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Cranny   /krˈæni/   Listen
Cranny

noun
(pl. crannies)
1.
A long narrow depression in a surface.  Synonyms: chap, crack, crevice, fissure.
2.
A small opening or crevice (especially in a rock face or wall).



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"Cranny" Quotes from Famous Books



... every side stretched long aisles pillared with the clean red trunks of the pine trees wrought in network pattern. At their feet raged the Goat, foaming out his futile fury at the unmoved black rocks. Up the rocky sides from the water's edge, bravely clinging to nook and cranny, running along ledges, hanging trembling to ragged edges, boldly climbing up to the forest, were all spring's myriad tender things wherewith she redeems Nature from winter's ugliness. From the river below came gusts of misty wind, waves ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor

... so disreputable, that he at once made up his mind that here at last was the thief for whom they had waited so long in vain. The man's wild, roving eye, that seemed to search out every corner and cranny in the place and rest nowhere for longer than a second at a time, added to Delore's suspicions. The unsavoury visitor was evidently spying out the land, and Adolph felt certain he would do no business with him at that particular ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr

... parallel to, and about fifteen yards away from, the wire. It is subdivided to form a dressing-room and a place for the shower baths, every exit being strongly barred, and a sentry stationed at the door. After a minute inspection of every nook and cranny, I found that it was just possible, by standing upright, to squeeze into an alcove, about eleven inches deep and a foot wide, in an angle formed by a wall and the brickwork of a chimney ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight

... began to look under the leaves and under the bark. They pawed around in the grass, they hunted in every nook and cranny, but not a nut could they find. They were tired and cross and hot and they accused Billy Mink of having hidden the nuts. Billy Mink stoutly insisted that he had not hidden the nuts, that he had not found the nuts, and when they saw how hard he was hunting ...
— Old Mother West Wind • Thornton W. Burgess

... not go to bed, or even undress, for she knew that Ishmael was locked out; and so she threw a light shawl around her, and seated herself at the open back window, which from its high point of view commanded every nook and cranny of the back grounds, to watch until Ishmael should wake up and approach the house, so that she might go down and admit him quietly, without disturbing the servants and exciting their curiosity and conjectures. No one should ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth

... undergrowth. The first to arrive was MYalu, angry to find the whole assembly of wizards apparently sitting as if they had never moved, engaged in mystic incantations. MYalu had not fled far and from his cranny had seen the flight of Bakahenzie and the departure of Zalu Zako, but he dared not betray the doctors. He squatted sullenly and waited while the remainder of the warriors, of whom many had also seen the general ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle

... as physically perfect as any of the free creatures that lived in the hills. And, keenly alive to the life that throbbed and surged about her, her woman's heart and soul responded to the spirit of the season. The droning of the bees in the blossoms that grew in a cranny of the rock; the tinkle, tinkle of the sheep bells, as the flock moved slowly in their feeding; and the soft breathing of Mother Earth was in her ears; while the gentle breeze that stirred her hair came heavy with the smell of growing things. Lying so, she looked far up into ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright

... character than by a pregnant passage from one of the essays[67] of Sir Henry Taylor. 'So manifold are the bearings of money upon the lives and characters of mankind, that an insight which should search out the life of a man in his pecuniary relations would penetrate into almost every cranny of his nature. He who knows like St. Paul both how to spare and how to abound has a great knowledge; for if we take account of all the virtues with which money is mixed up—honesty, justice, generosity, charity, frugality, forethought, ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... against what were believed to be the dank humors of the night. Nor was this enough. You slept, of course, in a four-post bed; and the curtains had to be pulled together beyond the peradventure of a cranny. Then as a last prophylaxis you put on a night-cap. Mr. Pickwick's was tied under the chin like a sunbonnet and the cords dangled against his chest, but this was a matter of taste. It was behind such triple rampart that you slept, and were adjudged safe from the ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks

... rose as they rummaged among the mouldering mass, setting them coughing and sneezing. Now and then a great gray rat would shoot out beneath their very feet, and disappear, like a sudden shadow, into some hole or cranny in the wall. ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle

... have one of them fellows running about loose. I heard of one up in the West Parish last summer, who was staying with Lars Norby. He was running about with a bag and a hammer, and poking his nose into every nook and cranny of the rocks. And all the while he stayed there, the devil ran riot on the farm. Three cows slinked, the bay mare followed suit, and the chickens took the cramps, and died as fast as they were hatched. There was no luck in anything. I tell you, my lass, the Almighty doesn't like ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... thorough search could have been made. Every nook and cranny of the schooner was searched, but at last Eph was obliged to admit that the man he sought ...
— The Submarine Boys for the Flag - Deeding Their Lives to Uncle Sam • Victor G. Durham

... sat silent, being thus called upon to give his evidence, after divers strange gesticulations, opened his mouth like a gasping cod, and with a cadence like that of the east wind singing through a cranny, pronounced, "Half a quarter of a ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... hearty co-operation breathes from every nook and cranny of the Cincinnati schools. Principals and teachers alike sense the fact. Alike they aim toward ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing

... cranny of the rocks Agatha hollowed out the sand, still warm beneath the surface here where the sun had lain on it through long summer days, and made for herself a bed and coverlet and pillow all at once. With the sand piled around ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger

... declined so deep Even with him for consort? I revolve Much memory, pry into the looks and words Of that day's walk beneath the College wall, And nowhere can distinguish, in what gleams Only pure marble through my dusky past, A dubious cranny where such poison-seed Might harbor, nourish what should yield to-day This dread ingredient for the cup I drink. Do not I recognize and honor truth In seeming?—take your truth and for return, Give you my truth, a no less precious gift? You loved me: I ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke

... the table a dozen metal boxes exquisitely adorned with coloured lacquer. On the lid of a silver box an adventure of a monkey is represented in raised work. Pursued by a snake, the monkey has taken refuge in a cranny beneath a projecting rock. The snake sits on the top. He cannot see the monkey, but he catches sight of his reflection in the water below the stone. The monkey, too, sees the image of the snake, and each is now waiting for ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin

... much furniture in the place to search, and before long, with the aid of the constable's lantern, we had investigated every nook and cranny. ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux

... divide bores myself, in the manner of rifles, Into two great divisions, regardless of trifles:— 1230 There's your smooth-bore and screw-bore, who do not much vary In the weight of cold lead they respectively carry. The smooth-bore is one in whose essence the mind Not a corner nor cranny to cling by can find; You feel as in nightmares sometimes, when you slip Down a steep slated roof, where there's nothing to grip; You slide and you slide, the blank horror increases,— You had rather by far be at once ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... Morton said nothing, but he would let no one put a foot before him. He still pressed forward among the rocks, and at last came to a spot from whence he might have sprung at one leap into the ocean. It was a broken cranny on the sea-shore into which the sea beat, and surrounded on every side but the one by huge broken fragments of stone, which at first sight seemed as though they would have admitted of a path down among ...
— Aaron Trow • Anthony Trollope

... more they dug into the facts, however, and into Arnold's reputation, the more it appeared that he was telling the truth. Besides having an unquestionable character, he was an excellent mountain pilot, and mountain pilots are a breed of men who know every nook and cranny of the mountains in their area. The most fantastic part of Arnold's story had been the 1,700-miles-per-hour speed computed from Arnold's timing the objects between two landmarks. "When Arnold told us how he computed the speed," ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt

... members of the home circle, or to smell at flowers laid beside them as solace to their industry. An old grandmother rocked and kissed a naked baby with a pot belly. A big grey rat stole from a rubbish heap close by her, flitted across the sunlit space, and disappeared into a cranny. Pigeons circled above the home activities, delicate lovers of the air, wandered among the palm tops, returned and fearlessly alighted on the brown earth parapets, strutting hither and thither and making their perpetual, characteristic motion of the head, half nod, ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens

... in hot rooms, covered up close and dark, felt it was morning, and chafed and grew restless in their little cells; bright-eyed mice crept back to their tiny homes and nestled timidly together; the sleek house-cat, forgetful of her prey, sat winking at the rays of sun starting through keyhole and cranny in the door, and longed for her stealthy run and warm sleek bask outside. The nobler beasts confined in dens, stood motionless behind their bars and gazed on fluttering boughs, and sunshine peeping through some little window, with eyes in which old forests gleamed—then trod impatiently the ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens

... of a man's nature which has to do with the unknown was in Bascombe shut off by a wall without chink or cranny; he was unaware of its existence. He had come out of the darkness, and was going back into the darkness; all that lay between, plain and clear, he had to do with—nothing more. He could not present to himself the idea of a man who found it impossible to live ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald

... the reason and responsible will. The light 'a priori', in which, according to my conviction, the Scriptures must be read and tried, is no other than the earnest, 'What shall I do to be saved?' with the inward consciousness,—the gleam or flash let into the inner man through the rent or cranny of the prison of sense, however produced by earthquake, or by decay,—as the ground and antecedent of the question; and with a predisposition towards, and an insight into, the 'a priori' probability of the Christian dispensation as the necessary consequents. ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge

... the sun had dried every board and stave so that it became like tinder. The ship itself felt the heat; the seams gaped more widely, the boards warped and fell away from their rusty nails, the timbers were exposed all over it, and the hot, dry wind penetrated every cranny. The interior of the hold and the cabin became free from ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille

... vented itself in frequent audible grating of her strong white teeth. So passed Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, in the examination of witnesses who recapitulated all that had been elicited at the preliminary investigation; and each nook and cranny of recollection in the mind of Anthony Burk, the station agent; of Belshazzer Tatem, the lame gardener; of lean and acrid Miss Angeline, the seamstress, was illuminated by the lurid light of Mr. Churchill's adroit interrogation. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... absence the girl had searched the boudoir from end to end. Her sharp eyes had not missed a cranny big enough to hide a pin, to say nothing of a rope of pearls or a large envelope with five red seals. Both the pearls and the envelope must have been stolen. Were there two thieves, ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... world, who defied public opinion and was suspected of unutterable things—such a personality added enormous zest to his poetry. But now that Byron's whole career has been once more laid out before his countrymen, with light poured on to it from every cranny and peephole, those who take up this final edition of his life and works must feel that their main object and duty should be to form an unbiased estimate of the true value, apart from the author's rank and private history, of poems which ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... end of Paris. The black mud, the stream in the centre of the lane, the reverberations from the high walls, the drinking-shops built from old planks, all seemed to belong to the past. From every nook and cranny, from stairs and balconies, whence fluttered linen hung to dry, streamed forth a crowd of children escorted by an army of lean and hungry cats. It was amazing to see that so small a spot could accommodate such a number of persons. English grooms in shabby liveries, worn-out jockeys, and dilapidated ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet

... an elephant should await our arrival at Chitorgarh to take us up to the ancient city, but a careful search into every nook and cranny failed to ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne

... steps, on the well-boards, in the wood-shed, in the snow; Clara looked down the well till her nose and fingers were blue, but the ear-ring was not to be found. We hunted in-doors, under the stove, and the chairs, and the table, in every possible and impossible nook, cranny, and crevice, but gave up the search in despair. It was a pretty trinket,—a leaf of delicately wrought gold, with a pearl dew-drop on it,—very becoming to Clara, and the first present Winthrop had sent her from his earnings. If she had been a little younger she would have cried. She came ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various

... moraine, but sustained and exposed the fragments which fell on its surface, pulverizing these by keeping them in motion, but producing very unimportant effects on the rock below; the roundings and striation produced by ice were superficial; while a torrent penetrated into every angle and cranny, undermining and wearing continually, and carrying stones, at the lowest estimate, six hundred thousand times as fast as the glacier. Had the quantity of rain which has fallen on Mont Blanc in the form of snow (and descended in the ravines as ice) fallen as rain, and ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... perceptible in the atmosphere; but the rain again began to descend, and for hours pelted like the dischage of a waterspout. Towards morning, a violent thunder storm careered along the crest of the range, and every rock and cranny re-echoed from the crash of the thunder. Deep darkness again settled on the mountains, and a heavy rumbling noise, like the passage of artillery wheels, as followed by the shrill cry of despair. The earth, saturated with moisture, had slidden from their steep slopes, houses and cottages were engulfed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various

... be a GENERAL solution of the problem; and to minds of sombre tinge, who naturally feel life as a tragic mystery, such optimism is a shallow dodge or mean evasion. It accepts, in lieu of a real deliverance, what is a lucky personal accident merely, a cranny to escape by. It leaves the general world unhelped and still in the clutch of Satan. The real deliverance, the twice-born folk insist, must be of universal application. Pain and wrong and death must be fairly met and overcome in higher ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... in the surface, some cranny large enough for Karpin to have stuffed the body into. But I didn't find any of these either as I plodded along, being sure to keep one magnetted boot always in contact with ...
— The Risk Profession • Donald Edwin Westlake

... collection, there is the additional satisfaction that the author is writing only of what he thoroughly knows and understands. At the Lakes Wilson lived for years, and was familiar with every cranny of the hills, from the Pillar to Hawes Water, and from Newby Bridge to Saddleback. He began marching and fishing through the Highlands when he was a boy, enticed even his wife into perilous pedestrian enterprises with him, and, though the extent of his knowledge was perhaps not quite so large ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury

... skilful crab and lobster fisher, and knew every hole and cranny, along several miles of rocky shore, in which the creatures were accustomed to shelter, with not a few of their own peculiarities of character. Contrary to the view taken by some of our naturalists, such as ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... minerals, a piece of stone 3 in. in diameter, irregularly fractured, and a little worn by the weather, has precisely the same character of outline which we should find and admire in a mountain of the same material 6000 ft. high;[9] and, therefore, the eye, though not feeling the cause, rests on every cranny, and crack, and fissure with delight. It is true that we have no idea that every small projection, if of chert, has such an outline as Scawfell's; if of gray-wacke, as Skiddaw's; or if of slate, as Helvellyn's; but their combinations of form are, ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin

... there sounded somewhere as it were the slam of a heavy iron door, the echoes of which seemed to go searching into every cranny of the multitudinous garrets. Florimel gave a shriek, and laying hold of Malcolm, clung to him in terror. A sympathetic tremor, set in motion by her cry, went vibrating through the fisherman's powerful frame, and, almost involuntarily, he clasped her close. With wide eyes ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald

... the warm night sky and the buoyant spirits of those below its velvet richness. Spring was in the air—a stimulation as of etherialized champagne. The spirit of adventure, the spirit of renaissance, the spirit of creation was abroad once more. Not a cranny in even this sprawling section of denaturalized earth but thrilled for the time being with budding hopes, sap-swollen courage, and bright, colorful dreams. Walking beneath the spitting glare of the arc-lights, through the golden mist ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett

... beauty; and, lastly, whilst he pitches his tent on this sacred volcanic isle of nature, does not offer to build houses and barns thereon, reverencing the splendor of God which he sees bursting through each chink and cranny." ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)

... "It is too soon to tell. Just now Alan fills every nook and cranny of me. I can't think of any other man or imagine myself loving anybody else as I loved him. But I am a very much alive person. I don't believe I shall give myself to death forever. Alan himself wouldn't want it so. A part of me will always be his but there are other margins of me that Alan never ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper

... and trample them all, I will, some day," he says, and dances a banshee dance with shuffling feet and flinging arms. The spiders—who are all misers—glare down on him with a poison joy, and hasten to spin a web over the cranny where the can of treasure is buried. "No thief will suspect what is hidden there now," says Tim; and opens another deposit in another cranny, where a spider with golden spots mounts guard. But the mice having set their nests in order only look on at all this, so as not to take their part ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... cannot venture to speak upon what the Germans may be doing. But these two ladies can tell us, perhaps, whether they are not clearing everything up very fast;—making windows in your cave, Miss Margaret, till nobody will be afraid to look into every cranny of it." ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau

... none too soon. The frightened cortege had not left the palace far behind it before the maddened citizens burst open its doors, searched every nook and cranny of the building for the queen and her body-guard, and, finding they had fled, wreaked their wrath on all that was left, plundering the ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... these moments, the ship had been moved cautiously nearer the shore. It was useless to remain out in such thick weather. Her officers knew every nook and cranny of the coast along their beat. They thought that she would be much better in a certain cove. It wasn't a large place, just ample room for a ship to swing at her anchor. She would have an easier time of it till the fog ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad

... of life as we had previously noted from our perch in the chestnut tree. The tough moss upon the stone was fully four inches long, and covered the slab completely. In vain we stamped around looking for a possible hiding place. The massive block didn't offer a cranny that a lizard could hide in, and with an unsolved mystery upon our hands we descended to ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer

... golden-rod. You can almost touch with your cane the low edge of the broad, overhanging eaves. The batten shutters at door and window, with hinges like those of a postern, are shut with a grip that makes one's knuckles and nails feel lacerated. Save in the brick-work itself there is not a cranny. You would say the house has the lock-jaw. There are two doors, and to each a single chipped and battered marble step. Continuing on down the sidewalk, on a line with the house, is a garden masked from view by a high, close ...
— Madame Delphine • George W. Cable

... out of its cranny in the wall. With an apprehensive beat of its wings it sailed off over the deserted village and sent forth ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein

... TIME. Since November I have worked again as I could; a second volume got wrapped up and sealed out of my sight within the last three days. There is but a Third now: one pull more, and then! It seems to me, I will fly into some obscurest cranny of the world, and lie silent there for a twelvemonth. The mind is weary, the body is very sick; a little black speck dances to and fro in the left eye (part of the retina protesting against the liver, and striking work): I cannot help it; it must flutter and dance there, like a signal of distress, ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... looks different to me every time I float on its noble flood. I have seen it from on board steamers large and small, from an Indiaman's deck, the gunwale of a cutter, and the poop of an ironclad, as well as from rowboat and canoe, and have penetrated almost every nook and cranny on the water, some of them a dozen times, yet always it is ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor

... lightning was now forked and intensely blue. It flashed into every cranny in the cave, showing the barnacles on the roof, the little bits of fern, the strange stalactites. After the flash had passed, the darkness which followed was so intense that the light of the dim candle could scarcely be seen. ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade

... junction of two immense boulders. Tearing my hands with the sharp corners of the rocks, I climbed in vain hope of at last seeing the summit. Still rocks piled on rocks faced my wearied eyes, vainly striving to pierce through some chink or cranny into the space behind them. Still rocks, rocks, rocks, against whose adamantine sides my feeble will dashed restlessly and impotently. My eyeballs almost burst, as it seemed, in the intense effort to strain through ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various

... waned grey, and the great light streamed in through every crack and cranny, and the sun had risen on the Tenth of April. What would be done before ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... somehow or other, news, like water, will find a vent, however small the cranny,—by slow degrees it came to be understood that Mrs. Deborah's visiter was a certain Mr. Adolphus Lynfield, clerk to an attorney of no great note in the good town of Belford Regis, and nearly related, as he affirmed, to the ...
— Aunt Deborah • Mary Russell Mitford

... seems, was the priestess of this temple, and your worship had commenced so strong a flirtation with the Lambeth sybil, that all the world looked upon wedlock as inevitable. As I stood in the porch, I overheard your amatory sighs and groans which sounded in my ears like Boreas wooing Vulcan through a cranny in a chimney-corner. On approaching your pew, how was I struck with the change in your physiognomy! Your face heretofore as red and round as the full moon, had, by the joint influence of that planet and the aforesaid Joanna, extended itself to ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold

... on, "you drive me crazy. You expect a man to be all broken up about the sunset, and not to care a dime for a place where fortunes are fought for and made and lost all day; or for a career that consists in studying up life till you have it at your finger-ends, spying out every cranny where you can get your hand in and a dollar out, and standing there in the midst—one foot on bankruptcy, the other on a borrowed dollar, and the whole thing spinning round you like a mill—raking in the stamps; in spite of fate ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Tinishona wrote that exquisite example of the short Japanese poem entitled "Honourable Chrysanthemum in Honourable Hole in Wall." But I do not therefore admit that Tennyson's little verse about the flower in the cranny was not original ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton

... the severest castigation; and he will get it: his abuse of confidence will stick by him all his days. Not that he has done his benefactor—in intention, again—any harm. The patience with which E. M. put the blunders into intelligible form, and the perseverance with which he tried to find a cranny-hole for common reasoning to get in at, are more than respectable: they are admirable. It is, we can assure E. M., a good thing that the nature of the circle-squarer should be so completely exposed as in this volume. The benefit which he intended Mr. James Smith may be {107} ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan

... In Palestine we have passed through vast plains of the richest soil all waste and desolate—here we see the mountain's rugged side clothed with soil not its own, and watered by a thousand rills led captive from fountains far away. Every spot on which a handful of soil can rest, every cranny to which a vine can cling, every ledge on which a mulberry can stand, is occupied. The people too, now nearly all Christians, have a thrifty well-to-do look, and the children, thanks to the energy of the ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn

... the wildest confusion. Beyond these rocks, was a vast chasm above the level of the lake, and extending right and left for a distance of fifty rods. This huge chasm was one mass of crimson light, whose rays pierced every nook and cranny on every side of ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis

... to hesitate. He was singularly unnerved by the glances of those dark blue eyes, which like searchlights seemed to penetrate into every nook and cranny of his soul. But his recklessness and love of adventure having led him so far, it was now too late to retract or to reconsider the risks he might possibly be running. He therefore took the quill and dipped it into ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... master brain of the British army that it was useless longer to chase De Wet up and down over the face of the earth. The Boer general was familiar with every crack and cranny of that earth. He knew where to hide, where to dodge, where to scurry away as fast as his convoy train could bear him company. Behind him, plucky, but totally in ignorance of the natural advantages of the country, toiled and perspired ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller

... go and fasten it," cried Tom, beginning to dress rapidly, and waking up more and more to the fact that a wild storm was raging. Every now and then, after a great deal of shrieking and howling, as if the wind was forcing itself through crack and cranny, there came a loud heavy bass booming sound, as a vast wave of air broke upon the house, making the windows seem to be on the point of falling in, while the slates upon the roof ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn

... times especially, not only the Torch still burns, and perhaps more fiercely than ever, but innumerable Rushlights, and Sulphur-matches, kindled thereat, are also glancing in every direction, so that not the smallest cranny or dog-hole in Nature or Art can remain unilluminated,—it might strike the reflective mind with some surprise that hitherto little or nothing of a fundamental character, whether in the way of Philosophy or History, has been written on the ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle

... these deeply interesting pages we seem to get right back into the dawn of history. We seem to enter into the feelings of the inhabitants when the ships of the sea-rovers hove in sight. Here a carpenter's kit lies concealed in a cranny; there a carefully mended anvil stands at the door of the village smithy. In the palace at Knossos the system of drainage is superior to any known in Europe between that day and the last century. Most wonderful of all is ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner

... woman, elderly nor young; the little Irish beggar that comes barefoot to my door; the mouse that steals out of the cranny in the wainscot; the bird that, in frost and snow, pecks at the window for a crumb. I know somebody to whose knee the black cat loves to climb, against whose shoulder and cheek it loves to purr. The old dog always ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.

... of mines. And now he came up ready to sell something too. He walked straight past Geissler, and addressed himself to the gentlemen; he had found some remarkable specimens of rock hereabouts, quite extraordinary, some blood-like, others like silver; he knew every cranny and corner in the hills around and could go straight to every spot; he knew of long veins of some heavy metal—whatever it ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun

... he?" said Uncle John, "well, I wouldn't be surprised if young Donald had a fishing outfit tucked snugly away in some cranny in the rocks, where he doubtless found it after he ...
— Princess Polly's Playmates • Amy Brooks

... having touched the brooch, ring, or scissors. Carrying on the hollow system, the mother would calmly assume an air of belief, and afterwards ceaselessly watch and dog the child till she tracked her: to her hiding-places—some hole in the garden-wall—some chink or cranny in garret or out-house. This done, Madame would send Desiree out for a walk with her bonne, and profit by her absence to rob the robber. Desiree proved herself the true daughter of her astute parent, by never suffering either her countenance or manner to betray the least sign ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte

... the Pacific & Alaska dock, his glance sweeping every dark nook and cranny that might conceal a huddled form. Out of a sodden sky rain pelted in a ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine

... himself that it was a fancy of his brain. And then he had pulled himself together and listened. And again, as if from very far off, the little cry had stolen to his ear and faded away. Then he had said to himself that it was the night wind caught in some cranny of the house, and striving to get free. He had thrown open his window and leaned out, and trembled, when he found that the hot night was breathless, airless, that no leaf danced in the elm that shaded his study, that the ivy climbing beneath the sill did not stir as he gazed down at it ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens

... to stop writing about Cohasset. There are so many bits of history tucked into every ledge and cranny of her shore. The green in front of the old white meeting-house—one of the prettiest and most perfect meeting-houses on the South Shore—has been pressed by the feet of men assembling for six wars. It makes Cohasset seem venerable, indeed, when one thinks ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery

... access save the clumsy wheels. Upon an elevated perch in front sat the driver, grinning over his shoulder at the scrambling crowd of passengers, most of whom were now loaded upon the wagon, while a circle of disappointed aspirants danced wildly around it, looking for a yet possible nook or cranny. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various

... an idea occurred to me—a plan of vengeance, so bold, so new, and withal so terrible, that I started from my seat as though stung by an adder. I paced up and down restlessly, with this lurid light of fearful revenge pouring in on every nook and cranny of my darkened mind. From whence had come this daring scheme? What devil, or rather what angel of retribution, had whispered it to my soul? Dimly I wondered—but amid all my wonder I began practically to arrange the details ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli

... and near; they examined every nook and cranny; the mountain was steep at this point, and difficult for any sound man; for an old man, crippled, it seemed impossible, but he was nowhere to be found; he ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen

... to keep our men somewhere near their districts, for even from a strategical point of view they were better there, knowing every nook and cranny, which enabled them to find exactly where to hide in case of danger. Even in the dark they were able to tell, after scouting, which way the enemy would be coming. This especially gave a commando the necessary self-reliance, which is of such great importance in battle. ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen

... a ray of moonshine, streaming through a cranny of the ruin above, shone directly on the lock ...
— The Castle of Otranto • Horace Walpole

... y, as cranny; in our, as labour, favour; in ow, as willow, wallow, except allow; in le, as battle, bible; in ish, as banish; in ck, as cambrick, cassock; in ter, as to batter; in age, as courage, in en, as fasten; in et, as ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson

... round, he found that neither Timar nor Almira was there. Timar had gone to the attic to sleep, where he soon made himself a couch of fragrant hay, while Almira had crept into some cranny in ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai

... graceful birds these scavengers are, stronger than the eagle even, tireless and seemingly motionless as they drift along searching every nook and cranny for their provender! But aside from a grudgingly given tribute of admiration for their power, one has about as much respect for them as for the equally graceful rattlesnake, that other product of nature which ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb

... steamer "Palmyra." Lady Burton then walked round and round to every room, recalling all her life in that happy home and all the painful events that had so recently taken place. She gazed pensively and sadly at the beautiful views from the windows and went "into every nook and cranny of the garden." The very walls seemed to mourn ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright

... light our torch, but with the help of some wool from my cap as tinder I set to work with flint and steel, and at last we got the tar rope in a blaze. Thora took the torch in hand and picked her way over the rocky floor, exploring every nook and cranny of the cave. So rapidly did she skip from stone to stone and climb over the intervening boulders, that I frequently found it difficult to keep ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton

... desperate expedient, and I know not how long I had been a prisoner when one day I fancied that I heard something near me, which breathed loudly. Turning to the place from which the sound came I dimly saw a shadowy form which fled at my movement, squeezing itself through a cranny in the wall. I pursued it as fast as I could, and found myself in a narrow crack among the rocks, along which I was just able to force my way. I followed it for what seemed to me many miles, and at last saw before me a glimmer of light which grew clearer ...
— Oriental Literature - The Literature of Arabia • Anonymous

... moments this was of more importance to him than the fact that he had found gold. Wabi and Mukoki were now in a panic of excitement. The buckskin bag was turned inside out; the table was cleared of every other object; every nook and cranny was searched with new enthusiasm. The searchers hardly spoke. Each was intent upon finding—finding—finding. Thus does gold—virgin gold—stir up the sparks of that latent, feverish fire which is in every man's soul. Again Rod joined in the search. ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood

... rest of that night, which seemed interminably long, I patrolled the vicinity of the pavilion, without seeing a living creature or hearing any noise but the concert of the wind, the sea, and the rain. A light in the upper story filtered through a cranny of the shutter, and kept me company till the approach ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various

... work as an inspector of Jesuit institutions across the length and breadth of Canada could not lessen the good father's enthusiasm; his smile was as indefatigable as his critical eyes. The one looked sharply into every corner of a room and every nook and hidden cranny of thoughts and deeds; the other veiled the criticism and soothed the wounds ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand

... place is this? it looks like an old barne: ile peep in at some cranny or other, and try if I can see what they are doing. Such a bevy of beldames did I never behold; and cramming like so many Cormorants: Marry choke you with ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts

... Hermes, Hermeias, is but a transliteration of the Sanscrit Sarameyas, under which he appears in the Vedic songs, as the son of Sarama, the Dawn. Even his character as the master thief and patron saint of the light-fingered gentry, drawn from the way the winds and breezes penetrate every crack and cranny of the house, is absolutely repeated in the Mexican hero-god Quetzalcoatl, who was also the patron of thieves. I might carry the comparison yet further, for as Sarameyas is derived from the root sar, to creep, whence serpo, serpent, the creeper, so the name Quetzalcoatl can be ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton

... quiet study, when the doors were opened unceremoniously and some officials entered with a warrant to search his house. Carpets were taken up, walls were tapped, furniture was overturned and examined, books were removed from their shelves and every cranny inspected with the greatest thoroughness, but the pile of letters lying open on his writing-table, over which they had found him bending when they entered the room, was passed over without so much as ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt

... them on their side. They have never wanted mine. That I have known—KNOWN. She believes that her Deity is in Apple Blossom Court—in the dire holes its people live in, on the broken stairway, in every nook and awful cranny of it—a great Glory we will not see—only waiting to be called and to answer. Do I believe it—do you—do any of those anointed of us who preach each day so glibly 'God is EVERYWHERE'? Who is the one who believes? If there were such a man he would go about ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... the woful and dreadful effects and consequents of the first transgression upon all mankind. The effect is twofold,—sin and misery, or sin and death. The subject is universal in both,—"all men," the whole world. Behold what a flood of calamity hath entered at a small cranny—by one man's transgression! May it not be said of sin in general, what the wise man speaks of strife,—"the beginning of" sin "is as when one letteth out water?" Therefore it had been good leaving it oft before it had been meddled with, it entered at a ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... did not much like the responsibility of the charge committed to me, but fortunately our conductor soon returned with permission to pass. We got out while he drove his 4 in hand quietly into the boat, every cranny of which was filled up by soldiers and artillery horses, which, as if to shew off the pomp of war, capered and reared before our sedate steeds, who only wanted pipes in their mouths to rival the impenetrable gravity of their driver. It is necessary to cross the Waal before you get ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley

... had gone, chagrined and mortified—though filled with wonder, for they had roamed the Cossack, and peered into its every nook and cranny, and stopped to look a second time at the fair-haired young boy who looked like a girl, and hovered close to the master—came His Grace, Wenceslas. He came alone, and with a sneer curling his imperious lips. And his calm, arrogant eyes held a meaning ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... their thoughts. And for to serve their turn, Instead of talk they used signs: the closelier they suppressed The fire of love, the fiercer still it raged in their breast. The wall that parted house from house had riven therein a cranny, Which shrunk at making of the wall: this fault not marked of any Of many hundred years before (what doth not love espy?) These lovers first of all found out, and made a way whereby To talk together secretly, and through the same did go Their loving whisp'rings very light and safely to and fro. ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick

... seemed that he stood in a shaft of consuming light that exposed every shadowy nook and cranny of his nature, and the narrow-minded meanness that she saw, ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand

... shrubs, the colour of mouldy copper, dotted the slopes, and a wilderness of rocks through which we could scarce find a road. There was no living thing in it but carrion birds. And serpents. They dwelt in every cranny of stone, and the noise of them was like bees humming. We lost two stout fellows from their poison. The sky was brass above us and our tongues were dry sticks, and by the foul vapours of the place our scanty food was corrupted. Never have men been nearer death. ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan

... entrance, which cannot be passed in an upright position. The floor is composed of stone slabs, probably covering a hot spring, for they are very warm. The person wishing to use this bath betakes himself to this room, and carefully closes every cranny; a suffocating heat, which induces violent perspiration over the whole frame, is thus generated. The people, however, seldom avail ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer

... dashed on the rocks alone broke the stillness. Trembling with excitement, they swept the boat close around the rocky promontory. John, standing up in the bow, held aloft a lantern, so that every cranny of the rocks might be brought out into full relief. At length ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille

... thin faery-thing, The stormy hush amid, I hear his captive trebles sing Beneath the kettle's lid; Or now a harp of elfland string In some dark cranny hid. ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein

... the gun deck was dark and dismal. The fog oozed in through every crack and cranny, and all was ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday

... unwearying care, Ella Liebling escaped with nothing but a bad cold. Looking very pretty and saucy in her own clothes, which had been cleaned and dried, the little maiden pried about in every nook and cranny of the vessel. The skipper granted her a free pass to his bridge, the engineers to the engine-room. She was even admitted into the great tube of the propeller-shaft. She was everybody's pet, and all soon became acquainted with her mother's ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann

... gradually succumbed to the more potent influences around it, and became their sport and playground. The mountain breezes from the distant summit swept down upon its flimsy structure, shook the great glass windows as with a strong hand, and sent the balm of bay and spruce through every chink and cranny. In the great hall and corridors the carpets billowed with the intruding blast along the floors; there was the murmur of the pines in the passages, and the damp odor of leaves in the dining-room. There was the cry of night birds in the creaking cupola, and ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte

... with eyes that flashed with excitement; and drawing a step nearer his brother, he said in changed tones, "Now must that rascally priest have fled, and it behoves us to search the precincts of the place with all diligence. We must not leave a nook or a cranny unvisited, and must make a mighty coil. Thou takest me, brother, ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green

... lantern and a box of matches. David had borrowed the lantern that afternoon from a Clough End friend under the most solemn vows of secrecy, and he drew it out now with a deliberate and special relish. When he had driven a peg into a cranny of the rock, trimmed half a dip carefully, lighted it, put it into the lantern, and hung the lantern on the peg, he fell back on his heels to study the effect, with a beaming countenance, filled all through with the ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... wanting to feed me pap"—pointing scornfully toward the hall where a tray laden with a teapot and tempting dishes stood on a table near the door. "Do you not yet realize, Minna, that this is my life work?" With a sweeping gesture he indicated the models, brass, wood, and wax, which filled every cranny ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln

... gone, Martha set her loaves aside under cover to rise, never pausing a moment to take breath, before giving the kitchen a "scrub-down" that left no corner or cranny harboring a particle of dust. It was twilight when she finished, and "time to turn to an' ...
— Martha By-the-Day • Julie M. Lippmann

... scattered various articles of female attire. On another table, placed below a high, narrow, shutterless casement (athwart which, instead of a curtain, a checked apron had been loosely hung, and now waved fitfully to and fro in the gusts of wind that made easy ingress through many a chink and cranny), were a looking-glass, sundry appliances of the toilet, a box of coarse rouge, a few ornaments of more show than value, and a watch, the regular and calm click of which produced that indescribably painful feeling which, we fear, many of our readers who have heard the sound in a sick-chamber can ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... as a plaything, Nailing the shoe in its place; while near him the tire of the cart-wheel Lay like a fiery snake, coiled round in a circle of cinders. Oft on autumnal eves, when without in the gathering darkness Bursting with light seemed the smithy, through every cranny and crevice, Warm by the forge within they watched the laboring bellows, And as its panting ceased, and the sparks expired in the ashes, Merrily laughed, and said they were nuns going into the chapel. Oft on sledges in winter, as swift as the swoop of the eagle, Down ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... deep, husky voice, "Now, if aught of harm befalls thee because of this day's doings, I swear by Saint George that the red cock shall crow over the rooftree of this house, for the hot flames shall lick every crack and cranny thereof. As for these women"—here he ground his teeth—"it will be ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle

... to his men, and they scattered throughout the ship, with blowers and disinfectants, driving antiseptic sprays into every crack and cranny of the ship's interior, scouring the hull outside in the rigid pattern prescribed for plague ships. They herded the doctors into the decontamination lock, stripped them of their clothes, scrubbed them down and tossed them ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse

... Bull's joy was equal to that of either of the two; he skipped from room to room, ran up-stairs and down-stairs, from the kitchen to the garrets, and from the garrets to the kitchen; he peeped into every cranny; sometimes he admired the beauty of the architecture and the vast solidity of the mason's work; at other times he commended the symmetry and proportion of the rooms. He walked about the gardens; he bathed himself in the canal, swimming, diving, and beating the liquid element ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot

... into the white parlour, Blanche slipped away. She got hold of her firm ally, the butler, and explained in a very few words what she thought had better be done. Accompanied by Pegler, they went into every room, and into every nook and cranny of the house, upstairs and down—but they found no ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes

... woke up and looked out of his hole, there was as usual no supper for him, and the cellar was close shut. He peered about, to try and find some cranny under the door to creep out at, but there was none. And he felt so hungry that he could almost have eaten the cat, who kept walking to and fro in a melancholy manner—only she was alive, and he couldn't well eat her alive:— besides he knew she was old, and had an idea she might be tough; so he merely ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... piled wood upon the andirons as high as she could reach up the chimney-throat without grazing her hands in withdrawing them, as was the rule in fire-architecture on Virginia plantations. The March wind, finding its way through many a crack and cranny, beat at the flames until they flared this way and that. The cat dashed dizzily across the hearth, and Lucy, with a cry of alarm, darted forward to snatch him from the dangerous neighborhood. She caught hold of him, and pulled him away, and the draught whipped ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland

... cranny and hollow of ground. I wandered in the woods, found every wild flower, knew every tree; knew where the trailing evergreens grew; could go to the spot where I could find what I wanted for bouquets, and surprised ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman

... stood starkly up in the gray rain and the swooping, shifting gray fog. It marked the site of a cabin burned long ago, and in such melancholy wise as it might it told of the home that had been. Now and again far-away lightning flashed on its fireless hearth; a vacant bird's-nest in a cranny duplicated the suggestions of desertion; the cold mist crept in and curled up out of the smokeless flue with a mockery of semblance. The fire that had wrought its devastating will in the black midnight in the deep wilderness, so far from rescue or succor, ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock

... a truth well known to most, That whatsoever thing is lost. We seek it, ere it come to light, In every cranny but the right. The ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various

... that made my nerves quiver. We explored all the corners and cupboards of the place. We even crawled up over the sitting-room behind the dingy curtain, where a large quantity of disused frames and old stretchers were packed away. We familiarized ourselves, in fact, with every nook and cranny of each room; moved the furniture about in a different order; hung up draperies and sketches, and in many ways changed the character of the interior. The faded, weary-looking widow from whom I hired the place, and who took care of the rooms, carried away to her own apartment many of the most obnoxious ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various

... the prescription of a consumptive, and returns him to the tremendous Reality. Again he spreads his hands and cries the sacred formula, the eternal forces advance, he stands fast and is flung bleeding to the wall, or he flees. Afraid, hidden in some cranny of the rocks, nursing his hurt, the child begins to see the truth. This passing from the world as it should be to the world as it is nearly kills him. It is ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post

... of his voice somehow emboldened him. Once more he backed out of his cranny, and with cautious, trembling steps explored the control room. He kept his eyes from the teleview, though it had a terrible fascination for him, and surveyed the NX-1's array of control instruments. The prospective navigator groaned ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various

... her baskets and her handbag; and still not willing to trust the thoroughness of his predecessors he would begin looking all over the immediate vicinity, match in hand. So presently nearly two hundred men, forgetting their soreness and fatigue, were down on their knees scouring every nook and cranny. The sleepers were awakened, the drinkers routed out and put to work, scanning ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard

... housekeeper. It is a matter of the greatest interest to see the letters of every busy trifler. Yet who does not laugh at such men?" This is the attack! but as if some half truths, like light through the cranny in a dark room, had just darted in a stream of atoms over this scoffer at secret history, he suddenly views his object with a very different appearance—for his lordship justly concludes that "It must be confessed, however, that knowledge ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... followed it, the swarm beheld the upheaval, exposure, and destruction of all that had been well or ill done in every cranny of their Hive for generations past. There was black comb so old that they had forgotten where it hung; orange, buff, and ochre-varnished store-comb, built as bees were used to build before the days of artificial foundations; and there was a little, ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling

... floated. Every moment she seemed about to turn over on her back, like a dead fish. The good condition and perfectly water-tight state of the hull alone saved her from this disaster. Below the water-line not a plank had started. There was not a cranny, chink, nor crack; and she had not made a single drop of water in the hold. This was lucky, as the pump, being out ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... told us old things in a new way.' MURPHY. 'He seems to have read a great deal of French criticism, and wants to make it his own; as if he had been for years anatomising the heart of man, and peeping into every cranny of it.' GOLDSMITH. 'It is easier to write that book, than to read it[269].' JOHNSON. 'We have an example of true criticism in Burke's Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful; and, if I recollect, there is also Du Bos[270]; ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell

... abrupt bend, he drew up sharply. Not fifty yards from him, a blaze-faced buckskin, saddled and bridled, with a lariat rope trailing from the saddle horn, was cropping grass. His eyes surveyed every nook and cranny of the coulee for signs of the rider, but seeing none he approached the horse which raised its head and nickered friendly greeting. He loosened his rope, but the horse made no effort to escape, and riding close the man reached down and secured the reins ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx

... its summit and to its cave-pierced sides. It is the home of enormous flocks of white birds, which resemble in form the heron rather than the eider duck, but which, like the latter, line with down drawn from their own breasts the nests which, counted by millions, occupy every nook and cranny of the crystalline walls, about ten miles in circumference. Each of the nests is nearly as large as that of the stork. They are made of a jelly digested from the bones of the fish upon which the birds prey, and are almost as white in colour as the birds themselves. Freshly formed ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg

... the only way to get children thoroughly washed is to keep them well amused. If you knew the diversions that have to be invented before these despotic sovereigns will permit a soft sponge to be passed over every nook and cranny, you would be awestruck at the amount of ingenuity and intelligence demanded by the maternal profession when one takes it seriously. Prayers, scoldings, promises, are alike in requisition; above all, the jugglery must be so dexterous that it defies detection. The case would be desperate had not ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac

... once upon the alert, and ordered every passenger to be closely searched. In consequence, everyone was turned out and searched, a woman searching the female passengers, Signorina Lacava waxing highly indignant. Rayne, Duperre and myself were also very closely searched, while every nook and cranny of the compartments and baggage were rummaged during the transit of the train from Lyons down to Marseilles. The missing bonds could not be discovered, nor did any suspicion attach ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux

... to the tender mercies of her own thoughts. Her memories burnt, as corrosive acids, in her brain. She could find no shadow of protection from her own contempt. There was not one nook or cranny into which that ruthless self-knowledge could not throw its cruel glare. In the hours of darkness, in the haunted hours of the early morning, she and her memories played horrible games with one another. She was hunted, they the hunters. There ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... even before they could be recalled. Explosive bombs literally tore the pirate vessel to fragments, while vials of pure corrosion dissolved her substance into dripping corruption and reeking gases filled every cranny of the wreckage as its torn and dismembered fragments began their long plunge to the ground. The space-ship followed the pieces down, and Rodebush ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith

... to encourage them, for, truth to tell, the dark and the mystery were playing strange tricks with my nerves. As we penetrated deeper into that labyrinth I could start at every shadow and see a figure in every cranny. The men that the dark patches harboured, where were they? Their eyes might be watching every step we took, their pistols covering our bodies as we hurried on to the depths. And yet no sound was heard, ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton

... about, and so ramming and jamming them between the decks by the aid of jack-screws, that they were soon packed together in one homogeneous mass—so tightly squeezed that not even a cockroach could have crawled in between them, not a single crack or cranny being left vacant. ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson

... sounds to be as of great monsters; and the earth to shake under us; and other-whiles there to be a hush and only the steam about us, and somewhere in the distance and uncertainness a low piping of some steam cranny, very ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson

... a poem on the attitude of two people with nothing to do and no book to read, waiting in the parlour of an hotel for the rain to stop, a recollection after more than forty years. That the poet once dropped a pencil into the cranny of an old church where he was sketching inspires an elaborate lyric. The disappearance of a rotted summer-house, the look of a row of silver drops of fog condensed on the bar of a gate, the effect of candlelight years and years ago ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... wherein God ruled not supreme—desert places, where who could tell what might appear? For in such regions wild beasts range, evil herbs flourish, and demons go about. If in very deed he lived and moved and had his being in God, then assuredly there ought not to be one cranny in his nature, one realm of his consciousness, one well spring of thought, where the will of God was a stranger. If all were as it should be, then surely there would be no moment, looking back on which he could not ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald

... snow fell for several days almost without intermission. Then a fierce wind took it in hand, kneading it, packing it, and stuffing it into every crack and cranny of the landscape until hollows were filled, ridges were nicely rounded, and rocks had disappeared. In the meantime, strong white bridges had been thrown across lake and stream, and the great Labrador highway for winter travel was formally opened ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe

... firm, though gentle forward movement on my part, joined with the natural relaxation following her discharge, drove me up to the hilt in the very tightest little cunt it has ever been my good fortune to sheath myself in. I seemed to fill every cranny, and to have stretched every part to its utmost distention. My aunt with her great cunt had a power of pressure that seemed almost to nip off your prick, Miss Frankland, too, was great in that way. But this was ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous

... some sort a continuation of the kitchen. Stone walls or espaliers surround the property, and all sorts of fruit-trees are planted among the vines; in short, not an inch of this precious soil is wasted. If by chance man overlooks some dry cranny in the rocks, Nature puts in a fig-tree, or sows wildflowers or strawberries in sheltered ...
— La Grenadiere • Honore de Balzac

... hateful; all its associations were hateful. If he lived there until he was ninety, the abhorred ghost of the pre-war little Doggie Trevor would always haunt every nook and cranny of the place, mouthing the quarter of a century's shame that had culminated in the Great Disgrace. At last he brought his hand down with a bang on the arm of his chair. He would never live in this House of Dishonour again. ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke



Words linked to "Cranny" :   nook and cranny, chap, impression, depression, hole, imprint



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