"Sparsely" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and extent of the highway improvement needed in any locality is dependent entirely on the demands of traffic. In sparsely settled areas, particularly those that are semi-arid or arid, the amount of traffic on local roads is likely to be small and the unimproved trails or natural roads adequate. But as an area develops either on account of ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... was without a home as long as he remained in Wyoming or Montana, while in another sense he was the owner of numberless dwelling-places or "headquarters." He may be likened to a commercial traveller in a vast and sparsely-settled region, where he is well known and ...
— Cowmen and Rustlers • Edward S. Ellis
... of hills in the background. There are excellent roads for riding and driving a few miles out of the city. The climate is very healthy for Europeans; the low ranges of mountains running north to south of the Island are sparsely wooded, some being quite bare of trees, and the atmosphere is comparatively dry. The cactus is very common all over the Island, and miles of it are seen growing in the hedges. About an hour and a half's drive from Cebu City there is the little ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... the men took the dogs around the base of a high rock shoulder sparsely covered with scrub spruce while I went up the opposite slope accompanied by the other two. We had not been away from camp half an hour when the dogs began to yelp and almost immediately we heard them coming around the ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... know was if Wetzel still pursued. He passed on swiftly up a hill, through a wood of birches where the trail showed on a line of broken ferns, then out upon a low ridge where patches of grass grew sparsely. Here he saw in this last ground no indication of his comrade's trail; nothing was to be seen save the imprints of the horses' hoofs. Jonathan halted behind the nearest underbrush. This sudden move on the part of Wetzel was token that, ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... the democracy of the United States has more than fulfilled the highest hopes. At that time these United States were only a strip along the eastern seaboard, bounded on the east by the Atlantic Ocean and on the west by an unexplored wilderness; thirteen sparsely settled states, the settlements widely separated from each other, with a population of less than four million persons. Now the wilderness is overcome. By the Louisiana Purchase we acquired the Great Southwest. For a pittance we bought the wastes ...
— The Spirit of Lafayette • James Mott Hallowell
... the bridge, Dan led the big car far out to a sparsely built-up section of Flatbush and there at last his object was achieved. A loud report echoed behind them and glancing over her shoulder Willa saw the big car swerve and come to an ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... not the agricultural and commercial statistics of the place at hand; but the larger territorial part of the town was devoted to the farming interest, and was rather sparsely populated, while the principal village, called Pinchbrook Harbor, was more densely peopled, contained two stores, four churches, one wharf, a blacksmith shop, and several ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic
... from those we know. The arias in them (and, of course, the whole opera was practically but a succession of arias) were only sketched in an extremely vague manner. Much was left to the singer, and the accompaniment was sparsely indicated by figures written above a bass. The recitative which separated one aria from another was improvised by the singer, and was accompanied on the harpsichord by the kapellmeister, who was naturally obliged to improvise his part on the spur of ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... mob. In his splendid endeavor to uphold the law, the mayor called out the troops, and the result was a deadly fight between the militia and mob, nine of the mob being killed. The trouble occurred at Roanoke, Va. It is frequently claimed that lynchings occur only in sparsely settled districts, and, in fact, it is a favorite plea of governors and reverend apologists to couple two arrant falsehoods, stating that lynchings occur only because of assaults upon white women, and that these assaults occur and the ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... on nine o'clock in the evening. The streets of Paris, sparsely illuminated here and there with solitary oil lamps swung across from house to house on wires, presented a miserable and squalid appearance. A thin, misty rain had begun to fall, transforming the ill-paved roads into ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... cedared desert heaved higher and changed its aspect. The trees grew larger, bushier, greener, and closer together, with patches of bleached grass between, and russet-lichened rocks everywhere. Small cactus plants bristled sparsely in open places; and here and there bright red flowers—Indian paintbrush, Flo called them—added a touch of color to the gray. Glenn pointed to where dark banks of cloud had massed around the mountain peaks. The scene to the west was somber ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... types were openly referred to external phenomena, and were based upon the life of nature, since rational or scientific ideas had not yet made their appearance, or only very sparsely. In any case, the reality of these types and their animation are facts, as all the earliest records attest, whether among ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... herself by intelligent and godly arguments, and the only way she can defend herself is by numbers; but whenever she can resort to physical and brutal strength, she then makes a fight which crimsons the earth with blood, and Protestantism pays the penalty, and the reason why those in the country and in sparsely settled districts do not know more of the hellishness of Catholicism is because this creed cannot intelligently defend itself and will not take issue with Protestantism unless she can take issue by ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... favourite foods. I learned from Mr. Eisen that they were all of the same shape and habit, but some of them might be green, with cream-coloured heads and feet, and black face lines, the body covered sparsely with long hairs; or they might be brown, with markings of darker brown and black with white hairs; but they would be at least three inches long when full grown, and would have a queer habit of rearing ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... matters in this sparsely settled part of the United States were not as strictly enforced as in large cities. There the loss of deeds could be made up by other evidence. But in the west the papers were needed and without them, even though in possession, there ...
— The Boy Ranchers at Spur Creek - or Fighting the Sheep Herders • Willard F. Baker
... Portuguese-German frontier. Farther north are Port Alexander, Little Fish Bay and Lobito Bay, while shallower bays are numerous. Lobito Bay has water sufficient to allow large ships to unload close inshore. The coast plain extends inland for a distance varying from 30 to 100 m. This region is in general sparsely watered and somewhat sterile. The approach to the great central plateau of Africa is marked by a series of irregular terraces. This intermediate mountain belt is covered with luxuriant vegetation. Water is fairly abundant, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... art of improvising belongs to Italy and the Tyrol. The wonderful gift of ready verse to express satire, and ridicule, seems, as a rule, to be confined to the inhabitants of those two lands. Others are, indeed, scattered over the world, who possess this gift, but very sparsely. Theodore Hook stands almost alone in this country as an improviser. Yet to judge of such of his verses as have been preserved, taken down from memory or what not, the grand effect of them—and no doubt it was grand—must have been owing more to his manner and his acting, than to any intrinsic ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... leaned nearer his companion, and in a low voice gave him a brief and rapid account of his life and the adverse fate that had served to banish him to the sparsely populated mountains of Nevada. It was a strange, sad story of sin, and wrong, and shame, in which a complication of evidence and circumstances had permitted the real offender to escape justice and another to suffer the consequences ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... ran somewhat parallel with his own, and whose preferences were kindred to those of his natural class; and, moreover, there was always a strange comradery among those whose problems were the same, the "neighbours" of the sparsely settled West. Mrs. Buford also received Franklin with pleasure, and Mary Ellen certainly always with politeness. Yet, fatal sign, Mary Ellen never ran for her mirror when she knew that Franklin was coming. He was but one of the many who came to the Halfway ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... confidence is unavoidable anywhere through the period of the pride of adolescence; but it was heightened in this case by the simplicity of life's problems in this narrow valley, and in the provincial little village which was the metropolis of this sparsely settled region. To him "the cackle of that bourg was the murmur of the world," and his theories of a life lacking the complexities of larger aggregations of men seemed adequate, because he had never seen them thoroughly tested, ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... from the north-east. Their lodges, villages and hunting grounds were many moons' travel away, and the section of country through which they were journeying was so sparsely settled that they had no fear of pursuit. Now, when you give an American Indian the chance to commit some vicious mischief with no fear of being made to pay therefor, you may set it down as a truth that ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... southwards."[1] The great wastes on either side of the Nile valley are in no sense Egypt, neither the undulating sandy desert to the west, nor the rocky and gravelly highland to the east, which rises in terrace after terrace to a height, in some places, of six thousand feet. Both are sparsely inhabited, and by tribes of a different race from the Egyptian—tribes whose allegiance to the rulers of Egypt is in the best times nominal, and who for the most part spurn the very ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... after my arrival at Las Palomas, there was a dance at Shepherd's Ferry. There was no necessity for an invitation to such local meets; old and young alike were expected and welcome, and a dance naturally drained the sparsely settled community of its inhabitants from forty to fifty miles in every direction. On the Nueces in 1875, the amusements of the countryside were extremely limited; barbecues, tournaments, and dancing covered the social side of ranch life, and whether given ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... area of the sparsely populated and difficult country throughout which their movements were thus facilitated, it is not surprising that these roaming commandos were never completely suppressed. Of the 21,256 men who surrendered after Vereeniging, 3,635 were Boers and rebels, who had been, up to that time, at large in ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... to hurl him forward to the rescue. At a smart pace he ran, halloo'ing loudly, to tell the victims—should they still live—that help was at hand. At his right, extended the wall. At his left, a grove of sugar-maples, sparsely set, climbed a long slope, over the ridge of which the descending sun glowed warmly. Somewhat back from the road, a rough shack which served as a sugar-house for the spring sap-boiling, stood with gaping door, open to all the winds that blew. These things ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... seen in my mind's eye came out with a clearness at this, which struck me as providential. I could discern as plainly as if I had been a part of the scene the white-clad form of the bride bending toward the light which came in sparsely through the half-open shutter she had loosened for this task. This was the shutter which had never again been fastened and whose restless blowing to and fro had first led attention to this house and the crime it might otherwise have concealed indefinitely. Had some glimpse of the rank grass growing ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... up a well-worn trail she climbed, and soon came out upon the sparsely timbered bench that was her hunting grounds. Upon this day, however, she was full of happy anticipation and her mind was everywhere except upon her work. She was thinking of Stevens, of their love, of the power which he might turn on that very day, and of the possible rescue for which she had ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... the family the following Sunday. When there appeared a smallish, Yankee looking individual, wrinkled face, a tuft of beard on his chin, similar to that bestowed upon the comic cartoons of the face of Uncle Sam, a beaked nose, very dirty hands and iron grey hair, sparsely sprinkled over his acorn-shaped head, Alfred thought a farmer or stock breeder had called ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... had left a will which occasioned much comment. By its terms she had provided sparsely but adequately for Benjamin's education and living until he should graduate; and her house, with all her personal property, and the bulk of the sum from which she had derived her own income, fell to her granddaughter Annie. Annie had always been her grandmother's ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... to be thus affected. The brain is the soil upon which impressions act differently, according to its character, just as, with the sower casting his seed-wheat upon different fields, some springs up into a luxuriant crop, some grows sparsely, and some, again, takes no root, but rots where it falls. Possibly, if these individuals had lived a little longer, they might have passed the border-line which separates mental soundness from mental ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... formation, for every advance may entail an action. Thus strategy is grievously cramped by the constant necessity for caution, and still more by the tedious movements of the mass of transport, without which no army can continue to operate in a country sparsely inhabited, and ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... location bordering China, South Korea, and Russia; mountainous interior is isolated, nearly inaccessible, and sparsely populated ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... deep rents like the one above which, as we recollect, lies the estufa of the Koshare. Topanashka walked toward the upper part of the cluster of dwellings of Shyuamo, where the ascending slope was sparsely covered with brush. In front of one of the caves sat a woman. She was unusually tall for an Indian, and neither young nor old. She appeared to be busy extracting the filaments from shrivelled leaves of the yucca, ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... passengers left the coach and were carried across on a little ferry boat, rowed by an old man and his two sons. They spent the night at an Inn and next morning early boarded another coach bound northeast over the sparsely settled hills of New Jersey. The road was narrow and bad in places, slackening their speed. Twice the horses were changed, in little hamlets along the way. In the late afternoon they crossed the marshy flats beyond Newark and just after ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... through a pebbly waste of beach and salt-grass, and a sea-scrub of grey bushes. A mile to their left the rocks began, spurs of the mountains; the shrubs became stunted trees; the rocks climbed, the trees with them; then the forest rose, first sparsely, then thick and dark; lastly, into the deep blue of the sky soared the toothed ridges, grey, scarred, and splintry. Scurrying horsemen, on beasts incredibly sure of foot, hung on the edge of these fastnesses, yelling, whirling their lances, white-clad, swarthy and hoarse. They came ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... back in her seat. Rather than objecting to the short cut that Thornton had begun to negotiate, the road, now that she gave her attention to it, she found to be quite the prettiest bit she had seen in the whole afternoon's run, where, in the rough, sparsely settled north country, all was both pretty and a delight—miles and miles without the sign of even a farmhouse, just the great Maine forests, so majestic and grand in their solitude, bordering the road that undulated ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... trail that wandered along it crossed it now and then and hung in places on the high banks above it. The trail had been washed by freshets often and was rough and stony, overhung with trees and vines. Along it, a hundred feet or so from the river, were houses sparsely scattered in the almost continuous forest of cocoanut and breadfruit. Oranges and bananas, mangoes and limes, surrounded the cabins, most of which were built of rough planks and roofed with iron. Here and there I saw a native house of straw matting thatched with palm leaves, a sign of ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... long risen, looked over the ragged crest of the ridge, and sent long shadows down the sparsely wooded slope. Though there was no wind, and every tree was as motionless as if carved of ice, these spare, intricate shadows seemed to stir and writhe, as if instinct with a kind of sinister activity. This ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... and very soon she surprised him by opening the door of a little tower chamber on the ground floor, sparsely but quite sufficiently furnished. ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... and he sighed his relief. But his relief was short-lived. Without a sign or warning the trail he was on died out, and his course lay over a narrow level flat sparsely dotted with small, stubbly bush. Now he knew that the mare had been true to herself. She had passed the real trail by, and was running ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... we are treating of, the State of Maine was so sparsely settled, and covered with such a dense growth of forest, that it was practically impossible for either of the contending parties to advance an army through its territory. A continuation of the same wooded and mountainous district protected the northern parts of Vermont and New Hampshire, while ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... to the kloof, which was about three hundred yards in length and but sparsely wooded, and then the real fun began. There might be a lion behind every bush—there certainly were four lions somewhere; the delicate question was, where. I peeped and poked and looked in every possible direction, ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... skin was loose and baggy; the wrinkled eyelids, instead of being shaped to the pupil, came down flat and perpendicular. His nose and chin were witch-like, the nostrils large and elastic; the lips, drawn tight together, curved downwards, indifferently captious; a short white beard grew sparsely on the chin; the skin of the narrow neck was fantastically drawn and creased. His limbs were thin, the knees and elbows sharpened to a fine point; the hands very long, with blue, corded veins. As a rule his clothes were a distressing ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... was much surprised when after riding in the direction his visitor had indicated and spending hours hunting for gates in wire fences, had come upon an assembly of a size he would not have believed possible in that sparsely ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... of hot white sunrays burned away the shadow tapestry of the valleys. In place of the cool mysterious vales there were left only scorched gulleys and dry washes sparsely set with greasewood ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... nearly all the produce is grown. Instead of building his railway through this flat, thickly populated zone, the engineer chose to construct his line across the mountain range of the interior, a district very sparsely inhabited, and hardly cultivated at all. The Jamaica Government Railway is admirably designed if regarded as a scenic railway, but is hardly successful if considered as a commercial undertaking. The train winds slowly through ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... still somewhat of a terra incognita; there is no point on its mainland at which European steamers call, and the usual conception of it is as a vast and malarious equatorial jungle, sparsely peopled by a race of semi-civilized and treacherous Mohammedans. In fact, it is as little known to most people as it was to myself before I visited it; and as reliable information concerning it ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... victoriously all along the line. Absurd old conventions and ridiculous restrictions had to give way or were broken through in every direction. The compartments for smokers on railway trains, at first provided sparsely and grudgingly, became more and more numerous. The practice of smoking out of doors, which the early Victorians held in particular abhorrence, became common—at least so far as cigars and cigarettes were concerned. Lady Dorothy Nevill, whose memory covered so large a part of the nineteenth ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... East, as to-day, the punishment of murder was left to the family or tribe of the murdered man. Was this just or effective? The same crude method of avenging wrongs is found in the vendetta of Italy and the family feuds in certain sparsely settled regions in the United States. The survival of this institution is to-day one of the greatest obstacles to civilization in those ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... ugly stone structure which still looked strong enough to defy all time, but which no lapse of years had done much to beautify. Nothing had ever thrived at Bareacre, which was, in fact, a hill of apparently solid stone, sparsely covered by the poorest of soil. The house was big, for the Ingraham family had been numerous, but it was as square and austere as the builders could make it. The roof ended exactly at the walls, which made it look, as Amy said, "like a girl with her eyelashes cut off." There were no blinds or shutters ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... of territory, now sparsely populated, and inhabited chiefly by negroes, extending from the Dismal Swamp to the Capes of Florida, and from these Capes to the Brazos,—generally level, and free from rocks and stones,—of the average width of nearly one hundred miles,—its area at least two ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... dollar a year for a pupil that was enrolled as attending school. This made possible the employment of a teacher for a short term of three months in the vicinity of a few villages, where a large enrollment could be secured, but left unsupplied the greater number living in the sparsely settled neighborhoods. ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... Presently they passed underneath one of the streets of the moving ways, and saw its platforms running on their rails far overhead, and chinks of white lights between the transverse slits. The factories that were not working were sparsely lighted; to Graham they and their shrouded aisles of giant machines seemed plunged in gloom, and even where work was going on the illumination was far less brilliant than upon the ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... united to any man you do not truly love. In former days the system of marrying through the agency of a match-maker undoubtedly possessed great advantages. It is incumbent upon every good Israelite to marry, but originally the villages were sparsely settled, in many places there was a lack of marriageable men, in others the maidens were in the minority, and as facilities for travelling were limited, and often entirely absent, a schadchen, who made it a business to bring eligible couples ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... charming little river two or three miles. At a sharp bend to the east a huge sheet of rock sloped from a round grass knoll sparsely planted with birches directly down into a pool. Two or three tree trunks jammed directly opposite had formed a sort of half dam under which the water lay dark. A tiny grass meadow forty feet in diameter narrowed the stream to half ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... obstacle that Colonel Dessausure fell. The center of the Third Regiment and some parts of the other regiments, were partially protected by boulders and large trees, but the greater part fought in the open field or in sparsely timbered groves of small trees. The fight ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... requires, in addition to competent directors, a business manager, mining-manager, and assistants, engineer, chemist, and metallurgist, with assistant assayers, etc., all highly qualified men. But it will be asked, how are many struggling mines in sparsely populated countries to obtain the services of all these eminent scientists? The reply is by co-operation. One of the most ruinous mistakes of the past has been that each little mining venture has started on an independent course, ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... and the beach being occupied by a swamp lying so low that it was difficult to judge, in places, the precise line of demarcation between land and water. The southern half of the island consisted entirely of low, flat ground, sparsely covered with coarse grass and isolated clumps of scrub, across which, at a distance of some eight miles, the high, precipitous cliffs of the island where we encountered the ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... that as these districts are so sparsely populated and the Bhuttias on the hills won't take the work, we have to import the thousands of coolies needed from Chota Nagpur and other places hundreds of miles away," said Daleham. "Lately, however, we have begun to ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... twenty years since Germany began to build up a colonial empire in Africa, and the net result is that, after spending some hundred million dollars, she has acquired over a hundred million square miles of territory, with a sparsely scattered German population of between five and six thousand souls. A third of the adult white population is represented by officials and soldiers. Militarism is rampant everywhere, with the result ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... the hall where a tray laden with a teapot and tempting dishes stood on a table near the door. "Do you not yet realize, Minna, that this is my life work?" With a sweeping gesture he indicated the models, brass, wood, and wax, which filled every cranny of the sparsely furnished room. ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... them are two, labor competition and instinctive race-hatred. It is probable that, if race- hatred did not exist, the difficulties of labor competition could be overcome. European immigrants also compete, but they are not excluded. In a sparsely populated country, industrious cheap labor could, with a little care, be so utilized as to enrich the existing inhabitants; it might, for example, be confined to certain kinds of work, by custom if not by law. But race-hatred opens men's minds to the evils of competition and closes them ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... of May 25th, traveling the sparsely settled country road, about 2:00 p.m. a courier brought our Captain orders to rush his guns forward, infantry and wagons giving space and away we went, the cannoneers mounting on our gun carriages and caissons. Private James Hogan, of Tuscaloosa, ...
— A History of Lumsden's Battery, C.S.A. • George Little
... fertile when it can be brought under irrigating ditches and watered, but here it lies out almost like a desert. It is sparsely inhabited along the little streams by a straggling off-shoot of the Mexican race; yet once in a while a fine place is to be seen, like an oasis in the Sahara, the home of some old Spanish Don, with thousands of cattle or ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... on the flank of any army advancing upon London from the south. Nothing came of Lord Hardinge's proposal till the experience of the Crimean campaign fully endorsed his opinion. The lands at Aldershot, an extensive open heath country, sparsely dotted by fir-woods and intersected by the Basingstoke canal, were then acquired by the crown. Wooden huts were erected in 1855, and permanent buildings to replace them were begun in 1881. Under the Barracks Act 1890, and the Military Works Act of 1897 and 1899, large sums were ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... have reduced the amount of heavy trucking—is proportionately great, and their din and crush is characteristic of the city. The residential districts, on the other hand, are unevenly and loosely spread; many areas well within the city are only sparsely settled. A belt of "bad lands"—occupied by factories, shanties, &c.—partially surrounds the best business district. The smoke resulting from the use of soft coal has given a drab and dingy colour-tone to the buildings. The low and even relief of the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... over almost level ground that day, across forest sparsely wooded and with much undergrowth of palms and ferns. We had drenching rain the entire day. My trousers were in shreds, dangling and catching in everything. When we had gone some eight or ten kilometres they were such a trouble to me that I discarded them altogether. ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... army come up on a line. Milledgeville is beautifully situated in the paradise portion of Georgia, the country around being rich, and on the whole, level and fertile. The city itself is laid off with much good taste, the streets being wide and handsome, and the buildings sparsely built along them. The private dwellings, for the most part, were framework, not costly and extravagant, but constructed in plain and wholesome style. The State House, however, was especially grand in its design and ...
— History of the Eighty-sixth Regiment, Illinois Volunteer Infantry, during its term of service • John R. Kinnear
... soldier gazed quickly in the direction of the speaker. Through the grove, where the trees were so slender and sparsely planted the eye could penetrate the thicket, he saw a band of horsemen dismounting and tying their animals. There was something unreal, grotesque even, in their appearance, but it was not until one of their number stepped from the shadow of the trees into the clearer light of the road ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... Bayamo, in Oriente, about the middle of July. The respective leaders were Antonio Maceo and General Martinez Campos, in person. The victory fell to Maceo, and Martinez Campos barely eluded capture. The engagements of the Ten Years' War were confined to the then sparsely settled eastern half of the island. Those of the revolution of 1895 covered the greater part of the island, sweeping gradually but steadily from east to west. During my first visit to Cuba, I was frequently puzzled by references to "the invasion." "What invasion?" I asked, "Who invaded ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... was sparsely and sketchily clad. At first. his tanned face seemed to be of several different colors and to have been modeled by some bungling caricaturist. Yet, despite this eccentricity of aspect, something about the obsequiously hurrying man struck ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... wide expanse of sparsely settled land, the two came upon a hut—a little rough shanty with a sod roof, and probably but two tiny rooms at most. It was nearing evening, and the red rays of the setting sun fell upon a young woman, humbly clad, sitting on a bench at the doorway, and cuddling ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... last on this question refers to the successful experiment in regard to woman suffrage in the Territories of Wyoming and Washington. It is not upon the plains of the sparsely-settled Territories of the West that woman suffrage can be tested. Suffrage in the rural districts and sparsely-settled regions of this country must from the very nature of things remain pure when corrupt everywhere else. The danger ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... the road lay mostly over the coast mountains. Toward night they entered upon the table-lands of Natal, which were generally level, except where, here and there, a low mountain spur had to be crossed. It was a grassy country, sparsely dotted with palms, with here and there timber in sight up ravines that ran down from the hills, and occasionally they ran upon clusters of heath-flowers. Indeed, the whole country was covered with flowers of rare beauty, but mostly odorless. It was ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... or town becomes so large that its government does not meet the people's local public needs, it is incorporated as a city. Where the country is sparsely settled the peace is seldom broken, private interests do not conflict, the people's public needs are small, and therefore the functions of government are few and light. As the population grows dense, the public peace is oftener disturbed, crime increases, ...
— Elements of Civil Government • Alexander L. Peterman
... are they. Overhead soar stone-pines—a roof of sombre green, a lattice-work of strong red branches, through which the moon peers wonderfully. One part of this marvellous piano is bare rock tufted with keen-scented herbs, and sparsely grown with locust-trees and olives. Another waves from sea to summit with beech-copses and oak-woods, as verdant as the most abundant English valley. Another region turns its hoary raiment of olive-gardens to the sun and sea, or flourishes ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... they arrived by way of a hill, over which they plunged into the middle of the camp. Thorpe saw three large buildings, backed end to end, and two smaller ones, all built of heavy logs, roofed with plank, and lighted sparsely through one or two windows apiece. The driver pulled up opposite the space between two of the larger buildings, and began to unload his provisions. Thorpe set about aiding him, and so found himself for the first time in ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... summer, and therefore the summer dining-room of the Spatts was in use. This dining-room consisted of one white, windowed wall, a tiled floor, and a roof of wood. The windows gave into the winter dining-room, which was a white apartment, sparsely curtained and cushioned with chintz, and containing very few pieces of furniture or pictures. The Spatts considered, rightly, that furniture and pictures were unhygienic and the secret lairs of noxious germs. Had the Spatts flourished twenty-five years earlier their ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... to south, actually covering about one-third of the continent. It embraces all that portion lying to the westward of the one hundred and twenty-ninth meridian of east longitude, and has an area of about a million square miles. It has few towns and is very sparsely settled, Perth having scarcely eleven thousand inhabitants, and the whole province a population of not over forty-two thousand. Pearl oysters abound upon its coast and form the principal export, being most freely gathered near Torres's Strait, which separates Australia ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... fifteen and thirty, and upon the face and upper part of the trunk, where they may exist sparsely or in great numbers. They are occasionally associated with oily seborrh[oe]a, the parts presenting a greasy ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... had reached the porch-steps he had made, unconsciously to himself, a mental inventory of his host's special features: tall, sparsely built, with stooping shoulders and long arms, the big hands full of cold knuckles with rough finger-tips (Oliver found that out when his own warm fingers closed over them); thin face, with high cheek-bones showing above his closely-cropped beard and whiskers; gray eyes—steady, ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... number, very small in proportion to the size and productive capacity of our planet, will find abundant room and food in the most beautiful, most agreeable, and most fertile parts of the earth. Ninety-nine per cent. of the land superficies of the earth will be either not at all or very sparsely populated—so far as the population depends upon the production of the locality—and ninety per cent, will be cultivated either not at all or only ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... France and in England (after 1066) the national assembly began as a feudal council, composed of the prelates and barons who held their lands and dignities directly from the Crown. But that of France was, before the twelfth century, seldom convened, sparsely attended, and generally ignored by the greater feudatories, a conference of partisans rather than a parliament. In England the Great Council of the Norman dynasty, inheriting the prestige and the claims of the Anglo-Saxon ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... need of warmth. I drew out my lens and touchwood, but alas! there was no sun. I sat down on a log to await his friendly appearance. Hours passed; he did not come. Night, cold, freezing night, set in, and found me exposed to all its terrors. A bleak hill-side sparsely covered with pines afforded poor accommodations for a half-clad, famished man. I could only keep from freezing by the most active exertion in walking, rubbing, and striking my benumbed feet and hands against the logs. It seemed the longest, most ...
— Thirty-Seven Days of Peril - from Scribner's Monthly Vol III Nov. 1871 • Truman Everts
... path that had been the street of the Ancient People. The yucca and niggerhead cactus grew everywhere. From her doorstep she looked out on the ocher-colored slope that ran down several hundred feet to the stream, and this hot rock was sparsely grown with dwarf trees. Their colors were so pale that the shadows of the little trees on the rock stood out sharper than the trees themselves. When Thea first came, the chokecherry bushes were in blossom, and the scent of them was almost sickeningly sweet after a ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... the sod, and lay it again to grass. If it be in wheat or other grain, we see the field spotted and uneven; here a portion on some slight elevation, tall and dark colored, and healthy; and there a little depression, sparsely covered with a low and sickly growth. An American traveling in England in the growing season, will always be struck with the perfect evenness of the fields of grain upon the well-drained soil. Journeying through a considerable portion of England and ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... predicted, the tracking was much easier. A few yards into the cornfield they came to a gap where a few seeds had failed to germinate or the plants had died. It was a bare space, sparsely ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... divisions of industry are determined first and mainly by natural differences of climate, soil, and material resources. Thus trade arises easily between North and South, between warm and frigid climates, between new countries and old, between regions sparsely and ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... embroidered court uniform, crept out slowly and with much difficulty. Coughing and murmuring peevish words to himself, he slipped into the allee leading to the terraces. His back was bent, and from under the three-cornered hat, ornamented with rich gold lace, came sparsely, here and there, a few silver hairs. Who could have recognized, in this doubled-up, decrepit form, now with tottering knees creeping up the terrace, the once gay, careless, unconcerned grand-master of ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... a pretty plant, but at first sight it will not be taken for a Boletus. They are not plentiful in our woods. I find them only occasionally and then sparsely. They are found in July and August, the months for the Boleti. They grow in leaf mold in mixed woods, especially among ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... dawn was approaching, the sky shading to a dull gray in the east, and casting a weird light over the landscape. It was a gloomy scene of desolation, the road a mere ribbon, overgrown with grass and weeds, a soggy marsh on one side, and a line of sand-hills on the other, sparsely covered by some stunted growth. Far away, across the level, my eyes caught a glimmer of water, locating the river, but in no direction was there any sign of a house, or curl of smoke. The unproductive land—barren and swampy—sufficiently accounted for lack of inhabitants, ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... that the haul was long and cruel. Starting at one, two or three o'clock in the morning, it would be impossible to forecast the weather with any degree of accuracy, so that often they would be overtaken by blizzards. At such times the lack of stopping-places and shelter in the sparsely settled reaches of the trail encompassed the journey with risks every whit as real as pioneer perils of ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... the Astoria to make arrangements for the evening's expedition, Duquesne upon entering his room, found there a large-boned man, with a great, sparsely-covered skull, and a thin, untidy beard. He sat writing by the window, and, at the other's entrance, cast a slow glance from heavy-lidded eyes across ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... way off, and so the sisters waded the stream. There was the delicious coolness of the water round their knees. They remained standing on the bank and admired the porcupines of sand, studded sparsely with tall blades of grass as with spines; also the round pebbles made smooth by the water. Their cooled legs felt for some time afterwards the sensation of the ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... the course of the river. Once there he found himself standing on a bluff with the broad, placid stream stretching away to the north and south at his feet. The bank was some twenty feet high and covered sparsely with grass and weeds; and a few feet below him a granite bowlder stuck its lichened head outward from the cliff, forming an inviting seat from which to view the sunset across the lowland opposite. The boy half scrambled, half fell the short distance, ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... while we slid past low-lying ground, verdant and fresh and blowing, but flat and sparsely timbered, with coppices here and there and, sometimes, elms in the hedgerows, and, now and again, a parcel of youngster oaks about a green—fair country enough at any time, and at this summer sundown homely and radiant. But ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... time immemorial, much difference of opinion concerning woman's right to do a good share in the drudgery of the world. But in the remunerative employments, before 1850, she was but sparsely represented. In 1840, when Harriet Martineau visited this country, she found to her surprise that there were only seven vocations, outside home, into which the women of the United States had entered. These were "teaching, needlework, keeping boarders, weaving, type-setting, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... newspapers were in attendance. The next day one of them declared, in the widely circulated Alten Buergerzeitung, that the poems the poet Kohn, who enlists our sympathy because of his physical handicap, brought to the attention of a sparsely attended hall were not yet ready for publication; however, one might expect something from his muse when Kohn has matured. Another declared, in the Journal for Enlightened Citizens: the overall impression is pleasing, but the poems are not all of the same quality. In addition, the ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... branch of the public service. It is the index of the growth of education and of the prosperity of the people, two elements highly conducive to the vigor and stability of republics. With a vast territory like ours, much of it sparsely populated, but all requiring the services of the mail, it is not at present to be expected that this Department can be made self-sustaining. But a gradual approach to this end from year to year is confidently relied on, and the day is not far distant when the Post-Office ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ulysses S. Grant • Ulysses S. Grant
... country without question or interference, and reached the wild mountains of Donegal in safety. Archie had asked that his conductors should lead him to the abode of the principal chieftain of the district. The miserable appearance of the sparsely scattered villages through which they had passed had prepared him to find that the superiors of such a people would be in a very different position from the feudal lords of the Highlands of Scotland. He was not surprised, ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... there was a large long room with four windows looking into a small wilderness that had once been a garden, and commanding a fine view of land and sea. This the Captain called the drawing-room. It was sparsely furnished with a spindle-legged table, half-a-dozen armchairs covered with faded tapestry, an antique walnut-wood cabinet, another of ebony, a small oasis of carpet in the middle of the bare ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... fact did he attribute the power by which he clung on to various parts of the steed during his wild career of perhaps a mile, but which seemed to the troubled senses of the rider not much less than fifty. It was providential for him, too, that the country was but sparsely intersected by fences, and those not of a very formidable character: nevertheless, at each of these the too confiding Button experienced a change of position, being, as he used to express it, "interjuiced forrard o' the saddle or back'ard o' the saddle, accordin' to the kind o' thing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... thousand troops. His cool adversary, who since his defeat at Narva had been prosecuting his reforms and reorganizing his army and building a navy, was more of a wily statesman than a successful general. He retreated before Charles, avoided battles, tempted him in the pursuit to dreary and sparsely inhabited districts, decoyed him into provinces remote from his base of supplies; so that at the approach of winter Charles found himself in a cold and desolate country (as Napoleon was afterwards tempted to his ruin), with ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... under the influence of the rays of an almost broiling sun, four miles to the town of Sonoma. The plain, which lies between the landing and Sonoma, is timbered sparsely with evergreen oaks. The luxuriant grass is now brown and crisp. The hills surrounding this beautiful valley or plain are gentle, sloping, highly picturesque, and covered to their tops with wild oats. Reaching Sonoma, we procured lodgings in a large and half-finished ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... those tremendously solid brown, or rather black, rocks which emerge from the sand like something primitive. Rough with crinkled limpet shells and sparsely strewn with locks of dry seaweed, a small boy has to stretch his legs far apart, and indeed to feel rather heroic, before ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... 1852, when, having almost lost the use of his voice, he took a superannuated relation. But as soon thereafter as his health would permit, he entered the service of the Bible Cause and for three years proved an efficient Agent. In this work his field of labor lay mostly in the new and sparsely settled regions of the Chippewa Valley, and along the frontiers of Minnesota. But here he evinced the same perseverance and self-denial which had characterized his whole life. Leaving his most estimable companion, he took the Word of God, and though he could no longer give it a living voice, ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... rattled noisily over the cobbles, some of the shops were taking down their shutters, the surface cars were beginning to run with increasing frequency, and the sidewalks were becoming sparsely populated. Familiar as the sights were, they were yet somehow strangely unreal to the young man. In a night the face of the world had changed for him; its features loomed weirdly blurred and contorted ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... out a theory that suits me," he mused aloud. "If any one has been riding out this way and lost it, will they perhaps return and look for it? Yet if I leave it where I found it the sand might drift over it at any time. And surely, in this sparsely settled country, I shall be able to at least hear of any strangers who might have carried such a foolish little thing. Then, too, if I leave it where I found it some one might steal it. Well, I guess we'll ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... was immediately shown in 1894, after the Bell patents had expired, by the tremendous outburst of new competitive activity, in "independent" country systems and toll lines through sparsely settled districts—work for which the Edison apparatus and methods were peculiarly adapted, yet against which the influence of the Edison patent was invoked. The data secured by the United States Census Office in 1902 showed that the whole ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... bone, and that while a young practitioner, living in a village composed of a few scattering houses, situated in a new and sparsely settled country, where opportunities for cultivating surgical science were necessarily rare, and the means for ...
— Pioneer Surgery in Kentucky - A Sketch • David W. Yandell
... if sparsely furnished. And everything seemed scrupulously clean. Their young hostess opened the door into her mother's room, which was that originally ...
— The Girls of Central High Aiding the Red Cross - Or Amateur Theatricals for a Worthy Cause • Gertrude W. Morrison
... really Athens?" she had said, wondering, as they had driven into what seemed a village set in bright bareness, sparsely shaded here and ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... always crowded. The Uffizi is never crowded; the Accademia is always comfortable; the Bargello is sparsely attended. But the Pitti is normally congested, not only by individuals but by flocks, whose guides, speaking broken English, and sometimes broken American, lead from room to room. I need hardly say that they form the tightest knots before the works of Raphael. All this ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... More than this, the clever Alsatian had slipped a topographical map of the surrounding country between two of the plates in the basket. According to the scale, the frontier was distant only about five leagues, across open country, sparsely settled with occasional farms which would serve ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... was sparsely covered with a growth of stunted spruce and banskian, which served as a screen both for the stockade and the long, low, fort-like building of logs, which was Lapierre's main cache for the storing of fur, goods of barter, and contraband whiskey. The fort ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... the house were sparsely occupied, but the stalls were full. Owen, disapproving of the whole business, refused to buy a programme, and settled himself in his seat prepared for the worst. He had a vivid recollection of White Roses, the novel, and he did ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... each ear. Forehead and breast reddish buff; lighter underneath. (General impression of color, bluish fawn.) Bill black, with tumid, fleshy covering; feet red; two middle tail feathers longest; all others banded with black and tipped with ashy white. Wing coverts sparsely spotted with black. Flanks and underneath the wings bluish. Female — Duller and without iridescent reflections on neck. Range — North America, from Quebec to Panama, and westward to Arizona. Most common in temperate climate, east of ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... tree about 7 high commonly called Gumamela in Manila; the leaves are ovate, acute, with about 5 nerves, serrate from the middle to the apex, hairs growing sparsely on both surfaces, with a small group of dark-colored, deciduous hairs growing on the lower part of the midrib. Petioles short with 2 stipules at the base. Calyx double, the outer part divided almost to the base into 6-8 parts; the inner ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... to meet certain friends, and thought to have hit off the happy mean by entering the ball-room just twenty minutes before midnight; but, lo! the musicians had not yet taken possession of their corner, and sofas and chairs were but sparsely occupied by some couple of dozen specimens of that portion of the fair sex who in outward seeming not attractive, for dancing purposes, to the frivolous male, yet for some inscrutable reason always put in the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... on the East River side, even most of what lay beyond Seventh Street, was unreclaimed land. I sailed my toy boats on the salt marshes where Tompkins Square now is, and I used to shoot, botanize, and hunt for crystals all over the island beyond Thirty-Second Street, the land being sparsely inhabited. I discovered a little wild cactus growing freely amongst the rocks, and carried a handkerchief full of it home, getting myself well pricked by the spines, but to my botanical enthusiasm this was nothing in view of the discovery. Only here ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... on the islands and coast of Alaska. This is the smallest of the Auklets; length 6.5 in. This species has no crest, but has the slender white plumes extending back from the eye. The entire under parts are white sparsely spotted with dusky. This species is by far the most abundant of the water birds of the extreme Northwest, and thousands of them, accompanied by the two preceding species, nest on the rocky cliffs of the islands of Bering Sea. Their nesting habits are the same as those of the other Auklets, they ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... journey still before us. It is an excellent circumstance, that hospitality grows best where it is most needed. In the thick of men it dwindles and disappears, like fruits in the thick of a wood; but where man is planted sparsely, it blossoms and matures, like apples on a standard or espalier. It flourishes where the inn and the lodging-house cannot exist, and dies out ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... was a cold place on a low western island. Snow was drifting sparsely, and a dull grey Atlantic swell was grumbling on the reefs. He was crouching among the withered rushes, where seaweed and shells had been blown, and snow lay in dirty patches. He felt the thick collar of his shooting-coat ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan |
