"Breast-high" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the longer you follow it, until at last it becomes impossible to puzzle it out. I will, therefore, submit to circumstances, and tell you the whole story, though somewhat tedious, in hopes that I can conclude with such a trail as you will open upon breast-high. ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... across after some hostiles that had been skirmishing with his troop. The hostiles had fallen back after some hot shooting, and had dispersed among the brush and tepees on the farther shore, picking up their dead, as Indians do. It was interesting work, this splashing breast-high through a river into a concealed hornets'-nest, and the lieutenant thought a little on his unfinished plans and duties in life; he noted one dead Indian left on the shore, and went steadfastly in among the half-seen tepees, rummaging and beating in the thick brush to be ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... by a courier. The slight eminence, all clad with scrub-oak, all carpeted with wild flowers, was reached. The horsemen turned and looked eastward, the breast-high scrub, the few tender-foliaged young trees sheltering them from view. They looked eastward, and in the distance they saw Dowdall's Tavern. But it was not Dowdall's Tavern that was the strangest thing. The strangest thing was nearer than Dowdall's; it was at ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... looked at Patrasche, paused, wondered, turned aside, then kneeled down in the rank grass and weeds of the ditch, and surveyed the dog with kindly eyes of pity. There was with him a little rosy, fair-haired, dark-eyed child of a few years old, who pattered in amidst the bushes, that were for him breast-high, and stood gazing with a pretty seriousness upon ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... from this innocent pastime, Mark became aware that he was watched and found himself face to face with the object of his search. Robert Redmayne stood separated from him by a distance of thirty yards behind the boughs of a breast-high shrub. He stood bare-headed, peering over the thicket, and the sun shone upon his fiery red scalp and tawny mustache. There could be no mistaking the man, and Brendon, rejoicing that daylight would now enable ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... of boxes was about breast-high. Unable to use his hands, Martin leaned over and explored with his chin. The fourth box rewarded him. He broke his skin upon a bared nail, and, craning further, rubbed his jawbone over the cold, smooth, ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... were then to be taken up on the rail, which kept all hands on the forecastle for an hour, though every now and then the seas broke over it, washing the rigging off to leeward, filling the lee scuppers breast-high, and washing chock aft ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... exhausted foe by the neck, and notwithstanding his struggles, and the violent flapping of his long unwounded wing, began to draw him towards the shore. We hurried to meet and help him. Jezebel was the first that dashed breast-high into the water; and seizing a pinion in her strong jaws, she soon drew both the swan and Fig, who would have died rather than let go, through the yielding ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... at all is humiliation, but to retreat as this luckless army did was agony. Deep mud clogged their weary feet; when a halt was called they could but rest on their halberts, to lie down was to be suffocated in filth; mountain torrents swollen breast-high had to be crossed, the wading men were washed away till they built a rude bridge—O crowning humiliation!—out of the wreckage of their own ships. Hasan and a multitude of Turks and Arabs hung forever on their flanks. ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... still, and he crept on in this way from tree to tree, six, eight, and ten feet at a time, till, to his great delight, he found the water waist instead of breast-high. Ten minutes later it was not more than half-way up this height, and in another five he left the rafter still pressed against two trunks, and waded through the rushing stream, holding on by bough after bough, till he stood triumphantly upon dry land. Then after walking ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... horses up a shoulder of a steep hill-top, three shots cracked out from in front of us to left and right. Nobody fell, but if ever there was instantaneous response it happened then. Anazeh and his four galloped forward up-hill, firing as they rode for the cover of a breast-high ridge. One man on the off-side tipped me out of the saddle, so suddenly that I had no chance to prevent him; another caught me, and two others flung me into a hole behind a stone. I heard the rear-guard ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... bore all too palpably the marks of violence and bloodshed. There was an open space in front, where the shattered fragments of the engine lay scattered; and here the rails had been torn up by violence, and there stretched across, breast-high, a rudely piled rampart of stone. A human skeleton lay atop, whitened by the winds; there was a broken pike beside it; and, stuck fast in the naked skull, which had rolled to the bottom of the rampart, the rusty ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... my back to them for a moment. Through the breast-high oval I could see down across the deck-space and out through the side dome windows. And my heart suddenly leaped into my throat. It seemed that down there in the Earthlit shadows, where the spreading base of the giant crater joined the plains, ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... announced over the telephone and told that Mr. Black would be down directly. She looked around her. Two girls were being shown about by a little fat man in a slash-pocket coat, and one of them had indicated a stack of thin parcels, piled breast-high against the wall, and extending ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... from the grass got up, and so, With a caw and flap, away they went; When the grey mare made up her mind to go At the tail of the bounds on a breast-high scent, The best of the startled rooks might fail To match her flight ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... going like flails and the tail was up. Hobson pulled up to look at him for a minute. I got down and went to the wall, knowing that it afforded perfect security. Black Jack came up slowly, as if he meant no mischief. I leant over the wall, which was breast-high, and poked fun at him. In an instant, like a flash of light, he came at me. I saw his great claw over my head, and almost before I could jump back, a couple of heavy stones were driven violently off the top of the wall. To bolt and jump into the cart was almost an involuntary ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... the photography of wild animals by night in the forests of tropical Africa, and has published an interesting book giving his photographic results. In order to take these pictures the track followed by certain animals has to be detected, and then a thread is stretched "breast-high" across the track, so that the animal coming along it by night shall pull the thread. Immediately the thread is pulled it sets an electric contact in action. There is a brief flash of one two-thousandth of ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... a deep ravine that lay Yet darkling in the Moslem's way; Fit spot to make invaders rue The many fallen before the few. The torrents from that morning's sky Had filled the narrow chasm breast-high, And on each side aloft and wild Huge cliffs and toppling crags were piled,— The guards with which young Freedom lines The pathways to her mountain-shrines, Here at this pass the scanty band; Of IRAN'S last avengers stand; Here wait in silence ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... riding with you! Trying to ride with you!" he called out grimly as, taking the lead impetuously again, Eve Edgarton's horse shied off at a rabbit and went sidling down a sand-bank into a brand-new area of rocks and stubble and breast-high ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... a slow sweeping rustle of the wheat. Breast-high it stood down there, outside his window, a moving body, higher than the gloom. That rustle was a voice of childhood, youth, and manhood, whispering to him, thrilling as never before. It was a growing rustle, different from that when the wheat had matured. It seemed to change and ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... a light, and, forsaking what they believed in hopeful moments to be the road, they made for it across country. Across open spaces of sand, into gullies and out of gullies, through stinging patches of yucca and prickly pear, through breast-high chaparral, meshed, knotted, and matted, like a clumsy weaving together of very tough ropes, some with thorns, and all with ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... suddenly roused by the attack of the Carthaginian horsemen, and, without waiting for food, moved out of camp, chasing the horsemen toward the river. Into its icy waters the Romans waded breast-high, and when they came up on the opposite bank they were benumbed with cold. As soon as Hannibal knew that the Romans had crossed the river he attacked them fiercely with all his troops. Two thousand men whom he had placed in ambush fell upon the rear of their line. Their allies ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton
... western wall there stood in the centre the factory itself, a good log building of somewhat spacious size; its big room, divided by a breast-high solid railing, with a small gate in the middle, serving as office and general receiving-place. Beyond the railing, in the smaller space toward the north, there stood the great wooden desk of the factor, its massive book of accounts always open on its face, its hand-made drawers filled with the ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... may not, be one secret of his popularity, but it is the truth—that Morris's heart is at the level of most other people's, and his poetry flows out by that door. He stands breast-high in the common stream of sympathy, and the fine oil of his poetic feeling goes from him upon an element it is its nature to float upon, and which carries it safe to other bosoms, with little need of deep diving or high flying. ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... at the end of the house. There no less than sixteen bodies were found, while around the door and windows were thirteen others. All these were dead. The guns having been discharged through loopholes breast-high, had taken effect upon the head ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... besides, I won't promise how long I'll hold the Dillihay place. Real estate is brisk around here now. I didn't want to delay a good work on account of not having a location." Mr. Hooker turned away to a big ledger on a breast-high desk, and apparently was about to settle himself to the endless routine ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... floods had driven the game all away; so that they soon began to feel hunger, while their progress was very slow, and they suffered much from the fatigue of travelling all day long through deep mud or breast-high water. On the 17th they reached the Embarras River, but could not cross, nor could they find a dry spot on which to camp; at last they found the water falling off a small, almost submerged hillock, and on this they huddled through the night. At ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... large-looming from his wave, Out leaned, chin hand-propped, pensive on the ledge, A sea-worn face, sad as mortality, Divine with yearning after fellowship. He rose but breast-high. So much god she saw; So much she sees now, and ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... another against the rapidity of the river, leaving sufficient intervals between their ranks for the passage of the water. "We were nearly a hundred men a-breast," writes Lord George Murray;[157] "and it was a very fine show. The water was big, and most of the men breast-high. When I was near across the river, I believe there were two thousand men in the water at once: there was nothing seen but their heads and shoulders; but there was no danger, for we had crossed many waters, and the ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... knees and descended the stool. He stood breast-high behind the counter. He dropped a lack-luster eye to the box. "Velly nice," he ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... preternatural repose and dignity of the adult Russian peasant, and followed the liturgy independently. One little girl of seven, self-possessed and serenely unconscious, slipped through the crowd to the large image of the Virgin near the altar, grasped the breast-high guard-rail, and kissed the holy picture in the middle of her agile vault. When some members of the imperial family arrived, the crowd pressed together still more closely, to make a narrow passage to the small space reserved for them opposite the choir. After the ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... along the row of buildings a fire was opened on the bunk house. Apparently one man was detailed to search out a certain crevice between the logs. Harris threw himself flat against the lower log which barely shielded him. One rifleman covered a crack breast-high, another the one next below, drilling it at six-inch intervals. Shreds of 'dobe chinking littered the room. The balls which found an entrance splintered through the bunks and buried themselves in the logs of the far wall. A third marksman worked on the lower crack. Puffs of 'dobe pulverized ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... they cut the rope, and ran off under their foresail, still keeping up their fire with blunderbusses, each loaded with eight or ten pistol balls, which the Indians returned with their arrows, those on shore wading after them breast-high into the sea: When they had got clear of these, the canoes pursued them with great fortitude and vigour, till one of them was sunk, and the numbers on board the rest greatly reduced by the fire, and then they returned to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... to take my place in the stable where the lessons are given. It is a small room, empty and bare, with peat-moss litter bedding and white-washed walls. The horse is separated from the people present by breast-high wooden partitions. Opposite the four-legged scholar is a black-board, nailed to the wall; and on one side a corn-bin which forms a seat for the spectators. Muhamed is led in. Krall, who is a little nervous, makes no secret of his uneasiness. His horses are ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... in. Mrs. Ormonde was deep in her letters. "What an infernal nuisance it is!" he continued, looking out of the window nearest him. "The off days are always soft and the 'meet' days hard and frosty. The scent would be breast-high to-day." Mrs. Ormonde made no reply. "Your correspondence seems uncommonly interesting!" he ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... well-lit shops, crowds of well-dressed people, balconies filled with ladies, colonnades of churches, and facades of palaces, danced dimly before our eyes, instead of the accustomed cordages, the naked masts, the smutty sail, the breast-high bulwarks, and that horrid squat funnel, with its cascade of black smoke tinged, as it rolled forth, with a dull red glow. When I retired to rest, I caught myself holding on to the bed as I prepared to get into it; and I dreamed of nothing ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... correct in his supposition. It is true he had now only to descend upon the little roof, cross it, and climb to the window, which was but breast-high; but before descending it was necessary to find some support—stone, wood or iron, to which he could fasten the second rope, which he had brought wound about his neck, shoulders, and waist. Unfortunately he discovered nothing. At last, in leaning over, he perceived at the outer ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... instance; however, I have just received from a friend, who took interest in the subject, a sketch of something almost identical from the disused chapel at Chillon in the Canton Vaud. Of this I have not the measurements, but it stands about breast-high. It is there called a "prie-dieu," and is said to have belonged to the Dukes of Savoy, but the size is very unusual for such a use. I send sketches of each of the subjects of my Query, {102} and hope that, if this should be thought worthy of a place in "N. & Q.," some ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 196, July 30, 1853 • Various
... would prove but a frail defence against the mighty arms and tremendous claws of a furiously hungry tiger; and after the first shock he crept cautiously to the hiding-place of one of the spears and drew it out, to plant the butt against one retired foot and hold it with the keen blade about breast-high in the direction of the bamboo uprights and palm lath slats that were woven in and out ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... addition of Archbishop Odo, c. 950, the church having been thus turned from west to east, as at the already-described basilica of S. Lorenzo at Rome. The choir, as at S. Clemente's, occupied the eastern part of the nave, and like it was probably enclosed by breast-high partitions. There were attached porches to the north and south of the nave. The main entrance of the church was through that to the south. At this suthdure, according to Eadmer, "all disputes from the whole kingdom, which could not legally be referred to the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... with a breast-high parapet around both its inner and outer edges, was beautifully laid out with a variety of flowers and with trellised flower-bearing vines. In one corner were growing a number of small trees with great fan-shaped leaves of blue and bearing a large ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... a few breast-high bushes and crawled into their thin shade and lay down; before him he spread out the Quigley storekeeper's map. This he studied with thoughtful eyes. The storekeeper had said it would be no trick at all for a man like Howard to make the trip, but he had meant Howard on horseback. On foot it became ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... motive power to propel this spear was derived from a green bamboo, so strong that it required several powerful men to bend it in the form of a bow. A species of trigger was arranged to let the bent bow fly, and a piece of fine cord passed from this across the opening about breast-high for a tiger. The intention was that the animal, in entering the enclosure, should become its own executioner— should commit unintentional suicide, if ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... right hand three or four clerks, shut off from the public by a railing breast-high, were writing down the names of the depositors, and counting out money. Far back, a large opening was visible, where another clerk appeared from time to time, to take in the articles that were pawned. After waiting ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... him now on a breast-high scent, But he leaves us standing still; When we swing round by Westland Pound He's far up Challacombe Hill. The pack are a string of struggling ants, The quarry's a dancing midge, They're trying their reins on the edge of the Chains While ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... grasped his wrists. A white-haired man appeared on the other side of the parapet. He took a good, solid grip, and heaved. He drew Hoddan over the breast-high top of the wall and let him down to the ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... cluster of breast-high rocks, and before moving took a look round. Judge then of my astonishment and delight at the second glance to perceive about a hundred yards away a brown object, looking like an ape in the half light, meandering slowly up the margin of the water ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... of say thirty or forty feet in diameter; another driver fastening six others, horses and mares, to another long halter, led them to the side opposite the first six. As soon as they were stationed, waving long-lashed whips, plunge! ahead went the wild horses, jumping into the wheat-sheaves breast-high, rearing, squealing, kicking, lashing out their hoofs, their eyes starting from their heads, while each driver stood firm in one spot, whirling his whiplash and keeping his team within a circle one half of which was in the wheat and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... fact it flows W.S.W. in another great bend, and they had gone far to the north without seeing it, but the country was exceedingly difficult from forest and water. As I had already seen, trees fallen across the path formed a breast-high wall which had to be climbed over: flooded rivers, breast and neck deep, had to be crossed, the mud was awful, and nothing but villages eight ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... perhaps I stood there, breast-high in the almost boiling water, dumbfounded at my position, hopeless of escape. Through the reek I could see the people who had been with me in the river scrambling out of the water through the reeds, like ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... blossom, red and honey-sweet, In summer billowed like a crimson sea Across the meadow lands. One day, I stood Breast-high amidst its waves, and heard the hum Of myriad bees, that had gone mad like me With fragrance and with beauty. Over us, A loving sun smiled from a cloudless sky, While a bold breeze kissed lightly as it passed, Clover in ...
— Poems of Optimism • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... and knees, holding the knife in one hand and his rifle in the other. He immediately crawled in this way till he came to a secure spot. The men who had not attempted this passage were ordered to return and wade the river at the foot of the bluff, where they found the water breast-high. This adventure taught them the danger of crossing the slippery heights of the river; but as the plains were intersected by deep ravines, almost as difficult to pass, they continued down the river, sometimes in the mud of the low grounds, ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks |
