"Shell" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... been carefully distributed between several firms of founders and engineers, in order that none could have any means of discovering the use to which they were intended to be put. The whole of the shell of the vessel was double, with a packed space between the two skins; and each door opened into a small lobby, having another door on the farther side, to ensure that every part might be kept perfectly ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... cone-shaped shells adhering to the rocks. When she and Jean tried to pick the small creatures from their abiding places, the least touch or sound caused them to tighten to the boulders. It was impossible then to dislodge them without smashing the shell. ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... a lute that was wrought of a shell Luminous as the shine Of a new-born star in a dewy dell,— And its strings were strands of wine That sprayed at the Fancy's touch and fused, As your listening spirit leant Drunken through with the airs that ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... Lake Asphaltites does not present any variety of fish. Mariti asserts that it produces none, and even that those which are carried into it by the rapidity of the Jordan perish almost immediately upon being immerged in its acrid waves. A few shell-snails constitute the sole tenants of its dreary shores, unmixed either with the helix or ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... doors were barred, and were locked by throwing a switch at the near end of the ranges; but any particular door could also be opened by a key. The cell doors of the inner structure were at a distance of some twenty feet from the walls and windows of the outer shell, and got what light and air they had from these—none too much of course. Also, the guard on duty in the range, if the weather be chilly, will close the windows, against the protests of the prisoners, and against the regulations too; ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... retreated through a field of ripe wheat; a shell burst and fired the straw, and two or three thousand men were caught in the midst of a terrible conflagration; cartridge-boxes exploded, and fearful disorder reigned in ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... exemplified; the savage makes earthenware, but the civilized make porcelain—thus the gradations from the rudest earthenware will mark the improvement in the scale of civilization. The prime utensil of the African savage is the gourd; the shell of which is the bowl presented to him by nature as the first idea from which he is to model. Nature, adapting herself to the requirements of animals and man, appears in these savage countries to yield abundantly much that ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... be back in them No'th Calliny mountains. You two young gen'rals may think it's an easy an' safe job drivin' a wagon loaded with ammunition. But s'pose you have to drive it right under fire, as you most often have to do, an' then if a shell or somethin' like it hits your wagon the whole thing goes off kerplunk, an' ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... of the legations, varying from a single shot to a general and continuous attack along the whole line." Artillery was placed around the legations and on the over-looking palace walls, and thousands Of 3-inch shot and shell were fired, destroying some buildings and damaging all. So thickly did the balls rain, that, when the ammunition of the besieged ran low, five quarts of Chinese bullets were gathered in an hour in ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... listened. Her aunt had not sent her empty-handed either, for she had a loving and tender heart under a rather harsh exterior, the cold looks with which all sentiment was frowned down seemed but the rough, hard shell which covered a noble and generous disposition. But this rather severe aunt had refused Louie permission to make many visits at her father's home, on account of the displeasure with which she regarded her mother. She had never been pleased at ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... heathcock, fish were also plentiful. Whales visited the Persian Gulf, and were sometimes stranded upon the shores, where their carcases furnished a mine of wealth to the inhabitants. Dolphins abounded, as well as many smaller kinds; and shell-fish, particularly oysters, could always be obtained without difficulty. The rivers, too, were capable of furnishing fresh-water fish in good quantity, though we cannot say if this source of supply ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... as vital character, the negative conception of it is necessarily followed by an unsatisfying and false view of the characteristic in Art. Lifeless and of intolerable hardness would be the Art that should aim to exhibit the empty shell or limitation of the Individual. Certainly we desire to see not merely the individual, but, more than this, its vital Idea. But if the artist has seized the inward creative spirit and essence of the Idea, and sets this forth, he makes the individual a world in itself, a class, an eternal ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... prevails! It may be good; I do not wish to crab it, But you should hear the language it entails, Should see this waste of wide uncharted craters Where it is vain to seek the companies, Seeing the shell-holes are as like as taters And no one knows where ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 20, 1917 • Various
... what I want," said Mr. Snodgrass. "That is one of my problems—to find out the effect of noise on the organisms of certain insects and reptiles. Men suffer from shell shock, and why should not insects suffer from the terrific noise of bursting guns? Most insects are noise-producers themselves," he went on, in something of his class-room manner, which the boys so well remembered at Boxwood Hall. "The grasshopper, the katydid and the cricket, to give ...
— Ned, Bob and Jerry on the Firing Line - The Motor Boys Fighting for Uncle Sam • Clarence Young
... a hundred miles to the little town which was to be our headquarters for nine long months, and I remember the thrill that I had when we first saw the effects of shell fire—a hole about two feet in diameter in the bricks above the door of the Hotel de Ville. As we later discovered, the village authorities had decided not to repair that hole but to leave it as a memorial of the day when the Germans had been driven from the town ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... for all in all, the German gunners had simply been beautifying London. The Albert Hall, struck by a merciful shell, had come down with a run, and was now a heap of picturesque ruins; Whitefield's Tabernacle was a charred mass; and the burning of the Royal Academy proved a great comfort to all. At a mass meeting in Trafalgar Square a hearty vote of thanks ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... pretty village in which there are good hotels, a land locked harbor, and plenty of shell fish. Many summer residents have their homes there and it is ...
— Cape Cod and All the Pilgrim Land, June 1922, Volume 6, Number 4 • Various
... force as best she might. She was not evil by nature. She had been well grounded in principles of righteousness. Nevertheless, though she maintained the integrity of her character, that character suffered from the taint. There developed over the girl's original sensibility a shell of hardness, which in time would surely come to make her less scrupulous in her reckoning ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... her eye fell upon the first package she had taken out, and which was wrapped in a silk handkerchief, she took it up, and removing the covering, started as suddenly as if a blow had been dealt her, for there was the tortoise-shell box, with its blue satin lining, and its diamonds, which seemed to her like so many sparks of fire flashing in her eyes and dazzling her with ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... of paley-brown; Patella pellucida, with its lustrous rays of vivid blue on its dark epidermis, that resemble the sparks of a firework breaking against a cloud; and, above all, Cypraea Europea, a not rare shell further to the north, but so little abundant in the Firth of Cromarty, as to render the live animal, when once or twice in a season I used to find it creeping on the laminaria at the extreme outer edge of ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... asked to come in, and every treatment had recourse to; and, though of such medicines as cinnamon, aconitum seeds, turtle shell, ophiopogon, Yue-chue herb, and the like, he took several tens of catties, he nevertheless experienced no change for the better; so that by the time the twelfth moon drew once again to an end, and spring returned, this illness had become still ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... him the case. Shargar undid the hooks in a moment, and revealed the creature lying in its shell like ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... know the ship. As she goes by, shell set all her flags a-flying, and, if Father isn't at home, Mother will send up our great red flag on the garden pole. Oh dear! I could nearly cry for joy to ...
— Crusoes of the Frozen North • Gordon Stables
... exchanges the enthusiastic departure from Petersburg for the grim reality of the bastions; the fear of the still sound and healthy man as he enters the improvised hospitals; the fear as the men watch the point of approaching light that means a shell; the fear of the men lying on the ground, waiting with closed eyes for the shell to burst. It is the very psychology of death. In reading the account of Praskukhin's sensations just before death, one feels, as one does in reading the thoughts of Anna Karenina under the train, ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... of looking for me out on the water," she cried, triumphantly, and quickly untying it, she sprung into the little skiff, and seizing the oars, with a vigorous stroke the little shell shot rapidly out into the shimmering water, Daisy never once pausing in her mad, impetuous flight until the dim line of the shore was almost indistinguishable from the blue arching dome of the horizon. "There," she cried, flushed and excited, leaning on the oars; "no one could ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... plain and neat apparel, it is the presumption that she has fair expectations, and a husband that can show a balance in his favor. For women are like books,—too much gilding makes men suspicious, that the binding is the most important part. The body is the shell of the soul, and the dress is the husk of the body; but the husk generally tells what the kernel is. As a fashionably dressed young lady passed some gentlemen, one of them raised his hat, whereupon another, struck by the fine appearance of the lady, made some inquiries ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... A shell screaming like a storm banshee went over the huddled heads of the reserves. It landed in the grove, and exploding redly flung the brown earth. There was a little shower of ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... one of the best loved amongst western men. On his return to England, after the war broke out, he enlisted, and received a commission as a Lieutenant in the "Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry." He went with his regiment to France, and was instantaneously killed by a shell when seeking water for his wounded comrades. He died, as he lived, a Christian hero, and nothing better can be said of ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... knew that they were being sent to certain death, in order that they might open a way for their comrades. They never flinched. Shouting their "Banzai!"—their Japanese hurrah—the dogged little men rushed forward upon batteries spouting flame and shell, or upon ramparts lined with rifles, and gave their lives freely for Dai Nippon, Great Japan, the country ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Japan • John Finnemore
... a number of trifling matters which never occupy attention but when there is a lack of something better to employ it; for instance, he would knock off the top of an egg-shell at a single stroke of his fork; he therefore always ate eggs when he dined in public, and the Parisians who came on Sundays to see the King dine, returned home less struck with his fine figure than with the dexterity with which he broke ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... away. We found six small canoes, and six fires very near the beach, with some mussels roasting upon them, and a few oysters lying near: By this we judged that there had been one man in each canoe, who, having picked up some shell-fish, had come ashore to eat it, and made his separate fire for that purpose: We tasted of their cheer, and left them in return some strings of beads, and other things which we thought would please them. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... soil. He was one of the two American correspondents to march with the first American troops that entered the trenches on the Western front. He was with the first American troops to cross the German frontier. He was with the artillery battalion that fired the first American shell ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... the poorest rag that lingered upon the stripped shoulders of little Alice Fell, to have atoned all their malice; I would not have given 'em a red cloak to save their souls. I am afraid lest that substitution of a shell (a flat falsification of the history) for the household implement, as it stood at first, was a kind of tub thrown out to the beast, or rather thrown out for him. The tub was a good honest tub in its place, and nothing could fairly be said against it. You say you made ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... habits of the children of the sea—how in the midst of dashing waves the little polyps build the beautiful coral isles of the Pacific, and the foraminifera have made the chalk-hills of many a land—my teacher read me "The Chambered Nautilus," and showed me that the shell-building process of the mollusks is symbolical of the development of the mind. Just as the wonder-working mantle of the Nautilus changes the material it absorbs from the water and makes it a part of itself, so the bits of knowledge ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... reward. The birds ceased to regard me as an enemy, and, though they always looked at me, no longer tried to keep out of sight, or to hide the object of their visits. During the first day of watching I had the good fortune to see a second empty shell brought out of the nest, and dropped a little farther off than the first had been; and I feel safe in assuming that these two were the birthdays of ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... furnace for about thirty-six hours. After the reaction is completed there is left a core of graphite G. Surrounding this core is a layer of crystallized carborundum C, about 16 in. thick. Outside this is a shell of amorphous carborundum A. The remaining materials M are unchanged and are used for ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... Club and Boat Racing is the popular sport of crew rowing or sculling, where each college appoints a crew of eight strong scull pullers or oarsmen and one small coxswain or steersman to pilot a long narrow boat called a skiff or shell. The coxswain calls the strokes and is generally the coach and commander of the crew. Unlike in a canoe, the pullers face backwards, and the one nearest the coxswain is called the "stroke oar", because all the other ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... attended by Arabanoo, and a surgeon, went in a boat immediately to the spot. Here they found an old man stretched before a few lighted sticks, and a boy of nine or ten years old pouring water on his head, from a shell which he held in his hand: near them lay a female child dead, and a little farther off, its unfortunate mother: the body of the woman shewed that famine, superadded to disease, had occasioned her death: eruptions covered the poor boy from head to foot; and the old man was so reduced, ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... the terrain. These are usually repressed men; many of the foreign-born are to be found among them; they cover up because of pride, but they are not afraid of physical danger. Once any man, and particularly a superior, gets through the outer shell, he may have the effect of a catalyst on what is happening inside. If such men did not have basic loyalty, they would never fight. When at last they give their loyalty to an individual, they are usually his to command and will ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... on de chunks of cornbread what dey had crumbled in de trough, and us had to mussel 'em out. Yessum, I said mussel. De only spoons us had wuz mussel shells what us got out of de branches. A little Nigger could put peas and cornbread away mighty fast wid a mussel shell. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... receiving a visit from them, and he was in hopes that he might be able to induce them to call without showing his anxiety that they would do so. He made no secret at home of his visits to Downside, observing that the Miss Pembertons had employed him to ornament a shell grotto for them, and as he hated to be idle, he was very glad to find employment suited to his taste, and at the same time to do anything to please the ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... speak, In one word more, a little to the weak; Thou must not suffer men so to enclose Thee in their judgments, as to discompose Thee in that faith and peace thou hast with him; This would be like the losing of a limb; Or like to him who thinks he doth not well, Unless he lose the kernel for the shell. Thou art no captive, but a child and free; Thou wast not made for laws, but laws for thee; And thou must use them as thy light will bear it; They that say otherwise, do rend and tear it, More like to wicked tyrants, who are cruel, And add unto a little fire, more fuel. But ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Wounded Back Into Ladysmith. Advance of the Gordons at Elandslaagte. Advance of the Devons before the Attack at Elandslaagte. George Lynch Captured by the Boers. Boer Shell bursting among the Lancers at Rietfontein. General French and Staff on Black Monday. General White and Staff on Black Monday. Artillery crossing a Drift near Ladysmith. Naval Brigade passing through Ladysmith. General Yule's Column on the Way to Ladysmith. Hospital Train leaving Ladysmith ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... Berry. "Well, don't mind us. You get on with it. Short of locusts or an earthquake, it's going to be a long job. I suppose you couldn't hire a trench-mortar and shell it for ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... pictorial splendors in the town where he was born. Here and there, however, a queer edifice meets your eye, endowed with the individuality that belongs only to the domestic architecture of times gone by; the house seems to have grown out of some odd quality in its inhabitant, as a sea-shell is moulded from within by the character of its innate; and having been built in a strange fashion, generations ago, it has ever since been growing stranger and quainter, as old humorists are apt to do. Here, too (as so often impressed me in decayed English towns), there appeared ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... apartments. Morning had dawned when the work was done, and then Jack set out to investigate the condition of the quarters. Twenty or more of the negroes had disappeared. It was easy to trace them to the swamp, but Jack made no attempt to organize a pursuit. Blood could be traced on the white shell path leading to the rose-fields, and the pond gate was wide open. He reported the state of affairs to Mrs. Atterbury. She begged him to take horse to Williamsburg, bring the surgeon, and deliver a note to the commanding officer. He returned in two hours with the surgeon, ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... surface. What interests us in this poem is the way the nautilus grows. Just as a tree when sawed down has the record of its age in the number of its rings, so does the nautilus measure its age by the ever-widening compartments of its shell. These it has successively occupied. The poet, looking upon the now empty shell, thinks of human life as growing in the same way. We advance from one state of being to another, each nobler than the one which preceded it, until ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... for such a wheel is shaped like an open clam shell, the central line which cuts the stream of water into halves being ground to a sharp edge. The curves which absorb the momentum of the water are figured mathematically and in practice become polished like mirrors. So great is the eroding action of water, under great ...
— Electricity for the farm - Light, heat and power by inexpensive methods from the water - wheel or farm engine • Frederick Irving Anderson
... are folks enough in the town that know what's good when they hear it, and I guess they'll keep him if they can. And I guess he'll stay. He seems to like the look of things. He is a dreadful mild-spoken man, and I guess he won't want much in the way of pay. I guess you had better shell out some yourself, ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... Romish church are so accustomed to the mysteries with which their religion abounds, that every thing they meet with, and do not understand, among a strange people, is also resolved into a mystery. Thus, the following figure, which the Chinese, in allusion to the regular lines described on the back-shell of some of the tortoises, metaphorically call the mystic tortoise, has been supposed by some of these gentlemen to contain the most sublime doctrines of Chinese philosophy; that they embrace a summary of all that is perfect and imperfect, represent the numbers of heaven ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... sixteen. A mass of golden hair fell daintily from a small head, and the oval of her comely face was as shapely as an egg, and white with the transparent whiteness seen when the hands of a housewife hold a new-laid egg to the light to let the sun's rays filter through its shell. The same tint marked the maiden's ears where they glowed in the sunshine, and, in short, what with the tears in her wide-open, arresting eyes, she presented so attractive a picture that our hero bestowed upon it more than a passing glance before he turned his attention to the hubbub which ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... one. He was given first aid by the light of a candle; but it was useless. Silently his comrades removed his identification disk and wrapped him in a blanket. "Poor old Walt!" they said. An hour later he was buried in a shell hole at the back ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... jerked the oar from his hand. Despite the desperate efforts of the soldiers, the boat was whirled up the mountain of water like a leaf on a water-spout, and a second flash of lightning showed them what seemed a group of dolls struggling in the surf, and a walnut-shell bottom upwards was driven by the recoil of the waves towards them. For an instant all thought that they must share the fate which had overtaken the unlucky convicts; but Burgess succeeded in trimming the boat, and, ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... Not only that, she brought her friends with her and established a small court around his bed, thus cheering him in his pain and doing him a world of good, which finally enabled his spirit to triumph over his mortal shell. ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... coo of a pigeon is, So, compared to your moderns, sounds old Melesigenes; I may be too partial, the reason, perhaps, o't is That I've heard the old blind man recite his own rhapsodies, And my ear with that music impregnate may be, Like the poor exiled shell with the soul of the sea, Or as one can't bear Strauss when his nature is cloven To its deeps within deeps by the stroke of Beethoven; But, set that aside, and 'tis truth that I speak, Had Theocritus written in English, not Greek, 1330 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... poodles, she sought a refuge from despair. But even these varied charms, after a while, failed to please. The bullfinches grew hoarse; the canaries turned brown; the parrots became stupid; the gold fish would not eat; the squirrels were cross; the dogs fought; even a shell grotto that was constructing fell down; and by the time the aviary and conservatory were filled, they had lost their interest. The children were the next subjects for her Ladyship's ennui to discharge itself upon. Lord Courtland had a son some years older, and a daughter nearly of the same age as ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... exposed to the sun on the fourth day after it has been gathered, and this exposure should be daily repeated until it is perfectly dry. When that is the case, the beans burst on being squeezed, their shell resounds when struck, and they no longer become heated when placed in heaps; the latter is the best proof that the moisture injurious to their preservation is dissipated. If the cacao is not sufficiently exposed to the sun, it becomes mouldy; if too much, it withers, and easily pulverises—in either ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... if he were acquainted with the tool. Commonly, if men want anything of me, it is only to know how many acres I make of their land,—since I am a surveyor,—or, at most, what trivial news I have burdened myself with. They never will go to law for my meat; they prefer the shell. A man once came a considerable distance to ask me to lecture on Slavery; but on conversing with him, I found that he and his clique expected seven-eighths of the lecture to be theirs, and only one-eighth ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... black, the other white, were placed upon the ground before the temple. Each warrior selected one from either pile, as he preferred, and placed the shells so taken so as to form a third pile. When all had deposited a shell in this heap, they were counted by two of the elder counselors, and the first candidate, who was a protege of Tonsaroyoo, was declared rejected, having received too many of the black shells; as the rule is that if more than a certain prescribed ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... or educated men is the greatest of all considerations, for which reason there is always a tendency for anyone and everyone to wear a long coat and to don huge tortoise-shell-rimmed spectacles, such as are affected by the literati, as well as to cultivate the nails of the left hand. As the use of the word esquire has degenerated in this country until not to apply it to all and sundry is considered ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... evidently enjoyed the telling. And really it was wonderful! Before my eyes lay the bundles of rare furs; white beaver, black sables, white, blue and black fox and black panthers; small beautifully carved tortoise shell boxes containing hatyks ten or fifteen yards long, woven from Indian silk as fine as the webs of the spider; small bags made of golden thread filled with pearls, the presents of Indian Rajahs; precious rings with sapphires and rubies from China and India; big pieces of jade, rough ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... harm. You see I was forced to do her that injury; for, after all, poor young creature, it was a sad lot for her. A dull bookworm like me,—cochlea vitam agens, Mr. Squills,—leading the life of a snail! But my shell was all I could offer to my ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Science at daggers drawn, seems to have said to Science, "You find Christianity rotten at the core, do you? Well, I will scoop out the inside of it." And to Romanism: "You find Science mere dry light—cold and bare. Well, I will put your shell over it, and so, as schoolboys make a spectre out of a turnip and a tallow candle, behold the new religion ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... hath been missing these many days; I wot not what hath happened to him, and none can give me news of him." And he wept till he fainted. I sorrowed and condoled with him; and he would have applied certain medicaments to my eye, but he saw that it was become as a walnut with the shell empty. Then said he, "O my son, better to lose eye and keep life!" After that I could no longer remain silent about my cousin, who was his only son and one dearly loved, so I told him all that had happened. He rejoiced with extreme joyance to ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... and the sea flecked with white horses. It was shifting colours to-day like a mother-of-pearl shell—a great band of dark grey on the horizon, and then a soft carpet of green turning to grey again by the shore. The grey hoofs [Transcriber's note: roofs?] of the Cove crowded down to the edge of the land, seeming to lean a little forward, as though listening to what the sea had ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... said, "No, I'm only listening to him, thank you"; and then she looked at me again, and she said, "You don't live in this terrace, I think?" And I said, "No, I live on the Esplanade, number 59." Then she pulled out her spectacles—long things, you know, at the end of a turtle-shell stick.' ...
— Peterkin • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... frailty. Her great, wistful eyes Were like the deep blue of autumnal skies; And through them looked her soul, large, loving, tender. Her long, light hair was lustreless, except Upon the ends, where burnished sunbeams slept, And on the earlocks; and she looped the curls Back with a shell comb, studded thick with pearls, Costly yet simple. Her pale loveliness, That night, was heightened by her rich, black dress, That trailed behind her, leaving half in sight Her taper ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... his secret was, but Tom said the best way was not to seem anxious, then likely he would drop into it himself in one of his talks, but if we got to asking questions he would get suspicious and shet up his shell. It turned out just so. It warn't no trouble to see that he WANTED to talk about it, but always along at first he would scare away from it when he got on the very edge of it, and go to talking about something else. The way it come about was this: He got to asking us, kind of indifferent like, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... time, all guns, shot, shell, cotton, etc., to be moved to a safe place, easy to guard, and provisions and wagons got ready for another swath, aiming to have our army in hand about the head of Broad River, say Pocotaligo, Robertsville, and Coosawhatchie, ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... you see one of these beautiful, prettily dressed women emerge from them—see her emerge from a dark, dreary-looking den that looks dungeon all over, from the ground away halfway up to heaven. And then you wonder that such a charming moth could come from such a forbidding shell as that. The streets are wisely made narrow and the houses heavy and thick and stony, in order that the people may be cool in this roasting climate. And they are cool, and stay so. And while I think of it—the men wear hats and have ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... They caught the enemy in the water or struggling out of it in confusion; all who had got over were killed; multitudes were slaughtered in the river; others, trying to cross on the bodies of their comrades, were driven back. The confederates, shattered at a single defeat, broke up like an exploded shell. Their provisions had run short. They melted away and dispersed to their homes, Labienus pursuing and cutting down all that he ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... or ten minutes when a tremendous blow shook our staging, and a vast shower of falling tiles and bricks drowned all other sound. A shell, aimed well and low, had taken the roof full and fair, and brought a big piece in on top of us. For some time we could see nothing, nor realise the extent of the damage done, for clouds of choking dust filled our improvised fort, and made us oblivious to everything except a supreme desire for ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... glorification. We question, indeed, whether they could have told us; whether the mere fact of a man's being able to dissect himself, in public or in private, is not proof-patent that he is no man, but only a shell of a man, with works inside, which can of course be exhibited and taken to pieces—a rather more difficult matter with flesh and blood. If we believe that God is educating, the when, the where, and the ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... of doors. The hollow dark countryside re-echoed like a shell with shouts and calls and excited voices. Restlessness and nervous excitement, nervous hilarity were in the air. There was a sense of electric surcharge everywhere, frictional, a ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... and a heavy suitcase suspended from the other. He was compactly built without being too heavy, his smooth-shaven face wore an expression of good nature, and his eyes looked out on the world from behind tortoise-shell glasses with a friendly twinkle that concealed something of their sharpness. They had an inquiring expression now as ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... "That fool, Jan Lubber Fiend, will ever be at his tricks. 'Tis my young mistress that encourages him, more is the pity! For poor serving-men are held responsible for his knavish on-goings. Why, I had just set him cross-legged in the yard with a basket of pease to shell, seeing how he grows as much as a foot in the night—or near by. But so soon as my back is turned he will be forever answering the door and peeping out into the street to gather the mongrel boys about him. 'Tis a most foul Lubber ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... Besides, the attractions of her slender stock were all exhausted. She had not the means of refreshing it with pretty novelties and sentimental toys in that line,—with albums and valentines, fancy portfolios and pocket-secretaries, pearl paper-knives and tortoise-shell cardcases, Chinese puzzles and papier-mache checker-boards. Nor was the Library replenished "to keep up with the current literature of the day"; its last new novel was a superannuated dilapidation; not one of its yearly subscribers but had worked ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... think that notwithstanding his charity and devotion he never quite got away from the shell of things, never cracked it and set his teeth in the kernel which alone can feed our souls. His keen intellect, to take an example, recognised every one of the difficulties of our faith and flashed hither and thither in the darkness, seeking explanation, seeking light, trying to ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... dark and hidden shell Lies ocean's richest gem, So in our hearts shall ever dwell The spells thou'st breath'd in them! Why should we weep o'er the young flow'rs That cluster on thy sod? Stars like them glow in heav'n's bright bow'rs To light thee ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 12, Issue 328, August 23, 1828 • Various
... the intermediate hours, the children were constantly to be employed, or in exercise. It was difficult to provide suitable employments for their early age; but even the youngest of those admitted could be taught to wind balls of cotton, thread, and silk, for haberdashers; or they could shell peas and beans, &c. for a neighbouring traiteur; or they could weed in a garden. The next in age could learn knitting and plain-work, reading, writing, and arithmetic. As the girls should grow up, they were to be made useful in the care of ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... wandered several little brooklets, and in the midst of the forest there was a lake, or rather a pond, from the middle of which rose a marble Triton, which perpetually spouted forth water from his shell. The villa itself was of generous dimensions, in that style which is so familiar to us in this country, with broad piazzas and wide porticoes, and no lack of statuary. Here Obed Chute had made himself quite at home, and confided to Lord Chetwynde the fact that he ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... was flying over. No. The earth itself, this flat surface which lay spread out beneath me; the whole earthly globe, with its populations, multitudinous, feeble, crushed by want, grief and diseases, bound to a clod of pitiful dust; this brittle, rough crust, this shell over the fiery sands of our planet, overspread with the mildew we call the organic, vegetable kingdom; these human flies, a thousand times paltrier than flies; their dwellings glued together with filth, the pitiful traces of their tiny, monotonous bustle, of ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... gun-crews, though they had no protection, not a man was hurt. As we approached some wooded bluff, usually on the Georgia side, we could see galloping along the hillside what seemed a regiment of mounted riflemen, and could see our shell scatter them ere we approached. Shelling did not, however, prevent a rather fierce fusilade from our old friends of Captain dark's company at Waterman's Bluff, near Township Landing; but even this did no serious damage, and this was ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... cheered them on. The scene of blood and carnage has been too often repeated on other fateful days, and as often well described, when acts of glorious heroism occurred again and again. John had rushed forward to succour a wounded trooper when a shell crashed near them, and he fell to the ground. And then he know what the great thing was the New Year had promised him. For death was going to straighten out matters—John was going beyond. Well, he had never been rebellious, and he knew ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... expanded these so-called arguments, often they have pushed them to trifling and indecency. They have found God in the folds of the skin of the rhinoceros: one could, with equal reason, deny His existence because of the tortoise's shell. ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... slipperiness that the latter was obliged to take precedence. Sarah Pocket then made her separate effect of departing with, "Bless you, Miss Havisham dear!" and with a smile of forgiving pity on her walnut-shell countenance for the weaknesses of ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... the trunk on his shoulder and she trudged after him up steps and over an iron bridge and down steps; and an express whizzed like a flying shell through the station and vanished. And at a wicket, in a ragged road, there actually stood a cab and a skeleton of a horse between the shafts. The driver bounced up, enheartened at sight of the trunk and the inexperienced, timid girl; but the horse ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... awakened by a sickening crash as though the earth had collided with a star and been crushed as an egg-shell. The car seemed to leap a hundred feet into the air, plunge through space, and strike the ground with a dull smash that sent dust and splinters flying ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... simple instruments we now use to separate and arrange the hair, but ornamental structures that women wore at the back of the head to control their supposedly surplus locks. They were associated with Spanish beauties, and at their best estate were made of shell, but our combs were of horn and of great variety. In the better quality, shell was closely imitated, but some were frankly horn and ornamented by the application of aquafortis in patterns artistic or grotesque according to the taste and ability of the operator. The horns were ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... an adult male in full plumage, and that she saw it herself at Mr. Couch's shop. In the 'Zoologist' for 1874 she records another Montagu's Harrier—a young one—shot in Herm in July of that year. She adds that—"It was brought to Mr. Couch to skin. He found a whole Lark's egg, and also the shell of another, in its throat. He showed me how the whole egg was sticking in the empty shell ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... this nature; and if no such conception is at present held to be admissible, it is because long and varied experience has now shown that mineral matter never does assume the form and structure we find in fossils. If any one were to try to persuade you that an oyster-shell (which is also chiefly composed of carbonate of lime) had crystallized out of sea-water, I suppose you would laugh at the absurdity. Your laughter would be justified by the fact that all experience ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... not wishing to fail in such a high undertaking, he had already made most of the preparations for the ceremony, which was to take place on the 10th of August, that is to say, two days later,—but that the leaden shell in which the body was enclosed being very heavy, it was better to move it beforehand, and that night, to where the grave was dug, than to await the day of the interment itself; that thus they might ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of you to want me," she had said, as simply as a child. To which he had replied with prompt, if somewhat cheap, gallantry that no one could possibly help wanting her; and his reward had been a flush, as delicate in tint as the inner surface of a shell. This man had one strong point in his favour—he invariably talked to her about herself; a trick Desmond had never ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... landlord wrong. In a minute they had fresh wine decanters ranged down before them, filled with liquors of all variety of colours, red, green, and blue; and the table was covered with dishes full of jargonelles and pippins, raisins and almonds, shell-walnuts and plumdamases, with nut-crackers, and everything else they could think of eating; so that, after drinking "The King, and long life to him," and "The constitution of the country at home and abroad," and "Success to trade," and "A good harvest," and "May ne'er waur be among us," and ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... sternest realities of human life. Yet sometimes the thought occurs to me that if he were a little more articulate, or, perchance, if the time came when a democracy had to be met, not with bursts of Parliamentary eloquence, but with shot and shell, and the determination to kill or be killed, the leadership of the party of the aristocracy would fall from the effeminate hands of the supersubtle and cultivated Mr. Balfour into the firm and tight grip of the rugged, uncultured country gentleman ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... spell Go to thy dreams: and in thy slumbers, Fairies, with magic harp and shell, Sing o'er to thee thy own ...
— Poems • Frances Anne Butler
... had been captured by the French gunboat Zeile some weeks previous and was at anchor in the harbor, under the guns of the Zeile, when the German squadron appeared off the entrance. The gunboat immediately was made the target for the German guns, and sunk. During the attack, however, a wild shell missed the Zeile and struck the Valkyrie, tearing a great hole in her hull and causing her to sink in ten fathoms at ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... wished; large mussels; sphondyli; fieldfares with asparagus; fattened fowls; oyster and mussel pasties; black and white sea-acorns; sphondyli again; glycimarides; sea-nettles; becaficoes; roe-ribs; boar's-ribs; fowls dressed with flour; becaficoes; purple shell-fish of two sorts. The dinner itself consisted of sow's udder; boar's-head; fish-pasties; boar- pasties; ducks; boiled teals; hares; roasted fowls; starch-pastry; ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... thing as idleness for Valentine Hawkehurst during these happy days of his courtship. The world was his oyster, and that oyster was yet unopened. For some years he had been hacking and hewing the shell thereof with the sword of the freebooter, to very little advantageous effect. He now set himself seriously to work with the pickaxe of the steady-going labourer. He was a secessionist from the great ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... Said a professor of Harvard University to the writer some years ago: "Do you in Japan find it difficult to become truly acquainted with the Japanese? We see many students here, but we are unable to gain more than a superficial acquaintance. They seem to be incrusted in a shell that we are unable to pierce." The editor of the Japan Mail, speaking of the difficulty of securing "genuinely intimate intercourse with the Japanese people," says: "The language also is needed. Yet even when ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... same crustacean has a parasite living under its shell, a degenerated form of a snail that has lost all powers of movement. A true parasite that takes food from its host's body and gives nothing in return. Inside this snail's gut there is a protozoan that lives off the snail's ingested food. Yet this ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... column of water, as thick as a man's leg and as strong as a bar of iron, shot up straight into the air and turned over at the top like a gigantic umbrella. The water struck the bore staging with such tremendous force that it smashed a hole clean through a two-inch board as if a shell had crashed into it, and it wrenched the other boards from their supports and flung them for a hundred yards, just a useless mass of splintered wood. The man who was on the platform at the time heard the water coming and jumped for his life. He was not a moment too soon. If he had hesitated, ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... my spirit conduct thee. Till, as waves began to swell, Thou shoulds't rise o'er the crest of the billows, Like a VENUS upon the half-shell!" ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 11, June 11, 1870 • Various
... one who does not come for our longing! Month after month to dress the bed and the table, and lay out the books they loved, and the little treasures that may tell they were unforgotten. Joan looked at the small dressing-table holding the shell box, and the satin pincushion, and the alabaster vase which Denas had once thought beautiful beyond price. The snowy quilt and pillows, the carefully kept floor and chairs, the clothing washed and laid with sprigs of lavender in the tidy drawers—oh, what poetry and eloquence of ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... for the slight vibration that should announce that the projectile-shaped shell had entered ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... reported her doings, her sayings, and her conquests; royalties smiled approvingly on this queen of fashion, and not a single soul, Lady Lucille herself least of all, realized that this perfection was but the hollow husk and shell of beauty without heart or soul; that behind the lovely face, within the graceful form, lurked as selfish and ignoble a nature as that which stirs the blood of ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... river before midnight. At this critical moment a violent storm arose which prevented the boats returning. The enemy's fire reopened at daybreak, and the engineer and principal officers of the army gave it as their opinion that it was impossible to resist longer. Only one eight-inch shell and a hundred small ones remained. The defenses had in many places tumbled to ruins, and no effectual resistance could be opposed ...
— True to the Old Flag - A Tale of the American War of Independence • G. A. Henty
... "I come to Thee, knowin' I'm as a worm that crawls on the airth; like the dust blown by the winds; the empty shell on the shore, or the leaves that fall on the ground. I come poor an' humble. I come hungry and thirsty, like even the lowliest of the airth. I come and kneel at Thy feet—believin' that I, a poor worm o' the dust, will still have Thy love and pertection. ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... paints a drunkard coming home to abuse his wife and strike his children. It is much more effective than telling the truth in abstract terms. To depict the cruelness of war, do not assert the fact abstractly—"War is cruel." Show the soldier, an arm swept away by a bursting shell, lying on the battlefield pleading for water; show the children with tear-stained faces pressed against the window pane praying for their dead father to return. Avoid general and prosaic terms. Paint pictures. Evolve images for the imagination of your audience ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... myself alive on fruit and shell-fish since the turtle catchers deserted me. It's not a satisfying diet," Parmalee said with ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... you young gosling, with your shell still hanging about you!" cried Hippus, still more irate, and threw himself on the sofa. "Your business hours!" he continued, with infinite contempt; "any hours are ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... and you," he shouted, as he designated six men with a quick movement of his forefinger. The men tumbled over the side into the boat that was tossing like a cockle shell in the waves that threatened to dash her to pieces against the big steamer. The captain slipped over the side and took his place in the stern. It was a difficult task to get the boat safely off, but it was finally accomplished by skill and strength; and as she rode away from ...
— A Voyage with Captain Dynamite • Charles Edward Rich
... poesy! thy deep-ton'd shell The heart shall sooth, the spirit fire, And all the passion sink, or swell, In true accordance to the lyre. Oh! ever wake its heav'nly sound, Oh! call thy lovely visions round; Strew the soft path of peace with fancy's ...
— Poems (1786), Volume I. • Helen Maria Williams
... shell-pink shade as he replied: "It doesn't matter what her name was, it's Mitchell now. We were married yesterday and—all the roads were represented ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... tightly were they clasped in their last embrace. When they were stretched inside they there continued their eternal slumber, their heads half hidden by their odorous, mingling hair. And when this first coffin had been placed in the second one, a leaden shell, and the second had been enclosed in the third, of stout oak, and when the three lids had been soldered and screwed down, the lovers' faces could still be seen through the circular opening, covered with thick glass, which in accordance with the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... some gooseberries, grapes or barberries, and make it into little balls or rolls. Then have fresh fish scal'd, washed, dryed, and parted into equal pieces, season them with pepper, nutmeg, salt, and set them by; then make ready shell-fish, and season them as the other fishes lightly with the same spices. Then make ready roots, as potatoes, skirrets, artichocks and chesnuts, boil them, cleanse them, and season them with the former spices. Next have yolks of hard eggs, large ...
— The accomplisht cook - or, The art & mystery of cookery • Robert May
... that of a cannon-ball fired from a cannon. The process of evolution is, and has been from the beginning, dispersive. To borrow M. Bergson's simile, the process of evolution is not like that of a cannon-ball which followed one line, but like that of a shell, which burst into fragments the moment it was fired off; and these fragments being, as it were, themselves shells, in their turn burst into other fragments, themselves in their turn destined to burst, and so on throughout the whole process. The very lines, on ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... worker. Labor invented MONEY. Afterwards, this invention was revived and developed by the BILL OF EXCHANGE and the BANK. For all these things are substantially the same, and proceed from the same mind. The first man who conceived the idea of representing a value by a shell, a precious stone, or a certain weight of metal, was the real inventor of the Bank. What is a piece of money, in fact? It is a bill of exchange written upon solid and durable material, and carrying with it its own redemption. By this means, oppressed equality ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... suspect that our strength is departed from us. Many a stately elm that seems full of vigorous life, for all its spreading boughs and clouds of dancing leaves, is hollow at the heart, and when the storm comes goes down with a crash, and men wonder, as they look at the ruin, how such a mere shell of life with a core of corruption could stand so long. It rotted within, and fell at last, because its roots did not go deep down to the rich soil, where they would have found nourishment, but ran along near the surface among gravel and stones. If we would stand firm, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... there is no single exercise that develops the arms, chest, back and leg muscles as does rowing. Whether your boat is a dingey or an expensive rowing shell, always enter it, if the purpose is pleasure and exercise, with the determination to get the best out ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort |
