"Thinned" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... next three months Philip worked on subjects which were new to him. The unwieldy crowd which had entered the Medical School nearly two years before had thinned out: some had left the hospital, finding the examinations more difficult to pass than they expected, some had been taken away by parents who had not foreseen the expense of life in London, and some had drifted ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... he saw in print, a credulity of which many might have reason to complain. Although Fray Salvi made little use of violence, yet, as an old wiseacre of the town said, what he lacked in quantity he made up in quality. But this should not be counted against him, for the fasts and abstinences thinned his blood and unstrung his nerves and, as the people said, the wind got into his head. Thus it came about that it was not possible to learn from the condition of the sacristans' backs whether the curate ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... the deep dense plumes of night are thinned Surely with winnowing of the glimmering wind Whose feet are fledged with morning; and the breath Begins in heaven that sings the dark to death. And all the night wherein men groaned and sinned Sickens at heart to ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... time our retreat was ordered our ammunition was nearly exhausted and the ranks fearfully thinned. The Rebels had made a furious attack, in which they were repulsed. General Sweeney insisted that it was their last effort, and if we remained on the ground we would not be molested again. Major Sturgis, upon whom the command devolved after General Lyon's death, reasoned otherwise, and considered ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... natures. Longstreet's veterans, who had followed their old leader from the ensanguined fields of Virginia to Chicamauga and East Tennessee, and who had again been forwarded to their old fields of conflict, were thinned in numbers, and had lost much of the fierce fire of pluck that characterised them ...
— Lee's Last Campaign • John C. Gorman
... into the lower bar-room, which, though rather thinned, presented a picture of characters stimulated to the tottering point. A motion had been made and strongly seconded to visit the voluptuous house of a certain lady, which it is considered a stranger has not seen Charleston until he has visited. The Captain remonstrated against this, assuring ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... destroyed by buzzards, sparrow-hawks, and shrikes. Of those which migrate in autumn a considerable proportion are probably lost at sea or otherwise destroyed before they reach a place of safety; while those which remain with us are greatly thinned by cold and starvation during severe winters. Exactly the same thing goes on with every species of wild animal and plant from the lowest to the highest. All breed at such a rate, that in a few years the progeny of any one species would, if allowed to increase unchecked, ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... splendidly. As their ranks were thinned by shot and grape, they closed up into place, and kept a good line. But no matter what high soldierly qualities these men were endowed with, no matter how faithfully they obeyed the oft-repeated order to "charge," it was both a moral and physical impossibility for these men to ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... every tree upon it, became aware that she was close to the Chetworth gate. Suddenly the rattle of an engine and some men's voices caught her ear. The plough, sure enough! The sound of it was becoming common in the country-side. Then as the mist thinned and drifted she saw the thing plain—the puffing engine, one man driving and another following, while in their wake ran the black glistening furrow, where the grass ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of chiefs!—alas! how few, Since but the fleeting of a day Had thinned it; but this wreck was true And chivalrous: upon the clay Each sate him down, all sad and mute, Beside his monarch and his steed; 50 For danger levels man and brute, And all are fellows in their ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... advance and endure this storm of shot and shell, that by the time he reached the line of the enemy's infantry, his ranks were too much broken to offer a very formidable front. From the enemy's fortified position their deadly fire caused our already thinned ranks to melt like snow before the sun's warm rays. The result was a complete repulse along the whole line. But McClellan was only too glad to be allowed a breathing spell from his seven days of continual defeat, and availed himself of the ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... light came from her when she moved: And since the pirate would not yield her up, The King impaled him for his piracy; Then made her Queen: but those isle-nurtured eyes Waged such unwilling though successful war On all the youth, they sickened; councils thinned, And armies waned, for magnet-like she drew The rustiest iron of old fighters' hearts; And beasts themselves would worship; camels knelt Unbidden, and the brutes of mountain back That carry kings in castles, bowed ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... seek the Union left, and strike a Stonewall Jackson blow. Its march will be covered by the friendly woods. The keen-eyed adjutants are already warning the captains of every detail of the attack. Calm and unmoved, the gaunt centurions of the thinned host accepted the honorable charges of the forlorn hope. Valois' powder-seasoned fragment of the army was a "corps d'elite." Peyton wondered, as he watched his suffering colonel, if either would see ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... Then fry the slices delicately in lard. Make a ragout of chickens' hearts and livers as follows: Put two tablespoons of butter into a saucepan, fry the hearts and livers, and when cooked add two tablespoons of tomato paste, thinned with hot water (or a corresponding amount of tomato sauce). ...
— Simple Italian Cookery • Antonia Isola
... his own, had brought the other. A headstrong, dark youth with the characteristic sloping eyebrows and slender, vigorous, carriage. The traditional rebellious spirit had involved Jasper in disgrace; it had thinned his own blood. ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... turned in the doorway and sang in her reedy little voice, much thinned by the cold, sang to soften her young ...
— The Truce of God • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... puffs, driving the fog before it until the blank vapour dulled the faint morning light and the dawn faded into a colourless twilight. Spectral poplars, rank on rank, loomed up in the mist, endless rows of them, fading from sight as the vapours crowded in, appearing again as the fog thinned in a current ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... shots cracked out, fired into space. They hurt nobody. Amid the smoke, the engineer vanished; and when it had thinned away there was no trace of him. Robur the Conqueror had flown, as if some apparatus of aviation had borne him ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... to grip, to restrain, to impel me. If I may use such a figure, He stands, as it were, bugle in hand, and blows the sweet strains that are meant to set the echoes flying. But the rock must receive the impact of the vibrations ere it can throw back the thinned echo of the music. Love must be believed and known ere it can ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... was seen a strange and horrible sight. The rods twisted like branches of green wood in the fire, the ends flattened out into the shape of heads, thinned out into the shape of tails. Some remained smooth, others became scaly, according to the kind of serpent. All these swarmed and crawled and hissed, interlaced and knotted into hideous knots. There were vipers bearing ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... invading blast, He knew that it was no dream. And all the night belief held fast, Till thinned by the morning beam. Thus radiant mornings and pale nights passed ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... cacao-planters of Trinidad, I recommended twenty-four to thirty feet from tree to tree as the proper distance; but so as to meet the feelings of those who, unfortunately for themselves, consider every cacao tree cut down a sacrifice, I propose that the trees be thinned out to twenty-four feet, and that, at intervals of twenty rows at most, avenues of fifty feet in both directions should be left. After this, it will be better seen what may be necessary to be done to each individual tree; neither should the shade trees be forgotten; as a general ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... from a window in Fleet Street, watched him go by. Prince Rosmaran had been specially bidden to the luncheon, but he, too, had been with them earlier in the morning. Afterwards they turned their backs upon the city, and as soon as the crowd had thinned made their way to one of ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of their officers, who were dancing and flourishing their swords in front, they at last boldly advanced to the opposite side of our hedge, and began to deploy. Our first line, in the mean time, was getting so thinned, that Picton found it necessary to bring up his second, but fell in the act of doing it. The command of the division, at that critical moment, devolved upon Sir James Kempt, who was galloping along ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... rays, and when the band of Itchoua ceased to work,—so clear was their habitual domain, so illuminated were the grand, vaporous backgrounds of the Pyrenees and of Spain—the frontier fraud was resumed more ardently, as soon as the thinned crescent had become discreet and early setting. Then, in these beautiful times, smuggling by night was exquisite; a trade of solitude and of meditation when the mind of the naive and very pardonable defrauders ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... of individuals or groups, multiplied. A sort of methodical and inevitable tree-blazing—conducted sometimes by the police—ransacked the population and thinned it from day to day ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... abreast of the Silas P. Young. Then they shot into a deep gully and were lost among a thick forest of spruce-trees. For two miles horse and man evaded low-hanging branches and treacherous footfalls, until the timber thinned and the straggling Yukon came again to view. Away up-stream was the steamboat, crawling down by the near bank. There was no time to be lost if Angela's escape was to be frustrated. He tethered his foam-flecked mount to a tree and crept down the steep bank. The muddied water swirled along ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... on their heads to fend off stones, swarm up it, and axes flashing on the crest of the wall, and arrows flying, and smoke of guns: but the smoke cleared, and lo! the ladder was gone, and the three libbards grinned on the flag of England. So went the war, company after company staggering thinned from the fosse, and re-forming behind the cover of the vineyards; company after company marching forth, fresh and glorious, to fare as their friends had fared. And ever, with each company, went the Maid at their head, and D'Aulon, ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... the house has been in operation. Our last visit was in the early part of August, 1863, when we counted 734 bunches of grapes, weighing from one to seven pounds each, the Syrian being the grape which reached the last figure. Almost as many bunches were thinned out. In some cases too many are left, but they look very fine. The Muscats are extremely well set, and some of the bunches will weigh fully three pounds. The Black Hamburghs look quite as well; but the finest show of fruit is on the Esperione. The large number of bunches is ...
— Woodward's Graperies and Horticultural Buildings • George E. Woodward
... never-dying force, the wind Roared till we shouted with it, roared until Its vast vitality of wrath was thinned, Had beat its ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... the street was thinned of a part of its gay throng. Completely worn in body as well as mind, with slow faltering steps, Fleda moved on among those still left; looking upon them with a curious eye, as if they and she belonged to ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... and the masses which compose it are small and rounded, but thinned off towards a part, or towards the whole of their circumference. They are sometimes separate, and sometimes in groups. (Figures 4, ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... will admit of easy irrigation are usually turned over with the plough immediately after the grain is cut; which, in the middle provinces, is ready for the sickle early in June, about the same time that the young rice fields stand at the height of eight or ten inches. These being now thinned, the young plants are transplanted into the prepared wheat lands, which are then immediately flooded. Upon such a crop they reckon from fifteen to twenty for one. Instead of rice one of the millets is sometimes ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... more miles had been added, the woods thinned out perceptibly, and when the clearing was sufficient to enable them to get the first glimpse ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... thinned away; and at last only a few who had got in at half-price remained. To them the attendants hinted that they were going to shut shop, and one by one they shuffled out, the readier that Clare was now so tired that Pummy could not get up the merest tail ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... had fallen; the clouds that covered the moon had just thinned enough to render darkness visible, and nothing was to be heard save the continual croaking of the frogs, which are very large and numerous in the marshes of the Danube, when four boats pushed off and proceeded quickly, yet quietly, up ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... the gunwales into notches which should have been cut at the ends of the cross-boards. The shrinkage caused by the drying will stretch the paper tightly over the framework. When thoroughly dry, varnish inside and out with asphaltum varnish thinned with turpentine, and as soon as that has soaked in, apply a second coat of the same varnish, but with less turpentine; and finally cover the laps or joints of the paper with pieces of muslin stuck on with thick varnish. Now remove the loose strips of ash and put on another layer of paper, fastening ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... the British and settled in 1790 by the Bounty mutineers and their Tahitian companions. Pitcairn was the first Pacific island to become a British colony (in 1838) and today remains the last vestige of that empire in the South Pacific. Outmigration, primarily to New Zealand, has thinned the population from a peak of 233 in 1937 to less ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... coming," Gunston jeered. "Carrots have to be thinned when they're so far along. So do radishes. But carrots grow slow. Radishes grow fast. The slow-going carrots serve the purpose of thinning the radishes. And when the radishes are pulled, ready for market, that thins the carrots, ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... or thought they knew, Rupert Langley well said that the hour in which he sat there must have been an hour of terrible suffering. After that great debate, the business of the rest of the evening fell rather flat, and was conducted in a House which rapidly thinned down to little short of emptiness. When it was at its emptiest, Rupert Langley rose, lifted his hat to the Speaker, and ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... twinkled in the studies where the upper boys were working, and in the dormitories where the rest were now going to bed. The tall trees round the building stood quite black against the faintly-lighted sky, waving their thinned remnant of yellow leaves in the November air. In the stillness you heard every slight sound; and the murmur of boys' voices came mingled with the plashing of the mountain stream, and the moaning of the low waves as they broke upon the shore. A ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... chirped drowsily from mazy thicket where sullen shadow thinned, little by little, until behind leaf and twig was a glimmer of light that waxed ever brighter. And presently amid this growing brightness was soft stir and twitter, sleepy chirpings changed to notes of wistful sweetness, a plaintive calling that ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... loathed but a minute before. She noticed a slight limp in his gait and a convulsive twitching of his eyelids; his slender, almost transparent hand, she reflected, was that of a sick man, and pain and fever, no doubt, had thinned his hair, which had left many ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... on for a hundred years or so, the ranks have been so thinned that there are openings sufficiently large to allow other species a chance to come in. By this time, too, there is sufficient humus on the floor to allow the seeds of many other species to germinate. Lodge-pole thus colonizes barren places, holds them ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... are all very well where there is plenty of room, otherwise they are a mistake; they keep in the moisture, exclude light and air, and their roots disturb foundations; most of our London Squares would look much better if the trees were thinned. I should like to cut down all the plane trees in the garden of Clifford's Inn and leave only ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... the arms of the wind, The round earth rolls in a clasp of blue sky, And see, where the budding hazels are thinned, The wild anemones lie In ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... and hollyhocks raised and manure worked in. All the trees must be pruned, the bushes and vines trimmed, and the gooseberries, currants, and raspberries thinned. The strawberry bed must be fixed up, and the rhubarb and asparagus spaded around and manured. This whole garden ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... graphite, or any dry color insoluble in water, lithographic ink, much thinned with turpentine oil, be applied on the print in a light coating which permits one to see the design under it, and if, then, the print be soaked in water and afterwards developed as just directed, an image in greasy ink is obtained. And, furthermore, by replacing the printing by transfer ...
— Photographic Reproduction Processes • P.C. Duchochois
... oil is thinned to such a degree by the heat of the boiler that it runs off as soon as applied, and very often a hot bearing is ...
— The Traveling Engineers' Association - To Improve The Locomotive Engine Service of American Railroads • Anonymous
... faster the horses sped under the iron hand of the teamster, till distance took hold of the clatter and finally diminished it to a rumble. In a few minutes even the rising cloud of dust, like smoke above the tree tops, thinned and finally melted away, and so, once more, peace returned ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... journey from Fort Gibraltar. On the river trail, we overtook some Hudson's Bay trappers. The fellows would not answer a single question about events during the year and scampered away from us as if we carried smallpox, which had thinned the ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... approaching. Howland fancied that he could distinguish dark shadows between the thinned walls of the forest. He ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... reddish-coloured sandy clay took the place of the dark and compact loam: oaks began to appear, sparsely at first, but afterwards forming vast forests, which the peasants of our own days have thinned and reduced to a considerable extent. The stunted trunks of these trees are knotted and twisted, and the tallest of them do not exceed some thirty feet in height, while many of them may be regarded as nothing ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... began the real lines of the position, and as I wound my way through them to the first lines, the pleasant forest of autumnal branches thinned to a wood of trees bare as telegraph poles. It had taken me half an hour to get from the cook's shelters to the first lines, and during that time I had not heard one single explosion. In the first trench the men stood casually ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... seats; the filthy straw bedding was never changed. Every day at least a dozen corpses were dragged out and pitched like dead dogs into the ditches and morasses beyond the city. Escapes, deaths, and exchange at last thinned the ranks. Hundreds left names and ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... late ere we reached the shepherd's cottage—a dark, raftered, dimly-lighted building of turf and stone. The weather for several weeks before had been rainy and close, and the flocks of the inmate had been thinned by the common scourge of the sheep-farmer at such seasons on marshy and unwholesome farms. The rafters were laden with skins besmeared with blood, that dangled overhead to catch the conservative influences of the smoke; and on a rude plank table ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... harbored in the forests in the neighborhood of London. Strange stories are told of some of them, and, doubtless, when irritated, they were fierce and dangerous enough. As, however, civilization advanced, and the forests became thinned and contracted, these animals were seen more rarely, and at length almost disappeared. A few of them, however, are still to be found in the parks of some of the leading English noblemen, who keep them for ornament and ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... usually being white," replied Mr. Powers. "The ground has first to be plowed and harrowed, and is afterward laid off in eighteen-inch rows because beets, you know, are planted from seed. When the crop comes up trouble begins, for it has to be thinned until each plant has a good area in which to grow; the beets must also be carefully weeded and the soil round them loosened if they ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... and many more had gone across the country to the Ovens, or, farther still, to the Sydney diggings themselves. According to digging parlance, "the Turon was looking up," and Bendigo, Mount Alexander, and Forest Creek were thinned accordingly. But perhaps the real cause of their desertion arose from the altered state of the diggings. Some time since one party netted 900 pounds in three weeks; 100 pounds a week was thought nothing wonderful. Four men found one day seventy-five pounds weight; another party took from the foot ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... back to him slowly, his normal resilience overcoming to some extent the beating his body had taken. The grayness had thinned somewhat. He was less inclined to ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... men who a few decades ago, in war and peace, stood by the side of Emperor Wilhelm I.—of glorious memory—have gradually thinned. On the 9th of November, 1896, another of the few then surviving—Dr. Emil Frommel, Supreme Councillor of the Prussian Consistory, formerly chaplain to the Imperial Court and pastor of the "Garnisonkirche" in Berlin—closed his eyes forever. He was a man whose eminent gifts, ...
— Eingeschneit - Eine Studentengeschichte • Emil Frommel
... The crowd thinned towards six o'clock, and there was no one now at the far end of the room but a man who seemed to be looking at the sketches on the screen. Olive thought she might take a cup of tea herself, and she was ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... than that of the former Jesuitical organization, because it is more secret in its murderous deeds, not one half of the horrors of which will ever be publicly known. Moro Castle is full of political prisoners, who are thinned out by executions, starvation, and hardships generally, from day to day, only to make room for fresh victims. He who enters those grim portals leaves all hope behind. Political trials there are none, but of political ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... swooped down on the Christian camp. Scores of bloody battles had taken place. Almost beyond belief was the suffering that had been patiently endured by the soldiers of the Cross. Battles, hunger, and disease had thinned their ranks and sorely tried their souls. No wonder they hailed with joy the arrival of that famous warrior, Richard Coeur-de-Lion, for they believed that he would ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... inwardly, "but it may serve one good purpose. Dwight will cease his teasing to own one of the pesky things, I imagine. And don't worry over his dinner, Miss Faith. He's eaten enough already to keep him from starvation, I'm sure, and I'll see that he returns to finish after the guests have thinned somewhat. Poor boy! He's had monkey enough ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... seldom seen when we first settled in the Wisconsin woods, but they multiplied rapidly after the animals that preyed upon them had been thinned out or exterminated, and food and shelter supplied in grain-fields and log fences and the thickets of young oaks that grew up in pastures after the annual grass fires were kept out. Catching hares in the winter-time, when they were hidden in hollow fence-logs, was a favorite ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... soon as possible after they are gathered. Practical tests have shown that thick sowings of tree seeds give the best results. There is little danger of weeds smothering out the seedlings under such conditions. After the seed has germinated the beds may be thinned so that the seedlings will have ...
— The School Book of Forestry • Charles Lathrop Pack
... or rather, the darkness slowly thinned. All at once John became aware that, some yards away from him, there was something whitish. A moment, and it began to move like a flitting mist through the darkness. The same instant Sturdy began to pull his feet from the ground, and ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... of Sunday, then, the patient and in no wise discouraged Union Army lay as described, while in its front stood the weary Army of Northern Virginia, with ranks thinned and leaders gone, but with the pride of success, hardly fought for and nobly earned, to reward it for all the dangers and hardships of the past ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... the honoured friend and relative to whom I have feebly acknowledged my obligation by dedicating to him this book. I could not at first see it as he saw it: 'Think about it, and you will,' he said. I did think, and by degrees—not very quickly—my prejudgments thinned, faded, and almost vanished. I trust I see it now as a whole, and in its true relations, internal and external—its relations to itself, to the play, and to the Hamlet, ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... say I do not know that this presence of death had anything to do with my trepidation. The death of a child was no very solemn or very uncommon thing in my master's family. He had many children, and, when death thinned their ranks, took the loss like a philosopher,—as he was,—a French philosopher. He philosophized that his utmost exertions could not do much more for the child than bequeath to him just such a life as he led, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... that they'd have to settle that with their admiration, Mr. Davies, who was commanding the fighting line, but probably wasn't done saying his prayers. There was a lively, rattling skirmish next morning between the rear-guard and the Indians, and at one time things looked as though the thinned battalion of their comrades of the —th might be cut off, and some of Devers's regiment thought the rearmost troops ought to be deployed in support of the fellows who were fighting off the warriors, who came charging after them ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... novelty and nature and strange contrasts; in the old barbaric force and native colour of the passions as they burst out undisguised around the gold; in the hundred and one personal combats and trials of cunning; in a desert peopled and cities thinned by the magic of cupidity; in a huge army collected in ten thousand tents, not as heretofore by one man's constraining will, but each human unit spurred into the crowd by his own heart; in the "siege of gold" ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... on the terrace thinned as the hour of dejeuner approached. Presently she proclaimed her hunger. He murmured that it must be near dinner time. She protested. He passed his hands across his eyes and confessed that he had got mixed up in his meals the last few days. ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... time nearly hull down on our starboard quarter. Suddenly as we looked at her we saw a dense black cloud of smoke shoot up from her, which hung like a monstrous tree upon the sky-line. A few seconds later a roar like thunder burst upon our ears, and as the smoke thinned away there was no sign left of the Gloria Scott. In an instant we swept the boat's head round again, and pulled with all our strength for the place where the haze, still trailing over the water, marked the scene of ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... stripped well-nigh all the leaves from the great oaks in the park, whose dark branches now stood up against a gray sky, like branches of funereal candelabra. A light fog seemed to indicate rain; through the melancholy boughs of the thinned wood the heavy carriages of the court were seen slowly passing on, filled with women, uniformly dressed in black, and obliged to await the result of a chase which they did not witness. The distant hounds gave tongue, and the horn was ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... in the field. When I was a slave they raised a little cotton in Georgia but mostly corn. I chopped cotton and thinned out corn. ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... fatal collision with a foe as strong as that she had only escaped by a rare piece of luck; but this would give the crippled pirate time to refit and unite to destroy her. Add to this the failing ammunition, and the thinned crew! ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... glad tidings which ended in disappointment and heartache. The rise of the sun showed the desert stretching away around them, with nothing moving upon its monstrous face except themselves. With dull eyes and heavy hearts they stared round at that huge and empty expanse. Their hopes thinned away like the light morning mist ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... along the track worn by the passing of feet, which had thinned and flattened the grass. She could not see the new road of which Carmen had spoken, but she must reach it sooner or later, going this way. For the present, several low hills, like grass-sown waves, billowed between her and it. But by and by, perhaps, she would hear the "teuf-teuf" of Nick's motor ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... mobile pieces that could travel with the army and be brought quickly into firing position. They were lighter in weight than any other type of flat trajectory weapon. To achieve this lightness the designers had not only shortened the guns, but thinned down the bore walls. In the eighteenth century, calibers ran from the 3- to the 24-pounder, mounted on comparatively light, two-wheeled carriages. In addition, there was the 1-1/2-pounder (and sometimes the light 3- or 6-pounder) on a "galloper" carriage—a ...
— Artillery Through the Ages - A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America • Albert Manucy
... been altogether successful in the chase. The necessary wolf had been coy, and they, perforce, had to compromise with his poor relation, the coyote—a poor relation, indeed, whose shabby coat, thinned by the process of summer shedding, made it an unworthy souvenir to Miss Colebrooke. But it was not the lack of a wolf that robbed the hunting-party of its zest for Kitty. She could not tell what it was, but something seemed to have gone wrong with the day from the ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... Egyptian tombs and also depicted on the ancient hieroglyphics are made of reed or cane, about 14 inches long, possessing the usual six finger-holes. The top end is not stopped with a cork, as in the ordinary Flute, but is thinned off to a feather edge, leaving a sharp circular ring at right angles to the axis of the bore. By blowing across this ring a fair but somewhat feeble Flute tone ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... in ridges, the collodion may be too thick, and it must be thinned down with equal parts of alcohol and ether. A single piece of plate glass, about one-eighth inch thick, coated with aurentia collodion, is all that is required with an erythrosine plate. Or, after a piece has been successfully coated, another piece of the same plate glass, and the same ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various
... had sat up, Subhadra, beholding her brother, began to weep aloud, and afflicted with excessive grief, said,—'O thou of eyes like lotus petals, behold the grandson of Arjuna of great intelligence. Alas, the Kuru race having been thinned, a child has been born that is feeble and dead. The blade of grass (inspired into a weapon of great efficacy), uplifted by Drona's son for compassing the destruction of Bhimasena, fell upon Uttara and Vijaya and myself.[184] Alas, that blade, O Kesava, is still existing unextracted in me, after ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... I will tell you all—in front, to left, to right, More than a hedgerow thick that I have brought the light, More than an apple-tree that I have trimmed, More than an old vine-stalk that I have thinned To ripen lovely Muscat. Madame, you see that I look back upon my past, Without a blush at last; What would you? That I gave my vineyard back— And that with usury? Alack! And yet unto my garden I've no ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... I have somewhat thinned the number of rogues in this neighbourhood. I had a careful and almost certain plan of shooting them. Quite alone, with the exception of two faithful gun-bearers, I used to wait at the edge of the jungle at their ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... of huddled roofs and chimney-pots, the storm-mists thinned, lifting transiently; through them, gray, fairy-like, the towers of Westminster and the Houses of Parliament bulked monstrous and unreal, fading when again the fugitive dun vapors closed ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... outrage upon decency, and as such was felt and resented. From Maroney's personal popularity and agreeable manners, there were many who believed in his innocence, still more who did not desire his conviction. His marriage thinned the ranks of the latter and entirely wiped out almost every trace of the former. The man who would live with and introduce a prostitute as his wife, was regarded as never too good to be guilty of robbery or ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... everywhere! The steady shadows shook and thinned and died, The shining grass flashed brightness back for brightness, And sleep was gone, and there was ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... were acres of straight green lines hardly higher than gooseberry-bushes, and without a single tree to break the monotony or to cast a welcome shade. The bunches of grapes looked inviting enough, hanging among their decorative leaves and tendrils, but they had not been thinned and consequently were smaller than English hothouse grapes, while exposure to wind and dust had removed most of their bloom; but, in spite of their comparatively homely appearance, the children soon found that the fruit tasted ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... stood in her room to receive Nesta's hero. She was flushed, and had thinned her lips for utterance of a desperate thing, after the first ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... cold) must also be given two or three times a week. The fruit must be thinned, and the trees never over-cropped. Large trees in 16 or 18-inch pots need the annual renewal of the soil rather than repotting. The flowers should be fertilised by the admission of bees, by shaking the trees in fine weather about mid-day, or by passing a light brush ...
— The Book of Pears and Plums • Edward Bartrum
... out straight in the wind! The old red shall be floated again When the ranks that are thin shall be thinned, When the names that are ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... how we flew about the streets and squares, acting great practice; those who knew us by sight must have thought we had a great deal to do, but we practised nothing but locomotion. Some medical men thin the population, (so says Slander,) my master thinned nothing but his horses. They were the only good jobs that came in his way, and certainly he made the most of them. He was obliged to feed them, but he was very rarely feed himself. It so happened that nobody consulted us, and the unavoidable consumption of the family infected my master's pocket, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 400, November 21, 1829 • Various
... the innumerable herds of buffalo that Lewis and Clark saw here, at the great fork of the road into the Rockies; and soon the last pelt was baled from the beaver. If you go to the Blackfeet now you find them a thinned and broken people, and the highest ambition of their best men is to dress up in modern beef-hide finery and play circus Indian around the ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... which existed rather from the momentum they had from the past than from any living vigor of their own. It was a time of transition. The group of politicians dating from the Civil War was nearly extinct, and the leaders who had come to the front after 1870 were also much thinned in number, and fast dropping off. Washington itself was becoming one of the most beautiful cities in the world, with its broad avenues, seldom thronged, its circles and squares, whose frequenters seemed never busy, its spirit of leisure, its suggestion of opulence and amplitude, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... the clouds beyond the deep-set window were gloriously ablaze with a brilliance softly diffused. The cloud bank was deep, and they felt the craft under them sink slowly, steadily into the misty embrace. It thinned below them to drifting vapor, and the first hazy shadows of the ground showed through from far beneath. Their altitude, the flyer knew, was still ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... given to the boat sent Annabel to her knees. Clutching the side she gazed with horrified eyes at the water in her wake. The men had disappeared, but in the glowing white path cut across the lake by the sun, appeared a dull red streak that thinned away to faint purple and dim pink. She watched the sinister discoloration with fascinated eyes. What was taking place beneath the smooth tide? Or was it all over? Had Red Feather found a rock to which he could cling while ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... mankind were then subjected to many calamities, which have been moderated in our times. If crops failed, and the earth did not bring forth her fruit, vessels arrived not from distant parts, laden with corn. Hunger wasted the land. Sickness and pestilence followed, and thinned the remnant who had been left. Families were broken up, and the survivors became helpless outcasts; for the people of each country raised only as much grain as was sufficient for their own use, and could not supply their neighbours. War often produced still greater miseries. In all ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... Oscar's face, somewhat thinned by study, had acquired, through habits of business, a serious expression. He had reached his full growth, his beard was thriving; adolescence had given place to virility. The mother could not refrain from admiring her son and ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... hills gradually disappear and the plain spread under him, at the same time he noticed that the coast became less rugged, while the group of islands beyond thinned and finally vanished and the broad, open sea came clear up to firm land. Here there were no more forests: here the plain was supreme. It spread all the way to the horizon. A land that lay so exposed, with field upon field, reminded the ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... Silas!" said the knight, sighing deeply. "Things are not as they were in our glorious wars of York and Lancaster. The knaves were thinned then,—two or three crops a year of that rank squitch- grass which it has become the fashion of late to call the people. There was some difference then between buff doublets and iron mail, and the rogues felt it. Well-a-day! ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... Devons dashed into the open. The fire with which they were received was simply awful; it might have staggered any troops. Leaving the cover of the stones, the Boers stood upright and emptied their magazines into the advancing line. But it never wavered, never checked, though the ranks were sadly thinned. The Boers fled from the boulders which they had held with such tenacity throughout the day, and turned at bay upon the {p.247} edge of the crest, hoping yet to stay the deadly rush of steel. They were ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... to see the change wrought on his friend by the loss of his wife and daughter. All his gay spirits had left him; he had thinned perceptibly, and his eyes had that strained look which only a ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... whom it was necessary to post in every direction, and who were chosen from the most trustworthy men, thinned and exhausted the little central land. There were scarcely thirty in ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... civilization—from the canals that laced its surface, to great cities with mighty buildings still standing. But of life there was none. The atmosphere was too rare to support it; and the theory was that it had constantly thinned through thousands of years till the last Martian had gasped and died in air too attenuated to support life even in creatures that must have grown greater and greater ...
— The Red Hell of Jupiter • Paul Ernst
... the cotton, thinned with wear, That hides the poor, starved shoulder; bare The bruise shows, like a printed paw. Haste, draw the dumb, frayed sheet again, And think you cover so the stain Upon our hearts; for—have the truth!— 'Twas we who put the club of law Into bought hands to strike her ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... to go away, driven by hunger, she had to pass close to Dom Ferdinand and Lord Dauntrey. There was no crowd round the chairs, as the morning throng had thinned for dejeuner, and she heard Lord Dauntrey say: "I assure you, Monseigneur, it never went as badly as this on my roulette at home. You saw the records. But nobody can win at every seance. Don't ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... phenomenon the mechanical effect of reduced air-pressure, due to the higher temperatures above the surface of the boiling mud, though doubts are raised by the unusual intensity of the reaction. The feeling that the physical explanation is inadequate is strengthened when the vapours have thinned out and one is surprised to see that every crack and cranny in the Solfatara, right up to the top of the trough, shows signs of increased activity. Certainly, this cannot be accounted for by a cause-and-effect nexus of the kind found in the realm of mechanical causation, ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... castellated palace or schloss opened by one of its fronts, as well as a principal convent of the city, was the resort of many turbulent spirits. Most of these were young men, and amongst them many students of the university: for the war, which had thinned or totally dispersed some of the greatest universities in Germany, under the particular circumstances of its situation, had greatly increased that of Klosterheim. Judging by the tone which prevailed, and the random expressions which ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... him and the lightning still flashing, he went on again up the new road, and after a few minutes running saw a deserted barn in a hollow and made for it. In this dell or glade the trees had been thinned out, either by forest fires or by the owner, but one tall pine remained beside the forlorn and ruined barn as if ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... completely made up his mind on the subject, he sat down quietly in the back-ground, waiting till it should come to the widow's turn to be dealt with, for he was now interested only to see how she would be treated. The room gradually thinned I Mr. Dennis Garraghty came in, and sat down at the table, to help his brother to ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... The falling snow had thinned out and looked like flying powder; the leaden clouds, rolling close to the tree-tops, grew brighter and brighter; bits of azure sky ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... to them the brightest prospect, and is most like their own home. They may however rest satisfied that the voyage to Australia is as safe as that to New York, that it is far more pleasant as regards the weather, and that little or no sickness has ever thinned the number of those who have embarked for the Australian colonies. The expense of the voyage is certainly greater than that of a passage to the Canadas, or to the United States, but it is to be hoped that the means of transport ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... to unite for the production of connective tissue. Moreover, to the extent salt in the blood cells is decreased the connective tissue and muscle and tendon substance absorb water and the tissues become spongy, especially in the kidneys, so that the thinned blood albumen ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... Ole Petersen, an old sailor who was lounging about the dock. He nodded toward the mouth of the harbor, where now all could see the heavy veil of mist growing thinner. Little by little, even as the steady boom of the steamer's whistle came echoing in, the front of the fog-bank thinned and lifted, showing the white-capped waves rolling beneath. Suddenly a strong shift of wind descended from the canyon between two of the many mountain-peaks which line the bay, and broke the fog into long ribbons of white vapor. The sun shone through, and its warmth ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough
... where Ethel and her associates were located, the soil was immediately put to a fuller use. The cotton plants were thinned and pruned and between the rows quick growing vegetables were planted. Elsewhere the great pastures were broken up with captured kerosene-driven gang plows and by dint of hard labor the sod was quickly reduced to a fit state for ...
— In the Clutch of the War-God • Milo Hastings
... ceased, and stared. Brave Montgomery had appeared, summoned by the noise. He was standing yonder, among the thinned trees, trying to freshen the priming of his rifle. Two Indians darted for him at once. They pursued him amidst the trees—all vanished—two rifle shots spoke; the Indians came back waving a scalp, which they thrust into ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... the new tack, Van Horn set Borckman clearing the mess of ropes on deck, himself, squatting in the rain, undertaking to long-splice the tackle he had cut. As the rain thinned, so that the crackle of it on deck became less noisy, he was attracted by a sound from out over the water. He suspended the work of his hands to listen, and, when he recognized Jerry's wailing, sprang to his feet, ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... ethereal blue ring. His hair, parted in the middle, begins as silver and changes to streaks of silvery-gold and silvery-black, ending in ringlets at his shoulders. His beard and moustache are scant or thinned out, yet seem to enhance his features and, like his character, are deep and ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... had now thinned out and we moved on, my guide still explaining in some detail the distinction between business principles and moral principles, between whisky as a curse and whisky as a source of profit, which I ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... the way to talk to them! Denounce them traitors! Up whip, and set the ruffians capering! Hit them facers! Our men are always for the too-clever trick. They pluck the sprouts and eat them, as if the loss of a sprout or two thinned Manchester! Your policy of absorption is good enough when you're dealing with fragments. It's a devilish unlucky thing to attempt with a concrete mass. You might as well ask your head to absorb a wall by running at it like a pugnacious ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... And at that even the vikings shrank a little, closing their ranks, and then, with all the weight of the close-ranked wedge behind me, we were among them, and our axes were at work where men were driven on one another before us; and the press thinned and scattered at last, while the Danes howled, and for a moment we three and a few lines behind us stood with no foemen before us, while all down the sides of the wedge the fight raged. Then we halted, and ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... upland flocks grew starved and thinned: Their shepherds scarce could feed the lambs Whose milkless mothers butted them, Or who were orphaned of their dams. The lambs athirst for mother's milk Filled all the place with piteous sounds: Their mothers' ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... molecular drive, and to proceed with an acceleration equal only to that of gravitation at the surface of the Earth. Tired of weightlessness and its attendant discomforts to everyday life, the travelers enjoyed the interlude immensely, but it was all too short—too soon the stars thinned out ahead of "Three's" needle prow. As soon as the way ahead of them was clear, Seaton again put on the maximum power of his terrific bars and, held securely at the console, set up a long and involved integral. ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... run its course and given place to "The Gray Lady," which had not pleased the public. The papers said the leading role did not show Miss Lopez off to the greatest advantage and the audiences thinned, for Miss Lopez had transformed the Albion from a house of light opera to a temple enshrining a star. The management, grumbling over their mistake, laid about for something that would give the star a chance to exhibit those qualities ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... trails. The lynx had multiplied. The moose and caribou had gone unhunted by man. The beaver had built their homes—undisturbed. The tracks of the black bear were as thick as the tracks of the deer farther south. And where once the deadfalls and poison baits of Tusoo had kept the wolves thinned down, there was no longer a menace for these mohekuns ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood |
