"Skeleton" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... way, infected by the not uncommon notion that womanliness means manliness. Moreover, she would not, or could not, make any more allowance for the periodicity of her organization than for the shape of her skeleton. When about twenty years of age, perhaps a year or so older, she applied to me for advice in consequence of neuralgia, back-ache, menorrhagia, leucorrhoea, and general debility. She was anemic, and looked pale, care-worn, and anxious. There was no evidence of any local ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... excited commotions on former occasions, suddenly made his appearance. Whence he came no one knew: it was rumored that he had been in the mountains of the Alpuxarras and on the coast of Barbary endeavoring to rouse the Moslems to the relief of Granada. He was reduced to a skeleton; his eyes glowed like coals in their sockets, and his speech was little better than frantic raving. He harangued the populace in the streets and squares, inveighed against the capitulation, denounced the ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... and women under arrest have used a powerful automobile in going about the city, robbing the slot boxes with skeleton keys and files. The men arrested gave the following names and ages:—Tom Morrison, 21; Nic Marino, 26; Adam Neeley, 25; William O. Cohen, 30; and Charles Guise, 25. The women were Della Thomas, 25; Dorothy Price, 25; ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... behind that rock and make a fire, while we go out and kill a deer. You must build a wigwam, too, by the time we get back. Hear me? I'm a big chief! 'I am Famine—Buckadawin!' and I'll make a living skeleton of you if you ...
— Two Little Knights of Kentucky • Annie Fellows Johnston
... his troubles,' he replied evasively. 'Most people indulge in the luxury of a private skeleton. Now I have often thought that Miss Hamilton and her sister would have been far happier without Miss Darrell; she has rather a peculiar temper, and I have often fancied that she has misrepresented things. It is always ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... with an ornate border. Posed stiffly in a photographer's chair, against a background which represented a frightful storm at sea, sat Sandy Kilday. His feet were sadly out of focus, and his head was held at an impossible angle by the iron rest which stood like a half-concealed skeleton behind him. He wore cheap store-clothes, and a turn-down collar which rested upon a ready-made tie of enormous proportions. It was a picture he had had taken in his first new clothes soon after coming to Clayton. Ruth had found it in an old ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... Lord!" she gasped. "I THOUGHT there was something mighty familiar even about the skeleton of you! Oh, Peter, Peter, where did you get this, and ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... this, and she was an amiable woman; neither of which facts could have been gathered from these inscriptive verses. This epitaph would derive little advantage from being translated into another style as the former was; for there is no under current; no skeleton or staminae of thought and feeling. The Reader will perceive at once that nothing in the heart of the Writer had determined either the choice, the order or the expression, of the ideas; that there is no interchange ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... hour before the coast was clear for me to git into the parlor and open that lock with a skeleton key an' a hairpin. An' when I seen the title of that book—well it got ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin
... the cuckoo; Haste away, thou plague of Northland, Haste along the track of' moonbeams, Wander hence, forever wander, To the darksome fields or Pohya. "If at once thou dost not leave me, I will send the eagle's talons, Send to thee the beaks of vultures, To devour thine evil body, Hurl thy skeleton to Hisi. Much more quickly cruel Lempo Left my vitals when commanded, When I called the aid of Ukko, Called the help of my Creator. Flee, thou motherless offendant, Flee, thou fiend of Sariola, Flee, ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... it for this that these islands were taken and retaken, till every gully held the skeleton of an Englishman? Was it for this that these seas were reddened with blood year after year, till the sharks learnt to gather to a sea-fight, as eagle, kite, and wolf gathered of old to fights on land? Did all those gallant souls go down to Hades in vain, and ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... away an encircling collection of sand-dwelling scavengers, and what he was on his knees studying intently was an almost clean-picked skeleton of one of his own race. But there was something odd—Dalgard brushed aside a tendril of weed which cut his line of vision and so was able ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... is only two hundred and eighty feet to the top of the weather vane, but infinitely slimmer in proportion; whilst even Salisbury spire is only about four hundred odd feet. Immediately below the parapet is the enormous skeleton clock-face, the proportions of which are reproduced on the pavement of the market-place below. The carillons in this tower are an extravagant example of the Belgian passion for chiming bells. Once safely ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... there is bleeding from the nose and bowels. The joints are often swollen, tender, and painful. Constipation is rather the rule, but in bad cases there may be diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting, and the victim becomes a walking skeleton. Mental depression ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... work, you spalpeens, what are you doing here? Begorra, the little boss just hit from the shoulder. He won't fight, but he says he has sat down, and begorra, we all know he'll be a skeleton afore he rises. Get to work, ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... of kings. See Major Wee-Wee, the smallest man in the world, no bigger than a two-year-old baby, and Tom Morgan, the giant who stands seven feet three inches in his stocking feet. They are all there—every kind of human freak from the living skeleton to the fat woman who weighs four hundred pounds. The price is the same to one and all—twenty-five cents, only a quarter of a dollar. This way and get your tickets for the side show. There is just ...
— The Circus Comes to Town • Lebbeus Mitchell
... the Regent Theatre. Sir John Pilgrim, also in a fur coat, stood near the bottom of the steps, with the glare of a Wells light full on him and throwing his shadow almost up to Edward Henry's feet. Around, Edward Henry could descry the vast mysterious forms of the building's skeleton—black in places, but in other places lit up by bright rays from the gaiety below, and showing glimpses of that gaiety in the occasional revelation of a woman's cloak through slits in the construction. High overhead two gigantic cranes interlaced their arms; and, even ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... escaped after the deed, and the blame fell on Dabney Madison, as he was the only slave of his master and mistress. The clothes of the two victims were hung on two pine trees, and no colored person would touch them. Since I have grown up, I have seen the skeleton of one of these men in the office of ...
— Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days • Annie L. Burton
... dead on the field and taken prisoner. We must not ask him questions. I don't know why he is alive. He escaped, God knows how. At this time he does not know himself. I saw him on the boat. He asked me to take charge of him," she spoke very quickly. "He is a skeleton, ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... curious thoughts, I retired to my room, that night, prepared to encounter some new experience of a spectral character. Nor was my preparation needless, for, waking from an uneasy sleep at exactly two o'clock in the morning, what were my feelings to find that I was sharing my bed with the skeleton ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... rocked on its springs; Marguerite, giddy and overtired, lay back with closed eyes, her hand resting in that of Armand. Time, space and distance had ceased to be; only Death, the great Lord of all, had remained; he walked on ahead, scythe on skeleton shoulder, and beckoned patiently, but with a sure, ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... A skeleton, which is computed to be 150,000 years old, has been discovered by a German professor. From the position in which it was found it is conjectured that the man was drowned, and the police will no doubt take the matter up, and the relatives will, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 25, 1914 • Various
... Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1705), brought poets back to the original sources of terror in popular tradition, and helped to revive the latent feelings of awe, wonder and fear. In Coleridge's Ancient Manner the skeleton-ship with its ghastly crew—the spectre-woman and her deathmate—the sensations of the mariner, alone on a wide, wide sea, seize on our imagination with irresistible power. The very substance of the poem ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... nearer to justifying such a claim than any contemporary British or American work. In more expensive publications some of Mr. Mosher's work, like his quarto edition of Burton's "Kasidah," merits a place in this class. A better known, if older, instance is the holiday edition of Longfellow's "Skeleton in Armor." Who would not rather read the poem in this Old English type than in any Roman type in which it has ever been printed? The work of the Kelmscott Press obviously falls within ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... Records vol. xxxii. pt. ii. p. 495.] Our little army consisted nominally of parts of three corps, but the column in the field consisted of one division of the Twenty-third Corps, under the immediate command of General Stoneman, one of the Fourth Corps under Brigadier-General Thomas J. Wood, and the skeleton of the Ninth Corps under General Parke. [Footnote: Id. p. 455.] We had also Colonel Garrard's division of cavalry. Another division of the Twenty-third Corps under Brigadier-General Milo S. Hascall was left as the garrison of Knoxville, with the ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... face of the earth) came and compelled them to move farther down the valley, to a point about half way between the East and Middle Mesa, and there they stayed many plantings. One time the old men were assembled and Msauwu came among them, looking like a horrible skeleton, and his bones rattling dreadfully. He menaced them with awful gestures, and lifted off his fleshless head and thrust it into their faces; but he could not frighten them. So he said, "I have lost my wager; all that ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... uninviting, man was poor, and social progress, as exhibited under the form of building, halted miserably. The streets dwindled feebly, as they receded from the center of the town, into smaller and smaller houses, and died away on the barren open ground into an atrophy of skeleton cottages. Builders hereabouts appeared to have universally abandoned their work in the first stage of its creation. Land-holders set up poles on lost patches of ground, and, plaintively advertising that they were to let for building, raised ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... Denman, and Sampson lifted it up. It was a low, skeleton rail, and, as the big man hobbled toward it, somehow—neither he nor Denman ever knew how—his foot slipped, and he and the box went overboard together. The box floated, but when Sampson came to the surface it was out ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... doubt had spies in the principal ports. But the brig in which we had brought Mistress Lucy being still in the harbor, the admiral instructed me to fit her out as a trader, and send her to sea with a dummy captain and a skeleton crew, and then to join her secretly with some thirty picked men ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... lowered the last grinning skeleton into the pit. "There seems a kind of stern justice in their present position, Charley," he continued. "Now, they are resting side by side with those whom they tortured and ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... together by a roundabout way and in excellent spirits. It seemed more and more absurd to Nan that the long feud and almost tragic state of family affairs should have come to so prosaic a conclusion, and that she who had been the skeleton of her aunt's ancestral closet should have dared to emerge and to walk by her side through the town. After all, here was another proof of the wisdom of the old Spanish proverb, that it takes two to make a quarrel, but only one to ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... that gloves were a kind of passport, or perhaps a skeleton key guaranteed to open principals' doors. It was Mr. Smith who first made me feel that there was a connection between morals, respectability, and cold baths. To miss the morning tub, as Mr. Smith saw it, was not merely a calamity but also a disgrace; a thing to make one ashamed; ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... that a skeleton—say that of Mag. Nicolas Francken—was discovered. That was not so. What they did find lying between the beams which supported the flooring was a small copper box. In it was a neatly-folded vellum document, with about ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... danger of their situation was now forcibly impressed upon them, and the whole command became grave and anxious. Stuart alone was unmoved, and at this juncture one of his scouts informed him that the skeleton of an old bridge spanned the stream about a mile below. An abandoned warehouse furnished the materials for a footway, over which the troopers passed, holding the bridles of their horses as they swam alongside. Half the column thus ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... then, is over; the pompous black pyramid at the Louvre is only a skeleton now; all the flags have been miraculously whisked away during the night, and the fine chandeliers which glittered down the Champs Elysees for full half a mile, have been consigned to their dens and darkness. Will ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 'Skeleton in Armor'?" she asked; and when Cannie said no, she repeated part of the poem, and promised to find the rest for Cannie to read when they got home. Then they drove on; and Cannie's head was so full of "Lief the son of Arnulf," the "fearful guest," and the maiden whose ...
— A Little Country Girl • Susan Coolidge
... said the latter, after a long minute, in which a little skeleton clock on the mantelpiece ticked loudly—"there's no hurry, ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... sunlight, painting it falling across a court-yard or streaming through a window with marvellous truth and poetry. His subjects were commonplace enough. An interior with a figure or two in the middle distance, and a passage-way leading into a lighted background were sufficient for him. These formed a skeleton which he clothed in a half-tone shadow, pierced with warm yellow light, enriched with rare colors, usually garnet reds and deep yellows repeated in the different planes, and surrounded with a subtle pervading ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... a company of six Mexican traders, who were known as "smugglers" because they evaded duties on goods which they brought into United States and sold in Arizona, were camped in Skeleton Canon, ten miles north of the north line of Old Mexico. They were known to carry large sums of money, but as they were always armed and ready to defend their possessions they were not often molested. However, on this occasion, ...
— Geronimo's Story of His Life • Geronimo
... Wild Man of Cape Cod Newbury's Old Elm Samuel Sewall's Prophecy The Shrieking Woman Agnes Surriage Skipper Ireson's Ride Heartbreak Hill Harry Main: The Treasure and the Cats The Wessaguscus Hanging The Unknown Champion Goody Cole General Moulton and the Devil The Skeleton in Armor Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket Love and Treason The Headless Skeleton of Swamptown The Crow and Cat of Hopkins Hill The Old Stone Mill Origin of a Name Micah Rood Apples A Dinner and its Consequences ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... have but the extremity of a bone well preserved, you may, by attention, consideration, and the aid of resources which analogy furnishes to skill, determine all the rest as well as if you had the entire skeleton submitted ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... inside a fair before, was gazing open-mouthed at an enormous portrait of the "Living Skeleton." She turned to Nurse with a face from which all expression had gone but one of ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton
... minutes there was, so far as the soldier could see, not a living thing left upon the common, and every bush and tree upon it that was not already a blackened skeleton was burning. The hussars had been on the road beyond the curvature of the ground, and he saw nothing of them. He heard the Martians rattle for a time and then become still. The giant saved Woking station and its cluster of houses until the last; then in ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... cit. v. p. 314. Not to have all one's bones in the next world is a disgrace, as Muir says, and for that reason they are collected at burial. Compare the custom as described by the French missionaries here. The American Indian has to have all his bones for future use, and the burying of the skeleton is ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... breed arose in the Cotswold hills, in Gloucestershire. In this variety the skeleton is large, the chest capacious, the back broad and straight, and the ribs well arched. It has good quarters, and a finely-arched neck. It is distinguished by a large tuft of wool—"fore-top," on the forehead. It fattens early, and produces about 25 ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... Octopus and the Cuttle are related to the Snail and Whelk, they have no shell. Their bodies are naked. Neither do they grow a backbone, or skeleton; but, inside the body, the Cuttle has a plate of chalk, which you may find on the shore. Some kinds have a long strip of transparent substance, like a large feather. Fishermen use the smaller kinds of Cuttle as bait. You will find it quite easy ...
— Within the Deep - Cassell's "Eyes And No Eyes" Series, Book VIII. • R. Cadwallader Smith
... The entire female skeleton differs from the male skeleton; all the bones are smaller and more gracile; the pelvis, as we have seen before, is shallower and wider. Then the muscles are smaller and more rounded. The entire contour of the body is rounded ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... a large part of the armies operating against Richmond is left behind. The enemy, knowing this, may, as an only chance, strip their lines to the merest skeleton, in the hope of advantage not being taken of it, while they hurl everything against the moving column, and return. It cannot be impressed too strongly upon commanders of troops left in the trenches not to allow this to ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... whisk their faded fresh. And on I read Presently, though my path grew perilous Between the outspread straw-work, piles of plait Soon to be flapping, each o'er two black eyes And swathe of Tuscan hair, on festas fine: Through fire-irons, tribes of tongs, shovels in sheaves, Skeleton bedsteads, wardrobe-drawers agape, Rows of tall slim brass lamps with dangling gear,— And worse, cast clothes a-sweetening in the sun: None of them took my eye from off my prize. Still read I on, from written title page To written index, on, through street and street, At the Strozzi, at the Pillar, ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... ever-ravening eagle's beak and talon annihilate us? Tear the noble hear of Britain, leave it gorily quivering? Bark an answer, Britain's raven! bark and blacken innumerable, Blacken round the Roman carrion, make the carcase a skeleton, Kite and kestrel, wolf and wolfkin, from the wilderness, wallow in it, Till the face of Bel be brighten'd, Taranis be propitiated. Lo their colony half-defended! lo their colony, Camulodune! There the horde of Roman robbers mock at a barbarous ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... glass of brandy, and remained polite, intent and silent. Kenny, with his heart in the telling, went on to the tale of Conoclach and the first harp. Conoclach, he said, hating Cull, her husband, had run away from him toward the sea. There upon the sand lay the skeleton of a whale and the wind playing upon the taut sinews made sounds low and soothing enough to lull her to sleep. And Cull, coming up, marveled at her slumber, heard the murmuring of the wind through the sinews and ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... life. She could not conceive of a spirit life. Nor could she conceive of the skeletons of the dead in some strange resurrection being reclothed with the flesh which she adored, being inhabited again by the vitality which makes skeleton and flesh living man or woman. This life was all to her. And when the light in which it existed and was perceived died away and was consumed, she believed that the vision could ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... we explain, 'which you are pleased to compare with fireworks, constitute the skeleton, or framework, of four turrets, which, after having been concealed behind canvas, painted stone-colour, and relieved with imitation port-holes, will be suspended from the uppermost ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... the rope spun out into the middle air of the room. It moved and twisted like a live thing, and Mr. Wicker, Chris thought, seemed to be drawing the outline of a boat in the air with the moving line. Even as this thought flickered in his mind, the rope formed in mid-air the skeleton of a dingy, and then, mysteriously, the rope added to itself until the bare struts and sides were filled in and there, rocking lightly from the speed of its creation, a small row-boat hovered in the air, as if it were tied up to ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... a skeleton key into the lock of the gate, opened it (the charwoman protesting in the interests of her employer) and went up the flagged path. The door of the cottage was a more difficult proposition, being fitted ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... nerve-worn and sleepless, or thinkers standing with hands to the eyes on some crag above the multitude, see things thus in skeleton outline, bare of flesh? In Surbiton the skeleton is ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... 1853, he left Linyante, having overcome Sekeletu's objection to let him go, and arrived at Loando, on the West Coast, on 31st May, 1854, after a variety of adventures, and being reduced by fever to a mere skeleton. ...
— Beneath the Banner • F. J. Cross
... from boding thoughts, a while The shepherd stood; then makes his way Towards the dog, o'er rocks and stones, As quickly as he may; Nor far had gone before he found A human skeleton on the ground; The appalled discoverer, with a sigh, Looks ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... the air nimble, brisk. On the summit of the skeleton-like tower of the artesian well, the windmill was turning steadily in a breeze from the southwest. The water in the irrigating ditch was well up. There was no cloud in the sky. Far off to the east and west, the bulwarks of the valley, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... his master down two long corridors that ended in a chapel. There, lying before the altar, they found a man clad in a filthy priest's robe, a dying man who still had the strength to cry for help or mercy, although in truth he was wasted to a skeleton, since the plague which had taken him was of the most lingering sort. Indeed, little seemed to be left of him save his rolling eyes, prominent nose and high cheekbones covered with yellow parchment that had been skin, and a stubbly growth ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... no moon, but he has been over the road so many times that it is no journey at all. Silence and darkness reign supreme. He unfastens the door with his skeleton key, lights a burner in the hallway and a safety lamp which he carries with him. How weird and ghostly these long passages look! The loom-rooms seem tenanted by huge, misshapen denizens of some preadamic world. He stands and looks, and fantastic ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... reality, let us hope that "Let there be light" will be printed in large black letters across the space to be occupied by each closet in every house plan, for the average closet is so dark that even a self-respecting family skeleton would decline to occupy it, evil though its deeds are supposed to be. The downpour of the miscellaneous collection of a closet's shelves upon the blind groper after some particular package thereon, gives convincing proof that absence of light means presence of confusion; while it also invites ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... his skeleton key to release the Yale lock with which the front door was equipped. Straight down the main hall he went and into the little foyer between the hall and Nita's bedroom. He snatched up the telephone and to his relief it was not dead. He gave the number of Captain Strawn's ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... which assumes to perpetuate the history of Kershaw's Brigade should not be a skeleton, consisting of an enumeration of the battles, skirmishes, and marches which were participated in—with the names of the commanding officers. What is needed is not a skeleton, but a body with all its members, so to speak. It should be stated who they were, ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... that those who are best fitted to appreciate the economic problems and science of the modern world are, either by race or religion, or both, cut off from the mediaeval system, and even when they are acquainted with the skeleton, as it were, of that body of Christian Europe, are none the less out of sympathy with, or even ignorant of, its living form ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... skeleton of the elephant are disposed in a manner differing from most other mammalia. The humerus is remarkable for the great development of the supinator ridge. "The ulna and radius are quite distinct and permanently crossed; the upper end of the latter is ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... La Tour's enemy had been carried to the upper floor, and the woman sent with a soldier's wife to the barracks; yet Madame La Tour continued to walk the stone flags, feeling that small skeleton on her bosom, and the pressure of death ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... by all means. I'll work you to day, {you} skeleton,[71] as you deserve. AEschinus loiters intolerably; the breakfast's spoiling; and as for Ctesipho, he's head and ears in love.[72] I shall now think of myself, for I'll be off at once, and pick out the very nicest bit, and, leisurely sipping my cups,[73] ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... thirty-pounder Parrott rifles now drilling before my tent is a more convincing argument than the largest Democratic meeting the State of New York can possibly assemble at Albany; and a simple order of the War Department to draft enough men to fill our skeleton regiments would be more convincing as to our national perpetuity than an humble pardon to Jeff. Davis and all ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... were covered with a layer of burnt clay, uneven and broken; immediately below this a layer of ashes 6 inches thick, and below this black loam. On these areas large trees were growing, one a poplar 3 feet in diameter. Below one of these floors were found a skeleton, some pottery, and a pipe. A large oak formerly stood at this point, but it has ...
— The Problem of Ohio Mounds • Cyrus Thomas
... because he told them that he should be deeply involved in trouble if his participation in their escape should be discovered; but, happy as Rosa was in reciprocated love, this necessity of concealment was a skeleton ever sitting at her feast; and Floracita, who had no romantic compensation for it, chafed under the restraint. It was dusk when they returned to the cottage, and the thickets were alive with fire-flies, as if Queen Mab and all her train were out ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... perceived, although I did not immediately recognise him; for his dark body was painted, back and front, from head to foot, in white, in such a manner as to represent, with considerable skill and fidelity, a fleshless skeleton. His head was decorated with a pair of bullock's horns, firmly secured by means of straps; round his neck he wore a necklace composed entirely of skeleton human hands, which had been severed at the wrists; about his waist was ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... manifold way, a somewhat passive, a somewhat contrary, and, as it were, inimical to action, though action be the sole aim and use of his contrivance. Thus, the human body is penetrated by the passive and powerless skeleton, which is a mere weight upon the muscles, a part of the burden that, nevertheless, it enables them to bear. The lever of Archimedes would push the planet aside, provided only it were supplied with its indispensable complement, a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... measured the bonds uniting the various characters; so well that each individual is defined separately as to his personal and his social side, and in the same manner each family is defined. It is the skeleton of these individuals and of these families that is laid bare for your contemplation in these notes of Messieurs Cerfberr and Christophe. But this structure of facts, dependent one upon another by a logic equal to that of life itself, ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... a wee bit, and nobody'll recognise you like that. Now come, Meg, you won't refuse? I 'd do it myself, and do it well; only I might be discovered, but you wouldn't. Who'll think of Meg Drummond turning into the ghost? You must clasp your skeleton hands and say very mournfully, "Dry my locks, sweet maid of England!" That's all. She'll be sure to go out into the grounds, and the rest of us will be close by, ready to catch her up if she swoons; and she 'll never guess ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... lowered a man down into the well, who fastened those withes round the body of the horse; and the people, having first drawn up the man, took hold of the withes, and to my surprise, pulled the horse out with the greatest facility. The poor animal was now reduced to a mere skeleton, and the roads were scarcely passable, being either very rocky, or else full of mud and water. I therefore found it impracticable to travel with him any farther, and was happy to leave him in the ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... splendid nobles, she had lived to see one of her favourites die and to send another to the block; and now she herself was dying. She knew it, and she would not hear of death. She was never so ready for the gaiety she could not enjoy. Her strength left her, she was a skeleton; still she sat with her dress unchanged, staring before her, flashing sudden rages at her ministers, rallying at the mention of an heir's name. Beauchamp, heir to the Suffolks, they put forward; she cried out he was the ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... however, will have a dim recollection or suggestive instinct as to its size in nature. Nothing striking is revealed by this amount of magnification excepting the existence of breathing pores or spiracles along the scale armor of its body. But there is a trace of structure in the terminal ring of the exo-skeleton which we cannot clearly define, and of which we may desire to know more. This can be done only by the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... to have a plan! Those strange horned, humped, armoured beasts of prehistoric rocks are all bewilderingly like ourselves so far as physical construction goes; they had heart, brain, eyes, lungs, legs, a similarly planned skeleton; it seems as if the creative spirit was working by a well-conceived pattern, was trying to make a very definite kind of thing; there is not by any means an infinite variety, when one considers the sort of creatures that even a man could devise and ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a good one, the shop democracies from which all power derives, would judge the scheme in operation by what they learn of it and by what they can imagine. The guilds would see the same scheme differently. And so instead of the scheme being the skeleton that keeps guild society together, the attempt to define what the scheme ought to be, would be under guild socialism as elsewhere, the main business of politics. If we could allow Mr. Cole his scheme of functions we could allow him almost everything. Unfortunately ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... instructed him to maintain his dangerous situation without fear or giddiness, and successively to assume the different postures of devotion. He sometimes prayed in an erect attitude, with his outstretched arms in the figure of a cross, but his most familiar practice was that of bending his meagre skeleton from the forehead to the feet; and a curious spectator, after numbering twelve hundred and forty-four repetitions, at length desisted from the endless account. The progress of an ulcer in his thigh [72] might shorten, but it could not disturb, this celestial life; and the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... an instant, and saw at his feet Bignold worn to a skeleton, with eyes starting from his head and fixed on Grassette in ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... I saw one labeled "Henry VIII," and feeling a little curious upon seeing that it looked like Calvin Edson, the living skeleton, I said: "Do you call that 'Henry the Eighth?'" He replied, "Certainly; sir; it was taken from life at Hampton Court, by special order of his majesty; ...
— The Art of Money Getting - or, Golden Rules for Making Money • P. T. Barnum
... candlelight. When he was just equipped as a serpent, his rays set fire to part of his envelope, and it was with the greatest difficulty that he was extricated. He escaped unhurt, but his serpent's skin was utterly consumed; nothing remained but the melancholy spectacle of its skeleton. He was obliged to give up the hopes of shining at the masquerade, but he resolved to be at Lady Singleton's that he might meet Lady Delacour and Miss Portman. The moment that the tragic and comic muse appeared, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... all these things, them lofty towers riz up like gigantick skeleton fingers outstretched mockin'ly. They seemed to be sayin' to me and Josiah and the world at large, "You may boast of your inventions, your marvels of this age, your civilization, your glory, your pryin' into dark continents and unexplored regions of land and science. ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... danger is the last interest of life! All was gray! Nothing was, but the damp and chill of the grave! No cloak of insanest belief, of dullest mistake, would henceforth hide any more the dreary nakedness of the skeleton, life! The world lay in clearest, barest, coldest light, its hopeless deceit and its misery all revealed! It was well that a grumous fog pervaded the air, each atom a spike in a vesicle of darkness! it was well that no summer noon was blazing about the world! At least ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... forced her to take the family name, to save appearances. The old woman was capable of anything, even of providing an obscure nephew with a brilliant sister. And I should not be thanked if I interfered. This skeleton of swift reasoning passed between word and word ... "You are no sister of mine!" I was continuing my sentence ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... the end of his task, Finn sat erect on his haunches for it may have been a quarter of an hour, gazing out at the risen moon, which sailed serenely now, high above the praying hands of the skeleton trees. Certainly, Finn's spirit was near to breaking-point. He rose, meaning to seek his corner again, as after so many other futile testings of his bars; but something moved him first to look out as far as he could, over the tent-top, to the great world beyond. Sore though his body was, he ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... Fielding and Richardson. It is, however, something more—for it comes also from a failure to estimate aright the parabasis-openings which have been more than once referred to. These passages do not perhaps exhibit the by-work and the process in the conspicuous skeleton-clock fashion which their critics admire and desire, but they contain an amount of acute and profound exploration of human nature which it would be difficult to match and impossible to surpass elsewhere: ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... a mere shadowy caricature of the Mookoomahn Bob had known. The face was fleshless as that of a skeleton head, with the skin of the former inhabitant stretched and dried upon the bones; the lips so shrunken that they scarcely served to cover the two white lines of teeth; the eyes deep fallen into gaping ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... to fool myself into imagining I was the servant of the people by introducing or speaking for petty little popular measures. I saw clearly that graft was the backbone, the whole skeleton of legislative business, and that its fleshly cover of pretended public service could be seen only by the blind. I saw, also, that no one in the machine of either party had any real power. The state boss of our party, United States Senator Dunkirk, was a creature and servant of corporations. Silliman, ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... back with him searched and found in the skull the mark of a pistol ball, and buried in the sand, 'neath the skeleton fingers, was found a Smith & Wesson revolver. In the side pocket of his coat his wallet was discovered, with its contents untouched, and among numerous other articles was a letter addressed ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... captain, in the name of Allah—the fakir's mode of begging—to give him a passage to Aden. His prayer was answered, and he came on board. He was a Mussulman, born in Cashmere, and had been wandering about the world in the capacity of a fakir; but was now, through hunger and starvation, reduced to a mere skeleton of skin and bones. His stomach was so completely doubled inwards, it was surprising the vital spark remained within him. On being asked to recite his history, he said, "I was born in the 'happy valley' of Cashmere; but reduced circumstances led me to leave my native ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... quite blind to what this all means, but you may possibly see some connection between this sudden act of sacrifice on X's part and the work of the arrow. At all events, I thought you ought to know that Mr. X's closet holds a skeleton which he will doubtless take every pains to keep securely locked from general view. Holmes says that his last word to the disappointed girl was in the way of warning. No mention of this break in their plans was to be ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... "and Buck Denham compared him to a human skeleton on stilts. I don't like him; but I suppose we shall get used to ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... buried in these tumuli, the bones of which, in a tolerable state of preservation, are supposed to be exhibited upon excavation. The writer has witnessed the opening of many of these mounds, and has seen the fragments of an occasional skeleton, found near the surface. Without stopping here to enter upon a disquisition on the hypothesis assumed, that these mounds, as they are termed, are as much the results of natural causes, as any other prominences on the surface of the globe: I will only remark, ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... and himself—had spent in the wilderness far from the Hudson Bay Post, of their months of trapping, their desperate war with the Woongas, the discovery of the century-old cabin and its ancient skeletons, and their finding of the birch-bark map between the bones of one of the skeleton's fingers, on which, dimmed by age, was drawn the trail to ...
— The Gold Hunters - A Story of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds • James Oliver Curwood
... Poet's Corner stands a monument which is among the most renowned achievements of modern art, but which to me appears horrible rather than sublime. It is the tomb of Mrs. Nightingale, by Roubillac. The bottom of the monument is represented as throwing open its marble doors, and a sheeted skeleton is starting forth. The shroud is falling from his fleshless frame as he launches his dart at his victim. She is sinking into her affrighted husband's arms, who strives with vain and frantic effort to avert the blow. ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... the thinnest, palest, puniest little object that had ever come into this world prematurely, uncalled for, and unwelcome. It did not look at all likely to live. And as Hannah fed the ravenous little skeleton she could not help mentally calculating the number of its hours on earth, and wishing that she had thought to request Mr. Wynne, while he was in the house, to baptize the wretched baby, so little likely to live for another opportunity. Nor could ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... now had not been able to raise himself on his pillows; this unfortunate sufferer, who looked more like a skeleton than a human being; this wounded man, who had scarcely his breath left him,—threw back his blankets, and rushed to the middle of the room, crying, with ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... afforded by the multitudinous and varied chambered shells of the Ammonitidoe. The remains by which these animals are recognised are necessarily less perfect, as a rule, than those of the latter, as no external shell is present (except in rare and more modern groups), and the internal skeleton is not necessarily calcareous. Nevertheless, we have an ample record of the Cuttle-fishes of the Jurassic period, in the shape of the fossilised jaws or beak, the ink-bag, and, most commonly of all, the horny or calcareous structure which is embedded in the soft tissues, and is variously ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... frame of the church caught Kermode's eye. Something was wrong with it. The skeleton tower looked out of the perpendicular; and on his second glance its inclination seemed to have increased. The snow, however, was clogging the front of his sled and he set to work to scrape it off. While he was thus engaged ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... hand was a meagre skeleton of a figure, called the death of Fear. Through his exterior you might see that he did not possess any heart; and by his door there were bags, and chests also, and locks and castles. By this gate went usurers, bad governors and ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... its own organization and will be inspected by its proper commanders, and to which, as a unit, emergency orders can be issued in time of war or other emergency. Moreover, the organization, which in many respects is necessarily a skeleton, will furnish a guide for future development. The separate regiments and companies will know the brigades and divisions to which they belong. They will be maneuvered together whenever maneuvers are established by Congress, and the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of William H. Taft • William H. Taft
... veins and arteries stood out in startling distinctness. The hard parts faded away to nothingness, and the blood system alone was left. Not even the fleshy ducts remained. The naked blood alone was visible, flowing this way and that like a fiery, liquid skeleton, in the shape of the monster. Then this blood began to change too. Instead of a continuous liquid stream, Maskull perceived that it was composed of a million individual points. The red colour had been an illusion caused by the rapid motion ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... you that your little charge is a sleep-walker; she is the ghost who has nightly opened the front door and put your household into this fever of alarm. Secondly, the child is consumed with homesickness, to such an extent that she is nearly a skeleton already, and soon will be quite one; something must be done at once. For the first trouble, due to her over-excited nerves, there is but one remedy, to send her back to her native mountain air; and for the second trouble there is also but one cure, ...
— Heidi • Johanna Spyri
... as I haven't had, when I'd ought to. What do you call that?" She pointed to a plate of something on the kitchen table. "Is that a dinner for a human being, or is it a dinner for a beetle? D'you think I'd eat it, and me with money in my pocket to buy better? You want to make a walkin' skeleton of me, do you?—but I'll have it out of you, I will—There goes another dish! And here goes a sugar-basin! And ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... streams carry pestilence in their blue waters. If I could snatch away from that world of nature, which you extol, its kirtle of sunshine and its girdle of greenery, you would see it hideous like a very fury, a skeleton, rotting away with disease ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... that the skeleton man and the fat woman then on exhibition in his 'greatest show on ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... that trembled with excitement, reached across and over the skeleton remains posted like a ghostly guard before the door. He threw ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... Egyptians made use of a very extraordinary custom in their festivals. They shewed to every guest a skeleton: this, according to some, was to make them think of death. Others again assure us, "That this strange figure was made use of to a quite contrary end; that this image of death was shewn for no other ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... in twenty-four hours,—while the tide ebbs and flows twice daily, and the seasons come and go in rotation, every atom changes its relations to every other atom every moment. Influences are tossed into these skeleton cycles of motion and event which start a myriad of diverse currents, and break up the whole surface of life and being into a healthful confusion. There are never two days alike. The motherly sky never gives birth to twin clouds. The weather shakes its bundle of mysteries in our faces, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... was written in the style of a tragic serial story: abstract phrases, bureaucratic epithets, academic periphrases. No movement, not a sound unrehearsed. From beginning to end it was clockwork, a set problem, a scenario, the skeleton of a play, with not a scrap of flesh, only literary phrases. Timid ideas lay behind discussions that were meant to be bold: the whole spirit of the thing was hopelessly middle-class ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... somebody were overlooking what he was doing. Of course it could not be true, but so sudden and so vivid was the impression that he rose, opened the door, and glanced into the private washroom—even poked under the bed and the opposite sofa; and of course discovered that only a living skeleton could lie concealed in ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... grave was opened, when, in the innermost of three coffins, his skeleton was found, wrapped in five robes of embroidered silk, some of the fragments of which may still be seen in the ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... much to the glory of this commonwealth, by interweaving the militia with more art and lustre than any legislator from or before the time of Servius Tullius, who constituted the Roman militia. But as the bones or skeleton of a man, though the greatest part of his beauty be contained in their proportion or symmetry, yet shown without flesh are a spectacle that is rather horrid than entertaining, so without discourses are the orders of a commonwealth; which, if she goes forth in that manner, ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... leader. And what support had Lord Spencer against all these foes—before him, around him—on all sides of him? On the benches immediately behind him there was a small band of men—not forty all told—looking strangely deserted, skeleton-like, even abashed in all their loneliness and isolation. These were the friends—few but faithful—amid all the hundreds, who alone had a word of cheer for Lord Spencer in a long and trying speech he had to address to his ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... ghostly sighs haunt their virgin glades. Sometimes in the midst of this almost black greenness, some forest monarch, bleached and scared by the icy breath of generations of Siberian winters, stands out with skeleton distinctness. A dreary, desolate place altogether. There must be a town somewhere in the vicinity, though, for in the afternoon the military commandant hove in sight. This official had on the enormous bearskin head-dress, and dark green uniform of the ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... almost undecayed, as when he received the fatal wound on the banks of the Lech. The bones of Charles V., the savior of his country, were dispersed. At his feet was found the coffin of the faithful Du Gueselin, and the French hands profaned the skeleton before which English invasion had rolled back. Most of these tombs were found to be strongly secured. Much time, and no small exertion of skill and labor, were required to burst their barriers. They ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... trace nor hide nor hair of men, dogs, sleds, or anything was ever found. They dropped clean out of sight. It became one of the mysteries of the country. Steve and I plugged away up the Stewart, and six weeks afterward that Spot crawled into camp. He was a perambulating skeleton, and could just drag along; but he got there. And what I want to know is who told him we were up the Stewart? We could have gone a thousand other places. How did he know? You tell ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... her in, for it went with a spring-lock. Lord Lovel sought her that night and sought next day, and so on for a week, but nowhere could he find her. Some years later, the old chest was sold, and, on being opened, was found to contain the skeleton ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... forbidden air, but instead a deep stillness; no grass grew from the earth, no weed peered through the void sand; but in mockery of all life there were trees borne down by Jordan in some ancient flood, and these, grotesquely planted upon the forlorn shore, spread out their grim skeleton arms, all scorched and charred to blackness by the heats of the long ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... give her no figure of Mr. Brumley as intimate, as habitual. She could as easily imagine his skeleton. He remained in all this queer speculation something friendly, something incidental, more than a trifle disembodied, entirely devoted of course in ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... to Nannie—"and look quite like Peter Bond again. The sea-voyage made me hearty, and a good appetite, freely indulged, plumped me up to my usual size, so that you would scarcely believe me the same man who left you two months ago, with the skeleton limbs losing themselves in the folds of my wide garments. Every thing is so new and strange to me, too, that I have plenty of amusement in watching my neighbors; and I often forget that I am as great a lion to them, until I meet their ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... advantages. For one thing, the group of rocks was the ready skeleton of the house Steenie wanted. Again, if the snow sometimes lay deeper there than in other parts of the hill, there first it began to melt. A third advantage was that, while, as I have said, the valley was protected by higher ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... cleared from the place. There were many piles of fagots about, and a great log lying here and there along the side of the path. One of these, when a tree, had been struck by lightning, and had stood till the frosts and rains had bared it of its bark. Now it lay white as a skeleton by the side of the path, and was, I think, the cause of what followed. All at once my daughter's pony sprang to the other side of the road, shying sideways; unsettled her so, I presume; then rearing and plunging, threw her from the saddle across one of the logs ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... belt and loosened his sword in its sheath. Hurriedly giving the helm to Corette, he went forward and jerked a lot of ropes and hooks from a cubby-hole where they had been stowed away. Then he pulled out a small, dark flag, with bits of skeleton painted on it, and ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... the first experiments both investigators used organic substances as the reagent to cause the deposit of gold on its base, and in each case these substances whether woodchips, leather, or even dead flies, were found to be so absolutely impregnated with gold as to leave a golden skeleton when afterwards burned. Timber found in the Ballarat deep leads has been proved to ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... two bodies in the said coffin identified as that of the said lady, one whereof was that of a woman apparently of middle age, and the other that of a babe, which lay upon the chest of the larger skeleton in such a way or manner as to be retained or held in that position by the arms of the same being laid across it; that having satisfied himself of these facts, the commissioner caused the coffin to be again closed and the grave covered with all decency and care. And he accordingly ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... joy for sixty-three years; then she got to associating with insurance presidents, and lost flesh and character, and was a sorrow to look at and no longer competent for business. She was a great loss to me. Yet not all loss. I sold her —ah, pathetic skeleton, as she was—I sold her to Leopold, the pirate King of Belgium; he sold her to our Metropolitan Museum, and it was very glad to get her, for without a rag on, she stands 57 feet long and 16 feet high, and they think she's a brontosaur. Well, she looks it. They believe it will take nineteen geological ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the pair are regarded as negroid, verging on the Pygmy; but if we could study an adult male of the same stock, it might possibly turn out not to be so very divergent from the Cro-Magnon. Again, a single specimen does duty for the so-called Chancelade race. The skeleton is of comparatively low stature, and is deemed to show close affinities to the type of the modern Eskimo. Without being unduly sceptical, one may once more wonder if the Cro-Magnon stock may not have produced this ...
— Progress and History • Various
... Florestan chained to a stone; he is wasted to a skeleton as his food has been reduced in quantity week by week by the cruel orders of his tormentor. He is gradually losing his reason; he has visions and in each one beholds his ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... one of my books. He was looking with much interest at a picture in a work on paleontology, a book which by some chance had accompanied a few selected works that I had brought with me from England. The picture that so interested him, I saw as I drew nearer, represented the skeleton of a prehistoric mammoth with a man standing by its side, the latter figure placed in the picture, no doubt, for the purpose of showing relations of size. As I stepped up close to Arthur's side, he turned a page in the book and disclosed a still more startling representation, that of a ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... the boat, looking straight into the sky. He was a horrid-looking object, with his streaming hair, pasty features, and red beard, his naked shanks and feet protruding through his soaking, clinging trousers, which figured his shin-bones as though they clothed a skeleton. Now and again he would give himself a wild twirl and yelp out fiercely; but he was well-nigh spent with his swim, and on the whole was ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... come through green glass. Half a dozen chairs were placed in front of the stage, on one of which sat the ballet-master—a stout, bald-headed man, who beat time with his stick. A violinist played at his elbow the skeleton airs of the ballet music, while the male and female dancers executed their assigned parts; the stout bald-headed gentleman occasionally interrupting the rehearsal to suggest improvements, or to issue a peremptory reprimand to one of those pale, pretty ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... the floor lay a skeleton, every vestige of flesh gone from the bones to which still clung the mildewed and moldered remnants of what had once been clothing. Upon the bed lay a similar gruesome thing, but smaller, while in a tiny cradle near-by was a third, a ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... put aght his hand to find it. "Well, awl be shot! Tha worn't mich when we set off, but tha seems to ha gooan to nowt! Aw could caant thi ribs befoor, but aw can feel 'em nah. Ther's nowt left but a skeleton!" ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... little more easily it seemed a foolish thing to bring out this old skeleton from the closet again, so a perpetual state of hush was established. Finally, the whole thing was practically forgotten except for a short paragraph in an occasional history text. But no politician or historian has ever dared publicly to question ...
— Cubs of the Wolf • Raymond F. Jones
... but unattractive, with its varnished board walls, bare floor, and wire-mesh filling the skeleton door, which a spring banged to before the mosquitoes could get in. There were no curtains or ventilator-fans, the room was very hot, and the glaring sunshine emphasized its ugliness. Then it was ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... last words, I started, and did, like the ghost of Hamlet, Senior, "jump at this dead hour," being convinced that young HOWARD had found out (perhaps from Hon'ble CUMMERBUND) that my title was a bogus, and anticipating that, if he divulged the skeleton of my bare cupboard to his highly genteel parents, I should infallibly experience the crushing mortification ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... the conclusion which it forces upon the mind. It may concentrate in itself all the elements of certainty usually obtained from many sources. It may be determinative in its very nature, and admit of scepticism only at the expense of rationality. A single human grave, with its entombed skeleton, discovered in some uninhabited waste, where it was never known the foot of man had trod, would prove conclusively that human footsteps had once trod there. The discovery of a single weapon of the quality and temper of the Damascus blade amid the ruins of a buried ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... answered quietly, "I want your help and not abuse. Your storming will not accomplish anything. You are the only living soul to whom I have confessed the presence of a skeleton in my married life, and I want you to help me. I have been told repeatedly that you are a man of courage, steadiness of nerve, scientific ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... high and dry A crowd of twisted things; A twisted branch upon the beach Eaten smooth, and polished As if the world gave up The secret of its skeleton, Stiff and white. A broken spring in a factory yard, Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left Hard and ...
— Prufrock and Other Observations • T. S. Eliot
... die. He told me that he had come from your land when he was a child. His trouble was the lungs and he had fallen off to a skeleton. He talked to me of your wide ocean land. Is it, indeed so great? And has ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... immense plains, as smooth as if the husbandman had passed over them with his roller. As you approach the mountains the soil becomes more and more unequal and sterile; the ground is, as it were, pierced in a thousand places by primitive rocks, which appear like the bones of a skeleton whose flesh is partly consumed. The surface of the earth is covered with a granite sand and huge irregular masses of stone, among which a few plants force their growth, and give the appearance of a green field covered with the ruins of a vast edifice. These stones ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... talked of many things, but as the twilight came on and the thick clouds still hovered, the abandoned village took on a ghostly appearance. Nearly all the wall opposite that against which they lay was gone, and, as it faced the larger part of the village, they could see the ruined wigwams and the skeleton frames that had been used for drying game. Out of the forest came the long lonesome howl of a wolf, some ragged, desolate creature that had not yet found shelter with his kind. The effect upon everyone was instantaneous and the same. This flight from the Indians and the slaying of the ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... described in this work was, as a matter of fact, a chimpanzee, and its skeleton is at this present moment in the Natural History Museum at South Kensington. Tyson's granddaughter married a Dr. Allardyce, who was a physician of good standing in Cheltenham. The "Pygmie" formed a somewhat remarkable item of her dowry. Her husband presented it to the Cheltenham ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... transport. As a matter of fact, there were three complete squadrons and a part of a fourth which constituted the force sent to France at the outbreak of war. The value of General Henderson's work lies in the fact that, in spite of official stinginess and meagre supplies of every kind, he built up a skeleton organisation so elastic and so well thought out that it conformed to war requirements as well as even the German plans fitted in with their aerial needs. On the 4th of August, 1914, the nominal British air strength of the military wing was 179 machines. ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... this," exclaimed lady Feng smilingly, "cannot help making one's heart full of displeasure! We simply rely upon the reputation of our grandfather to maintain the status of a penniless official; that's all! Why, in whose household is there anything substantial? we are merely the denuded skeleton of what we were in days of old, and no more! As the proverb has it: The Emperor himself has three families of poverty-stricken relatives; and how much more such as ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin |
