questions, which, after flickering about separately for some time, ran together at last like drops of quicksilver, and so formed for the diplomatists and for the newspapers ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... Cupid, leave to speak improperly; since we are turn'd cracks, let's study to be like cracks; practise their language, and behaviours, and not with a dead imitation: Act freely, carelessly, and capriciously, as if our veins ran with quicksilver, and not utter a phrase, but what shall come forth steep'd in the very brine of conceit, and sparkle like salt ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... acquaintances, but each has heard very frequently about the other, and their relatives have been often associated. "We have a good deal in common," says the Barometer. "Of the same blood, as we may say; quicksilver is thicker than water." "Yes," says the little Fahrenheit, "and we are both of the same mercurial temperament." While their columns are dancing up and down with laughter at this somewhat tepid and low-pressure pleasantry, there come ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... touching, the two Terrestrials stared spell-bound into the plate; watching while the insensately vicious intelligences within the sphere brought its every force to bear upon another and larger sphere which was now so close as to be plainly visible. Like a gigantic drop of quicksilver this second globe appeared—its smooth and highly-polished surface one enormous, perfect, spherical mirror. Watching tensely, they saw flash out that frightful plane of seething energy, with the effects of which they were all too familiar, and saw ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... the art of working metals, especially gold and silver. Besides these precious metals, they had copper, tin, lead, and quicksilver. Figures 65 and 66 show some of the implements used by the Peruvians. Iron was unknown to them in the time of the Incas, although some maintain that they had it in the previous ages, to which belong the ruins at Lake Titicaca. Iron ore was and still is very abundant in Peru. ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... drawn from my royal exchequer for those islands are so consuming and reducing that account and fund, to such an extent, and with so injurious effect, that it hardly comes in but it must be paid out. Considering that what is carried in exchange for the quicksilver [35] is revenue derived from the same merchandise that was sent, while the receipts from the bulls for the crusade are (as you know) but moderately successful, you are accordingly informed of this in such ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVIII, 1617-1620 • Various
... in the shaft of light looked like quicksilver. The smoke from the funnel mixed in the heavy air with the mist and the light, and formed a fantastic beam of vapor from the ship to the shore. Up this stream of quivering, scintillating irradiation, as brilliant as flashing water in the sun, flew from the land thousands ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... conscious of a wave of heat. In the distance she could see the smoke rolling across the open. She touched her horse with the quirt. The spot which she must pass to keep on the track to the depot was scarcely a hundred yards ahead, but already the fire seemed to be running like quicksilver across the ground licking up the dry greasewood with indeed a flaming tongue. She glanced once behind, warned by the heat. The fire was closing in upon her. A puff of smoke suddenly enveloped her. She coughed. Her head began to swim and a fit of giddiness assailed her. She rocked ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the weight seemed more than they could get into the boat. But even the strength of the younger ones seemed to grow into the strength of giants when they saw through the clear water a great moving mass like quicksilver. And then the wild excitement of hauling in; the difficulty of it; the danger of the fish escaping; the warning cries of Rob; the clatter made by the mackerel; the possibility of swamping the boat altogether, as all the four were straining their utmost at one side. Indeed, by an awkward tilt ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... many old acquaintances there, from the mines of Pennsylvania; Massachusetts and New York were also very well represented. I had no idea before, that the mineral wealth of Austria was so great. Besides the iron and lead mines among the hills of Styria and the quicksilver of Idria, there is no small amount of gold and silver found, and the Carpathian mountains are rich in jasper, opal and lapiz lazuli. The largest opal ever found, was in this collection. It weighs thirty-four ounces and looks like a ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... constant one. It would presumably prove to be a general law, and not an isolated fact. If bismuth turned into mercury, what would mercury turn into? There would be no rest for me until I had solved the question. I renewed the exhausted batteries and passed the current through the bowl of quicksilver. For sixteen hours I sat watching the metal, marking how it slowly seemed to curdle, to grow firmer, to lose its silvery glitter and to take a dull yellow hue. When I at last picked it up in a forceps, ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... by this time, or by the point of Cairn.—Lord help ye! they are a kind of amphibious deevils, neither land nor water beasts neither English nor Scots—neither county nor stewartry, as we say—they are dispersed like so much quicksilver. You may as well try to whistle a sealgh out of the Solway, as to get hold of one of them till all the ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... have harboured the Czar's rebels in England, there has been a craze possessing our newspaper press, that Russia was, or might be, brewing evil against India. We can all see the absurdity of such reveries when exemplified by our quicksilver neighbour France, bouncing for ever in her dreams about insults meditated from the perfidious England; but we are blind to the image which this French mirror reflects of our own attitude towards Russia. One hundred and fifty years ago, the incubus which lay heavy on the slumbers of England ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... understand our terms. I suppose, there are few of the keywords of the New Testament which have lost more of their radiance, like quicksilver, by exposure in the air during the centuries than that great word Grace, which is always on the lips of this Apostle, and to him had music in its sound, and which to us is a piece of dead doctrine, associated with certain high Calvinistic theories which we enlightened people have ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... beauty-loving eyes as well as to the four-horse tyro driver, past Calistoga with its old mud-baths and chicken-soup springs, with St. Helena and its giant saddle ever towering before us, we climbed the mountains on a good grade and dropped down past the quicksilver mines to the canyon of the Geysers. After a stop over night and an exploration of the miniature-grand volcanic scene, we pulled on across the canyon and took the grade where the cicadas simmered audibly in the noon sunshine among the hillside manzanitas. Then, higher, came the ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... as "flit or soar," involving wingedness. Seriously, they are evidently content to let the wings belong to Horse, or Muse, or Angel, rather than to themselves; but they all, somehow or other, express an honest wish for a Spiritual Boat. I will not dwell on poor Shelley's paper navies, and seas of quicksilver, lest we should begin to think evil of boats in general because of that traitorous one in Spezzia Bay; but it is a triumph to find the pastorally minded Wordsworth imagine no other way of visiting the stars than in ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... next to nothing. Bond, who better apprehended the spirit of the hour, let himself loose in a vein of pure fantasy,—he ventured on the whimsical, the sprightly, the paradoxical. The poor fellow sent to interview him might as well have tried to grasp a bundle of sunbeams or a handful of quicksilver. His report turned out a frightful bungle; the wretched Bond, made clumsy, fatuous, pointless, sodden, when he had meant to show himself as witty and brilliant as possible, was completely crushed. With Joyce going for next to nothing and Bond for worse than nothing, ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... this chapter will be to give the reader some little insight into the habits of the woodcock, and the mode of snaring them in the forests of Le Morvan, during the month of November. At the close of this month, Dame Nature's barometer, their instinct, far better than the quicksilver, tells them the December rains are close at hand; and that if they remain in their hiding-places in the low grounds, they will be driven out by the approaching deluge. They at length make up their minds to set forth on their travels. With a long-drawn sigh, therefore, the woodcock ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... supposed to have attained to the perfection of its nature by passing in succession through the forms of lead, brass and silver; gold and silver were held to contain very pure red sulphur and white quicksilver, whereas in the other metals these materials were coarser and of a different colour. From an analogy instituted between the healthy human being and gold, the most perfect of the metals, silver, mercury, copper, iron, lead and tin, were regarded in the light of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... formerly called Cuenca, and formed part of the department of Azuay, which also included the province of Loja. Azuay is an elevated mountainous district with a great variety of climates and products; among the latter are silver, quicksilver, wheat, Indian corn, barley, cattle, wool, cinchona and straw hats. The ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... of quicksilver, beat up with the white of two eggs, and put on with a feather, is the cleanest and surest bed-bug poison. What is left should be thrown away: it is dangerous to have it about the house. If the vermin are in your walls, fill up the cracks with ...
— The American Frugal Housewife • Lydia M. Child
... especially the heavy export duty on coin and bullion, so as to cheapen and facilitate the purchase of imports and permit the precious metals, untaxed, to flow out freely from Mexico into general circulation. Quicksilver and machinery for working the mines of precious metals in Mexico, for the same reasons, should also be admitted duty free, which, with the measures above indicated, would largely increase the production and circulation of the precious metals, improve our own commerce and industry ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... to the empty canvas and quested on over the sea in the hope of wind-ruffles on the water. But all was glassy calm, each great sea, of all the orderly procession of great seas, heaving up, round-topped and mountainous, like so much quicksilver. ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... imagines I'm still dancing in the ballroom at the Amberson Mansion, and she probably thinks of the Mansion as still beautiful—still the finest house in town. Life and money both behave like loose quicksilver in a nest of cracks. And when they're gone we can't tell where—or what the devil we did with 'em! But I believe I'll say now—while there isn't much time left for either of us to get embarrassed about it—I ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... however, was changed. California had developed into a rich grape-producing country. Its cereals were beyond the demands of local consumption. A considerable trade had sprung up with Oregon, the Sandwich Islands, and latterly with China. The production of quicksilver was on the increase. Valuable copper mines had recently been opened. Moreover, the immense gold seams of Colorado, the vast silver deposits in Nevada, and the auriferous quartz of Idaho, were disclosed almost simultaneously, diverting population to the interior table-lands, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... plugged either with wax or soft metal that was easily melted. Again, pieces of lead were used which had been plugged with lumps of gold carefully covered over; and a very simple and impressive demonstration was making use of a nugget of gold that had been coated over with quicksilver and tarnished so as to resemble lead or some base metal. When this was thrown into acid the coating was removed by chemical action, leaving the shining metal in the bottom of the vessel. In order to perform some of these tricks, it is obvious that ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... were they so very black? The freckles were still there. There was a cure for freckles—but there were not so many as there looked to be; the old glass was so full of spots and holes in the quicksilver. ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... his bed and crown. That as he was sleeping in his garden, his custom always in the afternoon, his treasonous brother stole upon him in his sleep, and poured the juice of poisonous henbane into his ears, which has such an antipathy to the life of man, that swift as quicksilver it courses through all the veins of the body, baking up the blood, and spreading a crustlike leprosy all over the skin: thus sleeping, by a brother's hand he was cut off at once from his crown, his queen, and his life: and he adjured Hamlet, if he did ever ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... was blazing like quicksilver. Some white clouds cooled the sky a little, but everything around was sweltering with hotness. On we went, fleet and cheerful, sending up the water in sparkles, and flying toward the ocean, with green banks on each side of us, and that gloriously hot sun heating ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... was the last that I was ever to see of Cousin Edie. She stood in the sunlight with the old challenge in her eyes, and flash of her teeth; and so I shall always remember her, shining and unstable, like a drop of quicksilver. As I joined my comrade in the street below, I saw a grand carriage and pair at the door, and I knew that she had asked me to slip out so that her grand new friends might never know what common people she had been associated with in her childhood. ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to look at the army. Never had I seen them so joyous. It would be impossible to convey any idea of the afflatus which buoyed them up. Every man's veins seemed to run with quicksilver, instead of blood. Every cheek was glowing. Every eye flashed with superb joy and defiance. You would have supposed, indeed, that the troops were under the effect of champagne or laughing gas. "I never even imagined such courage," ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... rainfall is excessive, and winters severe; in the S. there is little rain, and a delightful climate. Wheat is the most important product; the grape and all manner of fruits grow luxuriantly. Mineral wealth is great: it is the foremost State for gold and quicksilver; lead, silver, copper, iron, sulphur, coal, and many other minerals abound. The industries include brandy and sugar manufactures, silk-growing, shipbuilding, and fishing. All products are exported, eastward ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... affirm that quicksilver is the common seed of all metals. They do not bear in mind that nature raises substances according to the diversity of things which she wishes to produce in ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... he exclaimed, waving his hand. "We meet to-night, I trust. I will show you a new dance—the Dance of Death, I shall call it. I seem calm, but I am on fire with excitement. To-night I shall dance as though quicksilver were in my feet. You must not miss it. You ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... flat on the rocks, chin in fist, watching the comedies and tragedies and the strange chancy life of the pools. And they were absorbing enough to keep even Carette quiet, although her veins seemed filled with quicksilver and ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... were not brought up so early as usual; and in the interim I endeavoured to repair the barometer, which was out of order. This accident had occurred in consequence of the man having carried it, contrary to my orders, slung round his body instead of holding it in his hand. Much of the quicksilver had shaken out of the bag and lodged in the lower part of the cylinder; but by filing the brass and letting off this mercury the instrument was rendered once more serviceable. We travelled this day due west, and at the end of 7 1/2 miles ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... directive force of the current, is a magical machine for accomplishment of the metamorphoses desired by the creative chemist. A hundred years ago Davy, by dipping the poles of his battery into melted soda lye, saw forming on one of them a shining globule like quicksilver. It was the metal sodium, never before seen by man. Nowadays this process of electrolysis (electric loosening) is carried out daily by ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... miles to go, and the breeze fell from fresh to light, until at last, shrouded in a thick fog, one Sunday morning, when there was no air at all, only a flat calm, the sea as smooth as a glass mirror with the quicksilver clouded. ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... the night unto the day, and so make up the measure," the passengers had all the more for their money, and were incomparably better off as to time than they had ever been before. But after this many years elapsed before "old Quicksilver" made good its ten miles an hour in one unbroken trot to Exeter, and was rivalled by "young Quicksilver" on the road to Bristol, and beaten by the light-winged Hirondelle, that flew from Liverpool to Cheltenham, and troops of others, each faster than ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.11.17 • Various
... Yeoman's Tale in Chaucer, that many of those who professed to turn the base metals into gold were held in bad repute as early as the 14th century. The "false chanoun" persuaded the priest, who was his dupe, to send his servant for quicksilver, which he promised to make into "as good silver and as fyn, As ther is any in youre purse or myn"; he then gave the priest a "crosselet," and bid him put it on the fire, and blow the coals. While the priest ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... boat-pullers said. "They put you into the salt-mines and work you till you die. Never see daylight again. Why, I've heard tell of one fellow that was chained to his mate, and that mate died. And they were both chained together! And if they send you to the quicksilver mines you get salivated. I'd rather be hung ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... quicksilver is fluid at ordinary temperatures, and that might lead us to the idea ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... he was making was not one she could entertain under any circumstances. She kept shaking her head, and the more she shook it, the more the glazed Jingleberry seemed to implore her to be his. Finally, Jingleberry saw his quicksilver counterpart fall upon his knees before Marian of the glass, and hold out his arms and hands towards her in an attitude of prayerful despair, whereupon the girl sprang to her feet, stamped her left foot furiously upon the floor, ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... contemplating the irruption of outside barbarians. We went into the house, and there, with many a laugh and jest, the spectacled school-teacher was transformed into my own bright and happy Estella. The two girls flowed into one another, by natural affinity, like a couple of drops of quicksilver; each recognized the transparent soul in the other, and in a moment they ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... filled and well secured against the penetration of the air, and exposed to solar rays, will ascend to the skies and sometimes suffer a natural change. And if the eggs of the larger description of swans, or leather balls stitched with fine thongs, be filled with nitre, the purest sulphur quicksilver, or kindred materials which rarify by their caloric energy, and if they externally resemble pigeons, they will easily be mistaken for ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... the other metals after the gods. Thus Quicksilver was called Mercury, Lead Saturn, Tin Jupiter, Copper Venus, Silver Luna, and so on; and our own language has received a colouring from the Roman nomenclature, ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... good deal a matter of temperament," said the American. "A fellow like Nap, for instance, all hustle and quicksilver, might be expected to kick now and then. One makes allowances for a fellow ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... other early poems of Mr. Bowles. Well would it have been for me, perhaps, had I never relapsed into the same mental disease; if I had continued to pluck the flower and reap the harvest from the cultivated surface, instead of delving in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic lore. And if in after time I have sought a refuge from bodily pain and mismanaged sensibility in abstruse researches, which exercised the strength and subtilty of the understanding without awakening the feelings of ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... touch of vexation in his voice, but Theos heeded it not. His heart gave a great bound against his ribs as though pricked by a fire-tipped arrow,—something swift and ardent stirred in his blood like the flowing of quicksilver, . . the picture of the dusky-eyed, witchingly beautiful woman he had seen that morning in her gold-adorned ship, seemed to float between him and the light,—her face shone out like a growing glory-flower in the tangled wilderness of ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... than is commonly believed. Water is nineteen times lighter, and by consequence nineteen times rarer, than gold; and gold is so rare, as very readily, and without the least opposition, to transmit the magnetic effluvia, and easily to admit quicksilver into its pores, and to let water pass through it. From all which we may conclude, that gold has more pores than solid parts, and by consequence that water has above forty times more pores than parts. ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... death after the war, and his grandfather from mere love of his cups. Nothing but a hopeless smash-up, though, would ever have let it get the best of him.... He was terribly high-strung under all that fine repose of his, and although his mind was like polished metal in a way, it was full of quicksilver. When a man like that lets go—nothing left to hold on to—he goes down hill at ten times the pace of an ordinary chap. I—I—suppose I may as well tell you the whole truth. He never drew a sober breath on the steamer and he's been drunk more or less ever since he arrived ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... the water is to be boiled for two hours in a flask filled with it, and immersed in a vessel of water kept boiling, with the mouth of the flask under the surface of the water: it is to be inverted in quicksilver, taking care that no air-bubble adheres to the side of the flask, and being tinged with infusion of litmus, a little nitrous gas is to be introduced: if the oxygen gas has been sufficiently expelled from the water, the purple colour of the litmus does not change; while, if oxygen ...
— A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons • Fredrick Accum
... which, beyond all doubt, was connected with the adventures of those extraordinary people, known by the appellation of Buccaneers. Some workmen were digging near the foot of the hill under the fort, when they discovered some quicksilver, and on inspection, a very considerable quantity was found; it had evidently been a part of the plunder of the pirates, buried in casks or skins, and these having decayed, the liquid ore naturally escaped ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... commend me for a traveller. HERE ends my Cornish expedition. Does it recall to thee, O sire, thine own of old time, undertaken (if I remember rightly) with Dr. Kidd?—Mails then did not travel like the Quicksilver, averaging 12 miles an hour, and few people go 40 miles before breakfast. Now, I feel able to get nearer my Albury destination, and in a week or so, shall hope to be residing at Dorchester, near the Blandford of paternal recollections. ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Romano himself.[22] Brought to England with the rest of the Mantua pieces purchased by Daniel Nys for Charles I., they suffered injury, and Van Dyck is said to have repainted the Vitellius, which was one of several canvases irretrievably ruined by the quicksilver of the frames during the transit from Italy.[23] On the disposal of the royal collection after Charles Stuart's execution the Twelve Caesars were sold by the State—not presented, as is usually asserted—to the Spanish Ambassador Cardenas, ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... upon the express condition (which, however, has been amply proved to exist) that the mean density of the fluid mass is less than the mean density of the earth. Everything else remaining the same, if we substituted an ocean of quicksilver for the actual ocean, this stability would disappear. The fluid would frequently overflow its boundaries, to ravage continents even to the height of the snowy peaks which lose ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... rolls over the tall grass of the prairie, which bends beneath its weight, sighs by me, and seems to cling to me as it passes, and moves on toward the arid plains of the South. The Ohio sweeps down in calmness and majesty. With its surface of quicksilver, and the little waves dancing up in gladness, and its heavy dull wash, it rolls along its mighty mass of waters, hastening to pour itself into the mightier mass of the Mississippi. Occasionally a giant tree, torn from its place, and cast root and branch into the flood, comes booming down, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... Scotch-Irish friend and classmate of the late Mr. Zane, Duff Salter of Arkansas. He cannot hear what I have said, for he is almost stone deaf. However, go through the motions of shaking hands. I am told he has heard very little of anything for the past ten years. An explosion in a quicksilver mine broke ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... And then I felt altogether the force of the maxim of St. Ambrose, "Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum;"—I had a great dislike of paper logic. For myself, it was not logic that carried me on; as well might one say that the quicksilver in the barometer changes the weather. It is the concrete being that reasons; pass a number of years, and I find my mind in a new place; how? the whole man moves; paper logic is but the record of it. All the logic in the world would not have made me move faster towards Rome ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... the 11th, the sabandar, his father-in-law Medigoffar, and several others, came to Swally, and delivered the Firmaun to me in form, making great professions of respect for our nation in the name of their king. The 14th we landed all our cloth, with 310 elephants teeth, and all our quicksilver. This day likewise the Portuguese galleons came within three or four miles of us. The 16th, I landed Anthony Starkey, with orders to travel over land for England, carrying letters to give ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... laden with men and women dressed in many-coloured costumes, caused the Nile to disappear entirely over an extent of many miles, and presented under the brilliant Egyptian sun a spectacle dazzling in its changefulness. The water, agitated in every direction, surged, sparkled, and gleamed like quicksilver, and resembled a sun shattered ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... consists in this circumstance, that in the former the insulating medium, whether of air, or of thin glass, is ruptured in one part, and thus a communication is made between the vitreous and resinous ethers, and they unite immediately, like globules of quicksilver, when pressed forcibly together: but in the electric shock a communication is made by some conducting body applied to the other extremities of the vitreous, and of the resinous atmospheres, through which they pass and unite, whether both sides of ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... out of my reach, since the sextant would not measure double the altitude. Observations of the stars were, in like manner, uncertain, in consequence of the boisterous weather we had had, and the unavoidable agitation of the quicksilver. My last observation of Antares placed us in latitude 34 degrees 4 minutes; so that we were still 115 miles from ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... said Brace, drawing a dull vermilion-colored stone from his pocket; "but here's something I picked up just now that ain't 'played out,' nor even the value of it suspected by those fellows. That's cinnabar—quicksilver ore—and a big per cent. of it too; and if there's as much of it here as the indications show, you could buy up all your SILVER mines in the country ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... weight of water; but the actual weight of the principal solid substances composing the outer crust is as two and a half times the weight of water; and this, we know, if the globe were solid and cold, should increase vastly towards the centre, water acquiring the density of quicksilver at 362 miles below the surface, and other things in proportion, and these densities becoming much greater at greater depths; so that the entire mass of a cool globe should be of a gravity infinitely exceeding four and a half times the weight of water. The only alternative supposition is, ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... beggars make me hot!" Anstice threw himself back into his corner and drew a long breath. "It's always a mystery to me how people who live in hot climates are so beastly energetic! They seem to have quicksilver in ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... the sensational news was through half of Thrums, of which Monypenny may be regarded as a broken piece, left behind, like the dot of quicksilver in the tube, to show how high the town once rose. Some could only rejoice at first in the down-come of Jean Myles, but most blamed the smith (and himself among them) for not taking note of her address, so that Thrums Street could be informed of it and sent to her relief. For ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... at Piombino, each place appearing as fitfully as in a fevered dream.... We catch a glimpse of him again at Rome in 1514, surrounded by his mirrors and vials and furnaces, making strange toys that seemed alive of wax and quicksilver. The hesitation which had haunted him all through life, and made like one under a spell, was upon him now with double force. No one had ever carried political indifferentism farther; it had always been his ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... in such close communication with the sea, where they might safely be shipped, and sent to countries which required them. As to the metals, there is hardly one which Spain does not possess in large quantities. Her mines of silver and quicksilver are well known. She abounds in copper, and her supply of lead is enormous. Iron and coal, the two most useful of all the productions of the inorganic world, are also abundant in that highly favored country. Iron is said to exist in every part of Spain, and to be of the best quality; ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... girl!" he thought. "Beauty and gift and a divine despair. Everything ready to make the great artist. And then the heart of a woman, which is like quicksilver, to reckon with. I spoke bravely about her forgetting, but I have doubts. Sometimes I wonder if it be possible for a person with a fine and generous nature to become a really great artist. Perhaps it is necessary to have great egotism and selfishness for the arts' development. ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... the corners of the bed. It is a good plan to use only metal beds with iron spring frames, for bugs like wood much better; they seldom stay where there is none. If you ever find a bug, or the tiny black speck it makes, get the white of an egg and beat it with a teaspoonful of quicksilver, and paint everything with it, and you will ...
— A Little Housekeeping Book for a Little Girl - Margaret's Saturday Mornings • Caroline French Benton
... breath. For the half-dispersed thousands were flowing together again like quicksilver. The whole Hira Mundi region was packed with a seething dangerous mob, completely out of hand, amenable to ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... defenseless and inert, but all of him beyond the flesh was galvanized into quicksilver acuteness and determination. He was praying for a reprieve of life sufficient to call this Judas friend to an accounting—and if that failed, for strength enough to die with his denunciation spoken. Yet he realized the need of conserving his ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... primarily affected, small doses of quicksilver act in a wonderful and a prodigious manner. How the stomach, when wrong, disturbs the head, is apparent to every one. How a faulty action of the liver disturbs the head is also well known; but the liver, in an especial manner, disturbs ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 274, Saturday, September 22, 1827 • Various
... a few paces in the rear of the line of guns. I saw his eye going watchfully from one point to another of his charge; his head making quick little turns to right and left to see if all were doing properly; the horse a statue, the man alive as quicksilver, though nothing of him moved but his head. I was sure, very sure, that he would not see me. He was intent on his duty; spectators or the whole world looking on were nothing to him. He would not even perhaps be conscious ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... to $19,500,000. The value of the fishery products is five-sevenths as great as the output of the gold mines. Alaskan coal-fields are estimated to be even richer than her gold deposits. Other productions of the territory are silver, tin, lead, quicksilver, graphite, marble, lumber, grains, vegetables, ...
— History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... pearls, porcelain or China ware; japanned or varnished works; spices, musk, true ambergris, camphire [sic], sugar, ginger, tea, linen, and silk; of the latter there is such abundance, that they are able to furnish all the world with it. Here are also mines of quicksilver, vermillion, azure-stone, vitriol, &c. So much for the wealth: Now as to the inhabitants, they are so numerous, that the great roads may be compared to a perpetual fair, such numbers are continually passing, which made a ...
— A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies - A Private Tutor for Little Masters and Misses • Unknown
... England, and raised, as if by magic, the enthusiasm of the English; how one fortune after another has been swallowed up in the dark, deep gulf of speculation; how expectations have been disappointed; and how the great cause of this is the scarcity of quicksilver, which has been paid at the rate of one hundred and fifty dollars per quintal in real cash, when the same quantity was given at credit by the Spanish government for fifty dollars; how heaps of silver lie abandoned, because ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... Street; they weighed fifteen pounds, and carried seven drachms of powder without a disagreeable recoil. The bullet was a blunt cone, one and a half diameter of the bore, and I used a mixture of nine-tenths lead and one-tenth quicksilver for the hardening of the projectile. This is superior to all mixtures for that purpose, as it combines hardness with extra weight; the lead must be melted in a pot by itself to a red heat, and the proportion of quicksilver ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... quicksilver one ounce, one ounce nitric acid, one ten cent piece, rain water 1/2 pint to a pint, put the three first articles into a tumbler together; let them stand until dissolved, occasionally stirring, then add the water, and it is ready for ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... of Sarawak are antimony, quicksilver, coal, timber of many kinds, gutta-percha, rice, sago, and rattans. Gold is also worked in small quantities by Chinese.[8] The principal imports are cloths, salt, tobacco, brass, and crockery-ware. The Borneo Company, Limited, have the monopoly ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... she bent and slipped it in. Two faces looked at her from round the door; she heard Bob Pillin's smothered chuckle; her mother's rich and feathery laugh. Oh! How red his forehead was! She touched it with her lips; skipped back, twirled round, danced silently a second, blew a kiss, and like quicksilver was gone. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... side-table—and of course under such circumstances each article must be sizable—stood a sewing machine, in the corner was a bedstead with exquisitely clean bedding, in another a tiny cooking stove. Vases of flowers, framed pictures and ornamental quicksilver balls had been found place for, this bargewoman's home aptly illustrating Shakespeare's adage—"Order gives all things view." The brisk, weather-beaten mistress now came up, no little gratified by our ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... notwithstanding the great curiosity with which they gazed at and required an explanation of every object in the ship, it was as impossible, says the elder Forster, to rivet their attention for any time, as to make quicksilver ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... was wide awake in an instant. He knew that he had been robbed and grabbed for the fellow who slipped away as though he had been quicksilver and when Jim who became entangled in the bed clothes got to the door of the sleeper it was locked. Perhaps he has gone the other way, thought Jim, and he rushed to the other end of the car; the door there ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt |
