"Sharpened" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ill-pleased with the morning's entertainment. Dr. Surtaine saw, in retrospect and in prospect, his son being led astray into various radical and harebrained vagaries of journalism. None of those at the breakfast had foreseen more clearly than the wise and sharpened quack what serious difficulties beset the course which Hal had ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... of action which he used to the utmost, and he became a member of the so-called National Convention, established in Birmingham in 1839. Already he had achieved prominence by being imprisoned as the leader of a torch-light procession, and this taste of martyrdom naturally sharpened his zeal. He had married young, but only visited his family from time to time. His wife for the most part earned her own living, and ultimately betook herself to London with her son Joseph, the single survivor of seven children. Henry pursued his career ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... I, "ought to divide each of those tricing-lines at a single stroke, when down would go the net upon the defenders' heads and hamper their movements long enough to give our people a chance." And then I remembered that only a day or two before I had sharpened my own stout clasp-knife—at that moment hung about my neck on a lanyard— to almost a razor edge, and that consequently I had in my possession just the weapon for ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... and explained to the court: "Your honor, the odors complained of can not exist!" "But here are twenty complaints." "Yes, but I have worked in my factory for the last fifteen years, and I'll take my oath I can not detect any smells." "As a rule, prisoner," replied the judge, as he sharpened his spectacles on his bootleg, "the best noses are on the outside of soap factories. You are fined $25 and costs." Moral: Where a soap factory and a school-house are at loggerheads the school should ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... is it?" cried Andrew, with a glare in his usually mild eyes and his ugly jaw set. They had had many passages at arms. Bakkus's sophistical rhetoric against Andrew's steady common sense; and they had sharpened Andrew's wit. But never before had they come to a serious quarrel. Feeling his power he had hitherto exercised it with humorous effectiveness. But now the situation appeared entirely devoid of humour. He ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... So Wul-Takim sharpened his big broadsword, and Nerle carefully prepared his master's horse, so that before an hour had passed they were galloping toward the province of the Red Rogue ...
— The Enchanted Island of Yew • L. Frank Baum
... Indian woman, with a shrieking infant in her arms, rushed to the door. There was a blue gunshot wound in her neck, from which two or three large black clotting gouts of blood were trickling. Her long black hair was streaming in coarse braids, and her features were pinched and sharpened, as if in the agony of death. She glanced wildly behind, and gasped out "Escapa, Oreeque, escape, para mi, soi muerto ya." Another shot, and the miserable creature convulsively clasped her child, whose small shrill cry I often fancy I hear to this hour blending with its mother's death—shriek, ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... it was, too—ranking second to only the famed Fort Pitt at Pittsburgh. It stood near the river edge of a flat bluff about a quarter of a mile up the Ohio from the mouth of Wheeling Creek. Its stockade of sharpened white-oak pickets seventeen feet high enclosed more than half an acre, with small block-houses or bastions in the corners, and with a commandant's log house of two ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... ore growne with shrubs and bushes thick, The sharpened thornes your tender feete will pricke, The brambles round about your traine will lappe, The burs and briers about your ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... fifteen or sixteen years old, and therefore could hardly be a match in intellectual resources for the seventeen and eighteen year-old first-class scholars of the Apollinean Institute. But city-wall-fruit ripens early, and he soon found that this girl's training had so sharpened her wits and stored her memory, that he need not be at the trouble to stoop painfully in order to come ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... in love and in the chase, drunk with his twofold drunkenness, his eyes fixed on his victim, seemed to be already tasting the delights of his victory, with the end of his tongue hanging from his mouth, as he sharpened his teeth with a ferocious laugh. If you looked only at him, you said to yourself: "He has him!" But a glance at the fox reassured you at once. Under his lustrous, velvety coat, catlike, with his body almost touching the ground, skimming ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... lay, spake Ailill: "I marvel and wonder, O Fergus, who could have sharpened the fork and slain with such speed the four that had gone out before us." "Fitter it were to marvel and wonder at him who with a single stroke lopped the fork which thou seest, root and top, pointed and charred ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... musket, and certain innocent-looking white powders as having some little claim to be regarded as dangerous. It is the practical inattention to similar coincidences which has given rise to the unpleasant but often necessary documents called indictments, which has sharpened a form of the cephalotome sometimes employed in the case of adults, and adjusted that modification of the fillet which delivers the world of those who happen to be too much in the way while such ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... impropriety, aghast at the consequences, Mooty—doctor alike of laws, of science, and of medicine, and a man of imperative mood—sharpened his tomahawk at the Chinaman's grindstone, theatrically testing its edge with distorted thumb. Tom Goat disappeared as silently as last night's dew, for Mooty does not hesitate to summarily administer his own judgment when his professions are scorned, ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... stairs to the hall below and passed through the open door to the veranda. No one was in sight, but from the kitchen in the rear he heard the clatter of utensils and dishes, and smelt the aroma of boiling coffee and frying ham. Already his appetite was sharpened as if by the mountain air. He decided on taking a walk, and, stepping down to the grass, he turned round the house, coming face to face upon Dolly, whom he had not yet seen, as she came from a ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... the afternoon, I killed a very fat buck, and although we were anxious to follow the tracks, to ascertain what description of travellers were before us, our horses were so tired, and our appetites so sharpened, that upon reflection, we thought it desirable to remain where we were. I took this opportunity of making myself a pair of mocassins, with the now useless saddle-bags ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... each detail of the scene below. He saw the avidity with which Numa devoured the carcass; he noted with growing admiration the finer points of the beast, and also the cunning construction of the trap. The ordinary lion pit with which Tarzan was familiar had stakes imbedded in the bottom, upon whose sharpened points the hapless lion would be impaled, but this pit was not so made. Here the short stakes were set at intervals of about a foot around the walls near the top, their sharpened points inclining downward so that the lion had fallen unhurt into the trap but could not leap out because each ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... pieces of split goose feather were lashed on the notched end, and three different kinds of arrows were made. All were alike in shaft and in feathering, but differed in the head. First, the target arrows: these were merely sharpened, and the points hardened by roasting to a brown colour. They would have been better with conical points of steel, but none of these were to be had. Second, the ordinary hunting arrows with barbed steel heads, usually bought ready-made, or filed out of a hoop: these were for use in securing ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... all sides around it very high rocks and precipices, there was left on one side a gently ascending approach, of not more than 200 feet in width; which place they had fortified with a very lofty double wall: besides, they had placed stones of great weight and sharpened stakes upon the walls. They were descended from the Cimbri and Teutones, who, when they were marching into our province and Italy, having deposited on this side the river Rhine such of their baggage-trains as they ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar
... individualities, or the real interests and tastes of the nations that fought and made laws and treaties. It was all a dealing with records and monuments, just the things that happened to survive decay—as though one's study of primitive man were to begin and end with sharpened flints! ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... sharpened equally on both sides On this tool the cutting edge should form an angle of about 20 deg. with one of the edges. The skew is used in cutting both to the right and to the left, and therefore, must be beveled on both sides. The length of the bevel should ...
— A Course In Wood Turning • Archie S. Milton and Otto K. Wohlers
... father, probably tempted by the alluring offers of a richer suitor, forbade the nuptials. Archilochus thereupon composed so bitter a lampoon upon the family that the daughters of the nobleman are said to have hanged themselves. Says SYMONDS, "He made Iambic metre his own, and sharpened it into a terrible weapon of attack. Each verse he wrote was polished, and pointed like an arrow-head. Each line was steeped in the poison of hideous charges against his sweetheart, her sisters, and her father." [Footnote: "The Greek ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... training to be found, for which we have been lauding the study of Natural History: but in healthful walks and voyages out of doors, and in careful and patient watching of the living animals and plants at home, with an observation sharpened by practice, and a temper calmed by the continual practice of the naturalist's first ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... speaker indulgently. To his sharpened transatlantic sense, these old men, in this funny old village, seemed to him a curiously dim and feeble folk. He could hardly prevent himself from talking to them as though they were children. He supposed his grandfather would have been like that ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to-day I walked to the Dublin trenches with Creighton, who was to bury some of the men killed last night. As we passed a workshop and engineers' dump on our way back, Creighton was again asked to bury a man. While he was doing so I sharpened my pocket knife on a grindstone standing by, and asked a soldier if that was all the killed they had last night. "Yes," he said, "and we had an officer buried to-day." "Oh," said I, "when was he killed?" "He wasn't killed at all." "Then why did you bury him?" "A shell blew in a trench ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... says everyone with whom I have conversed, that the affairs of the national government are not yet firmly established; that its enemies, generally speaking, are as inveterate as ever; that their enmity has been sharpened by its success, and by all the resentments which flow from disappointed predictions and mortified vanity; that a general and strenuous effort is making in every State to place the administration of it in the hands ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... quality in the quotations—a word naturally expresses a thought. Shakespeare's figures express a series of thoughts as varied landscapes seen in pictures; in consequence, to read him is to see resemblances in things, because we have sharpened vision and can not, after reading him, be blind as we were before, but feel the plethora of our world with the poetic. After he has spoken for us and to us, the world's capacity is enlarged; we are, in truth, not so much as those who have read poetry as we are like ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... the French must cross was so wet and miry that their heavily armed horsemen sank deep at every step. The English bowmen, on the other hand, being on foot, could move with ease. Henry ordered every archer to drive a stake, sharpened at both ends, into the ground before him. This was a substitute for the modern bayonet, and presented an almost impassable barrier to the ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... I was wild with surplus spirits, and found joyous relief in running loose in the open again. Many a summer afternoon a party of four or five of my playmates roamed over the hills with me. We each carried a light sharpened rod about four feet long, with which we pried up certain sweet roots. When we had eaten all the choice roots we chanced upon, we shouldered our rods and strayed off into patches of a stalky plant ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... before. But it's not the same thing. This is a house, not a fort, and I have only a handful of men to defend it; and I am not Luffe." Then his voice sharpened. "Why didn't you listen to him? All this is your fault—yours and Dewes', who didn't ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... quantity of this may be chopped on the block with the hatchet and kept on hand in a box. Never fill any part of a mounted bird with cotton unless it may be the sockets as it is impossible to force a sharpened wire ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... woodland, Wagner's the fresh primeval wilderness. The "Poeme de l'extase," with its oceanic tides of voluptuously entangled bodies, is a sort of Tannhaeuser "Bacchanale" modernized, enlarged, and intensely sharpened. For, in spite of the fact that at moments he handled it with rare sympathy, the orchestra was not his proper medium. The piano was his instrument. It is only in composition for that medium that he expressed indelibly his exquisite, luminously ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... slanted outward at an angle of about thirty degrees, in which position they were held by shorter logs embedded in the ground at right angles to them and with their upper ends supporting the longer pieces a trifle above their centers of equilibrium. Along the top of the palisade sharpened stakes had been driven at all sorts ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... him in the Musee Carnavalet, drawn just before he, in his turn, went to expiate his crimes on that very guillotine, which he had sharpened and wielded so powerfully against his fellows. The artist has well caught the slouchy, slovenly look of his loosely knit figure, his long limbs and narrow head, with the snakelike eyes and slightly receding chin. Like Marat, his model and prototype, Merlin affected dirty, ragged clothes. ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... did, on the same spot, a little later, in Vendemiaire. Well, my life has been a torment of that kind, extending over four years. How many a speech to the Chamber have I not delivered in the deserted alleys of the Bois de Boulogne! These wasted harangues have at any rate sharpened my tongue and accustomed my mind to formulate its ideas in words. And while I was undergoing this secret torture, you were getting married, you had paid for your business, you were made law-clerk to the Maire of your district, ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... wind, tapped incessantly, as if calling to the ghosts within. Charles glanced ever and anon at the sky. It showed no trace of clearing—as yet. He was getting cramped with standing. He wished he had gone on to the stables. His anxiety for Raymond was sharpened by this long inaction. He seemed to have been standing for ages. What were the others doing? Not a sound reached him between the lengthening pauses of the wind. His companion stood drawn up motionless beside him; and so they waited, straining ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... places. You allege, that you never invited others to sin. You did not by your tongue, but you have done it by your dress and deportment more effectually than you could by your voice: when you have made another to sin in his heart, how can you be innocent? You sharpened and drew the sword: you gave the thrust by which the soul is wounded.[13] Tell me, whom does the world condemn? whom do judges punish? Those who drink the poison, or those who prepare and give the fatal draught? ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... upon the mountain, and the sheep upon the western farm, and the cattle on the upper barrows, scarcely one in ten was saved; do what we would for them, and this was not through any neglect (now that our wits were sharpened), but from the pure impossibility of finding them at all. That great snow never ceased a moment for three days and nights; and then when all the earth was filled, and the topmost hedges were unseen, and the trees broke down with weight (wherever the wind ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... A few hours' labor threw up a rude hut which was all the home he desired. His rifle furnished him with food, and with the skins of animals for bed and bedding. Every frontiersman knew how to dress the skin of deer for moccasins and other garments. With a sharpened stick he punched holes through the rank sod, and planted corn, in soil so rich that it would return him ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... be so! Let me take the evil with the good, and live my rich wild life through bliss and agony, like a true daughter of the sun, instead of crystallising slowly here into ice, amid countenances rigid with respectability, sharpened by the lust of gain; without taste, without emotion, without even sorrow! Let who will be the stagnant mill-head, crawling in its ugly spade-cut ditch to turn the mill. Let me be the wild mountain brook, which foams and flashes over the rocks—what if they tear ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... until you hear the rest of it!" Kate's tone sharpened a little with impatience. She moved a petulant elbow while a tired waitress placed two glasses of water and a tiny plate of white and brown bread upon the table. The minute the girl's back was turned upon them she cast a cautious eye around the clattering ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... himself at the table. His pen had fallen on the floor, and not being able to find it, he quickly sharpened a pencil with a keen-edged poniard which he drew from the depths ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... so still in the power-house that the ticking of the dollar watch hanging on a nail sounded like a clock. Smaltz shifted feet nervously. At last Bruce walked to the work-bench and took a carpenter's pencil from a box and sharpened it. He smoothed out some wrapping paper then motioned Smaltz to ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... once, when Philip of Macedon threatened Corinth, the virtuous inhabitants of that city were thrown into mortal fear; but they were not too much paralyzed to forget the necessity of defence; and while some fortified the walls, others sharpened spears, and others again carried the baskets, the noble Diogenes, who was doubtless the chief literary man of the place, was observed to thwack and bang his tub with unmerciful vehemence. When he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... not use his axe until after he could drive the sharpened end of the fork into the ground. The bear having seized the handle, was shaking it as well as Zbyszko, and notwithstanding the pain caused by every movement of the points imbedded in his breast, be would not let it be "underpropped." ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... eye, his fair skin, and his smiling mouth gave him a charming look of innocence and happiness. The features of the other, on the contrary, had something rough in them; his eye was quick and lively, his complexion dark, his smile less merry than shrewd; all showed a mind sharpened by too early experience; he walked boldly through the middle of the streets thronged by carriages, and followed ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... Baghzem, instead of being the high mountain pictured to me by the Ghadamsee merchants, is, at this view of it, only a low range. Two little things observed to-day were, first, a "traveller's sharpening stone," on which every person passing by sharpened his dagger or his sword: next, were heaps of sand scraped together, and sticks or stalks of herbage stuck on the top, as frail marks of the route, corresponding to the heaps of stone which mark in line the routes of the Sahara. There was also a mosque formed of boughs of trees; ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... wonderfully efficacious in curing a man of his folly. Nor was there any special limit to the time during which the treatment lasted. And in case of a dangerous fit of folly, there were always a few faggots ready, or a sharpened axe, to put a finishing stroke to other and more ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... unrolled, the whole skin is soft and pliable. It is thick, however, and no one who is not an expert can thin it properly. The process is called "mooning" because the knife used is shaped like a crescent moon. It is flat, its center is cut out, and the outer edge is sharpened. Over the inner curve is a handle. The skin is hung on a pole, and the expert workman draws the mooning knife down it until any bit of dried flesh remaining has been removed, and the skin is of the same thickness, or, ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan
... continuous development of the same form of ecclesiastical regimen has now been illustrated. This polity was obviously based upon the principle that "in the multitude of counsellors there is safety." [621:1] At the meetings of the elders, information was multiplied, the intellect was sharpened, the brethren were made better acquainted with each other, and the Christian cause enjoyed the benefit of the decisions of their collective wisdom. The members had been previously elected to office by the voice of the people, so ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... and flanked by three batteries, and the whole front of that which was accessible intersected by deep traverses, and blocked up with felled trees, with their branches turned outwards, and their points sharpened. ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... in his arms. Spero was the worthy pupil of the man whose powers of observation had been sharpened during his intercourse with ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... slept; he knew where—with luck—he could sleep again; and he had money in his pocket for several more ample meals. At this moment he felt equal to anything. No more than pleasantly aware of his hunger, sharpened by the walk in this keen morning air, he made a nonchalant progress toward the cafeteria. Motor cars were now streaming through the gate, disgorging other actors—trim young men and beautiful young women who must hurry to the ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... they discussed were indirectly linked with his plan for her. If it were, she was unconscious of it. She sat on the wooden step of the porch, looking out on the melancholy sweep of meadow and hill range growing cool and dimmer in the dun twilight, not hearing what they said, until the sharpened, ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... herself: pure and by the vulgar estimate "cold," but deep devoted delicate sensitive noble. Her vividness in these respects became for him, in the special conditions, almost an obsession; and though the obsession sharpened his pulses, adding really to the excitement of life, there were hours at which, to be less on the stretch, he directly sought forgetfulness. He knew it for the queerest of adventures—a circumstance capable of playing such a part only for Lambert Strether—that in Paris itself, of ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... left not a vestige of life or a patch of green. Blind Gray Wolf could not see the blackened world, but she sensed it. It recalled to her memory of that other fire, after the battle on the Sun Rock; and all of her wonderful instincts, sharpened and developed by her blindness, told her that to the north—and not south—lay the hunting-grounds they were seeking. The strain of dog that was in Kazan still pulled him south. It was not because he ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... themselves conceived in a way which sharpened the opposition of man and nature. Francis Bacon presents an almost perfect example of the union of naturalistic and humanistic interest. Science, adopting the methods of observation and experimentation, ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... warning, and to lift up their voice as a trumpet, when they see those wolves ready to break in and devour the flock, have the heaviest account of all others to make, if they neglect their duty; much more if they betray their trust. If they are so set on some smaller matters, and are so sharpened upon that account, that they will not see their danger, nor awaken others to see it, and to fly from it; the guilt of those souls who have perished by their means, God will require at their hands. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... across, on the side of a hill, and at the end of the plain was a great rock partly hollowed out, but not so as quite to make a cave. Here he pitched his tent, close to the hollow place in the rock. Round in front of the tent he drove two rows of strong stakes, about eighteen inches apart, sharpened at top; and he made this fence so strong that when it was finished he was sure that nothing could get at him, for he left no door, but climbed in and out by a ladder, which he always hauled ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... nothing his patron said or did, no shade of misgiving occurred that, taken down in writing, it might annotate somewhat oddly the sermon on the table. It was spoken with insight too, for had not his own poverty, or the fear of it, sharpened Mr. Simeon's tongue just now and prompted him to quote Brother Copas detrimentally? The little man did not shape this accusation clearly against himself, for he had a rambling head; but he had also a sound heart, and ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Senses less sharpened by danger than mine would have understood but too easily, from these words, that they were about to use the beam as a battering-ram against the door. When that conviction overcame me, I lost courage at last. I felt that the ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... mulching. Thermometer. Soil sampler (Fig. 42, p. 88). This tool consists of a steel tube 2 in. in diameter and 9 in. long, with a slit cut along its length and all the edges sharpened. The tube is fixed on to a vertical steel rod, bent at the end to a ring 2 in. in diameter, through which a stout wooden handle passes. It is readily made ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... some 10-1/2 by 13-1/2 inches, and 1 inch thick, forms the base of the apparatus. In this, at a distance of some 6 inches, two holes are drilled, into which are inserted pegs, 3-1/2 inches long, and sharpened at their top edges to a fine knife-edge. This constitutes the fulcrum—the upper board resting on these knife-edges, and being unevenly balanced on them. ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... weeks past a fierce war has been waged by the 'Times' against the Chancellor. It was declared in some menacing articles which soon swelled into a tone of rebuke, and have since been sharpened into attacks of a constancy, violence, and vigour quite unexampled; all the power of writing which the paper can command—argument, abuse, and ridicule—have been heaped day after day upon him, and when it took a little breathing ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... bold have been, Are your long spears sharpened well? Fix anew the quartz-stone keen, Let each shaft upon them tell. Poise your meer-ros, long and sure, Let the kileys whiz and whirl Strangely through the air so pure; Heavy dow-uks at them hurl; Shout the yell they dread to hear. Let the young men leap on high, To avoid ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... Scanlon, sitting in the first-base bleachers, yelled to Ruth to lead off with a homer. Thibbets sharpened his pencil. Liebman and O'Rourke, in the south stand, engaged in a bitter controversy over Peckingpaugh's last-season batting average. ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... a solitary individual, who made a desperate move, and cut up a fowl which he handed round, no one put out a finger; as we were quite at the lower end of the table, and saw with consternation that our appetites, sharpened with the fine air of the sea, were not likely to be satisfied, and not relishing this Governor Sancho's fare, we beckoned to a mute female, who had entered with the second course, and stood by as if a spectator of the solemnity, and remonstrated on the absurdity, entreating to have something ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... ranged against the wall in the ball-room, talking of their horses; grave heads and snuff-boxes in a corner settling the fate of Europe, proving that, they were, are, or ought to be, behind the scenes; at the card-tables, sharpened faces seeing nothing in the universe but their cards; and at the piano-forte a set of signers and signoras, and ladies of quality, mingled together, full of duets, solos, overtures, cavatinas, expression, execution, and thorough bass—mothers in agonies, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... yellow face waiting behind her chair. As the lengths of grass lessened between them, and the little group at the table grew larger and clearer in the sunlight, Paynter had a painful sense of being part of an embassy of doom. It sharpened when the girl looked up from the table ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... their respective heaps; they then cut twelve pieces 2 inches in length, except that cut by the attendant who sat at the north, who made his about 1-1/4 inches long. Being asked why he cut his shorter than the rest, he replied, "All men are not the same size." The sticks were sharpened at one end and cut squarely off at the other. In order that all of the sticks should be of the same length they were measured by placing the three first fingers across the stick. The fifth man ...
— Ceremonial of Hasjelti Dailjis and Mythical Sand Painting of the - Navajo Indians • James Stevenson
... assigning a single measure to each motive. But both here, and in Ex. 10, the student is advised to adhere to the two-measure standard; he will avoid much needless confusion by so doing,—at least until he shall have so developed and sharpened his sense of melodic syntax that he can apprehend the finer shades of distinction in the "motion and repose" of a melody. Adopting the lower line of brackets, we discover successive members of unequal ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... three now, and the experiences of the day had sharpened the appetite. The colonel wasn't finished yet, however. He turned into the Infantry Brigade Headquarters, and spent a quarter of an hour with the brigadier general and his brigade-major discussing ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... difference; only I felt it. I was looking all the time for the moment of Dr. Sandford's appearance, and praying for strength. It came, his visit, as everything does come, when its time was; and I followed him in his round; waiting and helping as there was want of me. I did it coolly, I know, with faculties sharpened by an intense motive and feelings engrossed with one thought. I proved myself a good assistant; I knew Dr. Sandford approved of me; I triumphed, so far, in the consciousness that I had made good my claim to my position, and was in no danger ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... was to be no division of the profits. Nate Griggs had coveted the whole. His craft had secured it for himself alone. He had the legal title to the land, the mine—all! There seemed absolutely no vulnerable point in his scheme. With suddenly sharpened perceptions, Birt realized that if he should now claim the discovery and the consequent right of thirty days' notice of Nate's intention, by virtue of the priority of entering land accorded by the statute to the finder of a mine or valuable ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... of pleasure flushed Virginia's sharpened features, mounting to the thin little curls on her forehead. These little curls, to which she sentimentally clung in spite of the changes in the fashions, were a cause of ceaseless worry to Lucy, who had developed into a "stylish" girl, and would have died sooner than she would have ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... became as a panther of the south; he sharpened his knife; he took it in his hand; he stood behind the door of his stable to slay his younger brother as he came in the evening to bring his cattle ...
— Egyptian Tales, Second Series - Translated from the Papyri • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... anyway, and the Gruyere smelt so, and so did Camembert; and pine-apple cheese was Philistine. There was nothing for it but olives, and though olives had no savor of originality, the little crescent ones were picturesque, and if you picked them out of the bottle with the end of a brush-handle, sharpened to a point, and the other person received them with their thumb and finger, the whole act ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... But they sharpened no weapons at all, And they poisoned no arrows—not they! They made ready to conquer or fall In a totally different way— ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... sharpened since moming, soon raked out another pig, and fairly rending it asunder, thrust the lesser half by main force into the fists of Ho-ti, still shouting out "Eat, eat, eat the burnt pig, father, only taste—O Lord,"—with such like barbarous ejaculations, cramming all the while as ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... was, as I suppose, from its apparent consonance to reason, universally allowed, till the inhabitants of Ledbury, whither soldiers had been sent to suppress a riot and enforce the laws, found their apprehensions so sharpened by their malice, that they discovered in the act an ambiguity, which had, till that time, escaped the penetration of the most sagacious, and, upon comparison of one circumstance with another, found themselves under no obligation to give any ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... of drypoint is, as Jakob Rosenberg says, "the most important innovation in Rembrandt's mature graphic work."[33] After etching his skeletal design on the plate, he went to work with his drypoint needles—long, stiff, iron instruments—sharpened to a fine point. An artist generally has several available, so that he does not have to stop and re-sharpen in the course of his work. Rembrandt evidently went even further and deliberately used dull needles to obtain certain ...
— Rembrandt's Etching Technique: An Example • Peter Morse
... mode of execution which is well calculated to inspire terror, without putting the sufferer to extraordinary pain. The criminal is placed on a scaffold, opposite to the gigantick figure of a woman, with arms extended, filled with spikes, or long sharpened nails, and a dagger pointed from her breast, she is gradually moved towards him by machinery for the purpose, till he gets within her embrace, when her arms encircle him, and the dagger is pressed through his heart. This is vulgarly called among them, kissing the Yssrow, or woman, and excites ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 5: Some Strange and Curious Punishments • Henry M. Brooks
... there was something so gallant about her cracked and polished shoes, her mended gloves, her collar, laundered to a cobweb thinness, and about the improbable sea-shell pink in her hollow cheeks. She had a sort of eager, sharpened sweetness in her face ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... shade, But all sunshine, as when his beams at noon Culminate from the equator, as they now Shot upward still direct, whence no way round Shadow from body opaque can fall; and the air, Nowhere so clear sharpened his visual ray To objects distant far, whereby he soon Saw within here a glorious ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... sharpened bayonet. You slung it round your neck when you were swimming.... Only had to use it once ... nasty sticky job. No joke either, crawling about naked on your belly ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... thirsty. The belief that a picture yields only visual impressions is a curious illusion. The bloom of a cheek, the warmth of a youthful body, the sweetness and freshness of a fruit, the cutting of a sharpened blade, are not these, also, impressions that we have from a picture? Maybe they are visual? What would a picture be for a hypothetical man, deprived of all or many of his senses, who should in an instant acquire the sole organ of sight? The picture we are standing opposite and believe ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... as the door closed upon the shivering little waif who scratched and whined at the door of his lost Paradise, Jimsy's face, sharpened by disappointment, seemed suddenly thinner and less boyish. Bent upon making the best of things, ...
— Jimsy - The Christmas Kid • Leona Dalrymple
... again, watching the techs. A sudden shivering seized him. How could they remain so calm? Were they so close to the forest they couldn't notice? Something was about to happen ... to him it was unmistakable, in the very atmosphere, sharpened and heightened by the four walls—a pervading sense of wrongness and ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... faucet—Alas, poor Edward! He makes a rich, creamy lather either in a mug or (for the sake of literary directness) on his own with a shaving-stick. He strops his razor, or perhaps selects a blade already sharpened for his convenience. He rubs in the lather. He shaves, and, as Dr. Johnson so shrewdly pointed out that night at Dr. Taylor's, 'Sir, of a thousand shavers, two do not shave so much alike as not to be distinguished.' Perhaps ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... the war was over, Grandpa he went back to his castle to rest up for the next war, and to have his sword sharpened and his petard fixed. One dark night he was a-setting in his ante-room pondering over the past and wondering what had become of that feller's head—and also what had become of his widder, who was a most bewitching creature ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... the welter of emotions boiling up within her, grief was not present. There was a very deep-reaching excitement that sharpened all her faculties; that even made her see colors more brightly and hear fainter sounds. There was an intent eagerness to get the new life fairly begun. But, strangest of all, and yet so vivid that even its strangeness ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... hazy but warm, with promise of a cloudless noon), already the streets breathed festival. Sir Felix's coppices had been thinned as usual for the occasion, and scores of small saplings, larch and beech and hazel, lined the narrow streets, their sharpened stems planted between the cobbles, their leafy tops braced back against the house-fronts and stayed with ropes which, leading through the upper windows, were made fast within to bars of grates, table-legs and bed-posts. Over them, from house to house, strings of flags ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Robert, as he held the steak on the end of a sharpened stick over the coals and listened to the pleasant sizzling sound, "and after this is finished and a respectable time has elapsed, I may ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... was in the humour for disputation. Even her own Percival had these contentious moods. The masculine mind liked to play with moral ninepins, to send all kinds of exploded theories rolling with their little ball of wit; it sharpened their argumentative faculties, and kept them ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... so with a sudden motion Kari shook the cloak back from his body and for the first time I saw that thrust through his leathern belt was a long weapon, half sword and half dagger, also that its sharpened ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard
... names and their use are fully understood. With some this is a long and tedious task, but others master it in a short time. I mastered the alphabet in one day, but I was not a child and had a mind sharpened by experience. By constant exercise the sense of feeling becomes so acute that very slight differences of form are readily detected, and reading by the touch becomes an easily mastered art. Having thus the key of knowledge the subsequent progress of the ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... stakes, for we had wood enough, which stakes were not stuck in one by another like pales, but in an irregular manner; a great multitude of them so placed that they took up near two yards in thickness, some higher, some lower, all sharpened at the top, and about a foot asunder: so that had any creature jumped at them, unless he had gone clean over, which it was very hard to do, he would be hung upon twenty ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... wider interpretation. The fable of the Eternal's personal mediation in the affairs of man must be accepted for what it was—a beautiful allegory, the fondly dreamed fulfilment of a world-old desire. And bringing thus a sharpened critical sense to bear on the Scriptures, Mahony embarked on his voyage of discovery. Before him, but more as a warning than a beacon, shone the example of a famous German savant, who, taking our Saviour's life as his theme, demolished ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... husband at the moment made no response. When, six months later, however, he received an invitation to the wedding of Walter Dryden and Miss Florence Mayberry, he remarked in her presence, as he sharpened his pencil for the occasion: "Those swells have trusted me to write it up ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... hogs are the longest, lankest, boniest animals in creation. I am reminded of this by that broth of an Irish lad, Conway, who says, in substance, and with a broad Celtic accent, that their noses have to be sharpened every morning to enable them to pick a living among ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... in Berlin, by way of protest, made a demonstration. Going to the doorsteps of the French minister, they there sharpened their swords! Napoleon was furious; he sought out the bookseller circulating an anti-French pamphlet, "The Deepest Humiliation of Prussia," lured him across the frontier, and ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... was a mighty pole in the cave, green wood of an olive tree, big as a ship's mast, which Polyphemus purposed to use, when the smoke should have dried it, as a walking staff. Of this he cut off a fathom's length, and his comrades sharpened it and hardened it in the fire and then hid it away. At evening the giant came back and drove his sheep into the cave, nor left the rams outside, as he had been wont to do before, but shut them in. And having duly done his ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... the instruments were sharpened and refined. Here Wolf, a philologist with historical instinct, was a pioneer. His "Prolegomena" to Homer (1795) announced new modes of attack. Historical investigation was soon transformed by the ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... a sharp-featured woman whose wits had been sharpened by a ten years' daily acquaintance with poverty, came out of the shop into the parlour and looked searchingly ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher |
