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More "Explosive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the epithet "sparrow-like," and which was noted by others as characteristic of Goethe at this period, could not fail to irritate one like Herder, naturally grave, sobered by hard experience, and then suffering from a painful and serious ailment. Equally distasteful to Herder were Goethe's explosive outbursts in general conversation and his liking for practical jokes at the expense of his friends. To Herder as to everyone else Goethe aired his opinions with the "frank confidingness" which he notes as a trait of his ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... "An explosive bullet," Carl said grimly. "I thought I would make certain of the beast, even at the risk of hurting you; and, mein Gott! it was a near shave! You have lost some of your hair, but nothing more. When I saw you go away with the woman, I guessed something was up. I did not like ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... even from a distance of 3,000 yards may act as an explosive, scattering the contents in all directions; but the bullet from a revolver will usually be ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... the Germans had seamed the western slopes with trenches, a network of tunnels and of concrete redoubts. Behind the ridge lay the German batteries. For months this ridge had been mined and countermined by both sides, until the English had placed 500 tons of high explosive, that is approximately 1,000,000 pounds of amminol, beneath nineteen strategic points which were to be taken. At the foot of the ridge, along a front of nine miles, the British had concentrated their batteries, heavy guns, and vast supplies of ammunition. Day and night ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... the incarnation of those qualities we love to call American, I should turn to a familiar gallery of my memory and point to the living portrait that hangs there of Walter Page. A sort of foursquareness, bluntness, it seemed to some; an uneasy, often explosive energy; a disposition to underrate fine drawn nicenesses of all sorts; ingrained Yankee common sense, checking his vaulting enthusiasm; enormous self-confidence, impatience of failure—all of these were in him; and he was besides affectionate to a fault, devoted to his country, ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... government. By the "business at hand" they meant a new explosive and slow-burning powder that was to be used in the new type of fourteen-inch turret guns being made in Glasgow. Some of that explosive was in my possession. The fact that it was not discovered in my effects, nor was anything ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... hear that that house was levelled to the ground next morning—a shrapnel shell on each side of it to get the range—a high explosive into it to burst it up—and an incendiary shell to burn the rubbish; and one ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... what I mean—love boiled down and sugared off is mighty apt to get an explosive flavor, and one had better be careful with that kind if one is timid; which I'm not. As I said, also, I am ready for a little taste of life, so I read on without fear. And, to be fair, Alfred had well boiled his own last paragraph. It snapped; and I jumped and gasped ...
— The Melting of Molly • Maria Thompson Daviess
... the College have been secured in the heart of Mayfair and a competent staff of instructors has already been appointed, who, with the aid of gramophones, will be able to train the students to perfection in the requisite command of the most explosive gutturals, labials and sibilants. Doctor Prtnkeivitchsvtnshchitzky will be the director of the College; Dr. SETON WATSON and Mr. WICKHAM STEED have kindly undertaken to supervise the Yugo-Slav section, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various
... makes you hold your breath before you enter the inner nature of some one who has extraordinary depth. You feel as if you were going to find something different and interesting, and possibly difficult or explosive. It is dark, too, yet you feel impelled to enter. It is like ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... circulation of the Scriptures, the Greek and Latin classics, and all other valuable works, which, by the industry of the monkish copyist, had been preserved from the ravages of time and barbarism. Gunpowder, whose explosive power had been perceived by Roger Bacon as early as 1280, though it was not used on the field of battle until 1346, had completely changed the art of war and had greatly contributed to undermine the feudal system. The polarity of the magnet, also discovered in the middle ages, and not ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... find my doubts confirmed. A short time after this I made a more unexpected and astonishing discovery. I found that this complex and hitherto misunderstood gas could, under the influence of certain high-frequency electrical discharges, be made to combine with explosive violence with the nitrogen of the atmosphere, leaving only a harmless residue. We wired the surrounding region for the electrical discharge and, with a vast explosion of weird purple flame, cleared ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... where the cooper could not barrel his aspiring soul? It was the French-horn at the butcher's, the fife at the grocer's, the cornet in the chief saloon on the main street; while at the edge of the town, from the soot and grime of the smithy, I heard at intervals the boom of the explosive drum. It was thus they responded to one another on that melodious shore, and with an ambitious diligence worthy of ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... 3: On the 14th of January, the assassination of the French Emperor, which had been planned in England by Felice Orsini and other refugees, was attempted. On the arrival of the Imperial carriage at the Opera House in the Rue Lepelletier, explosive hand-grenades were thrown at it, and though the Emperor and Empress were unhurt, ten people were either killed outright or died of their wounds, and over one hundred and fifty were injured. Notwithstanding the scene ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... amount of power can be concentrated in the machine, but at present we can do little more than float with the wind. It is probable that an engine sufficiently strong, built of the best steel, and propelled by the explosive power of gun cotton, or some similar explosive, would overcome the difficulty. If I were to construct such an engine I would substitute for the lifting power of a balloon that of a sail acting as ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... creation, I could understand it; but if that's his game, a speck of radium beats him in a common canter. I read in a scientific paper last week, in a signed article which bore every impress of truth, that there's a high explosive that will run a spark from here to Paris while you are pronouncing its name. Yet extend that run, and run it far and fast as you will, it can only come back to your hand. . . . Which," continued Brother Copas, ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... human race if it goes too far. He is trying to discover a psychic ray that will explode all the explosive at ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... to the sand, with the knowledge that the swing will end there, for a follow-through is not desired and would in many cases be impossible. When the heavy blade goes crash into the sand and blows it, and the ball with it, up into the air as if the electric touch had been given to an explosive mine, the club has finished its work, and when the golfer is at rest again and is surveying the results of his labours—with his eyes, let us hope, directed to the further side of the hazard—the blade will still remain in the cavity that it has made in the floor ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... necessarily creates the desire for improper conduct. The policy of silence showed an instinctive understanding of this fundamental situation. Even if that traditional policy had had no positive purpose, its negative function, its leaving at rest the explosive sexual system of the youth, must be acknowledged as one of those wonderful instinctive procedures by ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... stunned by the unexpectedly-heavy explosion. But he recovers directly, and determines to try the experiment over again. There is one immense rocket among the collection he has brought out—one almost as long as himself and apparently capable of holding half a barrel of explosive material. He shakes his head knowingly to the audience, indicative of the fact that this is something immense and that he is going to be very careful about it. He sticks it up in the very middle of the stage, secures a light at the end of ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... Kukor's grandson, the lady was Mrs. Kukor's daughter, for "Mama!" cried the young mother; and as they met just in front of Johnnie there was an explosive outburst of talk in a strange tongue, and much of what Johnnie afterwards described to Cis as "double kissin'," that is, a kissing on both cheeks, the baby coming in for his share and weeping over ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... Sary vented an explosive "Humph!" and grabbed the meat-platter. As she left the kitchen, she sent an insulted glance at her mistress, but the recent correction in speech made her forget the hornet. The watchful insect had been ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... leaders judged rightly and acted virtuously: but, beyond a doubt, it condemns the previous order which brought it about. What a horrid thing is the explosion! Why, is the obvious answer, did you allow the explosive materials to accumulate, till the first match must fire the train? The greatest blot upon Burke, I need hardly say, is that his passions blinded him in his age, to this, as ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... lashed out again, spread on the air as if it were flying, looking something like a dragon, then closing up again, inconceivably powerful and explosive. The man's body, strung to its efforts, vibrated strongly. Then a sudden sharp, white-edged wrath came up in him. Swift as lightning he drew back and brought his free hand down like a hawk on the neck of the rabbit. Simultaneously, there ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... No, my dear, you shan't." He let himself sink back again and joining the tips of his fingers contemplated the ceiling. But Margaret was in the mind to try. She shot out her words at him like so many explosive bullets. ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... Bell explained that the explosive stuff was packed in such a manner that even the most violent shock would ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... engines having proved extravagant in fuel. There were both a high and a low pressure turbine on the same shaft, which also drove the dynamo for the searchlight and the lamp illuminating the compass, and for igniting the explosive mixture. By means of an eccentric, moreover, the shaft worked a pump for compressing the mixture of hot air and petrol before ignition, the air being heated by passing through jackets round the high-pressure turbines. The framework of the planes consisted of hollow rods made of ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... the steady jingle of the splendid team. Anon, the intermittent funnel roar of protest at every violent roll, becomes the regular blast of a high pressure engine, and I recognise the exceedingly explosive steamer in which I ascended the Mississippi when the American civil war was not, and when only its causes were. A fragment of mast on which the light of a lantern falls, an end of rope, and a jerking block or so, become ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... began at 4:25 o'clock, just as the first hint of dawn was appearing. All night the British big guns had been pouring a steady stream of high explosive shells into the German positions, great detonations overlapping one another like the rapid crackling of machine-gun fire and swelling into a mighty volume of thunder that shook the earth and stunned the senses. Then, a short time before the hour set for the attack arrived, the batteries ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... August of the previous year I had such a broad view that if a shell were to explode anywhere along the front of five miles it would have been visible to me, and I saw not a single burst of smoke from high explosive or shrapnel. Apparently the Germans never expected to undertake any offensive here. All their energy was devoted to defensive preparations, without even an occasional attack over a few hundred yards to keep in their hand. Tranquillity, which amounted to the simulation ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... that explosive is in double vacuum containers, and it will be safe for some time yet. Besides, it's in the cellar. It's the carbide I'm most worried about. ...
— Tom Swift and his Aerial Warship - or, The Naval Terror of the Seas • Victor Appleton
... the savages to catch sight of the King who, besides, was screened by the underwood. Stas, sitting on his neck, quietly issued the final orders, after which he gave Kali the signal to light one of the sky-rockets. A red ribbon flew up, hissing, high in the dark sky, after which, with an explosive sound, it scattered into a bouquet of red, blue, and golden stars. All voices became hushed and a moment of gloomy silence ensued. A few seconds later two more fiery snakes flew out, as though with an infernal hiss, but this ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... eighty hours in the jacket; I, whom even the stupid guards could see was too weak to work in the loom-room; I, who had been given the day off to recuperate—from too terrible punishment—I was named as the one who had helped hide the non-existent thirty-five pounds of high explosive! ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... time to use this expression: "I assure you, Mr. Pinkerton, that there are not many who can say so much"—from which I gathered that my friend had tempered his self-accusations with at least one legitimate boast. From this ghostly counselling, Jim turned to me; and though he never got beyond the explosive utterance of my name and one fierce handgrip, communicated some of his own emotion, like a charge of electricity, to his best man. We stood up to the ceremony at last, in a general and kindly discomposure. Jim was all abroad; and the divine himself betrayed his sympathy in voice and demeanour, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gradually broken, crushed under a weight of Barthops—father-in-law, wife and children—moulded into a thin semblance of a Marquis of Ipswich, a bastard Marquis. No one but himself knew the weakness of his character—explosive, audacious in alarums or excursions, but without the something, call it strength or hardness or stupidity, which enables the man or woman possessing it to resist constant domestic pressure—the unconscious pressure of radically opposed character. The crowd applauds ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... to flattery, to importunity, to the ordinary variety of masculine solicitation; to the revelation of genuine feeling, too, in its various modes of expression—sentimental, explosive, insinuating—the entire gamut. ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... am sick at heart when I hear the first question put in these days to each inventor: 'Can you enable us to kill more of our fellowmen than we can kill with existing appliances?' Is it a new engine, a new amalgam of metals, a new explosive, a new field of electrical energy, one hears the same vulture's cry— 'How many, how far, how safely can we slay?' I regard this lust for destruction as contemptible. It is a strange and ignominious ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... not think a general, or even a very extensive, slave insurrection is possible. The indispensable concert of action cannot be obtained. The slaves have no means of rapid communication; nor can incendiary freemen, black or white, supply it. The explosive materials are everywhere in parcels; but there neither are, nor can be supplied, the ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln
... words left his lips there was a wild series of explosive thrumming as the old quail arose from all about Wolf, while the young ones scuttled for safety and disappeared miraculously before the spectators' ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... the lower." He repeats in new phrase his warning] "that every man of high natural ability, who is both ignorant and miserable, is as great a danger to society as a rocket without a stick is to people who fire it. Misery is a match that never goes out; genius, as an explosive power, beats gunpowder hollow: and if knowledge, which should give that power guidance, is wanting, the chances are not small that the rocket will simply run amuck ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... the next morning finding "cissers," crackers that had failed to burn out entirely, and still had a little explosive merit when touched by a piece of lighted punk. There was no school that day, and Steve took them up to West Farms to expend the rest of their hilarity. The little girl was pale and languid. Mrs. Underhill was quite troubled at ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas
... and constantly recurring interjections. This trait in the man of the Midi is one that Daudet has brought out humorously in the Tartarin books. It is often difficult in serious situations to take these explosive monosyllables seriously. ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... gun being lifted above the water, after each shot, by shears and suitable tackle. The present projectile of the Destroyer is the result of the extended trials referred to; its length is 25 feet 6 inches, diameter 16 inches, and its weight 1,500 pounds, including 250 pounds of explosive materials. We are not at liberty at present to describe its form, but we may mention that the great length of the body and the absence of all internal machinery enable the constructor to carry the stated enormous quantity of explosive matter. With minimum charge ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... appealed to his emotions. Under glass were ranged minutiae such as bullets, fragments of shells, bits of gore-drenched cloth or linen, a splinter of human bone—all ticketed with neat inscription. A bookcase contained volumes of military history, works on firearms, treatises on (chiefly explosive) chemistry; several great portfolios were packed with maps and diagrams of warfare. Upstairs, a long garret served as laboratory, and here were ranged less valuable possessions; weapons to which some doubt attached, unbloody scraps of accoutrements, also a few models ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... he stared, his irritation speedily overcame his amazement. The curious-looking creature over there on the knoll was defying him, was challenging him. At this time of year his blood was hot and quick for any challenge. He gave vent to a short, harsh, explosive cry, more like a grumbling bleat than a bellow, and as unlike the buffalo's challenge as could well be imagined. Then he fell to thrashing the nearest bushes violently with his antlers. This, for some reason unknown to the mere human chronicler, seemed to ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... packed contents of the last shed atop Crestline; then roared and sang, while the hills sent back their outbursts with echoes that rolled, one into another, until at last the whole world was one terrific out-pouring of explosive sounds and shrill, shrieking blasts, as though the mountains were bellowing their anger, their remonstrance at defeat. Eight feet, then eight feet more; steadily eight feet onward. Nor did the men curse at the sulphur fumes, nor rail at the steel-blue ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... sudden explosive sound, and, with a crunch and a jerk which almost threw them from their seats, the machine came to a standstill. Brockton and his chauffeur were out in an instant, the one peering beneath, the other examining more closely. ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... writers of the social-conscience school. They are in a rage over wicked, wasteful man. Their novels are bursted notebooks—sometimes neat and orderly notebooks, like Mr. Galsworthy's or our own Ernest Poole's, sometimes haphazard ones, like those of Mr. Wells, but always explosive with reform. These gentlemen know very well what they are about, especially Mr. Wells, the lesser artist, perhaps, as compared with Galsworthy, but the shrewder and possibly the greater man. The very sentimentalists, ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... agreeing on the whole with Scrope and Lyell, as to the explosive origin of ordinary volcanic craters, Darwin clearly saw that, in some cases, great craters might be formed or enlarged, by the subsidence of the floors after eruptions. The importance of this agency, to which too little attention has been directed by geologists, ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... suddenly released from a tension of many millions of pounds can be dangerous in the extreme, forming a writhing whip that can lash through a spacesuit as though it did not exist. What damage it did to flesh and bone after that was of minor importance; a man who loses all his air in explosive decompression certainly has very little use ...
— Thin Edge • Gordon Randall Garrett
... exclaimed, "black gunpowder. Our absintheur was a bomb- maker, an expert perhaps. Let me see. I imagine he was making an explosive bomb, ingeniously contrived of five glass tubes. The centre one, I venture, contained sulphuric acid and chlorate of potash separated by a close-packed wad of cotton wool. Then the two tubes on each side probably contained the powder, ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... rushed out of Lysander's soul like a rocket, culminated in a loud, explosive oath, and was followed by a shower of fiery curses falling harmless on the heads of the ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... The women, indeed, whom he loved, whom he proposed to, always awoke with a shock to the risk of joining for life a man of such explosive whims, of such absorption in his own self and art, of such utter deafness, untidiness, and morose habit ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... superficial. Diplomats may formulate leagues of nations and nations may pledge their utmost strength to maintain them, statesmen may dream of reconstructing the world out of alliances, hegemonies and spheres of influence, but woman, continuing to produce explosive populations, will convert these pledges into the proverbial scraps of paper; or she may, by controlling birth, lift motherhood to the plane of a voluntary, intelligent function, and remake the world. When the world is thus remade, it will exceed the ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... affectionate and devoted of friends in my trouble, we returned to Canterbury: I mean my aunt, Agnes, and I. We proceeded by appointment straight to Mr. Micawber's house; where, and at Mr. Wickfield's, my friend had been labouring ever since our explosive meeting. When poor Mrs. Micawber saw me come in, in my black clothes, she was sensibly affected. There was a great deal of good in Mrs. Micawber's heart, which had not been dunned out of it in ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... resumed the King. "I thought them as united amongst themselves as they are in my heart. Vermandois is quick, and as explosive as saltpetre; but he has the best nature in the world. I will reconcile ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... Explosive shells of melinite are the leading idea in France. It is manufactured at Bourges and is said to be a hundred times as powerful as gunpowder, or ten times nitroglycerine, and reduces what it strikes to a fine powder. They ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... hundred yards of her. This is, unfortunately, very far indeed from being the case; it is, on the contrary, necessary to explode the charge near the submarine in order to effect destruction. Taking the depth charge with 300 lb. weight of explosive, ordinarily supplied to destroyers in 1917, it was necessary to explode it within fourteen feet of a submarine to ensure destruction; at distances up to about twenty-eight feet from the hull the depth charge might be expected to disable a submarine ...
— The Crisis of the Naval War • John Rushworth Jellicoe
... only bought a week or two previously, warranted to be perfectly steady with motor traffic, bicycles, and other common objects of the roadside. The animal lived up to its reputation, and passed the most explosive of motor-bikes with an indifference that almost amounted to apathy. However, I suppose we all draw the line somewhere, and this particular cob drew it at travelling wild beast shows. Of course my sister didn't know that, but she knew it very distinctly ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... have spotted the vindictive crash of "75's," the deep-toned bellowing of "heavies," or, nearer by—had they been in action—the banging of trench mortars. In the sky he could have told from white or greenish-orange flashes, from lace-like wreaths or fixed-star blasts, where shrapnel or high explosive shells had burst; from the ringing of a gas gong he could tell where "green cross" shells were falling; he could, and gladly would, have explained—to his own satisfaction, at least—the many freak phenomena: a solitary light spirally ascending upward ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... On the whole, no explosive has ever been invented that is so noisy in its effect, so furiously expansive in its action, as the fumes of cheap whiskey. The great dock-shed soon began to reverberate to the wildest clamor, which added ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... but go in the tan at once after being scraped. I use common stove gasoline for benzine; it is as good for the purpose of cleaning and deodorizing, and cheaper. It must never be used in the vicinity of fire or a lighted lamp, as its evaporation produces a very explosive gas. For this reason I do the cleaning and beating of furs out of doors if practicable. Gasoline wrung out of skins may be saved and, after allowing to settle, used again and again. It will not do for the final cleaning of white furs, but for removing grease before tanning, it is as ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... and partly, if not mainly, because our naval guns fire common shell with bursting charges of black powder, the effect of which—though not so violent locally as that of the Boer shells, charged with melinite explosive—is spread over a much wider area. It is not much satisfaction, however, for the losses and worry we endure here to know that the investing force suffers even more severely so long as it continues to harass us while ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... The explosive sounds issuing from under the shimmering veil of Queen Vashti certainly sounded more masculine than feminine, and that Persian princess confessed presently to the ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... him! He never upset no tar; I was there!" shouted somebody. The two Norwegians sat on a chest side by side, alike and placid, resembling a pair of love-birds on a perch, and with round eyes stared innocently; but the Russian Finn, in the racket of explosive shouts and rolling laughter, remained motionless, limp and dull, like a deaf man without a backbone. Near him Archie smiled at his needle. A broad-chested, slow-eyed newcomer spoke deliberately to Belfast during an exhausted lull in the noise:—"I wonder any of the mates here are alive yet ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... doubt whether this is possible for young people, though I know it is the fashion nowadays to behave as though it were. And especially is it difficult—or impossible—where there has been any thought of love—on either side. For love is the great, unmanageable, explosive thing, which cannot be tamed down, at a word, into friendship—not in youth at any rate. The attempt to treat it as a negligible quantity can ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... derived, although the few rounds that were fired proved their destructive effect on the opposing trenches. The Turkish weapon was known as the "broomstick bomb" and was also propelled from a mortar. It consisted of a 4-inch cartridge case filled with a high explosive and also containing metal such as boiler punchings, nails, etc. (in one case gramophone needles were discovered), and provided with a percussion cap. It was fitted to a stick about two inches thick and five feet long. Its descent ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... content with his sign in town, the grocer had a large brass plate on his door, with Appleditch engraved upon it in capitals: it saved them always looking at the numbers. The boy ran on before, and assailed this door with a succession of explosive knocks. ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... Conference Hall, adding: "While arguing or appealing to my country's arbiters I felt I was addressing only a minority of the distinguished judges, while the thoughts of the others were far away. And when the interpreter was rendering, quickly, mechanically, and summarily, my ideas without any of the explosive passion that shot them from my heart, I felt discouraged. But suddenly it dawned on me that no judgment would be uttered on the strength of anything that I had said or left unsaid. I remembered that everything would be referred to a commission, ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... of the harpoon-gun was followed by a swirl as the whale sounded for a long dive, but a moment later there came a dull, muffled report from the water, the explosive head of the harpoon, known as the 'bomb,' having burst. For a minute or two there was no sound but the swish of the line and the clank of the big winch as it ran out, while the animal sank to the bottom. There was a moment's wait, and then Hank, seeing ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... excuse for declaring war. This came in 1858 from an attempt at assassination. Felice Orsini, a fanatical Italian patriot, incensed at Napoleon from his failing to come to the aid of Italy, launched three explosive bombs against his carriage. The effect was fatal to many of the people in the street, though the intended victim escaped. Orsini while in prison expressed patriotic sentiments and a loud-voiced love for his country. "Remember that ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... peacefully up the trail in the moonlight, wondering how thoroughly he was lost and how much farther it was to Debbleby's. Then, at a sudden sharp turn in the canyon bridle-path, he had stumbled upon the camp-fire, had heard an explosive "Hands up!" and had found himself confronted by three men, with one of the three covering him with a sawed-off Winchester. From that to the unhorsing and the binding had been merely a rough-and-tumble half-minute, inasmuch as he was unarmed and the surprise ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... hope for, which they both could summon, was luck and the deadening hands of time. He told himself, here, that it was more than probable that he was exaggerating the proportions of the whole situation—Fanny had been angry before; her resentment faded the sooner for its swift explosive character. But this assurance was unconvincing; his presentiment, which didn't rest on reason, was not amenable to a reasonable conclusion. Of this he was certain, that Fanny never had harbored the suspicion of what, for her, would be the very worst. Did she know? If she ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the side door unfastened, and she made her way rapidly to the foot of the back stairway. When she opened the door to ascend, a thick, black smoke rushed down, almost overpowering her. The opening of the door seemed to aid the fire, too, and there was a sort of explosive eagerness in the new start it took as it now crackled and roared above her. Then she recognized in the sickening smoke a smell of burning feathers, and she felt faint and weak as she thought that it might be his bed ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... ordered General Lozier. The plane wavered in signal to the others and swung sharply to the left. Each man knew the flaming death that was theirs if the fire of their exhaust touched that explosive mixture of hydrogen and air. The great bubble turned with ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... saltpetre as a source of power is seen in the adaptation of its explosive force to special purposes. It performs that work well which we cannot carry on so perfectly by means of any other agent, and the great mining and engineering works of a country are dependent on ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... crude oil is placed in an iron retort connected with a coil of pipe in a vessel of cold water. Heat is then applied to the retort, when the process of distillation commences. The first product is a light-colored, volatile substance, sometimes called naphtha, that is very explosive. This substance is used in the place of spirits of turpentine in the preparation of paints and varnishes, and, after further treatment, in removing paints and grease from clothing. The next product from the retort is the refined fluid for illumination. This is ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... generation are rather more phlegmatic than their explosive neighbors across the channel, and neither the injustice of black slavery abroad, nor the starvation of white slaves at home, can shake them from their lop-sided neutrality, so long as money goes into their pocket. The excitable French, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... explosive shells. They fired the guns backwards, out of the base of the leaf, so to speak, and rammed with the beak. That was the theory, you know, but they had never been fought. No one could tell exactly what was going to happen. And meanwhile ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... adopted into the Wyoming Gang, or clan, descendants of the original populations of Wilkes-Barre, Scranton and the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania; how quite by accident I stumbled upon a method of destroying Han aircraft by shooting explosive rockets, not directly at the heavily armored ships, but at the repeller ray columns, which automatically drew the rockets upward where they exploded in the generators of the aircraft; how the Wyomings threw the first thrill of terror into the Airlords by bringing an entire ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan
... come to the sea. To-morrow once more the flat, dusty country with the heat haze shimmering over it and every now and then the dull drone of some bursting crump, or the vicious crack of high explosive. Behind, the same old row of balloons; in front, the same old holes in the ground. . . . But to-day—peace. . ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... I'll use a new kind of explosive electric bullet Mr. Roumann told me about," declared Andy. "It has a charge of electricity in it, and he says it will kill the biggest animal that ever lived, with ...
— Through Space to Mars • Roy Rockwood
... does not remember." At this I remarked guardedly to the doctor, "I asked Alfred when he last saw Harvey, and he replies that he doesn't remember, but he must have seen him on board the boat." To this she instantly replied, with an explosive laugh, "He says that if he did it was all blown out of him!" I will only comment on this reply, that it was quite in accordance with the character of my brother to joke on the most serious ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... the change of scene was rather bewildering. His eyes were still full of the light from gasolene-burners, his ears still rang with the confusion of tent-noise into which entered the prolonged monotones of inarticulate groanings, and the explosive suddenness of seemingly irrelevant Amens. Above all, he tingled from the electric atmosphere of intense religious excitement; he was charged with currents at a pressure so high that his nerves were unresponsive to dull ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... dugouts. On the contrary, the last long mile had been covered in a final desperate spurt, the paddles swinging in swift unison to the accompaniment of a ferocious chant of one syllable: "Hough! Hough! Hough!" This explosive cadence had echoed down the stream ahead of them; and now, as the panting crews emerged from the jungle, they found themselves flanked by a long line of their fellow-warriors, bristling with drawn arrows and ready spear points. ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... had escaped, the explosive blast rising upward; and the danger being apparently at an end, the principal actors in the catastrophe roused to find officers hurrying to meet them, and men coming forward armed with pails of water to dash and scatter here and there ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... away if, on the 30th of November, Neb, strolling on the beach, had not found a piece of a thick iron cylinder, bearing traces of explosion. The edges of this cylinder were twisted and broken, as if they had been subjected to the action of some explosive substance. ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... all right," he shouted, as they neared the bank above the danger spot. He was a few yards in advance of Jack's father and "Old Mack." Then suddenly he stood stock still, gave vent to a long, explosive whistle, and yelled, "Well, I'll be gin-busted! Look a' there, boys!" And following his astounded gaze, they saw, on the brink of the river, an old grey horse, with down-hanging head, his back to the gale, and about his neck a boy's coat, from the knotted sleeves ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... the thing was just where I left it, among the white-hot coals. The explosive hadn't burst the case. And then I had a problem to face. You know time is an important element in crystallisation. If you hurry the process the crystals are small—it is only by prolonged standing that they grow to any size. I resolved to let this apparatus cool for two years, ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... course prepared for any amount of explosive gas you may shower down upon their uncombed crowns, as the cool and perfectly-at-home manner they descend your steps to mount those of your next-door neighbor plainly ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... not think it right," he said, "that there should be evening worship in the family?" Old William had not idea enough for conversation: he either signified acquiescence in whatever was said that pleased him, by an ever-recurring ay, ay, ay; or he grumbled out his dissent in a few explosive sounds, that conveyed his meaning rather in their character as tones than as vocables. But there now mingled with the ordinary explosions the distinct enunciation, given with, for him, unwonted emphasis, that he "wasna for that." I struck in, however, on the other side, and appealed to Peggy. ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... dyestuffs and related chemicals. Our complete dependence upon German supplies before the war made the interruption of trade a cause of exceptional economic disturbance. The close relation between the manufacture of dyestuffs, on the one hand, and of explosive and poisonous gases, on the other, moreover, has given the industry an exceptional significance and value. Although the United States will gladly and unhesitatingly join in the programme of international disarmament, it will, nevertheless, be a policy of obvious ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... investigation. A letter from M. Lobry de Bruyn appears in the number of the Chemiker Zeitung for October 31, warning those who may attempt to prepare free hydroxylamine by the above method that it is a dangerously explosive substance when warmed to a temperature of 80 deg.-100 deg.. Upon warming a flask containing the free solid base upon a water bath a most violent explosion occurs. A spontaneous decomposition appears to set in about 80 deg., and even ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... is the equivalent of our "Ger-rreat Caesar!" but spoken with the proper Australian unction and fervency, it is worth six of it for grace and charm and expressiveness. Our form is rude and explosive; it is not suited to the drawing-room or the heifer-paddock; but "M-y word!" is, and is music to the ear, too, when the utterer knows how to say it. I saw it in print several times on the Pacific Ocean, but it struck me coldly, it aroused no sympathy. That was because it was the dead ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... steel shrapnel cases, but they were empty. There was no explosive of any sort aboard. As to the report that the Lusitania had guns aboard, I cannot assert too strongly that it is positively untrue. There were no guns whatever aboard. The Lusitania was an unarmed passenger steamer. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... years old when my uncle presented me with a flint-lock gun. The possession of the "mysterious iron," and the explosive dirt, or "pulverized coal," as it is called, filled me with new thoughts. All the war-songs that I had ever heard from childhood came back to me with their heroes. It seemed as if I were an entirely new being—the boy had ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... St. Chassepot, who once, it will not be forgotten, "wrought miracles"; but he has his doubts as to the morality of explosive bullets. The nymph of modern warfare is addressed as she ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... was possible. Some one, for instance, had worked hard over the ordering of the lunch—to secure the maximum of explosive effect. It began with ice-cream, moulded in fancy shapes and then buried in white of egg and baked brown. Then there was a turtle soup, thick and green and greasy; and then—horror of horrors—a great steaming plum-pudding. It ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... than had been done by any one before I dug my hole. Our volcanoes, it is now proved, are situated over the market-places of various provincial towns in Skitzland. When a revolution happens, the rebels are shot up—discharged from mortars by means of an explosive material evidently far more powerful than our gun-powder or gun-cotton; and they are pulverized by the friction in grinding their way through the earth. How simple and easy truth appears, when we have once ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... suggested, tentatively, as a solution of the puzzle, that "he had forgotten to put the powder in." Another argued that he did not know how; while there were a few who doubted whether "the Boer" considered powder in any sense explosive. There was a garrulous "bore" (from somewhere over-sea, not Holland) who advanced a still clearer elucidation of the mystery. "What was Rhodes doing in Germany for twelve months," he cried, "tell me that?" The relevancy of this rather ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... salt, and distil the resulting liquid with dilute sulphuric acid. The pure acid may be obtained by fractional distillation as a colourless liquid of very unpleasant smell, boiling at 30deg C., and extremely explosive. It is soluble in water, and the solution dissolves many metals (zinc, iron, &c.) with liberation of hydrogen and formation of salts (azoimides, azides or hydrazoates). All the salts are explosive and readily interact with the alkyl iodides. In its properties it ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... different wreaths and depths of smoke, and the explosive look of the flash on the right, are, however, very wonderful and peculiarly Turneresque; the sky is also beautiful in form, and the foreground, in which we find his old regard for washerwomen has not quite deserted him, singularly skillful. It is curious how formal the ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... influence of luxury and excitement and refinement in attracting the girl of the people, as the flame attracts the moth, is indicated by the fact that it is the country dwellers who chiefly succumb to the fascination. The girls whose adolescent explosive and orgiastic impulses, sometimes increased by a slight congenital lack of nervous balance, have been latent in the dull monotony of country life and heightened by the spectacle of luxury acting on the unrelieved drudgery of town life, find at last their complete gratification in the ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... London was very trying on account of the cold, fog, and snow. The train ploughed its way slowly and cautiously amidst the explosive signals, which did not add to our comfort. We felt very sorry for Mr. and Mrs. Seeley, who were sitting up for us so ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... had jumped up and come to his senses, crying out: "It is treachery! It is Chamber No. 6 blowing up!" As a matter of fact, that was where the cartridges were. It was said that at Meudon traces had been found of the same explosive as had been used in bombs against the Emperor during the first days of May (a plot that had probably been hatched by the police). The perpetrator, however,—doubtless for good ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... they were for a few minutes, listening to the firing. For the first time the note of real hand-to-hand fighting came into the battle din. They could hear the crashing volleys of rifle fire, and the explosive crackling of machine guns coming into play for the first time. That was confirmation enough of their guess that a regular assault on the line of ...
— The Belgians to the Front • Colonel James Fiske
... to drop this holiness stuff, for there is nothing in it—all bunk. Living above sin are you? Ha! ha! ha!" and the old man gave poor Robert an explosive horse-laugh. ...
— Around Old Bethany • Robert Lee Berry
... the world over. It's like the regions in Iceland that are full of geysers. I don't know whether it is the inheritance from those people who broke away from the old countries, and who ought to be matched to tremendous circumstances of life, but now and then there comes an amazingly explosive and uncontrollable temperament that goes all to pieces from its own conservation and accumulation of force. By and by you will have all blown up,—you quiet descendants of the Pilgrims and Puritans, ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... my firm had any competitors in our line of business,' said Merton. 'But perhaps you have come here under some misapprehension. There is a firm of family solicitors on the floor above, and next them are the offices of a company interested in a patent explosive. If your affairs, or your political ideas, demand a legal opinion, or an outlet in an explosive which is widely recommended ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... through fear and anxiety. His ministers were killed by the revolutionists. Some of the guards placed about his person became victims of the secret band. Letters bordered with black and threatening the emperor's life were found among his papers or his clothes. An explosive powder placed in his handkerchief injured his sight for a time; a box of asthma pills sent him proved to contain a small but dangerous infernal machine. He grew haggard through this constant peril; his hair whitened, his form shrank, ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... action—then, the mystery of Miss Minerva's inner nature might possibly have been revealed. As it was, nothing more remarkable exposed itself to view than an irritable temper; serving perhaps as safety-valve to an underlying explosive force, which (with strong enough temptation and sufficient opportunity) might yet ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... and a previous one stirred Florence, who had been sitting quietly, according to request, and "resting", but not resting her curiosity. "Who's disappointed in love, papa?" she inquired with an explosive eagerness that slightly startled her preoccupied parents. "What is all this about Aunt Julia, and grandpa goin' to live alone, and people committing suicide and prohibition and everything? ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... heavier than the others. He did not stop to knead his paste, for already he could hear the crash of glass and the sound of sledges on the door at the rear of the cigar-shop. Catching up a strand of what he knew to be the most explosive of all guncottons—it was cellulose-hexanitrate—he worked it gently into the open keyhole and again scuttled back to safety ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... his head, and "No!" closing his lips abruptly, and opening them again to emit a final "No!" with an explosive force which alone seemed to save him. "Not at all, Mrs. Munger; not on any account! I am surprised at Mr. Peck, or rather I am not surprised. He is not a practical man—not a man of the world; and I should have much preferred to hear that he objected to the dancing and the play; I could ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... scene is the great volcano Vesuvius, which rises a vast green cone from the midst of the plain, and emits from its summit a constant stream of smoke. In times of eruption this smoke becomes very dense and voluminous, and alternates from time to time with bursts of what seems to be flame, and with explosive ejections of red-hot stones or molten lava. Besides the cities and towns that are now to be seen along the shore at the foot of the slopes of the mountain, there are many others buried deep beneath the ground, having been overwhelmed by currents ...
— Rollo in Naples • Jacob Abbott
... in this matter of negro slavery, has undertaken to apply his explosive pitch and rosin, not to the affectation of humanity, but to humanity itself. He mocks at pity, scoffs at all who seek to lessen the amount of pain and suffering, sneers at and denies the most sacred ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... no accident of nature but a piously planned and methodically executed human deed. From the opposite heights the poor little garden-girt town was shelled like a steel fortress; then, when the Germans entered, a fire was built in every house, and at the nicely-timed right moment one of the explosive tabloids which the fearless Teuton carries about for his land-Lusitanias was tossed on each hearth. It was all so well done that one wonders—almost apologetically for German thoroughness—that any of the human rats escaped ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... took the hatchet he had brought with him at his girdle, flung over one of the barrels on its side, knocked in the head of it, allowing the dull black powder to pour on the cobblestones. Then filling his hat with the explosive, he came out towards us, leaving a thick trail behind him. By this time we were sorely beset, and one of our men had gone down under the fire of the enemy, who shot wildly, being baffled by the darkness, otherwise all of us had been slaughtered. I seized ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... to their personal plans have resigned, and others have taken their places of whom we need not fear this. I believe, therefore that I may state that our outlook toward France is more peaceful and less explosive today than it was a year ago and I am glad to do this, because I wish to quiet, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... religion, men possessing enormous power over the forces of nature are like children to whom powder or explosive gas has been given as a plaything. Considering this power which men of our time possess, and the way they use it, one feels that considering the degree of their moral development men have no right, not only to the ...
— "Bethink Yourselves" • Leo Tolstoy
... back in the chair and rocked back and forth with the sleeping baby in her arms, showing that she was enjoying the little explosive she had dropped in the midst of her family circle. There was silence for a few moments; then Mr. Thornton ...
— Drusilla with a Million • Elizabeth Cooper
... indefinable fabric of traditional home training in restraint that is very hard to separate in analysis from mental heredity. People who have dwelt for many generations in towns are not only more temperate and less explosive in the grosser indulgences, but more urbane altogether. The drunken people are also the "uncivil" peoples and the individualistic peoples. The great prevalence of drunkenness among the upper classes two ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... at the great centre of Rome; the insurrectionary temper of Jewish society, as indicated by the continual rise of robber leaders, that drew off multitudes into the neighboring deserts; and, universally, the unsettled mind of the Jewish nation. These explosive materials had long been accumulated; they needed only a kindling spark. Heavenly citations to war had long been felt in the insults and aggressions of paganism; there wanted only a leader. And such a leader, if he would but ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... follow Edison. Even in the educational world there are few inventors and many followers. This is evidence of the large power of imitation and adaptation and of the universal habit of borrowing. On the other hand, if one chemical laboratory should discover a high explosive which may be used in blasting rock for making the foundations for buildings, a nation might borrow the idea and use it in warfare for ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... shoulder and hears a voice in her ear saying, "Taste it!" On examination, she finds she has got a morphine powder by mistake. The natural interpretation is that a sleeping memory of the morphine powders awoke in this quasi-explosive way. A like explanation offers itself as most plausible for the following case: A lady, with little time to catch the train, and the expressman about to call, is excitedly looking for the lost key of ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... recklessness of life is proverbial among foreigners, we may be thankful that India-rubber bags of explosive gases are not carried by ignorant boys through our streets, as in Newcastle, England. The practice resulted by a singular chain of mishaps in a violent explosion. The first error was in using a bag for conveying an explosive gas; the second ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... Eisberg is a long way from red hot, but normal sealing still won't keep out hydrogen. Add to that the fact that hydrogen and methane are both colorless, odorless, and tasteless, and you have the beginnings of an explosive situation. ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... she told the story of how she had written the verses in the infirmary. On her witty tongue the stubby pencil, the dull knife, and the teasing midget of an impudent freshman made a delightfully humorous tale. Even the explosive "Lila!" and its accompanying side glance of terrified joy in the daring developed into a picture that sent the seniors into tempests of laughter. Somehow she did not care to mention the letter which Ellen had ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... word, Billy let out an explosive "BOO!" and Saxon giggled involuntarily at the startle ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... weapons. The most that we could do was to check their progress by distracting their attention with the flash and roar of our guns, and so to give both the natives and ourselves time to reach the steps which led to safety. But where the conical explosive bullets of the twentieth century were of no avail, the poisoned arrows of the natives, dipped in the juice of strophanthus and steeped afterwards in decayed carrion, could succeed. Such arrows were of little avail to the hunter who attacked the beast, because their action ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and was about two hundred yards away when the canopy of the other vehicle popped open and a sheet of automatic weapons fire raked the patrol car. Only the low angle of the sedan and the nearness of the bulky patrol car saved the troopers. Explosive bullets smashed into the patrol car canopy and sent shards of plastiglass ...
— Code Three • Rick Raphael
... momentum) combines with least resistance from the atmosphere. In the pursuit of this result every experimenter since the fifteenth century has worked. Lautmann, writing in 1729, recommends an elliptical missile, hollow behind, from a notion that the hollow gathered the explosive force, Robins recommends elongated balls; and they were used in many varieties of form. Theory would assign, as the shape of highest rapidity, one like that which would be made by the revolution of the waterline section of a fast ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... or goblins? Well, let's strike a match and light up: then perhaps we may. That's one good thing about these hollows,—there is no explosive gas, like there is in a coal mine. There, take this and hold it out before you," he continued, as he closed and passed the lanthorn. "Lift it up! Now ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... saltpetre, and sulphur ready to my hand,—all obtainable from natural sources close by; but the result of all my efforts (and I tried mixing the ingredients in every conceivable way) was a very coarse kind of powder with practically no explosive force, but which would go off with an ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... the newcomer in her customary explosive and vivacious manner. "I've just found out where you've been hiding, and came around to ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... volcanic vents, we frequently observe accumulations of angular fragments of rocks formed during eruptions by the explosive action of steam, which shatters the subjacent stony formations, and hurls them up into the air. They then fall in showers around the cone or crater, or may be spread for some distance over the surrounding country. The fragments consist usually ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... known to fail in the performance of his duties in all these connections. Moreover, he is a constant attendant upon the sessions of the Senate, and one of the most alert of its members. Apparently, often, he is impulsive and explosive, and occasionally under the excitement of debate says what seems to be a harsh thing. If, however, his manner is indicative of feeling, such a feeling, like a passing summer cloud, is soon dissipated, and almost immediately gives ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... "that every man of high natural ability, who is both ignorant and miserable, is as great a danger to society as a rocket without a stick is to people who fire it. Misery is a match that never goes out; genius, as an explosive power, beats gunpowder hollow: and if knowledge, which should give that power guidance, is wanting, the chances are not small that the rocket will simply run amuck ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... The boy lifted and sprang and dropped cat-footed in the middle of the ring, hunched of shoulder and bent of knee to meet the shocking impact. It was bewilderingly rapid—terrifyingly effortless—this explosive, spontaneous answer of every muscle to the call of the brain. Just as before, Sutton feinted and saw his opening and swung. Young Denny knew only one best way to fight; he knew only that he had to take a blow in order to give one, and Sutton's fist shot ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... journalists write column after column about the dangerous explosive energy and restlessness of modern Germany, I feel sure that they must be right, and yet I wish they could have come shopping with me a year or two ago in a small Black Forest town. One of us wanted a watch key and the other a piece of tape, and we set off light-heartedly ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... their latest invention, an electric car capable of making the speed of a gasoline-driven vehicle, and one which could be operated at a minimum of cost, almost a nominal expense, as compared with the high price of a vehicle run by an explosive engine. ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... is absolutely essential to success. Now you are in touch with the official world. I shouldn't ask you to subscribe, though if you cared to do so there would be no objection. And I may say that the syndicate can't help making a tremendous lot of money. When I tell you that the new explosive is forty-seven times as powerful as ...
— The Title - A Comedy in Three Acts • Arnold Bennett
... after he left Glen Ellen, had invented a most powerful explosive—"expedite" he called it. This was the weapon the balloons used. They were only hot-air balloons, clumsily and hastily made, but they did the work. I saw it all from the top of an office building. The first balloon missed ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... Thursday, May 25, the Column of July was a remarkable sight. It had been hung with wreaths of immortelles, and those caught fire from an explosive. Elsewhere, except for burning buildings, there was total darkness. There was no gas in Paris, of course. And here our Englishman goes on to say that so far as his experience went, he saw no petroleuses nor fighting women, nor did he ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... shortness of the available time might not permit the proper resolution of such episodes. Two, a couple who have openly discharged rage against each other may well react later with deep feelings of humiliation that are not easily assuaged. Three, coping with this kind of explosive emotional discharge could be alarming for lay leaders not accustomed, as the therapist is, to the expression of deep feelings which normally are not displayed in public. Four, other members of the group could be similarly disturbed and diverted from ...
— Marriage Enrichment Retreats - Story of a Quaker Project • David Mace
... bombers had but one object in view, which was to bomb the important target below. To drop an explosive on a certain spot had been the most important training of those aboard these craft. They had been carefully selected from the ranks of the many observers taking service in the aviation branch of the service; and great things were expected ...
— Air Service Boys Over the Atlantic • Charles Amory Beach
... says Miss Penelope, in a somewhat troubled tone, remembering how an innocent baker in Rossmoyne had had some of the explosive matter in question thrown into his kitchen the night before last,—"you don't really think that these parcels you speak of contain infernal machines?—Yes, that is what they call them, my dear Priscilla," turning to her sister, as though anxious to apologize ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... president, "though it would, of course, suit for that. Nihil humunum alienum, eh?" and he broke into a loud, explosive laugh, while his spectacles irradiated that peculiar form of glee derived from a Latin quotation by those able to enjoy it. Dr. Boyster, walking on the other side of Mr. Tomlinson, joined in the laugh in a deep, ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... natives, despite my friend's accident, bought every cartridge from him, singly or in lots, and they then began to enjoy themselves. Every hour of the day for many weeks afterwards the sullen thud of the explosive could be heard from all parts of the lagoon, followed by applauding shouts. Vast numbers of fish were blown to pieces, for no native would ever think of dividing a cartridge into half a dozen portions and using only one at a time; the entire 6-oz. cartridge was used, ...
— "Five-Head" Creek; and Fish Drugging In The Pacific - 1901 • Louis Becke
... the policy of terrorism has been in the throwing from aeroplanes of bombs, explosive or incendiary. M. Clunet lays down that, by the most recent decision of the institute, bomb throwing from aeroplanes must follow the rules of bombardment by artillery. This would prohibit such bombs without formal notice. But in Antwerp bombs were dropped without notice ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... and pulsatory currents have long been known. For instance, it was long since discovered that an electro-magnet gives forth a decided sound when it is suddenly magnetized or demagnetized. When the circuit upon which it is placed is rapidly made and broken, a succession of explosive noises proceeds from the magnet. These sounds produce upon the ear the effect of a musical note when the current is interrupted a sufficient ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... the sixth year of wedlock, is still very fond of his Sophie Dorothee,— "Fiechen" (Feekin diminutive of Sophie ), as he calls her; she also having, and continuing to have, the due wife's regard for her solid, honest, if somewhat explosive bear. He troubles her a little now and then, it is said, with whiffs of jealousy; but they are whiffs only, the product of accidental moodinesses in him, or of transient aspects, misinterpreted, in the court-life of a young and pretty woman. As the general rule, he is beautifully ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... the Apostle's reason for specifying these fiery darts was simply that they were the most formidable offensive weapons that he had ever heard of. Probably, if he had lived to-day, he would have spoken of rifle-bullets or explosive shells, instead of fiery darts. But, though probably the Apostle had no further meaning in the metaphor than to suggest that faith was mightier than the mightiest assaults that can be hurled against it, we may venture to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... along. By jerks and nervous, spasmodic spurts he rushes along from cover to cover like a soldier dodging the enemy's bullets. When he discovers me, he pauses, and with one paw on his heart appears to press a button, that lets off a flood of snickering, explosive sounds that seem like ridicule of me and my work. Failing to get any response from me, he presently turns, and, springing from the wall to the bending branch of a near apple-tree, he rushes up and disappears amid ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... wounded, and you are still sore. Suspect me as you please,—make me out a new Pandarus, if you like—I shall not be offended. But you know—for I have often told you— that I never interfere in love matters. They are too explosive, too vitally dangerous; outsiders ought never to meddle with them. And I never do. Come back with me to Cairo. And when we are once more safely established on the solid and unromantic isles of Britain, you will forget all about the Princess Ziska; ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... of the 9th May was the first major action of the war in which the "Ninth" took part. Shattered at its inception, the whole attack soon came to an end. The lack of high explosive shells and the consequent failure of the British artillery to destroy the enemy wire entanglements were probably the main causes of the holocaust that took place on that day. Though one of the biggest disasters the British arms sustained throughout the ...
— The Story of the "9th King's" in France • Enos Herbert Glynne Roberts
... sour fish, was very cold, very dirty, and very blue with cigar smoke. The remains of a delicatessen breakfast stood on a table near the only window, which was tightly shut, and under the sill of which a radiator emitted explosive symptoms ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... there anything in that explosive material that need cause you to look so wild? I thought you were better acquainted ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... had dropped a large explosive bomb, which, luckily for the Motor Boys and their comrades, had fallen into an open space, though not far from one of the camouflaged stations where the soldiers were quartered before being taken up to the front-line trenches. ...
— Ned, Bob and Jerry on the Firing Line - The Motor Boys Fighting for Uncle Sam • Clarence Young
... creatures, and with the explosive and mechanistic aid of ideas we can pervert the whole psyche. Only, however, in a destructive degree, not in a positive ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... to be given unadvisedly, such was the moral effect of the question. It hadn't been asked in a casual way, but showed, by its explosive form of utterance, that it was the result not so much of a pent-up curiosity as of a careful speculation as to the manner in which I would receive it. So I tried to look unconscious, and at this critical juncture ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... his vivid imagination caused the negro to give way to an explosive laugh that sent the eavesdropping monkey like a brown thunderbolt into the recesses of its native jungle, while Nigel went off to write and despatch ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... stopped right here if some one would dynamite all the block beyond Van Ness Avenue. It could never jump across a strip so broad.' 'But they've forbidden any more dynamiting,' said Anderson. 'Never mind; I'd take the chance myself if we could get any explosive,' replied Lane. 'Well, there's a launch full of dynamite from Contra Costa County lying right now at Meigs's Wharf,' said Anderson. Just then Mr. and Mrs. Tom Magee arrived, driving an automobile on the wheel rims. Lane despatched them ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... dishevelled girl were too near. Lady Agnes wore much of the time the countenance she might have shown at the theatre during a play in which pistols were fired; and indeed the manner of the young reciter had become more spasmodic and more explosive. It appeared, however, that the company in general thought her very clever and successful; which showed, to Sherringham's sense, how little they understood the matter. Poor Biddy was immensely struck; ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... in striking—well, the State would strike too, with all its might; otherwise there was an end of government in this country. The cheers which greeted this statement seriously annoyed Mr. JACK JONES, who sits for Silvertown, and maintains the explosive ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... foam-flecked Eagle Falls. Our road here was blasted through some fiercely solid and hostile rock. One boulder alone that stood in the way weighed (it was estimated by the engineers) from 800 to 1000 tons. Fifty cases of highly explosive powder were suitably placed all around it. Excursion steamers took hundreds of people from all parts of the Lake to see the explosion, and at the proper moment, while everybody held his breath, the fuses were fired, the blasts took effect, the rock flew down to ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... Then he removed the explosive itself and the various murderous slugs and bits of metal embedded in it, carefully separating each as if to be labelled "Exhibit A," "B," and so on for a class in bomb dissection. Finally, he studied the sides and bottom ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... table they were all three in that excruciating state of rawness of the nerves, in which a man has the sensation that his brain is a violent explosive which a single jarring sound or word must ignite and blow to atoms, ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... Guided by a white-haired priest, out in the wheat we found at last a little mound with a part of a broken airplane lying thereupon. I pulled the rest of his machine upon his grave and learned that when the French boys picked him up they found that four explosive bullets had struck him while flying in the air after his victory over many ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... by way of a challenge. As evening fell the woods began to echo with the roar of artillery. Later, Forts Fleron, Chaudfontaine and Embourg were added to the German bombardment. The Germans used long range field pieces with powerful explosive shells. The fire proved to be remarkably accurate. As their shells exploded on the cupolas and platforms of the forts, the garrisons in their confined citadels began to experience that inferno of vibrations which subsequently deprived them of the incentive to eat or ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... the twisted dynamite I was engaged in "gentling," I found that Brower was saddling the mournful creature with my saddle. My expostulation found him very snappy and very arbitrary. His opium-irritated nerves were beginning to react. I realized that he was not far short of explosive obstinacy. So I conceded the point; although, as every rider knows, a cowboy's saddle and a cowboy's gun are like unto a toothbrush when it comes to lending. Also it involved changing the stirrup length on the livery saddle. I needed things just right to ride Tiger through ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... at 4:25 o'clock, just as the first hint of dawn was appearing. All night the British big guns had been pouring a steady stream of high explosive shells into the German positions, great detonations overlapping one another like the rapid crackling of machine-gun fire and swelling into a mighty volume of thunder that shook the earth and stunned the senses. Then, a ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... end. In the old chronicles you read of earthquakes and pestilences, and are told that these showed the power and majesty of God and the littleness of Man. Nowadays the chronicles describe battles. In a battle two bodies of men shoot at one another with bullets and explosive shells until one body runs away, when the others chase the fugitives on horseback and cut them to pieces as they fly. And this, the chronicle concludes, shows the greatness and majesty of empires, and the littleness of the vanquished. Over such battles the people run about the streets ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... that Redwheels had shed a bolt in its flight last night. I settled the bolt question with a quarter and turned to the letter. It was from Peter, and I knew by the amount of ink splashed all over the envelope that it must contain a high explosive splashed on ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... she, with her new Husband as with her old, continued to have troubles, pretty much as the sparks fly upwards. She had fierce siegings after this, and explosive procedures,—little short of Monk Schwartz, who was just inventing gunpowder at the time. We cannot hope she lived in Elysian harmony with Kurfurst Ludwig;—the reverse, in fact; and oftenest with the whole breadth of Germany ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... say. But I don't see why you should be afraid of it in any case. To judge by the size of it, I shouldn't say it could be a very dangerous explosive." ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... did not hear the yarn immediately. All that it heard and all that it knew was contained in Captain Nat's brief telegram. "Arrived to-day. Will be home Thursday." That was all, but it was enough, for in that dispatch was explosive sufficient to blow to atoms the doctor's plans and Keziah's, the great scheme which was to bring happiness to John ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... of their own country and of Europe to their personal plans have resigned, and others have taken their places of whom we need not fear this. I believe, therefore that I may state that our outlook toward France is more peaceful and less explosive today than it was a year ago and I am glad to do this, because I wish to quiet, not to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... ready, Gridley, you may fire!" replied Jim. I pressed the gun button. The crash of the gun was followed by another report from outside as the radite shell burst against the Mercurian flyer. The deadly explosive did its work, and the shattered remains of the wreck fell, to be engulfed ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... not prove that its leaders judged rightly and acted virtuously: but, beyond a doubt, it condemns the previous order which brought it about. What a horrid thing is the explosion! Why, is the obvious answer, did you allow the explosive materials to accumulate, till the first match must fire the train? The greatest blot upon Burke, I need hardly say, is that his passions blinded him in his age, to this, as we ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... never married. The women, indeed, whom he loved, whom he proposed to, always awoke with a shock to the risk of joining for life a man of such explosive whims, of such absorption in his own self and art, of such utter deafness, untidiness, and morose ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... each separate sound correctly, but connect the consonants, especially the explosive sounds, with the succeeding vowels badly, with effort as if an obstacle were to be overcome. The paths i and l are affected, and hence M is not properly excited. S, too, comes under consideration in the case of ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... commanded higher prices in 1907 than fifty years before, but the number of his ships rapidly decreased. Whales were becoming scarce, and New England capital preferred other forms of investment. The leisurely old sailing craft was succeeded by the steam whaler, and the explosive bomb slew, instead of the harpoon and lance hurled by the sinewy right arm of a New Bedford man or Cape ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... Protestant theologians was not difficult. A little skilful warping of Scripture, a little skilful use of that time-honoured phrase, attributed to Cardinal Baronius, that the Bible is given to teach us, not how the heavens go, but how men go to heaven, and a free use of explosive rhetoric against the ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... hole, and then use dynamite," decided Captain Weston promptly. "You have some explosive, haven't ...
— Tom Swift and his Submarine Boat - or, Under the Ocean for Sunken Treasure • Victor Appleton
... bags had escaped, the explosive blast rising upward; and the danger being apparently at an end, the principal actors in the catastrophe roused to find officers hurrying to meet them, and men coming forward armed with pails of water to dash and scatter here and there till ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... state, from which I roused to find myself on an American ship bound for New York, surrounded by people whose only means of communicating with one another is to keep up while together a constant clatter of hissing, guttural, and explosive noises, eked out by all manner of facial contortions and bodily gestures. I frequently find myself staring open-mouthed at those who address me, too much struck by their grotesque appearance to bethink myself ...
— To Whom This May Come - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... consonants, the former of which represents the common letters, and the latter their respective "cut letters," which may be described as being pronounced with a shorter and more explosive sound than the corresponding common letter, and separated by a short pause from the ...
— The Annals of the Cakchiquels • Daniel G. Brinton
... for a revolver: nevertheless it took effect. The luminous object disappeared with a faint explosive sound, followed by a shout unmistakably human. The long stems of the wild mustard swayed and parted, and out sprang a figure, which ran straight ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... I had arranged everything before you came in, and had sat down to make an end of it. This button at my hand once started an electric apparatus; but now it is connected with a quantity of an explosive—my own invention, and a terrible one. Believe me, one touch and everything in this building is ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... as a slow moving, high trajectory missile containing high explosive and exploding by contact or time fuse. Grenades may be divided roughly into two classes—1, hand grenades, and 2, rifle grenades, and each of these classes may be subdivided as regards means of explosion, into 1, time fuse, or ...
— Military Instructors Manual • James P. Cole and Oliver Schoonmaker
... unfastened, and she made her way rapidly to the foot of the back stairway. When she opened the door to ascend, a thick, black smoke rushed down, almost overpowering her. The opening of the door seemed to aid the fire, too, and there was a sort of explosive eagerness in the new start it took as it now crackled and roared above her. Then she recognized in the sickening smoke a smell of burning feathers, and she felt faint and weak as she thought that it might be his bed that ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... energy of his courage. He raised himself on the cart, bent his brows, and, clenching his fist, shook it at the spectre with a ghastly look of hate and defiance. The goblin vanished with his usual tremendous and explosive laugh, and left Waldeck exhausted with this effort ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... from them, they being really underground communications with their rear defences. The whole fighting was of a cold, deliberate, merciless nature. No quarter was given or taken. One of the battalions opposing us was similar to our own, a students' battalion from Bavaria. The enemy used explosive and dum-dum bullets, and sniped off any of our wounded lying exposed in the open. They were helped in their work by an arrangement we had come to regarding wounded. It was not permitted to stop to take back prisoners or to stop to dress a wounded chum; but it was permitted to stick ...
— The Seventeenth Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Chamber of Commerce Battalion) - Record of War Service, 1914-1918 • Various
... though it must have been difficult for him to believe that it was really I who followed them, he could not very well doubt the witness of his own eyes; and so he trained their stern gun upon me with his own hands, and an instant later an explosive radium projectile whizzed ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the man beside him, whose assumed indifference vanished at this suggestion of hope; "—the little battery that I used on the gun, to fire the explosive. It has an astounding amperage, and a voltage around three hundred. It's in my ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... important in their results to civilization. Of these the principal were gunpowder, the mariner's compass, and printing by movable types. Gunpowder was not first made by Schwartz, a monk of Freiburg, as has often been asserted. We have notices, more or less obscure, of the use of an explosive material resembling it, among the Chinese, among the Indians in the East as early as Alexander the Great, and among the Arabs. It was first brought into use in firearms in the middle of the fourteenth century. The effect ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... come with an effect of dramatic and incalculable authority. Like a blast of air that drives the furnace to new heat and turns the metal white, his mind now suddenly saw clear and sure. The effect of the incident was too explosive, however, for him to find expression. Action he found in a measure, but no words. He took Miriam passionately into his arms as they stood there in the gathering dusk upon the staircase of that haunted and terrible building, and Miriam it was who found the ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... whose growing and rival influence he had already so much reason to be jealous, he must have put an end to anarchy in Stockbridge, and once more stand at the head of its government. Sedgwick had warned him of the explosive state of popular feeling: he had resented that warning, and the event had proved his rival right. The only thing now left him was to show Sedgwick that if he had not been able to foresee the rebellion, he had been able to suppress it. Nevertheless ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... ground-ice, on whose foot the Vega had run up, had been hewn away with axes and ice-hatchets. Some attempts were made to blast the ice with gunpowder, but they were unsuccessful. For this purpose dynamite is much more efficacious, and this explosive ought therefore always to form part of the equipment in voyages in which belts of ice have to be ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... of "empties" down on the long drain-board of the sink, turned to the wall, and buried her face in her hands. The cook, Bert, though he cast a startled glance at her would not have dared to speak, after that encounter of the morning, but a rather explosive sniff was too eloquent an appeal ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... in Iceland that are full of geysers. I don't know whether it is the inheritance from those people who broke away from the old countries, and who ought to be matched to tremendous circumstances of life, but now and then there comes an amazingly explosive and uncontrollable temperament that goes all to pieces from its own conservation and accumulation of force. By and by you will have all blown up,—you quiet descendants of the Pilgrims and Puritans, ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... across this bottle-neck, it should have been an easy job to block. So they sank the floating dock in the southern portion of the channel and moored the Koenig by bow and stern hawsers, to the shores on either side in position for sinking. Instead of flooding her they prepared an explosive bomb and timed it to go off at the fall of the tide. But the bomb failed to explode, and an ebb tide setting in, broke the stern moorings and drove her sideways on the shore. Here she lies now and ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... right," he shouted, as they neared the bank above the danger spot. He was a few yards in advance of Jack's father and "Old Mack." Then suddenly he stood stock still, gave vent to a long, explosive whistle, and yelled, "Well, I'll be gin-busted! Look a' there, boys!" And following his astounded gaze, they saw, on the brink of the river, an old grey horse, with down-hanging head, his back to the gale, and about his neck a boy's coat, from the knotted sleeves of which ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... with respect to the abruptness and rapidity of expiration there are three modes of utterance: the effusive, by which the voice is poured forth smoothly and equably, the expulsive and the explosive. Of these three modes the effusive is by far the most important, but the others, and especially the expulsive, have their uses also. These modes will be illustrated ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... the poet in my nature; something, possibly, of the tribune. And, for my small part, I shall remain devoted to that more emphatic, more striking, and (if you please) more popular method, of the explosive bomb. Yes,' he cried, with unshaken hope, 'I will still continue, and, I feel it in my bosom, I shall ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... experiment described how to take a little powdered sugar and mix it with a little powder obtained by crushing up a tablet of chlorate of potash—such as people put in their mouths for a sore throat. That would make an explosive, as powerful as the powder used in guns. It could be set off by dropping on it from an eye-dropper one drop of a certain kind of acid, from ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... heard—the men in Barbazon's Tavern saying that the bridge should be blown up on the Saturday night; and this was Saturday night—the night of the day following that of the Orange funeral. He had heard the criminal hireling of Felix Marchand say that it should be done at midnight, and that the explosive should be laid under that part of the bridge which joined the Manitou bank of the Sagalac. As though in very truth he saw with his eyes, he stopped short not far from the point where the bridge joined the land, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... eyes, with their shaggy, sandy eyebrows, and stiff, wiry, sun-burned hair, were rather unprepossessing items, it is to be confessed; his large, coarse mouth was distended with tobacco, the juice of which, from time to time, he ejected from him with great decision and explosive force; his hands were immensely large, hairy, sun-burned, freckled, and very dirty, and garnished with long nails, in a very foul condition. This man proceeded to a very free personal examination of the lot. He seized ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... "All set," he reported crisply, and barked a series of | | explosive syllables at Shiro, ending upon a rising note. | | | | The Tale of the Galactic Cruise Which Ushered in Universal ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... earlier he had been riding peacefully up the trail in the moonlight, wondering how thoroughly he was lost and how much farther it was to Debbleby's. Then, at a sudden sharp turn in the canyon bridle-path, he had stumbled upon the camp-fire, had heard an explosive "Hands up!" and had found himself confronted by three men, with one of the three covering him with a sawed-off Winchester. From that to the unhorsing and the binding had been merely a rough-and-tumble half-minute, inasmuch as he was unarmed and the surprise had been complete; ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... began with almost explosive suddenness, "let's get this straight. I want to work with you, if you'll let me." He paused long enough for Bristow to nod a pleased assent. "And I believe there's something back of this crime that nobody has yet put his finger on. Mr. Withers ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... days were the most anxious of my life. Never before had I lived on terms of intimacy with a picric bomb, that most deadly and uncertain of all explosive agencies. I speedily found that Simard was so absinthe-soaked I could do nothing with him. He could not be bribed or cajoled or persuaded or threatened. Once, indeed, when he talked with drunken affection of Eugene Valmont, I conceived a wild notion ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... the gun being lifted above the water, after each shot, by shears and suitable tackle. The present projectile of the Destroyer is the result of the extended trials referred to; its length is 25 feet 6 inches, diameter 16 inches, and its weight 1,500 pounds, including 250 pounds of explosive materials. We are not at liberty at present to describe its form, but we may mention that the great length of the body and the absence of all internal machinery enable the constructor to carry the ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... the little valley of the bushy swamp. As he stared, his irritation speedily overcame his amazement. The curious-looking creature over there on the knoll was defying him, was challenging him. At this time of year his blood was hot and quick for any challenge. He gave vent to a short, harsh, explosive cry, more like a grumbling bleat than a bellow, and as unlike the buffalo's challenge as could well be imagined. Then he fell to thrashing the nearest bushes violently with his antlers. This, for some reason unknown to the mere human chronicler, seemed to be taken by Last Bull as a crowning ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... close quarters with reality is visible in every phrase. The denial of the value of all the old romantic stage machinery, with its artificial climaxes and explosive effects, is perceptible in the quiet endings of the acts and the entirely unsensational exposition of the dramatic action. There is one scene (and by no means an unnatural one) in which there is a touch of violence, viz., where Tjaelde, while he hopes to avert his bankruptcy, threatens to shoot ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... from the nobleman so violently that Mr. Heatherbloom's momentary exultation changed to a feeling of apprehension. But M. le Capitaine had evidently become accustomed to occasional explosive moments from his august patron. He concerned himself only with the command, not the manner in ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... vapor," ordered General Lozier. The plane wavered in signal to the others and swung sharply to the left. Each man knew the flaming death that was theirs if the fire of their exhaust touched that explosive mixture of hydrogen and air. The great bubble turned with ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... a considerable increase of temperature, on the average about one degree Fahrenheit for each eighty feet of descent. It may, indeed, become so heated that if it were at the earth's surface it would not only burst into steam with a vast explosive energy, but would actually shine in the manner of heated solids. As the temperature of water rises, and as the pressure on it increases, it acquires a solvent power, and takes in rocky matter in a measure unapproached at the earth's surface. At the depth ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... 1444, changed the whole system of book-making, and vastly increased the circulation of the Scriptures, the Greek and Latin classics, and all other valuable works, which, by the industry of the monkish copyist, had been preserved from the ravages of time and barbarism. Gunpowder, whose explosive power had been perceived by Roger Bacon as early as 1280, though it was not used on the field of battle until 1346, had completely changed the art of war and had greatly contributed to undermine the feudal system. The polarity of the magnet, also discovered in the middle ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... trace of blood. Like a hound he paused, snuffling the earth. Then with wide mouth and outthrust, curling tongue, uttered voice. Wild as the tiger's food-sick cry, his warning roar burst forth, ending in a strange, upward explosive whine. Instantly every head in the herd was lifted, even the old cows heavy with milk stood as if suddenly renewing ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... ship like the Lusitania would remain above water long enough, even after the torpedoing, to permit passengers to enter the ship's boats. Circumstances of a very peculiar kind, especially the presence on board of large quantities of highly explosive ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... rather bar meddling with politics, especially the white-hot explosive politics that ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... the German government. By the "business at hand" they meant a new explosive and slow-burning powder that was to be used in the new type of fourteen-inch turret guns being made in Glasgow. Some of that explosive was in my possession. The fact that it was not discovered in my effects, nor was anything else incriminating ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... of the Scientists, the same kind of fighting had been going on. We learned later that when Grim Hagen's men winged their way in from the sea, his army had already retaken the Tower. Ato and his soldiers were scattered. Half of them were dead. So, after scattering their explosive eggs across the city, and killing the very old and the very young, Grim Hagen and his men took refuge in the Tower and prepared to withstand our siege. They had learned much from their first defeat, and this time they held ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... hovered over the attacking force, darting hither and thither with bewildering rapidity, and raining down shells charged with an unknown explosive of fearful power among the crowded ships of the great force which was blocking the Sound. Half a dozen of these shells were fired upon the seaward fortifications of Copenhagen in passing, and produced a perfectly ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... atmosphere to a red-blooded, jubilant nature like mine was rather stifling after a while. I was fond of a good story and was full of Irish folklore and fairy stories, and I noticed my brethren did not relish my outbursts of laughter. It was explosive, spontaneous and hearty, but not contagious among them. Their faces assumed a rather pained expression, a kind of notice of emotion that a sense of humour and religious beliefs occupied different compartments in the human mind. It was intimated to me that such "frivolousness" was out of kelter with ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... were for a few minutes, listening to the firing. For the first time the note of real hand-to-hand fighting came into the battle din. They could hear the crashing volleys of rifle fire, and the explosive crackling of machine guns coming into play for the first time. That was confirmation enough of their guess that a regular assault on the line ...
— The Belgians to the Front • Colonel James Fiske
... how I was adopted into the Wyoming Gang, or clan, descendants of the original populations of Wilkes-Barre, Scranton and the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania; how quite by accident I stumbled upon a method of destroying Han aircraft by shooting explosive rockets, not directly at the heavily armored ships, but at the repeller ray columns, which automatically drew the rockets upward where they exploded in the generators of the aircraft; how the Wyomings ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan
... doctor was a little slow, he was sure, for he said something emphatically to the father, who in turn seized Mildred's hand, exclaiming, with explosive energy, "Gott ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... hundreds of drays, some hermetically sealed with the prudence that explosive material requires, others with bundles and boxes that were sending out a stale odor of provisions. Then came great herds of cattle raising thick, whirling clouds of dust in the narrow parts of the road, prodded on by the sticks and yells of the ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... and the like are added. These ideal values come to be regarded as more vital than material values. Hatred between groups becomes chronic and often seems to be groundless because the values concerned have thus become intangible. The chronic moods of hatred and dislike become explosive forces, ready to be excited to action whenever any difference arises. Veblen (97) says wars never occur except when questions of honor are involved, which is of course equivalent to saying that the reaction ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... curled herself comfortably on a gayly-cushioned lounge, and proceeded to adjust a serpent-like, squirming appendage to her ear. With an encouraging nod, she bade us commence, closing her eyes meanwhile with an air of expectant rapture. But the vibrating trumpet stirred our foolish souls to explosive laughter, partially smothered in a simultaneous strangled cough. Wondering at the double paroxysm and subsequent hush of shame, she unclosed her eyes, softly murmuring, "Don't be bashful nor afraid, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... was called as a witness at the inquest upon the bodies of the unfortunate persons killed by the recent explosion at Bergen, N.J. The Professor having previously analyzed some of the explosive mixture, testified as follows:—"I have subjected it to chemical analysis, and find it to correspond to the formula C{6}, H{3}, O{3}, and NO{5}; it is well made nitro-glycerin; the substance freezes at about 46; it is made to ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... which snapped under its explosive force was that of the powerful Methodist Episcopal Church. The next cord that snapped was that of the Baptists, one of the largest and most respectable of the denominations. That of the Presbyterian is not entirely snapped, but some of its strands have given way. That ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... available time might not permit the proper resolution of such episodes. Two, a couple who have openly discharged rage against each other may well react later with deep feelings of humiliation that are not easily assuaged. Three, coping with this kind of explosive emotional discharge could be alarming for lay leaders not accustomed, as the therapist is, to the expression of deep feelings which normally are not displayed in public. Four, other members of the group could be similarly ...
— Marriage Enrichment Retreats - Story of a Quaker Project • David Mace
... indistinctly; some in tones of solemn rebuke, others in those of heart-broken pathos, but most distinctly audible in detached fragments. There was one exception,—a few words uttered brokenly, with a half-explosive force, from James 5: ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... uncertain movement. Such a load of intricacies and exaggerated anxieties hanging on it, the royal mind goes like the most confused smoke-jack, sure only to HAVE revolutions; and we know how, afar from Soissons, and at home in Tobacco-Parliament, the machine is influenced! Enough, the explosive procedures continue, and ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... seem to be at all surprised by the explosive emphasis with which Ned Newton conveyed this information. He gazed calmly at his friend and manager, and ...
— Tom Swift and his Undersea Search - or, The Treasure on the Floor of the Atlantic • Victor Appleton
... of consonants, the former of which represents the common letters, and the latter their respective "cut letters," which may be described as being pronounced with a shorter and more explosive sound than the corresponding common letter, and separated by a short pause from ...
— The Annals of the Cakchiquels • Daniel G. Brinton
... in target cordinate identification and location. Precision does not mean "small warhead," although there is a beneficial impact as the right amount of explosive is placed on the target due the penalties imposed on the delivery vehicle required to carry the warhead long distances. All operations involving the use of firepower must also understand and evaluate the beneficial aspects of using non-destructive elements in conjunction with ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... agricultural country; yet she is at the present moment threatened in many parts with an Industrial Revolution, the ultimate effects of which may prove far more subversive than the attempted revolution of 1905. For beneath her soil lie explosive materials more deadly than any dynamite manufactured by intelligentsia. Her mineral wealth, at present almost untouched, is incalculable in quantity and amazing in variety. When her mines are opened up ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... of the jaguar, and as we passed it a pair of those royal beasts were playing on the shore like two enormous cats. As they caught sight of us, one leapt into the mangrove swamp, out of sight, and the other took a plunge into the river, only to rise a few yards distant and receive an explosive bullet in his head. The mangrove tree, with its twisting limbs and bright green foliage, grows in the warm water and ftid mud of tropical countries. It is a type of death, for pestilence hangs round it like a cloud. ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... succession of thumps which put an end to this pretty flight of fancy. Aghast he surveyed the scene before him. Close to the Brigade Headquarters' dug-out was an old French dump of every conceivable kind of explosive made up into every known form of projectile. No longer was it a picture of Still Life. The Sleeping Beauty was awake indeed. The Prince had come in the form ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 3, 1917 • Various
... us, out of the empty air of that smoke-laden room, a force which I can only compare to the pushing, driving power of a great wind pent up within a narrow space. It was almost explosive in its effect, and it seemed to operate upon all parts of my body equally. It fell upon us with a rushing noise that filled my ears and made me think for a moment the very walls and roof of the building had been torn asunder. Under its first blow ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... of Consonants are explosive; which, viz. are discharged at one push, and as it were, in the twinkling of an Eye and are nothing else but Breath, which being got close together, either in the fore, middle, or hinder Region of the Mouth, is discharged on a suddain; and (k) is indeed formed in the hinder Region, ...
— The Talking Deaf Man - A Method Proposed, Whereby He Who is Born Deaf, May Learn to Speak, 1692 • John Conrade Amman
... of the evenin' she confines her remarks to Auntie, cuttin' loose with the sarcasm at every openin' and now and then tossin' an explosive gas bomb at us over Auntie's shoulder. Nothing anyone could grab up and hurl back at her, you know. It's all shootin' from ambush. Some keen tongue she has, take it from me. At 9:30 I backed out under fire, leavin' Vee with ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... broader grin than ever. He managed to convey the idea that he wished to congratulate the hose-cart driver on his recovery and to apologize for having caused the accident. This he accomplished by so many extravagant gestures and explosive noises that the company was diverted for half an hour. Then they kicked him out again, and on the next day he came back grinning. How or where he lived no one knew. And then John Byrnes's nine-year-old ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... said, was making a special study of oratorio—and that it was profanation, for any one with so incalculably little idea of the very first principles of art to attempt to interpret the works of the great masters, together with much more of a like explosive character. Finally, he dismissed him abruptly ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... various implements and chemicals. First of all he set out, on the floor, a two-quart copper tea-kettle; and beside this, choosing carefully, he ranged the necessary ingredients for a "making" of his secret explosive. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... whip cracked with an explosive sound, at which the gray mare, unaffected by the noise and the excitement, started away at a measured gallop, her head rising and falling like the prow of a ship ...
— The Circus Boys Across The Continent • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... a good reader, and splendidly thrilling and stormy and tragic, but it was a damage to me, because I have never since been able to read Shakespeare in a calm and sane way. I cannot rid it of his explosive interlardings, they break in everywhere with their irrelevant, "What in hell are you up to NOW! pull her down! more! MORE!—there now, steady as you go," and the other disorganizing interruptions that were always leaping from his mouth. When I read Shakespeare ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... cleared away if, on the 30th of November, Neb, strolling on the beach, had not found a piece of a thick iron cylinder, bearing traces of explosion. The edges of this cylinder were twisted and broken, as if they had been subjected to the action of some explosive substance. ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... Simon pushed another button. There was no sound, but his practiced eye saw the eye of the anchor quiver. A small explosive charge, set in the buried end of the anchor, had detonated, expanding the far end of the bolt, wedging it firmly in the hole. At the same time, a piston had been forced up a small shaft in the center of the bolt, forcing a catalyst ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... natural and proper enough that the masses of explosive ammunition stored up in detective stories and the replete and solid sweet-stuff shops which are called sentimental novelettes should be popular with the ordinary customer. It is not difficult to realize that all of us, ignorant ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... lasting benefit being derived, although the few rounds that were fired proved their destructive effect on the opposing trenches. The Turkish weapon was known as the "broomstick bomb" and was also propelled from a mortar. It consisted of a 4-inch cartridge case filled with a high explosive and also containing metal such as boiler punchings, nails, etc. (in one case gramophone needles were discovered), and provided with a percussion cap. It was fitted to a stick about two inches thick and five feet long. Its descent into our lines or support area was almost vertical—hence ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... had not been those of an explosion. It was more as though some tremendous force had pushed outward from within. It had not been the shattering shock of high explosive, but some great thrust that had unhurriedly, but irresistibly, moved everything out of ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... are still sore. Suspect me as you please,—make me out a new Pandarus, if you like—I shall not be offended. But you know—for I have often told you— that I never interfere in love matters. They are too explosive, too vitally dangerous; outsiders ought never to meddle with them. And I never do. Come back with me to Cairo. And when we are once more safely established on the solid and unromantic isles of Britain, you will forget all about the Princess ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... taken into consideration as well as social outlets. Instruction out of proportion with and superior to condition works differently with different nations. For the German adult it is rather soothing and a derivative; with the adult Frenchman it is especially an irritant or even an explosive.] ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Christian religion is with us no explosive force threatening the disruption of our most cherished institutions. On the contrary, it has been said, not as a mere figure of speech, that "Christianity is part of the common law of England." And even ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... Jack declared. "One stick is enough to blow the Fortuna to pieces. Here are one, two, three, four, five, six—six sticks of high powered explosive lying right next to our engines. Where would the good ship have been if that stuff had let go? I tell you, fellows, this ...
— Boy Scouts in Southern Waters • G. Harvey Ralphson
... second visit and then he and Slippery, each carrying a heavy satchel filled with the tools Slippery had so carefully looked after, followed by Joe, around whose left leg they had bandaged, despite his most vehement protests, the small bottle containing the deadly explosive, left the flat. They took a street car to the railroad station, where Boston Frank purchased tickets to Dixon, one of the prettiest and most hustling cities in western Illinois. Soon they were rolling out of the railroad yards and across the fertile plains and arrived ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... was held to be the special seat of the sudden and explosive emotions and passions, whether of mirth or anger. Cf. Troilus and Cressida, I, iii, 178; 1 Henry IV, ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... lightly a mate or a deck-hand to find the old keel-boatman savagery. Captains were overlords, and pilots kings in this estate; but they were not angels. In Life on the Mississippi Clemens refers to his chief's explosive vocabulary and tells us how he envied the mate's manner of giving an order. It was easier to acquire those things than piloting, and, on the whole, quicker. One could improve upon them, too, with imagination and wit and ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... effect of the explosive habit of speech limited to the person who indulges it. The other day a lady, apparently in no haste, sauntered into a station of the "Elevated" ahead of me, holding by the hand a small boy. The boy was enjoying himself immensely, gazing about him with the ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated by the United States. Before it was set off at Bikini on February 28, 1954, it was expected to explode with an energy equivalent of about 8 million tons of TNT. Actually, it produced almost twice that explosive power—equivalent to 15 million tons ...
— Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War: Some Perspectives • United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
... was a crack like a pistol shot as the bunk-post snapped, the chest leaped like a live thing at the man, and Fitzgibbon's heels flew out from under him. He landed upon his back, and the chest landed upon his stomach; and the wind went out of him with an explosive oof! ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... out again, spread on the air as if it were flying, looking something like a dragon, then closing up again, inconceivably powerful and explosive. The man's body, strung to its efforts, vibrated strongly. Then a sudden sharp, white-edged wrath came up in him. Swift as lightning he drew back and brought his free hand down like a hawk on the neck of the rabbit. Simultaneously, there came the unearthly ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... manoeuvres on it, which unexpectedly conclude its existence:—"with unaccountable hardihood," as Archenholtz has it, physiognomically TRUE to Friedrich's general style just now, if a little incorrect as to the case in hand, "sees good to march direct, once for all, athwart said Chain; right across its explosive cannonadings and it,—counter-cannonading, and marching rapidly on; such a march for insolence, say the Austrians!" [Archenholtz (ii. 115-116); who is in a hurry, dateless, and rather confuses a subsequent DAY (September 18th) with this "night of August ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... he made the hole, the murmur of voices became more and more distinct. At last, the sharp point of the knife pierced the board, and then working as carefully as though he were handling the most deadly explosive, he began to enlarge the little ...
— The Ranger Boys and the Border Smugglers • Claude A. Labelle
... patrolman. To his horror he found it to be one of the much-dreaded thermos bottles. Experts from the Bureau of Rumbustibles were summoned, and the bomb was carefully analyzed. Much to the disappointment of the chief inspector, the devilish ingredients of the explosive had been spoiled by immersion in a pail of water, so his examination was purely theoretical; but it was plain that the leading component of this hellish mixture had been nothing less than gin, animated by a fuse of lemon-peel. If the cylinder had exploded, unquestionably every occupant ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... muttered a combination of explosive words which he had probably picked up from sailors, making the churchman cross himself. He spoke ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... compounding gun cotton or explosive cotton, also named pyroxylin, and this is used to make collodion, ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... or reading, with respect to the abruptness and rapidity of expiration there are three modes of utterance: the effusive, by which the voice is poured forth smoothly and equably, the expulsive and the explosive. Of these three modes the effusive is by far the most important, but the others, and especially the expulsive, have their uses also. These modes will be illustrated in ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... Kate's laughter became explosive and uncontrollable. Pete nodded sideways to fill up the gap in his eloquence, and then went on. "But if my dooiney molla can't marry my wife, there's one thing he can do for her—he can make her house his home in Ramsey when he goes ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... a digression. Let us return to the "Victoria." She is now in eighty fathoms of water with her hundreds of dead. Poor fellows! theirs was a sad fate; though not more so than the fate of miners blasted or suffocated in explosive pits. We pity their dear ones—mothers, sisters, wives, and children. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hearts are aching on their account; mourning for the dead who will never be buried under the sweet churchyard grass, though they ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... good spirits that had mellowed for years in the cellars, was now crowded in every shelf with forbidding-looking bottles of black draughts, with packages of salt and senna, and with ill-omened piles of raking pills, perhaps not less destructive in their way than shot and shell of a more explosive sort. The butler's pantry and store rooms had their shelves and drawers and boxes filled, not with jellies and marmalades and preserves, and boxes of lemons and preserved ginger and drums of figs, and all sorts of original packages of all sorts of things toothsome and satisfying to the ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... The draught, the mental confusion, the noise and stirring in my head, seemed to last an interminable time. Curious vague impressions of half-forgotten things danced and vanished on the edge of my consciousness. At last he broke the spell. With a sudden explosive sigh he put down ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... Blood, blood, blood; and the blood all on one side. For perhaps twenty times Drislane was knocked flat. If Sickles had only the explosive spark to go with those tremendous blows he wouldn't have had to hit Drislane more than once. But he could only continue to knock the little man flat; and knocking him flat often enough, the pounding ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly
... incessant hospital rounds Mr Crewdson found an Australian whose leg had been shattered by an explosive bullet and who told him this strange tale. When thus wounded he fell between two rocks and found himself unable to move, but while lying there a young well-dressed Boer discovered him, and with a perfect English accent said, "Are you much hurt, old fellow?" ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... in the clove islands between Spain and the republic's East India Company. The English in those regions were not slow to avail themselves of the advantage. The Portuguese of Tydor received from neutral sympathy a copious supply of powder and of pamphlets. The one explosive material enabled them to make a more effective defence of their citadel against the Dutch fleet; the other revealed to the Portuguese and their Mussulman allies that "the Netherlanders could not exist ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... September 13, 1916, a group of Austrian seaplanes attacked Venice once more. Incendiary and explosive bombs struck the church of San Giovanni Paola, the Home for the Aged, and a number of other buildings, inflicting some damage, although no casualties were reported. Chioggra also was attacked by the same machines; but here, too, the damage was ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... doing homage but taking part, sharing almost in a creation, comet-like, of stars in the sky. Nothing in the bravura disconcerted or even displeased him, no lack of coherence or obviousness in contrasts disturbed him; what was loud, boisterous, explosive, he tossed about as in a colossal game, he bathed luxuriously in what was luscious in the melodies, giving them almost more than their real worth by the delighted skill with which he set them singing. ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... have to learn that, although London contains tenfold the inflammable matter that it did in 1666; though, not content with filling our rooms with woodwork and light draperies, we must needs lead inflammable and explosive gases into every corner of our streets and houses, we never allow even a street to burn down. And if he asked how this had come about, we should have to explain that the improvement of natural knowledge ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... an effort; he was not employed for his imagination. "Why," he hesitated, "because I suppose the cartridges would blow up in the men's pouches and in the machine-gun belts; and then the trench-mortar ammunition and the hand grenades; well, everything explosive would simply explode! And then we'd go over to what was left of them, and it would ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... gone gunning against the British? To a certain extent, I presume you never heard tell of the Laughton-Zigler automatic two-inch field-gun, with self-feeding hopper, single oil-cylinder recoil, and ballbearing gear throughout? Or Laughtite, the new explosive? Absolutely uniform in effect, and one-ninth the bulk of any present effete charge—flake, cannonite, cordite, troisdorf, cellulose, cocoa, cord, or prism—I don't care what it is. Laughtite's immense; so's the Zigler automatic. It's me. ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... voice: "Look out, there!" The loose powder hissed and spat for a moment, then bang went the cannon, and a great cloud of smoke rolled upward, while the rousing cheers came echoing back from the surrounding forests. The helper, with the powder-horn, would spring to the anvil and pour the black explosive into the hole, while another stood ready with plug and hammer. The delicious scent of burned gunpowder filled the air, and was inhaled by all the youngsters with satisfaction, for now they realized what real war was. Thus the salutes were fired, and thus the royal ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... purposes. The hexagonal bore is not a new invention, some of the Russians having used it in the late Baltic campaign; but it is doubtless Mr. Whitworth's wonderful accuracy of construction that is destined to give it celebrity, by arming it with a power and correctness it wanted before.[CQ] An explosive ball has also been introduced by Colonel Jacob of Eastern celebrity, which from its greater flight will prove, when perfected, a more deadly arm than the old spherical explosive ball invented and forgotten ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... even after making allowance for his secluded life, we are astonished at the powerful grasp which Calvinism, in its expiring age, had laid upon so penetrating an intellect. The framework of dogma was so powerful, that the explosive force of Edwards' speculations, instead of destroying his early principles by its recoil, expended its whole energy along the line in which orthodox opinion was not injured. Most bold speculators, indeed, suffer from a kind of colour-blindness, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... parachutes and are blown about by the wind. What other plants can you find whose seeds are scattered in the same way? Can you discover a plant whose seeds are carried by water? The Witch-hazel shoots its seeds. What other plants can you find that have explosive fruits? Cherry-seeds are carried by birds. Mention some other seeds that are carried in this way. It would take very little observation to learn how Burdock-burs, Cockle-burs, Stick-tights, Beggar-lice, Spanish-needles, and ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... wild and explosive oath. He knew this man was playing on his vanity, jealousy, and hatred for some purpose not yet apparent, but he found it impossible to close his mind to the whisperings of the plotter. He welcomed the spur of Steelman's two-edged ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... at the safe they tried to open, Dad," begged Bud, when he and his cousins had ridden over to pay a week-end visit to the home ranch. "Did they try to drill it for an explosive?" ...
— The Boy Ranchers on the Trail • Willard F. Baker
... To this explosive condition of things the news of Burgoyne's surrender acted as a spark. The experience of former wars had taught France the worth of the Americans as enemies, and she was expecting to find in them valuable helpers in her schemes of revenge; ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... break away from restraints that we suspected were keeping us off the instructive knife-edges of life. Hatherleigh was a good Englishman of the premature type with a red face, a lot of hair, a deep voice and an explosive plunging manner, and it was he who said one evening—Heaven knows how we got to it—"Look here, you know, it's all Rot, this Shutting Up about Women. We OUGHT to talk about them. What are we going to do about them? It's got to come. We're all festering inside about it. Let's out ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... of speaking was nervous, eager, explosive. He used many gestures, some of which were strongly reminiscent of his father, of whom he, unlike most English lads, who shy at mentioning a distinguished parent, ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... This statement was denied with much explosive emphasis by a writer in the Catholic World for September and October, 1891, but he brought no FACT to support this denial. I may perhaps be allowed to remind the reverend writer that since the days of Pascal, whose eminence in the ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the powerful machine puffed out on its flaring way through the night. Faster and faster came the big explosive breaths, until they blended in a long steady roar, and the train was sweeping northward at forty miles an hour. The clouds had broken; the night had grown colder; the gibbous moon gleamed over the vast and solitary landscape. It was a different thing to Hemenway, riding ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... later ideas into an earlier time. First-rate importance on the whole cannot be claimed for the Nebiim, but occasionally there arose amongst them a man in whom the spirit which was cultivated within their circles may be said to have risen to the explosive pitch. Historical influence was exercised at no time save by these individuals, who rose above their order and even placed themselves in opposition to it, but always at the same time had their base of operations within it. The prototype of this class of exceptional ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... but the best one lies in the use of bisulphide of carbon. This is very effective, but it has come into such common use that a word of caution should be given as to its handling. It is very volatile and, when near flame, powerfully explosive, and should be handled with great care. Pour it into the runways of the ants, and then throw over these a mat. The fumes will speedily kill all the ants. A better way, however, is to drive a stick into the ground in several places where ...
— Making a Lawn • Luke Joseph Doogue
... using a shell containing cordite, a powerful English explosive, was in charge of a marine corporal named J.J. Murray, who acted as captain of the gun. After firing several rounds with marked success, Murray saw that the gun was loaded ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday
... capable of extracting from it infinite complications of successive and cumulative comedy. This humour seemed like the mental functionings of some mad, yet inevitably logical jester; it grew from more to more, from extravagance to extravagance, until reason itself tired and gave over. Such explosive stories as 'How I Edited an Agricultural Paper', 'A Genuine Mexican Plug', the deciphering of the Horace Greeley correspondence, 'The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract, and many another, as Mr. Chesterton has pointed out, have ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... Ippolito was posing to Perris for his picture of A Venetian Priest, the painter asked, to make talk, "Have you hit upon that new explosive yet, which is to utilize your breech-loading cannon? Or are you engaged upon ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... scratched, and every button that his vest had ever known had taken wings unto itself and flown, Bessie knew not whither. And yet, tired out as he was, dishevelled as he was, Thaddeus was not grumpy, but inclined rather to explosive laughter as he ...
— Paste Jewels • John Kendrick Bangs
... clasp the frightened girl. Hilary seemed to uncoil. His fist shot straight up with all the power of his body behind it. It crashed into the jutting jaw of the Mercutian like a charge of high explosive dynol. For all his height and massive strength, the giant toppled over, thudding ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
... eloquent than a Sneeze? The Sneeze is the protest of the Free Spirit against the Smug Citizen who never exposes himself to a cold. Oh, Beautiful Sneezes! Oh, to make my life one loud explosive Sneeze in the ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... the guns that were advanced from the camp to cover the retreat, but as this does not appear in the reports, perhaps it is not true. Our loss was about 200 killed and wounded, including Sir George Colley, Drs. Landon and Cornish, and Commander Romilly, who was shot with an explosive bullet, and died after some days' suffering. When the wounded Commander was being carried to a more sheltered spot, it was with great difficulty that the Boers were prevented from massacring him as he lay, they being under the impression that ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... a ghostly beam, for an instant of time so short that before the explosive shells of the other could be trained on it, the Solarite had moved. Under that touch the mighty plane began crumbling, then it splintered beneath the driving blow of the great wing, as it shot toward the main body of the plane at several miles a second—driving ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... will note was the second explosive point in our conversation. I was too much concerned at the moment to take in all his words implied or to appreciate the fine dexterity with which a difficult situation was being handled. These decisive sentences were cracked off quick, sharp, emphatic, like the snapping ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... he broke out suddenly, in an explosive, febrile manner that startled and alarmed himself, 'that I am a stay-at-home, because I fear anything under God. God knows I am tired enough of it all; and when the time comes for a longer journey than ever you dream of, I reckon I shall find ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... betrayed.—"Elevated to the height achieved by the French people," says another president, "it looks down upon the tempests under its feet."[2339] The tempest is at hand and bursts over its head. War, like a black cloud, rises above the horizon, overspreads the sky, thunders and wraps France filled with explosive materials in a circle of lightening, and it is the Assembly which, through the greatest of its mistakes, draws down the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... crew—they were dumfounded with terror. The crashing of the heavy steel projectiles above deck, the explosion in the foreward gun-turret, and several shots which had passed through the unarmored starboard side of the forepart of the ship in rapid succession—they were explosive shells which created fearful havoc and filled all the rooms with the poisonous gases of the Shimose-powder—all this, added to the continual ring of the alarm-signals, had completely robbed the crew below deck of their senses ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... wish that we had a more beautiful word than "art" for so beautiful a thing; it is in itself a snappish explosive word, like the cry of an angry animal; and it has, too, to bear the sad burden of its own misuse by affected people. Moreover, it stands for so many things, that one is never quite sure what the people who use it intend it to mean; some people use it in an abstract, some in a concrete ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and her aunt went into the other side of the house, and Aunt Maria, who had been waxing fairly explosive, told the tale of poor little Jessy Ramsey going to ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... moment a steady pursuit of one idea characterized Ringfield's actions. Already charged to explosive point by pressure of emotions both worthy and the reverse, he immediately entered into correspondence with several charitable institutions with regard to Angeel, and he also wrote to Mr. Enderby and Mr. Abercorn. It was now the ninth of the month and the snow still ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... The whole fighting was of a cold, deliberate, merciless nature. No quarter was given or taken. One of the battalions opposing us was similar to our own, a students' battalion from Bavaria. The enemy used explosive and dum-dum bullets, and sniped off any of our wounded lying exposed in the open. They were helped in their work by an arrangement we had come to regarding wounded. It was not permitted to stop to take back prisoners or to stop to dress a wounded chum; but it was permitted to stick ...
— The Seventeenth Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Chamber of Commerce Battalion) - Record of War Service, 1914-1918 • Various
... of the origin of the theory is brief. The Chatelaine of a certain sugar plantation in Louisiana, in preparing a list of guests for her house-party, discovered, in one of those explosive moments of inspiration, that all people were easily divided into two fundamental groups or families, the Sulphites and the Bromides. The revelation was apodictic, convincing; it made life a different thing; it made society almost plausible. ...
— Are You A Bromide? • Gelett Burgess
... invention of gunpowder dates back to the days of the Phoenicians, and may have been derived by them from Atlantis. It is not impossible that in this picture of the Kyklopes we see a tradition of sea-going ships, with a light burning at the prow, and armed with some explosive preparation, which, with a roar like thunder, and a flash like lightning, destroyed those against whom it was employed? It at least requires less strain upon our credulity to suppose these monsters were a barbarian's memory of great ships than to believe that ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... With an explosive roar the Mercury shot across the line and rushed, gathering speed in long leaps, down the white course. Under the first arched bridge, out of sight it flashed, followed by an answering roar from the countless throats of those between ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... liquid dynamite, capable of wrecking the whole settlement in a moment. Endless precautions and vigilant care alone secure the safety of Balik-Papan from the perils incidental to the vast stores of explosive material. The raw petroleum brought from the mines of Samarinda, farther down the coast, by a fleet of hoppers (the local steamers which ply round the indented shore), is extracted by boring a stratum of coal known as "antichine," and ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... since discovered that an electro-magnet gives forth a decided sound when it is suddenly magnetized or demagnetized. When the circuit upon which it is placed is rapidly made and broken, a succession of explosive noises proceeds from the magnet. These sounds produce upon the ear the effect of a musical note when the current is interrupted a sufficient ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... developed by various other physical agencies,—by heat, by light, by electricity, by magnetism, by mechanical agencies; and, vice versa, that chemical action develops heat, light, electricity, magnetism, mechanical force, as we see in our matches, galvanic batteries, and explosive compounds. Proceeding with our experiments, we find that every kind of force is capable of producing all other kinds, or, in Mr. Faraday's language, that "the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest have a common origin, ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... be no doubt that she had the situation in her hands. That, of course, did not mean safety. She had it in her hands as one may hold some highly explosive and uncertain compound. D'Alcacer thought of her with profound sympathy and with a quite unselfish interest. Sometimes in a street we cross the path of personalities compelling sympathy and wonder but for all that we don't follow them home. D'Alcacer refrained from ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... almost everything would be in his familiar little world; fearing, indeed, that there would be no surprises in his visit. But he had found that humdrum world in a terribly dynamic condition, in which even badinage and lyrism had turned explosive; and the first day of this visit had become the most fatal epoch of his life. The next morning he felt so harassed with the nightmare of consequences—he dreaded so much the immediate issues before him—that ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... Mr. McCall had been in a state of suppressed revolution. He had smouldered, but had not dared to blaze. But this startling upheaval of his fellow-sufferer, Washy, had acted upon him like a high explosive. There was a strange gleam in his eye, a gleam of determination. He ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... and unsympathetic. Courteous, well-bred, self-possessed, she was to a fault, but—unpardonable sin in school-girl eyes—she shrank from those dear and delicious intimacies, those mushroom friendships of our tender years, that are as explosive as fire-crackers and as evanescent as the smoke thereof. The volumes of satire that have been written on the subject have exhausted the field and rendered new ideas out of the question, but they have in no wise ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... sort of dismal grit. Bark your shins, rouse you, and you'll go! You'd rush any position you had a mind to rush. I know a bit about character, George—trust me. You've got—" He clenched his hands and thrust them out suddenly, and at the same time said, with explosive violence, "Wooosh! Yes. You have! The way you put away that Latin at Wimblehurst; ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... kinds. The admiral, not considering it advisable to retain the city, withdrew his men, leaving only a force sufficient for the protection of the factory. This place the Chinese attempted to burn, and made every effort to destroy the fleet with fire-rafts and enormous explosive machines, some of which, it is said, contained 3000 pounds of gunpowder. They were invariably, however, towed clear of the ships. Yeh then one night sent a fleet of 23 war-junks in the hopes of surprising the fleet. Getting news ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... person or vessel engaging in fur-seal fishing operations under this act shall use or employ in such operations any net, firearm, air gun, or explosive: Provided, however, That this prohibition shall not apply to the use of shotguns in such operations outside of Bering Sea during the season when the killing of fur seals is not there ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... cold, deliberate voice dominated the explosive Durade. "Do you remember a gambler named Jones? ... He was shot in this room ... If I should happen to be shot here—in the same way—you and your gang would not last ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... ministers were killed by the revolutionists. Some of the guards placed about his person became victims of the secret band. Letters bordered with black and threatening the emperor's life were found among his papers or his clothes. An explosive powder placed in his handkerchief injured his sight for a time; a box of asthma pills sent him proved to contain a small but dangerous infernal machine. He grew haggard through this constant peril; his hair whitened, his form shrank, his ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... through every phase of black bewilderment for five minutes past, suddenly lifted his hand and struck the table in explosive enlightenment. ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... The Germans poisoned the wells in South-West Africa; in Europe they did all they could to poison the wells of mutual trust and mutual understanding among civilized men. Do they think that these things will make a good advertisement for the explosive guttural sounds and the huddled deformed syntax of the speech in which they express their arrogance and their hate? Which of the chief European languages will come first, after the War, with the little nations? Will Serbia be content to speak German? Will Norway and Denmark ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... mercury; or over a saturated salt solution, in which it is only slightly soluble. At ordinary temperatures it unites directly with many other elements; thus with hydrogen, combination takes place in direct sunlight with explosive violence; arsenic, antimony, thin copper foil and phosphorus take fire in an atmosphere of chlorine, forming the corresponding chlorides. Many compounds containing hydrogen are readily decomposed by ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... broke the clean lines of their under-bodies black spheres were dropping in steady streams. Allan knew then whence came the crash that had rocked his ship as she rose. These were bombs, huge bombs, charged with heaven alone knew what Earth-shaking explosive. They were catapulting down, an iron death hail, on the fleet and the ...
— When the Sleepers Woke • Arthur Leo Zagat
... gardener and servant all in one, and who now prepared the table, setting thereon linen and glass and silver of some value. There was excellent wine, and over the simple meal the father and son, in a jerky, explosive way, made merry. For Lory was at heart a Frenchman, and the French know, better than any, how near together tears and laughter must ever be, and have less difficulty in snatching a smile from sad environments ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... made furious attacks on each other and upon their respective adherents, discharging their heavy artillery, consisting of large sheets loaded with scoundrel, villain, liar, rascal, numskull, nincompoop, dunderhead, wiseacre, blockhead, jackass." As single words were not always explosive enough to make a report equal to their feelings, they had recourse to compounds;—"pert and prating popinjay," "hackneyed gutscraper," "maggot of corruption," "toad on a dung-heap," "snivelling sophisticating hound," are ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... forth, over these weeks of their stay together. It halted, it ran on, it stopped again to consider, but always it was of Dick and incidentally of himself who didn't matter so much, but who had to be in it all. Were they at one in this epidemic of world sickness? As the great explosive forces of destruction and decay seemed to have released actual germs to attack the physical well-being of races, had the terrible crashes of spiritual destinies unsettled the very air of life, poisoned it, drugged it with madness and despair? ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... not till brawny Mrs. Cox took her stand in the witness-box that the absurdity of the Meroury's story and the charge was exposed fully to a delighted audience. Mrs. Cox marched into the box in an aggressive way, saluted the book with an emphatic and explosive kiss, and then stood erect, square-shouldered and defiant, giving the court and all concerned to understand by her attitude that it must not be imagined any advantage could be taken of her. She told her story in a bluff dogmatic ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... across the canvas, he had hardly left his corner in the ropes before Young Denny was upon him. The boy lifted and sprang and dropped cat-footed in the middle of the ring, hunched of shoulder and bent of knee to meet the shocking impact. It was bewilderingly rapid—terrifyingly effortless—this explosive, spontaneous answer of every muscle to the call of the brain. Just as before, Sutton feinted and saw his opening and swung. Young Denny knew only one best way to fight; he knew only that he had to take a blow in order to give one, and Sutton's fist shot ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... last night, very muddy and trenchy; said the train was like heaven! It is lovely fun taking the sweets round; they are such an unexpected treat. The sitting-ups make many jokes, and say "they serve round 'arder sweets than this in the firing line—more explosive like." ...
— Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... the energy of his courage. He raised himself on the cart, bent his brows, and, clenching his fist, shook it at the spectre with a ghastly look of hate and defiance. The goblin vanished with his usual tremendous and explosive laugh, and left Waldeck exhausted with ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... denunciation of them, because sometimes their pranks are wild and overleap the fences of propriety. Rather let appreciation of their worthiness accompany all reproving checks upon their extravagances. Let nimble fun, explosive jokes, festoon-faced humor, the whole tribe of gibes and quirks, every light, keen, and flashing weapon in the armory of which Punch is the keeper, be employed to make the world laugh, and put the world's laughter on the side of all right as against ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... and repeated to himself that he had experienced a great happiness and was probably on the threshold of a great success. These two reflections did not help him much. The happiness had been of the explosive kind, and the success in the business matter was more than problematic, as well as certainly distant ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... wasted. By this it is not implied that their artillery fire is not good; it is more than good—it is excellent. But the British soldier is a difficult person to impress or depress, even by immense shells filled with a high explosive which detonate with terrific violence and form craters large enough to act ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... dab on the nose, and a kick on the stomach all at once. Feeling that it was impossible to plant a well-directed blow on such an assailant, he waited for the next onslaught; and the moment he saw the explosive object flying through the air towards him, he met it with a crack of his heavy fist, which, happening to take effect in the middle of the chest, drove it backwards with about as much velocity as it had approached, and poor Baptiste measured his length ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... himself, and restless, located a trapdoor in the floor, rather ingeniously concealed, which disclosed the existence of a small cellar below. Candle in hand he explored this, returning with two guns, together with a quantity of powder and ball, and information that there remained a half-keg of the explosive hidden below. ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... remarked Tom judicially, though his voice was still husky. "Now, while I don't know everything, I believe there always has to be an explosive in order to bring about an explosion. ...
— The Grammar School Boys in Summer Athletics • H. Irving Hancock
... back into its holster and took the keys. In a moment he had unlocked the padlock and swung open the iron door, exposing case after case of high explosive within ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts
... rocks explosive rend their tomb; Volcanos, laboring many a nation's doom, Wild o'er the regions pour their floods of fire; The shores heave backward, and the seas retire. There lava waits my late reluctant call, To roar aloft and shake ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... in an explosive gasp. "What a washout!" he exclaimed, and again he thought only of this as a weapon to be used for his own ends. "Can we use that on their fleets?" he asked. "Why, man—they will never conquer the earth; they will never even ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... most affectionate and devoted of friends in my trouble, we returned to Canterbury: I mean my aunt, Agnes, and I. We proceeded by appointment straight to Mr. Micawber's house; where, and at Mr. Wickfield's, my friend had been labouring ever since our explosive meeting. When poor Mrs. Micawber saw me come in, in my black clothes, she was sensibly affected. There was a great deal of good in Mrs. Micawber's heart, which had not been dunned out of it in all those ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... the morning the explosive energy of the mighty mass culminated. The whole cone burst open with a tremendous earthquake shock, from the heart of the recently silent mountain came a deafening roar, and red-hot rocks, like the balls from nature's mighty artillery, were ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... the state isn't the same thing as robbing an individual," cried the explosive, driven into ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... are two steel rails to fill grooves in the rocket. These guide the rocket much as rifling in a gun barrel guides a bullet. Prof. Goddard, when teaching at Princeton in 1912, evolved the idea of shooting a rocket to the moon by means of successive charges of explosive much as the new German rocket motor racers are powered. In this most recent experiment he used a ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... counteract the system extensively adopted, and now under the consideration of the National Assembly, of arming all batteries with projectiles, whereby to burn or blow up our ships of war—a fate which even the precaution of keeping out of range could not avert, by reason of the incendiary and explosive missiles whereby 'les petits bailments a vapeur pouront attaquer les plus gros vaisseaux.' It is impossible to retaliate by using similar weapons. Forts and batteries are incombustible. Recourse must therefore be had to other ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... likely—scuttling for shelter. Occasionally the Austrians would vary their rain of heavy projectiles with a sort of shell that went bang and released a fleecy cloud of smoke overhead and then dropped a parcel of high explosive that burst on the ground. It was curious to think that the guns from which these shells came were cunningly hidden away in nooks and glens on the other side of that distant range of hills, that the men serving the guns had little if any idea what they were firing at, and that the bombardment ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... life—incredible as the thing appeared! I couldn't let him go on to make himself a worry and a nuisance, drive her out from a town in which she wished to be (for whatever reason) and perhaps start some explosive scandal. And that girl Rose seemed to fear something graver even than a scandal. But if I were to explain the matter fully to H. he would simply rejoice in his heart. Nothing would please him more than to have Dona Rita ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... but I fear that the complaints were not all on one side. He was, I suppose, one of those very able men who have the unfortunate quality of converting any combination into which they enter into an explosive compound. He died at ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... conversion of these products into the structureless homogeneous solid or semi-solid form has the effect of controlling their combustion. The use of nitroglycerin as an agent for this purpose gives the curious result of the admixture of two high or blasting explosives to produce a new explosive capable of extended use for military purposes. The leading representatives of this class of propulsive explosives, or 'smokeless powders' are ballistite and cordite, the technology of which will be found fully discussed in special manuals of the subject. Since the contribution of these inventions ...
— Researches on Cellulose - 1895-1900 • C. F. Cross
... of course prepared for any amount of explosive gas you may shower down upon their uncombed crowns, as the cool and perfectly-at-home manner they descend your steps to mount those of your next-door neighbor plainly indicates. The ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... your interrogative eye—they pause, by a happy instinct, directly under my window, and dispute their point or tell their story or make their confidence. One scarce is sure which it may be; everything has such an explosive promptness, such a redundancy of inflection and action. But everything for that matter takes on such dramatic life as our lame colloquies never know—so that almost any uttered communications here ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... depression he saw himself through all the coming years being gradually broken, crushed under a weight of Barthops—father-in-law, wife and children—moulded into a thin semblance of a Marquis of Ipswich, a bastard Marquis. No one but himself knew the weakness of his character—explosive, audacious in alarums or excursions, but without the something, call it strength or hardness or stupidity, which enables the man or woman possessing it to resist constant domestic pressure—the unconscious pressure of radically opposed character. The ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... suffer a sensation of cruel restraint from what she called our English reserve; though we thought we were very cordial with her: but we did not slap her on the shoulder, and if we consented to kiss her cheek, it was done quietly, and without any explosive smack. These omissions oppressed and depressed her considerably; still, on the whole, we got on very well. Accustomed to instruct foreign girls, who hardly ever will think and study for themselves— who have no idea of grappling ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... red-blooded, jubilant nature like mine was rather stifling after a while. I was fond of a good story and was full of Irish folklore and fairy stories, and I noticed my brethren did not relish my outbursts of laughter. It was explosive, spontaneous and hearty, but not contagious among them. Their faces assumed a rather pained expression, a kind of notice of emotion that a sense of humour and religious beliefs occupied different compartments in the human mind. It was intimated to me that such ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... million copies have been printed and the presses can't keep up with the demands. This book is storing powder in the souls of the masses who don't know how to think, because they've never been trained to think. This explosive emotion is the preparation for fanaticism. We only wait the coming of the fanatic—the madman who may lift a torch and hurl it into this magazine. The South is asleep. And when we don't sleep, we dance. There's no use ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... acid, i.e. choke-damp, alone is given off. For in the wood-coal a great deal of the hydrogen still remains. In mines of true coal, not only is choke-damp given off, but that more terrible pest of the miners, fire-damp, or explosive carburetted hydrogen and olefiant gases. Now the occurrence of that fire-damp in mines proves that changes are still going on in the coal: that it is getting rid of its hydrogen, and so progressing toward the state of anthracite or culm—stone-coal ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... preparation as it was when taken in an attack. The wire entanglements were miles in depth, and the great trees by the roadside were mined. This was done by cutting a groove three or four inches broad and of an equal depth and filling it with packages of explosive. I suppose the purpose was to block the road in case of retreat. Only a few of the mines had ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... of the ground-ice, on whose foot the Vega had run up, had been hewn away with axes and ice-hatchets. Some attempts were made to blast the ice with gunpowder, but they were unsuccessful. For this purpose dynamite is much more efficacious, and this explosive ought therefore always to form part of the equipment in voyages in which belts of ice have ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... only, and the Liverpool and Manchester as a merchandise line. Passengers were not taken into account as a source of revenue, for at the time of their projection, it was not believed that people would trust themselves to be drawn upon a railway by an "explosive machine," as the locomotive was described to be. Indeed, a writer of eminence declared that he would as soon think of being fired off on a ricochet rocket, as travel on a railway at twice the speed of the old stagecoaches. So great was ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... replied. "It is something much more subtle than an explosive bullet—which would really be a rather crude appliance—admirably thought out and thoroughly well executed. We have to deal with a most ingenious and ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... fitfully in the lighter mist. In other directions the common gleam of the sunshine from the waves and their shattered crests was exquisitely beautiful. The complexity of the action was still further illustrated by the fact, that in some cases, as if by the exercise of a local explosive force, the drops were shot radially from a particular centre, forming around it ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... kind of whale gun, firing an explosive bullet?" inquired the commander, as he came down off the bridge and shook hands with Tom. "If it is, I'd like to buy one. We may be rammed again by ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton
... loss through reckless, thoughtless, or unfortunate smokers being the cause of partial or total destruction by fire of buildings, ships, factories, homesteads, crops, stores, and property of many kinds; also loss of life and property by explosions in mines, explosive factories, powder magazines, explosive ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... matched the world over. It's like the regions in Iceland that are full of geysers. I don't know whether it is the inheritance from those people who broke away from the old countries, and who ought to be matched to tremendous circumstances of life, but now and then there comes an amazingly explosive and uncontrollable temperament that goes all to pieces from its own conservation and accumulation of force. By and by you will have all blown up,—you quiet descendants of the Pilgrims and Puritans, and have ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... that they may be regarded as negligible, so, now, I propose to teach them a new lesson. The mines which the Koryu is shipping are not harmless; on the contrary, they are exceedingly formidable affairs, containing charges ranging from one hundred to two hundred pounds of Shimose explosive, and they are arranged to automatically adjust themselves to varying depths of water. The ship which strikes one of them will be done for! Having told you so much, you will readily understand that they are ticklish affairs to handle, particularly when it comes to laying them; ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... can well imagine the joyful surprise which must have been called forth at the sight and exquisite taste of the Doctor's sugar, and the wonder with which they must have regarded the strange ammunition of the Wasungu. It is to be sincerely hoped that they did not hurt themselves with the explosive bullets and rim cartridges through any ignorance of the nature of the deadly contents; in which ease the box and its contents would prove ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... public opinion was ready to run wild upon the subject. The Doctor, excited, horrified, interested, read the account. The two explosions had taken place almost simultaneously, and had evidently been caused by the same kind of infernal machine, whether containing dynamite or some other explosive was not quite certain. As for the police-agent who had been killed, it was known that he had been threatened by some secret society, supposed to have lurking-places in various parts of London, he having a year or two before been mainly instrumental in the breaking up of a Nihilist society in Russia, ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford
... could make a round trip, blowing like porpoises. It was a comical sight. And as some of the boys were always out watching the show, those hippos had no respite during the daylight hours. From a short distance inland the explosive blowing as they came to the surface sounded like the irregular ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... and poured it into the barrel, in happy unconsciousness that in the future ingenious people would contrive not only guns that would open at the breech for a cartridge containing in itself powder, shot, and explosive cap, to be thrust in with one movement, but magazine rifles that could be loaded for many ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... compound turbine, reciprocating engines having proved extravagant in fuel. There were both a high and a low pressure turbine on the same shaft, which also drove the dynamo for the searchlight and the lamp illuminating the compass, and for igniting the explosive mixture. By means of an eccentric, moreover, the shaft worked a pump for compressing the mixture of hot air and petrol before ignition, the air being heated by passing through jackets round the high-pressure turbines. The framework of the planes consisted of hollow ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... filled to the brim. And in many cases apparently the insulation of the tabooed person is recommended as a precaution not merely for his own sake but for the sake of others; for since the virtue of holiness or taboo is, so to say, a powerful explosive which the smallest touch may detonate, it is necessary in the interest of the general safety to keep it within narrow bounds, lest breaking out it should blast, blight, and destroy whatever it comes ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... terebinth, has disappeared from the surrounding plains, to be converted into battering rams, or wrought into immense towers, fired, if possible, by means of well-barbed arrows and javelins, to which were attached sacs and balls of inflammable and explosive substances. These fastening themselves upon every part of the tower could not fail to set fire to them while yet at some distance, and in extinguishing which the water and other means provided for ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... temperament are the numerous and constantly recurring interjections. This trait in the man of the Midi is one that Daudet has brought out humorously in the Tartarin books. It is often difficult in serious situations to take these explosive monosyllables seriously. ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... at one another a moment and then began laughing. Arthur seemed crestfallen, while Uncle John handled his small box as gingerly as if he suspected it contained an explosive. ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... Mr. Farebrother, after an explosive laugh, "you know very well that Lydgate is of a good family in the North. He never heard of ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... impossible. Exhaustion of supplies forbade another try, and saved their lives, for a few days later a violent earthquake shook McKinley to its summit. Later on Mr. Browne identified this earthquake as concurrent with the terrific explosive eruption which blew off the top of Mount Katmai, on ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... you saw on top. It is the collecting end of an electrical system for extracting nitrogen and other elements, from the air. This extraction goes on constantly while we are in the atmosphere and my fuel is an extremely powerful explosive of which nitrates are the base. The supply is replenished continuously, so we have no fear of running short even in ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... a group of alert professional women, housed in a theatre building, and known as the Women's Crisis League. To their office she took her way, determined to enlist for Belgium. Mrs. Bracher was in charge of the office—a woman with a stern chin, and an explosive energy, that ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... completely unstrung. His excellent common sense, however, soon asserted itself, and his sound, practical mind did not leave him long in doubt about what to do. Poison having proved a complete failure, dynamite, or some other form of explosive, was obviously the ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... pronounced with an explosive initial sound, and Ad. F. Bandelier spells it Qq'u[^e]res, ...
— Indian Linguistic Families Of America, North Of Mexico • John Wesley Powell
... all your lard, and to-morrow the Fourth, and the store shut." From all appearances Mrs. Snooks was having something of a struggle to control her irritation at such evidences of short-sightedness. It was clear, however, that her efforts had been crowned with success, when she announced with an explosive sigh, "Well, if you haven't lard or baking-soda, I'll take a cup of granulated sugar, and a ball of darning cotton. Yes, black, I guess, though if you're out of black, 'most ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... expression: "I assure you, Mr. Pinkerton, that there are not many who can say so much"—from which I gathered that my friend had tempered his self-accusations with at least one legitimate boast. From this ghostly counselling, Jim turned to me; and though he never got beyond the explosive utterance of my name and one fierce handgrip, communicated some of his own emotion, like a charge of electricity, to his best man. We stood up to the ceremony at last, in a general and kindly discomposure. Jim was all abroad; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which go to express the numerous and clashing emotions which must necessarily agitate your venerable bosom. You surely mean more than damn. Damn is expressive and forceful, because capable of being enunciated at one explosive effort of the breath, but it is monotonous when too freely employed. To be sure, you might with some justice reply that you had qualified said adjective strongly—but the qualification was trite though blasphemous. And you limited it very nicely—but ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... things in the United States, I do not think a general, or even a very extensive slave insurrection, is possible. The indispensable concert of action cannot be attained. The slaves have no means of rapid communication; nor can incendiary freemen, black or white, supply it. The explosive materials are everywhere in parcels; but there neither are, nor can be supplied, the indispensable ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... he said coolly. "We must fight that. It is dangerous, but the explosive spirit has burned out, or been destroyed; the powder has gone, and we have nothing to fear now but the slow working of our friend or enemy, whichever you ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... an agricultural country; yet she is at the present moment threatened in many parts with an Industrial Revolution, the ultimate effects of which may prove far more subversive than the attempted revolution of 1905. For beneath her soil lie explosive materials more deadly than any dynamite manufactured by intelligentsia. Her mineral wealth, at present almost untouched, is incalculable in quantity and amazing in variety. When her mines are opened up Russia will become, according to the judgment of Dr. Kennard, editor of The Russian ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... built-in, explosive reaction to bacterial and viral toxins, and there hadn't yet been any pathogenic organism discovered to which a tormal could not more or less immediately develop antibody resistance. So that in interstellar ...
— This World Is Taboo • Murray Leinster
... a crescent. Not content with his sign in town, the grocer had a large brass plate on his door, with Appleditch engraved upon it in capitals: it saved them always looking at the numbers. The boy ran on before, and assailed this door with a succession of explosive knocks. ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... as though the three persons standing there had all passed, at a single step, through the explosive phases of wrath to the colder, steadier and deadlier zone of feeling where all their words came level, and ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... the present day, as we shall see in the sequel, but which has never been allowed to develop into an organised political party. Its aims were so moderate that its programme might have been used as a convenient safety-valve for the explosive forces which were steadily accumulating under the surface of Society, but it never found favour in the official world. When some of its leading members ventured to hint in the Press and in loyal addresses to the Emperor that the Government would do well to consult the country on important questions, ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... in digging more of these shallow pits, that reminded one rather gruesomely of graves, and had barely scraped them deep enough to roll into before a hail of small high-explosive shell ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... helpless, guideless[obs3]; in a bad way; reduced to the last extremity, at the last extremity; trembling in the balance; nodding to its fall &c. (destruction) 162. threatening &c. 909; ominous, illomened; alarming &c. (fear) 860; explosive. adventurous &c. (rash) 863, (bold) 861. Phr. incidit in Scyllam qui vult vitare Charybdim[Lat]; nam tua res agitur paries ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... death-dealing metal and explosive were being hurled through the air as if Atlas were hurling stars about. There was something elemental, and superhuman about such colossal force. One felt like a pygmy in a Battle of ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... where they were for a few minutes, listening to the firing. For the first time the note of real hand-to-hand fighting came into the battle din. They could hear the crashing volleys of rifle fire, and the explosive crackling of machine guns coming into play for the first time. That was confirmation enough of their guess that a regular assault on the line of forts ...
— The Belgians to the Front • Colonel James Fiske
... resistance. A revolution does not, perhaps, justify itself; it does not prove that its leaders judged rightly and acted virtuously: but, beyond a doubt, it condemns the previous order which brought it about. What a horrid thing is the explosion! Why, is the obvious answer, did you allow the explosive materials to accumulate, till the first match must fire the train? The greatest blot upon Burke, I need hardly say, is that his passions blinded him in his age, to this, as we ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... noticed it about the same time. I yanked out my automatic (I had a clip of Boland explosive bullets in it) and Tweel, quick as a sleight-of-hand trick, snapped a queer little glass revolver out of his bag. It was much like our weapons, except that the grip was larger to accommodate his four-taloned hand. And we held our weapons ready while we sneaked up along ...
— A Martian Odyssey • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... book he had lately read concerning radio-activity, in which he had been struck by the following passage—"Radio-activity is an explosion of great violence; the energy exerted is millions of times more powerful than the highest explosive substance yet made in our laboratories; one bomb loaded with such energy would be equal to millions of bombs of the same size and energy as used in the trenches. One's mind stands aghast at the thought of what could be possible if such power were used for destructive ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... May 25, the Column of July was a remarkable sight. It had been hung with wreaths of immortelles, and those caught fire from an explosive. Elsewhere, except for burning buildings, there was total darkness. There was no gas in Paris, of course. And here our Englishman goes on to say that so far as his experience went, he saw no petroleuses nor fighting women, nor did he believe ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... some careless mistake had no doubt been made. It is not known how or why a communication had been established between the reservoir which contained the oxygen and that which enclosed the hydrogen. An explosive mixture had resulted from the union of these two gases, to which fire had ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... the eyes of Chet Bullard, master-pilot of the world, was answer enough. But Chet amplified it with explosive words. ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... upon us, out of the empty air of that smoke-laden room, a force which I can only compare to the pushing, driving power of a great wind pent up within a narrow space. It was almost explosive in its effect, and it seemed to operate upon all parts of my body equally. It fell upon us with a rushing noise that filled my ears and made me think for a moment the very walls and roof of the building had been torn asunder. Under its first blow we staggered ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... grand S.O.S. rocket and Very light display—ten francs. While for a further twenty francs the tourist will be allowed to pick up as many souvenirs in the way of rolls of barbed wire, dud bombs and blind crumps as he can stagger away with. By this means the country will be cleared of its explosive matter and I shall be able to spend my declining years in Park Lane, or, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... recommended, but the best one lies in the use of bisulphide of carbon. This is very effective, but it has come into such common use that a word of caution should be given as to its handling. It is very volatile and, when near flame, powerfully explosive, and should be handled with great care. Pour it into the runways of the ants, and then throw over these a mat. The fumes will speedily kill all the ants. A better way, however, is to drive a stick into the ground in several places where the colony ...
— Making a Lawn • Luke Joseph Doogue
... and steel which they have learned to temper to a hardness far exceeding that of the steel with which we are familiar. The weight of these rifles is comparatively little, and with the small caliber, explosive, radium projectiles which they use, and the great length of the barrel, they are deadly in the extreme and at ranges which would be unthinkable on Earth. The theoretic effective radius of this rifle is three ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... entrusted it to the care of the chaplain of the Dutch embassy, who happened to be a native of Vaud. In passing the barrier, the packet fell into the hands of the officials. They tore it open and examined it, happily unconscious that they were handling the most explosive kind of gunpowder that they had ever meddled with. It was not until the chaplain claimed it in the name of ambassadorial privilege, that the manuscript was allowed to go on its way to the press.[79] Rousseau repeats a hundred times, not only in the Confessions, but also in letters ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... the cavern, he gazed at the two miners, almost as if doubting their words, decided as they were. In fact, carburetted hydrogen is not completely scentless, and the engineer, whose sense of smell was very keen, was astonished that it had not revealed the presence of the explosive gas. At any rate, if the gas had mingled at all with the surrounding air, it could only be in a very small stream. There was no danger of an explosion, and they might without fear open the safety lamp to try the experiment, just as the old miner had ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... a short, explosive laugh, fixed a pair of eyeglasses on the bridge of her nose, and looked at Lesley as if she ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... communing with the past in a lofty room with distempered walls and busts round them. That he should be forced to act, to decide, to be artful, to wrangle with maids, to make ends meet, to squeeze his long frame and explosive disposition into a Creeper Cottage where only an ill-fitting door separated him from the noise and fumes of the kitchen, was surely a cruel trick of Fate, and not less cruel because he had brought it on himself. That ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... warping of Scripture, a little skilful use of that time-honoured phrase, attributed to Cardinal Baronius, that the Bible is given to teach us, not how the heavens go, but how men go to heaven, and a free use of explosive rhetoric against the ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... in normal or abnormal channels was perhaps attached by the mind to some group of objects. It was completely suppressed but it left an abnormal tension in the central system. If now a chance experience touches on this group of ideas, there results an explosive reaction; and movements, convulsions, spasms, obsessions, and fears set in which get their particular character not through the secondary intrusion but from the primary desire. To discharge that intrusion leads therefore only to the elimination of those symptoms which resulted ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... secure me station in the outside world." She began to pace the great apartment, oblivious of her surroundings, conscious only of a surging rebellion against even the small necessity of biding her time. The day's happenings on the schooner had shown her clearly the explosive condition of her crew; she had no mistaken ideas that for her to load up the schooner and sail away was simple. Further, she detected in recent events a growing unrest among the band, the cause of which she had but begun to fathom. Even now, through the tapestry ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... not keep within doors in this explosive state, and she went downstairs, and out upon the piazza. Mr. Maynard was there, smoking, with his boots on top of the veranda-rail, and his person thrown back in his chair at the angle requisite to accomplish this elevation of the feet. He took them down, as he saw ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Duchess of Snowdon, and we are not precisely congenial; besides, I had much to do in the laboratory. I'm working for that new explosive of which I told you. There's fame and fortune in it, and I'm on the way. I feel it coming"—his eyes sparkled a little. "I made it right with the servants; so don't ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... diligently strove to do, when once admitted to speech again;—Grumkow steadily declining to meddle, and only Queen Sophie, as we can fancy, auguring joyfully of it. Seckendorf, admitted to speech the third day after that explosive Session, snuffles his softest, his cunningest;—continues to ride diligently, the concluding portion (such it proved) of his 25,000 miles with the Prussian Majesty up and down through winter and spring; but makes not the least progress, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... more powerful explosives. Now, what do these explosives represent if not a storing-up of the solar energy, the degradation of which energy is thus provisionally suspended on some of the points where it was being poured forth? The usable energy which the explosive conceals will be expended, of course, at the moment of the explosion; but it would have been expended sooner if an organism had not happened to be there to arrest its dissipation, in order to retain it and save it up. As we see it to-day, ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... very much in their old way. To the great relief of Adele there was no explosive village demonstration of the news which had come home so cruelly to herself. The Doctor had given an admonition to the young minister, and the old Squire had told him, in a pointed and confidential way, that he had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... no purpose: doubly suspicious as members of a proscribed class, and as heads of the army, it is against them that public distrust excites the most frequent explosions, and so much the more as the instrument they handle is singularly explosive. Recruited by volunteer enlistment "amongst a passionate, turbulent, and somewhat debauched people," the army is composed of "all that are most fiery, most turbulent, and most debauched in the nation."[3336] Add to these the sweepings of the alms-houses, and you find a good many blackguards in uniform! ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... in a dugout at Vieville-en-Haye. Carefully hidden in a forest immediately south of this village were then located three of our large guns. The boys had proudly named them, "President's Answer," "Theda Bara" and "Miss McCarthy." They were throwing high explosive shells along the Metz highway. The enemy was frantically replying with eight-inch Howitzers from points some six kilometers north, dropping shells at two-minute intervals into Vieville-en-Haye ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy
... proved a curse to the island. The natives, despite my friend's accident, bought every cartridge from him, singly or in lots, and they then began to enjoy themselves. Every hour of the day for many weeks afterwards the sullen thud of the explosive could be heard from all parts of the lagoon, followed by applauding shouts. Vast numbers of fish were blown to pieces, for no native would ever think of dividing a cartridge into half a dozen portions and using only one at a time; the entire 6-oz. cartridge was used, ...
— "Five-Head" Creek; and Fish Drugging In The Pacific - 1901 • Louis Becke
... should have to do with. The truth is that if the arrow leaves the point A to fall down at the point B, its movement AB is as simple, as indecomposable, in so far as it is movement, as the tension of the bow that shoots it. As the shrapnel, bursting before it falls to the ground, covers the explosive zone with an indivisible danger, so the arrow which goes from A to B displays with a single stroke, although over a certain extent of duration, its indivisible mobility. Suppose an elastic stretched ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... dog, squirming and rubbing against the newcomer's legs, opened his mouth and barked. It was an explosive bark, brief ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... the matter of it than had been done by any one before I dug my hole. Our volcanoes, it is now proved, are situated over the market-places of various provincial towns in Skitzland. When a revolution happens, the rebels are shot up—discharged from mortars by means of an explosive material evidently far more powerful than our gun-powder or gun-cotton; and they are pulverized by the friction in grinding their way through the earth. How simple and easy truth appears, when we have ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... trees, special contrivances would seem to have been provided by nature for insuring their dispersion, as well as migration. With a small number of plants, for instance, the seeds are discharged for short distances by the explosive force of their seed-vessels, when properly matured; an equally small number have certain membranous contrivances, called "wings," by which they may be borne still greater distances; others, again, are provided with light feathery tufts, to which the seed is attached, and these may ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... non-explosive one, I hope," added Mr. Damon dryly. "Bless my shoe buttons, Tom, but if my wife knew what danger I'd been in she'd never let me come over to ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Scout - or, Uncle Sam's Mastery of the Sky • Victor Appleton
... bang!—with the deep note of an explosion. A third, a fourth shot. We went into the street. There the Zeppelin was revealed by a searchlight—sailing along. I think it had probably dropped its bombs; but the aircraft guns were cracking away at it. Some of them shot explosive projectiles to find the range. Now and then one such explosive would almost reach the Zeppelin, but it was too high for them and it sailed away, the air guns doing their ineffectual best. I couldn't see whether airplanes were trying to shoot it or not. The searchlight revealed the Zeppelin ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... exceedingly simple. The crude oil is placed in an iron retort connected with a coil of pipe in a vessel of cold water. Heat is then applied to the retort, when the process of distillation commences. The first product is a light-colored, volatile substance, sometimes called naphtha, that is very explosive. This substance is used in the place of spirits of turpentine in the preparation of paints and varnishes, and, after further treatment, in removing paints and grease from clothing. The next product from the retort is the refined fluid for illumination. This is of a yellow color, with ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... sweet, and penetrating without any loudness or mark of effort. His enunciation was beautifully clear, but he often hesitated as if waiting for the right word to present itself. His manner was very quiet, his smile was pleasant, but he did not like explosive laughter any better than Hawthorne did. None who met him can fail to recall that serene and kindly presence, in which there was mingled a certain spiritual remoteness with the most benignant human welcome to all who were privileged to ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... alas, was not so ample as in the far-off days when his sturdy shoulders bore the modest single-bar, instead of the proud spread eagle of the present. Even had it been, the explosive energy of his speech would have speedily exhausted it. Compelled to stop to pump in a fresh supply, the Colonel of the regiment took advantage of the pause to whisper ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... break," he commented. "You can see that it was an explosive that was used—an explosive well and properly tamped down with wet clay. Without tamping, the rails would ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... Harris, "a building or a ship were perfectly metallic in all its parts, no damage could possibly arise to it when struck by lightning, since the explosive action would vanish the instant the electrical agency entered the metal. In applying lightning-conductors, therefore, as a means of guarding against the destructive effects of lightning, our object should be to carry out this ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... these conclusions to the theory of the ignition of an explosive gas-mixture, and in particular to the combustion of "knallgas" (a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen) to water-vapour. At ordinary temperatures knallgas undergoes practically no change, and it might be supposed that the two gases, oxygen and hydrogen, have no affinity for each other. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... houses, and at certain crossroads which had not been blown up in the usual manner, the Boche had left mines, timed to go off at any time up to twenty-eight days. One could never be sure that the ground underneath one's feet would not blow up at any moment. These mines were small boxes of high explosive, inside of which was a little metal tube with trigger and detonator attached. Inside the tube was a powerful acid, which, when it had eaten its way through, set free the trigger and exploded the charge. The length of time it took for ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... instructions, I have examined the explosive machine sent to this arsenal yesterday. It is a small miniature case containing twelve copper cartridges, such as are used in a Smith & Wesson pocket pistol, a bundle of sensitive friction matches, a strip of sand-paper, and some fulminating powder. The cartridges ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... circumstances under which men get wounded is unbounded. Multitudes of those bowled over have never seen a German. It may be far back in the rear that a 'Jack Johnson' or 'Black Maria' (for we have many names for the German high explosive) has knocked a man out. It is all over in a moment; in the quiet of the night, or amid the bustle of the day the deadly shriek of an approaching shell falls upon the man's ear, and before he can seek for cover—even supposing there is any to hand—the roar of the explosion will probably ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester
... "I don't mean simply intensity of sensation. I said intensity of perception. You may perceive harmony, proportion, rhythm, intensely. They are things faint and slight in themselves, as physical facts, but they are like the detonator of a bomb: they let loose the explosive. There's the internal factor as well as the external.... I don't know if I express myself clearly. I mean that the point is that vividness of perception is the essential factor of beauty; but, of course, vividness may be ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... in order to keep him quiet, to keep up a barrage. Our ammunition had run down to a point where we had only fourteen shells left, and we received orders to hold two high explosive shells, one for the muzzle and another for the breech of the gun, to put it out of business in case ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... commanding United States squadron in Mobile Bay, and had come to meet me. A bountiful luncheon was spread, of which we partook, with joyous poppings of champagne corks for accompaniment, the first agreeable explosive sounds I had heard for years. The air of "Hail Columbia," which the band in attendance struck up, was instantly changed by Canby's order to that of "Dixie"; but I insisted on the first, and expressed a hope that Columbia would be again a happy land, ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... has become a sensation. Every Northern Congressman has read it. A half million copies have been printed and the presses can't keep up with the demands. This book is storing powder in the souls of the masses who don't know how to think, because they've never been trained to think. This explosive emotion is the preparation for fanaticism. We only wait the coming of the fanatic—the madman who may lift a torch and hurl it into this magazine. The South is asleep. And when we don't sleep, we dance. There's no use fooling ourselves. We're dancing ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... be shelled or trench-mortared at intervals. In earlier days it might be totally blown up by a mine, or in later times bombed or machine-gunned from the air. For 30 to 40 high explosive shells to fall all round a post was quite common. Sometimes a 'dud' would fall inside it, or a huge 'Minnie,' which burst in the wire, cover the occupants with earth and splinters. The crash of these huge trench-mortar bombs was satanic; and there was always a next one to be waited for. Sometimes ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... previous one stirred Florence, who had been sitting quietly, according to request, and "resting", but not resting her curiosity. "Who's disappointed in love, papa?" she inquired with an explosive eagerness that slightly startled her preoccupied parents. "What is all this about Aunt Julia, and grandpa goin' to live alone, and people committing suicide and prohibition and everything? What ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... his case, as in others which are more or less parallel, is the acquiring of immunity to fatigue, both muscular and central. It is not claimed that the sparing diet confers great strength for momentary efforts—'explosive strength,' as the term goes—but that moderate muscular contractions may be repeated many times with far less discomfort than before. The inference appears to be that the subject who eats more than ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... republic's East India Company. The English in those regions were not slow to avail themselves of the advantage. The Portuguese of Tydor received from neutral sympathy a copious supply of powder and of pamphlets. The one explosive material enabled them to make a more effective defence of their citadel against the Dutch fleet; the other revealed to the Portuguese and their Mussulman allies that "the Netherlanders could not exist ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... slow and listened. Through the air came the sharp "woop-wing" of shrapnel bursting towards you, the most devilish sound of all. Some prefer the shriek of shrapnel to the dolorous wail and deep thunderous crash of high explosive. But nothing frightens me so ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... the last thing she ever saw; for Bones, on the bridge of the Zaire, squinted along the sights of his Express and pressed the trigger. Struck in the head by an explosive bullet, the Green One went out in a ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... into his line of fire, Wilson," the Major said; "he is explosive this morning, and has been giving it to us all round. However, nobody minds what the Doctor says; his bark is very bad, but he has no bite. Wait till you are down with the fever, and you will find him devote himself to you as if he were ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty
... attractive offer. There's a lot of paperwork to such a sale, and it's all handled by the company. While waiting, the smart prospector sits on his claim and makes sure nobody chips off a part of it for himself, a stunt that still happens now and again. It doesn't take too much concentrated explosive to make two rocks out of one rock, and a man's claim is only the rock with ...
— The Risk Profession • Donald Edwin Westlake
... him again; she might never have really loved him at all; but he would content himself with a benevolent toleration. Like her, he was afraid of love. The word meant too much or too little, he was not sure which. It was too explosive. Its dynamic force was at too high a pressure for the calm routine of married life. If Lois could find a substitute for love, he was willing to accept it, giving her his own substitute in return. All he asked was the privilege of seeing her, of being with ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... Guards, who, without any preliminary warning or any effort at persuasion, fired into the crowd. Among the first victims was a member of the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Peasants' Delegates, the Siberian peasant Logvinov, part of whose head was shot away by an explosive bullet. Another victim was the militant Socialist-Revolutionist Gorbatchevskaia. Several students and a number of workmen were also killed. Similar massacres occurred at the same time in other parts of the city. Other processions wending their way toward the meeting-place ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... a lamp made like this, so that if he should be in the presence of the explosive gas, "fire damp", it would not explode because of the wire ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... obvious why the streets should be so noisy. All the bells and gongs and danger-signals, one would think, would be equally effectual if they were not so loud, but now the competition of sounds is so great that any warning must almost be explosive in its violence to be audible at all. It is no wonder that we find in this city so many people suffering from nerves; it is quite surprising the number of men I have met who dare not drink coffee, men who have ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... relented toward her somewhat after her death. But even while her old cronies at Mrs. Smiley's millinery store said that it was a terrible thing, they added that nothing but a powerful explosive COULD have killed Mrs. Archie, and that it was only right the doctor should ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... going on. We learned later that when Grim Hagen's men winged their way in from the sea, his army had already retaken the Tower. Ato and his soldiers were scattered. Half of them were dead. So, after scattering their explosive eggs across the city, and killing the very old and the very young, Grim Hagen and his men took refuge in the Tower and prepared to withstand our siege. They had learned much from their first defeat, and this ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... metallic gauze so rapidly conducts away the heat, that the temperature of the gas beneath the gauze is unable to arrive at the point of ignition. In the safety-lamp the little oil-lamp is placed in a circular funnel of fine gauze, which prevents the flame from passing through it to any explosive gas that may be floating about outside, but at the same time allows the rays of light to pass through readily. Sir Humphrey Davy, in introducing his lamp, cautioned the miners against exposing it to a rapid current ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... substance or fluid with which he, as a vial, is filled to the brim. And in many cases apparently the insulation of the tabooed person is recommended as a precaution not merely for his own sake but for the sake of others; for since the virtue of holiness or taboo is, so to say, a powerful explosive which the smallest touch may detonate, it is necessary in the interest of the general safety to keep it within narrow bounds, lest breaking out it should blast, blight, and destroy whatever ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... their stay together. It halted, it ran on, it stopped again to consider, but always it was of Dick and incidentally of himself who didn't matter so much, but who had to be in it all. Were they at one in this epidemic of world sickness? As the great explosive forces of destruction and decay seemed to have released actual germs to attack the physical well-being of races, had the terrible crashes of spiritual destinies unsettled the very air of life, poisoned it, drugged it with madness and despair? Was there a universal disease of the mind, following ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... shattered by our artillery preparation as it was when taken in an attack. The wire entanglements were miles in depth, and the great trees by the roadside were mined. This was done by cutting a groove three or four inches broad and of an equal depth and filling it with packages of explosive. I suppose the purpose was to block the road in case of retreat. Only a few of the mines had been ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... time to time by fierce irregular wars called strikes. He had never known anything of a real self-governing commonwealth, and such progress as he and his kind had made was never the result of their citizenship, of their powers as voters, but grew out of the explosive and ragged upheavals, of their ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... dynamite all the block beyond Van Ness Avenue. It could never jump across a strip so broad.' 'But they've forbidden any more dynamiting,' said Anderson. 'Never mind; I'd take the chance myself if we could get any explosive,' replied Lane. 'Well, there's a launch full of dynamite from Contra Costa County lying right now at Meigs's Wharf,' said Anderson. Just then Mr. and Mrs. Tom Magee arrived, driving an automobile on the wheel rims. Lane despatched them to Meigs's ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... word every man threw his whole strength into the pull—all singing it in chorus, with a quick, explosive sound. And so, jump by jump, the sheet was ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... clanged, and the powerful machine puffed out on its flaring way through the night. Faster and faster came the big explosive breaths, until they blended in a long steady roar, and the train was sweeping northward at forty miles an hour. The clouds had broken; the night had grown colder; the gibbous moon gleamed over the vast and solitary landscape. It was a different thing to Hemenway, riding ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... it," replied the captain. "The length of their stay in the submarine will depend on the length of the fuse attached to the time explosive in the hold." ...
— The Boy Volunteers with the Submarine Fleet • Kenneth Ward
... The wave does not merely batter the face of the cliff. Like a skillful quarryman it inserts wedges in all natural fissures, such as joints, and uses explosive forces. As a wave flaps against a crevice it compresses the air within with the sudden stroke; as it falls back the air as suddenly expands. On lighthouses heavily barred doors have been burst outward by the explosive force of the air within, as it was released from pressure when a partial vacuum ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... owing to the breeze dying down at the last moment. On December 21, however, as the wind was favourable, a gas attack took place on a front of about a mile. It was on this day that Captain Cameron, of No. 1 Company, was wounded in the arm by a piece of high-explosive while entering the ...
— The 23rd (Service) Battalion Royal Fusiliers (First Sportsman's) - A Record of its Services in the Great War, 1914-1919 • Fred W. Ward
... and a number of other similar cases, I should like to suggest, from a descriptive point of view, that the epileptiform seizure is of the nature of an orgasm. An orgasm is a sudden, explosive, discharge of nervous energy, raised to the breaking point of nervous tension. I should like to generalize the idea of orgasm. Ordinarily, of course, it is confined to the sexual sphere. In the last case I reported it ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... loaves of bread, the villagers stood around admiring him while he swaggered about, the little boys gazed up at his face with humble homage, and the landlord brought out foaming mugs of beer and conversed proudly with him while he drank. Then he mounted his lofty box, swung his explosive whip, and away he went again, like a storm. I had not seen anything like this before since I was a boy, and the stage used to flourish the village with the dust flying ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... behind them there arose all at once a chorus of explosive gruntings, mixed with a huge crashing of the canes. Glancing over their shoulders, they saw a great rust-red animal, about the size of a rhinoceros, which burst forth from the canes and stood staring after them. Its hideous head was larger than that of any rhinoceros they had ever ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... suddenly gasped, and the explosive tensity of that wheezing cry caused her to look up, startled. He swayed toward her as she did so, swept by some power not his own. There was something leonine in his movement, something leonine in his snarl as he fell on her. He caught her body in his great arms and shook it. He moved without ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... sulphur, and charcoal, mixed together and powdered; its explosive force when fired, is owing to the instantaneous and abundant liberation of gaseous matter by the intense heat resulting from the action of the combustibles upon the saltpetre. It is not known by whom it was first applied to the purposes of war, but it is certain that it was used early in the ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... word, explosive, intensive, had strained the limits of her vituperation. If that would not stir these men, what could? Tommy's neck ran red again, but he kept his tongue between his teeth. Dick's eyes mellowed. He had the advantage over Tommy, ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... "black gunpowder. Our absintheur was a bomb- maker, an expert perhaps. Let me see. I imagine he was making an explosive bomb, ingeniously contrived of five glass tubes. The centre one, I venture, contained sulphuric acid and chlorate of potash separated by a close-packed wad of cotton wool. Then the two tubes on each side probably contained the powder, ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... a voice, speaking very low, and another voice answered it. At that Georgie's heart sank, for this proved that there must be at least two burglars, and the odds against him were desperate. After that came a low, cruel laugh, the unmistakable sound of the rattle of knives and forks, and the explosive uncorking of a bottle. At that his heart sank even lower yet, for he had read that cool habitual burglars always had supper before they got to work, and therefore he was about to deal with a gang of professionals. Also that explosive uncorking clearly indicated ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... half an hour later than usual. But here her aunt's attention was diverted from this tender subject by Totty, who, perceiving at length that the arrival of her cousins was not likely to bring anything satisfactory to her in particular, began to cry, "Munny, munny," in an explosive manner. ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... basement of the upper palace to the palace in the internal world. By means of machines worked by electricity we have facilities for excavating earth; and where rocks or hard substances intervene we can remove large masses by the application of explosive electricities. These paths ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... left the table they were all three in that excruciating state of rawness of the nerves, in which a man has the sensation that his brain is a violent explosive which a single jarring sound or word must ignite and blow to atoms, like ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... became self-possessed, even animated; and, Howat thought, preoccupied. She was expectant, with a slightly impatient air, as if she were looking beyond his shoulder. The cause occurred to him in a flash that ignited his anger like a ready-charged explosive. She was waiting, desiring, the return of her husband. Felix Winscombe, she thought, would mean—escape. He used the word deliberately, realizing that that now expressed her attitude toward the Province, toward ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... terror suspended in his two brothers, seemed to be restored to Martin by the energy of his courage. He raised himself on the cart, bent his brows, and, clenching his fist, shook it at the spectre with a ghastly look of hate and defiance. The goblin vanished with his usual tremendous and explosive laugh, and left Waldeck exhausted with this ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... more, because his head received a terrific concussion, accompanied by an explosive sound. Freya had swung her round, strong arm with such force that the impact of her open palm on his flat cheek turned him half round. Uttering a faint, hoarse yell, the lieutenant clapped both his hands to the left side of ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... daintily out of the gasolene and began scraping her slippers, side and bottom, on the running-board of the automobile. The jelly-bean contained himself no longer. He bent double with explosive laughter and after a second she ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Well, let's strike a match and light up: then perhaps we may. That's one good thing about these hollows,—there is no explosive gas, like there is in a coal mine. There, take this and hold it out before you," he continued, as he closed and passed the lanthorn. "Lift it up! Now ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... I take back nothing of what is written in these papers concerning the Gaelic revival. In a country governed against the will of its people, forces that, under normal and healthy conditions, would be purely beneficent, may easily grow explosive and disruptive. Yet I have not changed my mind on a critical question which led me to sever my connection with the work of the Gaelic League. When that body decided to rely on compulsion rather than persuasion, it took the ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... an explosive cap, to which five or six wires are attached and staked down on the ground. Any one stumbling over one of these wires explodes the bomb and throws a charge of broken iron to a distance of fifty feet. How the Spaniards are going ...
— Cuba in War Time • Richard Harding Davis
... we experiment with it and see what it would do, so Perry built a fire, after placing the powder at a safe distance, and then touched a glow-ing ember to a minute particle of the deadly explosive. It extinguished ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... exhausted. Its movements become irregular, it stops and throws itself about so that the water spurts up round it. Then a boat rows up, and a long spear is thrust in three feet deep towards the animal's heart, and perhaps an explosive bullet is fired. If the lungs are pierced the whale sends up jets of blood from its nostrils—"hoisting the red flag," in the language of whalers. Its time is come; it gives up the struggle, and its death tremors show that another of ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... warlike purposes? I am sick at heart when I hear the first question put in these days to each inventor: 'Can you enable us to kill more of our fellowmen than we can kill with existing appliances?' Is it a new engine, a new amalgam of metals, a new explosive, a new field of electrical energy, one hears the same vulture's cry— 'How many, how far, how safely can we slay?' I regard this lust for destruction as contemptible. It is a strange and ignominious feature ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... by me a violent little fragment of undelivered lecture, which puts this, perhaps, still more clearly. Your idle people (it says), as they are now, are not merely waste coal-beds. They are explosive coal-beds, which you pay a high annual rent for. You are keeping all these idle persons, remember, at far greater cost than if they were busy. Do you think a vicious person eats less than an honest one? or that it is cheaper to keep a bad man drunk, than a good man sober? There ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... off in one large room across the back of the house and two in front. As we opened the door to the larger room, we could only gaze about in surprise. This was the rendezvous, the arsenal, literary, explosive and toxicological of the "Group." Ranged on a table were all the materials for bomb-making, while in a cabinet I fancied there were poisons enough ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... too near. Lady Agnes wore much of the time the countenance she might have shown at the theatre during a play in which pistols were fired; and indeed the manner of the young reciter had become more spasmodic and more explosive. It appeared, however, that the company in general thought her very clever and successful; which showed, to Sherringham's sense, how little they understood the matter. Poor Biddy was immensely struck; she grew flushed and absorbed in proportion as Miriam, at her best moments, became pale and ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... A religious community may hold together, like a political party, with only a vague tacit understanding. When a body is once formed, it has an outward cohesion, which is quite enough for maintaining it in the absence of explosive materials. The established Churches could retain their historical continuity under any modification of the articles. By the present system, they have been habituated to take their creed as their legal definition; for that they could substitute their history ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... Correspondence Editor' with a gentleman who wishes to learn 'How to manufacture dynamite' seems to me artificial; as though the idea of saying a few words in season against explosive compounds had occurred to him, without any particular opportunity having really offered itself for ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... buck Inter-Solar. We'll make you an offer—" That was Kallee's contribution, made probably because his commanding officer couldn't find words explosive enough. ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... looking thoughtfully into his coffee cup, as he sat opposite his wife, Martha, at the breakfast-table, "is supposed to change a man radically. The influence of a good and lovely woman can hardly be overestimated. But the question is, can the temper of a red-headed explosive ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
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