"Crumbled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the brave that fell When thy heaven crumbled into hell? Can I banish from before thine eyes Haunting visions under haggard skies? Blazing home and blackened plain, Can I make them fair again? Can I ever heal ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 4, 1914 • Various
... this great house after the young King's abandonment of it is very remarkable, and shows how important was the royal position, notwithstanding the manner in which it had been exploite, and the mere nominal power of its actual possessor. The house of Angus crumbled into the dust as soon as their young prisoner escaped their hands. They took refuge in England, where they vainly attempted on various occasions to negotiate for their return, but with no success. The name continued obnoxious to James during his whole life. Sir ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... an old and grey porter's lodge, and an old and grey gateway, with two tall, moss-grown stone pillars, and an iron gate between them. On the top of the pillars were crumbled stone shields, seemingly held in place by a lion on ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... Alderman's face was brighter: it was all a lie, he said. The revolt had crumbled away; my Lord Sussex was impregnably fortified in York with guns from Hull; Lord Pembroke was gathering forces at Windsor; Lords Clinton, Hereford and Warwick were converging towards York to relieve the siege. And as if to show Isabel ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... robbery, or at any rate they would risk it if it were, have left their own pitcher and taken the better looking one; but always as soon as they have come within sight of the village huts, the new pitcher has crumbled into dust, and the water in it been spilt on the ground; and the worst of it is, when they have returned to fetch their own discarded pitcher, they find it also ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... straight into the middle of the Fianna, and gave his sword good feeding on their bodies, till they broke away before him and made no stand till Lugaidh's Son turned round against him. And those two fought a great fight, till their swords were bent and their spears crumbled away, and they lost their golden shields. And at the last Lugaidh's Son made a stroke of his sword that cut through the foreigner's sword, and then he made another stroke that cut his heart in two halves. And he came back high and proud ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... memories) of our symbols, our apparatus and material of war. Then innumerable triumphs of our old, bastard, half-commercial, fine-art were presently condemned, great oil paintings, done to please the half-educated middle-class, glared for a moment and were gone, Academy marbles crumbled to useful lime, a gross multitude of silly statuettes and decorative crockery, and hangings, and embroideries, and bad music, and musical instruments shared this fate. And books, countless books, too, and bales ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... there came a cracking from the front of the house, the corner-post of the porch, to which the boat had been fastened less than five minutes before, fell with a crash and the front of the house crumbled. There was a moment's pause, and then the whole structure keeled over, away from the boat, and with a rending and cracking of timbers, broke from its foundation. Over and over it heeled, and it looked ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... Battery Gregg, on Cummings' Point, and on the right Fort Moultrie and Battery Bee, on Sullivan's Island, were pointed out, till at length the cry rang out, "Fort Sumter! Fort Sumter!" Battered and crumbled almost to shapelessness, it rose before us like some vast monster in the centre of the harbor. As we drew nearer, we could distinguish the sentinels on the ramparts, whose bayonets glistened in the rays of ...
— The Flag Replaced on Sumter - A Personal Narrative • William A. Spicer
... London, a region that had once been genteel, but was now broken up into apartments. Squalid babies, with wan, pathetic faces, pullulated on the doorsteps; they showed from behind dingy windows at the breasts of haggard women. The fronts of the houses were black, the plaster had crumbled away, the paint had peeled off. It was the ruins of a minor Carthage, and, like Marius, I was lost in mournful reverie; my companion remarked, "These houses are going up; they now pay 7 per cent." He was perfectly justified. ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... monuments of millions lie here, mingled in the common corruption of the tomb, and the life of the present age shrinks away in terror. Long lines of lofty aqueducts come slowly down from the Alban hills, but these crumbled stones and broken arches tell a story more eloquent ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... put together with love and pride. The impossible lilies and roses, the huge peonies, and gigantic hollyhocks which composed its pattern, had been formed, stitch by stitch, by unknown fingers, probably now crumbled ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... Southern resistance in arms crumbled in 1865 when once Sherman and Grant were under way no doubt startled foreign observers, but in British opinion, at least, the end had been foreseen from the moment Sherman reached the sea at Savannah. The desperate courage of the South was admired, but regarded as futile. ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... came to Black Hill to find Mr. Touris and his sister yet at the breakfast-table. Mrs. Alison, who might have been up hours, sat over against a dour-looking master of the house who sipped his tea and crumbled his toast and had few good words for anything. But he was glad and said that he was ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... to melt up a bronze statue for swords or to haul away the stones of her temples for building. The Alpheios kept eating away its banks and cutting under statues and monuments. Many a beautiful thing crumbled and fell into the river and was rolled on down to the sea. Men sometimes found a bronze helmet or a marble head in the bed of ...
— Buried Cities: Pompeii, Olympia, Mycenae • Jennie Hall
... the sepulchre. A voice warned him in what direction to proceed; and not waiting for the domestic, he groped his way forward through a narrow passage. At first, Delme thought there was a wall on either side him; but as he made a false step, and the bones crumbled beneath, he knew that it was a wall, formed of the bleached remains of the bygone dead. As he drew nearer the voice, he was guided by the lanthorn brought by George's companion; and towards this he proceeded, almost overpowered by the horrible ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... but it was Maud who made the coffee. And how good it was! My contribution was canned beef fried with crumbled sea-biscuit and water. The breakfast was a success, and we sat about the fire much longer than enterprising explorers should have done, sipping the hot black coffee and talking over ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... corner of the dam, where a water-rat had burrowed, and there the water went seeping and creeping, gnawing ever at the hidden breach. Presently in the night came a mizzling rain, and far among the hills a cloud brake open, and the mill-pond flowed over and under, and the dam crumbled away, and the Mill shook, and the whole river ran ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... form, dimpled cheeks and flowing hair, decorated in rich habiliments of gorgeous dyes, her waist encircled by a zone of diamonds, and her arms with bracelets of precious stones. Wonder stricken at what we saw we gazed in silence upon her, and while we gazed the body slowly crumbled away and in half an hour it had dissolved in air leaving but a handful of dust and the glittering gems that had decked her a bride of death, to mark the spot where she lay. Turning another knob another door opened like the previous ones, and in a niche ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... of Barbara Wallace crumbled. Cummings had not learned through her that I was unsuccessful in the south; nor had she spilled a word to him that she shouldn't, or they'd have had the dope on where Worth had found that suitcase, and ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... a small, round hole in the surface of the prostrate trunk. Into this he crumbled a few bits of dry bark, minutely shredded, after which he inserted the tip of his pointed stick, and, sitting astride the bole of the tree, spun the slender rod rapidly ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... attempt their capture were the elephant and the rhinoceros. They boasted that they weren't afraid of rocks; nevertheless they came together to back up each other's courage. Half way up the slope they stuck. They were too heavy for so steep a path. The ground crumbled from under them, the dog worried them, the Man struck them, and away they went, bumping down the hill, rolling over and over. They never stopped till they had reached the bottom, where they lay on their backs with their feet in the air, grunting and ...
— Christmas Outside of Eden • Coningsby Dawson
... answer. A bit of earth crumbled from the broken side of the mound and made me start, but I saw nothing. So I stepped away from the door and back to my comrade, who had edged nearer the place, though his face showed that ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... sect became, little by little, mistress of almost the whole country. Then it subdivided, crumbled up into little churches which excommunicated each other. In Southern Numidia, the citadels of orthodox Donatism, so to speak, were Thimgad and Bagai. Carthage, with its primate, was the official centre. But in the Byzacena ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... He put all his ready money and all he could borrow into the venture, only to find there were no cellars, indispensable for making ices and beverages on the premises, and that the walls and floors were so old that they crumbled when repairs were started. ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... clung to the balcony rail, staring down at the broken city. It lay strewn and flattened as though, not ten minutes, but ten thousand years of time had crumbled it into ruins. ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... most primitive type, imperfect in shape and barbed. A few pieces of charcoal were also found at the same time and place. Dr. Booth was fully aware of the importance of the discovery, and tried to preserve everything found, but upon touching the skull it crumbled to dust, and some of the other bones broke into small pieces and partly crumbled away; but enough was preserved to fully establish the fact that they are ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... up, and so did he, I conclude. Alas! the earth crumbled beneath his hands; a deep groan escaped his bosom—not for himself, but for his wife and children, and all he held dear in the world. He could hold on no longer. I also failed in my attempt to spring up. Down I went; but what was ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... cold, cold light, how much of beauty and love it has congealed! It has fallen like a mantle of snow over the warm, living life of the earth; and blooming flowers, that sent up odours on the soft air, have crumbled to dust, and bright summer waters that reflected the heavens in their blue depths, and glittered in the light of stars and moon and sun, have now been congealed into solid, dull opaque masses, which yield not to the tread of ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... house-door, From there they conduct us Right back to the gate! When we begin singing 340 The housewife runs quickly And brings to the window A loaf and a knife. And then we sing loudly, 'Oh, give us the whole loaf, It cannot be cut And it cannot be crumbled, For you it is quicker, For us ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... representative of the social tendency of his life. It seems to us that the Thackeray theory—the conclusion that he is a man who loves to depict madness, and has no sensibilities to the finer qualities of character—crumbled quite away before that lecture upon Steele. We know that it was not considered the best; we know that many of the delighted audience were not sufficiently familiar with literary history fully to understand the ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... Max. All considerations of prudence, of caution, crumbled away under the influence of the intense pity he felt for ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... earnestly. One man stood up with his back to Chris, one hand gripping the outside ragged bark of the arbour frame with a peculiarly nervous, restless force. Chris could see the hand turned back distinctly. A piece of bark was being crumbled under a strong thumb. Such a thumb! Chris had ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... worth nothing to Europe; it was an idea that set them crusading. Nothing else seemed so unpractical and feeble as the gospel of Christ; but it crumbled the Roman Empire into dust, and has kept the world guessing and maneuvering ever since—never more than to-day. On the other hand, if you propose an easy job, something that can be done with one hand tied behind you, and your attention is diverted, it is apt to ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... hurricanes and marvellous tempests; Lightnings and flames he saw in readiness, That speedily on all his people fell; Apple and ash, their spear-shafts all burned, Also their shields, e'en the golden bosses, Crumbled the shafts of their trenchant lances, Crushed their hauberks and all their steel helmets. His chevaliers he saw in great distress. Bears and leopards would feed upon them next; Adversaries, dragons, wyverns, serpents, Griffins were there, ...
— The Song of Roland • Anonymous
... art humbled, Babylon! Humbled, crumbled, Babylon! Vengeance leaves no gated wall, Vengeance leaves no gilded hall, Vengeance blasts and buries ...
— Soldier Songs and Love Songs • A.H. Laidlaw
... of this idea of life among the crystals, we must remember that our hardest rocks and metals are composed of crystals, and that the dirt and earth upon which we grow and live are but crumbled rock and miniature crystals. Therefore the very dust under our feet is alive. There is nothing dead. There is no transformation of "dead matter" into live plant matter, and then into live animal matter. The chemicals are alive, and ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... neared the corner of California and Montgomery streets, where the crumbled bank walls had been transformed into a temporary habitation, he saw a crowd evidently pressing toward it. The bank doors were closed, though it was not yet three o'clock. Now and then people broke from the throng and wandered disconsolately away. One of these, a gray-haired ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... Socialist helped the matter? Men needed thousand years' education to make their schemes practicable; they ignored all this blindness, all selfishness, and overgrowth of the passions: no wonder these facts knobbed themselves up against their system, and so, in every instance it crumbled to pieces. The things are facts, and here; there is no use in denying that; and it is a fact, too, that almost every life seems a wasted failure, compared with what it might have been. Such hard, grimy problems ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... there would have been a distinct and calamitous set-back in the world movement. It would have been a reaction toward particularism, and how far might it not have gone? Into what granulations might not our society have crumbled? The South's principle once recognised, there could have been no valid or lasting tie between States. Counties even might have assumed to nullify, and towns to stand apart sufficient unto themselves. When the thing was doubtful with us, the North by no means escaped the infection. The New York ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... promontory; and that other brazen Pallas, called, by pre-eminence, "the Beautiful;" and the enormous Colossus of ivory and of gold, "the Immortal Maid"—the protecting goddess of the Parthenon—these have perished. But whilst the fingers of time have crumbled the Pentelic marble, and the glorious statuary has been broken to pieces by vandal hands, and the gold and brass have been melted in the crucibles of needy monarchs and converted into vulgar money, the philosophic thought ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... received the people into its low arched door every Sabbath for many centuries. There were many tombstones about it, some level with the ground, some raised on blocks of stone, on low pillars, moss-grown and weather-worn; and probably these were but the successors of other stones that had quite crumbled away, or been buried by the accumulation of dead men's dust above them. In the centre of the churchyard stood an old yew-tree, with immense trunk, which was all decayed within, so that it is a wonder how the tree retains any life,—which, nevertheless, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... figures, I shall continue to think that at least one of them, and very possibly all except the two old wooden ones, are by Tabachetti. The foot of the man binding Christ to the column has crumbled away, either because the clay was bad, or from insufficient baking. This is why the figure is propped up with a piece of wood. The damp has made the rope slack, so that the pulling action of the figure is in great measure destroyed, its effect being cancelled by its ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... a chalkpit among the rocks at the north of the forest, just beyond the edge of trees. The chalk was soft and in some places crumbled to a fine powder, so that when he had rolled himself for a few minutes in the dust all his feathers became as white as snow. This fact gave to Jim Crow a bright idea. No longer black, but white as a dove, he flew away to the forest and ...
— Twinkle and Chubbins - Their Astonishing Adventures in Nature-Fairyland • L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum
... are made in it with a buckle or a piece of charcoal. It stands with a light beside it on the table all through the festal season. On New Year's Day and Epiphany, before sunrise, a little of the cake is crumbled with salt and given to the cattle. The rest is kept till the day when the cattle are driven out to pasture for the first time in spring. It is then put in the herdsman's bag, and at evening is divided among the cattle ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... mused Malcourt, gazing affably at the rather blond girl who crumbled her bread and looked occasionally and blankly at him, occasionally and affectionately at the French count, her escort, who was consuming lobster with characteristic ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... night alone saved the English from being driven at once, and on the spot, from their defences. The walls were of the old {p.304} sort, constructed when the art of gunnery was in its infancy, and brick and stone crumbled to ruins before the heavy cannon which had ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... Seminoles, fierce and warlike, whose warriors fought on foot and on horseback, had avenged in countless bloody forays their fellow-Indian tribes, whose very names had perished under Spanish rule. The churches and forts had crumbled into nothing; only the cannon and the brazen bells, half buried in the rotting mould, remained to mark the place where once stood spire and citadel. The deserted plantations, the untravelled causeways, no longer marred the face of the tree-clad land, for even their sites ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... from the castle of the king, and the brightness of many candles streamed from all the windows; within was dance and song, and King Waldemar and the young, richly-attired maids of honor danced together. The morn now came; and as soon as the sun appeared, the whole town and the king's palace crumbled together, and one tower after the other; and at last only a single one remained standing where the castle had been before,* and the town was so small and poor, and the school boys came along with their books under their ...
— A Christmas Greeting • Hans Christian Andersen
... we were little children?—how little the surprise of the first shock mattered compared to the dread and horror of waiting for the second? That is how I feel in this place today. I stood on the rock I thought eternal; and without a word of warning it reeled and crumbled under me. I was safe with an infinite wisdom watching me, an army marching to Salvation with me; and in a moment, at a stroke of your pen in a cheque book, I stood alone; and the heavens were empty. That was the first shock of the earthquake: I ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... on ringing, a spirit came singing, And smiled as he crumbled the tree; 'Yon wood does but perish new seedlings to cherish, And the world is ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... thousand poisonous insects. On our left, opposite the falling church, was another ruin; but its vulgar features owned none of the green and mossy dignity of age, which gave a melancholy beauty to the former. It was a glaring pile of naked dust and rubbish, and its shot crumbled walls and riddled doors told the tale of its destruction. The entire front on that side of the plaza was in ruins, with the exception of one stout building on the corner diagonally opposed to us. The northern side was inclosed by a long, low building, with its elevated doors ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... the eminent poet-naturalist of the Mountains of California, had a habit at the table of "crumming" his bread—that is, toying with it, until it crumbled to pieces in his hand. He would, at the same time, be sending out a steady stream of the most entertaining, interesting, fascinating, and instructive lore about birds and beasts, trees and flowers, glaciers and rocks, that ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... did strike on the shelving part of the bank of sand, and the wind blowing from the higher part of the bank, the weight of the ship thus pressed by the wind, and working towards the lower part of the shelving of the bank, the sand crumbled away from the ship, and thereby and with the wind she was set on-float again. Another observed, that if the ship had struck higher on the bank or deeper, when her sails had been spread, with the force of her way, they could not in the least ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... up-to-date tourists. But even, granting all this to be true, the Palisades were already old, thrown up long ages before, between a rift in the earth's surface, where it cooled in columnar form. The rocky mould which held it, being of softer material, finally disintegrated and crumbled away, leaving the cliff with its peculiar ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... before the sun went down he had made a hole that his head, his neck, and his ever-beautiful ruffs could pass. His great broad shoulders were too large, but he could now strike downward, which gave him fourfold force; the snow-crust crumbled quickly, and in a little while he sprang from his ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... for a moment think of regaining Olivier's love. It was too late! She no longer cared for him enough. Or perhaps she cared for him too much. All her trust in him crumbled away, all that was left in her secret heart of her faith and hope in him. She did not tell herself that she had scorned him, and had discouraged him, and driven him to his new love, or that his love was innocent: and that after all we are not masters of ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... kindly said, and Phineas was flattered and comforted. He could not, however, make Lord Cantrip understand the whole truth. For him the dream of a life of politics was over for ever. He had tried it, and had succeeded beyond his utmost hopes; but, in spite of his success, the ground had crumbled to pieces beneath his feet, and he knew that he could never recover the niche in the world's gallery which ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... needed to have asked this question. How could she be otherwise than "flat-spirited," "a poor companion," and a "sad drag" on the gaiety of those who were light-hearted and happy! Her honest plan for earning her own livelihood had fallen away, crumbled to ashes; after all her preparations, not a pupil had offered herself; and, instead of being sorry that this wish of many years could not be realised, she had reason to be glad. Her poor father, nearly sightless, ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Libyan Desert. They are placed along the great Egyptian natural burying place in the western side of the Nile valley, as a sort of boulevard of the tombs of kings and nobles. Most of them are constructed of stone, although several are of adobe or sun-dried brick. The latter have crumbled into great conical mountains, like those of the ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... dilapidations, and estimate what was wanting. The great house had never been thoroughly furnished since the Bradfords had sold it, and it was, besides, in manifest need of repair. Damp corners, and piles of crumbled plaster told their own tale. A builder must be sent to survey it, and on the most sanguine computation, it could hardly be made habitable till ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... upon the mountains, whose shades were cool to the old Romans as to us, than anywhere within the walls of the city. Here we look out at the same Tivoli and the same Praeneste glittering in the sunshine, embowered among the far-off valleys, which were dear to them; and the blue mountains have not crumbled away into ruins. Within Rome itself we can see nothing as ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... are, then the reader will not fail to see how large a part of the argument in Supernatural Religion has crumbled to ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... would be a great pity," said Quicksilver, with his mischievous smile. "You would make a very handsome marble statue, it is true, and it would be a considerable number of centuries before you crumbled away; but, on the whole, one would rather be a young man for a few years, than a stone image for a ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... and they had been in ruins, and of no great character or size but this place was of proportions that stunned him, and it had not been desecrated by the hand of man, nor had it been crumbled by the hand of time. It was a stupendous tomb. It had been a city. It was just as it had been left by its builders. The little houses were there, the smoke-blackened stains of fires, the pieces of pottery scattered about cold hearths, the stone hatchets; and stone pestles and mealing-stones ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... I fell, it seemed that the great hall burst open and crumbled into flakes of fire round me. Then a great wind blew: there was a sound as the sound of Worlds rushing down the flood of ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... in other minds, and ever will remain the same, although your reflected semblance vary in a thousand ways, changeable as the hearts of those who view thee. One of these fragile mirrors, that ever doted on thine image, is about to be broken, crumbled to dust. But everteeming Nature will create another and another, and thou wilt loose nought by ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... language,—playful and picturesque, with fine touches of humorous pathos,—and conveys as perfect a picture as ever was drawn of a decayed English country-house; and among other rooms, most of which have since crumbled down and disappeared, he dashes off the grim aspect of this kitchen,—which, moreover, he peoples with witches, engaging Satan himself as head-cook, who stirs the infernal caldrons that seethe and bubble over the fires. This letter, and others relative to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... to their place on the carriage, lay a large pile of pine logs, so decayed that one could run his walking-stick through them. Near by, a building filled with charcoal was bursting open and the coal going to waste on the ground. The smelting works were also much crumbled by time. The schoolhouse was still used. Every day one of the daughters assembles her smaller brothers and sisters there and school keeps. The district library contained nearly one hundred readable books which were ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... brooded over it day and night, had told himself a thousand times that where a higher interest is at stake, the misery of the individual counts for nothing, and a conscientious leader must armor himself with indifference. And now he stood there and observed with terror how all his good resolutions crumbled, and nothing remained in him but an impassioned, boundless pity for these driven home-keepers, who prepared themselves with such quiet resignation. It was as if they were taking their life into their hands like a costly vessel in order to carry ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... vice-like grip: One face was calm, the other sad as death, With something in it of a pleading look, As might befall a man that dies at prayer. Amazed, the workman hallooed to his mates To see the wonder; but ere they could come, The figures crumbled and were ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... backward. It was his preparation for the leap. He launched forward. I rushed precipitately upward, feeling the air about me vibrating, it seemed, with an impending disaster. Chapman had landed on the further side of the break, but the cruel, treacherous rock crumbled beneath his impact, and I saw his staggering form turning backward. Another instant and his descending body was below me, plunging to the floor of the abyss. I turned, and then, my son, I felt the marvel of the ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... had fallen they had carried with them over the sides the greater part of the standing and running rigging with every spar, while the shrouds and ropes that had been dragged across the deck were reduced to cinders which crumbled at a touch. ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... and gnashing of teeth. Did the Germans destroy it or was it the rats that undermined its foundations? I fancy it was like the celebrated "One Horse Shay"—every brick in the wall that surrounded the hole had been wearing away for years, and at the stroke of Fate all crumbled into dust. We were able to do without our old friend, as Fritz very kindly built up in the churchyard at Fromelles a large red earthwork that could be seen for miles, and which our big guns sought unsuccessfully to destroy ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... the stream, the camp and the portage, the guests did justice to the savoury viands, and at last leaned back in repletion, while Rette took off the plates and cups; the spoons and forks, and set in their stead a huge pot of crumbled tobacco with a tin box ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... and down to the Revolution, hanging was the most common mode of execution in France; consequently, in every town, and almost in every village, there was a permanent gibbet, which, owing to the custom of leaving the bodies to hang till they crumbled into dust, was very rarely without having some corpses or skeletons attached to it. These gibbets, which were called fourches patibulaires or justices, because they represented the authority of the law, were generally composed ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... this man said to those about him, which was quickly repeated all over the circle, that the lost man had fallen upon a mass of crumbled rubbish with which the pit was half choked up, and that his fall had been further broken by some jagged earth at the side. He lay upon his back with one arm doubled under him, and according to his own belief had hardly ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... to snare me; on moonlit mountains, laughing and calling; in the streets of crowded cities, beckoning and disappearing in the crowd—and everywhere I have fled from you, holding above my head the sign of God's power in me, my gift and my mission.—What use? What use? It has crumbled, and ...
— The Faith Healer - A Play in Three Acts • William Vaughn Moody
... westward. Between us and modern Richmond there were several high hills, up which the poor dripping horses panted on summer days, a railroad station, and a broad slum-like bottom vaguely described as the "Old Market." Our prosperity, with our traditions, had crumbled around us, yet there were still left the ancient church, with its shady graveyard, and an imposing mansion or two inherited from the forgotten splendour of former days. The other Richmond—that "up-town" I heard sometimes mentioned—I had never seen, for my early horizon was bounded ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... catch a glimpse of before it went into the black portfolio. And suddenly I saw the letter about the Jewish detention camp, which I had forgotten all about. I saw the close lines of my writing, and it seemed as though the edge of the precipice crumbled and I went shooting down. A cold sweat broke ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... vacant attention soon found livelier attraction in the spectacle of a little hungry robin, which came and chirruped on the twigs of the leafless cherry-tree nailed against the wall near the casement. The remains of my breakfast of bread and milk stood on the table, and having crumbled a morsel of roll, I was tugging at the sash to put out the crumbs on the window-sill, when Bessie came running ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... dozen feet away when the final collapse of the bridge began. Without noise, but in a jerky way, it crumbled to an ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... plates of fruit, and shortly afterward he found himself trying to balance upon his knee a plate of pineapple soaked in spice and wine, a fork, a napkin starched as stiffly as a sheet of linoleum, and a piece of cake which crumbled at a look. It was a difficult bit of juggling, but he managed to keep one or two of the articles in the ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... be cleaned with a little dry bread crumbled up and rubbed gently, but firmly, over with the open hand. Cloth covers may be washed with a sponge dipped in a mixture made from the white of an egg beaten to a stiff froth and afterwards allowed to settle. To clean grease ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... must see it again; I must.... Good Heavens! this is horrible, horrible; if I had found a skeleton it could not have been worse! The rose, which last night seemed freshly plucked, full of color and perfume, is brown, dry—a thing kept for centuries between the leaves of a book—it has crumbled into dust between my fingers. Horrible, horrible! But why so, pray? Did I not know that I was in love with a woman dead three hundred years? If I wanted fresh roses which bloomed yesterday, the Countess Fiammetta or any little sempstress in Urbania might have given ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... Government. Their very inability to prevent the consummation of that Union, imbittered them. Hence their determination to seize every possible occasion and pretext afterward to destroy it, believing, as they doubtless did, that upon the crumbled and mouldering ruins of a dissevered Union and ruptured Republic, Monarchical ideas might the more easily take root and grow. But experience had already taught them that it would be long before their real object ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... out of the thicket a floating ball of thistle-down. 'It bloweth where it listeth,' he said. 'Soldier or shepherd, what matter now she is gone?' and rising to his feet and coming down the sloping lawn, overflowing with the shade of the larches, he climbed through the hawthorns growing out of a crumbled wall, and once at the edge of the lake, he stood waiting for nothing seemingly but to hear the tiresome clanking call of the stonechat, and he compared its reiterated call with the words 'atonement,' 'forgiveness,' 'death,' 'calamity,' words always clanking in his heart, for she might be lying ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... discipline or coordinating power, and weakened by jealousy and suspicion. The wonder is that it lasted fifteen months. Then came the "April Grand Jury," under the foremanship of a courageous and resourceful business man. The regime of criminals crumbled; forty-nine indictments, involving ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... no record of the outrage; it was not put into any book; and, save among the survivors, all remembrance of it vanished as the logs of the forsaken cabin rotted and crumbled. ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... say, he was an atheist. He had the courage to die for what he believed to be right. The murder of Bruno will never, in my judgment, be completely and perfectly revenged until from the city of Rome shall be swept every vestige of priests and pope—until from the shapeless ruins of St. Peter's, the crumbled Vatican and the fallen cross of Rome, rises a monument sacred to the philosopher, the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... before ten o'clock, and it was four before the tired, headachy, cramped members of the immediate family group regathered there, to discard the crape-smothered hats, and the odorous, sombre furs, and to talk quietly together as they sipped hot soup and crumbled rolls. Everything had been changed, the flowers were gone, furniture was back in place, and the upper front room had been opened widely to the suddenly spring-like afternoon. There was not a fallen violet petal to remind her descendants ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... oldest of all stories. He had heard it a hundred times before, but never had it left him quite so cold and pulseless as he was now. And yet, even as the palace of the wonderful ideal he had builded crumbled about him in ruin, there rose up out of the dust of it a thing new-born and tangible for him. Slowly his eyes turned to the beautiful head bowed in its attitude of prayer. The blood began to surge back into ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... again, and the two men started to run for a few yards, then turned to look back, as, after several warning cracks, the whole of the great white timber-built mill literally crumbled down over its undermined foundations and ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... attack upon the morale of the troops was followed by an unforeseen assault upon a quiet sector, which succeeded in piercing the line at numerous points. In the confusion that followed the whole structure of the defense crumbled, and ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... the Christians finished their slightly built edifices when an autumnal tempest of the kind came scouring from the mountains. The camp was immediately overflowed. Many of the houses, undermined by the floods or beaten by the rain, crumbled away and fell to the earth, burying man and beast beneath their ruins. Several valuable lives were lost, and great numbers of horses and other animals perished. To add to the distress and confusion of the camp, the daily supply of provisions suddenly ceased, for ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... the lazy people brought their breakfast. When it came, Irene crumbled a little about, threw some into the fireplace, and managed to make the tray look just ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... grinning skulls was ranged round the wall of the churchyard, and the sexton, who gave us admittance to the church, taking up one to show it off, it all crumbled into dust, which filled the air like ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... greedy courtier embezzled the money intended for this purpose. Whatever the truth, a literary Countess, Lady Dorset, repaired the omission twenty years afterwards, but by the following century her memorial had crumbled away, and was replaced by a copy, for which Gray's friend Mason collected a sum of money. After Spenser's burial this part of the transept was dedicated to the memory of poets, and amongst many forgotten names are others of undying fame. Before ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith
... lithographs—solemn facades of brick with classic white lanterns lifted against the inky smoke of a burning city; the pages of a lady's book, elegant engravings of hooped and gallooned females; and the scent of crumbled flowers. ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... bread, and put the crusts in water to soften. Then break them up small into the pan of crumbled bread. Cut up a pound of butter in the pan of bread. Rub the herbs to powder, and have two table-spoonfuls of sweet-marjoram and two of sweet basil, or more of each if the turkey is very large. Chop the pot-herbs, and pound the spice. Then add the salt and pepper, and mix all ...
— Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry Cakes, and Sweetmeats • Miss Leslie
... done to it, rises with rugged walls precipitously from the river. It is wholly unrestored; just enough care has been bestowed to prevent its utter destruction, but otherwise it stands as it has stood and crumbled from year to year. We climbed painfully up to the highest steep of its loftiest tower, and looked down on the wonderful scene spread out in the glory of a summer sunset. Below, a clear trickling stream flowed ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... cold: he had to fetch Captain Scottie's pea-jacket to wear at the wheel. On the long spilling crests, that crumbled and spread running layers of froth in their hurry shoreward, the Pomerania rode home. She knew her landfall and seemed to quicken. Steadily swinging on the jade-green surges, she buried her nose almost to the hawse-pipes, then lifted until her streaming ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... not two Angels, but what I was in search of. I uttered a cry of joy and called out to my sister: "Come, follow me, we shall be able to get through." We hurried on at once, scrambling over the ruins which crumbled under our feet. Papa, aghast at our boldness, called out to us, but we ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... must bow to it? You find a vague memory of it at best in the useless grandeurs about you, and you seem to be looking at a structure of which the stubborn earth-scented foundations alone remain, with the carved and painted shell that bends above them, while the central substance has utterly crumbled away. ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... 5th of August, 1791, the first anniversary of the famous night of the 4th of August, 1790, when feudality crumbled to atoms, that the National Assembly commenced the revision of the constitution. It was a solemn and imposing act, was this comprehensive coup d'oeil cast by legislators at the end of their career, over the ruins they had scattered, and the foundations they had laid in their course. ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... walls. So far, certainly, this was no new experience. It was past four. He waited for the shadows to gather. Light thickened beyond his windows; gradually the outflanking wall and part of a projecting terrace crumbled away in the darkness, as if Night were slowly reducing the castle. The figures on the tapestry in his room stood out faintly. The gallery, seen through his open door, barred with black spaces between the mullioned windows, presently became obliterated, as if invaded ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... what? For whom? There did not seem to be a living creature in the vicinity, though perhaps some of the poor things who fled out into the night across the fields for safety, have come back to dig out a little home under the crumbled stone. One or two houses remained standing, which seems a miracle, as petrole-soaked fire-brands were thrown systematically into every habitation. As we passed, rather quickly, I counted ninety houses in ruins and about half a mile from the road, a magnificent chateau, a victim as well ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... as well as I know anything in the world," said Annie, "that that message Junius brought you meant nothing." And, taking the crumpled letter from his hand, she threw it on the few embers that remained in the fireplace; and, as it blazed and crumbled into black ashes, she said: "Now that is the end of ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... small, peaked windows, had not been built in modern times. The furniture was almost in keeping: roomy settees, broad, plain, ribbed-back chairs, with faded worked covers, the task of fingers crumbled into dust, heavy bookcases loaded with proportionably ponderous or curiously quaint volumes, and mirrors, with their frames like coffins covered with black velvet and relieved ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... the meteorites slowly crumbled on top, the dust of disintegration hovering in a compact mass about the body. More and more of it melted away. The spinning motion grew irregular, eccentric, as the center of gravity was changed by ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... him all that he, according to some highly original conception of ultimate justice, deserves. As for England being 'on the crumble,' I consider it a conservative description of what has been going on in that country for years. In most departments of life England has crumbled, literally crumbled away. What Mr. Carville omits is the emergence of the new England, an England he doesn't like, an England we shall probably find hard to assimilate and which may quite conceivably drive us to do what Mr. Carville has sagely done already—come ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... escape the explosions. Many of the Island guns were dismounted, and the place was fast becoming untenable. At the same time the English batteries on the land side were pushing their work of destruction with relentless industry, and walls and bastions crumbled under their fire. The French labored with energy under cover of night to repair the mischief; closed the shattered West Gate with a wall of stone and earth twenty feet thick, made an epaulement to protect what was ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... nation neither enslaved nor enslaving! Once, and but once, has treason dishonored it. In that insane hour when the guiltiest and bloodiest rebellion of all time hurled their fires upon this fort, you, sir [turning to General Anderson], and a small, heroic band, stood within these now crumbled walls, and did gallant and just battle for the honor and defense of the nation's banner. In that cope of fire, that glorious flag still peacefully waved to the breeze above your head unconscious of harm as the stars and skies above it. Once it was shot ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... gambler: Wall Street was his goal; to adventure there, as one of the great single-eyed Cyclopean man-eaters, his fond ambition; and he had conceived the distillery trust as a means to attain it; but the structure tumbled about his ears; other edifices of his crumbled at the same time; he found himself beset, his solvency endangered, and there was the Tabor stock, quite as good as gold; Roger had just died, and it was enough to save him.—Save? That was a strange way to be remembering it to-day, when Fate grinned at him out of a dreadful ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... nervously, twisting his unlighted cigarette in his fingers until it crumbled, his mouth tight, his eyebrows drawn together. Then he seized his hat and overcoat and flung himself out of the door ...
— The Devil - A Tragedy of the Heart and Conscience • Joseph O'Brien
... to the floor. A tear trickled from his eye. His voice had risen, and crumbled to a weakling falsetto, and ceased. He was an old, old man about to be bereft of ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... pointed. In several places the concrete spillway had crumbled down to a ragged edge, showing that the solid wall was giving way. The amount of water flowing over the dam was greater now. The creek was steadily rising. Down the valley the horseman with the red flag was but a speck ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton
... away, Ettinger's point of view suddenly disgusting him. His golden opportunity had crumbled into dust and ashes. And although the little man by his side waxed voluble in alternating rage and supplication, Wayne Shandon's ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... time," said Henry as they approached the edge of a brook. But the bank, softened by the rain, crumbled beneath them, and the "next time" had come almost ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... it is passed away like a dream; the palaces are dust; the grassy sod has grown in mounds over the ruins of streets and fallen houses; nature has turfed them in one common grave with their inhabitants. The lofty palms have faded away and given place to forest trees, whose roots spring from the crumbled ruins; the bear and the leopard crouch in the porches of the temples; the owl roosts in the casements of the palaces; the jackal roams among the ruins in vain; there is not a bone left for him to gnaw of the multitudes which have passed away. There is their ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... not all the houris and the courtesans of all the ages could have found a way to breach them. But before those simple sentences of Corydon's, uttered in her gentle voice, and with her maiden's gaze of wonder—the battlements crumbled and rocked. ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... swagger and a rustle of his silk gown, and proceeded to set forth the theory of the defense. He said he did not purpose to call any witnesses. The hypothesis of the prosecution was so inherently childish and inconsequential, and so dependent upon a bundle of interdependent probabilities that it crumbled away at the merest touch. The prisoner's character was of unblemished integrity, his last public appearance had been made on the same platform with Mr. Gladstone, and his honesty and highmindedness had been vouched for by statesmen of the highest standing. His movements could be ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... ruins of which mark the site of ancient Nineveh and of the cities of the valley of the Euphrates. Their bricks, it is believed, were entirely sun-dried, not burnt to fuse or vitrify them as ours are, and they have consequently crumbled into mere mounds. The Assyrians also used fine clay tablets, baked in the fire—in fact, a kind of terra cotta—for the purpose of records, covering these tablets with beautifully executed inscriptions, made with a pointed instrument while the clay was soft, and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various
... - LAMIA has not yet turned up, but your letter came to me this evening with a scent of the Boulevard Montparnasse that was irresistible. The sand of Lavenue's crumbled under my heel; and the bouquet of the old Fleury came back to me, and I remembered the day when I found a twenty franc piece under my fetish. Have you that fetish still? and has it brought you luck? I remembered, ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... A crumbled wheel hung, rotten and moss-grown, over a dry water-course, where straggling willows stretched out from the bank and trailed their long, feathery ends a yard or so above the level of the weeds and grasses that carpeted the sandy bed of it, and along its edge—once built as a protection ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... fragments wander, music-fraught, Sighs of the soul, mine once, mine now, and mine For ever! Crumbled arch, crushed aqueduct, Alive with tremors in the shaggy growth Of wild-wood, crevice-sown, that triumphs there, Imparting exultation to ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... gift, Folded it in a casket, as ye know. Entering the house again, I saw a sight Passing the wit of man to understand: The tuft of wool with which I had laid on The unguent, I by chance had thrown aside Into the sunshine, where, as it grew warm, It crumbled all away, and on the ground Lay scattered, as when wood is being sawn We see the dust fall from the biting saw. So did it look; and after, from the earth Where it had lain, a clotted foam broke forth, As when in mellow Autumn the rich juice Of Bacchic vine is spilled ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... me at some distance from him on the table, which was thirty feet high from the floor. I was in a terrible fright, and kept as far as I could from the edge, for fear of falling. The wife minced a bit of meat, then crumbled some bread on a trencher, and placed it before me. I made her a low bow, took out my knife and fork, and fell to eat, which gave them exceeding delight. The mistress sent her maid for a small dram cup, which held about two gallons, and filled it with drink; ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... enclosed by a brick wall, and from a distance looked able to withstand the attack of any enemy; but a closer inspection showed that the defences were practically worthless, and that the town could be quickly destroyed by modern guns. In some places the walls had crumbled away. Some of the guns were so old and rusty that to have fired them would have done more harm to the gunners than to the enemy. But most of the guns were dummies—wooden things, mounted to give a formidable ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... Augustine, as he penned his 'De Civitate Dei,' felt the old world ended indeed, and the Kingdom of Heaven indeed at hand. And in Britain the whole elaborate system of Imperial civil and military government seems to have crumbled to the ground almost at once. It is noticeable that the rescript of Honorius is addressed simply to "the cities" of Britain, the local municipal officers of each several place. No higher authority remained. ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... from some distance. The first stage has a height a little short of seventy feet; the next exceeds thirty-two feet; the third is a little over twenty-two feet. It is possible that originally there were more stages, and probable that the present highest stage has in part crumbled away; so that we may fairly reckon the original height to have been between a hundred and forty and a hundred and fifty feet The monument is generally regarded as a tomb, from its situation in the Memphian necropolis and its remote resemblance to the pyramids; but as yet it has ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... had faded and the premature dusk of mid-winter was falling as, approaching nearer, we saw where the roof-thatch had decayed, where the insidious finger of Time had crumbled the stone walls. A chilly wind arising, moaned through the naked trees. The shadow of the guillotine seemed to brood oppressively over the scene, and, shuddering, ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... them entering her gates and fill her academies."—Chazotte's Essay, p. 30. "We have neither forgot his past, nor despair of his future success."—Duncan's Cicero, p. 121. "Her monuments and temples had long been shattered or crumbled into dust."—Lit. Conv., p. 15. "Competition is excellent, and the vital principle in all these things."—DR. LIEBER: ib., p. 64. "Whether provision should or not be made to meet this exigency."—Ib., p. 128. "That our Saviour was divinely inspired, and endued ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... crumbled to the nothingness out of which it was built, and the two came close together again in that perfect companionship that may choose whatever medium the mood of man may direct, and still hold taut the bond of ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... XIV, exclaimed: "Kings die, and so do kingdoms!" Could that great preacher rise from his grave into the pulpit, and behold France without a king, and that kingdom, not crumbled away, but enlarged, almost with the rapid accumulation of a snow-ball, into an enormous mass of territory, under the title of French Republic, what would he not have to say in a sermon? Rien de nouveau sous ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... dainty plant is the Ivy green, That creepeth o'er ruins old! Of right choice food are his meals I ween, In his cell so lone and cold. The wall must be crumbled, the stone decayed, To pleasure his dainty whim; And the mouldering dust that years have made Is a merry meal for him. Creeping where no life is seen, A rare old plant ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... on, though it occurred to Carroll that they were not opening up the bay very rapidly. The light was growing, and he could now discern the orderly phalanxes of white-topped combers that crumbled into a chaotic spouting on the point's outer end. It struck him that the sloop would not last long if she touched bottom there; but once more, after a glance at Vane's face, he kept silent. After all, Vane was leader; and when he looked as ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... watching the river on Tuesday evening, March 25th, when, with a roar that could be heard for blocks, hundreds of tons of dirt in the Morris Street levee crumbled under the pressure, and great walls of water rushed through ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... said?" answered the colonel: "you have said that which, if a man had spoken, nay, d—n me, if he had but hinted that he durst even think, I would have made him eat my sword; by all the dignity of man, I would have crumbled his soul into powder. But I consider that the words were spoken by a woman, and I am calm again. Consider, my dear, that you are my sister, and behave yourself with more spirit. I have only mentioned to you my surmise. It may not have happened ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... articulated, waving toward the room from which she had fled. The two women followed the rigid advance of Barzil Dunsack. As he saw the figure of his son there was a stabbing gasp of his breath. He halted for a moment, and it seemed to Nettie Vollar that suddenly his determined carriage crumbled, his shoulders sagged; then he went forward. The bed had high slender posts that at one time supported a canopy, but now they were bare, and an old hand held to one as ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... crumbled, sending up a flash which threw into relief the narrator's gnarled red face under its grey-black stubble. Pressed into the hollow of the dark leather armchair, it stood out an instant like an intaglio of yellowish ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... convulse the air: but her head was full of Roger; and she thought it was some mischief of his. One part of the Red-hill was very steep, and the ground soft. Her feet slipped on the moss first, and when she had got above the moss, the red earth crumbled; and she went back at every step, till she caught hold of some brambles, and then of the trunk of a tree; so that, trembling and panting, she reached at last ...
— The Settlers at Home • Harriet Martineau
... of the cabin, Little Bobtail turned his attention to the boxes upon which he had stumbled. All the cabin floor, except a small portion aft, was covered with these boxes, of which he counted twenty. The theory he had adopted that the yacht had been used for a pleasure excursion, crumbled away as he saw these boxes, for no party would go out sailing with the cabin lumbered up in this manner. He overhauled one of the boxes, without being any the wiser, and Little Bobtail was sorely puzzled. Taking the lantern in his hand, he crawled over the ...
— Little Bobtail - or The Wreck of the Penobscot. • Oliver Optic
... up, the street takes a slight bend; and immediately before you, you see it spanned by the lofty crumbled arch of St. Andrew's Gate, with its two mighty towers one on each side. Just as you see it you are at Columbus's house. The number is thirty-seven; it is like any of the other houses, tall and narrow; and there is a slab built into ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... were uncomfortably termed broken victuals had been given away during the winter, and a bewildering amount of begging women and children used to ask interviews with 'the Lady Winslow,' with stories that crumbled on investigation so as to make us recollect the ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... not—I promised him nothing. But I have been so beaten about, and I have tried so hard to do right; and it has all crumbled to pieces. As for you and me, Harry, let us both forget that we have ever had any differences. I can't bear to think that whenever you come home we must avoid each other. We were friends once—let us be friends again. It was very kind of you to come. I'm glad you didn't ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... who means to rise; It sneers at what he's doing or it bats him 'twixt the eyes; It trips him when he's careless, and it makes his way so hard What's left of him is sinew, not a walking tub of lard; But it's only wasting effort, for by George, the guy keeps on When his hopes have crumbled round him and you'd think his faith was gone, Till the world at last knocks under and it passes him a crown: Once, twice, thrice it has upset him, ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... looked down On the little seaport town Has crumbled into the dust; And on oaken beams below The bells swing to and fro, And are green with mould ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... a time of terrible suspense. Twice Jerry was almost out of water, and twice the edge of the ice crumbled, letting him ...
— The Camp in the Snow - Besiedged by Danger • William Murray Graydon
... emperors. With the second coming of Charlemagne at the dawn of the ninth century, the next period in the history of Rouen closes. At his death the semblance of an empire, into which his mighty personality had welded the warring anarchies of Western Europe, crumbled back into its constituent fragments. His was an empire wholly aristocratic, and wholly German. After Charles Martel had driven out the Saracens from Tours and Poitiers, it absorbed Gaul also in its rule, but Charlemagne was never other than ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... then in a blaze of passion, with white cheeks and flaming eyes. But as she met his look her heart gave a sudden thump of fright, and in a second her resistance had crumbled away. He did not speak another word, but his look ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... pressure, and the splintered fragments heaped up one above another in the wildest confusion, to a height of from fifty to eighty feet above the surface of the floe. The ice, which was about fifteen feet thick, crumbled away like fragile glass, and it was only by observing the manner in which masses weighing hundreds of tons were wildly tossed hither and thither like corks that even an approximate idea of the tremendous power ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... aghast. Lloyd George stood for all the popular confidence in victory that the nation felt. For a moment it appeared as if the very foundations of authority had crumbled. ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... darkness forth to light; And children, ragged, dirty, and despised, Clung to them. Children! heaven's early flowers, In their spring-time of life, blighted and lost! Children! those jewels of a parent's crown, Crushed to the ground and crumbled to the dust. Children! Heaven's representatives to man, Made menial slaves to watch at Evil's gate, And errand-boys to run at Sin's command. I asked why thus it was; and one old man Pushed up the visor of his cap, and said: "That low, black building is the cause ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... intruded lias are quickly left, and, the torrent having been passed on a substantial bridge, avery short distance brings us to a scene of sublime desolation. Amountain on the right hand has at some remote time crumbled into fragments and literally filled the valley from side to side with a colossal heap of ruins. Through and amongst these winds a narrow path practicable for mules, whilst the river dashes from rock to rock with excessive commotion, sometimes passing under the fragments which it was unable ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... the typist, crumbled her cake indifferently enough. Every time the door opened she looked up. What did she expect ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... idea of Death or Eternity. In accordance with this belief, they expressed in their dwellings the sentiment of transitoriness and vicissitude, and in their tombs the immortality of calm repose. And so their houses have crumbled into dust ages ago, but their tombs are eternal. In all the relations of Life the sentiment of Death was present in some form or other. The hallowed mummies of their ancestors were the most sacred mortgages of their debts, and to redeem them speedily was a point of the highest honor. They ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... invisible, to navigators at equal distances. It is even probable, that the chance of perceiving this volcano would not be greater, if the ashy cone, at the summit of which is the mouth of the crater, were equal, as in Vesuvius, to a quarter of the total height. These ashes, being pumice-stone crumbled into dust, do not reflect as much light as the snow of the Andes; and they cause the mountain, seen from afar, to detach itself not in a bright, but in a dark hue. The ashes also contribute, if we may use the expression, to equalize the portions ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... raising of continents above the sea, so that old sea-bottoms became the surface of the land, and for the depression of land areas so that new sedimentary rocks might be deposited upon them. They shewed how air and water slowly crumbled away the hardest rocks, and how rivers deepened their beds steadily but excessively slowly; and they held that while great catastrophic changes might occasionally have occurred, there was ample evidence of the present ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... before him. They had come to a break in the fringe of woodland, and upon a sudden view of the ocean. At this point the low line of coast-range which sheltered the valley of West Woodlands was abruptly cloven by a gorge that crumbled and fell away seaward to the shore of Horse Shoe Bay. On its northern trend stretched the settlement of Horse Shoe to the promontory of Whale Mouth Point, with its outlying reef of rocks curved inwards like the vast submerged ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... silence. It was a very aged, ghostly place; the church had been built many hundreds of years ago, and had once had a convent or monastery attached; for arches in ruins, remains of oriel windows, and fragments of blackened walls, were yet standing-, while other portions of the old building, which had crumbled away and fallen down, were mingled with the churchyard earth and overgrown with grass, as if they too claimed a burying-place and sought to mix their ashes with the dust of men. Hard by these gravestones of dead years, and forming a part ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... dike begin to tremble, then cave in with a hideous, sucking crash that shook the ground under them, he saw the flood of muddy water come roaring in and sweep against the painfully built rampart which swayed and crumbled to its fall. ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... ignorance, and apathy. Unfortunately the new rule, while more economical than the old, was not less arbitrary—military despotism being as little fitted for the development of a people as the rule of a corporation. Men looked aghast as the papacy and papal influence crumbled together, while the seat of real ecclesiastical power was removed from the banks of the Tiber to those of the Seine. Time seemed to be taking its revenge. Seven centuries earlier Lothair had been the vassal of Innocent II; Napoleon was now the suzerain ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... body without hesitation. Soon after sunrise they left their webs, and, retreating to the shade, formed two or three large masses as big as a hat under the thick foliage of a jessamine-tree. There they remained motionless till sunset, when the black lump crumbled to pieces. The process was a curious sight to witness. Then, in a leisurely way, the spiders scattered themselves to their aerial fishing. The air swarmed with mosquitoes, which were caught in great numbers. Larger flies, and especially moths, were at once pounced upon and devoured; ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston |
