"Sparse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with bright sunshine. They had delayed longer than they had intended to in making their start and already most of the other prospective contestants had concluded testing their engines or giving a final look over to brace wires and turn-buckles. A sparse sprinkling of spectators from the village was already on the grounds, early as was ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... flight—like the queen bee she had soared once into the farthest, bluest reaches of her heaven, and henceforth she was quite content to relapse into the utter commonplaces of the hive. Her yellow hair grew sparse and flat and streaked with gray, her pink-rose face became over plump and mottled across the nose, and her mind turned soon as flat and unelastic as her body; but she was perfectly satisfied with the portion ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... woman with thin, sparse, gold-glinting hair, with face pallid and rounded, with broad forehead and gray eyes of remarkable clarity. She was slim, dressed in a little brown coat and a short brown skirt. She came forward, trembling, as if overcome by the ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... an interminable distance, as it seemed to Mamie, until finally they stood upon the brink of a huge canon, with a snowy mountain range in the distance beyond, and in the intervening space, a vast panorama of granite mountain sides, almost white,—here and there covered with a sparse growth of timber. The waters from these mountain reaches had cut a channel for themselves known as Little Yosemite Valley, where pour the two wonderful cataracts known as Nevada Falls and Vernal Falls. Their deep roar came up from the valley. Mamie felt that she would be content to watch that scene ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... Tzer are less abrupt than those on the north and descend gradually into the Leschnitza Valley, out of which rise the lesser heights of the Iverak Mountains. Both these ranges are largely covered by prune orchards, intersected with some sparse timber. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... of the rich overshadowed weald land, the road had crossed long sandy wastes, where population was sparse, where were no enclosures, no farms, only scattered Scottish firs; and in front rose the stately ridge of sandstone that culminates in Hind Head and Leith Hill. It was to prepare the wayfarer for a scramble to the elevation ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... limits of the United States, have been furnished with arms and munitions of war by persons dwelling in conterminous foreign territory, and are thereby enabled to prosecute their savage warfare upon the exposed and sparse ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... if the vapor was lifted and borne away by the wind like a dark pall, and in others, after a period of intense darkness the atmosphere gradually lightened again. In our day, a phenomenon of this kind would be thoroughly investigated to its most remote possible cause; but then owing to the sparse settlement of the country and the difficulties of travel, the investigation of distant causes could not be made. Large fires may have prevailed that spring in the forests of Western New York and Pennsylvania—a region then an absolute wilderness—the smoke ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... at nine o'clock at night, to encamp in an open plain, destitute of water or pasturage. On the following morning, the horses were turned loose at the peep of day; to slake their thirst, if possible, from the dew collected on the sparse grass, here and there springing up among dry sand-banks. The soil of a great part of this Green River valley is a whitish clay, into which the rain cannot penetrate, but which dries and cracks with the sun. In ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... the lad Lee also went off on a side-trail after game, and with lessened numbers we broke camp rather late, and rode into dense woods down a steady descent on a fair trail. The changes of vegetation were curious and sudden—from pines and firs to elders, stunted willows and sparse cottonwood bending over half-dry beds of torrents, with vast boulders telling of the fierce fury of water which must have undermined, then loosened and at last tumbled them from the hillsides. These streams are, in the early ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... and melancholy-looking: the sort of house that must have children, many flowers, open windows, and little vistas of bright things, to make it seem a joyous home. In this latter end of autumn, with a sparse remnant of yellow leaves falling slowly athwart the dark evergreens in a stillness without sunshine, the house too had an air of autumnal decline, and Mr. Casaubon, when he presented himself, had no bloom that could be thrown into ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... passed, for beyond them were the radiant mists of the pit of the city, and through this precipitous gateway filtered the enveloping luminosity. On each side of us uprose gradually converging and perpendicular scarps along whose base huddled a sparse foliage. ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... the Peace, was sitting in the office of the Golden Age when we found him, reading the exchanges and offering gratuitous advice to the editor. He was a shortish man, thick in body, with sparse hair and hay-colored, ragged mustache. His face was florid, his pale eyes protruded. He was a wise-looking man, excellently well suited in appearance for the office which he filled. We explained to him our errand. Gradually, as the sense of ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... went, old Katy cried hard for many hours. An earthy, uncouth, servile peasant creature old Katy surely was. She stood there on the white stone steps of the little red brick house, with her bony, square dull head with its thin, tanned, toughened skin and its sparse and kinky grizzled hair, and her strong, squat figure a little overmade on the right side, clothed in her blue striped cotton dress, all clean and always washed but rough and harsh to see—and she stayed there on the steps till Anna brought her in, blubbering, her ...
— Three Lives - Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena • Gertrude Stein
... brink of that weir, and all along that stream's shallow upper course among grass and brakes of reeds, are the bay-trees I speak of: groups of three or four at intervals, each a sheaf of smooth tapering boles, tufted high up with evergreen leaves, sparse bunches whose outermost leaves are sharply printed like lance-heads against the sky. Most modest little trees, with their scant berries and rare pale buds; not trees at all, I fancy some people saying. ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... thought, many-legged arboreal octopi feeling for their food, and tall reeds on the tops of which sat crowds of chattering finches. Then just as the sun broke out, strongly, cheering them with its warmth and sucking up the vapours, they entered sparse bush with palms and great cotton trees growing here and there, and so at length came to the ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... comfortable dressing-gown of green silk, trimmed with black fur, which showed here and there a few worn-out, defective spots. A small green velvet cap, the shape of which reminded the beholder of the cap of the learned Melancthon, covered his expansive, intellectual forehead, which was shaded by sparse light-brown hair. ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... those tall men who look mean in spite of their height. His head was small and narrow, and his hair, which was sparse and lank, fell in untidy strands across his forehead. He stooped slightly from the neck, and his chest, though wide, was hollow between the shoulders. But his legs were big and bony, slightly bent at the knees, like those of an ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... by the few sparse folk of the country-side; But how fared each with other? E'en beasts couch, hide by hide. In a growling, grudged agreement: so father son lay curled The closelier up in their den because the last of their kind in ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... church through the window of the loggia, one half expects to see stoled ghosts in the vagueness below. Outside and opposite, the immense counterforts of the Palatine, and its terrace and sparse cypresses. ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... descent of the path took them so far downward that the change of temperature again became noticeable. The ground was rough and uneven and the animals dropped to a walk. Sometimes the course led around boulders, through sparse growths of cedar, beside brawling torrents, two of which they were compelled to ford, where it was hard for their animals to keep ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... this, he convoyed me to several of the cafe's where inverts are accustomed to foregather. These trysting places were much alike: a long hall, with sparse orchestra at one end, marble-topped tables lining the walls, leaving the floor free for dancing. Round the tables sat boys and youths, Adonises both by art and nature, ready for a drink or a chat with the chance Samaritan, and shyly importunate for the pleasures for which, upstairs, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... determined his going to Sienna. Bologna,[28] the Verna, the valley of Rieti, the Sacro-Speco of St. Benedict at Subiaco,[29] Gaeta;[30] San Michele on Mount Gargano[31] perhaps received him at this time, but the notes of his presence in these places are too sparse and vague to permit their being included ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... delightful memory of him, a warm sense of his approval, and a fierce ambition to be worthy of it, for which she would have sacrificed herself or the other miserable retainers about her, as a matter of course. She had driven Waya and the other squaws far along the sparse tableland pasture in search of missing stock; she herself had lain out all night on the rocks beside an ailing heifer. Yet, while satisfied to earn his praise for the performance of her duty, for some feminine ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... several enthusiastic ladies' voices chimed in, and at last there was an outburst of applause, sparse and feeble, it ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... for feeding-time. They are places of repose, at mid-day and at night, for the ducks of this and two or three other species, notably the blue- and green-winged teal, which at other times haunt the clumps of oak and pecan that skirt the sparse streams and their summer-dry affluents, where nuts and acorns in great variety, those of the live-oak being very sweet, supply unfailing winter provision. The thickets of ilex that shade off these wooded reaches into the treeless prairie are the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... had been a poet, it was a beautiful spectacle: the immense strand of a league or more, the sea covers at high tide, and which, at the reflux, appears gray and desolate, strewed with polypi and seaweed, with pebbles sparse and white, like bones in some vast old cemetery. But the soldier, the politician, and the ambitious man, had no longer the sweet consolation of looking towards heaven to read there a hope or a warning. A red sky ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... seated at a writing table studying maps. He is a man in the early thirties, prematurely worn and old. His face is burned a deep brick color and is sharpened by fatigue and loss of blood. His hair is sparse, dry and turning gray. Around the upper part of his head is a bandage covered largely by a black skull-cap. Of over average height the man is spare and muscular. The eye is keen and penetrating: his voice abrupt and authoritative. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... making a road, where we ascended from the bed of this creek, were whitened with lime; and during the afternoon's march I remarked in the soil a considerably quantity of calcareous concretions. Towards evening the sages became more sparse, and the clear spaces were occupied by tufts of green grass. The river still continued its course through a trough, or open canon; and towards sunset we followed the trail of several wagons which had turned in towards Snake ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... the spring dusk. She chose the road towards Barnham Wood because it was lonely there and the hedges were thin; you could feel the breath of the sea as it blew across the sparse fields. The hush of an English Sunday evening enfolded the road, the wood, the fields. The sun was very low and the saffron light penetrated the dark lines of the hedges and hung like a curtain of misty gold before the approaches ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... schools, as temporary, their necessity as ephemeral, and I think that under a proper public sentiment they will soon pass away. They cannot stand,—such has been the experience in Massachusetts,—they cannot stand by the side of a good system of public education. Yet where the population is sparse, where there is not property sufficient to enable the people to establish a high school, then an endowed school may properly come in to make up the deficiency, to supply the means of education to which the public wealth, at the present moment, is unequal. ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... heat of a thousand suns. His large gray eyes were mainly responsible for this feeling, and they blazed out feverishly from what was almost a death's-head, so thin was the face, the skin of which was a ghastly, dull, dead white. Not more than fifty, thatched with a sparse growth of iron-gray hair, he looked several times the age of Dowsett. Yet Nathaniel Letton possessed control—Daylight could see that plainly. He was a thin-faced ascetic, living in a state of high, attenuated calm—a molten planet under a transcontinental ice sheet. And yet, above all most ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... its one end, which was above all such petty details of existence, might well have looked about her. No such dainty maiden bower was there in the whole village as this. Madelon's own chamber, carpetless and freezing cold, with its sparse furniture and scanty sweep of white curtains across the furred windows which filled the room with the blue-white light of ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... struck forcibly now upon his nostrils. The grass beneath his feet had become more sparse and more coarse. The moisture which clung to his face had a taste of salt in it. Obviously he was quite close to ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... way was easy, and by moving slowly he suffered less pain than he had expected. Around him the frost-smitten aspens were shivering in the wind, their sparse leaves dangling like coins of red-and-yellow gold, and all the billowing land below, to the west, was iridescent with green and flame-color and crimson. A voiceless regret, a dim, wide-reaching, wistful sadness came over him, but did not shake his resolution. He had but to look ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... degrees 33 seconds; latitude 20 degrees 41 minutes. Started after party at 12.20. At 1.27 came east half north for two and a half miles over rich undulating land to a watercourse. These downs are so sparse of trees that a small belt of brushwood on the top of an eminence was a remarkable feature. It is situated about a mile this side of the spot from which I made my observation; at 3.20, when we had ...
— Journal of Landsborough's Expedition from Carpentaria - In search of Burke and Wills • William Landsborough
... presence on these occasions added in any marked degree to the general hilarity, but Celia's satisfaction was unmistakable. She always sat beside him with an air of proprietorship, digging her sharp little elbow into the sparse cushioning of his lean thighs or when weary, dropping her frowsy head against his shoulder with an engaging certainty that it was there for that very purpose. Like many another who has defied capture till after middle life, Joel atoned for past immunity ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... at the dusty gray olive-trees, the shabby scrub oaks, the low-branched sycamores as if she had not been familiar with them all her life. To-day the birds seemed to dart about more swiftly and to utter sweeter songs as they flew. The few sheep she spied nibbling the sparse grass on the rocky hillsides were surely whiter than those at home. The field flowers, with faces upturned to the bright sun, glowed with splendid color. The ...
— Christmas Light • Ethel Calvert Phillips
... transplant them, and I treasure them like gold. One cluster bears light-coloured bloom; another bears dark shades. I sit with head uncovered by the sparse-leaved artemesia hedge, And in their pure and cool fragrance, clasping my knees, I hum my lays. In the whole world, methinks, none see the light as peerless as these flowers. From all I see you have no other friend ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... just as he expected them to. Wilson ran his hand through his sparse, gray hair and murmured something about it being a shame to have to leave the natives on their own after having more or less dragged them out of their comfortable swamps. A glance from his wife ...
— Narakan Rifles, About Face! • Jan Smith
... individualism, this benevolent despotism gave the valley into the keeping of an individualism even purer and less restrained than that which it succeeded, for the sparse pioneer transmontane settlements were practically governed at first by only the consciences or whims of the inhabitants, instructed of parental commandments learned the other side of the mountains, and by their love of forest and of their ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... second order with leaves 4-5' long, sparse, 5-nerved, heart-shaped, broad, acute, entire, glabrous, 6 small glands on the lower face of the base. Petioles of equal length with the leaves. Flowers large, axillary, solitary. Calyx double, the outer portion ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... the afternoon, Nissr passed within far sight of the Azores, visible in cloud-rifts as little black spots sown on the waters like sparse seeds on a burnished plate of metal. This habitation of man soon slipped away to westward, and once more nothing remained but the clear, cold severity of space, with now and then a racing drift of rain below, and tumbling, ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... Common has its own features of sandy hillocks topped by clumps of pines, which set an austere gauntness on the place unlike the rolling flanks and ridges by Frensham and Hindhead. In May the heather is dark and dry; there are sparse patches of gorse scattered about the slopes, and looking across at a group of pines edging the horizon you sometimes get a setting of black, yellow, and blue, which belongs peculiarly to this corner ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... somewhat the character of the vegetation. The soil and climate are unsuited to the growth of large trees, but adapted to scrub jungle of a drought-resisting type, which at one time covered very large areas from the Jamna to the Jhelam. The soil on which this sparse scrub grew is a good strong loam, but the rainfall was too scanty and the water-level too deep to admit of much cultivation outside the valleys of the rivers till the labours of canal engineers carried their waters to the uplands. East of the Sutlej the Bikaner ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... the canal about three o'clock of the afternoon, and dropped anchor off the low-lying shores. Our binoculars showed us white houses in apparently single rank along a far-reaching narrow sand spit, with sparse trees and a railroad line. That was the town of Suez, and seemed so little interesting that we were not particularly sorry that we could not go ashore. Far in the distance were mountains; and the water all about us was the light, clear green ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... the club was foiled. It had been told that at Cortlandt Street a ferry bound for Weehawken might be found; but when Endymion and the Secretary arrived there, at 12:20 o'clock, they learned that the traffic to Weehawken is somewhat sparse. Next boat at 2:40, said a sign. They hastened to the Lackawanna ferry at Barclay Street, thinking that by voyaging to Hoboken and then taking a car they might still be in time. But it was not to be. When the Ithaca docked, just south of the huge red-blotched profile ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... unabridged, in view of the singular delicacy and pure-mindedness of the Jurgen mythos: in all, not more than a half-dozen deletions have seemed expedient (and have been duly indicated) in order to remove such sparse and unimportant outcroppings of mediaeval frankness as might ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... rock-mountain, and through its heart to the glacier beyond, more than 10,000 feet above sea-level. On the way back I left the train at the foot of the Eiger glacier, and walked down with my companion amongst the rocks of the moraine and over the sparse turf of these highest regions of life. Everywhere was a profusion of gentians, the larger and darker, as well as the smaller, bluest of all blue flowers. The large, plump, yellow globe-flowers (Trollius), ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... ideas of Lincoln's growth and development as a lawyer, we must remember that in those early days litigation was very simple as compared with that of modern times. Population was sparse and society scarcely organized, land was plentiful and employment abundant. There was an utter absence of the abstruse questions and complications which now beset the law. There was no need of that close and searching study into principles and precedents ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... apprehension—especially to one journeying alone. On all sides extended a vast plain of sterile soil—the brown earth but thinly covered with a growth of cactus and wild aloes, under the shadow of which appeared a sparse herbage, wild, and of yellowish hue. The aspect was monotonous and dreary beyond expression; while here and there vast clouds of dust rose in whirlwinds, and moved like spectres over the plain. The straggling huts encountered at long ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... Congregations were often very sparse. Few people attended, and perhaps none on weekdays, unless the clerk was in his place. On such occasions the parson was tempted to emulate the humour of Dean Swift, who at the first weekday service that he held after his appointment to the living of Laracor, ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... wrinkled old man, with sparse pepper-and-salt whiskers and a parrot-like nose. "Sharper" was written all over his hatchet features; but probably his provincialism and lack of book education had kept him from being a very ...
— Ruth Fielding on Cliff Island - The Old Hunter's Treasure Box • Alice Emerson
... things an end. The weary time of waiting and preparation was almost over. Sparse news filtered through that the northward advance towards Palestine had already begun; that there had been heavy fighting at Katia, where the Turks, under cover of a desert mist, surprised and cut up—but failed to defeat—our cavalry; and that ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... hot day. There is alkali all to the west of us, and we just commence to see the rise of ground miles to the southward that Idaho says is the San Jacinto Mountains. Plenty of water there. The desert hereabout is vast and lonesome beyond words; leagues of sparse sage-brush, leagues of leper-white alkali, leagues of baking gray sand, empty, heat-ridden, the abomination of desolation; and always—in whichever direction I turn my eyes—always, in the midst of this ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... this form are everywhere almost the same in colour and in form of wings, save for a few variations in the sparse black markings on the pale yellow ground. But the females occur in several quite different forms and colourings, and one of these only, the Abyssinian form, is like the male, while the other three or four are mimetic, that is to say, they copy a butterfly of quite a different family ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... sand and sagebrush, cacti and sparse bunch-grass was bounded by the horizon; behind him, in front of him, it was the same; only on the right was the monotony broken by foothills and beyond, a range of purple snow-covered peaks. From the slight elevation or "bench" upon which he sat he looked ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... "Deerslayer." Should I drop on my knees and crawl through the long grass, snooping round the beanpoles and taking the devoted block-house in flank? I swallowed my stiff-necked English pride and began to crawl. Then I saw a better plan. I slipped through the sparse line of dwarf oaks smothered with crimson poison-ivy that bordered the forest path and crept as silently as I could towards the street until I was abreast of the stump. As I paused Beppo was making his round of the fort and espied me. Instantly crying "Hostiles!" he ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... you he brings me a little bunch of eels of his own spearing? that you must be careful at table he has enough to eat, he takes such small pieces? that he is altogether a sparse man? has rows of pins on his sleeve that he picks up?—an old-fashioned man, whose type is fast fading out from these "fast," "steep" times. He tells a story of a stream of black flies which came so thick and so fast pouring on, he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... volume of noise attainable. And right here the splendid triumphs of modern invention and discovery are made manifest; electricity and gunpowder come to the relief of puny muscle, simple appliance, and orchestras limited by sparse population. Batteries of artillery thunder exultingly our victory over Primeval Man, beaten at his own game-signally routed and put to shame, pounding his impotent gong and punishing his ridiculous kettledrum in frantic silence, amidst the clash and clang ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... wooded ridge. They were standing in the marshy bottom of a natural hollow amidst a sparse scattering of pine and attenuated spruce. Beyond the ridge lay the waters of the cove. And to the left the broad waters of the river mouth flowed by. It was a desolate, damp spot, but its significance to the two men studying it ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... with which I (1) first noted the unique position (2) of Sparta amongst the states of Hellas, the relatively sparse population, (3) and at the same time the extraordinary power and prestige of the community. I was puzzled to account for the fact. It was only when I came to consider the peculiar institutions of the Spartans that my wonderment ceased. Or rather, it is transferred to the legislator who gave them ...
— The Polity of the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians • Xenophon
... again how changed! The clothes of the Duke of Charmerace littered the floor; the kit-bag was open; and he was wearing the very clothes of Chief-Inspector Guerchard, his seedy top-hat, his cloak. He wore also Guerchard's sparse, lank, black hair, his little, bristling, black moustache. His figure, hidden by the cloak, seemed to have shrunk to the ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... market-gardens and fields and hedges. It was here that Geof had listened to the whistle of the blackbird only the other day, as his boat lay moored to the bank, while he sketched the tiniest of little chapels, nestling modestly in the sparse shade of two dark cypresses. His mind recurred to that peaceful hour, as he chatted in desultory fashion with May, but those quiet musings seemed very far away and unreal in the clear, matter-of-fact atmosphere that that charming young person created about her, even ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... maximum military power. It is a grave question, however, whether a nation with a comparatively sparse population, high wages, and great wealth can safely limit that population in the presence of a capable, ambitious, and efficient rival that covets such opportunities. On the one hand, a population may be so sparse that it has not soldiers enough ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... one plant which may be considered as specially characteristic of the Devonian (though not confined to this series) is the Psilophyton (fig. 77) of Dr Dawson. These singular plants have slender branching stems, with sparse needle-shaped leaves, the young stems being at first coiled up, crosier-fashion, like the young fronds of ferns, whilst the old branches carry numerous spore-cases. The stems and branches seem to have attained a height of two or three feet; and they ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... belongs to the Methodist wing of this camp-meeting, was sent out by the conference to a sparse Western district, where the meeting-houses were a good way apart, and there was any amount of horseback riding to be done. On the cross-roads, near one of the stations, there was a blacksmith shop, where a great, two-fisted, tough old sinner was blowing ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... known world was covered with their settlements, in constant communication with one another through itinerant merchants, who effected an exchange of learning as well as of wares; while the other nations grew more and more isolated, and shut themselves off from even the sparse opportunities of mental culture ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... which in turn presented itself, first ahead of the train, then alongside and then behind, became speedily but 'a dot in the distance,' to use Bob's words over again; the snugly secluded seats of the county gentry, the scattered villages and sparse red-roofed farmhouses, with their outposts of hayricks and herds of cattle and other stock, that one moment appeared and the next disappeared from view behind masses of foliage, all dancing a wild Sir Roger de Coverley sort of country dance, 'down the valleys and over the hills,' until ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... unknown and not even guessed at, it is evident that many mistakes must have been made, and that many an instance, which until now has been considered reliable proof of a so-called single variation, is in fact only a case of vicinism. In reading the sparse literature on sports, numerous cases will be found, which cannot stand this test. In many instances crossing must be looked to as an explanation, [215] and in other cases the evidence relied upon does not suffice to exclude this assumption. Many an old argument has of late ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... think, he really——" she stopped suddenly, frowning at herself. "This dreariness is not our desert," she explained eagerly to the girl, as the horses dragged the carriage over the sandy earth, through whose hard brown surface the harsh, colourless blades of drinn pricked like a few sparse hairs on the head of a shrivelled old man. "In the Sahara, there are four kinds of desert, because Allah put four angels in charge, giving each his own portion. The Angel of the Chebka was cold of nature, with no kindness in his heart, and was jealous of ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... on the flat pulled them together again, and they plodded on by Bardie's Farm, where the scent became sparse, and on to Steg where, for the first time since leaving Templeton, they came upon ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... small, thin, bent, with two big hands resembling the claws of a crab. His colorless hair was sparse and thin, like the down of a young duck, allowing patches of his scalp to be seen. The brown and wrinkled skin of his neck showed big veins which disappeared behind his jaws and came out again at the temples. ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... sailed along I listened to an increasingly delightful commentary upon the islands, some of them barren rocks, or at best giving sparse pasturage for sheep in the early summer. On one of these an eager little flock ran to the water's edge and bleated at us so affectingly that I would willingly have stopped; but Mrs. Todd steered away from the rocks, and scolded at the sheep's mean owner, an acquaintance ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... endow it with more seeds. In springtime the deep-rooted mesquites and palo verdes threw out the golden halo of their flowers until the canyons were aflame; the soggy sahuaros drank a little at each sparse downpour and defied the drought; all the world of desert plants flaunted their pigmented green against the barren sky as if in grim contempt; but the little streams ran weaker and weaker, creeping along under the sand to escape ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... without such permission. The land is well populated because wars have not destroyed it as they have other provinces. The villages are of ordinary size and their houses are small, with walls of stone and adobe mixed and covered with roofs of straw. The grass which grows in this land is short and sparse. There are some rivers, although of small volume. In the middle of the province there is a great lake, in length almost one hundred leagues, and the most thickly peopled land is around its shore; in the middle of the lake there are two islets, and on one of them is ...
— An Account of the Conquest of Peru • Pedro Sancho
... excluded from our common schools, in consequence of the prejudices of teachers and parents. In some of our cities there are schools exclusively for their use, but in the country the colored population is usually too sparse to justify such schools; and white and black children are rarely seen studying under the same roof; although such cases do sometimes occur, and then they are confined to elementary schools. Some colored young men, who could bear the expense, have obtained in European seminaries ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... "Low lies my second charge; a third remains, Which, as a shaft from seasoned bow, not green, Shall pierce the marl. With convents still you sow The land: in other countries sparse and small They swell to cities here. A hundred monks On one late barren mountain dig and pray: A hundred nuns gladden one woodland lawn, Or sing in one small island. Well—'tis well! Yet, balance lost and measure, nought is well. The Angelic Life more common will become Than life of ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... loop-hound. On the occasion of those sparse first nights granted the metropolis of the Middle West he was always present, third row, aisle, left. When a new loop cafe was opened, Jo's table always commanded an unobstructed view of anything worth viewing. On entering he was wont to say, "Hello, Gus," with careless ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... is solid and sparse and all in a shape and largely very largely. Interleaved and successive and a sample of smell all this makes a certainty ...
— Tender Buttons - Objects—Food—Rooms • Gertrude Stein
... rode along she made good use of her eyes. The soil was sandy and porous, and she understood why the rain and water from the few springs disappeared so quickly. At a little distance the grama-grass appeared thick, but near at hand it was seen to be sparse. Bunches of greasewood and cactus plants were interspersed here and there in the grass. What surprised Madeline was the fact that, though she and Florence had seemed to be riding quite awhile, they had apparently not drawn any closer ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... Its sloping shores were covered with the most luxuriant vegetation, which reached upwards almost unbroken, but changing in character with the altitude, until there was a regular series of transitions, from the palms and bananas on the shores of the lake, to the sparse and scanty pines and firs that clung to the upper slopes of ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... he followed a stream, milky with lime, which ran through sparse patches of rush-grass. Grasping these rushes firmly near the root, he pulled up what resembled a young onion-sprout no larger than a shingle-nail. It was tender, and his teeth sank into it with a crunch that promised deliciously of food. ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... ice in the Strait had been out after yesterday's wind. The sea was frozen, but after twelve hours' calm it would be in any case. The dark appearance of the ice is noticeable, but this has been the case of late since the light is poor; little snow has fallen or drifted and the ice flowers are very sparse ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... in the waters of Boston harbor are a living tradition in all New England; the saintly and sainted Peter Williams, whose views of the best means of our elevation are in triumphant activity to-day; William Hamilton, the thinker and actor, whose sparse specimens of eloquence we will one day place in gilded frames as rare and beautiful specimens of Etruscan art—William Hamilton, who, four years afterwards, during the New York riots, when met in the street, loaded down with iron missiles, and asked ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... by. Then two other uniformed figures appeared at the opening to the hall, a sparse elderly man, a blond girl. They stood there talking earnestly together for some seconds, then came slowly down the aisle toward Quillan. It appeared to be an argument about some detail of her work. The girl frowned, stubbornly shaking her head. Near Quillan they separated, started off ...
— Lion Loose • James H. Schmitz
... Every such tract was riven in all directions by deep chasms and narrow ravines, whose sides sometimes rolled off in gentle slopes, but far more often rose as sheer cliffs, with narrow ledges along their fronts. A sparse growth of grass covered certain portions of these lands, and on some of the steep hillsides, or in the canyons, were scanty groves of coniferous evergreens, so stunted by the thin soil and bleak weather that many ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... powerful frame and steady eye were not inviting for personal arbitration of the matter in hand. He put up his two pairs of shears, put on his coat, and walked out of the shed. The time was passed when Red Bill or Terrible Dick (ruffians whom a sparse labour-market rendered necessary evils) would have flung down his shears upon the floor and told the manager that if he didn't like that shearing he could shear his———sheep himself and be hanged to him; or, on refusal of instant payment, would have proposed to ...
— Shearing in the Riverina, New South Wales • Rolf Boldrewood
... not need that heightened condition of spiritual perception which appears to be meant by the opening of the eyes. And what a sight the trembling young man saw! Where he had seen only barren rock or sparse vegetation, he saw that same fiery host that had attended Elijah in his translation, now enclosing the unarmed prophet and himself within a flaming ring. The manifestation, not the presence, of the angel guards was the miracle. It was a momentary unveiling ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... fit us for larger results. It would simplify and deepen our motives, and thus evolve from them nobler deeds and purer sacrifices. To all objections from so-called prudence, to all calculations from sparse results, to all cavils of onlookers who may carp and seek to hinder, we should have one all-sufficient answer. It is not for us to bandy arguments on such points as these. We care nothing for difficulties, for discouragements, for cost. We may think about these till we lose all ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... was over, and the sparse congregation had dwindled away, she went round to the vestry and asked Jarper, the cross old verger, if she could see Mr Pendle. Jarper, who took a paternal interest in the curate, and did not like Miss Mosk over much, since she stinted ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... either left me, or I ceased to notice it, and seeing a little way before me a bank above the road, and a fine grove of sparse and dominant chestnuts, I climbed up thither and turned, ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... oppressed us and the waves of heat which reeked from their toiling bodies sickened us. But there we crouched in our light dresses, easily seen if one had chanced to look, and separated only by an iron fence with sparse, fluttering vines from a mass of tired, quarrelsome, desperate men. Why! any of them might have run us through in a flash as one would lunge at a white rag for the amusement of his companions. Indoors the family were frantic, not ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... the almost perfect autarchy existing there, grave economic problems never really arise. Nowhere else, during the whole course of my various diplomatic wanderings, have I ever seen a happier people, who looked more cheerfully into the future. In view of the comparatively sparse population of the country, intensive agricultural production has only become necessary in a few isolated districts; there are always purchasers in plenty for the rich surplus of raw materials available, and industry has not yet been directed solely towards ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... themselves. Smoke still issues from Krakatau, though the vast rent in the cloven pyramid must materially diminish the power of any future eruption, and Nature's busy hand already covers the torn side of the precipitous cone with a green veil of sparse vegetation. A curious marine growth of weed and moss rooted itself on Krakatau three years after the phenomenal eruption, from seeds floating on the tide or carried by the wind. The thin soil formed by these decaying plants, and enriched ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... man tottered down the bank with the aid of a staff. He wore a dirty blanket capote—and a bicycle cap! He faced them, his head wagging with incipient palsy, and his dim eyes looking out bleared, indifferent, and jaded. Sparse grey hairs decorated his chin. It was a ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... Thevenin was old—so old that he seemed to be falling to pieces as he tottered forward. His skin was yellow and shrivelled, his mouth sunken, his hair sparse and grey; and from this weird face peered strange ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... excellent service in north but sparse in south; domestic satellite system with 12 earth stations (20 additional domestic earth stations are planned) international: 5 submarine cables; microwave radio relay to Italy, France, Spain, Morocco, and Tunisia; coaxial cable to Morocco and Tunisia; participant ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the military fugitives from Longwi. Wayworn, dusty, disheartened, these poor men enter the Legislative, about sunset or after; give the most pathetic detail of the frightful pass they were in:—Prussians billowing round by the myriad, volcanically spouting fire for fifteen hours: we, scattered sparse on the ramparts, hardly a cannoneer to two guns; our dastard Commandant Lavergne no where shewing face; the priming would not catch; there was no powder in the bombs,—what could we do? "Mourir! Die!" answer prompt voices; (Hist. Parl. xvii. ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... arrested my attention, and I turned my head to see and listen. The speaker, who wore a sergeant's chevron and carried one arm in a sling was a tall, loosely made person, with a pale face, light eyes of a washed-out blue tint, and very sparse yellow whiskers. His mouth was weak, both lips being almost alike, so that the organ might have been turned upside down without affecting its expression. His forehead, however, was high and thinly covered with sandy hair. I should have said, as a phrenologist, ...
— The Autobiography of a Quack And The Case Of George Dedlow • S. Weir Mitchell
... follow the track until he started Miss Long-ears from her covert, and then the fun began—the rabbit leaping off in frightened haste, running for life, winding and dodging about over the swells of the sparse grass hillocks, while Ugly, mad with excitement, spread his long, low body down to the chase. How the little fellow would put in his nose close to the ground, staunch on the trail as the best-blooded hound, and making the air ring ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... days. The next event in her calendar, and Johnny's, was the blooming of the fruit trees. She had seen hillside orchards in the west country break into a foam of flower—a sight perhaps as beautiful as any England has to show. But, to her mind, it did not compare with the sparse white bloom which lay like a first hoar frost on her crooked trees and showed cold and delicate against the pale blue sky. After that, nearly every day, there was something fresh and interesting for Mr. Gillat and Julia, so that the March wind was forgotten, except in the ill-effect ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... name was Old Terran Italian, but he had slanted Mongoloid eyes and a sparse little chin-beard, which accounted for his nickname. The amount of intermarriage that's gone on since the First Century, any resemblance between people's names and their appearances is purely coincidental. Oscar Fujisawa, ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper
... dentura, together with many trees of brilliant foliage similar in color to our Autumn tints. There was also a very tall bush with clusters of bright yellow blossoms, in size much like our wild rose. When nearer the crater, the trees became small and the vegetation more sparse, until we reached the point where we left our chairs and commenced our final ascent, about one quarter of a mile, over broken pieces of lava. Then we arrived at the halting-point and gazed on the ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... women who spent as much time as they could in visiting his theatre and rejoicing in the sight of his brave gestures and the sound of his vibrant voice. It was even said that they had a badge by which they could know each other; although on the face of it, judging by what sparse scraps of information concerning the nature of woman I have been able painfully to collect, I should say that segregation would be, in such a case as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 28, 1917 • Various
... one hand, and often a straw in the mouth—he did not smoke—was familiar in the yard where he turned the handle of the separator, or in the fields and cowsheds, from daybreak to dusk, save for the hours of dinner and tea, which he ate in the farm kitchen, making sparse and surprising comments. To his peculiar whistles and calls the cattle and calves, for all their rumination and stubborn shyness, were amazingly responsive. It was a pretty sight to see them pushing against each other round him—for, after all, he was as much the source of their persistence, ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... of Maryburgh, in Fife, and the most celebrated of four brothers, John, Robert, James and William Adam, was born at Kirkcaldy in 1728. For few famous men have we so little biographical material, and contemporary references to him are sparse. He certainly studied at the university of Edinburgh, and probably received his first instruction in architecture from his father, who gave proofs of his own skill and taste in the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary (now demolished). His mother was the aunt of Dr W. Robertson, the first ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... everything, so much so that the stalk yields to the grower's suggestions and becomes fleshy and swells into an ellipse similar to the turnip, of which it possesses all the merits of corpulence, flavour and delicacy; only the strange product serves as a base for a few sparse leaves, the last protests of a real stem that refuses to lose its attributes entirely. This ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre |
