"Thinning" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for any hunter knows that such a chance may befall him in a strange and wild country. So we laughed together and off-saddled and hobbled the horses, and so sat down supperless to wait for morning under the rock. The mist was clammy round us, thinning and then thickening again as the breaths of wind took it; but the moon would rise soon, and then ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... Dim, gradual thinning of the shapeless gloom Shudders to drizzling daybreak that reveals Disconsolate men who stamp their sodden boots And turn dulled, sunken faces to the sky Haggard and hopeless. They, who have beaten down The stale despair of night, must ...
— The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon • Siegfried Sassoon
... a couple of miles Hilario reined in and the others crowded close. Ahead, dimly discernible against the night sky, there appeared to be a thinning of the woods. After listening for a moment or two, Hilario dismounted and slipped away; the three riders sat their saddles with ears strained. Once more the myriad voices of the night became audible—the chirping of crickets, the strident ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... entirely unremarkable face; the face of the type that used to be labeled "Babbitt." The corner of Rand's mind that handled such data subconsciously filed his description: forty-five to fifty, one-eighty, five feet eight, hair brown and thinning, eyes blue. To this he added the Rotarian button on the lapel, and the small gold globule on the watch chain that testified that, when his age and weight had been considerably less, Dunmore had played on somebody's ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... among the tolerant Hindoos, on the western coast of India and in the peninsula of Guzerat. There they throve and there they live still, while the ranks of their co-religionists in Persia are daily thinning and dwindling away.[9] ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... The houses were thinning out rapidly; one side of the road was already only a succession of fields, and along a tiny worn path through one of these Caroline was hurrying nervously. She crossed the widening brook, almost a little river now, and kept along its farther bank for half an hour, then left it and ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... growths. Fruit-buds are usually thicker, or "fatter," than leaf-buds, and often fuzzy. Heading-back the tree of course tends to concentrate the fruit-buds and to keep them nearer the center of the tree-top; but heading-back must be combined with intelligent saving and thinning of the interior shoots. Heading-back of pears and peaches and plums is usually a very ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... must be stayed as our poor means afford. I have to bend attention steadfastly Upon the centre here. The game just now Goes all against us; and if staunchness fail But for one moment with these thinning foot, ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... crusaders found themselves not conquerors, but in desperate straits from famine. The winter rains had turned the land round their camp into a swamp, and lack of food left them more and more unable to resist the pestilential diseases which were rapidly thinning their numbers. A foraging expedition under Bohemond and Tancred filled the camp with food; it was again recklessly wasted. The second famine scared away Tatikios, the lieutenant of the Greek emperor Alexius; but the crusading chiefs were perhaps still more disgusted by the desertion of William ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... difficulty and danger they went steadily toward the summit, and streamers of mist yet floating about the mountain often enclosed them in a damp shroud. Obviously, however, the clouds and vapors were thinning, and soon the last shred would ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler
... round the base of the tub, more because we knew nowhere else to lay them than for any other reason, for the sergeant-major had apparently forgotten his grandiose designs in other schemes, and had disappeared. The fatigue party was thinning. The corporal said what may be freely translated as "disappear quietly," and we made off to our camp, where I found Henry, who had doctor's leave to be excused fatigues, ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... were accurate and in the end I directed the bow of the canoe into the rushes behind which I had left my companions. Just then the moon began to struggle out through the thinning rain-clouds, and by its light they saw me, and I saw what for a moment I took to be the gorilla-god himself waddling forward to seize the boat. There was the dreadful brute exactly as he had appeared in the forest, except that it seemed ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... looked up at him with a tender, inquiring smile. Above her head the electric light, with which Oliver and the girls had insisted on replacing the gas-jets that she preferred, cast a hard glitter over the hollowed lines of her face and over the thinning curls which she had striven to brush back from her temples. Her figure, unassisted as yet by Miss Willy's ruffles, looked so fragile in the pitiless glare that his heart melted in one of those waves ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... reverberates, colour withdrawing Into a sky so white, sight cannot follow it. While in the shadows cast, rich hues, intenser Far than in light spaces, offer me gladness. Sun reigns triumphantly, thinning all vapour Into translucency, through which the foliage Bears out in sparkles of full golden greenery. O'er this, short dashes of keen grey-green masses lie; Even the cooler tints, pitched in this higher key— ...
— Songs, Sonnets & Miscellaneous Poems • Thomas Runciman
... forty years old, to strike a balance between the youth of eyes, mouth, and contour, and the age of deep lines and grayish, thinning hair. He had large, frank, blue eyes, a large nose, a strong forehead and chin, a grossly self-indulgent mouth,—there was the weakness, there, as usual! Evidently, the strength his mind and character gave him went in pandering to physical appetites. In confirmation ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... the picturesque native dress on the occasion of a dance, or the feast known as a "Potlatch." The Thlinkits are not hardy, nor, as a rule, long-lived, and diseases due to drink and dissipation are rapidly thinning them out. Shamanism exists here, but not to such an extent as amongst the Siberian races, and the totem poles, which are met with at every turn in Wrangell, are not objects of worship, but are used apparently for a heraldic purpose. Some of the ancient war canoes of this ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... of all, a thinning of the dark, that grew and broadened till it was like a thing coming at me—like something thrown at me. And suddenly it was all about me, and I was in it, and it was daylight—just ordinary daylight, you know. There was a white, flat road, with a hedge on one side ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... grew; the day wore on. Two rifles to one were now playing against his devoted company, which had had neither food nor drink since early morning. As he scanned his thinning line he saw a look of bloodlessness and hopelessness gathering on the set faces of which he had grown so fond during this ordeal. Some of the men were crouching too ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... another half-hour the gully died out and lost itself in the hillside, after which they made a rather faster pace over the thinning talus. Still, it was snowing hard, and none of them was capable of much further exertion when, soaked through and white all over, they limped into the lee of a ridge of rock on the crest of the divide. A bitter wind wailed above them, but there was a little shelter beneath ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... one chief cause of the desertion which was thinning his army was the natural unwillingness of the men to leave their families in a state of destitution. Cork and its neighbourhood were filled with the kindred of those who were going abroad. Great numbers of women, many of them leading, carrying, suckling their infants, covered all the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Already, the thinning of the trees in the neighbouring forests, and the excellence of the grass, had rendered New South Wales an excellent pasturage. Cattle and sheep had been ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... broken down by its action easier to cultivate. Such land should be ploughed not less than twice, but three times is better.[83] The Summer is the season of the grain harvest; the Autumn, when the weather is dry, that of the vintage: and it is also the fit time for thinning out the woods, when the trees to be removed should be cut down close to the ground and the roots should be dug up before the first rains to prevent them from stooling. In Winter the trees may be pruned, provided this is ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... more heavily in the war than the masters of the State schools, which are equivalent to English Council schools and American public schools. The thinning of their ranks is an eloquent proof of the heaviness of the German death toll. Their places have been taken by elderly men, but principally by women. It is a kind of Nemesis that they should have fallen in the very cause they have been propagating ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... the Indian scouts were ranging. Once we were forced to remain flat on our stomachs while a group of warriors passed within a dozen feet of us, driving to their camp some strayed beeves from the high rolling bottom-lands to the east. When the last of them had passed I observed with great alarm a thinning out of the darkness along the ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... gulch which might have been sought in vain for ten years by a stranger, they passed into the rim of a bowl-shaped valley. Timber covered it from edge to edge, but over to the left a keen eye could see a thinning of the foliage. Toward this they went, following the sidehill and gradually dipping down through heavy underbrush. Before him the officer of rangers saw daylight, and presently a corral, ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... sound of the Colonel's manly voice, as he trolled out a warlike ditty in French, with a chorus of "Marchons! Marchons!" and at every word grapeshot fell to the ground, for the Colonel, in spite of the suggestions of war, was peacefully engaged, being seated on the top of a pair of steps thinning out the grapes which hung from ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... appealingly. The moonlight, falling through the thinning forest, showed her white cerements. Then the recollection of all she must have suffered—the awful loneliness in that grim tomb in the Crypt, the despairing agony of one who is helpless against the unknown—swept over me in ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... were thinning off by degrees as Charlotte and Eleanor walked about in quest of Bertie. Their search might have been long had they not happened to hear his voice. He was comfortably ensconced in the ha-ha, with his ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... tree. In short, the production of the forest is not only sustained, but actually increased, by removing the oldest trees at just the proper time; and is decreased by taking out young trees either not yet at the natural age of greatest mean annual increment or capable of artificial stimulation by thinning. ...
— Practical Forestry in the Pacific Northwest • Edward Tyson Allen
... a is the shell; x the cavity, converted, as I believe, into a pouch by, firstly, the delicate tunic (c) lining the sack of the female; secondly, a double layer (d) of corium; and, thirdly, by a special, rather thick membranous layer (b), which thinning out round the cavity coats only part of the under surface of the scutum. This latter membrane I have not seen in any other Cirripede, and I believe it is nothing but the tissue, here not calcified, which, in a calcified condition, ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... through the thinning blond hair. "We-el, not exactly," he admitted frankly. "You see, I did take a shine to Nita, and if I do say so myself, she liked me a lot.... Oh, nothing serious! Just a little flirtation, like most of our crowd have with ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... slowly lost their grasp of the fortresses they had seized. Newcomers ceased to fill their thinning ranks. Their force was finally shattered at the battle of Clontarf, which the Annalist thus records: "1013: The Foreigners of the west of Europe assembled against Brian and Maelseaclain, and they took with them a thousand ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... endangered marine species include walruses and whales; fragile ecosystem slow to change and slow to recover from disruptions or damage; thinning polar icepack ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... which the Tremolino, with her plucky heart crushed at one blow, had slipped off into deep water to her eternal rest. The vastness of the open sea was smothered in driving mists, and in the centre of the thinning squall, phantom-like, under a frightful press of canvas, the unconscious guardacosta dashed on, still chasing to the northward. Our men were already descending the reverse slope to look for that punt which we knew ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... Siliceous Rocks. Argillaceous. Calcareous. Gypsum. Forms of Stratification. Original Horizontality. Thinning ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... and tried to look back through the mists. They were thinning fast as the sun climbed higher, but were yet thick. His men came on and entered the gate, while Kynan ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler
... Put-in-Bay. The work of the sailors in this action was cool and effective. Their fire covered the advance of the troops, and silenced more than one of the enemy's guns. "The American ships," writes a British historian, "with their heavy discharges of round and grape, too well succeeded in thinning the ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... demonstration, the ordinary expedients by which the attacker seeks to distract the attention and confuse the efforts of the defence, was made use of; and yet division after division, with no abatement of courage, marched in good order over the naked plain, dashed forward with ever-thinning ranks, and then, receding sullenly before the storm of fire, left, within a hundred yards of the stone wall, a long line of writhing forms to mark the ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... till the mushroom juice is reduced to half the quantity. There are several advantages attending this concentration: it will keep much better, and only half the quantity required; so you can flavor sauce, &c., without thinning it; neither is this an extravagant way of making it, for merely the aqueous part is evaporated. Skim it well, and pour it into a clean dry jar or jug; cover it close, and let it stand in a cool place till next day; then pour it off as gently as possible (so as not to disturb the settlings at ...
— A Poetical Cook-Book • Maria J. Moss
... though rooted to the spot; then Pearl and George ran as fast as their legs could carry them to the house of Mr. Grey. Peri, obeying the heroic impulse of his brave heart ran quickly but cautiously toward the thinning ice in the centre of the pond. Bobby had come to the surface and, though much frightened, had managed to grasp the edge of the broken ice. When Periwinkle came within a few feet of the child he flung ...
— Pearl and Periwinkle • Anna Graetz
... avoid going in a straight line. In point of fact, I could see bunches of exploding shells up over my right shoulder not a kilometre off. They continued to shell that section for some time; the little balls of smoke thinning out and merging ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... her two oldest sons frolicking about her like excited puppies, came up to Carolan Hall one exquisite morning a month later. Brush fires were burning in the thinning woods, and the blue, fragrant smoke drifted in ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... of love. Surely the King loved him, or he would not have chosen him out of many for this fateful work. He had asked of him the ultimate service, as a friend should. Aimery reconstructed in his inner vision all his memories of the King: the close fair hair now thinning about the temples; the small face still contoured like a boy's; the figure strung like a bow; the quick, eager gestures; the blue dove's eyes, kindly and humble, as became one whose proudest title was to be a "sergeant of the Crucified." But those ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... strong and straight of body, finely muscular, and did not look over forty, though it was more than eight years ago that he had reached the fortieth milestone. His hair was thinning a little at the temples and the rest of it was touched generously with grey. His features were regular and his skin clear. A full beard, closely cropped, hid the weakness of his chin, but did not entirely conceal those fine lines about the mouth ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... heavy against us. It was thinning rapidly and I could hear the scuffle as men made off down the side streets. My first notion was that these were the Turkish police. But I changed my mind when the leader came out into a patch of light. He carried no torch, but a long stave with which he ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... battle. Half a mile or more beyond the bare divide there rose against the southern sky a bold, oblong height or butte, studded with bowlders and stunted pine, and watchers at the fort became aware as the sun climbed higher that the smoke cloud, thinning gradually but perceptibly, was slowly drifting thither. The fire, too, grew faint and scattering. The war-whoops rang and re-echoed among the rocks, but all sound of cheering had long since died away. At last, an hour after the fury of the ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... She could not make out more than the vague outline of his figure now as he stood still, his body seeming to merge into the great trunk of the tree. He did not answer. Again, head down and hurriedly, he came on. On through the thinning fringe of shadow and into ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... enacted on this very spot! What strife in the days of the rival companies! Edmonton is a city still marked by the fine savour of the "Old-Timers," who meet once a year to renew associations, and for some fleeting but glorious hours recall the past on the great river. Age is thinning them out, and by and by the remainder man will shake his "few, sad, last gray hairs," and slip out, too. But the tradition of him, it is to be hoped, will live, and bind his memory forever to the soil he trod, when all this Western ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... the work were rich enough in interest. After the flurry caused by the delay in opening communication, affairs fell into their grooves. The days passed on wings. Almost before he knew it, the dogwood leaves had turned rose, the aspens yellow, and the pines, thinning in anticipation of the heavy snows, were dropping their russet needles everywhere. A light snow in September reminded the workers of the altitude. By the first of November the works were closed down. The donkey engines had been roughly housed in; ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... become thinned; many populous villages have disappeared—brother, the Nansemonds are not what they were, at least in numbers. But they have not lost their courage and valour, nor degenerated from the ancient renown of their fathers, nor has the thinning of their nation in the least tarnished the reputation of the few who yet live, or caused their enemies to deem them less than men. None can say that they ever turned their backs upon a foe, or shunned ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... glimpse of these facts, we can no longer wonder at the submission of the French peasantry to a thinning of their families by military conscription; at the eager thirst for office which afflicts the whole nation; or at the morbid desire to overturn society, and strike out a better organisation. As matters ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various
... been revolving in his mind what he should say to the old gentleman. He had about decided to speak very plainly to him on the folly of such narrowness. Something, however, in the General's air again deterred him: a thinning of the nostril; an unwonted firmness of the mouth. A sudden increase in the resemblance to the man-in-armor over the mantel struck him—a mingled pride and gravity. It removed him a hundred ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... the south, to go up and down shallow hollows, to find the pines thinning out; then we shot out of the forest into the scrubby oak. Riding through this brush was the cruelest kind of work, but Satan kept on close to the sorrel. The hollows began to get deeper, and the ridges between them narrower. No longer could we keep ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... Berthier, peevishly, shrugging his shoulders. 'Facts are facts, and as men of the world, we must look them in the face. Are we to stand against the will of the nation? Are we to have civil war on the top of all our misfortunes? And, besides, we are thinning away. Every hour comes the news of fresh desertions. We have still time to make our peace, and, indeed, to earn the highest regard, by giving ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in the foothills by this time, and they had drawn out from the trees to a little level space on the top of a rise. The morning mist was thinning rapidly in the heart of the hollow beneath them. Far off, they heard the lowing of cows being driven into the pasture land after the morning milking, and they could make out tiny figures ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... instrument for saving souls, I was made the innocent means of destroying them. Oh, gentlemen, it was a shocking thing to tug away at the rope till the sweat ran down one, for four shillings a week; and to see all the time that one was thinning one's own congregation and ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... stranger to me. So cold. So vibrationless. Broken lights. These slanting wrecked corridors. With the ventilating fans stilled, the air was turning fetid. Chilling. And thinning, with escaping pressure, rarefying so that I could feel the grasp of it in my lungs and the pin-pricks ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... destroying the breastworks that had sheltered the foe in the first action, as far as the time would permit, and dragging the captured cannon along with him, slowly fell back, continuing to make his dispositions, and pour, from time to time, as he went, his well-aimed volleys upon the thinning ranks of his pursuers. At length, however, he took his stand, resolved, in despite of all his disadvantages, to make a final and desperate effort to regain the lost mastery of the field. But closer and closer pressed the exulting and determined foe; and, although ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... short, rotund little man of forty-five, smooth-shaven, somewhat sandy in complexion, with twinkling eyes that were friendly, and a light thatch of pinkish hair which was noticeably thinning on the top of his head. There was a general air of cheerfulness and content about him and his mouth, that was inclined to twitch at the corners, seemed continually on the point of smiling. In truth, the fairy godmother of Jason had presented ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... which thinned the Hospitals, it became less frequent, and but few died. The Guards marched upon the Expedition into Hesse, on the eleventh of February, which gave us full Room for billetting all our Convalescents, and thinning the Wards; by which Means the Fever almost entirely ceased in all the Hospitals we had before they went away; though there still remained ...
— An Account of the Diseases which were most frequent in the British military hospitals in Germany • Donald Monro
... The merry-makers were thinning out; she was quite alone at her end of the place. By this time a close observer might have noticed that she was trembling violently; there was an air of abject fear and ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... by form-analogy and by extensions into the relational sphere, the concepts ostensibly indicated being now so vaguely delimited that it is rather the tyranny of usage than the need of their concrete expression that sways us in the selection of this or that form. If the thinning-out process continues long enough, we may eventually be left with a system of forms on our hands from which all the color of life has vanished and which merely persist by inertia, duplicating each other's secondary, syntactic functions with endless prodigality. ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... sound of a sudden smack, as if some one's ears had been boxed when he least expected it, and this was followed by a loud angry squawk. Now the flakes, which had been gradually thinning, died away entirely, and the children suddenly discovered that they had not been snowflakes at all but only a cloud of white feathers sent whirling through the house, out of the windows, and up the chimney by some disturbance in the midst of a great heap in one corner of the room as ...
— The Wonderful Bed • Gertrude Knevels
... six,—Risk, the robust English gentlemen, and Hughie, the cheery, ingenious adventurer. It is not easy to draw a fair picture of one's self, even with the aid of a mirror, and when one can readily note the ravages of time in thinning locks and increasing wrinkles, it is hard to speak of the robust health of youth without exaggeration. At that time, however, he was about twenty-three, having dark hair and eyes, a medium stature, and splendid health. ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... imitated Timagenes was the destruction of the Moor, while he affected to be humorous, and attempted to seem eloquent. The example that is imitable in its faults, deceives [the ignorant]. Soh! if I was to grow up pale by accident, [these poetasters] would drink the blood-thinning cumin. O ye imitators, ye servile herd, how often your bustlings have stirred my ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... stocks and others. Other white-flowered varieties may be distinguished when germinating, their young axes being of a pure instead of a purplish green. It is a test ordinarily used by gardeners, to purify their flower beds long before the blooming time, when thinning or weeding them. Even in wild plants, as in Erodium, Calluna, Brunella and others, a botanist may recognize the rare white-flowered [147] variety by the pure green color of the leaves, at times when it is not in flower. Some sorts of peas bear colored flowers and ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... glee. It is the largest and strongest of the lot that has just died, a handsome dog; I called him 'Loeva' (Lion). He was such a confiding, gentle animal, and so affectionate. Only yesterday he was jumping and playing about and rubbing himself against me, and to-day he is dead. Our ranks are thinning, and the worst of it is we try in vain to make out what it is that ails them. This one was apparently quite in his normal condition and as cheerful as ever until his breakfast was given him; then he began to cry and tear round, yelping and barking as if distracted, just as the ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... enemy, who would see the apparent possibility of taking Telnitz easily, and then crossing the Goldbach and going on to Gross-Raigern in order to control the road from Brunn to Vienna and so cut off our line of retreat. The Austro-Russians fell headlong into the trap, and, thinning out the rest of their line, they clumsily piled up a considerable force in the lower part of Telnitz, and in the narrow, marshy defiles around the meres of Satschan and Menitz. They thought, for some unknown reason, that ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... these ghosts of mine, But the weapons I've used are sighs and brine, And now that I'm nearly forty-nine, Old age is my chiefest bogy; For my hair is thinning away at the crown, And the silver fights with the worn-out brown; And a general verdict sets me down As ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... curiosity impelled him higher and higher into the hitherto unexplored fastnesses. Now the timberlands lay beneath him, for, although the hardy laurel continued in profusion, albeit somewhat dried and withered, the trees were thinning out and becoming more scraggly, and more frequently the naked rocks, split and seamed, thrust themselves up through the baked soil, "like vertebrae in the backbone of the mountain," thought Donald. Now they were toned and softened by moss and lichen; now barren of vegetation, rugged ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... flanked by a pair of slender minarets, daintily proclaimed the Mosque Yeni-Djami against the fading amber. On Galata Bridge itself, the day-long tide of medleyed life was thinning. Where there had been an eddying current of turbans and tarbooshes, bespeaking all the tribes and styles which foregather at the meeting place of two Continents and two seas, there were now only the ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... a heavy overcoat with a fur collar. He was never seen without it in public during the winter. In private he removed it and sat in his shirt sleeves. Crowl was a thinker, or thought he was—which seems to involve original thinking anyway. His hair was thinning rapidly at the top, as if his brain was struggling to get as near as possible to the realities of things. He prided himself on having no fads. Few men are without some foible or hobby; Crowl felt almost lonely ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... into a velvet dusk. The great Change was drawing near. The silence lay like a thinning veil of mist upon the mountain-top. The clouds were parting in the East, all tinged with gold, like burnished gates flung back for the royal coming of the sun-god. The stillness that lay upon all the waiting earth was sacred as ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... Spain at this time, there was but one route, namely, the south, for the northern exits were closed by the Carlists, still in power there, though thinning fast. Indeed, Don Carlos was now illustrating the fact, which any may learn by the study of the world's history, that it is not the great causes, but the great men, who have made and destroyed nations. Nearly half of Spain was for Don Carlos. The Church sided with ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... scenery with its shady towing-paths and rustic swing-bridges. Almost the only traffic that remains to this canal, which comes out upon the Thames near Oxford, is carrying timber. The growth of English timber is slow, but some is still produced by the process of thinning the woods so as to make shapely trees, for otherwise the tall trunks would force themselves up almost ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... returned the towel and razor to his cabin. He decided that his slightly rumpled shirt and slacks of utilitarian gray would do for another day. About thirty-eight, an inch or two less than six feet and muscularly slim, Tremont had an air of habitual neatness. His dark hair, thinning at the temples, was clipped short and brushed straight back. There were smile wrinkles at the corners of his blue eyes and grooving ...
— Satellite System • Horace Brown Fyfe
... extended. I was here in scrubs to the north of it. The last night we camped at the dam was exceedingly cold, the thermometer falling to 26 degrees on the morning of the 16th of August, the day we left. I steered south-east, and we came out of the scrubs, which had been thinning, on to the great plain, in forty-nine or fifty miles. Changing my course here to east, we skirted along the edge of the plain for twenty-five miles. It was beautifully grassed, and had cotton and salt-bush on it: also some little clover hollows, in which ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... who, hearing, did not laugh, or if they did, it was with a mere strained thinning of the lips that had no element of mirth in it. Temper and tolerance were short ten years ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... note-book and was busily making jottings. He seemed, if anything, more worn than ever, more tired. He was living on his nerves. The gray face was enough to bring tears to a woman's eyes, and the lank, ill-clothed form seemed in danger of thinning away to nothingness. So Myra said nothing, but kept looking at him, trying to save him by her strength of love, trying to send out those warm currents and wrap him up and infuse him with life ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... had begun to lessen, its downfall thinning into a soft patter among the leaves. The young man took off his hat and let the damp air play over his hair. It was thick hair, black and straight, already longer than city fashions dictated, and ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... carried Allen to Crabapple, and Mrs. Kinemon and David followed in the buggy, a great bundle, folded in the bright quilt, roped behind. They soon crossed the range and dropped into a broader valley. Crabapple lay on a road leading from mountain wall to wall, the houses quickly thinning out into ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... annual pruning. As far as possible we prune to prevent laterals from becoming too numerous, from growing so as to overtop or shade lower limbs, to let in light and sunshine, so as to get the maximum amount of color on the fruit and in a measure to help in thinning the fruit. Having in view the idea of an annual crop instead of a biennial one, one essential point always in mind is that we want an open headed tree, and we also wish to insure our trees against blight, and so we eliminate all water sprouts. Apparently, ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... which was promptly finished. They struck the tent, and packed it with their sleeping-bags and provisions upon the sled, and then, taking up the traces, set out across the ice. The light had grown clearer now, and the snow was thinning, but it still whirled about them, and lay piled in drawn-out wreaths to lee of every hummock or ragged ridge. They floundered knee-deep, and in the softer places the weight upon the traces grew unpleasantly heavy. That, however, was not a thing any of them felt the least desire ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... a man still young; under forty indeed, though marked prematurely by hard work and hard fighting. His black hair had receded on the temples, and was obviously thinning on the crown of the head; he wore spectacles, and his shoulders had taken the stoop of office work. But the eyes behind the spectacles lost nothing that they desired to see; and the general impression was one of bull-dog strength, which could be impertinent and aggressive, ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... obliterated by passing trains coming from nowhere and slipping into nothingness. As they crept along with the day, without, however, any lightening of the opaque vault overhead to mark its meridian, there came at times a thinning of the gray wall on either side of the track, showing the vague bulk of a distant hill, the battlemented sky line of an old-time hall, or the spires of a cathedral, but always melting back into the mist again as in a dream. Then vague stretches of gloom again, ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... classes to the service of Education, waxed daily more numerous and more insolent on the strength of their immunity from the old burden which had formerly exercised the twofold wholesome effect of at once taming their brutal nature and thinning their excessive numbers. ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... abundant where the oak and hickory were; the ruffled grouse still fed in families upon beech-nuts on the ridges and the thorn-apples of the lowlands. The wild turkey still strutted about in flocks rapidly thinning, and occasionally a deer fell to the lot of the shrewd hunter. John liked to hunt and fish. He wasted time that way, his neighbors said, and his wife was of the same opinion. It is true, he possessed certain qualities which, even in their utilitarian eyes, commanded some ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... John Burkett Ryder was surprisingly well preserved. With the exception of the slight stoop, already noted, and the rapidly thinning snow-white hair, his step was as light and elastic, and his brain as vigorous and alert, as in a man of forty. Of old English stock, his physical make-up presented all those strongly marked characteristics of our race which, sprung from Anglo-Saxon ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... the hands of artists,—yes,—artists—men who, from childhood, had known the soft pliant Japanese brush almost as a spirit hand;—had felt the joy of the long stroke down fibrous paper where the very thickening and thinning of the line, the turn of the brush here, the easing of it there, made visual music,—men who had realized the brush as part not only of the body but of the soul,—such men, indeed,—such artists, were to be offered a bunch of hog bristles, set in foreign tin. Why, even in the annals ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... blotted out whole lengths of the defenses and killed the defenders by scores. Time after time along those parts of the front selected for assault were parapets destroyed, and time after time did the thinning band of survivors build them up again and await the next onset ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... knew whether I stood on my head or my heels; but Brunow calling me by name, and the crush thinning just then for a moment, I made my way easily to the step below the one she stood on, and Brunow introduced us to each other. Now I had lived very much away from women all my life. I lost my mother early, and of sisters and cousins and such-like feminine ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... Palm trees which so attracted our attention along the banks from the mouth of the Gulf to Basrah still continues, but they are thinning down very considerably and by the time Kurnah is reached the belt has no depth at all. There is no question of a halt, no question of a rest, "Push On" is the order of the day. It may seem somewhat absurd now, ...
— With a Highland Regiment in Mesopotamia - 1916—1917 • Anonymous
... hand, so soft and yet instinct with warm and vigorous life, I stumbled on through leafy ways, traversed a little wood, on and ever on until, the trees thinning, showed beyond a glimmer of the great high ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... to say nothing of that to man, without taking auspices or offering sacrifices, draw up their line, which was extended towards the flanks, lest they should be surrounded by the great numbers of the enemy. Still their front could not be made equal to that of the enemy, though by thinning their line they rendered their centre weak and scarcely connected. There was on the right a small eminence, which it was determined to fill with bodies of reserve; and that circumstance, as it was the first cause of their dismay and flight, so it proved their only means of safety in their flight. ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... and thinning of the lines of the classic Roman capitals was partly due to the imitation in stone inscriptions of the letter forms as they were written on parchment with the pen. The early Latin scribes held their stiff-nibbed reed pens almost directly ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown
... in the afternoon of that hard-fought battle of Manassas (Bull Run), July 21, 1861, the Federals were thinning out the lines in gray. Now they were directing their efforts against the wings of Jackson and Beauregard. Jackson's solemn visage was growing more solemn; Beauregard was anxiously scanning the landscape beyond, in the hope of discovering the ...
— How the Flag Became Old Glory • Emma Look Scott
... been in the Guild service he would never have made that find on Jumala. That lucky, lucky find! Hume's plasta-flesh fingers curved, their nails drew across the red surface of the table. And where was Wass? He was about to rise and go when the golden oval on the wall smoked, its substance thinning to a mist as a man stepped through ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... Zagal were between him and them, and death was whistling by on every wind. Reluctantly, therefore, he consented to fly. Another horse was brought him: his faithful adalid guided him by one of the steepest paths, which lasted for four leagues, the enemy still hanging on his traces and thinning the scanty ranks of his followers. At length the marques reached the extremity of the mountain-defiles, and with a haggard remnant of his men escaped by dint ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... rifles. The band of Wa-ka-ra recoiled for a moment. It was by far the weakest; and had it been left to itself, would have sustained defeat in this terrible encounter. But the Utahs were armed both with rifles and pistols; and the latter, playing upon the ranks of the Arapahoes, were fast thinning them. Dusky warriors were seen dropping from their horses; while the terrified animals went galloping over the field—their wild neighs adding to the uproar of the fight. There was but one charge—a short ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... July, green apples are so large as to remind us of coddling, and of the autumn. The sward is commonly strewed with little ones which fall still-born, as it were,—Nature thus thinning them for us. The Roman writer Palladius said,—"If apples are inclined to fall before their time, a stone placed in a split root will retain them." Some such notion, still surviving, may account for some of the stones which we see placed to be overgrown ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... manslaughter. In 1805 Martin was the acknowledged head of the American Bar, but at the same time he was undoubtedly a drunkard and a spendthrift. With an income of $10,000 a year, he was always in need. His mediocre stature, thinning locks, and undistinguished features created an impression which was confirmed by his slovenly attire and ungrammatical speech, which seemed "shackled by a preternatural secretion of saliva." Here, indeed, for ugliness and caustic tongue ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... window now and then, we noticed that the fog was thinning; and at one place there seemed a luminous blur, indicating perhaps where the steamer lay. We wondered whether running so close upon Gadabout was what had determined the captain to cast anchor. And then we wondered other things about fogs and mists ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... or more, as we ran on, we thus continued exchanging broadsides, considerably thinning their crowded decks; but as some of our spars were wounded, our captain, fearing lest any being carried away, the enemy might escape, determined without delay to lay him on board, and to try the mettle of true men against their ruffian ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... sudden shower was falling down from heaven, drenching anew wet pastures, thinning the mud upon brown lanes, poppling upon the washed highway. Dainty scale-armour of a million leaves protected Anthony. Ere this was penetrated, the fusillade ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... town, Will and Gwilym had much to do; there were books to be got—there was a horse to be looked at for the farm—and, moreover, Will was to call upon Mr. Price the vicar, so the hours passed quickly away, until late in the afternoon when the crowd was a little thinning, the Nantmyny carriage passed through the street, within it Colonel Vaughan and his niece. Will saw it at once, and turned away to avoid recognition—for although nothing would have pleased him more, he was a man of great tact and ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... of aspirant engineer, sub-lieutenant of artillery, second lieutenant, deputy, comptroller, general guardian, etc., but with the ignoble positions of pioneer, train-soldier, dredger, cabin-boy, fagot- maker, and exciseman. There he will wait, until death, thinning the ranks, enables him to advance a step. Under such circumstances a man, a graduate of the polytechnic school and capable of becoming a Vauban, may die a laborer on a second class road, or a corporal ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... Battery position we followed the road behind Hill 123, up a glorious valley, whose sides were thickly wooded with pines, gradually thinning under the destruction wrought by Austrian shell fire and the Italian military need for timber. The only other vegetation here was a little coarse grass. On the lee side of Hill 123, sheltered from Austrian fire, was a whole village of wooden huts, admirably constructed, capable of housing several ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... the business of the courts you are enabled to diminish the number of judges, which is a very great advantage. When judges are very numerous, death is perpetually thinning the ranks of the judicial functionaries, and laying places vacant for newcomers. The ambition of the magistrates is therefore continually excited, and they are naturally made dependent upon the will of the majority, ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... glint to glint, on hoards Of scythes, and spades, and dinner-horns, so the old tools Are little candles throwing brightness round in pools. With Oriental splendour, red and gold, the dust Covering its flames like smoke and thinning as a gust Of brighter sunshine makes the colours leap and range, The strange old music-stand seems to strike out and change; To stroke and tear the darkness with sharp golden claws; To dart a forked, vermilion tongue from open jaws; To puff out bitter smoke which chokes the sun; and fade Back ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... just about the delay that he had expected, and Robert's hand sprang to the trigger at the very moment the man pulled his own. The bullet hummed by his cheek. His finger contracted and then it loosened. A sudden acuteness of vision, or a chance thinning of the fog at that point, enabled him to see the man's face, and he recognized the French partisan, Charles Langlade, known also to the Indians as the Owl, who, with his wife, the Dove, had once held him in a captivity by no ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... a scooping power, so that if similarly a d b in Fig. 47 represent the course of a glacier, starting at a and gradually thinning out to e, it may scoop out the rock to a certain extent at d; in that case if it subsequently retires say to c, there would be a lake lying in the basin thus ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... broken tiles and slates rattled down into the square; a thick cloud of dirty black smoke, gray and red tinged with mortar and brick-dust, appeared up above the roofs on the other side of the square, spread slowly and thickly, and hung long, dissolving very gradually and thinning off in ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... took place when the two caiques passed—just a thinning of the silken veil, with only one fold of the yashmak slipped over the eyes, softening the fire of their beauty; then a quick, all-enfolding, all-absorbing look, as if she would drink into her very soul the man ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... resemblance to either type. He was a well-set up, broad-shouldered person of about forty-five, very carefully dressed in a blue serge suit and black overcoat, with a large, even-tempered countenance, which sloped into a high forehead. The neatly brushed but thinning locks carefully arranged across the top of the head testified to the fact that Mr. Marigold had sacrificed most of his hair to the vicissitudes of his profession. When it is added that the detective had a small, yellow moustache ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... what," said Tom to himself, "it's much pleasanter sitting here in the shade, than broiling over celery trenches, and thinning wall fruit, with a baking sun at one's back, and a hot wall before one's eyes. But I'm a miserable slave. I must either work or see my family starve; a very hard lot it is ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... was well understood, for the Complete Farmer, s.v. Turnips (ed. 3), says that about 1750 Norfolk farmers boasted that turnips had doubled the value of their holdings, and Norfolk men were famous for understanding hoeing and thinning, which were little practised elsewhere. Further, Young, Southern Tour, p. 273, says: 'the extensive use of turnips is known but little of except in Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex. I found no farmers but ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... it will be a glorious day later. The clouds are thinning already," Sir Jasper went on; "strange, but I never realized, until this morning, how green—and ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... with a stick so old Tom could come and go as he pleased, and went on about his chores, working with a methodical efficiency that matched Tom's and went with his thinning gray hair and forty years in the woods. He dug the spuds he had planted that spring. He made a swing around his beaver lakes, tallying the blankets in each house. He took the canoe and moved supplies to his upper cabin. He harvested some fat mallards that had moved ...
— Cat and Mouse • Ralph Williams
... 1805, William married Jane Ripley, January 22nd, 1806, and Harmon, the first-born, married Cynthia Bent, June 8th, 1807. The four eldest sons were married within the year and a half, and on April 14th, 1808, Sallie, the eldest daughter, entered the matrimonial haven. This was thinning out the old home pretty fast. The sons, however, all settled near Prospect, and were several years getting finally located in their own homes. Harmon took the Mauger farm left him by his grandfather; Thomas, the Patten farm, joining the ...
— The Chignecto Isthmus And Its First Settlers • Howard Trueman
... obliged to plant seed for both. So he planted it in a drill as one plants lettuce. Later the little seedlings were thinned out to stand six inches apart. This thinning was done when the plants were four inches high. Four o'clocks need lots of room as they ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... the village I lost the brick path and could not find it again. For a full hour I wandered over the sodden fields under shell fire, discovering the village, a bulk of shadows thinning into a jagged line of chimneys against the black sky when the shells exploded, and losing it again when the darkness settled down around me. Eventually I stumbled across the road and ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... Peterkin had cut was full twelve feet long, being a very strong but light and tough young tree, which merely required thinning at the butt to be a ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... the work to have the protection of the military. In a very extensive culture of turnip and corn crops; in drainage on a large scale; in the building of capacious farm-offices; in planting the land not of an arable quality; and latterly, in the thinning of these plantations—all under the direction of a Scotch steward—almost unlimited employment was given; in addition to which, the establishment of a dispensary, the constant residence of a valuable clergyman, a station ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... cabbage from a short stretch of swamp and brule directly opposite. Through the velvet gloom the fire-flies trailed. Rocky ridges were scattered around in the background and high on the right was a huge rounded pile of rock with a few white-stemmed birches clinging to it for all the world like thinning gray hairs on an almost-bald head. It was too dark to see the birches clearly, but the ex-chainman for the Rutland survey party knew they were there and how they looked; he had seen hundreds of such growths. Behind ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... did not have much effect. The wet, cold, the raw kind that goes through, was in him and, despite all the power of his will, he shivered almost continually. But he persisted for a half hour and then became conscious of an increasing brightness about him. The white mist was not gone, but it was thinning greatly, and the rays of the sun fell on the snow brilliant ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... is thinning out, Dawson. At its best it is second-hand; at its worst, the mere conjecture of a rather careless draughtsman. I have two things to do: first to find out the real seducer, who is probably also the despatcher ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... also to note the increasing number of bright, sensible, earnest young women coming from all parts of the country to aid the older workers and to close up their thinning ranks. The sight would be a revelation to that Massachusetts legislator who was lately reported as saying that the petitioners who had been asking for suffrage for so many years were fast dying off, and soon there would be none left. He would have seen how greatly he was reckoning without his host—or ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... The 'primo tenore' statue of Garibaldi had already taken possession of the place in the name of Latin progress, and they met Italian faces, French faces, Spanish faces, as they strolled over the asphalt walks, under the thinning shadows of the autumn-stricken sycamores. They met the familiar picturesque raggedness of Southern Europe with the old kindly illusion that somehow it existed for their appreciation, and that it found adequate compensation for poverty in this. March thought he ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... dry-eyed one, women in spite of themselves with lips whitening, men grim with pride and an innermost bleeding, sagged suddenly, thinning and trickling back into the great, impersonal maw of the city. Apart from the rush of the exodus, a youth remained at the rail, gazing out and quivering for the smell of war. Finally, he ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... present menace to the sheep and it was only by constant watchfulness that the owner kept his negroes from overrunning the place with worthless curs. In 1792 he wrote to his manager: "I not only approve of your killing those Dogs which have been the occasion of the late loss, & of thinning the Plantations of others, but give it as a positive order that after saying what dog, or dogs shall remain, if any negro presumes under any pretence whatsoever, to preserve, or bring one into the family, that he shall be severely punished, ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... salt shroud from the sea! How it eddied and funneled and whorled, now massing thick like frosted glass, now thinning to a web of tissue. Suddenly, while he watched, a lane broke through. He saw clearly the piles at the wharf's end, a glimpse of dark water, and, between him and it, a figure huddled in a cloak—a female figure, also sitting upon an upturned keg. Then the ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay |
