"Slate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Sally, sister of its swarthy tenant, swarthy herself, shady-lipped, sad-voiced, and, bending over her flower-bed, would gather a "posy," as she called it, for the little boy. Sally lies in the churchyard with a slab of blue slate at her head, lichen- crusted, and leaning a little within the last few years. Cottage, garden-beds, posies, grenadier-like rows of seedling onions, —stateliest of vegetables,—all are gone, but the breath of a marigold brings them ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... overhung by tall old linden-trees, till he suddenly came upon the palace which stood a little to the left. It was a light, plaster building, in the Italian style, with a broad, double flight of steps in front; the slate-covered roof was finished in the usual manner, with a balustrade, and was adorned with ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... six floors, instead of five, and four regular facades surrounded the vast square of the courtyard. The walls were gray, covered with patches of leprous yellow, stained by the dripping from the slate-covered roof. The wall had not even a molding to break its dull uniformity—only the gutters ran across it. The windows had neither shutters nor blinds but showed the panes of glass which were greenish and full of bubbles. Some ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... course of my twenty years' constant investigation, I have had many score seances with various mediums—slate-writing mediums, materializing mediums, physical mediums, clairvoyant mediums, et hoc genus omne. Speaking now of materialization seances only—of which I have seen many—I may say that in all my ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... stepped forward a pace, as if to speak; but lifted a finger and beckoned instead: and out of the people a man fought his way to the foot of the scaffold. 'Twas the dashing sergeant, that was here upon sick-leave. Sick he was, I believe. His face above his shining regimentals was grey as a slate; for he had committed perjury to save his skin, and on the face of the perjured no sun ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... imagine,—it follows that it must be capable of resisting pressure both from above and from within. The floor and stand, the frame and joints must be strong and compact, and the walls of plate or thick crown glass. The bottom should be of slate; and if it is designed to attach arches of rock-work inside to the ends, they, too, must be of slate, as cement will not stick to glass. The frame should be iron, zinc, or well-turned wood; the joints closed with white-lead ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... it. He was employed as City Editor of the New York Herald—a position which had not then developed the importance which attaches to it to-day—and his duties consisted mainly of making out the "slate" for the staff of reporters, and doing such reportorial work as it was the province and habit of the City Editor to perform. This afforded little scope for a man of Mr. Croly's latent power; and his dissatisfaction and desire to find a new field was ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... and oranges; not in such large quantities, to be sure, as the "orphants'" friend had done, but generous enough for three children. And he bought a calico dress for his wife, a pair of shoes for each of the little girls, and a cap for Jack. That store contained everything, from grind-stones to slate-pencils, and from whale-oil to peppermint-drops. These purchases, together with some needful groceries, took all Mr. Boyd's money, except a few pennies, but a Christmas don't-care feeling pervaded his being, and he ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... pleasure in searching all the graveyards near her Vermont home for quaint inscriptions upon old tombstones. It was neither a morbid curiosity nor a spirit of melancholy that attracted her to the weather-beaten slabs of marble and slate, but rather a fondness for studying human eccentricity as revealed in whimsical epitaphs. In almost ...
— Quaint Epitaphs • Various
... two or three other spots in the drowsy little town; and wherever their murky stains of light hung suspended in the air there stood out in relief a medley of gables, drab-tinted trees, and false windows in white paint, on walls of a dull slate colour. ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... symbol,—or as profanely slighting their true application as the arrantest Ephesian journeyman that turned out those little shrines for the goddess)—exchange them for little bits of leather (our ancestors' money) or chalk and a slate!"— ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... fortunately, however, aerial international law may be written at the very start of the science by a common international standard and practice, thus obviating the greatest part of the divergences which long years of habit have grafted into the maritime laws of the various nations. The slate is clean so that uniformity may be assured in a law which is soon to come into the most vital touch with the ...
— Opportunities in Aviation • Arthur Sweetser
... 18th, night-fall found them entering St. Mary's, at the further end of the pass between Rattle Snake Hills and Elk Mountain. It was after 5 o'clock and already dark on the 19th, when the travellers, hurrying with all speed through the gloomy gorge of slate formation leading to the banks of the Green River, found the ford too deep to be ventured before morning. The 20th was a clear cold day very favorable for brisk locomotion, and the bright sun had not quite disappeared behind the Wahsatch Mountains ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... her burnin' words of love and passion, for he loved her too in the old-fashioned way Adam did Eve—no other woman round, you know. And the words he writ wuz, I spoze, enough to melt a slate stun, let alone a heart, tender and true. She never writ a word back, and at last she wouldn't read his letters and sent 'em back onopened. That madded him and he went on from bad to worse, swung right out into wickedness. He ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... the table at my elbow; then she crossed the room and drew back the window-curtains, making the rings tinkle crisply on the metal rods, and letting in a gush of dazzling sunshine. From where I lay I could see the house-fronts opposite glow pearly-grey in shadow, and the crest of the slate roofs sharply print itself on the sky, like a black line on a sheet of scintillant blue velvet. Yet, a few minutes ago, I had been fancying myself in the ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... become greatly reduced; ten weeks and two days had elapsed since I was here; and in another fortnight it would all be gone. If I intend doing anything towards the west it must be done at once or it will be too late. The day was warm—102 degrees. A large flock of galars, a slate-coloured kind of cockatoo, and a good talking bird, and hundreds of pigeons came to water at night; but having no ammunition, we did not bring a gun. The water was so low in the hole that the horses could not reach it, and had to be watered with ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... supreme egoist—who was visiting at a house when but the mother and her little girl—a mere child—were at home. As the self-esteemed great man was holding the mother in conversation, he noticed with pride that the child, who reposed on the hearthrug with a school-slate tilted on her knee, was making furtive glances up at his face, and returning her attention regularly to the slate, on which she kept scrawling with a pencil. When at length she stopped and looked serious, "Well, my dear," he exclaimed, ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... stretching like a phantom lake, rose and slate-colored, through the Peter Pan haunted glades of Kensington Gardens. Then he emerged from the Victoria Gate and found himself ringing a bell and being admitted by a butler, who relieved him of his coat and hat with the velvet-plush ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... in a big hotel in another city, reached after a long and tiresome railway journey. Here the girl saw little of her grandfather, for a governess came daily to teach Mary Louise to read and write and to do sums on a pretty slate framed in silver. Then, suddenly, in dead of night, away they whisked again, traveling by train until long after the sun was up, when they came to a pretty town where they kept ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... waited—and tried not to get any more jealous than possible. I suppose Miss Spencer used Ole as a sort of parachute to let Frankling down easily at the last. Anyway, we wiped the whole affair off the slate after that. She wasn't one of us, anyway. Made us shiver to think of her. What if one of us had sailed in the Freshman ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... at night with several of these sums done in his head, and report the results to an elder brother, who had worked his way through Williams College. His brother would perform the calculations upon a slate, and usually found ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... and night, day and night, for a whole long year, one surely expiates them! And then"—with calm certainty—"of course one has got rid of them. They are wiped off the slate and one begins again. At least, it was so with my niece. For when she came out of the sisterhood, the man who had betrayed her married her, and they have three—no, four bebes now. So that it is evident le bon dieu was pleased with her penance ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... from his architect, Dominico Fontana, the plan of the present library. The lower portion of the walls is entirely occupied by closed bookcases, composed of panels of wood painted in arabesque on a ground of white and slate color, and surrounded by gilded mouldings; which receptacles bear no sort of affinity in appearance to ordinary library furniture, and thoroughly conceal from public view the valuable manuscripts ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... their way upwards to the room in which he kept his school-books—almost the only articles of property which the boy possessed. Here they found nothing suspicious. All was even in the best possible order—not a very wonderful fact, seeing a few books and a slate were the only things there besides ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... the eyes of the startled boys. It melted from sight as do some moving pictures, when the "fade out" is used. It was as though a veil of mist came between the vision and the boys, or as if some giant hand had wiped it from a great slate with ...
— The Boy Ranchers - or Solving the Mystery at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker
... so the stupor case often shows excessive energy in a hypomanic phase before complete normality is reached. This corresponds again to the age-old association of the ideas of death and rebirth which we see together so frequently in stupor. It is the psychology of wiping the slate clean ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... of its goods and sent into port as empty as an eggshell from which the yolk had been sucked. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston suffered alike, and worthy ship owners had to leave off counting their losses upon their fingers and take to the slate ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... had a spare piece of pencil Robert was happy; he'd gladly give her his only piece and forthwith proceed to borrow another for himself. He saw that Mysie did certain things, used, for instance, to clean her slate with a bit of rag, and he instantly procured one, and this kept his ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... shall never get you well, you know; and the doctor will be sending you to Penzance or Devonport for a change. Well, Mabyn, have you convinced anybody yet that your farm-laborers with their twelve shillings a week are better off than the slate-workers with their eighteen? You'd better take your sister's opinion on that point, and don't squabble with me. Mother, what's the use of sitting here? You bring Miss Wenna with you into the wagonette, and talk to her there about all your business-affairs, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... began to play at visiting, dancing, and fighting. The tin-soldiers rattled in their box, for they wanted to be out too, but they could not raise the lid. The nut-crackers played at leap-frog, and the slate-pencil ran about the slate; there was such a noise that the canary woke up and began to talk to them, in poetry too! The only two who did not stir from their places were the Tin-soldier and the little Dancer. She remained on tip-toe, with both arms outstretched; he stood steadfastly ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Various
... curiosity dominated his complex hesitations, and he stole back into his darkling sitting-room. He paused in the doorway. The stranger was still in the same attitude, dark against the window. Save for the singing of some sailors aboard one of the little slate-carrying ships in the harbour the evening was very still. Outside, the spikes of monkshood and delphinium stood erect and motionless against the shadow of the hillside. Something flashed into Isbister's mind; he started, and leaning over the table, listened. An unpleasant suspicion grew stronger; ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... spitballs, an' he make him some watermelon teeth, an' he paint a chicken light red an' tuck it to the teacher fer a dodo, an' he put cotton in his pants 'fore he got licked, an' he drawed the teacher on a slate. That's what you go to school fer is to have fun, an' I sho' is goin' to have fun when I goes, an' I ain't goin' to take no bulldozin' offer ...
— Miss Minerva and William Green Hill • Frances Boyd Calhoun
... understand a thing like that," Mordacks answered, graciously; "my water-butt leaked for three weeks, pat, pat, all night long upon a piece of slate, and when a man came and caulked it up, I put all the blame upon the pillow; but the pillow was as good as ever. Not a wink could I sleep till it began to leak again; and you may trust a York workman that it wasn't very long. But, Joseph, I have interest at Scarborough also. The castle needs a watchman ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... cicalas crouch'd in ranks: Slack the thistle-head piled its down-silk gray: Scarce the stony lizard suck'd hollows in his flanks: Thick on spots of umbrage our drowsed flocks lay. Sudden bow'd the chestnuts beneath a wind unheard, Lengthen'd ran the grasses, the sky grew slate: Then amid a swift flight of wing'd seed white as curd, Clear of limb a Youth smote the master's gate. God! of whom music And song and blood are pure, The day is never darken'd That had ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... blue berrets for the Pyrenees and red fezzes for Constantinople are woven side by side. The scarlet sashes that the men wear round their waists are produced at Oloron. The manufacture of rough shoes in jute or hemp (espadrillas) is a growing element of local trade. Marble and slate works are plentiful, mainly concentrated round Lourdes and at Bagneres de Bigorre.... Persons who are insensible to marble can turn to the knitted woollen fabrics of which such quantities are made at Bagneres; many of them are as ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... as it seemed to me, I had been gazing upward at the stars and listening to the dear, minute sounds of peace; and in another the great gray slate was clean, and every bone of me set in plaster of Paris, and sniping beginning between pickets with the day. It was an occasional crack, not a constant crackle, but the whistle of a bullet as it passed us by, or a tiny transitory flame for the one bit of detail on a blue hill-side, was an unpleasant ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... the western section varies from a deep black vegetable loam to a light brown loamy earth. The bills are generally basalt stone and slate. The surface is generally undulating, well watered, well wooded, and well adapted for agriculture and pasturage. The timber consists of pine, fir, spruce, oaks (white and red), ash, arbutus, cedar, arbor-vitae, ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne
... interpret into warning or prophetic voices, but which a due exercise of the intellect, where such exercise has been properly encouraged, would easily explain. This reminds me of a singular occurrence: A friend of mine was lately walking in a beautiful vale. In approaching a slate-quarry he heard an explosion, and a mass of stone, which had been severed by gunpowder, fell near him as he walked along. He went immediately to the persons employed. He represented the impropriety of their conduct in not having given proper notice ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... find her slate, and when she did find it many of the figures were blurred, for Barbara had sat upon it. And then the numbers seemed to dance before her, and each time that she added, the answer was different. She went over and ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... thoughts, a little released, fled to Philip and lost themselves, I suppose. Anyhow, I was looking blankly, but rather pleasantly than otherwise, at another window, uncurtained, but by this time black as a slate with the final night-fall. It seemed to me that something like a snail was on the outside of the window-pane. But when I stared harder, it was more like a man's thumb pressed on the pane; it had that curled look that a thumb has. With my fear and courage re-awakened together, I rushed at the ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... was glorious. For a time, vivid streaks of crimson and of gold, crowned the summits of the heaving purple mountains. Gradually, these streaks became fainter, and died away, and rolling, slate-coloured clouds, hung heavily ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... my belief in educational matters "that the slate should be put into the child's hands as soon as the book is," you of course had your slate, and commenced making figures and letters ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... public-house, with a reddish slate roof, that looked as if it were suffering from leprosy, and before the door there stood three wagons drawn by mules, and loaded with huge stems of trees, and which took up nearly the whole of the road; ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... and every instant, we are guided and guarded, whether we notice it or not: "the very hairs of our heads are all numbered." Here shall follow some personal experiences in proof. Nearly seventy years ago I knew a small schoolboy of seven who accidentally slit his own throat while cutting a slate-frame against his chest with a sharp knife; there was a knot in the wood, the knife slipped up, a pinafore was instantaneously covered with blood—(though the little semisuicide was unconscious of any pain)—thereafter his ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... soul before it's spoil'd! Set up your mounted sign without the gate— And there inform the mind before 'tis soil'd! 'Tis sorry writing on a greasy slate! Nay, if you would not have your labors foil'd, Take it inclining tow'rds a virtuous state, Not prostrate and laid flat—else, woman meek! The upright pencil will ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... the houses which separated the timber-yards, the great pure sky was cut up into plates of ultramarine; and under the reverberating light of the sun, the white facades, the slate roofs, and the granite wharves glowed dazzlingly. In the distance arose a confused noise in the warm atmosphere; and the idleness of Sunday, as well as the melancholy engendered by the summer heat, seemed to ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... 1836, some boys were searching for rabbits' burrows in the rocky formation, near Edinburgh, known as Arthur's Seat. In the side of a cliff, they came upon some thin sheets of slate, ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... chateau until half-past six, and the Pope not till nearly seven. On their entrance to the church, their Majesties passed through the archbishop's palace, the buildings of which, as I have said, communicated with Notre Dame by means of a wooden gallery. This gallery, covered with slate, and hung with magnificent tapestry, ended in a platform, also of wood, erected before the principal entrance, and made to harmonize perfectly with the gothic architecture of this handsome metropolitan church. This platform rested upon four columns, ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... diamonds!" said the parson. "I can easily understand that. And then, when a fellow goes back again, he is so apt to lose it all. Don't you expect to see your diamonds turn into slate-stones?" ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... yet annoy me not, nor I them, as they appear to examine, find nothing, and away they go)—the vast space of the sky overhead so clear, and the buzzard up there sailing his slow whirl in majestic spirals and discs; just over the surface of the pond, two large slate-color'd dragon-flies, with wings of lace, circling and darting and occasionally balancing themselves quite still, their wings quivering all the time, (are they not showing off for my amusement?)—the pond itself, with the sword-shaped ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... wind was still blowing from the southeast, slanting the vessel slightly to the side where the sun hung over the horizon, turning the heavens in the west into a great, dusky conflagration. That sun, beneath which a slate-coloured sea was rolling in waves gently tossing foam—that sea, slate-coloured in the east and a cold, darkening blue in the west and south—that sky above, with great masses of clouds—these were to Frederick like the three mighty ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... greasy, grayish or brownish scales and crusts, in some cases moderate in quantity, in others so great that large irregular masses are formed, pasting the hair to the scalp. If removed, the scales and crusts rapidly re-form. The skin beneath is found slate-colored, hyperaemic or mildly inflammatory, and exceptionally it has in places an eczematous aspect (eczema seborrhoicum). Extraneous matter, such as dust and dirt, collects upon the parts, and the whole mass may become more ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... bolt upright among the wounded and the dying—for the nature of his terrible hurt was such that he could not lie down without suffocating. His face was swollen to more than twice its ordinary size—he was speechless of course—his wants were only made known by means of a broken slate and pencil, and he was slowly applying a wet sponge to his mouth, endeavoring to extract moisture, which might quench the fever and intolerable thirst under which he was suffering. By his side lay young Thomas, ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... the sea and the Seine, that Havre is helplessly circumscribed by enclosing fortifications, and, in short, that the mouth of the river, the harbor, and the docks present a very different aspect from the fifty thousand houses of Paris. At the foot of Montmartre an ocean of slate roofs lies in motionless blue billows; at Ingouville the sea is like the same roofs stirred by the wind. This eminence, or line of hills, which coasts the Seine from Rouen to the seashore, leaving a margin of valley land more or less narrow between ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... downy woodpecker. They peep in curiously through the window upon me, pecking away at my bone, too often a very poor one. A bone nailed to a tree a few feet in front of the window attracts crows as well as lesser birds. Even the slate-colored snowbird, a seed-eater, comes and nibbles ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... the head of the structure had been completely washed away by a gale, and no little care was necessary in order to step across the broken timbers in safety. The town, which contains between 1,200 and 1,300 inhabitants, is composed entirely of one-storied log huts, with slate or tile roofs, and with or without verandahs. They are all arranged in squares, separated from each other by wide roads; and the whole settlement is surrounded by stockades. At the further end of the town stands the convict prison, distinguished ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... any other creature, but is considerably larger, has no horns, and is free from the displeasing odour of our goats. Its fleece is not thick, but very long and fine; it varies in colour, but is never white, more generally of a slate-like or lavender hue. For clothing it is usually worn dyed to suit the taste of the wearer. These animals were exceedingly tame, and were treated with extraordinary care and affection by the children (chiefly female) ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Dove and Slate Colors of All Shades:—Boil in an iron vessel a teacupful of black tea with a teaspoonful of copperas and sufficient water. Dilute till ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... taking him altogether. The worst of him is, he is one of the most indiscreet persons I ever met with. Does the queerest things, when the whim takes him, and doesn't care what other people think of it. They say the Lepels have all got a slate loose in the upper story. Oh, no; not a very old family—I mean, nothing compared to the family of his friend, young Rothsay. They count back, as I have heard, to the ancient kings of Scotland. ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... Denmark and the duchies are well lodged. The material is brick. The roofing is of thatch in the country, and of tiles in the towns. Slate is unknown. The dwelling apartments are always floored with wood. I have described in a former note the great hall in which all the cattle and crops and wagons are housed, and into which the dwelling apartments open. The accommodations outside of the meanest ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... keep the accounts of the episcopal revenues, and making complicated calculations with the assistance of balls threaded on rods; he even multiplied and divided numbers in his head, without the use of slate or pencil, with a rapidity and accuracy that would have been admired even in a past master of money and finance. For him it was a pleasure to keep the books of the Deacon Modernus, who, growing old, used to muddle the figures and ...
— The Miracle Of The Great St. Nicolas - 1920 • Anatole France
... he was in search, which showed a front of white stone grooved in lines to represent courses, windows with closed gray blinds, and slender iron balconies decorated with rosettes painted yellow. Above the ground floor and the first floor were three dormer windows projecting from a slate roof; on the peak of the central one was a new weather-vane. This modern innovation represented a hunter in the attitude of shooting a hare. The front door was reached by three stone steps. On one side of this door a leaden pipe discharged the sink-water into ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... through the roof of a house at the end of the alley and burst in the basement, showering the street with slate and plaster. A second struck a chimney and plunged into the garden, followed by an avalanche of bricks, and another exploded with a deafening ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... the Slate-colored Snowbird (Fringilla Hudsonia) starts up before me and chirps sharply. His protest when thus disturbed is almost metallic in its sharpness. He breeds here, and is not esteemed a snowbird at all, as he disappears at the near approach of winter, and returns again ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... North Oxford, Massachusetts. She was the youngest child of a large family, and her brothers and sisters were very proud of her because she learned so rapidly and because she was never afraid of anything. She would follow her oldest brother about the house with a slate, begging him to give her hard sums to do. Out of doors she was eager for adventure; her brother David often said, "Clara is never afraid, she can ride any colt on the farm," and often he would throw her on the bare back of ...
— Modern Americans - A Biographical School Reader for the Upper Grades • Chester Sanford
... shabbily (but, as it seemed, more owing to his mother's carelessness than his father's poverty), in a blue apron, very wide and short trousers, shoes somewhat out at the toes, and a chip hat, with the frizzles of his curly hair sticking through its crevices. A book and a small slate, under his arm, indicated that he was on his way to school. He stared at Hepzibah a moment, as an elder customer than himself would have been likely enough to do, not knowing what to make of the tragic attitude and queer scowl ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in the case of the mine of Fahlun, in Sweden, but such accidents have generally been too inconsiderable in extent to deserve notice in a geographical point of view. [Footnote: In March, 1873, the imprudent extension of the excavations in a slate mine near Morzine, in Savoy, occasioned the fall of a mass of rock measuring more than 700,000 yards in cubical contents. A forest of firs was destroyed, and a hamlet of twelve houses crushed and buried by the slide.] It is said, however, that in many places ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... topped by a clock-face: Fenchurch Street Station. Beyond its dingy platforms, the metal track which contracts into the murk is the road to China, though that is, perhaps, the last place you would guess to be at the end of it. The train runs over a wilderness of tiles, a grey plateau of bare slate and rock, its expanse cracked and scored as though by a withering heat. Nothing grows there; nothing could live there. Smoke still pours from it, as though it were volcanic, from numberless vents. The ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... order of business is the first step toward the election of officers for the ensuing year. It is our custom to have a nominating committee elected at an early session. They deliberate and bring forward a slate which is voted on at a later session. This morning is a suitable time for the election of a committee, and tomorrow morning will be a suitable time for their report. Are there any nominations for the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Seventh Annual Meeting • Various
... ever wiser in the habits of glaciers than Muir, or proved to be a better pilot across their deathly crevasses. Half a mile of careful walking and jumping and we were on the ground again, at the base of the great cliff of metamorphic slate that crowned the summit. Muir's aneroid barometer showed a height of about seven thousand feet, and the wall of rock towered threateningly above us, leaning out in places, a thousand feet or so above the glacier. But the earth-fires that had ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... five minutes I had fallen on the trees in full blossom, and filled my arms with the sweet, resplendent flowers. I could not believe I was in our cold, northern Essex, which, in the dreary season when I pass its slate-colored, unpainted farm-houses, and huge, square, windy, 'squire-built "mansions," looks as brown and unvegetating as an old rug with its patterns all trodden out and the colored fringe worn from ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... seemed in a hurry, and the Queen was quite happy to hear her husband talk about a novel subject with so much knowledge and spirit. He called her back once or twice to look at a fine impression of a dragon-fly which I have in the Solenhope slate. Having glanced at the long succession of our fossils, from the youngest to the oldest, the party again moved into the lecture-room. The Queen was again mightily taken with the long neck of the Plesiosaurus; under it was a fine head ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... was banished for the crime of murder. Some fifteen years later Eric's son Lief made an expedition with thirty-five men and a ship in the direction of the new land. They came to a coast where there were nothing but ice mountains having the appearance of slate; this country they named Helluland—that is, Land of Slate. This country is our Newfoundland. Standing out to sea again, they reached a level wooded country with white sandy cliffs, which they called Markland, or Land of Wood, which is our Nova Scotia. ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... crossed the porch, and, without rapping at the door, entered the sitting-room where she found Dolly, Ann, and her mother together. Mrs. Drake was patching a sheet at the window; Ann, sulky and obstinate, was trying to do an example on a slate; and Dolly stood over her, a dark, wearied expression on ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... said he with the utmost benevolence. "This is the most interesting thing I've ever come across. Do you know, you're precisely the man I've always been wanting to meet?... The virgin mind. The clean slate.... Do you know, you're precisely the man that it's my ambition to ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... brown tips to the hairs (Blyth). Above dusky slate colour with rufescent tips to the fur; beneath paler, with a faint rufous tinge about the breast (Jerdon). Fur short ashy-brown, with a ferruginous smear on the upper surface; beneath a little paler coloured (Kellaart). Teeth and limbs small; ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... petroleum, natural gas, iron ore, lead, zinc, gold, tin, limestone, salt, clay, chalk, gypsum, potash, silica sand, slate, arable land ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... I was sitting in the chimney corner with my slate, expending great efforts on the production of a letter to Joe. I think it must have been a full year after our hunt upon the marshes, for it was a long time after, and it was winter and a hard frost. With an alphabet on the hearth at my feet for reference, ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... small town or large village of white houses with slate roofs, it contains about two thousand inhabitants, and is situated principally on the southern side of the Dee. At its western end it has an ancient bridge and a modest unpretending church nearly in its centre, in ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... of a barren little field, he saw Benjulia's house—a hideous square building of yellow brick, with a slate roof. A low wall surrounded the place, having another iron gate at the entrance. The enclosure within was as barren as the field without: not even an attempt at flower-garden or kitchen-garden was visible. At a distance of some two hundred yards ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... —pine-covered hillsides that shut out the sun, smiting the air with chill and shadow, and turning the Rampio, whose brawl seemed somehow to increase the chill, turning the sparkling, sportive Rampio to the colour of slate. "It puts one in mind of brigands," she said, with another little shudder. But though the air was chilly, it was wonderfully, keenly fragrant with the ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... seething mass of yellow flames grow less and less and then go completely under control. It was Providence which did it, however, and not the Constantinople fire department, with its little streams of water the size of slate-pencils! ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... time there has been a considerable increase in both items. The quantity of provisions in proportion to the inhabitants was considerably greater than in England. A small commerce is springing up, and slate, which abounds in South Australia, and oil, the produce of the adjacent seas, together with wool from the flocks fed upon the neighbouring hills, begin to form materials ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... unpaid. It was a charming little domain, the prettiest bit of property in Marsac. The house, with a garden before it and a yard at the back, was built of white tufa ornamented with carvings, cut without great expense in that easily wrought stone, and roofed with slate. The pretty furniture from the house in Angouleme looked prettier still at Marsac, for there was not the slightest attempt at comfort or luxury in the country in those days. A row of orange-trees, pomegranates, and rare plants stood before the house on ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... small and narrow windows, which were protected by iron bars, and the staircase of slate which gave admittance, this heavy building presented nothing remarkable, unless it were two round turrets, which rose above the surrounding roofs and even above the gigantic trees ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... in a way a political henchman and appointee of Mollenhauer's, the latter was only vaguely acquainted with him. He had seen him before; knew of him; had agreed that his name should be put on the local slate largely because he had been assured by those who were closest to him and who did his bidding that Stener was "all right," that he would do as he was told, that he would cause no one any trouble, etc. In fact, ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... of it all is, I know I'm ungrateful: I know they mean well. But why is it that people who mean well almost invariably grate upon your sensibilities like the screeching of a slate-pencil? ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... will perfume every breath of air blowing through a hall for a quarter of a century, and then not be perceptibly diminished. An ounce of gold may be reduced into four hundred and thirty two billion parts, each microscopically visible.30 There is a deposit of slate in Bohemia covering forty square miles to the depth of eight feet, each cubic inch of which Ehrenberg found by microscopic measurement to contain forty one thousand million infusorial animals. Sir David Brewster says, "A cubic ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... whose pungent satires of King Charles's foes ran like wild fire through Wales. Through a maze of tangled shrubs, in pouring rain, I was led to his chair—a mouldering stone slab forming the seat, and a large slate stone the back, with the poet's initials cut in it. I uncovered, and said in the best Welsh I could command, "Shade of Huw Morris, a Saxon has come to this place to pay that respect to true genius which he is ever ready ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... Jarvis, "I read as 'ow Sir Oliver Lodge 'as got messages from 'is departed ones through the medium of a slate. 'Oo's to say spirits can't talk on them wax records as well. It's a message, a warnin' to us in this ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell
... Ahead of them the turquoise waters were dotted by islets whose heights were densely overgrown, while sands of coral whiteness ringed their shore lines. Here and there a fleet of fishing-boats drifted. Far out in the roadstead lay two cruisers, slate-gray and grim. The waters over-side purled soothingly, the heavens beamed, the breeze was like a gentle caress. The excursionists lost themselves in ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... and sheer-waters, seals, whales, and porpoises: And on the 11th, having passed Falkland's islands, we discovered the coast of Terra del Fuego, at the distance of about four leagues, extending from the W* to S.E. by S. We had here five-and-thirty fathom, the ground soft, small slate stones. As we ranged along the shore to the S.E. at the distance of two or three leagues, we perceived smoke in several places, which was made by the natives, probably as a signal, for they did not continue it after we had passed by. This day we discovered that ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... house—it seemed all coming down. And up they rise, and down again they roll; Till that the Miller, stumbling o'er a coal, Went plunging headlong like a bull at bait, And met his wife, and both fell flat as slate. "Help, holy cross of Bromeholm!" loud she cried, "And all ye martyrs, fight upon my side! In manus tuas—help!—on thee I call! Simon, awake! the fiend on me doth fall: He crusheth me—help!—I am well-nigh dead: He lieth along my heart, and heels, and head. Help, ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... rule, and recited log-scaling tables as fluently as the multiplication table. They were in the midst of this lively give-and-take, listened to with a mild amusement on Arnold's part, when they emerged on a look-out ledge of gray slate, and were struck into silence by the grave loveliness of the immense ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... knowledge as a Strasburg goose does the food crammed down its throat. He thought he was doing his duty, but he nearly killed the boy, for a fever gave the poor child a sad holiday, and when he recovered, the overtasked brain gave out, and Billy's mind was like a slate over which a sponge has passed, ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... I built of blocks Came down with a crash to the floor; My train of cars ran over the rocks— I'll warrant they'll run no more; I have raced with Grip till I'm out of breath; My slate is broken in two, So I can't draw monkeys. I'm tired to death Because I ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... fallen block of slate, cushioned with rich brown moss and rusted weather-stains, the Water-Lady sat, and pointed to Farina the path of the moon toward the round tower. She did not speak, and if his lips parted, put her cold finger across them. Then she began to hum ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sharp-edged slate, and with it removed the scales and entrails. During this operation, her hands and garment became stained with the light ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... under full headway, up-stairs and down, in at windows and out through the roof, anywhere, so it could be reached directly by the water from the engines. They were made to regard it as worse than a waste to throw even a gallon of water upon a dead wall or upon a surface of slate or plaster, so long as by any means the branch pipe could be got to bear upon the seat of the fire itself. The statistics of the operations of the London Fire-engine Establishment from 1833 to the present time, show with what success ...
— Fire Prevention and Fire Extinction • James Braidwood
... if she had asked for it, but the mere noise it made in falling—one of the most distinctive and irrevocable sounding in the world—caused her to feel a lightening of the heart that meant satisfaction. She turned and went away down the bare village street, past the last row of whitewashed slate-roofed cottages, with the dark clumps of myrtle or tamarisk by their doors, and then she struck off the hard, bleak road, where the wind sang mournfully in the insulators at every telegraph post, and made ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... table complete with three balls, one of latest models—slate bed, pneumatic cushions. Be careful of the top one; it bust the other day. The butler had pumped it ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... low ground finally merging into a small salt-marsh. Across this wandered a thin plank walk on stilts which, over the clear water beyond the marsh, became a rickety landing-stage. At some distance out from the latter a long, slender, slate-coloured motor-boat rode at its moorings, a rowboat swinging from its stern. In the larger craft Eleanor could see the head and shoulders of a man bending over the engine—undoubtedly Mr. Ephraim Clover. While she watched him, he straightened ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... was weather again, and the weather was more promising than generous. It continued to promise all day without exactly explaining what its promise was, and without achieving any special fulfilment. Fine silver lines of sunlight were ruled at a steep angle across a grey slate view. ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... about them than he had at first suspected?—wasn't the cool glow of them, in a word, rather that of sunlight falling upon a wet slate roof? ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... were interrupted by arriving at the kennel, and finding the door fast, he looked under the slate, and above the frame, and inside the window, and on the wall, for the key; and his shake, and kick, and clatter were only answered by a full chorus from the excited ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... at her in bewilderment, then glanced around the cheerful kitchen. His slate lay on a chair where Robin had been scribbling and making pictures. The old cat that Robin had petted and played with that very morning purred comfortably under the stove. The corncob house he had built was still in the corner. ...
— Big Brother • Annie Fellows-Johnston
... at luncheon time, All Acts of Parliament spurning; There were "Kitchens," composed of slate and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 1890.05.10 • Various
... shirt very crumpled and dirty, a low standing collar and a black four-in-hand necktie, very greasy. His trousers were striped and of a slate blue colour—the "blue pants" of the ready-made clothing stores. Still sitting on the bed, Vandover continued his ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... the Raymounts were one by one assembling to break their fast, was discolored and dark, whether with age or smoke it would have needed more than a glance to say. The reds had grown brown, and the blues a dirty slate-color, while an impression of drab was prevalent. But the fire was burning as if it had been at it all night and was glorying in having at length routed the darkness; and in the middle of the table on the white cloth, stood a shallow piece of red pottery full of crocuses, the earnest of the ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... internally, is externally inept and is called madness. Ineptitude is something which language needs to shake off. Better surrender altogether some verbal categories and start again, in that respect, with a clean slate, than persist in any line of development that alienates thought from reality. The language of birds is excellent in its way, and those ancient sages who are reported to have understood it very likely had merely perceived that it was not meant to be intelligible; for ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... pipes are run in wall spaces, so as to be accessible. The rooms are ventilated through the hollow columns of the kiosks, and each is provided with an electric fan. They are heated by electric heaters. The woodwork of the rooms is oak; the walls are red slate wainscot ...
— The New York Subway - Its Construction and Equipment • Anonymous
... to remain inconspicuous. His contractor—or his architect, if one had been employed—had imagined a heavy, square affair of dull-red brick, with brown-stone trimmings in heavy courses. Items: a high basement, an undecorated mansard in slate; a big, clumsy pair of doors, set in the middle of all, at the top of a heavily balustraded flight of brown-stone steps; one vast window on the right of the doors to light the "parlor," and another like it, on the left, to light the "library": a facade reared before any allegiance ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... discovered is iron. It abounds in every part of the country, and is in some places purer than in any other part of the world. Coals are found in many places of the best quality. There is also abundance of slate, limestone and granite, though not in the immediate vicinity of Port Jackson. Sand-stone, quartz, and freestone are found ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... that mood of relapse, if he had come to me with the slightest trace of humility, with the slightest touch of entreaty, on his face, I'd have hugged his salt-and-peppery old head to my bosom and begged to start all over again with a clean slate.... ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... hundreds of feet high, of a bold and impressive grandeur, and crowned with firs which seem dwarfed to the passer-by. The impregnated clay appears to be constantly falling off the almost sheer face of the slate-brown cliffs, in great sheets, which plunge into the river's edge in broken masses. The opposite river bank is much more depressed, and is clothed ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... awkwardly lighted his pipe. "Wanted to begin again with what they call a clean slate. Besides, the stove's the best place for ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... connected by a pipe on the left hand with a large galvanised iron receptacle for steaming food for pigs, and on the right with a large wooden tub, lined with copper, in which the cake, mixed with water, is made into a thick soup. Adjoining this is a slate tank, of sufficient size to contain one feed for the entire lot of bullocks feeding. Into this tank is laid chaff with a three-grained fork, and pressed down firmly; and this process is repeated until the slate tank is full, when it is covered down for an hour or two before ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... building will be a beautiful and a convenient structure. The walls will be of pressed brick laid in red mortar, with dark granite base, and Nova Scotia sandstone trimmings. The roof will be covered with Monson slate. The basement will be eleven feet high, mostly above ground, and will serve for the force-pump, heating apparatus, and for ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... the hugest thing conceivable—a real exaltation of one's idea of space; so that one's entrance, even from the great empty square which either glares beneath the deep blue sky or makes of the cool far-cast shadow of the immense front something that resembles a big slate-coloured country on a map, seems not so much a going in somewhere as a going out. The mere man of pleasure in quest of new sensations might well not know where to better his encounter there of the sublime shock that brings him, within the threshold, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... the crude virility of the young man began to develop in him. It was a distressing, uncanny period. Had Vandover been a girl he would at this time have been subject to all sorts of abnormal vagaries, such as eating his slate pencil, nibbling bits of chalk, wishing he were dead, and drifting into states of unreasoned melancholy. As it was, his voice began to change, a little golden down appeared on his cheeks and upon the nape of his neck, while his ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... reflect upon what would become of the Christian homes if men and women were to attend to the same duties in life. To get a realistic notion, let every man who has a wife ask himself how he would relish being told by her, "I have an engagement with John Smith to-night to see about fixing up a slate to get Mrs. Jones nominated for sheriff," and being left to go his own way while she goes with Smith. If that wouldn't make hell in the household in one act we don't know what would, yet this is merely one little trivial episode of what ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... streets, is shoulder to shoulder with its neighbours. To each house there is but one entrance, the front door; and each house is about eighteen feet wide, with a bit of a brick- walled yard behind, where, when it is not raining, one may look at a slate-coloured sky. But it must be understood that this is East End opulence we are now considering. Some of the people in this street are even so well-to-do as to keep a "slavey." Johnny Upright keeps one, as I well know, she being my first acquaintance in this particular portion ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... others in different industries. These returns, though they do not cover the whole of the industries, are sufficiently reliable to indicate the widespread character of short time. During August 1914, in slate quarries and china clay works, "there was a good deal of short time and some unemployment in consequence of the war"; in tin-plate and sheet-steel works, "short time was very general. In some cases discharges ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... as short division in arithmetic, and round hand in the copy book—so as soon as I get through with my lessons, and you get through with your work, you come to this back porch, where I play, and I will bring my old primer and white slate, and I will teach you. If you get here before I do, you wait for me. I will never be long away. If I get here before you, I will wait ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... de figgurs on de slate—de queerest figgurs I ebber did see. Ise gittin' to be skeered, I tell you. Hab for to keep mighty tight eye 'pon him 'noovers. Todder day he gib me slip 'fore de sun up and was gone de whole ob de ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... mother's neck and every one cried a while; then we wiped up, Leon gave Sally his slate, and she came and sat beside the table and began to make out a list of those she really wanted to invite. First she put down all of our family, even many away in Ohio, and all of Peter's, and then his friends, and hers. Once in the list of girls ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... German lines, and stray pedestrians (unless in a group) are less liable than a motor to have a shell spent on them. We climbed under a driving grey sky which swept gusts of rain across our road. In the lee of the castle we stopped to look down at the valley of the Moselle, the slate roofs of Pont-a-Mousson and the broken bridge which once linked together the two sides of the town. Nothing but the wreck of the bridge showed that we were on the edge of war. The wind was too high for firing, and ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... (Cabbage-market so called), a captain and twelve musketeers to watch over him with fixed bayonets there; strictly private, till the HOFKRIEGSRATH had satisfied themselves in a point or two. "Hmph!" snuffled he; with brow blushing slate-color, I should think, and gray eyes much alight. And ever since, for ten months or so, Seckendorf, sealed up in the Cabbage-market, has been fencing for life with the HOFKRIEGSRATH; who want satisfaction upon "eighty-six" different "points;" and make no end of chicaning to one's clear answers. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... her mother is almost wild over it, and they thought at first that she would go insane, but the brave little child does all she can do to comfort her mother, and the men begged us to send them some things. Among the clothing we sent I put in a few school books, a slate, some pencils, and a Bible, which may be of use in lonely hours. They may read the good book now if they never have before. ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... arranged in storied box Of triple epoch, we survey the rocks, A learned nomenclature! Behold in time Strange forms imprison'd, forms of every clime! The Sauras quaint, daguerrotyped on slate, Obsolete birds and mammoths out of date; Colossal bones, that, once before our flood, Were clothed in flesh, and warm'd with living blood; And tiny creatures, crumbling into dust, All mix'd and kneaded in one common crust! Here tempting shells exhibit mineral stores, Of ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various |
