"Tapered" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as it has been for a long time in European countries. These devices are driven into the butts of the timbers so as to cross incipient checks and prevent their widening. In place of the regular S-hook another of crimped iron has been devised. (See Fig. 28.) Thin straps of iron with one tapered edge are run between intermeshing cogs and crimped, after which they may be cut off any length desired. The time for driving S-irons of either form is when the cracks ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... was still and pale. The muffled sunlight gleamed like gold tissue through grey gauze, and the beech alleys tapered away to a blue haze blent of sky and forest. It was one of those elusive days when the familiar forms of things seem about to dissolve ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... and since still no acknowledgment had come he strolled along the road himself. He came to a large white house. A flagpost tapered from its roof but no flag blew out its folds. There was a garden about the house, the trim well-ordered garden of the English folk with a lawn and banks of flowers, and a gardener with a hose was busy watering it. Thresk stopped before the hedge. ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... smooth, round, delicately tapered shaft, mostly without limbs, and colored rich purplish-brown, usually enlivened with tufts of yellow lichen. At the top of this magnificent bole, long, curving branches sweep gracefully outward and downward, sometimes forming a ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... down; half—two-thirds of the distance was done, then he looked again and saw the horror that lay before them. Already the bridge was narrow, barely the width of a small room; sixty yards further on it tapered to so fine a point that their stone would almost cover its breadth, and beneath it on either side yawned that unmeasured gulf wherein Nam was lost with the jewels. Nor was this all, for at its narrowest the ice band was broken ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... hall, asking him to kiss her. At such times she often looked quite bright, keen, alert and amused. Towards the end she would give at times playful answers, such as "I came to-day," or "This is the Hall of Fame." This tapered off, so that by December, 1910, she was ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... mighty spirit of the night; and the sails, as the moon shone dimly through them, were as dark as if they had been tarpawlings. But when I walked forward and looked aft, what a beauteous change! Now each mast, with its gently swelling canvass, the higher sails decreasing in size, until they tapered away nearly to a point, though topsail, topgallant sail, royal and skysails, showed like towers of snow, and the cordage like silver threads, while each dark spar seemed to be of ebony, fished with ivory, as a flood of cold, pale, mild light streamed from the beauteous ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... teeth, white, small, and separated like those of a young dog. Their black eyes are soft or stern at will. They are usually of middle size, large-chested, as befits Arabs from the hills, with small heads and finely-tapered wrists and ankles. They are dressed in red, with a covering of two bornouses—a white one beneath, and a black one fastened over. Long iron spurs are attached to their boots of red morocco, which come ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... had a long table in it, and benches. There was no blanket on the bed, only a sheet and a heavy patchwork quilt. Ah, yes, there was something else, carefully laid upon the quilt. This was a linen bag without an opening, which, when spread out, tapered towards the ends. Had I not known something about the old-fashioned nightcap, I should have puzzled a long time before discovering what I was expected to do with this object. The matter is simple to those who know that the cap is formed ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... this to me, then, Shirley, did you? It is bright, keen-edged, finely tapered; it is dangerous-looking. I never yet felt the impulse which could move me to direct this against a fellow-creature. It is difficult to fancy that circumstances could nerve my arm to strike home with ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... scientifically tempered, and proportioned. The strength of a perfectly tempered spring will always remain the same, whether in winter or summer, never losing its elasticity. The best of tempering, however, is useless in a spring badly formed or clumsily tapered. ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... gorgeous pattern of lace, with a fringe of bugles, projecting into eight points so as to form a star of drapery, hanging from the points of the flowery star in the dome. The spaces between the angles were filled with masses of stalactites, dropping one below the other, till they tapered into the plain square sides of ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... seemed an assurance against ill-timed levity. His cheeks were still fat and smooth shaven, but, like many of the successful men of Benham, he now wore a chin beard—a thick tuft of hair which in his case tapered so that it bore some resemblance to the beard of a goat, and gave a rough-and-ready aspect to his appearance suggestive alike of smart, solid worth and an absence of dandified tendencies. Mr. Parsons had a thicker beard of the same character, which ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... light and elegant proportions and the taste with which it was fitted up. The benches were covered with cushions, and its long streamer was of silk. On one of the cushion's lay a lady's glove, of delicate size and shape, with beautifully tapered fingers. I instantly seized it and thrust it in my bosom; it seemed a match for the fairy footstep that ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... fact is noted by Atkinson which is worth including for the guidance of future expeditions. Six new sledges came down per "Terra Nova" from Messrs. Hagen of Christiania, with tapered runners—the breadth of the runner in front being 4 inches, diminishing to 2 1/2 on the after part of the sledge. Compared with our original 12-foot pattern the new sledges contrasted to great advantage ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... Humboldt as of one hundred and eighteen feet in girth. "But this is a walking-stick compared with another at Bodega, as described to Sir George by Governor Etholine, of Sitka." It is thirty-six Russian fathoms (seven feet each) in span, and seventy-five in height; so that, if tapered into a perfect cone, it would contain nearly twenty-two thousand tons of bark and timber. In addition, the valley contains immense herds of wild horses, in troops of several thousands each. What ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... of the population is engaged in farming and stock raising, activities that generate almost half the national income. The economy also depends heavily on exploitation of large uranium deposits. Uranium production grew rapidly in the mid-1970s, but tapered off in the early 1980s when world prices declined. France is a major customer, while Germany, Japan, and Spain also make regular purchases. The depressed demand for uranium has contributed to an overall sluggishness in the economy, a severe trade imbalance, ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... broad and tapering points would be best. He saw too, that if the leaves had their veins running parallel with the midrib they would be stronger. He made search and at length found leaves that seemed made for his purpose. They were thick and leathery and tapered from base to ...
— An American Robinson Crusoe • Samuel B. Allison
... crouching all day long over the kitchen fire, with her elbows on her knees and her feet in the ashes. Once in a while she took a turn at the spit, and she never lacked a coarse gray stocking in her lap, the foot about half finished; it tapered away with her own waning life, and she knit the toe-stitch on the day of her death. She made it her serious business and sole amusement to tell me stories at any time from morning till night, in a mumbling, ...
— An Old Woman's Tale - (From: "The Doliver Romance and Other Pieces: Tales and Sketches") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and I sez, "I am one that is goin' to take good long breaths to the very last." She see I wuz like iron aginst the idee of bein' drawed in, and tapered, and she desisted. I s'pose I did look skairful. But she seemed still to cling to the idee of low necks and trains, and she sez sort ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... he could lay his hands on. He thought of the sapling cross-pieces in Bram's bunk against the wall and tore one out. It was four feet in length and as big around as his fist at one end while at the other it tapered down so that he could grip it easily with ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood
... girl in her stays, and wearing, well over one ear, a flat black wax-cloth cap like the "Boots" of an English hotel. His preposterously long moustache, which was drawn out stiff and straight, and tapered away indefinitely to each side till it finished off in a single thread so thin that it was impossible to say where it ended, seemed to weigh upon the corners of his mouth and form a deep ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... inferior powers obey— The crippled artist [Footnote: Vulcan.] moulds the tempered clay: A maid's coy image rose at Jove's behest; Minerva clasped the zone, diffused too vest; Adored Persuasion and the Graces young Her tapered limbs with golden jewels hung; Round her smooth brow the beauteous-tressed Hours A garland twined of ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... revival of church Gothic and with the effort to make church music and ritual richer and more impressive. But, upon the whole, it was more intellectual than aesthetic, an affair of doctrine and church polity rather than of ecclesiology; while the later phase of ritualism into which it has tapered down appears to the profane to be largely a matter of upholstery, given over to people who concern themselves with the carving of lecterns and the embroidery of chasubles and altar cloths; with Lent lilies, antiphonal choirs, and what Carlyle ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... attracted our attention, was the very surprising size of the anthills, or nests. I measured one, the height of which was 13 feet, and width at the base 7 feet; from whence it tapered gradually to the apex. They are composed of a pale red earth; but how it is sufficiently tempered, I am unable to state; certain is it, that it has almost the consistence of mortar, and will bear the tread of ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... not grow dull. He kept his golden touch and his impotent dollars piled higher and higher. The pile must have mocked Isabel Markley, for it could bring her nothing that she wanted. She stopped trying to give big parties and receptions. Her social efforts tapered down to little dinners for the new people in town. But as the dinner hour grew near she raged—so the servants said—whenever the telephone rang, and in the end she had to give up even the ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... sense of that world of beauty which lies among stems and branches, twigs and leaves. Painfully, but with happy pains, he traced the branch joint by joint, curve by curve, as it spread from the parent stem and tapered to its last delicate twigs. It was like following a river from its source to the sea. But to that sea of summer sky, in which the final ramifications of his branch were lost, Jan did not reach. He was abruptly stopped by the edge of his slate, ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... so narrow that the sun seldom brightened the merry brook, made a deep cut in the rocks. The head of this valley tapered until the walls nearly met; it seemed to lose itself in the shade of fern-faced cliffs, shadowed as they were by fir trees leaning over the brink, as though to search for secrets of the ravine. So deep ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... cones bristled, pyramiding to the base of one tremendous spire that tapered up almost to the top of the ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... opened his mouth to sound a warning, but something in Rathburn's gaze and posture held him silent. Rathburn's body was tense; his gaze was glued to the doorway; his right hand with its slim, brown, tapered fingers, hung above the gun ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts
... took two of the straightest and most tapered of the celery-top pines which Frere had cut on the previous day, and lashed them tightly together, with the butts outwards. He thus produced a spliced stick about twelve feet long. About two feet from either ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... kind that is called the swallow-tail butterfly, because each of its wings tapered to a point, something like the tail of a swallow. We will call the butterfly, Miss Swallow-tail, and now let us see what her ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes
... to make sure it was all right. It was an extension-table, but the spare leaves had been removed, and it was reduced to a circle. A mellow western light from that portion of the sky unswathed in clouds streamed through the window, and did duty as a lamp. The cloth was white, and tapered down in soft folds at the corners; a pleasant profusion of sparkling china and silver, and of savory eatables, filled the circumference of the board, leaving just space enough to operate in, and no more. In the centre of the table, ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... guide-bearing (Fig. 6) is simply a sleeve flanged at one end, babbitted on the inside, and slightly tapered on the outside where it fits into the base. The flange is held securely in the base by eight 3/4-inch cap-screws. Between the cap-screw holes are eight holes tapped to 3/4-inch, and when it is desired to take the bearing ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... Island trees measured 3 feet 11 inches girth at the base, and gradually tapered to a height of more than 40 feet (L. W. Russell). The trees at New Haven are 15-20 feet in height, with a trunk diameter of 6-10 inches, trunk and limbs much twisted by the winds. Their branches, beginning to put out at a ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... length, three feet or three feet six inches and more in the blade, and they were often beautifully finished, the work of the hilts being frequently both elaborate and costly. The blade itself, which was double-edged and inclined to be flat, tapered gradually from hilt to point, and was strengthened by a ridge running ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... he stood but thirteen hands and tipped the beam at scarcely twelve hundred weight, you might have guessed him to be taller by two hands. The deception lay in the way he carried his shapely head and in the manner in which his arched neck tapered from the well-placed shoulders. ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... the kerchief; so that it now framed becomingly her vivacious and yet pensive face. Her feet were gathered under her on the one side, and she leaned on her bare arm, which showed out strong and round, tapered to a slim wrist, and ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... paint would then conceal the slight chinks, and the boat might be examined in every possible way without any trace of this hiding-place being observed. The canoe was some eleven feet long, and nearly three feet in the beam; it tapered at either end, so that it might be propelled backwards or forwards without turning, and stem and stern (interchangeable definitions in this case) each rose a few inches higher than the general gunwale. The sides were about two inches thick, the bottom three, so that although dug out ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... to the left, Aston Hall, in the clear atmosphere, seemed only about a mile away. Beyond, on a gentle eminence, Coleshill was distinctly visible, and in the far distance the tower of St. Mary's Church at Coventry reared to the dim and hazy sky its exquisitely tapered ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... blueback run tapered off at Squitty. September ushered in the annual coho run on its way to the spawning grounds. And the coho did not school along island shores, feeding upon tiny herring. Stray squadrons of coho might pass Squitty, ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... feet from the ground, though some grand old patriarch may be met here and there that has enjoyed six or eight centuries of storms and attained a thickness of ten or even twelve feet, still sweet and fresh in every fiber. The trunk is a remarkably smooth, round, delicately-tapered shaft, straight and regular as if turned in a lathe, mostly without limbs, purplish brown in color and usually enlivened with tufts of a yellow lichen. Toward the head of this magnificent column long branches ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... touch on the subject of billiard balls. It may interest our readers to know that the size of the little black dot on a ball indicates its quality. The nerve which runs through a tusk, is visible at this point, and a ball made from the ivory near the end of the tusk, where the nerve has tapered off to its smallest proportions, is the best ball. The finest balls of all are made from short stubby tusks, which are known as "ball teeth." The ivory in these is closer in grain, and they are much more expensive. Very large tusks are more ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... rest was prairie, with clumps of trees, or beach with rocks, whose outer ring was capriciously tapered off in the form of capes and promontories. A few creeks cut out the coast, but could only afford refuge for two ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... could not help regarding me as one from whom fortune met the most ungrateful returns. At every new turn of the road he would endeavor to attract my attention by the objects around,—no white-turreted chateau, no tapered spire in the distance, escaped him; he kept up a constant ripple of half-muttered praise and censure upon all he saw, and instituted unceasing comparisons between the country and his own, in which, I am bound to say, Ireland rarely, if ever, had ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... small thing beside them. An hundred miles deep lay the lowest of the Underground Fields, and was an hundred miles from side to side, every way; and above it there were three hundred and six fields, each one less in area than that beneath; and in this wise they tapered, until the topmost field which lay direct beneath the lowermost floor of the Great Redoubt, was but four ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... good proportions. Of his face one gathered the impression of a blazing furnace. His cheeks and nose were of a vivid red, and still more fiery was the hair, now hidden 'neath his morion, and the beard that tapered to a dagger's point. His very eyes kept tune with the red harmony of his ferocious countenance, for the whites were ever bloodshot as a drunkard's—which, with no want of ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... the relative shape of the pieces to be joined, the portions that are to meet and form one piece are always shaped in the same general way, this shape being called a "scarf." The end of a piece of work, when scarfed, is tapered off on one side so that the extremity comes to a rather sharp edge. The other side of the piece is left flat and a continuation in the same straight plane with its side of the whole piece of work. The end is then in the form of a bevel or ...
— Oxy-Acetylene Welding and Cutting • Harold P. Manly
... be a sea-monster whilst others did not hesitate to express their belief that it was a sign of the approaching judgment. What seemed strange in the vessel was the substitution of lofty and straight smoke-pipes, rising from the deck, instead of the gracefully tapered masts... and, in place of the spars and rigging, the curious play of the walking-beam and pistons, and the slow turning and splashing of the huge and naked paddlewheels, met the astonished gaze. The dense clouds of smoke, ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... bread labor advocated by Tolstoy and the comfort the harvest fields are said to have once brought to Luther when, much perturbed by many theological difficulties, he suddenly forgot them all in a gush of gratitude for mere bread, exclaiming, "How it stands, that golden yellow corn, on its fine tapered stem; the meek earth, at God's kind bidding, has produced it once again!" At least the toiling poor had this comfort of bread labor, and perhaps it did not matter that they gained it unknowingly and painfully, if only they walked in the path of labor. ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... encouraging him and yelling something else he couldn't understand; pointing skyward. And then he saw it; the Nomad, with its sleek, tapered cylinder of a body nosing down toward them with the silvery aura of its propulsive energy gleaming like a beacon of hope against the dull clouds of the satellite of terror. And there was something ...
— Creatures of Vibration • Harl Vincent
... and bound the whole spirally with the long flat strips of the black bark of the climbing palm-tree. Among other materials, he had brought a quantity of wax of a dark hue, with which he smeared the whole of the outside. The tube he had thus formed tapered towards the muzzle, the mouthpiece being fitted to the upper end. Both ends were tightly bound round with a cord of silk grass; the butt being further secured by a nut cut horizontally through the middle, with a hole in the end forming a ring, which, should ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... fingers were broader than before, and was a little anxious lest they should have lost something of their cunning. He did not know that mechanical faculty, for fine work as well as rough, goes in general with square-pointed fingers. Delicately tapered fingers, whatever they may indicate in the way of artistic invention, are not the fingers of the painter or the sculptor. The finest fingers of the tapering kind I have ever seen, were those of a ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... if they drooped, had no trace of coarseness and were set wide apart above a basin face, the mare showed race indisputably, notwithstanding the white in her forehead was too smudgy to be called a star, or that, though her muzzle tapered finely, the lower lip habitually protruded a bit. A four-year-old, she was still a maiden—consequently had but a feather on her back in the Far and Near. The handicapper had laughed, half wearily, half compassionately as he allotted it, muttering something about the jockey club robbing ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... lines of the body tapered birdlike to the horizontal rudder twenty feet in the rear. The truss work of the body was covered with diagonally crossing strips of veneer, so that, as a whole, with the rigid planes, the monoplane had a substantial appearance. This frame, covered with waterproof canvas, made ...
— On the Edge of the Arctic - An Aeroplane in Snowland • Harry Lincoln Sayler
... good fellow," said Haward negligently, his eyes upon a row of dangling objects. "Fetch me down yonder cane; 't is as delicately tapered and clouded as ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... year we had six new Norwegian sledges twelve feet long, brought down by the ship, with tapered runners of hickory which were 33/4 inches broad in the fore part and 21/4 inches only at the stern. I believe that this was an idea of Scott, who considered that the broad runner in front would press down a path for the tapered part ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... only beheld, as in a mirror, the youthful face which had then been his, and he contemplated it and scrutinised it, as though it had been the face of a stranger. Tall and slender, he had an elongated visage, with an unusually developed forehead, lofty and straight like a tower; whilst his jaws tapered, ending in a small refined chin. He seemed, in fact, to be all brains; his mouth, rather large, alone retained an expression of tenderness. Indeed, when his usually serious face relaxed, his mouth and eyes acquired ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... it, he strolled pensively down towards the swimming-pool. A peacock and his hen trailed their shabby finery across the turf of the lower lawn. Odious birds! Their necks, thick and greedily fleshy at the roots, tapered up to the cruel inanity of their brainless heads, their flat eyes and piercing beaks. The fabulists were right, he reflected, when they took beasts to illustrate their tractates of human morality. Animals resemble men with all the truthfulness of a caricature. (Oh, the ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... globular bottle, according to a picture in a 1743 advertisement.[58] Speculation regarding the size and shape of the Stoughton bottle varies.[59] At least one Stoughton bottle was described as "Round amber. Tapered from domed shoulder to base. Long 5 in. bulged neck. Square ...
— Old English Patent Medicines in America • George B. Griffenhagen
... to the twist of the rope. The same operation applied to all the strands will give the result shown by Fig. 34. The splicing may be continued in the same manner to any extent (Fig. 35) and the free ends of the strands may be cut off when desired. The splice may be neatly tapered by cutting out a few fibers from each strand each time it is passed through the rope. Rolling under a board or the foot ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... forming a continuous structure round the entire vessel, extending well above and below the water-line, tapered off towards the bows and stern, and was subdivided into different compartments. In this way an explosion against one section did not necessarily damage any other part. The British monitors which so successfully bombarded the Belgian coast and the fortifications ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... his hands motionless for a single instant. Although he was of moderate build, with a fair suggestion of flesh, there were yet the marks of the artist and of the creative temperament in the fine sloping contours of his head and in his remarkably long fingers, which tapered to nails manicured immaculately. Kennedy seemed to pay particular attention to his eyes, which were dark, soft, ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... thirty-five or fifty years of age, I could not precisely state. He was tall, his forehead broad, his nose straight, his mouth clearly etched, his teeth magnificent, his hands refined, tapered, and to use a word from palmistry, highly "psychic," in other words, worthy of serving a lofty and passionate spirit. This man was certainly the most wonderful physical specimen I had ever encountered. One ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... succeeded in formulating very definite reasons for the feeling. Kate was a beauty, and a beauty of a type undeniably orthodox and almost aristocratic. She was tall and slight, her nose was the least trifle arched, her fingers tapered, and so, it was believed, did her feet. Her hair was golden, her mouth was small, and her accomplishments considerable. From her childhood she had been considered clever, and had vindicated her reputation by gaining ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... Harson as they stood near a tall, beautiful tree that tapered to a point, "has, you see, a straight, smooth trunk and tapers regularly and rapidly to the top. You will notice, too, that the leaves, which are needle-shaped and nearly flat, do not grow in clusters, but singly, and that their ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... curse of heaven on them: he asked that they should wear the mark of crime even to the fourth generation, by coming into the world deformed and mutilated as he was then. And it was so. The next child born in that house had round, hoof-like feet, with only two toes, and hands that tapered from the wrist into a single long finger. And in time there were twenty people so deformed in the valley: The "crab-clawed Zoarites" they ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... courteous, mildly abstracted greeting when Steve loomed in the doorway, his attitude was still very patently that of a man who attempts to conceal his own perplexities lest they compound those of another whose perplexities are already more than enough. He rose and held out a finely tapered hand. ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... was almost as large as a cathedral, and possessed a steeple which was a landmark for the neighbourhood. It was possible to ascend as far as the flying buttresses, and to walk round a stone causeway that encircled the tower just where the spire tapered up. The entrance was in the nave, through a small oak door studded with nails. The verger, aged, wheezy, and inclined to conversation, ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... suspected Mr. Drew's profession, I think I should not have remarked that he gave each of us a keen look as he raised his head. He had reddish-brown hair, and a pair of bushy red whiskers, each of which tapered to a long point. He was broad in the shoulders, and the clothes he wore rather enhanced this breadth. His suit was gray and almost new, the trousers perceptibly bagging at the knee, and he had a felt hat, a necktie of the white and flowery pattern, and square-toed "Congress" boots. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the red-headed man's own "tump-line," a leather strap about twelve feet long, which tapered from the middle to both ends, tied this firmly round the angry live mummy, and left him ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... slot and is held tight by the tapered ferrule. This can be pulled off by hand and the blade lengthened by pulling it ...
— Wood-Block Printing - A Description of the Craft of Woodcutting and Colour Printing Based on the Japanese Practice • F. Morley Fletcher
... machine which was known as the "Band" machine. In this machine the characters required for printing were indented in the edges of a series of narrow brass bands, each band containing a full alphabet, and hanging, with spacers, side by side in the machine. The bands tapered in thickness from top to bottom, the characters being arranged upon them in the order of the width-space which they occupied. By touching the keys of a keyboard similar to a typewriter, the bands dropped successively, bringing the characters required ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... not seen the bay, and the talk tapered off desultorily to a final "So-long, see yuh later." Lone rode on, careful not to look back. So she was Brit Hunter's girl! Lone whistled softly to himself while he studied this new angle of the problem,—for a problem he was beginning to consider it. She was ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... like a bird on a branch. At last Grandpa, after some mild protesting, was lulled by the rhapsody, and dozed once more; when Johnnie adroitly tapered off his song, brought the chair to a cautious stop, drew the book from its warm hiding place, sank into the morris chair, and again there swept into the kitchen, as on the crest of a stream, ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... upstairs from the ground floor of a flat seeking to attract the people who rarely answer. The only difference between it and the ordinary mouthpiece was that it was set in so that it was even with the woodwork of the door, and did not project at all. This mouthpiece tapered all around inside, and terminated in a keyhole which was rubber-lined. On the other side of this keyhole was a hard surface, padded with rubber, but having just opposite the mouth of the keyhole a small orifice extending through to a metal surface. That metal surface ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... The tapered choir, at the late hour of prayer, Oft let me tread, while to th' according voice The many-sounding organ peals on high The clear slow-dittied chant or varied hymn, Till all my soul is bathed in ecstasies And lapped in Paradise. Or let me sit Far in sequestered aisles of ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... elicited her remarks. In addition to the bright and circular flame, was now to be seen a fainter, though a vivid light, of an equal diameter to the other at the upper end, but which, after extending downward for many feet, gradually tapered to a point at its lower extremity. A dark space was plainly visible between the two, and the new illumination was placed beneath the other, the whole forming an appearance not unlike an inverted note of admiration. It was soon evident that ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... being spaced amidships as shown in Fig. 4; then the points where they cross the bow and stern and all the moulds are marked, and notches one inch by one-fourth of an inch cut to receive them, the edges of the bow and stern being tapered off at the same time to half an inch; then all the parts are placed in position again, and fastened with one-inch screws, except where the keelson joins the bow, stern, and moulds, where one inch and a half screws are used. Each screw is dipped in white ...
— Harper's Young People, April 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... and then. Miss Hood was a year younger than himself, and had well outgrown girlishness. She was of very slight build, looked indeed rather frail; but her face, though lacking colour, had the firmness of health. It was very broad at the forehead, and tapered down into narrowness; the eyes seemed set at an unusual distance from each other, though the nose was thin and of perfect form, its profile making but a slight angle away from the line of the brows. Her lips were large, but finely curved; the chin was prominent, ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... the first ten presidents, New England furnished only the two Adamses, while Virginia gave to the nation, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and then tapered off with Tyler. ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... plantations. Others shave, but the Mohammedans allow all the beard to grow.... Very comely some of the women are in their close-clinging soft brief robes and tantalizing veils—a costume leaving shoulders, arms, and ankles bare. The dark arm is always tapered and rounded; the silver- circled ankle always elegantly knit to the light straight foot. Many slim girls, whether standing or walking or in repose, offer remarkable studies of grace; their attitude when erect always suggests lightness ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... he shut to the door and left me. All at once it flashed on me where I was: and so terrible was the knowledge, that a cold sweat brake forth all over me. I had heard of the horrible prison in the Bishop of Lincoln's Palace of Woburn, called Little Ease [Note 1], which tapered down to a point, wherein a man might neither stand, nor sit, nor lie. Somewhat like despair came over me. Were they about to leave me to lie here and die of hunger? I shouted, and my voice came back to me with a mocking echo. I held my breath to listen, and I heard no sound. I ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... laid the logs of the house itself. These pieces were put in shorter, as we advanced to the top—so that the top ones might be lighter and more easily supported by those below; and when the whole was finished, and the chinks filled with clay, our chimney tapered upward like the funnel of a little factory. The chimney and fireplace occupied us quite a day, and at night—although it was not very cold—we tried it with a log-fire. It ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... tradition that the stone fell from the skies at Pessinus. There was another great stone in Syria (Herodianus, v. 5), in the temple of the Sun, which was worshipped: the stone was round in the lower part, and gradually tapered upwards; the colour was black, and the people Aida that it fell from heaven. It is probable that these stones were aerolites, the falling of which is often recorded in ancient writers, and now established beyond all doubt by repeated observation in modern times. ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... anvil, and work with the maul and spade. The people of this country are ill dressed in comparison with those of France, and there are more spots of uncultivated ground. The plough here is made with a single handle, which is a beam twelve feet long, six inches in diameter below, and tapered to about two inches at the upper end. They use goads for the oxen, not whips. The first swallows I have seen are to-day. There is a wine called Gatina, made in the neighborhood of Vercelli, both red and white. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... with dark, glossy hair of considerable length; the neck, breasts, and body of the female as low as the hips, appeared like a well-formed woman; from thence to the extremity of the tail they were perfect fish. The shoulders and arms were in good proportion, but from the elbow tapered to a fin, like the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... the most remarkable part of the equipage. The handle was only sixteen inches in length, but the lash was twenty feet long, made of the toughest seal-skin, and as thick as a man's wrist near the handle, whence it tapered off to a fine point. The labour of using such a formidable weapon is so great that Esquimaux usually, when practicable, travel in couples, one sledge behind the other. The dogs of the last sledge follow mechanically and require no whip, and the riders change about so as to relieve each other. ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... until nearly the last in order to get all the information possible as to the way the rest of the contestants played the game. A pole had been loaned to him, or rather a "peg," they called it, eight feet long, tapered so as to allow it to go through the brass ring for fully two ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in New Mexico • Frank Gee Patchin
... When he tapered off the stirring symphonies of Kun Gee with tranquilizing, soothing melodies from the Rim School of composers, Maril regarded him with a very peculiar ...
— This World Is Taboo • Murray Leinster
... set up in the centre of this building, the upper end fixed by a wooden pin to the top of the couple, and the lower end in an oblong trink in the earth or floor; and lastly, another pole was set across horizontally, having both ends tapered, one end of which was supported in a hole in the side of the perpendicular pole, and the other end in a similar hole in the couple leg. The horizontal stick was called the auger, having four short arms or levers fixed in its centre, to work ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various
... believe that the Sirian and the dwarf burned with impatience to converse with the atoms. The dwarf feared that his thunderous voice, and assuredly Micromegas, would deafen the mites without being understood. They had to diminish its force. They placed toothpicks in their mouths, whose tapered ends fell around the ship. The Sirian put the dwarf on his knees and the ship with its crew on a fingernail. He lowered his head and spoke softly. Finally, relying on these precautions and many others, he ...
— Romans — Volume 3: Micromegas • Voltaire
... of the Ajax was one of surpassing beauty and interest. The bright moonbeams rested on the waters, and left a silvery track upon the waves. Ahead and astern, the lofty masts of the squadron tapered darkly towards the sky, whilst the outline of every rope and spar was sharply defined against the clear blue vault of heaven. Every man in the ship, from the commander to the youngest boy, could feel and understand this natural beauty; but there ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... shielding her face from the searing heat with her arms, and so did not see what happened then. A burning branch like a long, flaming dagger flew straight with the wind and lighted true as if flung by the hand of an enemy. A long, neatly tapered stack received it fairly, and Kent's cry brought Val's arms down, and her ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... forces, would always be carried around the earth by those electro-magnetic Aether currents, and outside of those currents it could not pass. But the earth is only 8000 miles in diameter, therefore if the currents gradually tapered off as suggested, by the time the aetherial currents reached the distance of the moon, their depth would not ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... centuries of Viking raids into Europe tapered off following the adoption of Christianity by King Olav TRYGGVASON in 994. Conversion of the Norwegian kingdom occurred over the next several decades. In 1397, Norway was absorbed into a union with Denmark that was to last for more than ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... heads. The willows waved their feathery boughs in the sun and gleamed bright against the dark background of the pines. Migwan noted down the different contours of the trees, how the elms spread out wide at the top, how the pines tapered to a point, how the maples spread out irregularly. A flock of wild ducks passed them. In some places the banks of the river were honeycombed by the holes of bank swallows. A turtle, sitting on a half-sunken log, stretched his neck and looked after them as long as he could see them. All these ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... Gourdins, Robert and John Gaillard Keith, were dashing young fellows as I recollect them, belonging to Charleston, South Carolina. The "Southerners" were the reigning College elegans of that time, the merveilleux, the mirliflores, of their day. Their swallow-tail coats tapered to an arrow-point angle, and the prints of their little delicate calfskin boots in the snow were objects of great admiration to the village boys of the period. I cannot help wondering what brought Emerson and the showy, fascinating John ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... found a piece he had cut in making the tube. It was perfectly round, ideal for the purpose. He sliced off the inner side where it tapered to a cone, then, working only by eye estimate, cut out a hole in which the wedge of fission material would fit. He wasn't off by a thirty-second of an inch. Skillful application of the torch melted the thorium around the wedge ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage
... cap tends to become a pallid, reddish tan. This description is partially taken from Stevenson. The specimen we found had the margin revolute, it was 2 1/2 inches broad, and the stem 2 inches long. The flesh was white and the cap was turning a brownish color. The stem slightly tapered toward the base. The milk was scanty and peppery. Found in the beginning of August in the woods. ...
— Among the Mushrooms - A Guide For Beginners • Ellen M. Dallas and Caroline A. Burgin
... was attired as a mountaineer. His hat tapered to the top, and was crowned by a single heron feather. Hussars might have envied him his moustaches. From his right side protruded a couteau de chasse; and his legs were not a little set off by the tight-laced boots, which, coming up some way beyond the ancle, displayed his calf ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... the tips of his tapered fingers trembling on an empty table, straining forward and staring into the stranger's face; "no, Jack Ramsey has not been here; and if what you say be true—he sleeps alone in yonder fastness. Alas, poor Ramsey!—Ah knew 'im well"; and ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... capital in Sicily and Greece, it is already far in advance of anything that had gone before it in Greece, and it is quite different from the columns of Egypt. In the Doric temple of Corinth (650-600 B. C.) the columns have already reached the type form, the tapered shaft with its entasis or slight convex curvature in outline, its massive solidity (the ratio is one of diameter to four and a quarter of height), and the bold parabolic curve of the echinus moulding under the abacus of its ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... the height of about a dozen feet from the ground the trunk forked into a number of great branches, each of which was like a tree of itself; and, in fact, some of them were far thicker than most trees of the forest. These branches stretched out for many yards—at first horizontally, but as they tapered towards a point, they began gradually to curve downwards, until their extreme ends—the topmost twigs with their leaves—quite touched the earth. It was for this reason we had not been able to see the main trunk as we approached. The foliage of the outer boughs concealed it from the view, and ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... ef that was all! Why, he's been goin' thar twice an' three times a week regular. Jest as he begun taperin' off with you he tapered on with her. I don't reckon you hardly remember when he come heer last, do you? Ab Lithicum's as big a fool as yore mother was in not callin' a halt. Jest let a man have a little property, an' be a peg or two higher as to family connections, ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... "Snug," and said to myself, "I am sure I cannot tell which of these children I am most attached to." All the features and properties of little Phebe were aristocratic: beautiful feet and anckles; small, little plump hands, and finely-tapered fingers; an eye of the purest water and the most noble expression, beaming through a curtain of deep blue, under a canopy of the finest auburn; a brow, nose, lips, and chin, all exquisitely formed and proportioned. No child in the neighbourhood ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... neighbor. The face was that of a woman of perhaps twenty-four. The hair was brown, the eyes brown. The head was beautifully placed on a round, smooth throat. With a wide forehead, with great width between the eyes, the face tapered to a small round chin. The mouth and under the eyes smiled in a thousand different ways. The beauty that was there was subtle, not discoverable by every one.—The girl settled back upon the grass beneath the thorn-tree. She was very near Glenfernie; he could see the rise and fall ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... and much respect, (I never judge men from what they seem on the outside, not I!) shall give me your confidence, I warrant you shall see I am no unscrupulous politician!" Here the throng sent up a loud cheer, and tapered it off with three tigers. "Ah! that is what I like," resumed the major; "I always did like the music of the Democracy. It sounds as if it was the free offering of hearts innocent, and not given to retrieve." "Intrigue," ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... people of such cultured taste, and that was the size of the ladies' waists. Of all that I measured not one was less than thirty inches in circumference, and it was rare to meet with one that small. At first I thought a waist that tapered from the arm pits would be an added beauty, if only these ladies would be taught how to acquire it. But I lived long enough among them to look upon a tapering waist as a disgusting deformity. They considered a large ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... give up the cathedrals, after all: Santa Maria del Fiore, with Brunelleschi's dome, which Michel Angelo wouldn't copy and couldn't beat; Milan, aflame with statues, like a thousand-tapered candelabrum; Tours, with its embroidered portal, so like the lace of an archbishop's robe; even Notre Dame of Paris, with its new spire; Rouen, Amiens, Chartres,—we must ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... or pins of ivory, bone, or steel. The latter are most commonly used, and should have tapered points, without the ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... in the flaming sun brought us to the foot of the great Pyramid of Cheops. It was a fairy vision no longer. It was a corrugated, unsightly mountain of stone. Each of its monstrous sides was a wide stairway which rose upward, step above step, narrowing as it went, till it tapered to a point far aloft in the air. Insect men and women—pilgrims from the Quaker City—were creeping about its dizzy perches, and one little black swarm were waving postage stamps from the airy summit—handkerchiefs will ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... five or six inches in length; make stoppers of wood to fit both ends, two and a half or three inches long; with your nail-gimlet make a hole through them lengthwise: when put together it should be about ten inches. The ends may be tapered. On one end leave a notch, that it may be held with the teeth, which is the most convenient way, as you will often want to use both hands: it is also always ready, without any trouble to blow through, and also to keep the tobacco burning. When ready ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby |
