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Pencil   Listen
verb
Pencil  v. t.  (past & past part. penciled or pencilled; pres. part. penciling or pencilling)  To write or mark with a pencil; to paint or to draw. "Where nature pencils butterflies on flowers."
pencil in to write (a tentative appoinment) on an appointment calendar, so as to reserve time, but to allow the appointment to be readily canceled and replaced with another; also used figuratively, with other means of recording appointments. The notion being that something written in pencil can be more easily changed than something written in ink. The phrase is commonly used in the early stages of organizing a meeting of multiple persons, before it is known whether all attendees will be free at the suggested time.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Pencil" Quotes from Famous Books



... such as the guitar, accordian, etc. In some cases it is able to actually lift the person himself from the floor, and carry him through the air, in the same way. It may also cause the movement of a pencil in a closed slate, or bit of chalk upon a blackboard. In fact, it may produce almost any form of movement possible to the physical hand. In the case of the levitation of the person himself, the astral arms, and sometimes the legs as well, extend to the floor and push up the physical body into the ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi

... grave to strew Amid the grass and clover, And plant thereby that pencil blue Wherewith he ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley

... was a small calendar, and with it he tapped unconsciously the arm of his chair; but after a while he again looked at it and with his pencil marked the date of the month. It was the fifteenth of December. Miss Keith was going home on the eighteenth. Three days of her visit yet remained, a month of it had passed, and after she went— He stirred uneasily, changed his position, ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher

... foundation of chestnut-covered hills, and buttressed by a few such salient spurs as are perhaps necessary to give variety and agreeable shadows to their acclivities. Their outlines were now drawn in those waving lines that the pencil of Raphael would have loved to sketch, dark, distinct, and appearing to be carved by art. The inflected and capricious edges of the rocks stood out in high relief against the back-ground of pearly sky, resembling so ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper

... in the art; and the Prior more than once stepped into his carrel and looked over his shoulder, watching the slender fingers with the bone pen between them polishing the gold till it shone like a mirror, or the steady lead pencil moving over the white page in faultless curve. Then he would pat him on the shoulder, and go ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson

... him in surprise, nobody supposing that, while so engrossed with his pencil, he could have cared for their conversation. Aimee saw at a glance that his paper was covered with caricatures of the ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau

... TRACER, a red-haired, sprightly young lady, is seated upon the settee on the right, turning the leaves of a picture-paper. A note-book, with a pencil stuck in it, lies by her side. There is a knock at the ...
— The Big Drum - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero

... nicer gift for a girl to make for her mother or married sister than a set of tea-napkins, with a large initial letter in white, or white and red, embroidered on each. The doily should be folded in four, and the letter out-lined in lead pencil in the corner of one of the quarters. If inked very black on paper, and held dry to the window behind the linen, the initial is easily traced. The pattern is then run and "stuffed" with heavy working-cotton, and the letter embroidered in finer cotton. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various

... old man took his pencil and changed some dates and a name or two, and gave to some of the sentences a turn that seemed to the reporter only another way of saying the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... of the people; distributed a just measure of rewards and punishments; employed his riches in the architecture of palaces and temples; and gave audience to the ambassadors of Egypt, Arabia, India, Tartary, Russia, and Spain, the last of whom presented a suit of tapestry which eclipsed the pencil of the oriental artists. A general indulgence was proclaimed; every law was relaxed, every pleasure was allowed; the people was free, the sovereign was idle; and the historian of Timur may remark that, after devoting fifty ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... the meanness of Lopez,—though no one but Mr. Wharton knew half his villainy, as he alone knew that the expenses had been paid twice over. In one corner of the reporters' gallery sat Mr. Slide, pencil in hand, prepared to revert to his old work on so momentous an occasion. It was a great day for him. He by his own unassisted energy had brought a Prime Minister to book, and had created all this turmoil. It might be his happy lot to be ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope

... the big grey house with the chemist's shop; at this point there used to stand a little house, and in it was a beershop; in that beershop I thought out my thesis and wrote my first love-letter to Varya. I wrote it in pencil, on a page headed "Historia morbi." Here there is a grocer's shop; at one time it was kept by a little Jew, who sold me cigarettes on credit; then by a fat peasant woman, who liked the students because "every one of them has a mother"; now there is a red-haired shopkeeper ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... turned to the remaining treasures in the wonder-box. These consisted of several volumes containing photographs, others full of sketches in pencil and water-colour, and a thick roll of glazed linen scrolls covered with designs in ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers

... the connecting rod working backwards and forwards, the small cylinder is made to turn frontways and backways; and within the small cylinder is another cylinder very much smaller; it has a tiny piston within it, and as the steam presses on the little piston at every stroke of the engine, a pencil from the outer cylinder is fixed in a slot and marks the movements of the little piston on a roll of prepared paper, slid over the inner cylinder for that purpose, the pencil being kept up to the ...
— The Stoker's Catechism • W. J. Connor

... whether to admire most its richness, its energy, its sweetness, its melancholy, its freedom, its dignity, or its harmony, for it has all these virtues in turn. The descriptive parts are depicted with the faithfulest pencil: the battle scenes can only ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells

... a homelier sketch, traced out on almost the same leading lines, with just a little less of the aerial in it, may have nearly the same subduing effect; I have, besides, a few curious touches to lay in, which seem hitherto to have escaped observation and the pencil; and in these several circumstances must lie my apology for adding one sketch more to the ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... was about to enter the adjoining bedroom which had been allotted to him, a slender pencil of light pierced the darkness of the passage leading off the one in which he stood. As he watched the gleam grew brighter and broader; somebody was walking along the other passage. A moment later the innkeeper's daughter came into view, carrying a candle. ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees

... winter-storm had ceased to rave, He roamed the snowy waste at even, to view The cloud stupendous, from the Atlantic wave High-towering, sail along the horizon blue: Where, 'midst the changeful scenery ever new, Fancy a thousand wondrous forms descries, More wildly great than ever pencil drew; Rocks, torrents, gulfs, and shapes of giant size, And glittering cliffs on cliffs, and fiery ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie

... big soft seat of the first-class carriage, a scrap of paper on one knee, a pencil chewed to splinters between his teeth. His brow was puckered into deep lines above troubled eyes which stared absently at a Mesdag picture in blue and white tile set in the compartment wall. He smiled at his friend's exuberance and dropped pencil ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle

... here be noted that there was a tendency to curves so long as the characters were scratched on bamboo tablets with a metal stylus. With the invention of paper in the first century A.D., and the substitution of a hair-pencil for the stylus, verticals and ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles

... pan, a beaker of distilled water. The horse hair must be long enough to keep the mineral well beneath the surface of the water so as to allow the balance to vibrate. Air bubbles are removed by touching with a camel-hair pencil. Whilst the mineral is suspended in water the weight is again taken. It will weigh less than before, and the difference between the two weighings gives the weight of water (and consequently the volume) displaced by the mineral. ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer

... draw his teeth," answered Buttar. "No, no, Dickey! You may take a copy of it in pencil, and show it to anybody you like. You may say also, that all the school, with the exception of a few miserable sneaks, like some who shall be nameless, will sign it and stick by it. And now, just go and tell the fellows ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston

... the old Hall and after lunch the great architect explained, with the aid of a sheet of paper and a pencil, his idea of ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice

... next stage, possesses no visible interest, and furnishes no employment for the pencil. The town is, like Bolbec, a residence for manufacturers; and the curious stranger would seek in vain for any traces of decayed magnificence, any vestiges or records of a royal residence. And yet, it is held that Yvetot was the ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner

... borrowings, in this instance as in others, relate only to the plot of the work, the poetry and character being all his own; and that, here as elsewhere, he used what he took merely as the canvas whereon to pencil out and express the breathing creatures of his mind. So that the whole workmanship is just as original, in the only right sense of that term, as if the story and incidents had been altogether the children of his own invention; and he but followed his usual custom ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson

... whereupon I retreated in good order and re-entered the master's cabin. The old boy had by this time slipped on his breeches and coat, and was bending over the table with the chart of "Africa—West Coast" spread out thereon, and a pencil and parallel ruler in his hands. He indulged in one or two of the grimly humorous remarks that were characteristic of him in reference to my disturbance of the doctor's slumbers; and then, pointing to a dot that he had just made upon the ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood

... Roman art. This was the epoch, in which the construction of the Roman arches and Roman roads began; in which works of art like the she-wolf of the Capitol originated; and in which a distinguished man of an old Roman patrician clan took up his pencil to embellish a newly constructed temple and thence received the honorary surname of the "Painter." This was not accident. Every great age lays grasp on all the powers of man; and, rigid as were Roman manners, strict ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... who was taken captive. There was something in the demeanor of this brave man which overawed them. He showed them his pocket compass, upon which they gazed with wonder. He then told them that if they would send to the fort a leaf from his pocket-book, upon which he had made several marks with his pencil, they would find the next day, at any spot they might designate, a certain number of axes, blankets, and other articles of great value to them. Their curiosity was exceedingly aroused; the paper was sent, and the next day the articles were found as promised. The Indians looked upon ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott

... proportioned more like a stick of macaroni or a lead pencil than the shapely limbs of an Adonis, they appear exceedingly funny when surmounted by a short coat, such as pictured in No. 89. A famous general in the Civil War did not despise cotton as a fortification to ...
— What Dress Makes of Us • Dorothy Quigley

... to teach. A good knowledge of history will enable him to invest the study of geography with new interest. Acquaintance with algebra will give a clearness to his perceptions, and consequently to his mode of inculcating the principles, of arithmetic. The ability to delineate off-hand with chalk or pencil the forms of objects, gives him an unlimited power of illustrating every subject, and of clothing even the dullest with interest. Familiarity with the principles of rhetoric and with the rules of criticism, gives at once elegance and ease to his language, and the means of ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart

... beautiful folio, full of quaint plates and fine old printing, and bound in a rich leather that time and the sun had tanned to an autumn gold. While I was regarding it the breeze came through the window and stirred the yellow leaves, exposing a pencil-marked verse in the most pastoral of psalms: "Hy doert my nederliggen in grasige wenden; Hy doert my sachtkens aen seer stille wateren." There was something impressive in the accident: the old book stoutly reminding the chance ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young

... a sliver in the door bore the entry in lead- pencil, "Gone Duck Shooting to Plover Slough," for it was the custom of the twins to faithfully chronicle the cause of their absence and their probable location each time they left home, to make it easy to find them in the event of a cablegram from Aunt ...
— The Black Creek Stopping-House • Nellie McClung

... Las Flores itself, this little valley of the flowers, it was beautiful enough in every part to inspire an artist's pencil or a poet's pen; so quiet and romantic it was, too, it might almost have been under a spell,—the home of some sleepy, enchanted princess waiting the magic kiss of a princely lover. It reached from the ocean to the mountains, and held a thousand different pictures on which to feast the ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... exact moment Miss Flagg was proclaiming herself a moral coward, in the local room of the REPUBLIC Collins, the copy editor, was editing Sam's story' of the laying of the corner-stone. The copy editor's cigar was tilted near his left eyebrow; his blue pencil, like a guillotine ready to fall upon the guilty word or paragraph, was suspended in mid-air; and continually, like a hawk preparing to strike, the blue pencil swooped and circled. But page after page fell softly to the desk and the blue pencil remained inactive. As ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis

... Elias had suspected in his own mind that there existed a creature, somewhat like a mouse, somewhat like a red flower-pot, which glided around during the night-watches to sharpen slate-pencils, smooth out dog-ears from school-books, erase lead-pencil marks, polish up marbles, straighten kite strings, put the "suck" into brick-suckers, and otherwise make itself useful. If there were not such a creature, there ought to be, and Elias became daily surer that there was. ...
— Harper's Young People, March 23, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... oldest individuals of the race assemble to receive the child, which is repeatedly blown on to drive demons and sickness away from it; the name of an animal is then given to it, and, according to Don Pedro Beltran, the witnesses of the ceremony mark with a wooden pencil some hieroglyphic characters on two leaves, which are carefully preserved, and on the death of the Indian, deposited in the ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi

... and, lighting the gas, went back to bed with what paper he could lay his hands on. He had no pen, no ink, only the stub of a pencil he carried in his pocket. How it flew over the ragged sheets under the fierce spell of his determination! All the misery and longing of months went out in that letter. Inarticulate no longer, he found the expression of a passionate and despairing eloquence. He could not live ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne

... dimensions needed. Use 2 x 2 for body. Use thin wood of equal width for back. Use tinfoil for mirror. Indicate drawers with pencil lines. ...
— Primary Handwork • Ella Victoria Dobbs

... taken up Dash again when I remembered that that other novel must be finished if it was to be changed on the morrow, so I turned dutifully to that instead. It was a capital story about a criminal who murdered people in an absolutely undetectable way by lending them a poisoned pencil which would not mark until the point was moistened. I enjoyed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 18, 1914 • Various

... next stage. Graphite, plumbago, or, as it is more commonly called, black-lead, which, we may say in passing, has nothing of lead about it at all, is best known in the shape of that very useful and cosmopolitan article, the black-lead pencil. This is even purer carbon than anthracite, not more than 5 per cent. of ash and other impurities being present. It is well-known by its grey metallic lustre; the chemist uses it mixed with fire-clay to make his crucibles; the engineer ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin

... squatted in front of the last hut, her back against the log wall. The man called Buck sat yawning on a rock a few yards away. What struck Melissy as strange was that the squaw was figuring on the back of an old envelope with the stub of a lead pencil. ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine

... introduced. But the present experimental fragment, to which it has been decided to give the title of "The Ancestral Footstep," possesses a freshness and spontaneity recalling the peculiar fascination of those chalk or pencil outlines with which great masters in the graphic art have been wont to arrest their fleeting glimpses ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... nearly as long as the pedicels of the sixth cirrus, thickly clothed with very fine bristles, like a camel's-hair pencil brush. ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin

... getting on pretty well. Claude, finding the historic pencil not lucrative, has taken to portrait-painting; and being no longer an enthusiastic artist, talks even of adopting the more expeditious method of the Daguerreotype. In the meantime, half the tradesmen of Avignon, to say nothing of Aix, have ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various

... wandering to-day?' I asked. 'Have you yet been as far as the park, which, as I told you, would supply such endless subjects for your pencil?' ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley

... I'm going to do," he said, drawing a note-book and a pencil from his pocket and beginning to write, holding it ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers

... There he received a splendid welcome and was loaded with commissions, the only dissentient voice being that of Raphael Mengs, who, obsessed by the taste for the classic and the antique, was fiercely opposed to the Venetian's art. Tiepolo died suddenly in Madrid in 1770, pencil in hand. Though he was past seventy, the frescoes he has left there show that his hand was as firm and his ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps

... said, when he had jabbed a bunch of copy paper into my hand and given me a pencil from his vest pocket, 'mind you, I won't stand for the high and flighty philosophical, and I perceive you have a tendency that way. Throw in the local color, wads of it, and a bit of sentiment perhaps, but no slumgullion about political economy nor social strata ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London

... like their own statues and pictures, and set mediaeval fashions which it was a pity the rest of the world did not follow. They drank much social tea with titled beings, as thick as blackberries, and, better still, men and women who had earned noble names for themselves with pencil, pen, or chisel. They paid visits in palaces where the horses lived in the basement, rich foreigners on the first floor, artists next, and princes ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott

... our hero first arrived at Ben-Ahmed's home, he had been despoiled of his own garments while he was in bed—the slave costume having been left in their place. On application to his friend Peter, however, his pocket-knife, pencil, letters, and a few other things had been returned to him. Thus, while waiting, he was able to turn his time to account by making a sketch of the interior of the coffee-house, to the great surprise and gratification of the negroes there—perhaps, also, ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne

... ter kill, an' say, 'Dat's so, dat's so, boy.' Den he take out his pencil an' write a word er two on a ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee

... truth that the pencil gives. Something is wanting in the physiognomy of the Poverello when we forget his conversation with Brother Leo on the perfect joy, his journey to Sienna with Masseo, or even the conversion ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier

... loop—which sailors call a bight— upward between the thumb and forefinger; bring the loop down to meet the two parts of the string on the palm of the hand; then take the two lines into the loop, and put a pencil under the two parts drawn through the loop. The flatiron will correspond to the stone sinker, and the thumb to the slings on the hogshead. Lift up the flatiron, so that the weight will bear on the thumb; then pull out the pencil, and the iron ...
— Haste and Waste • Oliver Optic

... work was simple. First he took a metal stylus or a pencil and drew perpendicular lines in the side margins of his parchment, and horizontal lines at equal distances from top to bottom of the page. Then the task of copying was straightforward. If the book ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage

... or frame of the work before us. It has induced us to select the Embellishments on the annexed page; and their description, from so graceful a pencil as that of the author, will, we hope, bespeak the favour ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 549 (Supplementary issue) • Various

... remained passive while Jack searched his pockets, producing therefrom the missing flashlight made to imitate an automatic pistol, a watch, a purse with some coins inside, a vile smelling pipe with a pouch of tobacco, a stubby lead pencil and a note book partly filled with figures and memoranda. Apparently there ...
— Boy Scouts in Southern Waters • G. Harvey Ralphson

... that I think we should at once introduce into London. The kiosk is a delightful object, and, when illuminated at night from within, as lovely as a fantastic Chinese lantern, especially when the transparent advertisements are from the clever pencil of M. Cheret. In London we have merely the ill-clad newsvendor, whose voice, in spite of the admirable efforts of the Royal College of Music to make England a really musical nation, is always out of tune, and whose rags, badly designed and badly worn, merely emphasise a painful note of uncomely ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde

... been surprised with laughter, sound asleep. The sermon that would send him to sleep had never been written, at all events by his favourite theologian, whose sermons he read every Sunday afternoon, and annotated with that same loving appreciation and careful pencil with which a scholar annotates some classic; so true is it that it is we who dignify our occupations, not ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne

... down, considering whether her oath, never to "say a word" to Prince Dolor about himself, would be broken if she were to take a pencil and write what was to be told. A mere quibble—a mean, miserable quibble. But then she was a miserable woman, more to ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik

... frank approval. He also did so to some purpose in his reports to Winnipeg, as subsequently transpired, while occasionally, when we lounged languidly contented under the dew-damped canvas at nights, Harry would figure with the end of a pencil how much we had already placed ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss

... middle age. He left behind him, by his last wife, two sons and a daughter; his eldest son he named after the illustrious Washington; and he has since proved himself to be highly worthy of that distinction. In this son will be readily recognised the distinguished artist, Washington Allston; whose pencil has bestowed celebrity upon the place of his birth, and whom every American should be proud to claim ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James

... yourself. Here, Patsey!—Patsey! run into Ballyglass for this gentleman at once. Now don't be long, for the chances are we shall find here." And then, after giving some further hurried instructions he left me to write a line in pencil to the innkeeper's wife on the back ...
— The O'Conors of Castle Conor from Tales from all Countries • Anthony Trollope

... of them lay on the carpet; and a pot of mignonette had been overturned inside the open window scattering some of the mould. She was very busy; the open sleeves of her lilac-muslin dress were thrown back, and her delicate hands were putting the finishing touches in pencil to a plan she had been copying, from one of the maps. A few minutes more, and the pencil was thrown ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood

... a Northern critic, writing of the new birth of interest in Timrod's work, said: "Time is the ideal editor." Surely, Editor Time's blue pencil has dealt ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett

... the rhapsodic passion of a god creating a new world. He began with a preamble that would have broken a copy-reader's heart. He followed it up with atmospheric discursiveness that would have worn away an editor's blue pencil. He told how Steam and Steel were supposed to have crushed the Spirit of Romance out of the age. He pointed out how the modern city of stone and concrete seemed no longer to house that wayward and retrospective spirit in which the heart of the poet ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine

... which looked as if it had been dropped by some workman. And recalling the superstition that it is lucky to find such an object, or a nail, I picked it up, when to my astonishment I found that it was a silver pencil case, but made to exactly resemble a screw. Hundreds of people had, perhaps, seen it, thought they knew all about it, or what it was, and then passed it by, little suspecting its ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland

... alone there were twenty thousand students; but they were still thronged with pupils, and taught by renowned professors. When the young Sidney came to Venice, Titian was just tottering into the grave, nearly a hundred years old, but still holding the pencil which Charles V. had picked up and handed to him in his studio. Galileo was a youth of twenty, studying mathematics at Pisa. The melancholy Tasso was completing his Jerusalem Delivered under the cypress trees of the Villa d'Este. Palestrina was composing the masses which ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis

... heightened in its reddish-gold by her dress, was fluffed loosely and adroitly about her eyes. The main mass of this treasure was done in two loose braids caught up in a black spangled net at the back of her neck; and her eyebrows had been emphasized by a pencil into something almost as significant as her hair. She was, for the occasion, a little too emphatic, perhaps, and yet more because of her burning vitality than of her costume. Art for her should have meant subduing ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser

... told me not to tell nobody who sent it, and not to give it to nobody on earth but you, and how to slip in through the hedge and try and find you in the garden when nobody was lookin', and he give a pencil for you to answer on the back of ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington

... know her as indeed the "excellent and beautiful person" of Lord John's measured approval, not so much by what she says or does as by her reactions on Tom himself. A study of her has to be made out of a number of pencil-scratches—one here, one there—put down by the diarist with unpremeditated art; for it is certain that, though Moore intended his diaries to speak for him after his death, what he had to say of his wife was the last thing in them he ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett

... fair enough," agreed Bob. "Just wait a minute until I get a paper and pencil, then shoot as fast as ...
— The Radio Boys at the Sending Station - Making Good in the Wireless Room • Allen Chapman

... commerce played the proper accompaniment to Steve O'Valley's orders and Mary's thoughts and Beatrice's actions—a jangling yet accurate rhythm of typewriters and adding machines and office chatter, pencil sharpeners, windows being opened, shades adjusted, wastebaskets dragged into position, boys demanding their telegrams or delivering the same, phone bells ringing, voices asking for Mr. O'Valley and being told that ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley

... fingers, like minute pieces of metal or grains of gravel. It was within Don Caesar's experience that gold specimens were often sent in that manner. It was in a state of singular preservation, except the address, which, being written in pencil, was scarcely discernible, and even when deciphered appeared to be incoherent and unfinished. The unknown correspondent had written "dear Mary," and then "Mrs. Mary Slinn," with an unintelligible scrawl following for ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte

... Convention. He might run Mr. J.B. Gough hard on his favorite stump. He might be tempted, perchance, to cross the ocean in the evening of his days, to note down, with his inimitable and still unfaltering pencil, some of the humors of Yankee-land. I am certain, that, were George Cruikshank or Dicky Doyle to come this way and give a pictorial history of a tour through the States, somewhat after the immortal Brown, Jones, and Robinson pattern, the Americans would be in a better ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various

... invention than Painting; particularly we are told, that in America when the Spaniards first arrived there Expresses were sent to the Emperor of Mexico in Paint, and the News of his Country delineated by the Strokes of a Pencil, which was a more natural Way than that of Writing, tho' at the same time much more imperfect, because it is impossible to draw the little Connexions of Speech, or to give the Picture of a Conjunction or an Adverb. It would be yet more strange, to represent visible ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... Mrs. Warwick's guest for a fortnight, and observed them together. She sometimes charitably laid down her pencil and left them, having forgotten this or that. They were conversing of general matters with their usual crisp precision on her return, and she was rather like the two countrymen, in debating whether it was excess ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... went so well with the word toad. I was going to call it 'Ode to a Toad,' but it isn't to a toad at all, though it's about a toad. Ah! by the bye, I might call it 'A Toad's Ode,' mightn't I? I think that sounds very jolly." He altered the title in pencil. ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow

... and aspens, were scattered a few cows, sheep, and herds of pigs. Fields, sown with thin buckwheat and rye, stretched away to a background of half-cultivated hills, offering no remarkable prospect. The pencil of an artist in quest of the picturesque would have found nothing to reproduce ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne

... Testament, showing the marks of usage, yet not worn. It was a tiny thing, very thin, easily fitting in a vest-pocket, and not a burden to carry. He took the little book in his hand, removed the silken rubber band that bound it, and turned the leaves reverently in his fingers, noting that there were pencil-marks here and there. His face was all emotion as he looked up ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill

... figures of the five leading types of birds: (1) small perching birds, (2) hawks, (3) snipes, (4) herons, (5) ducks. On the page opposite is a list of numbers corresponding to colors. You can quickly mark on the outline the proper numbers, and note with your pencil any marks on the bird. Then check the other data on the page, add any additional memoranda, and you have your "bird in the hand," ready to take back and look ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America

... passes from one transparent medium into another—for example, from air to water—and the mediums are of different densities. We may regard the surface of a visible object as made up of countless points, from each of which a diverging pencil of rays is ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams

... outward objects alone the receptacles of the Spirit of Good. Look into the mind of man, where wisdom reigns enthroned; where imagination, the painter, sits, with his pencil dipt in hues lovelier than those of sunset, adorning familiar life with glowing tints. What a noble boon, worthy the giver, is the imagination! it takes from reality its leaden hue: it envelopes all thought and sensation in a radiant veil, and ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley

... followed this announcement. The pencil with which the priest was about to record the "profession" of the godfather fell from his hands. Madame Etienne in her ecstasy fell almost fainting into an arm-chair, and Monsieur Etienne, taking the child from the arms of the nurse, came ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach

... dispersion. But, aside from the mechanical difficulties which arise when the lens is of the minute dimensions required for use with the microscope, other perplexities are introduced by the fact that the use of a wide pencil of light is a desideratum, in order to gain sufficient illumination when large ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... pencil and paper and wrote. Page after page he crumpled in his hand and flung into the fire. At last, swiftly and despairingly, he ended with half a dozen lines. What he said came from ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood

... shoulders could see spaced words, written in pencil, taking shape as a sentence upon the card. Hanaud turned abruptly in his ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason

... words yourself," she coolly observed. "While someone's back was turned, you whipped out your pencil and—" ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green

... the home of strangers, and I went to live in an obscure quarter of a distant town. My means being exceeding small, I took rooms in a small house in a semi-rural suburb, and from thence began to look for work for pen and pencil. I had learned to draw, and had succeeded in one or two small attempts at story telling, and with my pen and pencil for crutches, and with youth and hope on my side, I started out with nervous confidence upon the highway ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various

... with crimson and gold. Then a wet wind blew, and ruined all the uniforms of that gorgeous army; and the oaks, who had held themselves in reserve, buckled on their dull and bronzed cuirasses and stood it out stiffly to the last blown leaf, till nothing remained but pencil-shading of bare boughs, and one could see into the most private heart ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling

... to the family of Edward I.—a highly interesting period, replete with curious illustrations of the genius and manners of the Middle Ages. Such works, from the truthfulness of their spirit, furnish a more lively picture of the tunes than even the graphic, though delusive, pencil ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross

... men pointed to the pocket in his jerkin and asked what he had in it. Compass and watch were gone, but Smith delved into its depths in hopes of finding something he had forgotten which might interest them. He brought out a pencil and a small note-book. He wrote a few words and ...
— The Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson

... with Lord Treasurer to-day, and sat with him till ten, in spite of my teeth, though my printer waited for me to correct a sheet. I told him of four lines I writ extempore with my pencil, on a bit of paper in his house, while he lay wounded. Some of the servants, I suppose, made waste-paper of them, and he never had heard of them. Shall I tell them you? They were inscribed to Mr. ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift

... to write so many songs of love— I wrote them carefully, I did not know That love was more than moonlight from above, And pretty words set in an even row, I held my pencil calmly in my hand, And sang of arms and lips and tender eyes; I wrote of love—who did not understand— And hoped that folk would think me ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster

... lace pockets—then dropping at last to her neat little shoes, and to the thin bright line of white stocking that just separated them from the hem of her favorite grey dress. He only looked up again, when she touched his hand and put her slate pencil into it. At that signal he raised his eyes once more, read the line she had written to thank him for the scarlet pouch, and tried to write something in return. But his hand shook, and his thoughts seemed to fail him, he gave her back the slate and pencil, looking ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins

... The pencil's power—but fir'd by higher forms Of beauty than that pencil knew to paint, Work'd with the living hues that Nature lent, And realiz'd his landscapes. Generous be, Who gave to Painting what the wayward nymph Refus'd her votary; those Elysian scenes, Which would she emulate, her ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 269, August 18, 1827 • Various

... days to get the animals through the customs, and in the meantime I cast about for quarters and finally rented a stable on Eighteenth Street to keep them in until I should secure an engagement." He took a pencil from his pocket and drew a plan on the white ...
— Side Show Studies • Francis Metcalfe

... with a stern and magisterial air, his tablets and pencil in hand, which he did with the intention of awing Barney into a full confession of the exact truth—a precaution which Barney's romance of the windy colic induced him to take,—"I say," ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... meeting-house and told how he had found the Lord, and recommending all the people to choose Christ as their portion—the same Christ about whom he was reading the very night before he died, in that little book called "The Changed Cross," the more tender passages marked with his own lead-pencil; and amid these poems of Christ Henry Wilson had placed the pictures of his departed wife and departed son, for I suppose he thought as these were with Christ in heaven their dear faces might as well be next to His name in ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller

... ceased her chatter, took the telegram and began feverishly to count the words. Then her tapping pencil slowed down and her brows contracted; she was assimilating their meaning. Then, with a blush, and a very becoming one, she looked at me with an expression of distress and said, "Do you really want ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 22, 1920 • Various

... had strenuously disavowed. The picture-gallery, it was very probable, had been collected in the same manner. It contained little else than portraits, but these were truly admirable and interesting, being all recent works from the pencil of Vandyke, and composing a series of heads and features the most remarkable for station in the one sex, or for beauty in the other, which that age presented. Amongst them were nearly all the imperial leaders of distinction, and many of the Swedish. Maximilian and his ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... definite, restricted direction, but not probably anything worth calling real genius. For example, a family of artists, starting with some sort of manual dexterity in imitating natural forms and colours with paint and pencil, and strictly intermarrying always with other families possessing exactly the same inherited endowments, would probably go on getting more and more woodenly accurate in its drawing; more and more conventionally correct in its grouping; ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... to divulge some of love's secrets, to glide beneath the ceilings of a marriage chamber, not shamelessly, but like Trilby, frightening neither Dougal nor Jeannie, alarming no one,—being as chaste as our noble French language requires, and as bold as the pencil of Gerard in his picture of Daphnis ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac

... the course of what was really a canvassing tour, have honoured with such a mark of favour a man so generally distrusted and hated as Sunderland. But the people were determined to be pleased. All Northamptonshire crowded to kiss the royal hand in that fine gallery which had been embellished by the pencil of Vandyke and made classical by the muse of Waller; and the Earl tried to conciliate his neighbours by feasting them at eight tables, all blazing with plate. From Althorpe the King proceeded to Stamford. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... essential service, Weatherhelm, if you'll just do as I request. Here is the paper," and he produced a large sheet folded up. "You'll see me write my name, and you'll just write yours as a witness under it. There's the word 'witness,' you see, in pencil, you ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston

... We look like sergeant-majors who have come to report." They called over the seven hundred and fifty names of the Representatives. To each name they answered "Absent" or "Present," and the secretary jotted down with a pencil those who were present. When the name of Morny was reached, some one cried out, "At Clichy!" At the name of Persigny, the same voice exclaimed, "At Poissy!" The inventor of these two jokes, which ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo

... flooded it, for the flare of the street came feebly in through the summer leafage, and sat sensing the need of her as a thing to be handled and measured, a benumbing, suffocating presence. As he sat, a sound of music floated by, and a thin pencil of light from a pleasure barge on the river flitted from window to window, travelling the gilt line of a picture-frame and the dark block of a picture that hung over his bed. And as it touched in passing the high ramping figure of a knight in armour, the old magic worked. He felt ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin

... receiving a grain of pollen from another flower; for the pollen is shed in the early bud, and is there shut up round the stigma within a cup or indusium. But some observations led me to suspect that nevertheless insect agency here comes into play; for I found by holding a camel-hair pencil parallel to the pistil, and moving it as if it were a bee going to suck the nectar, the straggling hairs of the brush opened the lip of the indusium, entered it, stirred up the pollen, and brought out some grains. I did this to five flowers, and marked ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin

... imagine these islands to be animate masses which had broken loose from the "thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice," and were working their way, by wind and current, some alone, and some in fleets, to milder climes. No pencil has ever yet given anything like the true effect of an iceberg. In a picture, they are huge, uncouth masses, stuck in the sea, while their chief beauty and grandeur,—their slow, stately motion; the whirling of the snow about their summits, and the fearful groaning and cracking of their parts,—the ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana

... anything happened to Davies, interest and excitement had upheld me well. My alarms only began when I thought them nearly over. Davies had frequently urged me to turn in and sleep, and I went so far as to go below and coil myself up on the lee sofa with my pencil and diary. Suddenly there was a flapping and rattling on deck, and I began to slide on to the floor. 'What's happened?' I cried, in a panic, for there was Davies stooping in at ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers

... for the first time, he felt despair. He borrowed a pencil and a sheet of paper torn from an old memorandum book and made his will. His possessions were singularly few, and the most valuable at hand was his fine long-barreled rifle, which he left to his faithful friend, Obed White. He bequeathed his pistol and knife to the Panther, ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler

... feathers waving proudly in that sunlight. It really was the bird and not the lady that intercepted other and more pertinent reflections having to do with his future movements. He loitered about all morning, fished, lunched with his guide, made a pencil sketch of the Fall, and then about three o'clock in the afternoon walked out to Lac Calvaire. He neared the house; at first he saw no one, it was the middle-day siesta. No peacock was visible, no lady. Then he saw a face at a window and it stared ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison

... Tom Swift had drawn pencil and paper from his pocket, and, as he and Mr. Damon were sitting on the steps of one of the shops, the young inventor was about to demonstrate by a drawing part of his new project, when the interruption came in the shape of one of the men who had, an hour ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Scout - or, Uncle Sam's Mastery of the Sky • Victor Appleton

... illustrations of history—as also the great paintings of Rubens from the life of Anna dei Medici; and then the historical pictures of Horace Vernet, of Delaroche, of Lessing, and of Kaulbach—all these are illustrations of history. What those artists present and illustrate with paint and pencil, the Historical Romancer represents in words with his pen; and when he does this successfully, he will live in the memory of his reader as imperishably as the great historical pictures of the painters in the ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach

... mists of his boyhood memories. It was of an open field, with a fringe of beech woods in the distance. A single hickory stood near its centre, and under this a group lounged, smoking pipes. A man, perched on a cracker box, held a blank book and pencil. Another stood by a board, a gun in his hand. The smell of black powder hung in the atmosphere. Little glass balls popped into the air, and were snuffed out. He saw Oldham distinctly, looking younger and browner, but with the same cynical mouth, the ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White

... are written in pencil on sheet 61. of the Notes of the Debates in the Long Parliament, taken down in the House of Commons by Sir Ralph Verney. The Notes of Debates, but not these lines, were published by the Camden Society in 1845. For any thing that appears to the contrary, these lines may ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 2, November 10 1849 • Various

... design, spreading the linen on the back of her father's worn copy of Theocritus? If she lived a thousand years, would it be possible to forget the thin, almost transparent white hand, with its blue veins swollen like cords, which had gently taken the pencil from her fingers, and retouched and rounded the sweep of the curves; the dear wasted hand that she had stooped and kissed, as it ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. In learning to write, the pupil goes over with his pen what the teacher has outlined in pencil: so in reading; the greater part of the work of thought is already done for us. This is why it relieves us to take up a book after being occupied with our own thoughts. And in reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer

... situation for several minutes, when the former urged the necessity of expedition on his part, in order to precede Dunwoodie, from whose sense of duty they knew they had no escape. The captain took out his pocketbook, and wrote a few lines with his pencil; then folding the paper, he handed it ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper

... to both at once, and reckon your letters to come equally from both, yet I delight in seeing your hand with a pen as well as with a pencil, and you express yourself as well with the one as with the other. Your part in that which I have been so happy as to receive this moment, has singularly obliged me, by your having saved me the terror of knowing you had a torrent to cross ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole

... went out to business, and was again successful, getting rid of his thirty packages, and clearing another dollar. Half of this he invested in a drawing-book, a pencil and some drawing-paper for Jimmy. Even then he had left of his earnings for the day one dollar and eighty cents. But this success in the new business had already excited envy and competition, as he was destined to find ...
— Paul the Peddler - The Fortunes of a Young Street Merchant • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... secret looming up between her and Barby like a dreadful wall. The letter telling all about the wonderful and exciting things which had happened in her absence was already on its way to Kentucky. It was not a letter to be proud of. It was scrawled as fast as she could write it with a pencil, and she knew perfectly well that a dozen or more words were misspelled, but she couldn't take time to correct them, or to think of easy words to put in their places. But Barby wouldn't care. She would be so happy for Uncle ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston

... "MATCHING"). Numerous materials may be improved by the aid of raw linseed-oil mixed with a little spirits of turpentine. Artificial graining may be given to various woods by means of a camel-hair pencil and raw oil; two or three coats should be given, and after standing for some time the ground should have one coat of oil much diluted with spirits of turpentine, and then ...
— French Polishing and Enamelling - A Practical Work of Instruction • Richard Bitmead

... upon my duties at Ajaccio. One morning I was at the club, reading the papers which had just arrived from Paris, when the Prefect's man-servant brought me a note, hastily written in pencil: "Come at once; I want you. We have got the brigand, Quastana." I uttered an exclamation of joy, and went off as fast as I could to the Prefecture. I must tell you that, under the Empire, the arrest of a Corsican banditto was ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various



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