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More "Diminutive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was of slight, diminutive person, and unsoldierlike appearance; his manners are represented as unassuming and social, and his temper as placid and forgiving. His public speeches or addresses are said to have partaken of even classical ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... most diminutive in European dress. Each garment is a misfit, and exaggerates the miserable physique and the national defects of concave chests and bow legs. The lack of "complexion" and of hair upon the face makes it nearly impossible to ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... When he had nearly filled the tub he felt around with his black paws as delicately as if he was about to seize a musquito, and, clutching the kicking legs with one hand, he spun the little fellow a somersault over his head, and skinning off at the same time his diminutive frock, plunged him into the sparkling brine, singing the while in ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... of another pearl fishery, and the shell which produces them is the thin transparent oyster (Placuna placenta). whose clear white shells are used, in China and elsewhere, as a substitute for window glass. They are also collected annually for the sake of the diminutive pearls contained in them. These are exported to the coast of India, to be calcined for lime, which the luxurious affect to chew with their betel. These pearls are also burned in the mouths of the dead. So prolific are the mollusca of the Placuna, that the quantity ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... in the woods and Sam's recital from the stump, the three friends emerged again upon the road, and a belated farmer driving home half asleep on the seat of his wagon caught their attention. With the skill of an Indian boy the diminutive Morris sprang upon the wagon and thrust a ten dollar bill into the farmer's hand. "Lead us, O man of the soil!" he shouted, "Lead us to a gilded palace of sin! Take us to a saloon! The life oil gets low ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... deposited in it, accumulated to more than a mile in vertical thickness. In these deposits vast numbers of tropical animals were entombed, and here the oldest equine remains occur, four species of which have been described. These belong to the genus Orohippus (Marsh), and are all of a diminutive size, hardly bigger than a fox. The skeletons of these animals resemble that of the horse in many respects, much more indeed than any other existing species, but, instead of the single toe on each foot, so characteristic of all modern equines, the various species of Orohippus had four toes before ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... in the Ardennes, hard by Stavelot, and had left him in legacy her two-year-old son. The old man could ill contrive to support himself, but he took up the additional burden uncomplainingly, and it soon became welcome and precious to him. Little Nello—which was but a pet diminutive for Nicolas—throve with him, and the old man and the little child lived in ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... spaciousness the familiar forms seem incredibly diminutive. That little speck moving across one of the brown carpets is a ploughman and his team. That white stream that looks like milk flowing over the green carpet is a flock of sheep running before the sheep-dog ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... with considerable confidence, which is corroborated, that the Hel Shual have a tail half a cubit long; that they inhabit a district in the Desert at an immense distance south-east of Marocco; that the Hel El Killeb[148] 200 are in a similar direction; that the latter are diminutive, being about two or three cubits[149] in height; that they exclaim bak, bak, bak, and that they have a few articulate sounds, which they mutually understand among themselves; that they are extremely swift of foot, and run as fast as horses. The Arimaspi of Herodotus ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... constant and settled analogy, like diminutive adjectives in ish, as greenish, bluish; adverbs in ly, as dully, openly; substantives in ness, as vileness, faultiness; were less diligently sought, and sometimes have been omitted, when I had no authority that ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... country." "You shall call me nothing else, "said I then; but she shook her head, and hung it down as she whispered softly, "I like best Francesco," and then, so low as to be hardly audible, "Checho," the Sienese diminutive for my name of Francis. Old Nonna came in to hound me from the room. That night—it was my last but one—Aurelia came to the door with me, and let me ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... Missouri, I met an expatriated German baron, an unfortunate who had failed utterly in the rough life of the frontier. He was living in a squalid little hut, almost unfurnished, but studded around with the diminutive horns of the European roebuck. These were the only treasures he had taken with him to remind him of his former life, and he was never tired of describing what fun it was to shoot roebucks when driven by the little crooked-legged dachshunds. There were plenty ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... possible. Bed is not the place for heavy tomes; it is the appropriate locale of the duodecimo. And yet the type must not be too small, or the eyesight will suffer, unless the reader can command plenty of illumination—which is not always the case. And the book must be not only fairly diminutive, but bound and stitched in such a way as to allow the hand to clutch it and hold it with ease. There must be no unnecessary extension of the palm and fingers, for it adds so much to the fatigue. Unhappily, every volume does not fulfil this requirement, and the requisite selection must ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... you, just how do you suppose we are going to get this in the pie?" replied Alice, lifting from its position behind the bed a box so huge that the pie itself seemed almost diminutive ...
— Grandfather's Love Pie • Miriam Gaines
... even had her singular career not already tended to make her an object of universal curiosity and speculation. Short of stature and slender of form, with a step as light and noiseless as that of an aerial being; her exquisitely-moulded although diminutive figure draped in a robe of black velvet, made after a fashion of which the severe propriety contrasted forcibly with the somewhat too liberal exposure of the period; with a countenance pale almost to sallowness; ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... their hammers in old age. But these were rare specimens of vigour and longevity; not many such are to be found in Botallack mine. The miner's working life is a short one, and comparatively few of those who begin it live to a healthy old age. Little boys were there, too, diminutive but sturdy urchins, miniature copies of their seniors, though somewhat dirtier; proud as peacocks because of being permitted at so early an age to accompany their fathers or brothers underground, and their bosoms swelling with that stern Cornish ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... appearance he was very much what Punch always represented him—very short, with a head and shoulders which might have belonged to a much larger frame. When sitting he might have been taken for a man of average height, and it was only when he rose to his feet that his diminutive ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... find out; son," was the foreman's grim answer. "You there, Babe?" he called to his fat assistant, who rejoiced in the diminutive nickname. ...
— The Boy Ranchers at Spur Creek - or Fighting the Sheep Herders • Willard F. Baker
... ensconced at one end with their harps and violins. It reminded him that there was to be dancing. The tent had in the meantime half filled with a new set of young people who had come expressly for that pastime. Behind the girls gathered numbers of newly arrived young men with low shoulders and diminutive moustaches, who were evidently prepared for once to sacrifice ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... of tissue-paper, and he drew out a photograph—the photograph of a laughing girl with a diminutive terrier of doubtful extraction clasped in her arms. Without any change of countenance he studied ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... be confessed; and many an attack was made upon the gigantic enemy, which was cowardly, false, and malignant. But to see the monster writhing under the effects of the arrow—to see his uncouth fury in return, and the blind blows that he dealt at his diminutive opponent!—not one of these told in a hundred; when they DID tell, it may be imagined that they were fierce enough in all conscience, and served almost to annihilate ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... task which now lay before them. The journey was long, the way difficult. Onward again swept the diminutive squadron, the shallop outsailing the canoes, and making its way up the Richelieu, Champlain being too ardent with the fever of discovery to await the slow work of the paddles. He had not, however, sailed far up that forest-enclosed ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... moping about Daisy, when, at half-past four she set off from the house in her pony-chaise, laden with pail and basket and all she had bargained for. A happier child was seldom seen. Sam, a capable black boy, was behind her on a pony not too large to shame her own diminutive equipage; and Loupe, a good-sized Shetland pony, was very able for more than his little mistress was going to ask of him. Her father looked on, pleased, to see her departure; and when she had gathered up ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... horns and hoofs are black should have them cut away. The pupil of the eye and the teeth and the tongue cause no blemish in the heifer. If she be diminutive, she is allowed. "Had she a wen which was cut away?" R. Judah "disallowed her." Rabbi Simon said, "every place which was cut down, and no red hair sprang up in its place, ...
— Hebrew Literature
... own "Ol' Man Remenyi," who passed over only a year or so ago. I wonder if he was Ol' Man Remenyi then! He never really was an old man, and that appellation was more a mark of esteem than anything else—a sort of diminutive of good-will. I met Remenyi at Chautauqua, where he spent a month or more in Eighteen Hundred Ninety-three. He gave me my first introduction to the music of Brahms, of whom he never tired of talking. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... take all my money," forthwith going to a drawer in the old-fashioned book-case, and taking out a diminutive porte-monnaie, which contained her whole fortune, three silver three-cent pieces, and hanging it on her fat little hand, "and I can go to some g'ocery in the woods, and buy lots ...
— Connor Magan's Luck and Other Stories • M. T. W.
... Mounting the diminutive donkeys caused peals of laughter; the hamlets of Naza'er-Rizkeh and Naza'el Ba'irait rang with the cries of the cavalcade, and Damaris blindly followed Lady Thistleton's energetic offspring, as with note-book and pencil they followed the guide in and out of the regulation ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... of the ambulatory, particularly at the back of the reredos and the north-east portion adjacent to it, is very interesting work. The lower part is panelled with tracery in low relief, with the arches springing from diminutive heads. All the shafting is ornamented with a small ball-like enrichment. Above the panelling is some open tracery of beautiful design. By reference to the plan it will be seen that much of this original screen-work has been set back ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Abbey Church of Tewkesbury - with some Account of the Priory Church of Deerhurst Gloucestershire • H. J. L. J. Masse
... that brilliant summer day. I looked at her, dainty and exquisite as ever, her ruchings fresh and white, her very face indicative of decorum and order, her wistful old mouth still rather like a child's, her eyes, always slightly upturned because of her diminutive height, so that she had ...
— The Confession • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Greek diminutive epullia is here correctly expressed by the German verschen, but versicle would not ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... home, here I am back again," thought Lavretsky, as he walked into the diminutive passage, while one after another the shutters were being opened with much creaking and knocking, and the light of day poured into ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... different stitch and colour. Even the flowers, they embroider in the same way, in very fine thread, filling in the whole ground first, with stitches set very closely together and marking in the seed vessels afterwards, by very diminutive knots, ...
— Encyclopedia of Needlework • Therese de Dillmont
... looked at her again and yet again, and their looks crossed. The lip was lifted from her little teeth. He saw the red blood work vividly under her tawny skin. Her eye, which was great as a stag's, struck and held his gaze. He knew who she must be - Kirstie, she of the harsh diminutive, his housekeeper's niece, the sister of the rustic prophet, Gib - and he found in her the answer to ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... brought up to peak efficiency along the Potomac, for this is a "known factor" of great significance. Plants can and must be improved physically where necessary, and qualified operators provided for them. Collection systems have to be improved or enlarged in many places. Diminutive plants, doomed to inefficiency by their size and the financial impossibility of hiring expert workers for them, need to be eliminated in favor of regional waste collection and treatment facilities, which are quite feasible, particularly ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... entertaining Theseus in this expedition, seems to be not altogether void of truth; for the townships round about, meeting upon a certain day, used to offer a sacrifice, which they called Hecalesia, to Jupiter Hecaleius, and to pay honor to Hecale, whom, by a diminutive name, they called Hecalene, because she, while entertaining Theseus, who was quite a youth, addressed him, as old people do, with similar endearing diminutives; and having made a vow to Jupiter that he was going to the fight, ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... history of the name,' said Albinia; 'it sounds like nothing but the diminutive of ewer. I hope she will not be the little pitcher ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... unpacking of the chests and trunks. In our one diminutive room, and small hall, was no closet, there were no hooks on the bare walls, no place to hang things or lay things, and what to do I did not know. I was in despair; Jack came in, to find me sitting on the edge of a chest, which was half unpacked, ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... birds, according to the mother's elegant diminutive," said Beatrice, "serving as ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... just ahead of me was thrown violently open, and out strutted a tiny lady in a most disproportionate rage. She was beautiful neither in face nor figure; she was diminutive, and petulant of manner, but bore herself with an air of almost regal pride. It was she whom I came to know as Madame du Maine, a daughter of the proud and princely Condes. Following her, weeping bitterly, came the sweet maid who had spilled the tray of flowers on me at the door. I stepped ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... people to choose electors naturally excited a long and bitter debate, in which Azariah C. Flagg represented the Regency. Flagg was a printer by trade, the publisher of a Republican paper at Plattsburg, and a veteran of the War of 1812. He was not prepossessing in appearance; his diminutive stature, surmounted by a big, round head gave him the appearance of Atlas with the world upon his shoulders. His voice, too, was shrill and unattractive; but he suddenly evinced shrewdness and address in legislative tactics ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... jumble of the Colonel's stories ran through my brain, touching a sense of frightened laughter that was only held in check by the sight of this earnest, hurrying figure before me. For John Silence at work inspired me with a kind of awe. He looked so diminutive among these giant twisted trees, while yet I knew that his purpose and his knowledge were so great, and even in hurry he was dignified. The fancy that we were playing some queer, exaggerated game together met the fact that we were two men dancing upon the brink of some possible tragedy, and the mingling ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... beautifully green on the flat house-top, where the family would assemble with their dogs and cats, as on a pastoral lawn; there were no windows, and in my grandfather's expression, 'there was really no demonstration of a house unless it were the diminutive door.' He once landed on Ronaldsay with two friends. The inhabitants crowded and pressed so much upon the strangers that the bailiff, or resident factor of the island, blew with his ox-horn, calling out to the natives to ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... themselves, as the modern work appears by no means equal to the old. One curious form of decoration, of which the Japanese are much enamoured, consists in forming miniature representations of country scenes and landscapes; waterfalls, bridges, &c., being reproduced on the most diminutive scale. It is much to be feared that our small stock of knowledge of ancient Japanese art will never be greatly increased, as the whole country and the people are becoming modernised and Europeanised to such an extent that it appears probable ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... race of men: I would but show my own benevolence. Eyesight they had, yet nothing saw aright; Ears, and yet heard not; but like forms in dreams, For ages lived a life confused, nor bricks Nor woodwork had to build them sunny homes, But dwelt beneath the ground, as do the tribes Diminutive of ants, in sunless caves. Nor had they signs to mark the season's change, Coming of winter or of flowery spring Or of boon summer; but at random wrought In all things, till I taught them to discern The risings and the settings of the stars; The use of numbers, ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... of miles in which to gather force under the piping wind, the waves were of considerable height, considering that the three boats were of diminutive size. ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel
... have the disagreeable habit of introducing certain words or meaningless syllables into their speech, where these do not at all belong; or they tack on diminutive endings to their words. The syllables are often mere sounds, like eh, uh; in many cases they sound like ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... the likeness. The haze of years may magnify all the nobler outlines, while it conceals all that would enfeeble their dignity. To me, his eloquence now resembles those midsummer night dreams, in which all is contrast, and all is magical. Shapes, diminutive and grotesque for a moment, and then suddenly expanding into majesty and beauty; solitudes startling the eye with hopeless dreariness, and at a glance converted into the luxury of landscape, and filled with bowers of perpetual ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... Joe, trusted nobody. But since he had no intention of arresting Pee-wee and since the diminutive captive seemed rather angered than frightened, he released his hold. By a series of wriggles and contortions, Pee-wee adjusted his clothing and settled his neck in his stretched neckband. "Why don't—why—why ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... wonder," answered Philip with a return to seriousness. And the girl hastily tucked her diminutive shoes underneath her chair, as she saw the man's ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... were slowly mouching from the corrals as he neared the sheds. A diminutive herder was urging them along with shrill, piping shrieks—vicious but ineffective. Far more to the purpose were the efforts to a well-trained, bob-tailed sheep dog who was awaking echoes on the brisk morning air with the full-toned note of ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... overhead a tireless buzzard floats in circles. Is he keeping a death watch on the grizzled old "Desert Rat" we pass a little later? His face burned and seamed with the desert's heat and storms, the old prospector cheerfully waved at us, as he shared his beans and sour dough with a diminutive burro, which bore his master's pack during the long search through the trackless desert for the elusive gold. For us it would be suicide to leave the blazed trail. The chances are that the circling buzzard and hungry coyotes ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... pavement, there are here and there some huge white slabs of rough-hewn limestone, in consequence of which even carts drive round it instead of through it. In the very middle of an astoundingly dirty square rises a diminutive yellowish edifice with black holes in it, and in these holes sit men in big caps making a pretence of buying and selling. In this place there is an extraordinarily high striped post sticking up into the air, and near the post, in the interests of public order, by command ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... sent their bank-notes to the vestry, to save us the trouble of waiting upon them; others, on the contrary, levied the full value of their gifts, by keeping us wearily waiting before we got them. A barber, whom we found at his block busily weaving a wig, and whose diminutive crib would not contain half our company, apologised because it was not in his power to do much for us, and then diffidently tendered a guinea. A portly dealer in feminine luxuries talked largely of the claims of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... of the room was a large leather-covered writing-table, on which lay a perfect chaos of printed matter and manuscript; while bottles of ink, red, black, and blue, might be seen emerging from the confusion like diminutive forts set there to guard the papers from unlearned and intrusive fingers. Order was clearly not the doctor's "first law;" and certainly it must have required no common powers of memory to enable him, when seated in front of the confusion he himself had made, ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... smaller than they ought to be, and also queens more diminutive than usual, it was desirable to obtain a general explanation, to what degree the cells, where bees pass the first period of their existence, influence their size. With this view, you have advised ...
— New observations on the natural history of bees • Francis Huber
... the diminutive windows at the throng of life in the unquiet streets as they halted for the passing of a camel laden with bricks and stones from a demolished building; the poor thing teetered precariously past under such a back-breaking load that the ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... in Regie's money-box, and the other two immediately lost in the mat in the pony-carriage. However, Hester found them, and slipped them inside their white gloves, and the expedition started, accompanied by Boulou, a diminutive yellow-and-white dog of French extraction. Boulou was a well-meaning, kind little soul. There was a certain hurried arrogance about his hind-legs, but it was only manner. He was not in reality more conceited than most small dogs ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... they saw. The port where the transport docked had been transformed. Great storehouses and warehouses were erected. Whole railway systems had been built, with the American locomotives replacing the diminutive French ones. And the French population and army representatives were as much surprised at the initiative and wonderful progress of the American forces as were the new ...
— Ned, Bob and Jerry on the Firing Line - The Motor Boys Fighting for Uncle Sam • Clarence Young
... d'Hargicourt, was appointed captain in the prince's Swiss guards, one of the most honorable commissions that could have been conferred on him. The comte de Crussel and the prince d'Henin were named captains of the guard to M. d'Artois. This prince d'Henin was of such diminutive stature that he was sometimes styled, by way of jest, the "prince of dwarfs," "the dwarf of princes." He was the beloved nephew of the marechale de Mirepoix, whose fondness could not supply him with the sense he so greatly needed; he was besides very profligate, and continually ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... and fifty yards farther on George and I forded a brook, after which our course was through closely-grown, diminutive fir trees until we came to a series of low, barren knolls. On these knolls we found some mossberries. Then we pushed on. It was dreadfully slow travelling. The wind was in the east, and was rising. The drizzling rain had become a downpour, ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... 28th of March, and on her passage met with much bad weather, and some heavy gales of wind. She brought two bulls and a cow of the Bengal breed, together with twenty sheep and twenty goats; but these were of so diminutive a species, that, unless the breed could be considerably improved by that already in the country, very little benefit was for a length of time to be expected from their importation. Various seeds and plants also were received from the company's botanical garden; and much commendation ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... published in 1759, says;—'We have two literary reviews in London, with critical newspapers and magazines without number. The compilers of these resemble the commoners of Rome, they are all for levelling property, not by increasing their own, but by diminishing that of others.... The most diminutive son of fame or of famine has his we and his us, his firstlys and his secondlys, as methodical as if bound in cow-hide and closed with clasps of brass. Were these Monthly Reviews and Magazines frothy, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... rambling frame house dozing on a wide flower-bordered lot. There was nothing sleepy about the diminutive woman who opened the door to Jim's knock. Snapping black eyes peered at him from a maze of wrinkles. A veined hand moved swiftly to smooth down the white ...
— The Cuckoo Clock • Wesley Barefoot
... Lake, the course is west through five diminutive lakes, and across a series of sandy ridges to a small shallow lake, which is the source of Babewendigash River. Between this lake and Seal Lake intervene a high range of mountains—the highest seen on the journey to Lake Michikamau—rising fully one thousand feet above the level of Seal Lake. ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... roundness and fixity of her dry, owl-eyes, the enormous size of her protruding nose, and the great dark cavern of her mouth. Finally, her dress, like that of a young woman of Avapies—the new little cotton handkerchief which she wore on her head, tied under her chin, and a diminutive fan which she carried open in her hand, and with which, in affected modesty, she was covering the ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... with a peevish frown. Then something like a pitying smile warmed her expression. She was a handsome creature, of a large, somewhat bold type, with a passionate glow of strong youth and health in every feature of her well-shaped face. She was taller than her diminutive husband, and, in every detail of expression, his antithesis. She wore a dress with some pretensions to display, and suggesting a considerable personal vanity. But it was of the tawdry order that was unconvincing, and lacked both refinement ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... days ago this article appeared in the "Gazette," an amplification of the little paragraph in that diminutive newspaper "The Manchuria Daily News" of which I wrote you. Said the "Gazette," under a bold ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... caught the name— 'Precentor in the cathedral' surmised Mr Slope. Mr Harding confessed that such was the humble sphere of his work. 'Some parish duties as well,' suggested Mr Slope. Mr Harding acknowledged the diminutive incumbency of St Cuthbert's. Mr Slope then left him alone, having condescended sufficiently, and joined the conversation ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... of the reservation, the water supply, while still scanty, is abundant as compared with the eastern part. In the mountains themselves there are numerous small streams, some of which carry water nearly all the year; while here and there throughout the region are many diminutive springs almost or quite permanent in character. Most of the little streams rise near the crest of the mountains and, flowing westward, are collected in a deep canyon cut in the western slope, whence the water ...
— Navaho Houses, pages 469-518 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... time grown to mortal height. Whether fairies be the decayed poor relations of more successful deities, gods whose cult has been forgotten and neglected (as the Irish Sidhe, or fairy-folk), or diminutive animistic spirits, originating in the belief that every object, small or great, possessed a personality, it is noticeable that Celtic fairies are of human height, while those of the Teutonic peoples are usually dwarfish. Titania may come originally from the loins of Titans or she ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... reiterated, till a sudden gust of wind changed their merriment into consternation. The canoes immediately ahead of the ship could not leave its passage clear in time to prevent our running down great numbers of them. In a moment our majestic vessel had distanced the multitude of its diminutive attendants, leaving extreme confusion behind it. The islanders' skill in navigation, however, enabled them speedily to recover from the shock, and the wind falling again, they succeeded in overtaking us. In the effort to accomplish this, they left all those to their ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... drove out these imaginations. Besides, I now considered myself as 25 bound by the laws of hospitality to a people who had treated me with so much expense and magnificence. However, in my thoughts I could not sufficiently wonder at the intrepidity of these diminutive mortals, who durst venture to mount and walk upon my body, while one of my hands was 30 at liberty, without trembling at the very sight of so prodigious a creature as ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... century, I do not propose to enter. The enthusiasm of a Francis Xavier is not an everyday event, and the Japanese of the sixteenth century was, mayhap, more impressed by the missionaries of those days, arriving in flimsy and diminutive vessels after undergoing the perils and hardships of long voyages, having neither purse nor scrip nor wearing apparel except what they stood up in, than he is by the modern missionary arriving as a first-class passenger in a magnificent steamer and during his residence in the country ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... at eleven. It is reported, and is probably true, that the whole Boer force has surrendered. If so we have missed little or nothing. About twenty prisoners came in in the morning, quaint, rough people, shambling along on diminutive ponies. In the afternoon Williams went foraging for the officers, and I visited our Scotch friends, the donors of the cabbage, who were very kind, and asked me in. The married son had just come in from Basutoland, where he had been hiding, a great red, strapping ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... with the Parisian accent has a little more bone than Miss Pupford, but is of the same trim orderly diminutive cast, and, from long contemplation, admiration, and imitation of Miss Pupford, has grown like her. Being entirely devoted to Miss Pupford, and having a pretty talent for pencil-drawing, she once made a portrait ...
— Tom Tiddler's Ground • Charles Dickens
... has." (Caspar frequently used this diminutive for Ossaroo.) "I might say worse than drowning. Our comrade has been near a worse fate—that of being ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... frigate, seen from the impending rocks, looked like a light merchantman, in all but her symmetry and warlike guise; nature being moulded on so grand a scale all along that coast, as to render objects of human art unusually diminutive to the eye. On the other hand, the country-houses, churches, hermitages, convents, and villages, clustered all along the mountain-sides, presented equally delusive forms, though they gave an affluence to the views that left the ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... The diminutive Duc de Fronsac never failed, when he came to pay his respects to the Queen at her toilet, to turn the conversation upon Trianon, in order to make some ironical remarks on my father-in-law, of whom, from the time of his appointment, he always spoke as ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... to Mr. and Mrs. Applegate and their very diminutive daughter—whom somebody had fondly nicknamed "Puss"—and turned to follow the crowd. A short time later they set foot for the first time on the soil of the ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... entering upon a detailed description of their diminutive personalities. He listened comfortably, for her voice was soothing to him. Her whole personality was grateful to him. When it came time for her to go he seemed desirous ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... as the finest and largest ichthyological collection in the world. In the glass tanks curious sea fish darted through the water, grotesque sea monsters crawled over the pebbles, and transparent jelly fish floated slowly; pink and white sea anemones, like a bed of flowers, opened and closed, and diminutive sea animals, almost invisible, spread thread-like tentacles; sponges and coral grew upon the rocks, and mollusks showed by their movements ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... Maria Clara grew up amidst smiles and love. The very friars showered her with attentions when she appeared in the processions dressed in white, her abundant hair interwoven with tuberoses and sampaguitas, with two diminutive wings of silver and gold fastened on the back of her gown, and carrying in her hands a pair of white doves tied with blue ribbons. Afterwards, she would be so merry and talk so sweetly in her childish simplicity that the enraptured Capitan Tiago could do nothing but bless the ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... except the broken water on the reefs—was glimpsed in every part of the plantation always on the move under the white parasol. And once he climbed the headland and appeared suddenly to those below, a white speck elevated in the blue, with a diminutive ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... Tommy was naturally an enemy to all cruelty, and therefore, running towards the dog with more alacrity than prudence, he endeavoured to drive him from his prey; but the animal, who probably despised the diminutive size of his adversary, after growling a little while and showing his teeth, when he found that this was not sufficient to deter him from intermeddling, entirely quitted the sheep, and making a sudden ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... the little officer, standing beside, or rather below, Mr. Love, and looking so diminutive by the contras that you might have fancied that the Priest of Hymen had only to breathe ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... once; they presented flowers and fruits to our ladies, and refused any return. Some of the younger women, though sun-burnt, were handsome; and many of them, from their fanciful dresses, resembled the cottagers as exhibited on the stage. The men, on the other hand, were a most ugly race of beings, diminutive in size, and with the features of an old baboon. Mr. Younge, indeed, in some degree accounted for this, by the information that the best men had been taken for ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... it happened neither of us was afterwards able to decide. Perhaps Deuce knew. But suddenly, as often a figure appears in a cinematograph, the diminutive meadow thirty feet away contained two deer. They stood knee-deep in the grass, wagging their little tails ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... the suburbs of London. I am a thoroughly domesticated man, and notwithstanding that my occupation necessitates absence from my dwelling between the hours of 9 A.M. and 5 P.M., my heart is usually at home with my diminutive household. My wife and I love regularity and quiet above all things; and although, since the arrival of my son and heir, we have not enjoyed that perfect peace which was ours during the first years of our married life, yet his powerful little lungs, I am bound to say, have failed to ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... east of Walpi, and is approached by following the trail at the foot of the same mesa upon which Kuekuechomo is situated. The ruin is located on a small foothill and has a few standing walls. It was evidently diminutive in size and only temporarily inhabited. The best wall found at this ruin lies at the base of the hill, where the spring formerly was. This spring is now filled in, but a circular wall of masonry indicates its great size in ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... was called up next and introduced as "our little friend from Australia, the swimming teacher, who, on account of her diminutive size goes by the nickname of Tiny." Tiny was made to give her native Australian bush call of "Coo-ee! Coo-ee!" and was then told to rescue a drowning person in pantomime, which she did so realistically that the campers ...
— The Campfire Girls at Camp Keewaydin • Hildegard G. Frey
... made it just possible to stand upright in the centre aisle of the van; and a little sliding window opened onto the driver's seat in front. Altogether it was a very neat affair. The windows in front and back were curtained and a pot of geraniums stood on a diminutive shelf. I was amused to see a sandy Irish terrier curled up on a bright Mexican blanket in ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... came to the knowledge and love of Jesus was the old Chief Namakei. We came to live on his land, as it was near our diminutive harbor; and, upon the whole, he and his people were the most friendly, though his only brother, the Sacred Man of the tribe, on two occasions tried to shoot me. Namakei came a good deal about us at the Mission House, and helped ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... close to the ground in front of his assembled visitors. After this ceremony had been also repeated by the familiar, Chongi then took the gourd and twig, and sprinkled the contents all over us; retired to the Uganga, or magic house—a very diminutive hut—sprinkled pombe over it; and, finally, spreading a cow-skin under a tree, bade us sit, and gave us a jorum of pombe, making many apologies that he could not show us more hospitality, as famine had reduced his stores. What politeness ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... dormitory!" he cried. "What's all this about?" And then he saw Bassett just rising weakly to a sitting posture and observed the other boys slapping Teeny-bits on the back. He gazed in doubt from one to the other and then said to the diminutive conqueror: "Did you put ...
— The Mark of the Knife • Clayton H. Ernst
... hums." Here the doctor was for a moment diverted by some objective impression; and without a word of excuse to the little man, he swung himself into his buggy, which stood waiting, and drove rapidly away; whilst the diminutive man, after a moment of weak indecision, shuffled off down the street. I later learned that these talks of Doctor Castleton's were, as regards the element of verity, thrown off as writers of fiction throw off fancies. Sometimes he defended opinions that were in fierce conflict with the ideas ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... should say: "If you will drink this sort of stuff I suppose you must, but don't blame me for the consequences"), I settled Mr. Bellingham in Barnard's favourite lop-sided easy chair—the depressed seat of which suggested its customary use by an elephant of sedentary habits—and opened the diminutive piano. ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... a small sombre room within, with a bare yellow-washed floor and ragged curtains at the little window. In a corner was a diminutive altar draped with threadbare lace. The red glow of the taper lighted a cheap print of St. Joseph and a brazen crucifix. The human element in the room was furnished by a little, wizened yellow woman, who, black-robed, turbaned, and stern, sat before an ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... fed as he was (and this makes it a dark case) With sops every day from the lion's own pan, He lifts up his leg at the noble beast's carcase, And—does all a dog, so diminutive, can. ...
— English Satires • Various
... people, who had expected little from their diminutive navy, had calculated with confidence on being able to overrun Canada. As, however, they had taken no effectual measures to provide a mobile force they were disappointed. The British general, Sir George Prevost, was neither able nor energetic, but his subordinate, Major-General ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... dog had awakened a bowed old Mother Hubbard lady. She opened the door of her diminutive castle and peered across the ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... country, the peasants, were not quite so free as when Rurik landed. They began to be known as moujik, a contemptuous diminutive of the word mouj or man, literally manikin. The merchants or gosti did not form a distinct class, but in larger cities, such as Novgorod and Kief, they had a voice in the administration. These cities ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... YOUNGER. This distinguished bibliographer, rather than bookseller, lives hard by—in the Rue Git-Le-Coeur. He lives with his father, who superintends the business of the shop. The Rue Git-Le-Coeur is a sorry street—very diminutive, and a sort of cropt copy—to what it should have been, or what it might have been. However, there lives JACQ. CH. BRUNET, FILS: a writer, who will be known to the latest times in the bibliographical world. ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... was now on his knees. "You know Min, don't you?" Min was the nickname of one of the boys, because of his diminutive size. ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Conquest of the Savages • Roger Thompson Finlay
... might be wanted about the house and stables, was a youth, of perhaps eighteen, of quite an ordinary, and even singular appearance. His figure was low and slight, and he was made to appear the more diminutive, perhaps, by his dress, which consisted of short trousers, a long, coarse jacket, and a flat woollen cap, drawn down to the eyebrows. His hair, hanging, in lank locks, to his shoulders, was light and sandy, and his face was deeply freckled; ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... was aware of a figure standing in the hall. She was very much affronted by the violence of the intrusion, and not in the least afraid. She sat up with her glorious hair a little tousled, and her eyes flashing like a diminutive empress's. ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... out. Had Jack and Murray not been prisoners, with the possibility of the pirates changing their minds and cutting their throats, they would have been excessively amused at watching the proceedings of the crew, and rather enjoyed their cruise on board the pirate. On deck there was an erection like a diminutive caboose, but which was a temple or joss-house. The sailors were constantly making offerings before it, apparently as the caprice seized them, by burning gilt paper, or thin sticks, ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... me as if I might at any moment turn into the well-known and beloved relative I ought to have been. Even by undressing time I had not progressed far enough to be allowed intimate approach to small sacred nightgowns and diminutive shirts. The next morning, when I opened the door of the nursery where her maid was brushing her hair, the same dignity radiated from the little round figure perched on its high chair, the same almost hostile shyness gazed at me from the great expressive eyes. Obviously, it ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... critical humour vanished, for she looked so valiantly adorable in her love for the man. She was very small and slenderly made, with dark hair, luminous eyes, and ivory-white complexion, a sensitive nose and mouth, a wisp of nerves and passion. She carried her head high and, for so diminutive a person, ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... abounding in all things, Jove—hear us, and be with us;" and then, consider what strange phase of mind it was, which, under the very mountain-home of the god, was content with this symbol of him as a well-fed athlete, holding a diminutive and crouching eagle on his fist. The features and the right hand have been injured in this coin, but the action of the arm shows that it held a thunderbolt, of which, I believe, the twisted rays were triple. In the presumably earlier coin engraved by Millingen, however,[39] it ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... shall be much of a fighter," laughed Katie, looking at her diminutive hands; "and why is it any worse to go among the boys and girls in the factory than among the boys and girls in school? ...
— Katie Robertson - A Girls Story of Factory Life • Margaret E. Winslow
... general, are the most ugly and ill proportioned people that Captain Cook had ever seen, and are in every respect different from all the nations which had been met with in the Southern Ocean. They are a very dark-coloured, and rather a diminutive race, with long heads, flat faces, and countenances, which have some resemblance to that of the monkey. Their hair, which is mostly black or brown, is short and curly; but not altogether so soft and woolly as that of a negro. The difference of this people from any whom ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... terms, are accustomed to divide their novelistic fiction into what they call the roman, the nouvelle, and the conte. "Novel" and "novelette" are just as serviceable terms as roman and nouvelle; in fact, since "novelette" is the diminutive of "novel," they express even more clearly than their French equivalents the relation between the two forms they designate. But it is greatly to be regretted that we do not have in English a distinctive word ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... vol. i. xxxi. 1. 1, where the dwarfs and pigmies who came to the court of the king, in the period of the Ptolemies, to serve in his household, are mentioned. Various races of diminutive stature, which have since been driven down to the upper basin of the Congo, formerly extended further northward, and dwelt between Darfur and the marshes of Bahr-el-Ghazal. As to the Danga, cf. what has been said on p. 226 of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... months more than fifty-four. Mrs Austin, who saw him in 1828, says: 'His person was diminutive, almost to meanness, but his presence very imposing. His head and eye were grand, austere, and commanding. He had all the authority of intelligence, and looked and spoke like one not used to contradiction. He lived a ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 453 - Volume 18, New Series, September 4, 1852 • Various
... not aware of this love of diminutive females, but it would not show very good breeding ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... alleged means of Glooskap's death is described as being a cat-tail flag (haw-kwee-usqu', Passamaquoddy), while a handful of bird's down is the bane of Malsum the Wolf. The termination sis is a diminutive, here meaning the younger.] though this was not true. And Malsumsis said, "I can only die by a blow ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... circumstances, even for Ireland; and the consequence is, that they exhibit peculiar features of the most repulsive kind, projecting jaws with large open mouths, depressed noses, high cheek bones, and bow legs, together with an extremely diminutive stature. These, with an abnormal slenderness of the limbs, are the outward marks of a low and barbarous condition all over the world; it is particularly seen in the Australian aborigines. On the other hand, the beauty of the higher ranks in England is very remarkable, being, ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... had another distinction besides their diminutive stature and greyhound build. Their feet, clad in soft soleless shoes, made of skins, were long and pointed and of almost uncanny flexibility. It had become impossible for any one to look at either of the little men without letting his eyes wander ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... plants. Of those which have been described, about 8,000, or nearly one-sixth, belong to the first of the two classes, and of these nearly 2,000 are grasses. In cold and temperate climates the species of this most interesting and important family are comparatively diminutive in size. In our climate, for instance, the grasses are somewhat remarkable among vegetables for their humble stature, and their inconspicuous appearance; while in the warmer regions of the earth, the bamboos and canes, which are species ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 322, July 12, 1828 • Various
... track along which they were passing—it could hardly be called a road—ended abruptly in a tiny open space with a grove of trees upon one side and a sandpit on the other. In the centre was a pond, shrunken at this season of the year to most diminutive proportions; so much so, indeed, that it barely served for the ablutions of some half-a-dozen ducks, who hustled and jostled one another angrily in their efforts ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... symptoms. His diminutive friend was examining the embryo of a theory already established in his mind. It was a mere shadow, something vague and dark and uncertain in outline. But it existed, and would assume recognizable shape when an active imagination had fitted some shreds ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... Mr. Everard Hopkins made his appearance with one of two drawings sent in. The accepted one was an admirable travesty of the denouement of Ibsen's "Doll's House," representing a buxom middle-aged virago leaving the house of her diminutive hen-pecked husband, whose "birdie" she declines any longer to be. Numerous drawings of a graceful kind have since come from him, until he is in the way of being regarded as a ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... safety had spread over the pastoral Campo, forcing its way also, even as the waters of a high flood, into the nooks and crannies of the distant blue walls of the Sierras. Father first, in a pointed straw hat, then the mother with the bigger children, generally also a diminutive donkey, all under burdens, except the leader himself, or perhaps some grown girl, the pride of the family, stepping barefooted and straight as an arrow, with braids of raven hair, a thick, haughty profile, and no load to carry but the small guitar of the country and a pair of soft leather sandals ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... divergent lines as if scattered by a whirlwind, and galloping each to the commander of a regiment gave the word. There was a momentary confusion of tongues, a thin line of skirmishers detached itself from the compact front and pushed forward, followed by its diminutive reserves of half a company each—one of which platoons it was my fortune to command. When the straggling line of skirmishers had swept four or five hundred yards ahead, "See," said one of my comrades, "she moves!" She ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... powers in vain over the details of another period, seeking unsuccessfully for any documents which might allude to the present conspiracy, to enable him to perceive its true meaning, and all that had been attempted against him, when a diminutive man, of an olive complexion, who stooped much, entered the cabinet with a measured step. This was a Secretary of State named Desnoyers. He ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... thought of, and as Halicarnassus was fortunately absent for a few days, I prospected on the farm. A sunny little corner on a southern slope smiled up at me, and seemed to offer itself as a delightful situation for the diminutive garden which mine must be. The soil, too, seemed as fine and mellow as could be desired. I at once captured an Englishman from a neighboring plantation, hurried him into my corner, and bade him dig me and hoe me ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... Fido, after much deliberation and great hesitancy. My principal objection to this name was that nearly every diminutive dog bore it, but then it was old fashioned, and I had a weakness for old-fashioned things, if this taste could be spoken of in such a manner. I had really intended setting him adrift after his leg was strong, but during the days of his convalescence I became ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... deposits, and the general appearance of the country induced me strongly to hope that we should shortly get out of the region of reeds, or the great flooded concavity on which we had fixed our depot; but the sameness of vegetation, and the seemingly diminutive size of the timber in the distance, argued against any change for the better in the soil of the interior. Having taken the precaution of shortening the painter of the skiff, we found less difficulty ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... of a fine suite. A diminutive vestibule divides it from the corridor. You enter through double doors with muffed glass panes in a wooden partition opposite the wide French windows opening on the balcony. A pale blond light from the south fills ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... that he had something on his hook, and with immense pride he flourished in the air a diminutive blackfish—so small that the Hermit proposed to use it for bait, a suggestion promptly declined by the captor, who hid his catch securely in the fork of two branches, before re-baiting his hook. Then Harry pulled out a fine perch, ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... in her Ethiop hand Took the infant's diminutive palm, O, 'twas fearful to see how the features she scanned Of the babe in his slumbers so calm! Well she noted each mark and each furrow that crossed O'er the tracings of destiny's line: "WHENCE CAME YE?" she cried, in astonishment ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... we reached at 5 a.m., we had chota-hazri. Tea and toast, and most diminutive eggs, which we had to hold in our fingers as ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... back to their every-day plodding life with vacant brains and unexpanded souls, while Archibald Mackie, in his non-suggestive hovel, gathered big thoughts and exalted ideas, and grew majestic in intellect, even as he was diminutive in his outward frame. Not a stone upon the waste before him but could tell him its thrilling tale of weary heads pillowed thereon, when all other resting-places failed; of scanty meals spread out upon them for lack of a social board; and of forlorn and forsaken ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... shilpit drink, and a gill's a sma' measure for twa gentlemen to crack ower at their first acquaintance. But let us see your sneaking gill of sherry,' said Poor Peter, thrusting forth his huge hand to seize on the diminutive pewter measure, which, according to the fashion of the time, contained the generous liquor freshly ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... are solely addressed to the more diminutive class of midshipmen—those under five feet high, and under seven ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... inspected her she seemed absolutely empty, and the ocean, beyond acres of slippery seaweed, looked very far away. She has everything that a properly appointed station de bains should have, but everything is on a Lilliputian scale. The whole place looked like a huge Nueremburg toy. There is a diminutive hotel, in which, properly, the head waiter should be a pigmy and the chambermaid a sprite, and beside it there is a Casino on the smallest possible scale. Everything about the Casino is so harmoniously undersized that it seems a matter of course that the newspapers ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... of peace impossible. On the contrary, we were concerned to discover the best method of continuing the war. We knew, I need scarcely say, that humanly speaking ultimate victory for us was out of the question—that had been clear from the very beginning. For how could our diminutive army hope to stand against the overwhelming numbers at the enemy's command? Yet we had always felt that no one is worthy of the name of man who is not ready to vindicate the right, be the odds what they may. We knew also, that the Afrikanders, although ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... chariot, on which the wicked king Ravana was carrying Sita away, paused in the air. The king of the Nagas (serpents) ceased breathing flames, the monkey soldiers hung motionless on the trees, and Rama himself, clad in light blue and crowned with a diminutive pagoda, came to the front of the stage and pronounced in pure English speech, in which he thanked us for the honour of our presence. Then new bouquets, pansu-paris, and rose-water, and, finally, we reached ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... child's sweet slimness closer and looking down at her almost in envy. She was obliged to confess it to herself—she would have taken a passionate pleasure in talking of Gilbert Osmond to this innocent, diminutive creature who was so near him. But she said no other word; she only kissed Pansy once again. They went together through the vestibule, to the door that opened on the court; and there her young hostess stopped, looking rather wistfully ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... slipping or falling, would draw another after it, and, so the whole line would be thrown in confusion. In the palms noticed two small birds, white bodies, head and wings black. With the exception of the diminutive singing sparrow, and a few crows, these are all the birds I have seen in the oasis. Saw several Aheer Touaricks just arrived, and found them tall, well-made, comparatively fair, and fine-featured; nothing of the Negro character about them. All ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... changed, whitening a little as he sprang forward to meet him, but Jason, motioning with his thumb, swerved behind the chimney, where the stranger swiftly threw off his coat, the mountain boy spat on his hands, and like two diminutive demons they went at each other fiercely and silently. A few minutes later the two little girls rounding the chimney corner saw them—Gray on top and Jason writhing and biting under him like a tortured snake. A moment more Mavis's strong ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... handsome men to skip up behind their rolling carriages, and hand their plates at dinner. When John James was six years old his father remarked, with tears in his eyes, he wasn't higher than a plate-basket. The boys jeered at him in the streets—some whopped him, spite of his diminutive size. At school he made but little progress. He was always sickly and dirty, and timid and crying, whimpering in the kitchen away from his mother; who, though she loved him, took Mr. Ridley's view of his character, ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of the idea of a union of the Bulgarian race in a single state under a common government. This treaty was afterward torn to pieces by the Congress of Berlin, which set up for the Bulgarians a very diminutive principality. But the Bulgarians, from the palace down to the meanest hut, have always been animated by that racial and national idea. The annexation of Eastern Roumelia in 1885 was a great step in the direction of ...
— The Balkan Wars: 1912-1913 - Third Edition • Jacob Gould Schurman
... supposed to elapse, for refreshments, and when the curtain rises, GIMFRISKY, who has emerged through a diminutive hole, is discovered in the costume of AJAX defying the lightning, or something ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 13, June 25, 1870 • Various
... this projecting ledge stood a noble buck, with antlers and head raised, while he seemed to be gazing over the wild expanse of country below him. They knew he was a fine animal, though the distance made him appear diminutive. ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... spend their entire lives on the stems, sucking the juices through their little beaks, just as the aphids moor themselves to the tender rose-twigs, might be mistaken for thorns during one of their protective masquerades. Again they look like diminutive flocks of fowl, their heads ever pointing in one direction, no matter how the vine may twist and turn - always toward the top of the branch, that they may the better siphon the sap down their tiny throats. Toward the end of summer the females, which have a sharp instrument at the rear ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... dinner, he assured us that he never took anything in the middle of the day but a glass of wine and a biscuit; but he would be happy to sit down with us, which he accordingly did and kindly volunteered to carve for us. His offer was gladly accepted, but the appearance of a rather diminutive piece of neck of mutton was somewhat of a puzzle to him. He had evidently never seen such a joint in his life before, and had frankly to confess that he did not know how to set about carving it. Directions only ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... know, I repeat, how this scene would have ended, when there crossed the threshold a parsonage who came to take a part in the development of the drama. There entered, I say, a woman of twenty to twenty-two years of age, diminutive in body, superlative in audacity and grace. Neat and clean hose and shoes, short, black flounced petticoat, a linked girdle, head-dress or mantilla of fringed taffeta caught together at the nape of her neck, and a corner of it over her shoulder, she passed before my eyes ...
— First Love (Little Blue Book #1195) - And Other Fascinating Stories of Spanish Life • Various
... of the diminutive windows at the throng of life in the unquiet streets as they halted for the passing of a camel laden with bricks and stones from a demolished building; the poor thing teetered precariously past under such a back-breaking load that the girl felt it would ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... incumbency." Joachim and St. Anne seem very much distressed, and Joachim appears to be saying, "It is not our fault; I assure you, sir, we have done everything in our power. She has had plenty of nourishment." There must be some explanation of the diminutive size of the figure that is ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... ovina.—SHEEP'S FESCUE-GRASS.—This is very highly spoken of in all dissertations that have hitherto been written on the merits of our grasses; but its value must be confined to alpine situations, for its diminutive size added to its slow growth renders it in my opinion very inferior to the duriuscula. In fact, I am of opinion that these are often confounded together, and the merits of the former applied to this, although they are different in many respects. Those who wish to obtain more of its history may ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... the ships may go About men's business to and fro. But I, the egg-shell pinnace, sleep On crystal waters ankle-deep: I, whose diminutive design, Of sweeter cedar, pithier pine, Is fashioned on so frail a mould, A hand may launch, a hand withhold: I, rather, with the leaping trout Wind, among lilies, in and out; I, the unnamed, inviolate. Green, rustic rivers navigate. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... whole of this luxuriant area; and here our magnifiers blessed our panting hopes with specimens of conscious existence. In the shade of the woods we beheld brown quadrupeds having all the external characteristics of the bison, but more diminutive than any species of the bos genus in our natural history.' Then herds of agile creatures like antelopes are described, 'abounding on the acclivitous glades of the woods.' In the contemplation of these sprightly ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... Camo, I love, camipen, love; Chingar, to fight, chingaripen, war. It is of much the same service in expressing what is abstract and ideal as Engro, Mescro, and Engri are in expressing what is living and tangible. It is sometimes used as a diminutive, ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... swishing at each step, and tapping her shining boots with the riding crop. Her own horse she found at the hitching rack, and beside it Donnegan was on his chestnut horse. It was a tall horse, and he looked more diminutive than ever before, pitched so ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... 303.).—An attempt to explain the origin of the word maukin, or malkin, may be seen in the Philological Museum, vol. i. p. 681. (See also Halliwell's Dict., in Malkin and Maulkin.) The most probable derivation of the word is, that malkin is a diminutive of mal, abbreviated from Mary, now commonly written Moll. Hence, by successive changes, malkin or maukin might mean a dirty wench, a figure of old rags dressed up as a scarecrow, and a mop of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 234, April 22, 1854 • Various
... men for the ship, so that most of the work of rigging her was done by dock-side workers under a good old master rigger named Malley. Landsmen would have stared wide-eyed and open-mouthed at Malley's men with their diminutive dolly-winch had they watched our new masts and ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... this?" said he, as if he could not believe that the two young ladies dressed in black, of slight figures and diminutive stature, looking pleased yet agitated, could be the embodied Currer and Acton Bell for whom curiosity had been hunting so eagerly ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... so thriving a state, and were all low, but the plantain-trees made a better appearance, though they were not large. In general, the trees round this village, and which were seen at many of those which we passed before we anchored, are the cordia sebestina, but of a more diminutive size than the product of the southern isles. The greatest part of the village stands near the beach, and consists of above sixty houses there; but, perhaps, about forty more stand scattered about, farther up the country, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... lisped the small solemn-eyed urchin who had strayed in from the kitchen and now stood in the door hitching at a diminutive pair of trousers and eying Elliott absorbedly. "Gone!" he announced suddenly; coming out of ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist
... who is dastard enough to strike a woman, would allow himself to be beaten by a woman, were she to make at him in self-defence, even if, instead of possessing the stately height and athletic proportions of the aforesaid Isopel, she were as diminutive in stature, and had a hand as delicate, and foot as small, as a certain royal lady, who was some time ago assaulted by a fellow upwards of six feet high, whom the writer has no doubt she could have beaten had she thought proper to go at him. Such is the deliberate advice ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... that Thor, Odin, and Frigga, were frightful idols, as represented in the Upsala temple, and the small statues carried by the Scandinavian sailors on their expeditions and set in the place of honor on board their ships, were but diminutive copies of the hideous originals. It is known, moreover, that Odin had existed as a leader of some of their migrations, so that their idolatry resolved ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... sprang at him like a little tiger, and by the fierceness of her gestures and the volubility of her German jargon actually compelled him to retreat step by step until she had him outside the door, which she barred with her diminutive person. No one could help laughing at the discomfited giant and the mite of a child facing him so bravely, while she scolded at ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... adorable in her love for the man. She was very small and slenderly made, with dark hair, luminous eyes, and ivory-white complexion, a sensitive nose and mouth, a wisp of nerves and passion. She carried her head high and, for so diminutive a ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... His stature was diminutive, but he was regularly formed; his appearance, till he grew corpulent, was agreeable, and he suffered it to want no recommendation that dress could give it. His conversation was elegant and easy. The rest of his character may, without injury to his ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... the three McAfee brothers, who were among the pioneer hunters of Kentucky.[52] Previous to trying to move their families out to the new country, they made a cache of clothing, implements, and provisions, which in their absence was broken into and plundered. They caught the thief, "a little diminutive, red-headed white man," a runaway convict servant from one of the tide-water counties of Virginia. In the first impulse of anger at finding that he was the criminal, one of the McAfees rushed at him to kill him with his tomahawk; but the weapon turned, ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... such, I say, were the outlines of Dr. Slop's figure, coming slowly along, foot by foot, waddling thro' the dirt upon the vertebrae of a little diminutive pony, of a pretty colour—but of strength,—alack!—scarce able to have made an amble of it, under such a fardel, had the roads been in an ambling condition.—They were not.—Imagine to yourself, Obadiah mounted upon a strong monster of a coach-horse, pricked into a full gallop, and making ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... gas-stove and put on the kettle and began to lay the table. There was a "tin of something" in the diminutive pantry, a small loaf and a jug of milk, a tomato or two and a bottle of dressing—the high tea to which she sat down (a little flushed of the face and quite happy) was seasoned with content. She thought of the doctor and accounted herself ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... down along the gully next morning, following the main street, which changed direction every few yards, "paved" with three-inch cobbles, the sidewalks two feet wide, leaving one pedestrian to jump off it each time two met. A diminutive streetcar drawn by mules with jingling bells passed now and then. Peons swarmed here also, but there was by no means the abject poverty of San Luis Potosi, and Americans seemed in considerable favor, as their mines in the vicinity ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... gives the loose end a little shake, and casts it skilfully over his shoulder, so that it falls across his back, and, hanging there, displays the bright lining. He pauses to watch the result of an infantile accident. The baby picks itself up and brushes the dust from its diminutive frock with all the earnestness of early youth. ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... uncertain derivation, but forus, of which it is clearly the diminutive, is used by Virgil for ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... of rope; Billy and the others threw themselves after him; while half a dozen men working around the small eddy in the lee of the diminutive island caught up the oars and made a ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... alley of women. In every house on either side of the way a similar picture of attentive patience was revealed: a narrow Moorish archway with a wooden door set back against the wall to show a steep and diminutive staircase winding up into mystery; upon the highest stair a common candlestick with a lit candle guttering in it, and, immediately below, a girl, thickly painted, covered with barbarous jewels and magnificently dressed, ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... wish to make a mystery of him,—to you, anyway. But you must have formed your own opinion. Now, do consider the data. Diminutive footmarks, toes never fettered by boots, naked feet, stone-headed wooden mace, great agility, small poisoned darts. What do you make of ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... I had been a little too copious in talking of my beloved country, he took me up in his hand, and in a hearty fit of laughter asked me if I were a Whig or a Tory? Then, turning to his first minister, observed how contemptible a thing was human grandeur, which could be mimicked by such diminutive ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... These diminutive observations seem to take away something from the dignity of writing, and therefore are never communicated but with hesitation, and a little fear of abasement and contempt. But it must be remembered, that life consists not of a series of illustrious actions, or ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... means to ascertain his age, and must have concluded him only six months old from his small size; but from his teeth and walking alone, he was more likely to have been two years old, and his diminutive size was probably occasioned by the miseries of the climate, and wretchedness of every kind to which these ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... of the bundle was untied by the mite's busy fingers there crawled out a tiny tortoise-shell kitten, with its diminutive little tail erect like a young bottle-brush, which gave vent to a "phiz- phit," as if indignant at its long confinement, and then proceeded to rub itself against Jupp's leg, with a purring ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... startle a body when you ain't used to him," observed Miss Willy, with a bashful giggle. She was a diminutive, sparrow-like creature, with a natural taste for sick-rooms and death-beds, and an inexhaustible fund of gossip. As Mrs. Treadwell, for once, did not respond to her unspoken invitation to chat, she tied her bonnet strings under her ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... news he had heard with creditable disinterestedness, and admirable repression of anything beneath the dignity of a philosopher. When one has attained that felicitous point of wisdom from which one sees all mankind to be fools, the diminutive objects may make what new moves they please, one does not marvel at them: their sedateness is as comical as their frolic, and their frenzies more comical still. On this intellectual eminence the wise youth had built his castle, and he had lived in it from an early period. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... injurious than the larger variety, because their diminutive size escapes the gardener's eye. A good way to keep them under is to make small holes, about an inch deep, and about the diameter of the little finger, round the plants which they infest. Into these holes the slugs will retreat during the day, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 331, September 13, 1828 • Various
... 1: The locus is the mountains of Tirol. Laurin, the diminutive dwarf-king, has a rose-garden the trespasser upon which must lose a hand and foot. The arrogant Witege, Dietrich's man, wantonly tramples down the roses; whereupon Laurin assails him, in knightly fashion, on horseback. 2: The ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... meaning of this passage is made clear only by the discovery of the facts mentioned in Note B prefixed to this volume. The names Jasper and Susanneken (a diminutive of Susanna) appeal to Danckaerts and excite these reflections because they were the names of himself and his wife, who had died ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... summer weather he had obtained permission to bathe in a modest-sized pond in the orchard, and thither one afternoon Groby had bent his steps, attracted by loud imprecations of anger mingled with the shriller chattering of monkey-language. He beheld his plump diminutive servitor, clad only in a waistcoat and a pair of socks, storming ineffectually at the monkey which was seated on a low branch of an apple tree, abstractedly fingering the remainder of the boy's outfit, which he had removed just out ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... render himself thoroughly independent, or, more likely still, to surround his diminutive individuality with an air of mystery—had abandoned his birth-place, and established himself about two miles away from it, near a singularly-formed sandstone rock, situated in a small but exceedingly pretty fir-wood, and commonly known by the name of the Bear's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... the time I speak of, close upon seventy years of age, scarcely five feet in height, and even that diminutive stature lessened by a stoop. His face was thin, pointed, and russet-colored; his nose so aquiline as nearly to meet his projecting chin, and his small gray eyes, red and bleary, peered beneath his well-worn cap with ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... or, rather, half off it—pushed back from his forehead, and rather suspended than poised. He stood before a table on which old newspapers were scattered, one of which he had taken up and, with his eye-glass on his nose, was holding out at arm's-length. It was that honourable but extremely diminutive sheet, the Journal de Geneve, a newspaper of about the size of a pocket-handkerchief. As I drew near, looking for my Galignani, the tall gentleman gave me, over the top of his eye-glass, a somewhat solemn stare. Presently, however, before I had time ...
— The Pension Beaurepas • Henry James
... the early Christian sarcophagi, I shall give a full account in the "History of our Lord, as illustrated in the fine arts;" at present I confine myself to the female figure which takes this conspicuous place, while other female figures are prostrate, or of a diminutive size, to express their humility or inferiority; and I have no doubt that thus situated it is intended to represent the woman who was highly honoured as well as highly ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... a lone Washoe Indian; he is riding a diminutive, scraggy-looking mustang. One of his legs is muffled up in a red blanket, and in one hand he carries a rudely-invented crutch. "How will you trade horses?" I banteringly ask as we meet in the road; and I dismount ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... sector of the front which Von Buelow was well-informed enough to select for his offensive. But the nervousness was general: Italians had never yet met German troops in battle, save perhaps in small encounters with diminutive units in Macedonia, and some consternation was created when, about the middle of October, it was ascertained that there were German divisions on the Italian front; and presently popular imagination magnified Von Buelow's thirteen ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... quarter where the cart was, through mud and water, urging him on with shouts and cries, and laughing until we could laugh no longer, at the appearance of each. The cart had been hauling wood, but that was nothing to us. In we tumbled, and with a driver as diminutive as the horse, started off for Mr. Elder's, where we picked up all the children to be found, and went on. All told, we were twelve, drawn by that poor horse, who seemed at each step about to undergo the ham process, and leave us his hind quarters, while he escaped with the fore ones and harness. ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... a foreign air that breathes around us as we make the harmless, friendly voyage from Point Levis to Quebec. The boy on the ferry-boat, who cajoles us into buying a copy of Le Moniteur containing last month's news, has the address of a true though diminutive Frenchman. The landlord of the quiet little inn on the outskirts of the town welcomes us with Gallic effusion as well-known guests, and rubs his hands genially before us, while he escorts us to our apartments, groping secretly in his memory to recall our names. ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... very old variation of Emma, and sometimes spelt Emmot; Sens is a corruption of Sancha, naturalised among us in the thirteenth century; and Collet or Colette, the diminutive of Nichola, a common and favourite name in ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... others, who is making his life a part of a hundred or a thousand or a million lives, thus illimitably intensifying or multiplying his own, instead of living as you in what otherwise would be his own little, diminutive self, will find himself ascending higher and higher until he stands as one among the few, and will find a peace, a happiness, a satisfaction so rich and so beautiful, compared to which yours will be but a poor miserable something, and whose name and memory when his life here is finished, will ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... Across the way a phonograph bawled; our stringed orchestra played "The Dollar Princess;" from somewhere over in the dark and mysterious alleyways came the regular beating of a tom-tom. The magnificent and picturesque town car with its gaudy ragamuffins swayed by in train of its diminutive mule. ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... shouted. "Rugayushka!" he added, involuntarily by this diminutive expressing his affection and the hopes he placed on this red borzoi. Natasha saw and felt the agitation the two elderly men and her brother were trying to conceal, and was herself excited ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... profound is his influence that almost all the other gods of the pantheon take on some of his character. Whenever and wherever possible, those phases of the god's nature are emphasized which point to the possession of power over enemies. The gods of the Assyrian pantheon impress one as diminutive Ashurs by the side of the big one, and in proportion as they approach nearer to the character of Ashur himself, is their hold upon ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... lamp of the most primitive design, by the light of which the archbishop had evidently been reading. As soon as Derby entered, the venerable prelate arose. In his long sottana of violet he looked strangely diminutive and feminine; his pale skin and mild eyes, and the soft white hair like a fringe beneath his velvet cap—all gave an impression of great gentleness, an impression heightened by contrast with the bare, white-washed walls and rigorously meager furnishing of the cell-like room. With the ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... of the parents the child was never addressed as "Bob" or "Bobby," or by any other diminutive. In their practical opinion a child's name was his name, and ought not to be mauled or dismembered on the pretext of fondness. Similarly, the child had not been baptized after his father, or after any male member of either the Machin or the Cotterill family. ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... chap Done me up w'en I thought I had sich a soft snap, Done me up on a race with remarkable ease, An' lowered my pride a good many degrees. Did I give him the hoss? W'y o' course I did, boss, An' I tell you it warn't no diminutive loss. He writ me a letter from back in the East, An' said he presented the neat little beast To a feller named Pope, who stands at the head O' the ranch where the cussed ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... by the soldiers. Down between the two ranks, which were formed facing each other, came the Sultan on a white steed—a beautiful Arabian—and having at his side his son, a boy about ten or twelve years old, who was riding a pony, a diminutive copy of his father's mount, the two attended by a numerous body-guard, dressed in gorgeous Oriental uniforms. As the procession passed our carriage, I, as pre-arranged, stood up and took off my hat, His Serene Highness promptly ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... by the presence of medium-sized deer and cats, fox-like wolves, and small camel-like creatures, as well as by the presence of small armadillos, sloths, and ant-eaters. In other words, it includes diminutive representatives of the giants of the preceding era, both of the giants among the older forms of mammalia, and of the giants among the new and intrusive kinds. The change was widespread and extraordinary, and with our ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... what was called the Pearl Bible; alluding, I suppose, to that diminutive type in printing, for it could not derive its name from its worth. It is in twenty-fours;[272] but to contract the mighty book into this dwarfishness, all the original Hebrew text prefixed to the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... along the choir. His appearance is that of a veteran warrior, and he walked alone, with his numerous suite following at a respectful distance, preceded by heralds and ushers, who received him with marked attention, more certainly than any of the other Ambassadors. The Queen looked very diminutive, and the effect of the procession itself was spoilt by being too crowded; there was not interval enough between the Queen and the Lords and others going before her. The Bishop of London (Blomfield) preached a very good sermon. ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... balance of power in Europe. If we go beyond the kingdoms of Italy and cross the Adriatic, we come to the small kingdom of Greece, against which we have a nice account that will never be settled, while we have engagements to maintain that respectable but diminutive country under its present constitutional government. Then, leaving the kingdom of Greece, we pass up the eastern end of the Mediterranean, and from Greece to the Red Sea, where-ever the authority of the Sultan is more or less admitted, the blood and the industry of England are pledged ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... commerce begins with an egg no bigger than a mustard seed, out of which comes a diminutive caterpillar, which is kept in a frame and fed upon mulberry leaves. When the caterpillars are full grown, they climb upon twigs placed for them and begin to spin or make the cocoon. The silk comes from two little orifices in the head ...
— Textiles and Clothing • Kate Heintz Watson
... at which invitation, Musyer Fransoir, who has stood confessed, ascends the narrow side steps which give entrance to the cottage, and vanishes through a diminutive door. He appears again hatless, and beckons his companions, who follow his lead with alacrity. Soon, a hollow drumming, rattling, and grating, is heard, varied by the occasional twang of an exceedingly light guitar making vain efforts to promote harmony. A shuffling of slippered ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... Native mechanics are nowhere to be found, there being no demand for them, and the plough, the wine-press, and the oil-mill are equally rude and barbarous. The product of labour is, consequently, most diminutive, and its wages twopence a day, with a little food. The interest of money varies from 25 to 50 per cent. per annum, and this rate is frequently paid for the loan of bad seed that yields but little to ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... shrewdly observed that Foote must have meant a diminutive, or POCKET edition.] I mentioned my doubts to Dr Johnson, who said, he would go two miles out of his way to see Lord Monboddo. I therefore sent Joseph ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... the letters "m", "l", and "v" are not roots. The word "do" is not a noun, because "d" is not a root. The word "plej" is not a plural, because "ple" is not a root. The word "meti", to put, has nothing to do with the diminutive suffix "et", because "m" ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... standard and could be happy no longer, even in Paradise. According to this chapter the moral standard is the origin of all our woe. God himself summoned our first parents before him, and in what plight did they appear? We know how ridiculous the diminutive fig leaf makes a statue seem in our museums; think of the poor man and woman attired in fig leaves just plucked from the trees! I experienced a thrill of satisfaction that I should have been the first to understand a text that ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... threepenny-piece for each child, one of which was irretrievably buried in Regie's money-box, and the other two immediately lost in the mat in the pony-carriage. However, Hester found them, and slipped them inside their white gloves, and the expedition started, accompanied by Boulou, a diminutive yellow-and-white dog of French extraction. Boulou was a well-meaning, kind little soul. There was a certain hurried arrogance about his hind-legs, but it was only manner. He was not in reality more conceited than most small dogs who wear ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... echoes resentfully back sent; The complaint of a much disappointed cab-driver Mingled with it, demanding some ultimate stiver; Then, the heavy and hurried approach of a boot Which reveal'd by its sound no diminutive foot: And the door was flung suddenly open, and on The threshold Lord Alfred by bachelor John Was seized in that sort of affectionate rage or Frenzy of hugs which some stout Ursa Major On some lean Ursa Minor would doubtless bestow With a warmth for which ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... and fitting lids on them. Canoe birch is one of the best woods for this class of commodities, because it can be worked very thin, does not split readily, and is of pleasing color. Such boxes, or two-piece diminutive kegs, are used as containers for articles shipped and sold in small bulk, such as tacks, small nails, and brads. Such containers are generally cylindrical and of considerably greater depth than diameter. Many others of nearly similar ...
— Seasoning of Wood • Joseph B. Wagner
... pack him up so! Yes, yes, you poor little thing," said the grandmother soothingly, taking the diminutive Sami out of one wrapping and then a second ...
— What Sami Sings with the Birds • Johanna Spyri
... laughter so dear to my heart. I gave a loud cry of delight and welcome. Immediately rose a trumpeting as of baby-elephants, a neighing as of foals, and a bellowing as of calves, and through the bushes came a crowd of Little Ones, on diminutive horses, on small elephants, on little bears; but the noises came from the riders, not the animals. Mingled with the mounted ones walked the bigger of the boys and girls, among the latter a woman ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... have got on without him. He adapted the Spanish names of things to our English understanding by shortening them; a patio became a pat', and an old master an old mast'; and an endearing quality was imparted to the grim memory of Philip II. by the diminutive of Philly. We accepted this, but even to have Charles V. brought nearer our hearts as Charley Fif, we could not bear to have our guide exposed to the mockery of less considerate travelers. I instructed him that the emperor's name was Charles, and that ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... zephyr, which might soon be expected. The gallant frigate, seen from the impending rocks, looked like a light merchantman, in all but her symmetry and warlike guise; nature being moulded on so grand a scale all along that coast, as to render objects of human art unusually diminutive to the eye. On the other hand, the country-houses, churches, hermitages, convents, and villages, clustered all along the mountain-sides, presented equally delusive forms, though they gave an affluence to the views that left the ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... traits. Let the reader note Fleeming's eagerness to influence his friend Frank, an incipient Tory (no less) as further history displayed; his unconscious indifference to his father and devotion to his mother, betrayed in so many significant expressions and omissions; the sense of dignity of this diminutive "person resident on the spot," who was so happy as to escape insult; and the strange picture of the household—father, mother, son, and even poor Aunt Anna—all day in the streets in the thick of this rough business, and the boy packed off alone to school in a distant quarter ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... brought, and Sir John consumed it in silent majesty. While he was pouring out his second cup—of a diminutive size—the bell rang. He set down the silver coffee-pot with a clatter, as if his nerves were not quite so good as they used to be. It was not Jack, ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... daughters were Sibella, born 1792, and Anne Mary, whose birth caused the death of her mother in December 1796. Sibella married W. A. Garratt, who was second wrangler and first Smith's prizeman in 1804. He was a successful barrister and a man of high character, though of diminutive stature. 'Mr. Garratt,' a judge is reported to have said to him, 'when you are addressing the court you should stand up.' 'I am standing up, my lord.' 'Then, Mr. Garratt, you should stand upon the bench.' 'I am standing upon the bench, my lord.' He had been disinherited ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... varieties, or breeds, all of which, however, retain the more important characteristics of the primordial type. There appears to be no limit to the varieties of dogs, yet one can perceive by a glance that there is no specific difference between the huge Mont St. Bernard dog and the diminutive poodle, or between the sparse greyhound and the burly mastiff. All the varieties of our domestic fowl have been traced to a common origin—the wild Indian fowl (Gallus bankiva). Even Darwin admits that all the existing kinds of horses are, in all probability, the descendants of an ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... the schooner Rose of Milton, Capt. Hamilton, cruising on Lakes Ontario and Erie. In one trip to the town of Erie, Pennsylvania, for a cargo of coal, while lying at the dock, a diminutive negro man, with a white beard, came on board the vessel, and inquiried of me if this was a British vessel. On being informed that it was, he desired to be secreted, stating that he was a runaway slave, and that his pursuers were on his track. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... hanged himself on a tamarind-tree, which, before that time, was a tall, beautiful tree. After Judas's death it became the diminutive, shapeless shrub called vruca, which is a synonym for all that is worthless. The soul of the traitor is condemned to wander through the air, and every time it sees this shrub it pauses, and imagines it sees its miserable body dangling ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... in vain over the details of another period, seeking unsuccessfully for any documents which might allude to the present conspiracy, to enable him to perceive its true meaning, and all that had been attempted against him, when a diminutive man, of an olive complexion, who stooped much, entered the cabinet with a measured step. This was a Secretary of State named ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... narrow staircase, into a singularly diminutive drawing-room, Clarence and his guide were ushered. There, seated on a little chair by a little work-table, with one foot on a little stool and one hand on a little book, was ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Takruries arrive with camels laden with cotton and grain. The market-place is now a crowded and exciting scene: horses are tried by half-naked jockeys, who, with whip and heel, drive at a furious pace their diminutive steeds, reckless as to the limbs and lives ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... me to have been built upon a design of Palladio, and might be converted into an elegant place of worship; but it is indifferently contrived for that sort of idolatry which is performed in it at present: the grandeur of the fane gives a diminutive effect to the little painted divinities that are adorned in it, and the company, on a ball-night, must look like an assembly of fantastic fairies, revelling by moonlight among the columns of a ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... the admonition, suffered himself to be led by the child; and together they passed slowly out into the living room, through the kitchen, and thence into the diminutive rose garden, the pride of ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... woman was absolute mistress. Years before the Rector had made a great mistake; he had, as the plain-spoken East Burgen doctor put it, made an ass of himself on the matter of a childish illness, thereby imperilling Dora's half-fledged little life. Mrs. Glynde had then, like a diminutive tigress, stood up boldly before her awesome lord and master, saying such things to him that the remembrance of them made her catch her breath even now. From that time forth the Rector was allowed to hold ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... riders, and jostling and knocking against one another in a way that would have disgusted any other pony in the world. Conspicuous among the crowd of riders, was the thirty-rupee Prime Minister, who on a most diminutive little animal, charged about in a way he never could have condescended to do, had he had the misfortune to have still remained a Rajah. Each time that the ball was sent into the goal, the striker, picking it up dexterously, without ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... why Kate should want it, I can't think! She hadn't yellow hair, and she couldn't possibly have behaved so badly. I have often heard my parents say significantly that they had no trouble with Kate! Before she was four, she was dancing a hornpipe in a sailor's jumper, a rakish little hat, and a diminutive pair of white ducks! Those ducks, marked "Kate Terry," were kept by mother for years as a precious relic, and are, I hope, still ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... poll of the major and the silvery hair of his good wife were significant of venerable age, but there were younger people in the family, and with them a fair sprinkling of children. Of these the diminutive stockings were duly hung in a row over the big fireplace, waiting for the expected coming of Santa Claus, while their late wearers were soon huddled in bed, though with little hope of sleep in the excitement and sense of enchantment ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... no need of names, your highness." Georges Desmarets was diminutive, black-haired and corpulent. He was of dapper appearance, point-device in everything, and he reminded you ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... glittered in Miss Leonora's eyes of fiery hazel grey—tears of very diminutive size, totally unlike the big dewdrops which rained from Miss Dora's placid orbs and made them red, but did her no harm—but still a real moisture, forced out of a fountain which lay very deep down and inaccessible to ordinary ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... find the following interesting paper from the pen of Mr. C. W. Idell, a commission merchant, whose intelligent interest in fruits extends beyond their current price. He gives so graphic a picture of the diminutive beginning of small fruit growing and marketing, that I am ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... he, either, was the originator of that theory, for it is frequently referred to by Sir Walter Scott, who accepted it himself.[3] "In fact," he says, "there seems reason to conclude that these duergar [in English, dwarfs] were originally nothing else than the diminutive natives of the Lappish, Lettish and Finnish nations, who, flying before the conquering weapons of the Asae, sought the most retired regions of the north, and there endeavoured to hide themselves from ...
— Fians, Fairies and Picts • David MacRitchie
... 643; mere nothing, next to nothing; hardly anything; just enough to swear by; the shadow of a shade. finiteness, finite quantity. V. be small &c. adj.; lie in a nutshell. diminish &c. (decrease) 36; (contract) 195. Adj. small, little; diminutive &c. (small in size) 193; minute; fine; inconsiderable, paltry &c. (unimportant) 643; faint &c. (weak) 160; slender, light, slight, scanty, scant, limited; meager &c. (insufficient) 640; sparing; few &c. 103; low, so-so, middling, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... powers and properties of the creature as such, and is inconsistent with accidental or imperfect developments, and even with great variation from average size, the ideal size being neither gigantic nor diminutive, but the utmost grandeur and entireness of proportion at a certain point above the mean size; for as more individuals always fall short of generic size than rise above it, the generic is above the average or mean size. And this perfection of the creature ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... were very bulky and throne-like constructions, and were abandoned towards the end of the fifteenth century; and it is worthy of notice that though we have retained our word "chair," adopted from the Norman French, the French people discarded their synonym in favour of its diminutive "chaise" to describe the somewhat smaller and less massive seat which came into use ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... of the superior. Fealty is the Norman-French form of the word fidelity. An esquire is a scutiger (L.), or shield-bearer; for he carried the shield of the knight, when they were travelling and no fighting was going on. A vassal was a "little young man,"— in Low-Latin vassallus, a diminutive of vassus, from the Keltic word gws, a man. (The form vassaletus is also found, which gives us our varlet and valet.) Scutcheon comes from the Lat. scutum, a shield. Then scutcheon or escutcheon came to mean coat-of-arms— or the marks and signs on his shield by which the ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... roused by the waiter bringing coffee. Kitty Tailleur had come out on to the veranda. She was pouring out Grace Keating's coffee, and talking to her in another voice, the one that she kept for children and for animals, and for all diminutive and helpless things. She was saying that Miss Keating (whom she called Bunny) was a dear little white rabbit, and she wanted to ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... encroaching on their domain. Yet it was sometimes ludicrous to see one of the party momentarily stamping and roaring with pain, as he cried out to a companion to hasten and assist him in getting rid of an enemy at once so diminutive and so troublesome. ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... tarbooshes. Then a psalm by a company of Jewish boys in their black skull-caps—a brave old song of Zion sung by silvery young voices in an alien land. Finally, little black Ali, led out by his teacher, with his diminutive Moorish harp in his hands, showing no fear at all, but only a negro boy's shy looks of pleasure—his head aside, his eyes gleaming, his white teeth ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... Catholic. He alone was both their architect and their builder, working at them with inexhaustible industry and labour, for generally the thickest walls had to be broken into and large stones excavated, requiring stronger arms than were attached to a body so diminutive as to give him the nickname of 'Little John,' and by this his skill many priests were preserved from the prey of persecutors. Nor is it easy to find anyone who had not often been indebted for ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea
... of mountain torrents. The sun shone, the wind rustled joyously; and we had advanced some miles, and the city had already shrunk into an inconsiderable knoll upon the plain behind us, before my attention began to be diverted to the companion of my drive. To the eye, he seemed but a diminutive, loutish, well-made country lad, such as the doctor had described, mighty quick and active, but devoid of any culture; and this first impression was with most observers final. What began to strike me was his familiar, chattering talk; ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... down at her diminutive figure with its well-shaped, patrician head, its sensitive mouth, its wide-set, ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... chair, and said, "Come awa', my bonnie lassie, and let us hae a look at you." And Katherine laughingly pushed a stool toward the fire, and sat down between the two men on the hearthstone. She was the daintiest little Dutch maiden that ever latched a shoe,—very diminutive, with a complexion like a sea-shell, great blue eyes, and such a quantity of pale yellow hair, that it made light of its ribbon snood, and rippled over her brow and slender white neck in bewildering curls. She dearly loved fine clothes; and she had not removed her visiting dress of Indian ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... of chemistry have been laid open by her," continued the diminutive priest. "Inert matter is engaged in warlike commotion and she hath brought fire down from the heavens to entertain her. She hath placed our land in such a state of defence that no invader can approach it; she ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... Maerchenland as theirs might have prepared the Royal party for the unusual. But it was an undeniable shock to them all to find, on arrival at the mine, not only that the method of working was primitive to the last degree, but that it was entirely conducted by diminutive beings who were unmistakable Yellow Gnomes. The interior of the mine resounded with the blows of pickaxes, but the inevitable trumpeters had no sooner announced that the Sovereigns had left their coach than all work was suspended. ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... Jeanne had taken the rooms, a Mrs. Caynsard, she had seen only once or twice. She was waited upon most of the time by an exceedingly diminutive maid servant, very shy at first, but very talkative afterwards, in broad Norfolk dialect, when she had grown a little accustomed to this very unusual lodger. Now and then Kate Caynsard, the only daughter of the house, appeared, but for the most time she was away, sailing a fishing ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... finished? His course run? And, if he must live and solve his problem, could he stand after she had left? He bent closer to her, and listened to the gentle breathing. He seemed again to see her, as he was wont in the years past, flitting about her diminutive rose garden and calling to him to come and share her boundless joy. "Come!" he heard her call. "Come, Padre dear, and see my beautiful thoughts!" And then, so often, "Oh, Padre!" bounding into his arms, "here is a beautiful thought that came to me to-day, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... deep, and observe the colossal entrances to the various pits, the rocky bridges, the projections, arches, and caverns excavated in the solid rock. The miners appear so many puppets; their movements can hardly be distinguished, until the eye has grown accustomed to the darkness and to their diminutive size. ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... with the national officers there to this end but was unsuccessful. The headquarters of the Congressional Committee at the opening of this session consisted of two rooms in the Munsey Building at Washington too diminutive to hold even our furniture, to say nothing of our workers. On February 19 it moved to two larger rooms in the ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... himself, directed attention to the peculiar effect of the moon’s disc reflected in the white surf, and compared it to fire in snow. Rossetti, struck with the picturesqueness of the comparison, made there and then an elaborate prose note of it in one of the diminutive pocket-books that he was in the habit of carrying in the capacious pocket of his waistcoat. Years afterwards—shortly before his death, in fact—when he came to write ‘The King’s Tragedy,’ remembering this note, he thought he could find an excellent place for it in the scene where the king ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... not stop till they reached the middle of the river, and stuck their heads, ears and all, under the water. Luke's diminutive, snuff-colored beast was so overcome by the sight and feel of water that she lay down in it, with him astride, giving herself and her master the first real bath since the time that she did the same thing, in the Platte ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... not among the public speakers, are Mrs. Spofford, the treasurer, wife of the proprietor of the Riggs House, and Miss Ellen H. Sheldon, secretary of the Association. To these ladies is due much of the success of the convention. Mrs. Sheldon is of diminutive stature, with gray hair, and Mrs. Spofford is of large and queenly figure, with white hair. Her magnificent presence is always remarked at ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... than the larger variety, because their diminutive size escapes the gardener's eye. A good way to keep them under is to make small holes, about an inch deep, and about the diameter of the little finger, round the plants which they infest. Into these holes the slugs will retreat during the day, and they may be ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 331, September 13, 1828 • Various
... that there was danger of a falling out between his fat, overgrown hostess and her diminutive ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... be dancing. The tent had in the meantime half filled with a new set of young people who had come expressly for that pastime. Behind the girls gathered numbers of newly arrived young men with low shoulders and diminutive moustaches, who were evidently prepared for once to sacrifice ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... the simple heart, which sees it without understanding it, which touches it without being able to believe in it, and which sinks engulfed in the problem of it, like Empedocles in Etna. Non possum capere te, cape me, says the Aristotelian motto. Every diminutive of Beelzebub is an abyss, each demoniacal act is a gulf of darkness. Natural cruelty, inborn perfidy and falseness, even in animals, cast lurid gleams, as it were, into that fathomless pit of Satanic perversity which is a ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the species from becoming extinct uncounted ages since—simply because it was lacking in the higher qualities which would have enabled it to survive. And even the diplodocus, with its lumbering body and diminutive brain, was whole worlds superior to inorganic nature. That the marvellous thing called human personality should outlast the decay of what is so much inferior to itself, is therefore not only not inconceivable, but in itself not even improbable. It ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... a young man—Adolescentulus. "It is generally admitted that all were called adolescentes by the Romans, who were between the fifteenth or seventeenth year of their age and the fortieth. The diminutive is used in the same sense, but with a view to contrast more strongly the ardor and spirit of youth with the moderation, prudence, and experience of age. So Caesar is called adolescentulus, in c. 49, at a time when he was in his thirty-third year." Dietsch. And Cicero, referring ...
— Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jurgurthine War • Sallust
... name the particle ito or ita, the former being the masculine, the latter the feminine. It may be readily imagined that a foreigner is not a little startled on hearing a young lady called Dona Jesusita. In some names the diminutive takes a form totally different from the full name; as, for example, Panchita for Francisca, Pepita for Josefa, Conchita for Concepcion. A married woman does not take the family name of her husband, ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... respective ages being about twenty-five, fifteen, and ten. The oldest—the man—is not much above five feet in height, the other two short in proportion. All three, however, are stout-bodied, broad-shouldered, and with heads of goodly size, the short slender legs alone giving them a squat diminutive look. Their complexion is that of old mahogany; hair straight as needles, coarse as bristles, and crow-black; eyes of jet, obliqued to the line of the nose, this thin at the bridge, and depressed, while widely dilated at the nostrils; low foreheads ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... apartment houses (and diminutive apartments) is the other prime factor in the case. While the hotel dinner may have come into fashion first as the dire necessity of the "cliff dwellers," its convenience appeals to many householders who formerly would not have dreamed of offering their guests the ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... shop, to have it wound and set. The jeweller is knowing on the subject of a bracelet, which he begs leave to submit, in a general and quite aimless way. It would suit (he considers) a young bride, to perfection; especially if of a rather diminutive style of beauty. Finding the bracelet but coldly looked at, the jeweller invites attention to a tray of rings for gentlemen; here is a style of ring, now, he remarks—a very chaste signet—which gentlemen are much given to purchasing, when changing their condition. A ring of a very responsible ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... another, snarling like a tiger at an angel who has pulled a soul out of his claws, is equally well conceived; we know nothing like its ferocity except Rembrandt's sketches of wounded wild beasts. The angels we think generally disappointing; they are for the most part diminutive in size, and the crossing of the extremities of the two wings that cover the feet, gives them a coleopterous, cockchafer look, which is not a little undignified; the colors of their plumes are somewhat coarse and dark—one is covered with silky ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... growing up in him all the evening that his guest was suffering severely under some nervous affliction; one of those obscure diseases which change the whole colour of life to the sufferer, which distort all actions however simple and ordinary, which render diminutive trials monstrous, and small evils immense and ineffably tragic. It seemed to Uniacke to be his duty to combat Sir Graham's increasing melancholy, which actually bordered upon despair. At the same time, the young clergyman ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... listened is new to me. I saw this battle from eight o'clock until midday. There was one marvel in it which has not been mentioned—the splendid handling of the Monitor throughout the battle. The first bold advance of this diminutive vessel against a giant like the Merrimac was superlatively grand. She seemed inspired by Nelson's order at Trafalgar: 'He will make no mistake who lays his vessel alongside the enemy.' One would have thought the Monitor a living thing. No man was visible. You saw her ...
— The Monitor and the Merrimac - Both sides of the story • J. L. Worden et al.
... Constance's eyes were fixed upon a tiny purple figure that had just emerged from a side door in the gymnasium and was walking slowly across the big floor. Immediately afterward a door opened on the opposite side and a diminutive scarlet-clad ...
— Marjorie Dean High School Freshman • Pauline Lester
... seen in the illustrations in Chapters III and IV, openings of considerable size so located in the face of the outer wall as to unfit them for use as doorways, and others whose size is wholly inadequate, but which are still provided with the typical though diminutive single-paneled door. Many of these small openings, occurring most frequently in the back walls of house rows, have the jambs, lintels, etc., characteristic of the typical modern door. However, as the ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... left—for the path had now become serpentine, and at no moment could be traced for more than two or three paces in advance. Presently the sound of water fell gently on his ear, and in the shadiest of diminutive forests, amidst the interlacing branches of elm and beech, he caught the glimpse of a fountain. For an instant the wild thought of forcing his way through it, of plunging his burning forehead in its cooling spray, well-nigh mastered him. But his better sense conquered, and ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... considerably into the broad valley of the Lake, and it feels warmer than on the heights. Cloth here is more valuable, inasmuch as bark-cloth is scarce. The skins of goats and wild animals are used, and the kilt is very diminutive ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... Edward Dunsack recalled that he had promised himself to throw away the remainder of the opium on this and succeeding nights. In view of that his movements were inexplicable: he got out from a locked chest the yen tsiang, a heavy tube of dark wood inlaid with silver ideograms and diminutive earthen cup at one end. Then he produced a small brass lamp, brushes, long needles, and a metal rod. Taking off his clothes, and in the somber black folds of the silk robe, he made various minutely careful ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Elizabeth, he again received a patent as royal printer, but jointly with Richard Jugge, whose name is always found first. Nevertheless, Cawood printed at least two editions of the Bible in quarto, with his name alone on the title-page. They were very poor productions, the text being printed in the diminutive semi-gothic type that had done duty since the days of Caxton, and the woodcut borders being made up of odds and ends that happened to be handy. His rapidly increasing business had already compelled him to lease from the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... the right and left being always properly represented. Sometimes they are made singly, but usually in pairs, united directly or by a little straight bar or curved handle at the posterior end. White with color decorations, or brown or lead-colored without decorations, diminutive in size. The following specimens ...
— Illustrated Catalogue Of The Collections Obtained From The Indians Of New Mexico And Arizona In 1879 • James Stevenson
... this country it should seem to matter whether a little girl were a trifle less or a trifle more of a nonentity; for Eugenia had hitherto been conscious of no moral pressure as regards the appreciation of diminutive virgins. It was perhaps an indication of Lizzie's pertness that she very soon retired and left the Baroness on her brother's hands. Acton talked a great deal about his chinoiseries; he knew a good ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... He was a diminutive wisp of humanity, a starved, slender elf with a freckled face, wizened and peaked, which at times looked a thousand years old. It reminded you of the face of one of those preternaturally aged monkeys that sit motionless in a dark corner of the cage, oppressed ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... a small man—also a Scotchman. It is curious to note how numerous Scotchmen are in the wilds of North America. This specimen was diminutive and sharp. Moreover, he played the flute—an accomplishment of which he was so proud that he ordered out from England a flute of ebony, so elaborately enriched with silver keys that one's fingers ached to behold it. This ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... quest, and led thenceforth idyllic lives in groves of banian and of palm. Some became enamoured of the principles of the Gymnosophists, some couched themselves for uneasy slumber upon beds of spikes, weening to wake in the twenty-second heaven. All which romantic variety of fortune was the work of a diminutive insect that crawled or clung heedless of the purple it was weaving into the many-coloured web ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... confused hints and shadows of all these; and when the actual object opens first upon him, seen (in tame weather too most likely) from our unromantic coasts—a speck, a slip of sea-water, as it shows to him—what can it prove but a very unsatisfying and even diminutive entertainment? Or if he has come to it from the mouth of a river, was it much more than the river widening? and, even out of sight of land, what had he but a flat watery horizon about him, nothing comparable to the vast o'er-curtaining sky, his familiar object, seen daily without dread ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... by a constant and settled analogy, like diminutive adjectives in ish, as greenish, bluish; adverbs in ly, as dully, openly; substantives in ness, as vileness, faultiness; were less diligently sought, and many sometimes have been omitted, when I had no authority ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... The canoes immediately ahead of the ship could not leave its passage clear in time to prevent our running down great numbers of them. In a moment our majestic vessel had distanced the multitude of its diminutive attendants, leaving extreme confusion behind it. The islanders' skill in navigation, however, enabled them speedily to recover from the shock, and the wind falling again, they succeeded in overtaking us. In the effort to accomplish this, they left all those to their ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... of the distance to the island in midstream was accomplished. That diminutive patch of soil was a mutually acknowledged boundary between Russia and Austria. A fierce yell of triumph caused the swimmer to pause in his efforts. He looked back over his shoulder to see the first pair of pursuers push their wiry mounts into the river. Then with a groan he realized ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... space of firm ground at one end, and almost wholly unadorned with trees of any sort or description. There were, indeed, a few stinted [sic] firs upon the very edge of the water, but these were so diminutive in size as hardly to deserve a higher classification than among the meanest of shrubs. The interior was the resort of wild ducks and other water-fowl; and the pools and creeks with which it was intercepted abounded ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... and we knew not to what brimstone depths an unwary step might sink us. There were little ravines to be crossed, which had to be first carefully sounded. As we proceeded on the soft, crustaceous surface, diminutive spouts of vapor would spit forth, as if to resent our intrusion. In skirting the edge of the lake, its temperature and taste were both tested; the former varied with the distance from the seething bubbling going on at the extremity; in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... to the fact that they are not what we would call "horse Indians" and that they hunt barefoot over their wide domain. The same causes, perhaps, account for the only real deformity I noticed in the Seminole physique, namely, the diminutive toe-nails, and for the heavy, cracked, and seamed skin which covers the soles of their feet. The feet being otherwise well formed, the toes have only narrow shells for nails, these lying sunken across the middles of the tough cushions of flesh, ...
— The Seminole Indians of Florida • Clay MacCauley
... of the nausea that the thought of food inspired in me, was hunger. I commenced to be sensible of a shameless appetite again; a ravenous lust of food, which grew steadily worse and worse. It gnawed unmercifully in my breast; carrying on a silent, mysterious work in there. It was as if a score of diminutive gnome-like insects set their heads on one side and gnawed for a little, then laid their heads on the other side and gnawed a little more, then lay quite still for a moment's space, and then began afresh, boring noiselessly in, and without any haste, and left empty spaces everywhere after ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... AEDICULA (diminutive of Lat. aedis or aedes, a temple or house), a small house or temple,—a household shrine holding small altars or the statues of the Lares and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... thicket. And now, their nursery complete, four tiny, hairless voles, with disproportionate heads, round black eyes beneath unopened lids, wrinkled muzzles, and abbreviated tails—helpless midgets in form suggestive of diminutive bull-dog puppies—lay huddled in their tight, warm bed. It was a time of great anxiety for Kweek. While his mate with maternal pride went leisurely about her duties, doing all things in order, as if ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... be no halt in the work of building up the Navy, providing every year additional fighting craft. We are a very rich country, vast in extent of territory and great in population; a country, moreover, which has an Army diminutive indeed when compared with that of any other first-class power. We have deliberately made our own certain foreign policies which demand the possession of a first-class navy. The isthmian canal will greatly increase the efficiency of our Navy if the Navy is of sufficient size; but if ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... patron saints. Their usual compositions were the Madonna enthroned with the infant Jesus in her arms, surrounded by holy personages or angels, with the portraits of those who ordered the paintings, in general of diminutive size to express humility, and kneeling in adoration with clasped hands and upraised eyes. Unless the characteristics of the master-hand are unmistakable in this class of works, they are to be ranked as of the schools of the great men whose general features ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... disaffection. In a burst of hot summer weather he had obtained permission to bathe in a modest-sized pond in the orchard, and thither one afternoon Groby had bent his steps, attracted by loud imprecations of anger mingled with the shriller chattering of monkey-language. He beheld his plump diminutive servitor, clad only in a waistcoat and a pair of socks, storming ineffectually at the monkey which was seated on a low branch of an apple tree, abstractedly fingering the remainder of the boy's outfit, which he had removed just ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... in silence, walked softly round—her little childish feet scarcely sounded on the thick grass—and came out of the bushes near the old man. She was not a child of seven, as I had fancied at first, from her diminutive stature, but a girl of thirteen or fourteen. Her whole person was small and thin, but very neat and graceful, and her pretty little face was strikingly like Kassyan's own, though he was certainly not handsome. There were the same thin features, and the same strange expression, ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... impregnated with the oriental association of ideas. However vaguely their nature and appearance is described, they are uniformly represented as gentle, amiable females, to whose character beneficence and beauty are essential. None of them are mischievous or malignant; none of them are deformed or diminutive, like the Gothic fairy. Though they correspond in beauty with our ideas of angels, their employments are dissimilar; and, as they have no place in heaven, their abode is different. Neither do they resemble those intelligences, whom, on account of their wisdom, the ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... from whom Jeanne had taken the rooms, a Mrs. Caynsard, she had seen only once or twice. She was waited upon most of the time by an exceedingly diminutive maid servant, very shy at first, but very talkative afterwards, in broad Norfolk dialect, when she had grown a little accustomed to this very unusual lodger. Now and then Kate Caynsard, the only daughter of the house, ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... with great interest, the departure of some of the country Christians to their homes. The party consisted of a simple-looking company of men and women, clad in the plain blue garments that the country people usually wear. The men were walking, but the few women, with their diminutive feet, were perched on barrows, and one of them was pointed out as being "evangelist, pastor, and Biblewoman, all rolled into one," in the district from which they all came. This was the woman, a part of whose life-story is told in this book, and after reading the many striking incidents which ...
— Everlasting Pearl - One of China's Women • Anna Magdalena Johannsen
... kindly. "I've got a handkerchief," and she pulled forth from her pocket a diminutive bit of cambric. "You get some ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... this dead period of graying days, Constance Elliot burst one morning—a God from the Machine—tearing down the lane in her diminutive car with the great figure of Gunther, like some Norse divinity, beside her. She fell out of her auto, and into an explanation, in one breath, embracing Mary warmly ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... save from soilure the dainty fabric she was working at, I would rise and wipe her fingers with my handkerchief; whereupon she would coo out the sweetest "thank you," in the world, and perhaps hold up a diminutive garment. ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... somewhat in the same way, that they may be influenced by his own gestures or expression, irrespective of the sense of what he says. I believe, therefore, in the first place, that pulpits ought never to be highly decorated; the speaker is apt to look mean or diminutive if the pulpit is either on a very large scale or covered with splendid ornament, and if the interest of the sermon should flag the mind is instantly tempted to wander. I have observed that in almost all cathedrals, when the pulpits are peculiarly ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... doubt that the heads are those of a little child and its mother. A feeling for maternity is indeed always characteristic of Leonardo; and this feeling is further indicated here by the half-humorous pathos of the diminutive, rounded shoulders of the child. You may note a like pathetic power in drawings of a young man, seated in a stooping posture, his face in his hands, as in sorrow; of a slave sitting in an uneasy inclined attitude, in some brief interval of rest; of a small Madonna and Child, [115] peeping sideways ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... of the admonition, suffered himself to be led by the child; and together they passed slowly out into the living room, through the kitchen, and thence into the diminutive rose garden, the pride of the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... money-box, and the other two immediately lost in the mat in the pony-carriage. However, Hester found them, and slipped them inside their white gloves, and the expedition started, accompanied by Boulou, a diminutive yellow-and-white dog of French extraction. Boulou was a well-meaning, kind little soul. There was a certain hurried arrogance about his hind-legs, but it was only manner. He was not in reality more conceited than most small dogs who wear ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... pantheon take on some of his character. Whenever and wherever possible, those phases of the god's nature are emphasized which point to the possession of power over enemies. The gods of the Assyrian pantheon impress one as diminutive Ashurs by the side of the big one, and in proportion as they approach nearer to the character of Ashur himself, is their hold upon the ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... casts it skilfully over his shoulder, so that it falls across his back, and, hanging there, displays the bright lining. He pauses to watch the result of an infantile accident. The baby picks itself up and brushes the dust from its diminutive frock with all the earnestness of early youth. And the ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... Lombard and Delon, surgeons. They reported as follows: "We find the string of the foreskin shorter than it should be for giving the nut free scope to extend itself when turgid:—that the body of the left testicle is very diminutive and decayed, its tunicle separated, the spermatic vessels very much disordered by crooked swollen veins—that the right testicle is not of a due thickness, though thicker than the other: that it is somewhat withered and the spermatic vessels ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... to be of the nature of calcareous sea-weeds (Algoe) have been detected in the White Chalk; and the flints of the same formation commonly contain the spore-cases of the microscopic Desmids (the so-called Xanthidia), along with the siliceous cases of the equally diminutive Diatoms. ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... with that the dwarf pulled his cap hard over his brows and took two turns, of three feet long, up and down the room, lifting his legs up very high and setting them down very hard. This pause gave time for Gluck to collect his thoughts a little, and, seeing no great reason to view his diminutive visitor with dread, and feeling his curiosity overcome his amazement, he ventured on a ...
— The King of the Golden River - A Short Fairy Tale • John Ruskin.
... Exhausted, and his arm fail'd him fatigued; He therefore raised the band and wiped the blood Coagulate; when o'er his chariot yoke Her arm the Goddess threw, and thus began. 950 Tydeus, in truth, begat a son himself Not much resembling. Tydeus was of size Diminutive, but had a warrior's heart. When him I once commanded to abstain From furious fight (what time he enter'd Thebes 955 Ambassador, and the Cadmeans found Feasting, himself the sole Achaian there) And bade ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... Paul's, Which, as all the world knows, by practice or print, Is famous for making the most of a hint. Not a murmur of shame, Or buzz of blame, Not a flying report that flew at a name, Not a plausible gloss, or significant note, Not a word in the scandalous circles afloat, Of a beam in the eye, or diminutive mote, But vortex-like that tube of tin Sucked the censorious particle in; And, truth to tell, for as willing an organ As ever listened to serpent's hiss, Nor took the viperous sound amiss, On the snaky head of ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... well in their persons and dress as in their habits and manners.- their complexion is not remarkable, being the usual copper brown of most of the tribes of North America. they are low in statue reather diminutive, and illy shapen; possessing thick broad flat feet, thick ankles, crooked legs wide mouths thick lips, nose moderately large, fleshey, wide at the extremity with large nostrils, black eyes and black coarse hair. their eyes are sometimes of a dark yellowish brown ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... of the educated village of Stockbridge nothing can be imagined more charming than the panorama that the course presents on a busy day. Across the soft, green stretches, diminutive caddies may be seen scampering with long buckling-nets, while from the river-banks numerous recklessly exposed legs wave in the air as the more socially presentable portions hang frantically over the swirling current. Occasionally an enthusiastic golfer, ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... psychology there was a strange mingling of the pitiful and comic—among a division (the 35th) known as the Bantams. They were all volunteers, having been rejected by the ordinary recruiting-officer on account of their diminutive stature, which was on an average five feet high, descending to four feet six. Most of them came from Lancashire, Cheshire, Durham, and Glasgow, being the dwarfed children of industrial England and its mid-Victorian cruelties. Others were from London, banded together in a battalion of the Middlesex ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... impressed with the great difference between the chief kinds, and they ask with force, can differences in climate, food, or treatment have produced birds so different as the black stately Spanish, the diminutive elegant Bantam, the heavy Cochin with its many peculiarities, and the Polish fowl with its great top-knot and protuberant skull? But fanciers, whilst admitting and even overrating the effects of crossing the various breeds, do not sufficiently regard the probability ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... and of gold, the locket small; inside two painted miniatures but very diminutive, and both of them young. One would hardly be able to identify a middle aged person from them. There was no mark or initials, save an ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... above, known in the profession as "Cupid." He is a diminutive boy, with an old face and facetious manner wholly beyond his years.—C. Dickens, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... comfortable old chair—it is not every old chair that is comfortable,—with pipe in mouth, and in full unbuttoned ease, his bushy cauliflower wig laid aside, by reason of the heat, reposed Dr. Small. Small, indeed, was somewhat of a misnomer, as applied to the worthy doctor, who, besides being no diminutive specimen of his kind, entertained no insignificant opinion of himself. His height was certainly not remarkable; but his width of shoulder—his sesquipedality of stomach—and obesity of calf—these were unique! Of his origin we know nothing; but presume he must, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... of love and shame. Two ladies, rivals in fashionable life who tormented one another with a thousand little stings of womanish spite, were given to understand that each of their hearts was a nest of diminutive snakes, which did quite as much mischief ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to proceed after dark, when no longer able to run we would go ashore and gather specimens of the abundant and beautiful sub-arctic flora, and occasionally capture a bird or a dish of trout to help out our diminutive larder. ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... outcry: a police officer was ejecting a diminutive youth who tried to bite his hands and clung to the tables, against which, as he was dragged along, he struck with a ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... a little water-beast which pretends to consider itself a fish, and, under that pretext, hangs about the piles upon which West-Boston Bridge is built, swallowing the bait and hook intended for flounders. On being drawn from the water, it exposes an immense head, a diminutive bony carcass, and a surface so full of spines, ridges, ruffles, and frills, that the naturalists have not been able to count them without quarrelling about the number, and that the colored youth, whose sport they spoil, do not like to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... together. Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin sat together on a high backed settle by the fire. They were enjoying each other's conversation. Mrs. Benjamin's face shone as she listened to her husband. It was rather a plain face, surmounted by hair parted smoothly in the middle and drawn low into a diminutive knot at the back. She wore a queer dress, Isabelle thought, and a fine white kerchief was folded across her breast. This was her costume always, save on Sunday, when ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... was awful in its wild and terrible majesty. Infinity, immensity, closed in upon the soul from every side. Not a cloud in the sky, not a breath in the air, not a flaw on the bosom of the sand, ever moving in diminutive waves; the horizon ended as at sea on a clear day, with one line of light, definite as the ...
— A Passion in the Desert • Honore de Balzac
... of a crossbow, an arrow having a square, or four-edged head (from Middle Latin quadrellus, diminutive of ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... followed in all her rambles by a diminutive nondescript kind of dog—a tiny, long-haired, silky looking creature, the colour of coffee freshly ground, no bigger than a large squirrel, with brilliant black eyes, bushy tail, and a pert little face, ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... reading is, in tympanidis rogum inlatus est. This passage has been the occasion of as many different opinions concerning both the reading and the sense as any passage in the whole treatise. Tympanum is used for a timbrel or drum, tympanidia a diminutive of it. Lambinus says tympana "were sticks with which the tyrant used to beat the condemned." P. ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... one of the most inveterate frequenters of book-auctions was a certain Dr. G., of diminutive stature, on account of an awkward deviation of the spine. At that time the appearance of a private purchaser at a sale was a very rare event, and one which, when it occurred, invariably met with a more or less hostile reception from the fraternity. Dr. G.'s first appearance produced ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... the harbor we were joined by two diminutive Japanese destroyers which were to convoy us. The menace of the submarine being particularly felt in the Adriatic, the transports travelled only by night during the first part of the voyage. To a landsman it was incomprehensible how it ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... to make one shiver—and shrill, shrill as the song of the grasshoppers, it began to make itself heard, very softly at first, then growing louder and rising in the silence of the noonday like the diminutive wail of some poor Japanese soul in pain and anguish; it was Chrysantheme ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... morning, that which Andy had taken to be a ranch-house dwindled to a goat-herder's shack fronted by a brush-roofed lean-to. Near it was a diminutive corral and a sun-faded tent. The old Indian herder seemed in no way surprised to see a young rider dismount and approach cautiously—for Andy had entered into the spirit of the thing. He paused to glance apprehensively ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... ruthveni as a new genus and species of diminutive bufonid from British Guiana. Noble (1931) considered A. ruthveni to be a toothless relative of Centrolenella and placed the genus in the Hylidae. Gallardo (1965) suggested that Allophryne is a leptodactylid of uncertain affinities. ...
— Systematic Status of a South American Frog, Allophryne ruthveni Gaige • John D. Lynch
... seemed absolutely empty, and the ocean, beyond acres of slippery seaweed, looked very far away. She has everything that a properly appointed station de bains should have, but everything is on a Lilliputian scale. The whole place looked like a huge Nueremburg toy. There is a diminutive hotel, in which, properly, the head waiter should be a pigmy and the chambermaid a sprite, and beside it there is a Casino on the smallest possible scale. Everything about the Casino is so harmoniously undersized that it seems a matter of course that the ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... theatre,—that is to say, the orchestra and stage. It is fitted with charmingly painted scenery and all the appliances for scenic changes. There are tiny traps, and delicately constructed "lifts," and real footlights fed with burning-fluid, and in the orchestra sits a diminutive conductor before his desk, surrounded by musical manikins, all provided with the smallest of violoncellos, flutes, oboes, drums, and such like. There are characters also on the stage. A Templar in a white cloak is dragging a fainting female form to the parapet of a ruined ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... elfish creature, nine years old, diminutive and pale. Her long, silky brown hair, which was as straight as an Indian's, like mother's, and which she tore out when angry, usually covered her face, and her wild eyes looked wilder still peeping through it. She was too strange-looking for ordinary people to call her ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... not devoid of a certain tame picturesqueness. Early on the second day the steamer reaches Kazan, once the capital of an independent Tartar khanate, and still containing a considerable Tartar population. Several metchets (as the Mahometan houses of prayer are here termed), with their diminutive minarets in the lower part of the town, show that Islamism still survives, though the khanate was annexed to Muscovy more than three centuries ago; but the town, as a whole, has a European rather than an Asiatic character. If any one visits it in the hope of getting "a glimpse of ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... Pompilius, the closing or opening of which was the signal of peace or war. It was probably at first one of the ancient gates in a line of fortifications uniting the Capitol with the Palatine; and afterwards comprised, besides a passage-way through which a great part of the traffic of Rome passed, a diminutive bronze temple containing a bronze statue of the venerable deity of the Sabines, whose one face looked to the east, and the other to the west. The bronze gates of the temple were closed by Augustus for the third time after the battle of Actium, and finally ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... Pomona, the largest Orkney has 17,000 inhabitants on its 207 square miles of territory or 85 to the square mile. The Shetlands tell the same story—29 out of 100 islands inhabited, some of the holms or smaller islets serving as pastures for the sturdy ponies and diminutive cattle, and Mainland, the largest of the group, showing 58 inhabitants to the square mile. This is a density far greater than is reached in the nearby regions of Scotland, where the county of Sutherland can ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... cooly talked over the affairs of the Tuan Ingris (English gentleman) to a crowd of natives. Suddenly I heard the word kuda. Fortunately kuda (horse) was one of the words I knew: and I at once ordered the kuda to be brought. Half a dozen natives set off to find it. It turned out to be a very diminutive pony, but I was not ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... govern orthography. But what etymology? our own, or that which is foreign? If we say, both, they disagree; and the mere English scholar cannot know when, or how far, to be guided by the latter. If a Latin diminutive, as papilla from papula or papa, pupillus from pupus, or tranquillus from trans and quietus, happen to double an l, must we forever cling to the reduplication, and that, in spite of our own rules to the ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... was a shrug. Ruan is a small town that faces Troy across the diminutive harbour, or perhaps I should say that Troy looks down upon it at this slight distance. When a Trojan speaks of it he says, "Across the water," with as much implied contempt as though he meant Botany Bay. There is no cogent reason for this, except that ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... magnificent habiliment. His countenance was handsome and manly, with a certain broad burly look, thoroughly English in its character, which won him much admiration from his subjects; and though it might be objected that the eyes were too small, and the mouth somewhat too diminutive, it could not be denied that the general expression of the face was kingly in the extreme. A prince of a more "royal presence" than Henry the Eighth was never seen, and though he had many and grave faults, want of dignity was not amongst ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... picture him to myself with his head closely shaved—he never had too much hair—and a long pigtail banging down behind. He is married, I hear; and I hope he and she that was Miss Wang Wang are very happy together, sitting cross-legged over their diminutive cups of tea in a skyblue tower hung with bells. It is so I think of him; to me he is henceforth a jewelled mandarin, talking nothing but broken China. Whitcomb is a judge, sedate and wise, with spectacles balanced on the bridge of that remarkable nose which, ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... distinguished bibliographer, rather than bookseller, lives hard by—in the Rue Git-Le-Coeur. He lives with his father, who superintends the business of the shop. The Rue Git-Le-Coeur is a sorry street—very diminutive, and a sort of cropt copy—to what it should have been, or what it might have been. However, there lives JACQ. CH. BRUNET, FILS: a writer, who will be known to the latest times in the bibliographical world. He will be also thanked as well as known; for his Manuel du Libraire is a performance ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... more than a deep grass-grown ditch made by the spring as it won its way out of the heart of the knoll; or rather it was a green hallway, overtopped with a frieze of mesquite, leading in privately to the source of the stream. Janet, as she entered the house-like cosiness of this diminutive valley, felt very much as if she had just stepped in out of the universe. On a prairie there is such an insistent stare of space, so great a lack of stopping-place for the mind, that this little piece of outdoors, with the sun shining ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... the property was considerable; but Durant noticed that its owner applied the endearing diminutive to every object that appealed specially to his egotism. It was a peculiarity of the Colonel that he was ready to melt with affection over the things that belonged to himself, and was roused almost to ferocity ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... corner of her lips lingered a tender droop oddly at variance with the childish dimple of the finely moulded chin. Though the girl's red hair—like flame, as the lawyer had first thought, gave her an alive look, the little form under the queer straight dress was diminutive to frailty. ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... unencumbered except by the soldiers. Down between the two ranks, which were formed facing each other, came the Sultan on a white steed—a beautiful Arabian—and having at his side his son, a boy about ten or twelve years old, who was riding a pony, a diminutive copy of his father's mount, the two attended by a numerous body-guard, dressed in gorgeous Oriental uniforms. As the procession passed our carriage, I, as pre-arranged, stood up and took off my hat, His Serene Highness promptly acknowledging the salute by raising his hand to the forehead. This was ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... old woman of Hollowbush were true, then. Here was a place where gems were more abundant than flowers; and as the child stood on the threshold gazing into the diminutive but wondrously beautiful apartment that had opened so suddenly before her, she saw that she was indeed in the presence-chamber of ...
— Harper's Young People, January 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... pleasures Webb derived from observation with it. Speaking of it, he says that smaller ones will, of course, do less, especially with faint objects, but are often very perfect and distinct, and that even diminutive glasses, if good, will, at least, show something never seen without them. He adds: "I have a little hand telescope twenty-two and one-quarter inches long, when fully drawn out, with a focus of about fourteen inches, and one and one-third inches aperture; this, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 832, December 12, 1891 • Various
... blooming as a peach, and round as a baby's, surmounted by a quantity of nut-brown hair, the very sweetest mouth, the lips rather full, and just showing a line of pearl, and lastly, what looked rather odd on such an infantile countenance, a firm, square, and very determined, if very diminutive chin. For the rest, it was difficult to say which was the most perfect, her figure or ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... really so. Their habits of restlessness render them difficult of examination. "Tree-mice" is the local name given them by the farmers, and would be very appropriate could they sometimes remain as motionless as that diminutive animal. ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II, No 3, September 1897 • Various
... path which turns off to the left, and after having walked for about five minutes, found ourselves opposite the person we were in search of. It was a female of from thirty to forty years of age, of diminutive stature, dressed after the fashion of the of the day, but still an air of good taste was evident through the simplicity of her attire. Her countenance must once have been handsome, if one might judge by the beauty of her eyes and mouth, but she was pale, withered and already impressed with ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... omnivorous reader of novels and every other form of book, which he carries to and from his home in a favorite brown-leather handbag of diminutive size, he never had an ambition to create novels, though to his everlasting credit wrote two for a particular purpose which he accomplished by injecting the right tone or "color" into tales depicting the inner life on daily newspapers. ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... the most remarkable specimen of the industry of an animal. It was a hut or bower close to a small meadow enameled with flowers. The whole was on a diminutive scale, and I immediately recognized the famous nests described by the hunters of Bruiju. After well observing the whole I gave strict orders to my hunters not to destroy the little building. That, however, was an unnecessary caution, ...
— In Nesting Time • Olive Thorne Miller
... The meaning of this word is uncertain. [Greek: Stulis] is a diminutive of [Greek: stulos] , and signifies a small pillar, or pole. It may be that which carried the colours. But I do not profess to have translated the word, for I do not know ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... Acronatus among the large Antelopes, and numerous other representations of the same form. The fourth type is our Bos Pusio: here we find the horns, when present, remarkably small, but in many cases absent; and the size is diminutive to an extreme. These also are distinguishing marks of the groups it is to represent: the Tenuirostres among birds, and the Glires, or mice, among quadrupeds, are the smallest of their respective classes; and both are typically distinguished ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... the guards, blanketed like Indians, and with faces and hearts of wolves. Other Rebels—also clad in dingy butternut—slouched around lazily, crouched over diminutive fires, and talked idle gossip in the broadest of "nigger" dialect. Officers swelled and strutted hither and thither, and negro servants loitered around, striving to spread the least amount of work over the ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... stove sits, at least in wealthy houses, a black slave, whose name is generally a diminutive in token of familiarity or affection; in the present case it was Soweylim, the diminutive of Salim. His occupation is to make and pour out the coffee; where there is no slave in the family, the master of ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... guards, one of the most honorable commissions that could have been conferred on him. The comte de Crussel and the prince d'Henin were named captains of the guard to M. d'Artois. This prince d'Henin was of such diminutive stature that he was sometimes styled, by way of jest, the "prince of dwarfs," "the dwarf of princes." He was the beloved nephew of the marechale de Mirepoix, whose fondness could not supply him with the sense he so greatly needed; he was besides ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... we had spent the afternoon, he only said, 'I should have foreseen this. But the child—she is only a child, Rosa!—did her best!' and he looked so mournful that I, knowing he blamed me for his bantling's freak of temper, told him plainly that he cared a thousand times more for this diminutive bundle of hypocrisy than he ever did for me, and that his absurd favoritism was fast begetting in me a positive dislike for her. I couldn't endure the sight of the sulky little mischief-maker for a week after her complaint of ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... cowry of the Mediterranean, several species of Oliva, Ancillaria, Mitra, Terebra, Pyrula, Fasciolaria, and Conus. Of the cones there are no less than eight species, some very large, whereas the only European cone now living is of diminutive size. The genus Nerita, and many others, are also represented by individuals of a type now characteristic of equatorial seas, and wholly unlike any Mediterranean forms. These proofs of a more elevated temperature ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... think I shall be much of a fighter," laughed Katie, looking at her diminutive hands; "and why is it any worse to go among the boys and girls in the factory than among the boys and girls in ...
— Katie Robertson - A Girls Story of Factory Life • Margaret E. Winslow
... perjuries I suppose at which Jove laughs!' said Cicely getting up, and hastily rearranging her short curls with the help of various combs, before the only diminutive looking-glass the farm sitting-room provided. 'However, we shall see what happens. I have no doubt Miss Daisy has arranged the proposal scene for this very afternoon. We shall be in for the ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... carelessly formed, or suffered from interpolation afterwards. Some of the epigrams are foreign to the subject of the collection. Six are on women;[20] and four of these are on women whose names end in the diminutive form, Phanion, Callistion, etc., which suggests the inference that they were inserted at a late date and by an ignorant transcriber who confused these with masculine forms. For all the epigrams of Strato's collection the Anthology is the ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... the above letter, he became so much depressed in spirits that many of his friends thought it advisable to use other means to bring about the happy union. "Strange," said he, "that the contents of this diminutive letter should cause me to have such depressed feelings; but there is a nobler theme than this. I know not why my MILITARY TITLE is not as great as that of SQUIRE VALEER. For my life I cannot see that my ancestors are inferior to those who ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... one is above them, I began climbing as rapidly as possible, meaning to trail along in the wake of my companions. Unless one has had practice in flying in formation, however, it is hard to keep in contact. The diminutive avions de chasse are the merest pinpoints against the great sweep of landscape below and the limitless heavens above. The air was misty and clouds were gathering. Ahead there seemed a barrier of them. Although ...
— Flying for France • James R. McConnell
... nests of Foreign birds, that of the Taylor Bird deserves especial mention; the bird itself is a diminutive one, being little more than three inches long; it is an inhabitant of India. The nest is sometimes constructed of two leaves, one of them dead; the latter is fixed to the living one as it hangs upon ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, No. - 361, Supplementary Issue (1829) • Various
... is an excellent pasture plant for stock, they do not relish it so highly as some other pasture plants; when forming seed, it is least valuable for horses, owing to the extent to which it salivates them. Its diminutive habit of growth unfits it for making meadows, unless in conjunction with other hay plants. In nutritive properties, it is placed ahead of medium red clover. Some growers have spoken highly of it as a pasture plant ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... house, when they were met by Tyrker, whom they received most cordially. Leif observed at once that his foster-father was in lively spirits. Tyrker had a prominent forehead, restless eyes, small features, was diminutive in stature, and rather a sorry-looking individual withal, but was, nevertheless, a most capable handicraftsman. Leif addressed him, and asked: "Wherefore art thou so belated foster-father mine, and astray from the others?" In the beginning ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... stood alternately nuzzling her and looking up to us with plaintive whines. The next instant I swung out of my saddle, and, bending down, raised the unfortunate creature in my arms, when I saw, to my amazement, that she was evidently a full-grown woman, but of very diminutive stature, being only about four feet six inches in height. Moreover she was in a most shockingly emaciated condition, and on her back was a close network of scarcely healed scars, which looked as though they might have resulted from a most merciless scourging; and she was in a ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... cane in Shidzuoka—it is grown practically on the sea beach where it is visible from the express—the visitor to Japan may never see sugar cane until Shikoku is reached. The value of the crop in the whole island is about 800,000 yen. The tall cane is conspicuous alongside the more diminutive rice. In this prefecture an experiment is being ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... the soul is regarded as corporeal or material, like the body; they form, together, one nature or substance. The soul is composed of atoms exceedingly diminutive, smooth, and round, and connected with or diffused through the veins, viscera, and nerves. The substance of the soul is not to be regarded as simple and uncompounded; its constituent parts are aura, heat, and air. These are not sufficient, however, even in the judgment ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... France during the medieval period; but in England,in Early English work, a circular deeply moulded abacus was introduced, which in the 14th and 15th centuries was transformed into an octagonal one. The diminutive of Abacus, ABACISCUS, is applied in architecture to the chequers or squares of a tessellated pavement . "Abacus'' is also the name of an instrument employed by the ancients for arithmetical calculations; pebbles, hits of bone or coins ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the flat. The neat white room with its miniature overmantel, pink walls, and brass fire-irons like toys, resembled more than ever an elaborate doll's house. The frail white chairs seemed too slender to be sat on. Could one ever write at that diminutive white writing-desk? The flat might have been made, and furnished by Waring, for midgets. Everything was still in fair and dainty repair, except that the ceiling, which was painted in imitation of a blue sky, was beginning to look cloudy. Hyacinth sat on a tiny ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... young Gy, who might be sixteen years old, standing beside the magistrate and gazing at me with a very benignant countenance. She had not come to her full growth, and was scarcely taller than myself (viz., about feet 10 inches), and, thanks to that comparatively diminutive stature, I thought her the loveliest Gy I had hitherto seen. I suppose something in my eyes revealed that impression, for her countenance grew yet more benignant. "Taee tells me," she said, "that you have not yet learned to accustom yourself to wings. That grieves me, for I should ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... that Foote must have meant a diminutive, or POCKET edition.] I mentioned my doubts to Dr Johnson, who said, he would go two miles out of his way to see Lord Monboddo. I therefore sent Joseph forward, ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... probably not ill represented by Lyne's coloured map of half a century earlier, now exhibited in the King's Library at the British Museum. Piles of stately architecture, from King's College Chapel downward, tower all about, over narrow, tortuous, pebble-paved streets, bordered with diminutive, white-fronted, red-tiled dwellings, mere dolls' houses in comparison. So modest, however, is the chartographer's standard, that a flowery Latin inscription assures the men of Cambridge they need but divert Trumpington Brook into Clare Ditch to render their ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... artificially levelled with the chisel; large tracts of it are covered with the Indian fig (cactus). In the shade of these grotesque growths lives a dainty flora: trembling grasses of many kinds, rue, asphodel, thyme, the wild asparagus, a diminutive blue iris, as well as patches of saxifrage that deck the stone with a brilliant enamel of red and yellow. This wild beauty makes one think how much better the graceful wrought-iron balconies of the town would look if enlivened with blossoms, with pendent ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... a pivoted axle, which device we term a balance; the vibrations or oscillations being obtained by applying a coiled spring, which was first called a "pendulum spring," then a "balance spring," and finally, from its diminutive size and coil form, a "hairspring." We are all aware that for the motive power for keeping up the oscillations of the escaping circle l we must contrive to employ power derived from the teeth D of the escape wheel. About the most available means ...
— Watch and Clock Escapements • Anonymous
... glass of mulled wine on that black morning over a hundred-and-thirty years ago when he went out with Councillor Kinsella and shot him through the lungs by the Round House on the Arranakilty Road. The diminutive Tom Moore had sung his songs here "put standing on the table" by the other guests, and the great Dan had held forth and the wind had dashed the ivy against the windows just as it did to-night with fist-fulls of rain from the Slieve Bloom Mountains. Byrne had ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... man, with a thin red beard, great rings in his ears, and piercing, shifty eyes. A reddish, diminutive sort of man, altogether, with a thin little voice that went with his general appearance. He was literally scared stiff at the idea of the Boches finding the boys on his premises. That would mean his house burned, and death for himself, he said. Germans were all ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll
... gauze. Poppy's mandoline in an easy chair by itself. Poppy's hat on the grand piano, tumbling head over heels among a litter of coffee cups. On the tea-table a pair of shoes that could have belonged to nobody but Poppy, they were so diminutive. In the waste paper basket a bouquet that must have been Poppy's too, it was so enormous. And on the table in the window a Japanese flower-bowl that served as a handy receptacle for cigarette ash and spent vestas. Two immense mirrors facing each other reflected these ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... left in his heart. He had sympathized with her microscopic cut fingers, he had smiled into her glowing, damp little face when she stuttered to him long tales of bad doggies and big 'ticks; he had brought her "jacks" and paper-dolls and hair ribbons; he loved the diminutive femininity of the creature; she was all a woman, even at three. Alix he proudly called his "boy"; Alix used hair ribbons to tie up her dogs, and demanded hip boots and an air rifle and got them, too, and used them, but when he took Alix in his arms she was apt to bump his nose violently with her ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... than he, like a diminutive, sturdy steam-tug; and yet if she could have carried him, she would ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... courts-martial for like indications of ill-will; and—matter for laughter and matter for tears are inseparable in modern Greek history (perhaps in all history)—one met a cabman beaten again and again for calling his horse "Cotso" (diminutive of "Constantine"), or a woman dragged to the police-station because her parrot was heard whistling the Constantine March. Volumes would be needed to record the petty persecutions which arose from {212} the use of that popular name: suffice it to say that prudent ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... when Tims gasped with the certainty that the revelation of her friend's blank ignorance of the place and people was about to be made. Then Mildred—for so, despising the soft diminutive, she now desired to be called—by some extraordinary exertion of tact and ingenuity, would evade the inevitable and appear on the other side of it, a little elated, but otherwise serene. It was generally marked that Miss Flaxman was a different creature since she had given ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... notions are found. There are at this day countries where the Lifeguardsman Shaw would be considered as a much greater warrior than the Duke of Wellington. Buonaparte loved to describe the astonishment with which the Mamelukes looked at his diminutive figure. Mourad Bey, distinguished above all his fellows by his bodily strength, and by the skill with which he managed his horse and his sabre, could not believe that a man who was scarcely five feet high, and rode like a butcher, could be the greatest ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... are extracted from the MSS. of Mr. Syme, writer to the signet. Those, who are desirous of more information, may consult Craig de Feudis, Lib. II. dig. 9. sec. 24. It is hoped the reader will excuse this digression, though somewhat professional; especially as there can be little doubt, that this diminutive republic must soon share the fate of mightier states; for, in consequence of the increase of commerce, lands possessed under this singular tenure, being now often brought to sale, and purchased by the neighbouring proprietors, will, in process of time, be included in their investitures, and the right ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... ships the men are sized, as it is called, the tallest being placed at the after-end, and so on down to the most diminutive, who is fixed at the extremity. But this arrangement, being more of a military than of a naval cast, is rarely adopted now-a-days. It will seldom happen, indeed, that the biggest and burliest fellows in a ship's company are the leading men. ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... over it with a heavy stone on the top to keep it close to the surface. When Barney entered this cabin he found the vanithee, or woman of the house, engaged in the act of grinding oats into meal for their dinner with a quern, consisting of two diminutive millstones turned by the hand; this was placed upon a praskeen, or coarse apron, spread under it on the floor to receive the meal. An old woman, her mother, sat spinning flax with the distaff—for as yet flax wheels were scarcely known—and a lubberly young fellow ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... the parents the child was never addressed as "Bob" or "Bobby," or by any other diminutive. In their practical opinion a child's name was his name, and ought not to be mauled or dismembered on the pretext of fondness. Similarly, the child had not been baptized after his father, or after any male member of either the Machin or the Cotterill family. Why should ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... the sanest, but he was himself tall and comely, open-handed, a warm friend, humorous and of vigorous intellect. A hint of the affection in which he was held is obtained from his name Donatello, which is a pet diminutive of Donato—his full style being Donato di Niccolo di Betto Bardi. Born in 1386, four years before Fra Angelico and nearly a century after Giotto, he was the son of a well-to-do wool-comber who was no stranger to the perils of political energy in these ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... Exactly where Edward Billings Henry wished to go! And here was a rapid-transit vehicle, with room enough for ten such diminutive persons as he! Without loss of time, he limped up on his aching stone toe and jogged the arm ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... had it been possible, was now useless, as there was neither hill nor rising ground of any kind within the compass of our view, which was only bounded by the horizon in every quarter, entirely devoid of timber except a few diminutive gums on the very edge of the stream, might be so termed. The water in the bed of the lagoon, as it might now be properly denominated, was stagnant; its breadth about twenty feet, and the heads of grass growing in it, shewed it to be ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... feeling of the Russian peasant toward the rough corn-brandy of his own country is characteristic. The Russian language is full of diminutives expressive of affection. The peasant addresses his superior as Batushka, the affectionate diminutive of the word which means father; he addresses the mistress of the house as Matushka, which is the affectionate diminutive of the Russian word for mother. To his favorite drink, brandy, he has given the name which is the affectionate diminutive of the word voda, water—namely, vodka, which ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... Midas. "I am weary of collecting my treasures with so much trouble, and beholding the heap so diminutive, after I have done my best. I wish everything that I touch to ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... an abundance of sunshine. Mosquitoes breed only in water, but a very little water is sufficient if it is dirty and stagnant. Two inches of water standing in an old tin can will breed an innumerable horde. These "diminutive musicians" are not only a nuisance, but dangerous, as malaria and typhoid spreaders by their ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... poor boy wants a drop of cognac! Get him some father!" The reluctant farmer procured a big bottle and a very diminutive glass known as the "petit verre," which held about a thimbleful. Paul would congratulate the good dame on her keen perception. At this period Vodry ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... and then bent down to open the little gate. His stalwart figure, in the diminutive enclosure, reduced it to the appearance of a ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... business. On the 17th of August, 1721, he issued the first number of a newspaper entitled "The New England Courant." Benjamin set the type, struck off the impression of two or three hundred, with a hand-press, and then traversed the streets, carrying the diminutive sheet to the homes of the subscribers. The Courant soon attracted attention. A knot of sparkling writers began to contribute to its columns, and while the paper was with increasing eagerness sought for, ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... would, under the circumstances, be nothing more, I think, than what is distinctly advisable. The man Samuel Wapshott, of whose narrative I have recently afforded you a brief synopsis, stated in no uncertain terms that he found at the foot of the statue on which the dastardly outrage was perpetrated a diminutive ornament, in shape like the bats that are used in the game of cricket. This ornament, he avers (with what truth I know not), was handed by him to a youth of an age coeval with that of the lads in the upper division ...
— The Gold Bat • P. G. Wodehouse
... drooping her eyes at him with a purposefully artificial effect. From the time when she was a child of four she had carried on a violent and highly appreciated flirtation with "Cousin Billy," being the only person in the world who employed the diminutive of ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... only a few months more than fifty-four. Mrs Austin, who saw him in 1828, says: 'His person was diminutive, almost to meanness, but his presence very imposing. His head and eye were grand, austere, and commanding. He had all the authority of intelligence, and looked and spoke like one not used to contradiction. He lived a life of study and domestic seclusion, but he conversed ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 453 - Volume 18, New Series, September 4, 1852 • Various
... that might ensue from the preaching of the unpalatable doctrine of duty and discipline to their masters, the electors. Hence, amid dangers daily growing greater in magnitude, the defence of the Empire on land (the garrisoning of one-fifth part of the land-area of the globe) was left to the diminutive professional force established merely for Imperial police purposes—a force smaller than that which Serbia felt necessary to guard her independence, or Switzerland to ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... or Oriel, is a portico or court; also a small room near the hall in monasteries, where particular persons dined. (Blount's Glossog.) Du Cange says, "Oriolum, porticus, atrium;" and quotes Matthew Paris for it. Supposed by some to be a diminutive from area or areola. "In modern writings," says Nares, "we meet with mention of Oriel windows. I doubt the propriety of the expression; but, if right, they must mean those windows that project like ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 235, April 29, 1854 • Various
... in its entirety! Can you conceive of a man's getting himself into a sweat over so diminutive a provocation? I am sure I can't. What the devil can those friends of mine have been thinking about, to spread these 3 or 4 harmless things out into two months of daily sneers and affronts? The whole offense, boiled down, amounts to just this: one uncourteous remark ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Mr. and Mrs. Applegate and their very diminutive daughter—whom somebody had fondly nicknamed "Puss"—and turned to follow the crowd. A short time later they set foot for the first time on the soil of ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... there was a strange mingling of the pitiful and comic—among a division (the 35th) known as the Bantams. They were all volunteers, having been rejected by the ordinary recruiting-officer on account of their diminutive stature, which was on an average five feet high, descending to four feet six. Most of them came from Lancashire, Cheshire, Durham, and Glasgow, being the dwarfed children of industrial England and its mid-Victorian cruelties. Others were from London, ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... hadn't yellow hair, and she couldn't possibly have behaved so badly. I have often heard my parents say significantly that they had no trouble with Kate! Before she was four, she was dancing a hornpipe in a sailor's jumper, a rakish little hat, and a diminutive pair of white ducks! Those ducks, marked "Kate Terry," were kept by mother for years as a precious relic, and are, I hope, still in the ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... They had no means to ascertain his age, and must have concluded him only six months old from his small size; but from his teeth and walking alone, he was more likely to have been two years old, and his diminutive size was probably occasioned by the miseries of the climate, and wretchedness of every kind to which these ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... clarions drew our eyes to the Place of the Constitution; and, indeed, I had forgotten to say, that that majestic square was filled with military, with exceedingly small firelocks, the men ludicrously young and diminutive for the most part, in a uniform at once cheap and tawdry,—like those supplied to the warriors at Astley's, or from still humbler theatrical wardrobes: indeed, the whole scene was just like that of a little theatre; the houses curiously ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... brows, and took two turns, of three feet long, up and down the room, lifting his legs up very high, and setting them down very hard. This pause gave time for Gluck to collect his thoughts a little, and, seeing no great reason to view his diminutive visitor with dread, and feeling his curiosity overcome his amazement, he ventured on ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... shell had been aimed a trifle too high. It went directly over the lads on the diminutive deck. Instinctively they all ducked their heads as the missile screamed wickedly ...
— Boy Scouts in the North Sea - The Mystery of a Sub • G. Harvey Ralphson
... an evident play on words in this passage. The original reads: "Que le auian hecho papa o papilla y que con el les auian querido dar papillas." "Papilla" is the diminutive of "papa"—meaning "pope," or "pap"; and the phrase dar papilla is used to mean "deceiving by ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXV, 1635-36 • Various
... and looking up to us with plaintive whines. The next instant I swung out of my saddle, and, bending down, raised the unfortunate creature in my arms, when I saw, to my amazement, that she was evidently a full-grown woman, but of very diminutive stature, being only about four feet six inches in height. Moreover she was in a most shockingly emaciated condition, and on her back was a close network of scarcely healed scars, which looked as though they might have resulted from a most merciless scourging; and she was in ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... was absolutely necessary. An expedient occurred to her, by which she imagined this objection might be obviated; but it was necessary she should consult her father. She struck her palfrey with her riding-rod, and in a moment her diminutive, though beautiful figure, and her spirited little jennet, were by the side of the gigantic Fleming and his tall black horse, and riding, as it were, in their vast shadow. "My dearest father," said Rose, "the lady intends that Sir Damian be transported to the castle, where it is like he may ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... Hills, and took a house in the town of Lenox. It was a little red cottage, and was situated on the shore of a diminutive lake called the Stockbridge Bowl. He was now the most famous novelist in America, and had thousands of admirers in the Old World. His "Scarlet Letter" had won him fame, and had brought his earlier works more prominently ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... return could gratify the sight of these people but for a single instant; yet there, from early dusk almost to succeeding daylight, those working men, literally "in their thousands"—and not in the Trafalgar Square diminutive of that expression—gathered to gratify themselves with the sight of the pageant. In comparison, the "Boeuf Gras," which annually sends the gamins of Paris insane, is really a tasteful and refined exhibition. Yet there they were, women, men, and children—infants in arms, too, ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... the reservation, the water supply, while still scanty, is abundant as compared with the eastern part. In the mountains themselves there are numerous small streams, some of which carry water nearly all the year; while here and there throughout the region are many diminutive springs almost or quite permanent in character. Most of the little streams rise near the crest of the mountains and, flowing westward, are collected in a deep canyon cut in the western slope, whence the water is discharged into Chinlee valley, ...
— Navaho Houses, pages 469-518 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... was drawn to a very smart-looking trap, half dog and half training cart, which for the past fifteen minutes had been driven up and down by the most diminutive of grooms. Slowly he took in every detail, the high-actioned hackney, the handsome harness, the livery of the groom, even the wicker basket under the seat with its padlock hanging on the hasp. Lazily he attempted to decipher the monogram on the cart's shining sides, but without ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... sensible, but modest conversation,—instead of an astonishing variety of intellectual curiosities and intricate moral toys, whereat plain people marvelled—as in the case of a certain ingenious Chinese puzzle, ball within ball, all save the last elaborately carved—how the very diminutive plain one at the centre ever got in there, or ever could be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... space where a number of roads and paths focused. To the right was a little opening in the mountain-side, hardly large enough to be called a valley, but designated in the language of the region as a "hollow." At its mouth stood a couple of diminutive log-cabins, of the rudest possible construction, and roofed with "clapboards" held in place by stones and poles. A long string of wooden troughs, supported upon props, conducted the water from an elevated spring to the roof of one of the cabins, and the water could be seen issuing ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... in the quest of purging and salvation through the beauty of his surroundings, he had made his place perfect inside and out, from the diminutive flagged court in the front (with one brilliant mat of flowers laid down in the middle) to the last lovely border of the grass-garden at the back. I wondered, I have never ceased to wonder, knowing his beginnings, ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... me present the slaves of the lamp—the spirit lamp, General. Frank you know—too well, I dare say. Stand forth, vassal Number Two. This, General, is Captain Schuyler, a mite of a man physically—a Gothamite, in fact—but a tower of wit and wisdom when permitted to speak." (A diminutive youngster, with a head twice too big for his body, and a world of fun in his sparkling eyes, bowed elaborately to his commanding general, but prudently held his peace.) "Captain Schuyler, my dear General, meekly ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... the negative he walked into the room where I was, and speedily by his appearance, removed any apprehensions I had felt as to my safety. Nothing could less resemble the tall port and sturdy bearing of a gendarme, than the diminutive and dwarfish individual before me. His height could scarcely have reached five feet, of which the head formed fully a fourth part; and even this was rendered in appearance still greater by a mass of loosely floating black hair that fell upon his neck and shoulders, ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... have been in the habit of casting scorn on these early Italian works, as if their simplicity were the result of ignorance merely. When we know a little more of art in general, we shall begin to suspect that a man of Giotto's power of mind did not altogether suppose his clusters of formal trees, or diminutive masses of architecture, to be perfect representations of the woods of Judea, or of the streets of Jerusalem: we shall begin to understand that there is a symbolical art which addresses the imagination, ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... turned to the right and then again to the left—for the path had now become serpentine, and at no moment could be traced for more than two or three paces in advance. Presently the sound of water fell gently on his ear, and in the shadiest of diminutive forests, amidst the interlacing branches of elm and beech, he caught the glimpse of a fountain. For an instant the wild thought of forcing his way through it, of plunging his burning forehead in its cooling spray, well-nigh mastered him. But his better sense conquered, and he ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... of Cappello. This passage is obscure and most likely corrupt. Boccaccio probably meant to write "hat" instead of "chaplet" (ghirlanda), as the meaning of cappello, chaplet (diminutive of Old English chapel, a hat,) being the ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... Heights. His courage was manifested by the most extraordinary daring throughout the entire and unequal contest; but his small force was compelled to surrender with the honors of war. The whole affair reflected credit upon his diminutive force, and upon the young hero who led them. His imprisonment was not without dangers that afforded opportunities of displaying his lofty courage ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... any longer, so good-by for the present." She took up a little basket containing an old pair of gloves, large scissors, and a ball of twine, and walked briskly away to attend to the plants in her diminutive conservatory. ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... with her side of the choir, the Sub-Prioress, or the Mistress of the Novices, or whoever is second in authority, responds with the other nuns. The Office of Saint Dominic for Vespers practically consists of one short Psalm, a very diminutive Lesson, one Hymn, and the beautiful Canticle 'My soul doth magnify the Lord'; then follows a little prayer and the short responsory, and all is over. The whole service does not ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... we could overlook most of the city. I saw that the city covered a good deal of ground. From the elevated position we were occupying, we looked down and saw men and women walking, in the street below us, and they looked like a diminutive race. As I looked I thought the ground was rather flat and level for a city, but we made up our minds it was a, great place. Some of the merchandise of all the world was there. We came home feeling very well satisfied with our own city, Detroit. For the beauty of its scenery and the ...
— The Bark Covered House • William Nowlin
... outcries of violent disgust at himself and exclamations for pardon. He picked up the brooch. It was open. A strange, discoloured, folded substance lay on the floor of the carriage. Mrs. Lovell gazed down at it, and then at him, ghastly pale. He lifted it by one corner, and the diminutive folded squares came out, revealing a strip ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... by practice or print, Is famous for making the most of a hint. Not a murmur of shame, Or buzz of blame, Not a flying report that flew at a name, Not a plausible gloss, or significant note, Not a word in the scandalous circles afloat, Of a beam in the eye, or diminutive mote, But vortex-like that tube of tin Sucked the censorious particle in; And, truth to tell, for as willing an organ As ever listened to serpent's hiss, Nor took the viperous sound amiss, On the snaky head ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... may appear in time for lunch;" and with a significant look he directed Amy to the basket he had brought, from the bottom of which was drawn a doll with absurdly diminutive feet, and for once in her life Johnnie's heart craved ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... by plunder. This portion were termed boshmen, or bushmen, and have still retained that appellation: living in extreme destitution, sleeping in caves, constantly in a state of starvation, they soon dwindled down to a very diminutive race, and have continued so ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... the way of making the Percys revel in such epithets because he could not remember the girl's name; but this delicious use of the diminutive, as addressed to full-grown ladies, went to Tommy's head. His solemn face kept his secret, but he had some narrow escapes; as once, when saying good-night to Elspeth, he kissed her on mouth, eyes, nose, and ears, and said: "Shall I tuck you in, little woman?" He ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... contrary, we were concerned to discover the best method of continuing the war. We knew, I need scarcely say, that humanly speaking ultimate victory for us was out of the question—that had been clear from the very beginning. For how could our diminutive army hope to stand against the overwhelming numbers at the enemy's command? Yet we had always felt that no one is worthy of the name of man who is not ready to vindicate the right, be the odds what they may. We knew also, that ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... large rock, about twelve feet square, slightly elevated above the ground, and entirely overgrown with moss. A small fir tree, not ten inches high, grew in its centre, and the symmetry of its diminutive trunk, rendered more beautiful by the regularity with which its little branches sprung forth and drooped around first attracted our notice to the spot as ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... the news he had heard with creditable disinterestedness, and admirable repression of anything beneath the dignity of a philosopher. When one has attained that felicitous point of wisdom from which one sees all mankind to be fools, the diminutive objects may make what new moves they please, one does not marvel at them: their sedateness is as comical as their frolic, and their frenzies more comical still. On this intellectual eminence the wise youth had built his castle, and he had lived in it ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... liking for his nephew Willard, and on many a hunting excursion in the Great North Woods, the boy was his only companion. This affection, however, was not unmingled with some contempt for the lad's diminutive stature. ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... emerged from the door of my room into the hall, I found a small sedan-chair, of highly ornamental make, awaiting my convenience, carried upon the shoulders of two diminutive boys, who were as black, and shone as lustrously, as a bit of highly polished ebony. I had never seen their like before, save in an occasional bit of statuary in Italy, wherein marbles of differing hue and shade had been ingeniously used ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... Hornell, F. L. S., who intimately knows the habits of the pearl-oyster of the East, advances two interesting if not startling premises. One is that the pearl is produced as a consequence of the presence of dead bodies of a diminutive parasitical tapeworm which commonly affects the Ceylon bivalve. The living tapeworm does not induce pearl formation. The popular belief has been that the pearl was formed by secretions of nacre ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... led to a cessation of hostilities, which might have been followed by a definitive treaty of peace, but the daemon of discord again made its appearance in the tangible shape of a diminutive personage, who, hitherto silently occupying a snug out-of-the-way corner by the ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... with him. By regularly and frequently supplying them with fresh water, he succeeded in hatching them, and kept some of the young fishes alive for some time; but they died in consequence of neglect, and were even then very diminutive. The opinion generally received in Scotland seems to be, if I may judge from the evidence given before the House of Commons, that the Smolts go down to the sea in the spring after they are spawned, and that they return in the summer and autumn of the same ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... cocoa-trees were not in so thriving a state, and were all low, but the plantain-trees made a better appearance, though they were not large. In general, the trees round this village, and which were seen at many of those which we passed before we anchored, are the cordia sebestina, but of a more diminutive size than the product of the southern isles. The greatest part of the village stands near the beach, and consists of above sixty houses there; but, perhaps, about forty more stand scattered about, farther up the country, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... stretching its shimmering length like a bimetallic serpent to the north and south, he suddenly became conscious of a pair of very sharp eyes resting upon him, which a closer inspection showed belonged to a laborer of seemingly diminutive stature, who was engaged in carrying earth in a wheelbarrow from one dirt-pile to another. As Thaddeus caught his eye the laborer assumed towering proportions. He rose up quite two feet higher in ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... wall, leaving the Esplanade wholly unencumbered except by the soldiers. Down between the two ranks, which were formed facing each other, came the Sultan on a white steed—a beautiful Arabian—and having at his side his son, a boy about ten or twelve years old, who was riding a pony, a diminutive copy of his father's mount, the two attended by a numerous body-guard, dressed in gorgeous Oriental uniforms. As the procession passed our carriage, I, as pre-arranged, stood up and took off my hat, His Serene Highness promptly acknowledging ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... Vol. I, and here the weather, having suddenly become tropical, the Baron felt that his mighty brain "whirled, swam to a giddiness, and subsided." He has been stopped occasionally en route; he had come into view of "the diminutive marble cavalier of the infantile cerebellum." Then he retraced his steps, puzzled a bit, but after a "modest quencher" Swivellerian libation, he hit upon a luminous passage which warned him "in plain speech"—and whose is ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, June 27, 1891 • Various
... newspaper up and read an advertisement of steamships about to depart to the West Coast of Africa. His wife—engaged in cutting out a scarlet flannel garment of diminutive proportions (an operation which she made a point of performing on the study table)—gave two gentle ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... well displayed in his magnificent habiliment. His countenance was handsome and manly, with a certain broad burly look, thoroughly English in its character, which won him much admiration from his subjects; and though it might be objected that the eyes were too small, and the mouth somewhat too diminutive, it could not be denied that the general expression of the face was kingly in the extreme. A prince of a more "royal presence" than Henry the Eighth was never seen, and though he had many and grave faults, want of dignity ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... chastened lines of the worn and older face, which leaves no doubt that the heads are those of a little child and its mother. A feeling for maternity is indeed always characteristic of Leonardo; and this feeling is further indicated here by the half-humorous pathos of the diminutive, rounded shoulders of the child. You may note a like pathetic power in drawings of a young man, seated in a stooping posture, his face in his hands, as in sorrow; of a slave sitting in an uneasy inclined attitude, in some ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... whom Jeanne had taken the rooms, a Mrs. Caynsard, she had seen only once or twice. She was waited upon most of the time by an exceedingly diminutive maid servant, very shy at first, but very talkative afterwards, in broad Norfolk dialect, when she had grown a little accustomed to this very unusual lodger. Now and then Kate Caynsard, the only daughter of the house, appeared, but for the most time she was away, sailing a fishing boat or looking ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... head has wit in it. I live Again, and a far higher life, near her. Some women like a young philosopher; Perchance because he is diminutive. For woman's manly god must not exceed Proportions of the natural nursing size. Great poets and great sages draw no prize With women: but the little lap-dog breed, Who can be hugged, or on a mantel-piece Perched up for adoration, these obtain Her homage. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... have to start at the bottom?" she had protested. "You have never been quite fair to him, Clay." His boyish diminutive had stuck to him. "You expect him to know as much about the mill now as you do, ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... ecclesiastical origin, and on looking a little closer one soon discovers blocked up Gothic windows and others from which the tracery has been hacked. This was the chapel of the castle which has been so completely robbed of its sanctity that it is now cut up into small lodgings, and in one of its diminutive shops, picture post-cards of the ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... Observatory of Cambridge, the tube of the new reflector would require to be 280 feet in length, and the object-glass sixteen feet in diameter. Colossal as these dimensions may appear, they were diminutive in comparison with the 10,000 foot telescope proposed by the astronomer Hooke only a ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... indeed, for the little stranger happened to be none other than Anne Oldfield, whose elegance of manner, charm of voice and action and loveliness of face would in time make her the most delightful comedienne of her day. Perhaps she found no instant welcome, this diminutive maiden who came smiling into existence laden with a message from the sunshine; her father was richer in ancestry than guineas, and the arrival of another daughter may have seemed an honour hardly worth ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... Haiti, and Cipangu to their country. In the beginning the Spaniards called the island Isabella after the Queen Isabella, taking this name from the first colony they founded there. I have already spoken sufficiently of this in my First Decade. They afterwards called it Hispaniola, a diminutive of Hispania. This is enough concerning names; let us now pass to the conformation of ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... Welch—briefly, but with a passion that was evident in his flashing eyes and vehement gestures. The passion was contagious; they all sprang to their feet with a low but fierce cry, and in a few moments they had caught and saddled their diminutive palfreys, while one of the band, who seemed singled out by Meredydd, sallied forth alone from the orchard, and took his way, on foot, to the bridge. He did not tarry there long; at the sight of a single horseman, whom a shout of welcome, on that swarming thoroughfare, proclaimed ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... but three rooms below, barring the dining-room which was cut off by the low piazza. The stairway went up from Mrs. Jackson's little bedroom into a duplicate guest-chamber above. Two others, as diminutive, one above and below, were tucked onto these. And this, with the big room, was the Hermitage. A very unpretentious cabin was the first Hermitage; the humble and honored roof of Rachel and Andrew Jackson, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... have, however, denied. I instantly resolved to take advantage of this overture on the part of Count Ofalia, and to call on him myself. I therefore caused a copy of the Gospel to be handsomely bound, and proceeding to the palace, was instantly admitted to him. He is a dusky, diminutive person, between fifty and sixty years of age, with false hair and teeth, but exceedingly gentlemanly manners. He received me with great affability, and thanked me for my present; but on my proceeding ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... bracelets, gold chains and jeweled girdle, and a mitre-shaped coiffure of black and gold studded with enormous diamonds, any one of which would make the fortune of a Pall-Mall pawnbroker. A score of attendants about his own age were standing at the back of the young heir, while four diminutive dwarfs and four jesters in comic garb crouched at his feet, and innumerable other subordinates—such as the fan-holder, the handkerchief-holder, the tea- and bouquet-holders, etc. etc.—made up the retinue of this youthful dignitary. At a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... exclaimed Silvey, as a tall and diminutive figure made their way down the railroad embankment. "Kid brother with ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... faille tant de ceremonies pour parler a madame? On parle bien a Perrette" (Marianne, 2e partie). Perrette, from the well-known fable of La Fontaine, Perrette et le pot at lait, has come down to us as the personification of the dreamer, the builder of air-castles. Margot, a diminutive of Marguerite, is a ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... at him like a little tiger, and by the fierceness of her gestures and the volubility of her German jargon actually compelled him to retreat step by step until she had him outside the door, which she barred with her diminutive person. No one could help laughing at the discomfited giant and the mite of a child facing him so bravely, while she scolded at ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... round the garden, where they discovered a statue by Mahoudeau, very badly placed in a corner near the eastern vestibule. It was the bathing girl at last, standing erect, but of diminutive proportions, being scarcely as tall as a girl ten years old, but charmingly delicate—with slim hips and a tiny bosom, displaying all the exquisite hesitancy of a sprouting bud. The figure seemed to exhale a perfume, that grace which nothing can give, ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... edge of a low escarpment. Below him the narrowing valley showed bare, black ribs of rock, long, winding gray lines leading down to a central floor where mesquite and cactus dotted the barren landscape. Moving objects, diminutive in size, gray and white in color, arrested Gale's roving sight. They bobbed away for a while, then stopped. They were antelope, and they had seen his horse. When he rode on they started once more, keeping to the lowest level. These wary animals were often desert watchdogs ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... be unavailable as a naval base. Even here, however, we must pause to note that energy and will could do much toward making even a pinnacle rock a naval base; for we see the gigantic fortress of Heligoland erected on what was little but a shoal; and we see the diminutive water areas of Malta and Gibraltar made to hold in safety the war-ships of the greatest ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... provides vessels far dearer to the heart of the adventurous than anything driven by steam. Here, mayhap, will an untravelled traveller make his first acquaintance with the birch-bark canoe, and learn to call it by the affectionate diminutive, "Birch." Earlier in life there was no love lost between him and whatever bore that name. Even now, if the untravelled one's first acquaintance be not distinguished by an unlovely ducking, so much the worse. The ducking must come. Caution must be learnt by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... Egyptians and southern Europeans. Other facial characteristics suggest that a Mongolian racial connection is highly improbable; the prominent Sumerian nose, for instance, is quite unlike the Chinese, which is diminutive. Nor can far-reaching conclusions be drawn from the scanty linguistic evidence at our disposal. Although the languages of the Sumerians and long-headed Chinese are of the agglutinative variety, so are those also which are spoken by the broad-headed Turks and Magyars of ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... developed, was exclusively sandstone or ironstone, with inferior granite; and even the higher levels, which had heretofore been of a sandy nature, were now rugged and stony, and more sterile than before; the grasstrees, which generally accommodate themselves to any soil, were stunted and diminutive, and by no means so abundant as before. The general elevation of the country still appeared to be the same. I estimated it at about ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... KEYSERLING (diminutive of KAISER) into "Caesarion;"—and I should have said, he plays much upon names and also upon things, at Reinsberg, in that style; and has a good deal of airy symbolism, and cloud-work ingeniously painted round the solidities of his life ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... This passage has been the occasion of as many different opinions concerning both the reading and the sense as any passage in the whole treatise. Tympanum is used for a timbrel or drum, tympanidia a diminutive of it. Lambinus says tympana "were sticks with which the tyrant used to beat the condemned." P. Victorius substitutes tyrannidis ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... her large blue eyes expressed both gentleness and goodness. Seen beside this smiling and serene countenance, the appearance of the stranger was downright repulsive, and Monsieur de Lamotte could hardly repress a start of disagreeable surprise at the pitiful and sordid aspect of this diminutive person, who stood apart, looking overwhelmed by conscious inferiority. He was still more astonished when he saw his son take him by the hand with friendly kindness, ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... its fore flippers thicker and more rounded, and its hind quarters less tapering to the tail. Altogether, it impressed upon the mind a strong idea of a formidable monster, in spite of its relatively diminutive head; for its fearful tusks, and thick-set projecting whiskers, gave its visage a most truculent expression; and with its grotesquely fashioned ponderous carcass, provided with fin feet of strange formation, seemed to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 367 - 25 Apr 1829 • Various
... foreseen this. But the child—she is only a child, Rosa!—did her best!' and he looked so mournful that I, knowing he blamed me for his bantling's freak of temper, told him plainly that he cared a thousand times more for this diminutive bundle of hypocrisy than he ever did for me, and that his absurd favoritism was fast begetting in me a positive dislike for her. I couldn't endure the sight of the sulky little mischief-maker for a week after her complaint of barbarity had brought the ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... derivation, but forus, of which it is clearly the diminutive, is used by Virgil for the ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... the tree were quite low so Nell's aerial journey was brief. Kali soon seized her with his powerful arms and placed her between the trunk and a giant bough, where there was sufficient room for half a dozen of such diminutive beings. No wind could blow her away from there and in addition, even although water flowed all over the tree, the trunk, about fifteen feet thick, shielded her at least from new waves of rain borne ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Parisian accent has a little more bone than Miss Pupford, but is of the same trim orderly diminutive cast, and, from long contemplation, admiration, and imitation of Miss Pupford, has grown like her. Being entirely devoted to Miss Pupford, and having a pretty talent for pencil-drawing, she once made a portrait of that lady: which was so instantly identified and hailed by the pupils, ...
— Tom Tiddler's Ground • Charles Dickens
... natives. Suddenly I heard the word kuda. Fortunately kuda (horse) was one of the words I knew: and I at once ordered the kuda to be brought. Half a dozen natives set off to find it. It turned out to be a very diminutive pony, but I ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... use of an equally-poised wheel of some weight on a pivoted axle, which device we term a balance; the vibrations or oscillations being obtained by applying a coiled spring, which was first called a "pendulum spring," then a "balance spring," and finally, from its diminutive size and coil form, a "hairspring." We are all aware that for the motive power for keeping up the oscillations of the escaping circle l we must contrive to employ power derived from the teeth D of the escape wheel. About the most available ...
— Watch and Clock Escapements • Anonymous
... of Turnhill was very large for the size of the town. The diminutive town hall, which in reality was nothing but a watch-house, seemed to be a mere incident on its irregular expanse, to which the two-storey shops and dwellings made a low border. Behind this crimson, blue-slated border rose the loftier ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... my brother! Weigh you the worth and honour of a king, So great as our dread father's, in a scale Of common ounces? Will you with counters sum The past-proportion of his infinite, And buckle in a waist most fathomless With spans and inches so diminutive As fears and ...
— The History of Troilus and Cressida • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... usually regarded better for not being more than two or three years old. The usual theory is, that cells fill up by repeated use, and, becoming smaller, render the bees raised in them diminutive. This is not probable, as a known habit of the bee is to clean out the cells before reusing them. Huber demonstrated that bees raised in drone-cells (which are always larger than for workers) grew no larger than in their own natural cells. And as bees build their cells ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... some distance, would leap upon a rock that was there; then, after dropping his wings, flirting with his spread tail, erecting the ruff upon his neck, and throwing back his head, he would swell and strut upon the rock, exhibiting himself like a diminutive turkey-cock. After manoeuvring in this way for a few moments, he would commence flapping his wings in short quick strokes, which grew more rapid as he proceeded, until a 'booming' sound was produced, more like the rumble of distant thunder than ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... this cockpit hold] Shakespeare probably calls the stage a cockpit, as the most diminutive enclosure present ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... heedless of the admonition, suffered himself to be led by the child; and together they passed slowly out into the living room, through the kitchen, and thence into the diminutive rose garden, the pride of the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... rioters, and the mutinous regiments were sent as a penance to that sector of the front which Von Buelow was well-informed enough to select for his offensive. But the nervousness was general: Italians had never yet met German troops in battle, save perhaps in small encounters with diminutive units in Macedonia, and some consternation was created when, about the middle of October, it was ascertained that there were German divisions on the Italian front; and presently popular imagination magnified Von Buelow's thirteen divisions into the combined weight of the ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... room within, with a bare yellow-washed floor and ragged curtains at the little window. In a corner was a diminutive altar draped with threadbare lace. The red glow of the taper lighted a cheap print of St. Joseph and a brazen crucifix. The human element in the room was furnished by a little, wizened yellow woman, who, black-robed, turbaned, and stern, sat before ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... from the sentiments of piety and reverence for the modest virtues and simple manners of humble life with which they may be contemplated. A man must be very insensible who would not be touched with pleasure at the sight of the chapel of Buttermere, so strikingly expressing, by its diminutive size, how small must be the congregation there assembled, as it were, like one family; and proclaiming at the same time to the passenger, in connection with the surrounding mountains, the depth of that ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... nouns is derived from these two classes, called diminutive nouns. These are formed by the termination "ens" or "na" ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... that this word is a misprint for maynelas, a diminutive of maina, a talking bird. Delgado (ut supra) describes a bird called maya (Munia jagori—Cab.; Ploceus baya—Blyth.; and Ploceus hypoxantha—Tand.), which resembles the pogo, being smaller and of a cinnamon color, which pipes and ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... Marion was unpromising. At birth he was puny and diminutive in a remarkable degree. Weems, in his peculiar fashion, writes, "I have it from good authority, that this great soldier, at his birth, was not larger than a New England lobster, and might easily enough have been put into a quart pot." It was certainly as little supposed that he ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... the article in No. 16., "on Pet Names," had not been Scottish, I should have been less surprised at the author's passing over the name of Jock, universally used in Scotland for John. The termination ick or ck is often employed, as marking a diminutive object, or object of endearment. May not the English term Jack, if not directly borrowed from the Scottish Jock, have been ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 19, Saturday, March 9, 1850 • Various
... some more powerful animal spirit which is the natural enemy of the deer, usually the dog or the Wolf. These animal gods live up above beyond the seventh heaven and are the great prototypes of which the earthly animals are only diminutive copies. They are commonly located at the four cardinal points, each of which has a peculiar formulistic name and a special color which applies to everything in the same connection. Thus the east, north, west, and south ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... two rubies flashed from the deep eye-sockets. On the forehead was engraved, Ruit Hora; and on the occiput Tibi, Hippolyta. It opened like a box, the hinging being almost imperceptible, and the ticking inside lent an indescribable air of life to the diminutive skull. This sepulchral jewel, the offering of some unknown artist to his mistress, had doubtless marked many an hour of rapture, and served as a warning symbol to ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... good your talking, Aby," said a diminutive gentleman, with a Roman nose and generally antique visage; "you must do the best you can for yourself, and get your living in a respectable sort of vay. I can't do no more for you, so help ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... the familiar forms seem incredibly diminutive. That little speck moving across one of the brown carpets is a ploughman and his team. That white stream that looks like milk flowing over the green carpet is a flock of sheep running before the sheep-dog to another pasture. And the ear no less than the eye learns to translate ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... establishment. Indeed, temerity could not yet go so far as to speak of the court of Madame Bonaparte and the court ladies of Mademoiselle Hortense; they had still to be content with the limited space of the diminutive Luxembourg, but they were soon to be compensated for all this, and, if they still had to call each other monsieur and madame, they could, a few years later, say "your highness," "your majesty," and ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... the magnificence of this apartment in what style the rich Pompeiians lived. The floor is paved in black and white mosaic, with a marble basin in the centre. The doors opening from this hall conduct us to smaller apartments, two reception rooms, a parlor, the library, and six diminutive bedrooms, only large enough to contain a bedstead, and with no window. It must have been the fashion to sleep with open doors, or the sleepers must ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... and threes the late horses arrived swaddled in cloths, and surrounded by the usual crowd of bow-legged grooms and diminutive jockeys; while the air reeked with the smell of the stable and the oaths and ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... fitted up a rod, and was fortunate enough to catch two fine cat-fish. The cat-fish, although its name is not attractive, is excellent when cooked. It has, indeed, a very fine flavour, is firm, white, and very rich. In appearance it is like a diminutive dolphin. It has double fins in addition to those on its back, and a long beard-like excrescence hangs from each side of its mouth. One was more than sufficient for our supper, but Boxer had no objection to eat ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... like that of the felt of a badger in consistence, and in colour a reddish brown, like the hue of the heather-blossom. His limbs seemed of great strength; nor was he otherwise deformed than from their undue proportion in thickness to his diminutive height. The terrified sportsman stood gazing on this horrible apparition, until, with an angry countenance, the being demanded by what right he intruded himself on those hills, and destroyed their ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... quarter from his enemies and but little defense from his friends. One of his most formidable critics, writing long years after the war, describes him as "hungry for regard, influence, and honor, but too diminutive in intellect and character to feel the glow of true ambition—a man made, so to speak, to be neither loved nor hated, esteemed nor despised, slighted nor admired; intended to play an influential part in the agitation of parties, and by history to be silently ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... MSS. of Mr. Syme, writer to the signet. Those, who are desirous of more information, may consult Craig de Feudis, Lib. II. dig. 9. sec. 24. It is hoped the reader will excuse this digression, though somewhat professional; especially as there can be little doubt, that this diminutive republic must soon share the fate of mightier states; for, in consequence of the increase of commerce, lands possessed under this singular tenure, being now often brought to sale, and purchased by the neighbouring proprietors, will, ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... still as the snow that covered them. Maud Barrington was not unduly timorous, but the roar of that awful icy gale would have stricken dismay into the hearts of most men, and she found herself glancing with feverish impatience at a diminutive gold watch and wondering whether the cold had retarded its progress. Ten minutes passed very slowly, lengthened to twenty more slowly still, and then it flashed upon her that there was at least something she could do, and scraping up a little of the snow that sifted ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... fingers, he had smiled into her glowing, damp little face when she stuttered to him long tales of bad doggies and big 'ticks; he had brought her "jacks" and paper-dolls and hair ribbons; he loved the diminutive femininity of the creature; she was all a woman, even at three. Alix he proudly called his "boy"; Alix used hair ribbons to tie up her dogs, and demanded hip boots and an air rifle and got them, too, and used them, but when he took Alix in his arms she was apt to bump his nose violently with her ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... uneasiness which we could not help showing in our own faces as the dear child's head recorded its passage with a bump on every stair—Richard afterwards said he counted seven, besides one for the landing—received us with perfect equanimity. She was a pretty, very diminutive, plump woman of from forty to fifty, with handsome eyes, though they had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if—I am quoting Richard again—they could see ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... This practical business act of the diminutive beauty before him—albeit he was just ten dollars out of pocket by it—struck the official into ...
— Jeff Briggs's Love Story • Bret Harte
... a drop of cognac! Get him some father!" The reluctant farmer procured a big bottle and a very diminutive glass known as the "petit verre," which held about a thimbleful. Paul would congratulate the good dame on her keen perception. At this period Vodry would generally ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... from an outer chamber, grated by the iron door of a cell where chance prisoners were sometimes locked, and hung with gilded stars, and firemen's banners, a young figure diminutive, and of pale and ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... birds, that of the Taylor Bird deserves especial mention; the bird itself is a diminutive one, being little more than three inches long; it is an inhabitant of India. The nest is sometimes constructed of two leaves, one of them dead; the latter is fixed to the living one as it hangs ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, No. - 361, Supplementary Issue (1829) • Various
... very warm welcome to all of my Meredith nieces and nephews!" said the diminutive lady, holding out both hands ...
— The Quest of Happy Hearts • Kathleen Hay
... you prove yourself to be a philosopher of a modern school, you draw your inductions so far and wide from your diminutive premise." ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... they were passing—it could hardly be called a road—ended abruptly in a tiny open space with a grove of trees upon one side and a sandpit on the other. In the centre was a pond, shrunken at this season of the year to most diminutive proportions; so much so, indeed, that it barely served for the ablutions of some half-a-dozen ducks, who hustled and jostled one another angrily in their ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... not look, therefore, for a large amount or variety of animal life in the Ecuadorian forests. Time was when colossal megatheroids, mastodons, and glyptodons browsed on the foliage of the Andes and the Amazon; but now the terrestrial mammals of this tropical region are few and diminutive. They are likewise old-fashioned, inferior in type as well as bulk to those of the eastern hemisphere, for America was a finished continent long before Europe. "It seems most probable (says Darwin) that the North American elephants, mastodons, horse, and hollow-horned ruminants migrated, on ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... and left being always properly represented. Sometimes they are made singly, but usually in pairs, united directly or by a little straight bar or curved handle at the posterior end. White with color decorations, or brown or lead-colored without decorations, diminutive in size. The ...
— Illustrated Catalogue Of The Collections Obtained From The Indians Of New Mexico And Arizona In 1879 • James Stevenson
... of William the Silent, the future deliverer of Holland. The other and larger one was the Comtat Venaissin, a fief directly dependent upon the Pope. Of irregular shape, and touching the Rhone both above and below Orange, the Comtat Venaissin nearly enclosed the diminutive principality in its folds. Its capital, Avignon, having forfeited the distinction enjoyed in the fourteenth century as the residence of the Roman Pontiffs, still boasted the presence of a Legate of the Papal See, a poor compensation for the loss of its past splendor. On the shores of the Mediterranean ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... very neat and cleanly creature, everlastingly brushing her clothes, and bathing regularly in a bath of snow provided for her in the cabin. This last operation was her great delight. She would throw up the white flakes with her diminutive nose, rolling about and burying herself in them, wipe her face with her soft paws, and then mount to the side of the tub, looking round her knowingly, and barking the prettiest bark that ever was heard. This was her way of enforcing admiration; and ...
— Stories of Animal Sagacity • W.H.G. Kingston
... were established in what was known as the spare-room of the Burtwell house, which, with its north light and usual freedom from visitors made a very good studio. Madge was painting a miniature of Eleanor. The diminutive size of her undertaking was causing her a good deal of embarrassment, and she was consequently inclined to be ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... "I've got a handkerchief," and she pulled forth from her pocket a diminutive bit of cambric. "You get some ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... see them again that night. He betook himself then once more to the library, as it was called—the little, cozy, dark-panelled room off the hall, where the owner of the house had left two locked bookcases, and where Thorpe himself had installed a writing-desk and a diminutive safe for his papers. The chief purpose of the small apartment, however, was indicated by the two big, round, low-seated easy-chairs before the hearth, and by the cigar boxes and spirit-stand and tumblers visible ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... floor was a much used and faded ingrain carpet, in one place worn through by the edge of a loose board. A narrow strip of unpainted pine nailed to the wall carried six or seven wooden pegs to serve as wardrobe. Two diminutive towels with red borders hung on the rail of the washstand, and a battered tin slop jar, minus ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... approach the quadruped with notes of complacency, rubbing herself gently against his legs; while the horse would look down with satisfaction, and move with the greatest caution and circumspection, lest he should trample on his diminutive companion. Thus, by mutual good offices, each seemed to console the vacant hours of the other: so that Milton, when he puts the following sentiment in the mouth of Adam, seems to be somewhat ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... have ever since been settled, but in unusually miserable circumstances, even for Ireland; and the consequence is, that they exhibit peculiar features of the most repulsive kind, projecting jaws with large open mouths, depressed noses, high cheek bones, and bow legs, together with an extremely diminutive stature. These, with an abnormal slenderness of the limbs, are the outward marks of a low and barbarous condition all over the world; it is particularly seen in the Australian aborigines. On the other hand, the beauty of the higher ranks in England is very ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... of Faith that I saw in the Orient was in the Philippine Islands. We were traveling the jungle trail to visit a tribe of naked Negritos. These are diminutive people who look like American negroes only they are much smaller; much more underfed, and who live in trees very much like the Orangutans of Borneo. They eat roots and nuts. They hunt with bows ...
— Flash-lights from the Seven Seas • William L. Stidger
... memorials of Lockhart dates; that is to say, the portrait, or rather the two portraits, in the Fraser Gallery. In the general group of the Fraserians he sits between Fraser himself and Theodore Hook, with the diminutive figure of Crofton Croker half intercepted beyond him; and his image forms the third plate in Mr. Bates's republication of the gallery. It is said to be the most faithful of the whole series, and it is certainly the handsomest, ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... gentlemen he scarcely recognized his sister as the centre of attraction, or knew that Miss Cicely's effusive greeting of Maggie was her first one. "I knew he was dying to see you after all you had BOTH passed through, and I brought him straight here," said the diminutive Machiavelli, meeting the astonished gaze of her father and the curious eyes of her sister with perfect calmness, while Maggie, full of gratitude and admiration of her handsome brother, forgot his momentary obliviousness, and returned her greeting ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... tree-hoppers (Membracis binotata), which spend their entire lives on the stems, sucking the juices through their little beaks, just as the aphids moor themselves to the tender rose-twigs, might be mistaken for thorns during one of their protective masquerades. Again they look like diminutive flocks of fowl, their heads ever pointing in one direction, no matter how the vine may twist and turn - always toward the top of the branch, that they may the better siphon the sap down their tiny throats. Toward the end of summer the females, which have a sharp instrument at the ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... was slender and of gold, the locket small; inside two painted miniatures but very diminutive, and both of them young. One would hardly be able to identify a middle aged person from them. There was no mark or initials, save ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... She took one of the arm-chairs by the side of the fireplace, which her father had reserved for her, and while he and I were talking, she sat with her head leaning a little sideways on the back of the chair. I could just discern that her feet, which rested on the stool, were very diminutive, like her hands. ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... Let the reader note Fleeming's eagerness to influence his friend Frank, an incipient Tory (no less) as further history displayed; his unconscious indifference to his father and devotion to his mother, betrayed in so many significant expressions and omissions; the sense of dignity of this diminutive "person resident on the spot," who was so happy as to escape insult; and the strange picture of the household—father, mother, son, and even poor Aunt Anna—all day in the streets in the thick of this rough business, and the boy packed off alone ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... people come, after toping all day, to purchase, at the expense of their last penny, the repute of sober companions: a rota-room, that, like Noah's ark, receives animals of every sort, from the precise diminutive band, to the hectoring cravat and cuffs in folio; a nursery for training up the smaller fry of virtuosi in confident tattling, or a cabal of kittling critics that have only learned to spit and mew; a mint of intelligence, that, to make each man his ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... as sweet as the wild rose, and as gentle as the soft spring sun, received from her friends the affectionate diminutive of Rita. And so I shall ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... a crime. Mr. Oxford found a corner fairly free from midgets, and they established themselves in it, and liqueurs and cigars accompanied the coffee. You could actually see midgets laughing outright in the mist of smoke; the chatter narrowly escaped being a din; and at intervals a diminutive boy entered and bawled the name of a midget at the top of his voice, Priam was suddenly electrified, and Mr. Oxford, very alert, noticed ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... "Epipsychidion," given by Shelley to a poem, is a diminutive for "Epipsyche," "on the soul." If so, it means "a little thing" (whether poem or essay) "on the soul." Your second question has been many times answered. 2. Read "Dinners in Society," page 314, vol. ii., and "The Habits of Polite Society," page 162, vol. iii. Never, under any pretext, put a knife ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII. No. 358, November 6, 1886. • Various
... monkey gazed with clasped hands and dreadfully human eyes into futurity; there were sagacious looking elephants, placid rhinoceroses, rampant hares, two pug dogs clasped in an irrevocable embrace, an enormous lobster, a diminutive polar bear, and in the center of all a most evil-looking jackdaw ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... relinquish the habit of universal hospitality. As if discontented with the narrow proportions of her own family, Mrs. Cartwright was never thoroughly at ease unless she had three or four friends to occupy every available square foot of floor in her diminutive sitting-room, and to squeeze around the table when meals were served. In vain did acquaintances hold apart from a sense of consideration, or time their visits when eating and drinking could scarcely be in question; they were given plainly to ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... far advanced in years, a feeble, emaciate old man of very diminutive stature. In the days of his prime, he had been a renowned warrior. Hearing of the arrival of the Spaniards, he was disposed to regard them as enemies, and seizing his tomahawk, he was eager to descend from his castle and lead ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... and had a great liking for having their portraits painted. This vanity extended to the Courtiers and even to the dwarfs, several of whom were usually connected with the court as a source of amusement. There are portraits of some of these diminutive creatures so skillfully painted that we cannot help wishing that more worthy subjects had been used. Thus the vanity of monarchs and their courtiers gave a direction to Spanish art which can be accounted for in no other way—their greatest artists are always great portrait painters. ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor
... was nicknamed "The Little Duke," because he was diminutive in size. Having no name of his own, he took that of his wife, "Scott," countess of Buccleuch. Pepys says: "It is reported that the king will be tempted to set the crown on the Little Duke" ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... same was retained in France during the medieval period; but in England,in Early English work, a circular deeply moulded abacus was introduced, which in the 14th and 15th centuries was transformed into an octagonal one. The diminutive of Abacus, ABACISCUS, is applied in architecture to the chequers or squares of a tessellated pavement . "Abacus'' is also the name of an instrument employed by the ancients for arithmetical calculations; pebbles, hits of bone or coins being used as counters. Fig. 1 shows a Roman ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... it counted among its inhabitants no fewer than three species of insects of peculiar interest to me, and from that time I haunted it, going there day after day to spend long hours in pursuit of my small quarry. Not to kill and preserve their diminutive corpses in a cabinet, but solely to witness the comedy of their brilliant little lives. And as I used to take my luncheon in my pocket I fell into the habit of going to a particular spot, some opening in the dense wood with a big tree to lean ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson
... the columns or sprawled across them! There she was, measuring herself back to back with the Statue of Liberty; scudding through the firmament on a comet, whilst a crowd of tiny men in evening-dress stared up at her from the terrestrial globe; peering through a microscope held by Cupid over a diminutive Uncle Sam; teaching the American Eagle to stand on its head; and doing a hundred-and-one other things—whatever suggested itself to the fancy of native art. And through all this iridescent maze of symbolism were scattered many little slabs of realism. ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... of the parliament, if this diminutive assembly deserve that honorable name, retain not the least appearance of law, equity, or freedom. They instantly reversed the former vote, and declared the king's concessions unsatisfactory. They determined that no member absent at this last vote should be received till ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
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