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More "Thaw" Quotes from Famous Books



... awaken'd, straight, All he hath seen forgets; yet still retains Impression of the feeling in his dream; E'en such am I: for all the vision dies, As 't were, away; and yet the sense of sweet, That sprang from it, still trickles in my heart. Thus in the sun-thaw is the snow unseal'd; Thus in the winds on flitting leaves was lost The Sybil's sentence. O eternal beam! (Whose height what reach of mortal thought may soar?) Yield me again some little particle ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante

... to nothin', dear;" sais I, "I am just a nateral man. There is a time for all things, and a way to do 'em too. If I have to freeze down solid to a thing, why then, ice is the word. If there is a thaw, then fun and snow-ballin' is the ticket. I listen to a preacher, and try to be the better for his argufying, if he has any sense, and will let me; and I listen to the violin, and dance to it, if ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... to patronizing her. "She is really a very nice creature, and ought to join us more in our plays," we said. So we used to make her "one of us" in the play-ground. In fact, I began to thaw towards her very considerably. There was something in Abby ...
— The Old Castle and Other Stories • Anonymous

... had come over her,—a feeling that she was one of the great human family after all, and the icy mountain of reserve began to thaw just a little. Her purchases made, she concluded to take another road home. This route lay past a church. It was lighted, though early, and a few real worshipers had met to pray before the ...
— The King's Daughter and Other Stories for Girls • Various

... the next morning was fair and bright, flushed with pink and warmed with sunshine to its golden heart. It was acknowledged to be the "beatinest" winter weather that ever was known,—a thaw that was not enough of a thaw to make the roads impassable, and without rain. The rude little settlement was alive long before the sun was up. Candles and lanterns flitted to and fro. The people were all eager and alert. Even the dogs and roosters seemed to feel the unusual excitement ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various

... they were among the islands at the mouth of the Richelieu, where muskrats scuttled through the rushes and wild-fowl clouded the air. The south shore of Lake St. Peter was heavily forested; the north, shallow. The lake was flooded with spring thaw, and the Mohawks could scarcely find camping-ground among the islands. The young prisoner was deathly sick from the rank food that he had eaten and heart-sick from the widening distance between himself and Three Rivers. Still, they treated him kindly, saying, "Chagon! Chagon!—Be merry! Cheer up!" ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut

... of October 15th we got up at three o'clock. Hot sweet tea was the one thing we all craved. The tea-pot was found to be frozen solid, although it had been hung up in the tent. It took an hour to thaw and the tea was just warm enough for practical purposes when I made an awkward move in the crowded tent and kicked over the tea-pot! Never did men keep their tempers better under more aggravating circumstances. ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham

... all that you have to do, is to keep the apples in a state of total darkness until some days after a complete thaw has come. In America they are frequently frozen as hard as stones; if they thaw in the light, they rot; but if they thaw in darkness, they not only do not rot, but lose very little of their original flavour. This may be new to the English ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 335 - Vol. 12, No. 335, October 11, 1828 • Various

... this; and flattery (we are told) will warm the most austere of authors—which Staff was not. He said "Oh!" and smiled his slow, wry smile; and Mr. Iff, remarking these symptoms of a thaw with interest and encouragement, ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance

... to the gates of the farm, when the thaw came after severe winters. But the flood had never increased so rapidly. We could see through the open door that the courtyard was transformed into a lake. The ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various

... niggard skies afford. Gloomy Winter, hence away, Love and fancy scorn they sway; Love, and joy, and friendly mirth Shall bless this roof, these walls, this hearth, The rigor of the year control, And thaw the winter ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various

... a mistake had been made. The speech was a success, and the programme provided for the entertainment of the orator and his wife included the hospitality of several private houses. Selma felt that she could afford to hold her head high and not to thaw too readily for the benefit of a society which had failed to appreciate her worth when it had the chance. She was the wife now of one of the leading public men of the nation, and in a position to set fashions, not to ask favors. Nevertheless she ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant

... unwritten, for him to consume his scanty stock of vigor in the tedious and exhaustive routine of political existence; waiting whole evenings for the vote, and then ... trudging home at three in the morning through the slush of a February thaw." He therefore spared himself as a member of Parliament, and carefully husbanded his powers in order to work upon his book. He gave himself more time for his annual vacation, yet would write when he could on the subjects which engrossed his life. His labors were too severe ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord

... the softer atmosphere from the distant ocean. The rising sun was obscured by denser and increasing columns of clouds, while the southerly wind that rushed up the valley brought the never-failing symptoms of a thaw. ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper

... challenge. Frank Harris is deprived of a publisher for his "Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confession" by threats of immediate prosecution; the newspapers meanwhile dedicate thousands of columns to the filthy amusements of Harry Thaw. George Moore's "Memoirs of My Dead Life" are bowdlerized, James Lane Allen's "A Summer in Arcady" is barred from libraries, and a book by D. H. Lawrence is forbidden publication altogether; at the same time half a dozen cheap magazines devoted to sensational sex stories attain ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken

... sufficient; he pressed his hand in silence, and led him to a place by the side of the baroness. An animated discussion now began concerning the weather, which was completely changed; a strong south wind had risen in the night, so there was now a thaw. The snow was all melted—the torrents were flowing once more, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... I find for metaphor; All else were contrast,—save that contrast's wall Is down, and all opposed things flow together Into a vast monotony, where night And day, and frost and thaw, and death and life, Are synonyms. What now—what now to me Are all the jabbering birds and foolish flowers That clutter up the world? You were my song! Now, let discord scream! You were my flower! ...
— Renascence and Other Poems • Edna St. Vincent Millay

... spring thaw usually begins in May in the forest region, and in June and July on the high Sierra, varying somewhat both in time and fullness with the weather and the depth of the snow. Toward the end of summer the streams are at their lowest ebb, few even of the strongest singing much above a ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir

... the work of getting the city's ancient reservoirs cleared of silt before the next spring thaw brought more water down the underground aqueducts everybody called canals in mistranslation of Schiaparelli's Italian word, though this was proving considerably easier than anticipated. The ancient Canal-Builders must have anticipated a time when their descendants would no longer be ...
— Omnilingual • H. Beam Piper

... on the ground, but the earth was frozen in great ribs after a late thaw. Ellen ran painfully between the ridges which a long line of ice-wagons had made with their heavy wheels earlier in the day. When the spaces between the ridges were too narrow for her little feet, she ran along the crests, and ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... an Author that had his Hero and Heroine consent together very prettily; but 'twas in a Thaw, and the Editor being stout, the match was broken off unblessedly, till a Pact was made that it should indeed be a Thaw, but sufficient only to let the Heroine drop through ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... continted with one another, for it was too soon for her to begin to regulate him the way she used with poor Jim Soolivan, so they wor comfortable enough; but this was too good to last, for the thaw kem an', an' you may be sure Jim Soolivan didn't lose a minute's time as soon as the heavy dhrift iv snow was melted enough between him and home to let him pass, for he didn't hear a word iv news from home sinst he lift it, ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... when the Bunch were having one of their best parties, Babbitt drove them to the skating-rink which had been laid out on the Chaloosa River. After a thaw the streets had frozen in smooth ice. Down those wide endless streets the wind rattled between the rows of wooden houses, and the whole Bellevue district seemed a frontier town. Even with skid chains on all four wheels, Babbitt was afraid of sliding, and when he came ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis

... Australia; for palaeontologists produce fossil remains of marsupials or kangaroos. As for the polar conditions, when going round for snipes I constantly saw these in miniature. The planing action of ice was shown in the ditches, where bridges of ice had been formed; these slipping, with a partial thaw, smoothed the grasses and mars of teazles in the higher part of the slope, and then lower down, as the pressure increased, cut away the earth, exposing the roots of grasses, and sometimes the stores of acorns laid up by mice. Frozen again in the night, the ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies

... light in a way that is oftentimes amazing. Sometimes these facts appear within a few hours; again they are days in developing; and occasionally, after they have developed, the story will "follow" for weeks, months, and even years without losing its interest. The Thaw, Becker, and Charlton stories ran for years. The first item about the Titanic disaster was a bulletin of less than half a stick; yet the story ran ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer

... time before and after the poem appeared, Byron was, as he told Leigh Hunt (February 9, 1814; Letters, 1899, iii. 27), "snow-bound and thaw-swamped in 'the valley of the shadow' of Newstead Abbey," and it was not till he had returned to town that he resumed his journal, and bethought him of placing on record some dark sayings with regard to the story of the Corsair and the personality ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron

... will I be true, Nor shall my will rebellious prove. Amid the curls of golden hair That wave those beauteous temples round, Cupid spread craftily the snare With which my captive heart he bound: And from those eyes he caught the ray Which thaw'd the ice that fenced my breast, Chasing all other thoughts away, With brightness suddenly imprest. But now that hair of sunny gleam, Ah me! is ravish'd from my sight; Those beauteous eyes withdraw their beam, And change to sadness past delight. A glorious death by all is prized; Tis death ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... remembered Prato with horror. The marchese may well have thought me reserved, for it is true that I could barely be civil to him. He argued from that, as I learned afterwards from Donna Giulia, that I was of a ducal family, and in proportion as I froze, so did he thaw. As I receded, so did he advance. He pressed invitations upon me, all of which I could not decline; it was proper that I should offer him some hospitality in return—and I did. He supped with me once or twice in my lodgings, lost ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett

... We used to carry large pieces of it wrapped up in a newspaper, and when at the camp-fire we desired a little in our cup of tea, we cut it off with an axe. As will be seen from this we had about seven months of bright cold winter. During all that time there was not a thaw, the snow was never soft, and there was no dampness in the air or under foot. Soft deer skin moccasins are very much superior to civilised boots or shoes under ...
— On the Indian Trail - Stories of Missionary Work among Cree and Salteaux Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young

... flinging himself bodily upon that gentleman. "I thaw cook cut a fowl's froat vis ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren

... Which tore from oaks their branches broad, And stars from the ecliptic road. Time wore he as his clothing-weeds, He sowed the sun and moon for seeds. As melts the iceberg in the seas, As clouds give rain to the eastern breeze, As snow-banks thaw in April's beam, The solid kingdoms like a dream Resist in vain his motive strain, They totter now and float amain. For the Muse gave special charge His learning should be deep and large, And his training ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... had a great deal of sewing to do, and for two days Dinky-Dunk stayed in and helped me fix up the shack. I made more book-shelves out of more old biscuit-boxes and my lord made a gun-rack for our fire-arms. Percival Benson rode over once, through the storm, and it took us half an hour to thaw him out. But he brought some books, and says he has four cases, altogether, and that we're welcome to all we wish. He stayed until noon the next day, this time sleeping in the annex, which Dinky-Dunk and I have papered, so that it looks quite presentable. But as yet there ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer

... the old man shrank sensitively within him for a moment. Then he said to himself, "He will know of it some day, and I may as well tell him." For the heart that had been frozen for years this youth had had power to thaw. ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge

... from cold in the winter, and hope you are in a warm, comfortable house, have pleasant books to read, and some pleasant friends to see. One does not want many; only a few bright faces to look in now and then, and help thaw the ice with little rills of genial conversation. I have fewer of these than at Rome,—but still several. * * * * * Horace Sumner, youngest son of father's friend, Mr. Charles P. Sumner, lives near us, and comes every evening to read a little while with Ossoli. He has solid ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... and it being yesterday and to-day a great thaw it is not for a man to walk the streets, but took coach and to Mr. Povy's, and there meeting all of us again agreed upon an answer to the Lords by and by, and thence we did come to Exeter House, and there was a witness ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... come. At first it came dribbling in by rail in trucks, till the thaw set in; and then fast, in a multitude of barges, with a great rush of unbound waters. The gentle master stevedore had his hands very full at last; and the chief mate became worried in his mind as to the proper distribution of the weight of his ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad

... provide them with food and shelter. They passed by the way armies of those who had set out upon the perilous enterprise, who stood frozen stiffly, without sense or motion; but Prince Mannikin strictly forbade that any attempt should be made to thaw them. So they went on and on for more than three months, and day by day the Ice Mountain, which they had seen for a long time, grew clearer, until at last they stood close to it, and shuddered at its height and steepness. But by patience and perseverance they crept up foot by foot, ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various

... snaw when it's thaw, Jean; I'm wearing awa', To the land o' the leal. There's nae sorrow there, Jean, There's neither cauld nor care, Jean, The day is aye fair In the ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various

... between the old and the new. The new, though not acknowledging itself to be beaten, takes to its heels, and flees in the stormy night through wind and snow. But the snow is moist and heavy; it is beginning to thaw. There is a vague presentiment ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland

... two minutes after rising before Lieut. Greely could speak, so great was the outburst of enthusiasm which greeted him. He remarked that he was surprised to learn that the ground did not thaw lower at Lieut. Ray's station, which was ten degrees farther south than his own, where the ground thawed to a much greater depth—namely, twenty to thirty feet. In regard to an open polar sea, he differed from Lieut. Ray. He did not believe there was ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various

... I had better go to Sue's to thaw out some of my loneliness over this play," I answered him as I looked up with desperation and a smudge on my face. Then I went to my room and left Tolly alone with Peter's poor little heroine. "Say, tell the poet ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess

... a long speech for Abbot, but his heart is full. The old gentleman's sad face seems to thaw and beam under the influence of his frank avowal and that winning plea. Abbot has held forth his other hand, and there the two men stand, both trembling a little, under the influence of a deep and ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King

... on you for next Friday. A young American author studying England—I suppose like that Count Something-or-other in Pickwick Papers—is coming to dinner. I understand he drinks very little, so I am relying on you to thaw him. ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter

... mysterious principle of duplication governing so many Martian phenomena.[991] Changes of the hues associated respectively with land and water accompanied in lower latitudes, and were thought to be occasioned by floods ensuing upon this rapid antarctic thaw. It is true that scarcity of moisture would account for the scantiness and transitoriness of snowy deposits easily liquefied because thinly spread. But we might expect to see the whole wintry hemisphere, at any rate, frost-bound, since the sun radiates less than ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... for snow shoes after that snowstorm. A thaw followed by a cold spell caused a thick crust to form on the snow which would nearly hold us up without the aid of our snowshoes. We were rather awkward with those shoes for a while, trying to keep them clear of each other, and we found it particularly hard to turn sharply without causing ...
— The Scientific American Boy - The Camp at Willow Clump Island • A. Russell Bond

... broken, but it was cracking in all directions under this unexampled thaw. The two had clearly indicated a mutual suspicion of each other's industrious habits after dinner.... They had never got quite so far as this before: some quarrel had congealed the surface again. But now, with a desperate disagreement just behind them, ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson

... slums, and instinctively thinks in terms of them. If he talks of segregating some incurably vicious type of the sexual sort, he is thinking of a ruffian who assaults girls in lanes. He is not thinking of a millionaire like White, the victim of Thaw. If he speaks of the hopelessness of feeble-mindedness, he is thinking of some stunted creature gaping at hopeless lessons in a poor school. He is not thinking of a millionaire like Thaw, the slayer of White. And this not because he is such a brute as to like people like White or Thaw any more ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton

... be serious. I'm not goin' for that, but I really am goin'. I had a letter from Dad this evenin'. Did you have a good time after I left this afternoon? Did Mrs. Keyton-Wells thaw out?" ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... muffler round his neck, and a peculiarly comfortable greatcoat,—best double Saxony, equally new,—dashed into the room, bringing with him a very considerable quantity of cold air, which he hastened to thaw, first in my father's arms, next in my mother's. He then made a rush at the Captain, who ensconced himself behind the dumb-waiter with a "Hem! Mr.—sir—Jack—sir—hem, hem!" Failing there, Mr. Tibbets rubbed off the remaining frost upon his double Saxony against your humble servant, patted Squills ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... seditious, as well as by fulminating against insurrections that only existed in their own guilty imaginations, filled the minds of the people with false alarms, and taught every man to distrust if not to hate his neighbour. There was no more chance of Reform under the existing regime than of 'a thaw in Zembla,' to borrow a famous simile. Cobbett was right in his assertion that the measures and manners of George IV.'s reign did more to shake the long-settled ideas of the people in favour of monarchical government than anything ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid

... with looking far, All at once appeared an island, A stretching-place for sea-legs, A quiet bed for backs grown stiff On rowing-bench on rolling sea. A place to build a red fire And thaw ...
— Viking Tales • Jennie Hall

... be a pity," answered Johnson, "for there will have to be a thaw before these masses separate, and float away into the Atlantic; besides, they are more numerous in Davis Strait, because the two stretches of land approach one another between Cape Walsingham and Holsteinborg; but above latitude ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne

... it to like; it touches, in a dry enough manner, upon most things under heaven, and if you like me, I think you ought to like this intellectual—no, I withdraw the word—this artistic dog of mine. Thaw—thaw—thaw, up here; and farewell skating, and farewell the clear dry air and the wide, bright, white snow-surface, and all that was so pleasant ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the whole audience lost self control. I had witnessed mistakes, blunders and accidents that would make even solemnity herself laugh, and remained serenely grave. But to see myself in the presence of that polite audience, standing at that stove, and turning from side to side, to thaw the icicles from the skirts of my coat, was too much for me. I confess it was utterly impossible to keep my face in harmony with the character of the ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller

... at lunch Sir Hugo said to her, "The thaw has gone on like magic, and it's so pleasant out of doors just now—shall we go and see the stables and the other ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... Devil you can sit opposite that stiff embodiment of all the Ten Commandments, day by day, damn it! that's wot GETS me! Why, the first day I came here on business, the old man froze me so that I couldn't thaw a deposit out of my pocket. It chills me to think ...
— Two Men of Sandy Bar - A Drama • Bret Harte

... in the past, had made as remarkable provision for this necessity. A fall of snow had covered the corn which had ripened in September, but was left standing in the fields by this circumstance. Thus hidden from the enemy, a sudden thaw revealed the treasure thus mercifully laid up for these patriot warriors. In addition to the corn, strong detachments made requisitions on the valleys of Pragela and Queyras, and so obtained supplies of butter, salt, wine, and other provisions. A sad incident of the winter ...
— The Vaudois of Piedmont - A Visit to their Valleys • John Napper Worsfold

... labour, from the cottage door— "I'm thinking that, to-night, if not before, There'll be wild work. Dost hear old Chewton[12] roar? It's brewing up down westward; and look there, One of those sea-gulls! ay, there goes a pair; And such a sudden thaw! If rain comes on, As threats, the waters will be out anon. That path by th' ford's a nasty bit of way— Best let the young ones bide from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various

... and angry crimson, where the sun and wind together set a brand upon the clouds, for being guilty of such weather; and the widest open country is a long, dull streak of black; and there's hoar-frost on the finger-post, and thaw upon the track; and the ice isn't water, and the water isn't free; and you couldn't say that anything is what it ought to be; but he's coming, ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson

... voyageurs began that hardest of all canoe trips in America, through the forest hinterland of Ontario. Here the rivers were a stagnant marsh, with outlet hidden by dankest forest growth where the light of the sun never penetrated. There the waters swollen by spring thaw and broken by the ice jam whirled the {113} boats into rapids before the paddlers realized. There was wading to mid-waist in ice water. There were nights when camp was made on water-soaked moss. There were days when the windfall compelled the ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut

... remained for hours without melting the ice. The paper was placed over the ice, so that the hot water could not be poured on it, which would have thawed it at once. Every man who has poured hot water into a frozen pump, hoping to thaw out the ice by this means, has arrived at the fact, if not at the theory, that ice will not melt by hot water on the top of it. If, however, a piece of lead pipe be placed in the pump, resting on ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French

... 1915 comparative calm reigned over the Austro-Russian theatre of war, so far as actual hostilities were concerned. But it was not altogether the variable climatic conditions of alternate frost and thaw—the latter converting road and valley into impassable quagmires—that caused the lull. It was a short winter pause during which the opposing forces—on one side at least—were preparing and gathering the requisite momentum ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various

... ten Wounds The River-Dragon tamed at length submits To let his Sojourners depart, and oft Humbles his stubborn Heart; but still as Ice More harden'd after Thaw, till in his Rage Pursuing whom he late dismissed, the Sea Swallows him with his Host, but them lets pass As on dry Land between two Chrystal Walls, Aw'd by the Rod of Moses so ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... country, far below. Gradually down, by zig-zag roads, lying between an upward and a downward precipice, into warmer weather, calmer air, and softer scenery, until there lay before us, glittering like gold or silver in the thaw and sunshine, the metal-covered, red, green, yellow, domes and church-spires ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens

... man all over ever after. We cannot neglect any conviction of what we ought to do, without lowering the whole tone of our characters and laying ourselves open to assaults of evil from which we would once have turned shuddering and disgusted. A partial thaw is generally followed by intenser frost. An abortive insurrection is sure to issue in a more grinding tyranny. A soul half melted and then cooled off is less easy to melt than it was before. And so, dear brethren, remember this, that if you do not swiftly and fully carry out in life and conduct ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... restoration of the foot coverings there came a thaw and then a sudden cold snap. Ice began to form on the river, and soon it was thick enough for skating, much to the joy of the students, for nearly all of them loved to skate. Some of the boys had ice-boats, and these were also brought ...
— Dave Porter and His Rivals - or, The Chums and Foes of Oak Hall • Edward Stratemeyer

... Dec. 28—A thaw, much needed to settle the snow, which was getting too deep. Youngsters shovelled a strip on the pond ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar

... first fine afternoon to walk over to Brail. It was more than three miles by the road, but she was a famous walker. The lanes were still impassable on account of the thaw; February had set in with unusual mildness: the snow had melted, the little lake at Woodcote was no longer a sheet of blue ice, and Eiderdown and Snowflake were dabbling joyously with their yellow bills in the water and their ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... I rode up with Simms' party, we met two old trappers who were coming down. They had passed Old Grizzly Slide yesterday, and they said there must have been an awful thaw going on under the surface-ice of the Slide, as the yawning chasm where you discovered the crevice the other day was frightful. It made even their courageous spirits tremble at sight of it. But they turned again and rode up with us, as ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... aspect more drear and desolate than that of a burnt prairie. The ocean when its waves are grey—a blighted heath—a flat fenny country under a rapid thaw—all these impress the beholder with a feeling of chill monotony; but the water has motion, the heath, colour, and the half-thawed flat exhibits variety in its mottling of white ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid

... train had reached the top of the altitude. Ralph had walked over the more rugged parts of the pass, and had satisfied himself that there was no danger to be apprehended on this score. The ghyll was swollen by the thaw. The waters fell heavily over the great stones, and sent up clouds of spray, which were quickly dissipated by the wind. Huge hillocks of yellow foam gathered in every sheltered covelet. The roar of the cataract in the ravine silenced the voice ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine

... sets people laughing, and makes them forget that they are waiting, may alter the whole complexion of the party, may make the silent and distant people feel themselves drawn into the sympathy of common merriment, and thaw the iciness which so often fetters Anglo-Saxon society. But as this faculty is not given to many, so the average man may content himself with having something ready to tell, and this, if possible, in answer ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin

... in an earthen-pot, and in frosty weather, shewing it a little to the fire, the intire clod will come out with them, which are to be reserved, and set in the naked earth, in convenient and fit holes prepar'd beforehand, or so soon as the thaw is universal: Some commend the strewing a few oats at the bottom of the fosses or pits in which you transplant the naked roots, for a great promotement of their taking, and that it will cause them to shoot more in one year than in three: But ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn

... suddenly broke down. His work had been almost incessant. The cold in the tent had, at night, been extreme; and, having been wetted to the skin one day, when a sudden thaw came on, his clothes had been frozen stiff when, at nightfall, the frost returned with even greater severity than before. In spite of the cloaks and blankets that Karl heaped upon his bed, he shivered all night, and in the morning hot fits came on. The king's surgeon, coming ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty

... Hazy returned. With her was a bright-faced little woman whose smile seemed to thaw out the frozen places in Lovey Mary's heart and make her burst into tears on the ...
— Lovey Mary • Alice Hegan Rice

... stick. The cattle are fed upon these fish during the winter months. But it has been proved, which is very strange, that if, after they have been frozen for twenty-four hours or more, you put these fish into water and gradually thaw them as you do the meat, they will recover and swim about again as well as ever. To ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat

... burying, for then she had to go with Abel to help in carrying the coffin to the house of mourning. They set out on the second day after her return. The steep road down to the plain—called the Monkey's Ladder—was a river, for a thaw had set in. But Hazel did not mind that, though her boots let in the water, as she minded the atmosphere of gloom at old Samson's blind house. She would never, as Abel always did, 'view the corpse,' and this was always taken ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb

... it that night until their eyes ached, it seemed that it was visibly approaching. And that night, too, the weather changed, and the frost that had gripped all Central Europe and France and England softened towards a thaw. ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells

... every morning, to my residence at Headingley, and the police suggested that I should be accompanied by an officer; but I did not believe in my danger, and desired no such protection. In the depths of one winter's night, when a thaw was dissolving a heavy fall of snow, I had a great fright. I had left my cab, which had driven away, and was mounting the steps leading to the porch of my house, when I suddenly saw, lying on the half-melted snow against the door itself, a large bundle wrapped in sacking. I drew near it ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.

... Amsterdam, and imagined they were on the eve of dictating to all Europe: the churches were ordered to toll their only bell, and the gasconades of the bulletin were uncommonly pompous—but the novelty of the event has now subsided, and the conquest of Holland excites less interest than the thaw. Public spirit is absorbed by private necessities or afflictions; people who cannot procure bread or firing, even though they have money to purchase it, are little gratified by reading that a pair of their Deputies lodged in the Stadtholder's palace; and the triumphs ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady

... by our forest-rangers who help the timber jacks build these roads. You see, while frost holds good the heaviest tree trunks can be readily moved over icy swamp bottoms, but in the spring, when thaw and freshets begin, the bottoms are more like a marsh, or shallow lake, than anything else I know of. Then these corduroy roads are a make-shift for hard ground," explained Polly, while Noddy started to clip-clop ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens

... of a man, they thought, as Dan led him to the fire to thaw himself out. He was scarcely more than five and a half feet in height, with tiny hands and feet almost out of proportion even to his diminutive size. He was an old man, they would have said, though his movements were quick and agile as if he were set up on springs. His face, small, sharp-featured ...
— The Inn at the Red Oak • Latta Griswold

... Tom Gerrard, whose equanimity was now quite restored, took his seat opposite his sister with a smiling face, and in a few minutes, under the sunshine of his genial manner, Mrs Westonley, much against her own inclination, began to thaw, and presently found herself ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke

... pull out an eye, and bid it go, And t'other should not weep. Oh, Dolabella, How many deaths are in this word, depart! I dare not trust my tongue to tell her so: One look of hers would thaw me into tears, And I should melt, till I ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden

... bring about some crisis," replied Van Swieten, thoughtfully. "We must awake both the empress and the mother. The one must have work—the other, tears. This frozen sea of grief must thaw, or her ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach

... proceeded to pour out his soul, stating the miners' grievances and their rights as men. How they were always put off with promises, and defeated in dialectics and the game of wits. As he spoke he felt the assembly gradually thaw, then become liquid, finally it seemed to join the torrent of his eloquence, and sweep ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh

... wide up-town street the human tide flowed fast and as if thaw had set in, releasing it from the bondage of winter. Girls in light wraps and without hats loitered in the white flare of drugstore lights. Here and there a brown stoop bloomed with a boarder or two. In front of Seligman's florist ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst

... the bone, and thought I never should thaw. But the huge fires and bright and cosy atmosphere of the rooms—for the interior of Glamis was modernised throughout—soon set me right, and by tea time I felt nicely ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell

... sincere Romantic; he had no petty jealousy in matters literary; and, above all, he had, as Scott recognised, but as has not been always recognised since, a really remarkable and then novel command of flowing but fairly strict lyrical measures, the very things needed to thaw the frost of the eighteenth-century couplet. Erskine offered, and Lewis gladly accepted, contributions from Scott, and though Tales of Wonder were much delayed, and did not appear till 1801, the project directly caused the production of Scott's first original work in ballad, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury

... more off from the sun, and so are more cold and senseless; but was a man in a mountain of ice, yet if the Sun of Righteousness will arise upon him, his frozen heart shall feel a thaw; and thus it hath been ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... evening in winter, when the weather seemed inclined to thaw, Charlotte and Albert were returning home together. The former looked from time to time about her, as if she missed Werther's company. Albert began to speak of him, and censured him for his prejudices. He alluded ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe

... briskly towards Hill's grocery store. A dozen or more young men and as many older ones were lounging about the platform that ran the whole length of the store, for it was a very mild day in January, and the snow was rapidly leaving under the influence of what might be called a January thaw. ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin

... and Wee Willie Winkie was a very particular child. Once he accepted an acquaintance, he was graciously pleased to thaw. He accepted Brandis, a subaltern of the 195th, on sight. Brandis was having tea at the Colonel's, and Wee Willie Winkie entered strong in the possession of a good-conduct badge won for not chasing the hens round the compound. He regarded Brandis ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson

... enough, for they saw he was in earnest. He could thaw out and be genial and pleasant when he chose, and this was an occasion when he had no difficulty in thawing. He called Joe and gave orders about supper, and soon the delightful odor of cooking fish ...
— Frank Merriwell's Pursuit - How to Win • Burt L. Standish

... misericordiam [Lat.], quarter, grace, locus paenitentiae [Lat.]. sympathizer; advocate, friend, partisan, patron, wellwisher. V. pity; have pity, show pity, take pity &c n.; commiserate, compassionate; condole &c 915; sympathize; feel for, be sorry for, yearn for; weep, melt, thaw, enter into the feelings of. forbear, relent, relax, give quarter, wipe the tears, parcere subjectis [Lat.], give a coup de grace, put out of one's misery. raise pity, excite pity &c n.; touch, soften; melt, melt the heart; propitiate, disarm. ask for ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... pound. The year befaw latht he horthed the wegiment at an immenthe expenthe, and we're called the Queen'th Own Pyebalds from that day. Ever theen uth on pawade? The Empewar Nicolath burtht into tearth of envy when he thaw uth at Windthor. And you see,' continued my young friend, 'I brought Gules down with me, as the Governor is very sulky about shelling out, just to talk my mother over, who can do anything with him. Gules told her that I ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray

... strong to the weak, saved him from the sin, and he schooled himself to the endurance of middle aged arrogance. For the learning of the lesson he had practice enough: they rode every day, and Griffith did not thaw; but the one thundering gallop he had every morning along the sands with Kelpie, whom * no ordinary day's work was enough to save from the heart burning ferment of repressed activity, was both preparation and amends ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald

... had been his comforting and cheering friend. Immediately the crock of gold had been taken from its ambush in the thatch, it seemed as if the chill which had frozen up her heart had been melted by a sudden thaw. Roger Acton was no longer the selfish prodigal, but the guiltless, persecuted penitent; her care was now to soothe his griefs, not to scold him for excesses; and indignation at the false and bloody charge made him appear a martyr in her eyes. As to his accuser, Jennings, Mary had ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... temperature, brought on by cold south-east winds; if these are accompanied with rain in winter, which, however, rarely happens, it would sometimes turn to sleet or even snow, or else to hard freezing at night. The snow would, however, thaw with the warmth of the sun, and so restore the temperature as before. The bracing quality of the climate mostly consists just in those variations of cool nights and warm days, and the occasional days of comparatively cold, boisterous weather. The latter must indeed ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas

... thaw, as you know, and there isn't enough ice in Lake Metoka on which to sail the Bird. I guess Tommy'll have to wait until you get back there, Bert. We'll ...
— The Bobbsey Twins in a Great City • Laura Lee Hope

... for his chemical powers: the moment he enters a room the very walls grow damp; as for me, I dissolve; I should flow into a fountain, like Arethusa, if happily his lordship did not freeze one again into substance as fast as he dampens one into thaw." ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... her ears as warm thaw-rain on frozen sward; and slowly into the pallor of her face, the whiteness of her closed eyelids, crept a tender blush. Strange that for a few brief moments they were happy; strange, proof marvellous of the dominance of the inner life over the ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman

... of the oldest person, or that they ever heard of. I understand the road is ten feet deep with snow from this to Hamilton. I have had it cut through once, but this third fall makes an attempt impossible. Heaven only knows when the road will be open, nothing but a thaw can do it—it is ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde

... is, I tell you: A bed on the floor, a bit of rosin, A fire to thaw our thumbs (poor fellow, The paw he holds up there has been frozen), Plenty of catgut for my fiddle, (This outdoor business is bad for strings), Then a few nice buckwheats hot from the griddle, And Roger and I set up ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various

... fierce resistance to it, one reads few things like this of Colberg. 'The snow lies ell-deep,' says Archenholtz; 'snow-tempests, sleet, frost: a country wasted and hungered out; wants fuel-wood; has not even salt. The soldier's bread is a block of ice; impracticable to human teeth till you thaw it,—which is only possible by night.' The Russian ships disappear (17th October); November 2d, Butturlin, leaving reinforcements without stint, vanishes towards Poland. The day before Butturlin went, there had been solemn summons upon Eugen, 'Surrender honorably, we once more bid ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... origin in the Southern States. "Doggone it," "that beats the Dutch," "you bet," "you bet your boots," sprang from New York. "Step down and out" originated in the Beecher trial, just as "brain-storm" originated in the Thaw trial. ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin

... particle, and who became hysterically jubilant when they saw it. Forty-eight hours! Deeper and deeper went the imprints of milder weather upon the high-piled serrations of white, at last to cease. The sun had faded on the afternoon of the second day. The thaw stopped. The snowshoes soon carried a new crunching sound that gradually became softer, more muffled. For the clouds had come again, the wind had risen with a fiercer bite than ever in it; again the snow was falling. But the grim little army of rescuers, plodding from one ranchhouse ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper

... across it. Then, suddenly, they felt its warm touch upon their backs, and there were hard black shadows upon the sand in front of them. The Dervishes loosened their cloaks and proceeded to talk cheerily among themselves. The prisoners also began to thaw, and eagerly ate the doora which was served out for their breakfasts. A short halt had been called, and a cup of water handed ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle

... Galatea! At that word, Which seemed to shake my marble to the core, That which was dim before, came evident. Sounds, that had hummed around me, indistinct, Vague, meaningless—seemed to resolve themselves Into a language I could understand; I felt my frame pervaded by a glow That seemed to thaw my marble into flesh; Its cold, hard substance throbbed with active life, My limbs grew supple, and I moved—I lived! Lived in the ecstasy of a new-born life! Lived in the love of him that fashioned me! Lived in a ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa

... cold—which I had only fully felt when I got off the car and found my legs cramped—to come to the rescue as interpreter. The Spanish Friar was accustomed to these little embarrassments, and he had a manner of meeting them with a smile. The misunderstanding and the embarrassment seemed to thaw the formality of the reception. The women looked relieved. They were obviously not expected to say anything, and they had no fear now that they would be put to the ordeal of meeting a possibly superior person, ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly

... themselves and separated. Harry and his lady strolled off to secluded byways in the forest, so that they might discourse of their loves and digest their dinner. Tom had all the morning been waiting for this happy moment; he had counted on the expansive effect of a full stomach to thaw his Liza's coldness, and he had pictured himself sitting on the grass with his back against the trunk of a spreading chestnut-tree, with his arm round his Liza's waist, and her head resting affectionately on his manly bosom. Liza, too, had ...
— Liza of Lambeth • W. Somerset Maugham

... being able to agree upon a verdict. Some, who were originally in favor of the defendant, became weary of their long confinement, and consented to go over to the slaveholder's side; but one of them, named Benjamin Thaw, declared that he would eat his Christmas dinner in the jury-room, before he would consent to such a flagrant ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child

... All this, for a while, however, produced no very visible effects on the general face of nature; for the melting snow was many hours in becoming saturated with its own and water from above. Nor had our travellers, for the greater part of the day, been much incommoded by the rain, or the thaw, that was in silent, but rapid progress around and beneath them; as their vehicle was a covered one, and as the hard-trodden paths of the road were the last to be affected. But, during the last hour, a great change in the face of the landscape had become ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson

... to the door again, her sister, a pretty, delicate child of fewer years, stood still, and adroitly slipped her feet out of the snowy shoes she had brought in, which she put in the corner of the fireplace to thaw and dry off; the little stocking feet standing comfortably on the rug before the blaze. It was so neatly done, the mother and elder sisters looked on and could not chide. Neatness suited the place. The room ...
— What She Could • Susan Warner

... was filled, appeared. The climate was such this year that it froze hard twelve or fourteen hours every day, while from eleven o'clock in 'the morning till nearly four, the sun shone as brightly as possible, and it was too hot about mid-day for walking! Yet in the shade it did not thaw for an instant. This cold weather was all the more sharp because the air was purer and clearer, and the sky continually ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... as was common in our latitude, though there had been more snow along the coast than was usual. Salt air and snow do not agree well together; but I had driven in a sleigh over the Neck, most of the month of February, though there were symptoms of a thaw, and of a southerly wind, the day we left home. My father observed this, and he advised me to take the road through the centre of the county, and get among the hills, as soon as possible. Not only was there always more snow in that part of the country, ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper

... of being ill at ease: He hated that He cannot change His cold, Nor cure its ache. 'Hath spied an icy fish That longed to 'scape the rock-stream where she lived, And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine O' the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid, A crystal spike 'twixt two warm walls of wave; Only, she ever sickened, found repulse At the other kind of water, not ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning

... and poor alike upon; Clogging up the bronchial tubes Of the Urbans and the Roobs; Opening for all your grip With its lavish stores of pip; Scattering along your route Little gifts of Epizoot; Time of slush and time of thaw, Time of hours mild and raw; Blowing cold and blowing hot; Stable as a Hottentot; Coaxing flowers from the close Just to nip them on the nose; Calling birdies from their nests For to freeze their little chests; Springtime in the morning bright, With a blizzard on at night; Chills ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs

... anxiety grew apace. He was little more talkative than the painted devil chaser on the blackened canvas of his tepee, but he gave David to understand that he would have a hard time getting back with his dogs and sledge from Fond du Lac if the thaw came earlier than he had anticipated. David marvelled at the old warrior's endurance, and especially when they crossed the forty miles of ice on Wollaston Lake between dawn and darkness. At high noon the snow was beginning to soften on the sunny slopes even then, and by the time ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood

... aid; took Miss Grey's limp form, laid it on a lounge, and some set to work to restore her, while others helped Harry to free himself from snow and thaw himself out. ...
— Kristy's Rainy Day Picnic • Olive Thorne Miller

... of dung.' Now, that was precisely the course of thought with this old censorious Cato: So long as Greek offered, or seemed to offer, nothing but philosophy or poetry, he was clamorous against Greek; but he began to thaw and melt a little upon the charms of Greek—he 'owned the soft impeachment,' when he heard of some Grecian treatises upon beans and turnips; and, finally, he sank under its voluptuous seductions, when he heard of others upon DUNG. There are, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... eighty were gathered at the ruined village. Couriers had been sent to rouse the country, and before evening of the next day (the first of March) the force at Deerfield was increased to two hundred and fifty; but a thaw and a warm rain had set in, and as few of the men had snow-shoes, pursuit was out of the question. Even could the agile savages and their allies have been overtaken, the probable consequence would have been the murdering of the captives to prevent ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman

... all winter long the citizens had been throwing garbage into their back yards, to be cleaned up in spring. The recent thaw had disclosed heaps of ashes, dog-bones, torn bedding, clotted paint-cans, all half covered by the icy pools which filled the hollows of the yards. The refuse had stained the water to vile colors of waste: thin red, sour yellow, ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis

... bare And black along the turbid brook; When catkined willows blurred and shook Great tawny tangles in the air; In bottomlands, the first thaw makes An oozy bog, beneath the trees, Prophetic of the spring that wakes, Sang the ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein

... talking as if Dal were just another classmate. Tiger's open friendliness had been like a spring breeze to Dal who was desperately lonely in this world of strangers; their friendship had grown rapidly, and gradually others in the class had begun to thaw enough at least to be civil when Dal was around. Dal had sensed that this change of heart was largely because of Tiger and not because of him, yet he had welcomed it as a change from the previous intolerable coldness even though it left him feeling vaguely uneasy. Tiger was well liked by ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse

... reached the Hudson, and found the place where two paths diverged, the one for Albany and the other for Schenectady, they all without farther words took the latter. Indeed, to attempt Albany would have been an act of desperation. The march was horrible. There was a partial thaw, and they waded knee-deep through the half melted snow, and the mingled ice, mud, and water of the gloomy swamps. So painful and so slow was their progress, that it was nine days more before they reached a point two leagues ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman

... bombarded the German fortifications on the Belgian coast, from Zeebrugge to Ostend, for two hours on November 30, 1915. The weather suddenly changed on the entire western front. Rain, mist, and thaw imposed a check on the operations, which simmered down to artillery bombardments at isolated points. For the next three months the combatants settled down to the exciting monotony of a winter campaign, making themselves as comfortable as possible, strengthening their positions, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)

... there looking out; and all round him was the eternal drip, drip of the thaw. The wind lulled, and again the minute-bell tolled out clear and inexorable, resolute to recall what was and what ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant

... frae the clud when it 's shaken, And melts into dew ere it fa's on the bracken, Oh sae pure is the heart I hae won to my keepin'! But warm as the sun-blink that thaw'd it to weepin'! ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... swollen by the spring thaw and rains, had overflowed its banks, and was swirling around willows and poplars. It was not deep, and the water flashed in the moonlight as it rippled over the stones. There was a smell of fresh-cut logs. We looked beyond a sawmill into a gorge of pines that ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons

... being clear, it was never quite dark. Our horses were kept, or rather starved, underground; and as for our servants, whom we hired here to look after ourselves and horses, we had, every now and then, their fingers and toes to thaw and take care of, lest they should mortify and ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe

... became more amiable, and the young wife, clinging to vain hopes, also became more cheerful. The thaw had not yet set in and a hard, smooth, glittering covering of snow extended over the landscape. Neither men nor animals were to be seen; only the chimneys of the cottages gave evidence of life in the smoke that ascended from ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... arrived in great abundance, and as much progress is made in getting them up as could be hoped for, considering that there has been a very heavy fall of snow, and that a thaw has followed it, and the extremely limited means of conveyance ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria

... better that he should find his house chopped a little when the thaw comes," said Elizabeth Eliza, "than that he should find us lying about the house, dead of hunger, upon ...
— The Peterkin Papers • Lucretia P Hale

... may have lain, or will lie here, is a point not easily determined. Such ice is found in the Greenland seas all the summer long; and I think it cannot be colder there in the summer, than it is here. Be this as it may, we certainly had no thaw; on the contrary, the mercury in Fahrenheit's thermometer kept generally below the freezing point, although it was the ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook

... subject (which should only be broached in the wilds of Cornwall, or other equally primitive spots), of course you can speak of a hard frost being "an ice day for a hunting-man, although he is sure to swear at it." If the weather breaks, you may observe, "You thaw so," but not when you have to shout the quibble through the ear-trumpet of a deaf old maid. And this, with the other witticisms recorded above, should carry you (by desire) into ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 17, 1891 • Various

... just finished lunch—I was sitting alone by the window thinking of my uncle's release—outside there was the steam and glitter of an April thaw—when all at once my aunt, Pelageya Petrovna, walked into the room. She was at all times restless and fidgetty, she spoke in a shrill voice and was always waving her arms about; on this occasion she simply pounced ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... A rapid thaw set in, and up through the vanishing whiteness dawned the dark colours of the wintry landscape. For a day or two the soft wet snow lay mixed with water over all the road. After that came mire and dirt. But it was still so far off spring, that nobody cared to be ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald

... from Amsterdam, and imagined they were on the eve of dictating to all Europe: the churches were ordered to toll their only bell, and the gasconades of the bulletin were uncommonly pompous—but the novelty of the event has now subsided, and the conquest of Holland excites less interest than the thaw. Public spirit is absorbed by private necessities or afflictions; people who cannot procure bread or firing, even though they have money to purchase it, are little gratified by reading that a pair of their Deputies ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady

... Tilghman, "lissen! You 'cept a word of frien'ship an' warnin' f'um somebody dat's been kicked by more mules 'en whut you ever seen in yore whole life, an' you let dat Frank mule stay right whar he is. You kin have yore choice of de Maud mule or de Maggie mule or Friday or January Thaw; but my edvice to you is, jes' leave dat Frank mule be an' ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb

... familiarity from strangers, and Wee Willie Winkie was a very particular child. Once he accepted an acquaintance, he was graciously pleased to thaw. He accepted Brandis, a subaltern of the 195th, on sight. Brandis was having tea at the Colonel's, and Wee Willie Winkie entered strong in the possession of a good-conduct badge won for not chasing the hens round the compound. He regarded Brandis with gravity for at least ten minutes, ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling

... jovial and chatty. Sour, starchy individuals, who all the rest of the day go about looking as if they lived on vinegar and Epsom salts, break out into wreathed smiles after dinner, and exhibit a tendency to pat small children on the head and to talk to them—vaguely—about sixpences. Serious men thaw and become mildly cheerful, and snobbish young men of the heavy-mustache type forget to make ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome

... I went to school in spite of my bare feet. Often the ground would be frozen, and often there would be snow. My feet would crack and bleed freely, but when I reached home Mother would have a tub full of hot water ready to plunge me into and thaw me out. Although this caused my feet and legs to swell, it usually got me into shape for school the ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various

... an imprisonment, and witnessing some of his party condemned, and some executed, after having long sustained the most elevated and rigid tone, suddenly let his alp of ice dissolve away in the gentlest thaw that ever occurred in political life. Ambitious he was, but not of martyrdom! His party appeared once formidable,[410] and his protection at Court sure. I have read several letters of the Earl of Leicester, in MS., that show he always shielded Cartwright, whenever in danger. Many of the ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... The River-Dragon tamed at length submits To let his Sojourners depart, and oft Humbles his stubborn Heart; but still as Ice More harden'd after Thaw, till in his Rage Pursuing whom he late dismissed, the Sea Swallows him with his Host, but them lets pass As on dry Land between two Chrystal Walls, Aw'd by the Rod of ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... however, was a task not to be attempted; and the Auld Lichts, at least, rested content when enough light got into their workshops to let them see where their looms stood. Wading through beds of snow they did not much mind; but they wondered what would happen to their houses when the thaw came. ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie

... they were such good friends, he and the boys, that he was down on all-fours playing horses with them, and did some quite new tricks which they thought extremely amusing; he then invited them to come for a drive the next day. After a thaw, there had been an unusually heavy fall of snow; the town was white and the state of the ...
— The Bridal March; One Day • Bjornstjerne Bjornson

... his body, a terrible relaxing, a thaw, a decay of strength. Without knowing, he had let go his grip, and Gudrun had fallen to her knees. Must he see, must ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... 12.—Away we set, and came safely to Abbotsford amid all the dulness of a great thaw, which has set the rivers a-streaming in full tide. The wind is wintry, ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... of the cold spells of last winter the gas-meter in my cellar was frozen. I attempted to thaw it out by pouring hot water over it, but after spending an hour upon the effort I emerged from the contest with the meter with my feet and trousers wet, my hair full of dust and cobwebs and my temper at fever heat. After studying how I should get rid of the ice in the meter, I concluded to ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)

... and beneficial in operation. No lakes are interposed between the mountain torrents of the upper basis of the Tigris and the Euphrates and their lower courses. Hence, heavy rain, or an unusually rapid thaw in the uplands, gives rise to the sudden irruption of a vast volume of water which not even the rapid Tigris, still less its more sluggish companion, can carry off in time to prevent violent and dangerous overflows. Without an elaborate ...
— Hasisadra's Adventure - Essay #7 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley

... in its hole, and because spring will find a way, even down in the bargain basement of the Titanic Store, which is far below the level of the mole, Sadie Barnet, who had never seen a wood anemone and never sniffed of thaw or the wet wild smell of violets, felt the blood rise in her veins like sap, and across the aisle behind the white-goods counter Max Meltzer writhed in his woolens, and Sadie Barnet, presiding over a bin of specially priced mill-ends out mid-aisle between the white goods and the muslin underwear, ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst

... which had long lain dormant rather than dead within me had almost overwhelmed me; and the hardness which had its origin in the bitterness of conscious dependence, and which had gained strength from the pride of self-acquired independence, began to thaw in my heart, and to give way to milder and ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat

... calf not more than five days old, and had driven it down into the marsh. There he had chased it back and forth over the knolls—not with the idea of capturing it, but merely for the sport of seeing how he could scare it. The elk cow knew that the marsh was bottomless so soon after the thaw, and that it could not as yet hold up so large an animal as herself, so she stood on the solid earth for the longest time, watching! But when Karr kept chasing the calf farther and farther away, she rushed out on the marsh, drove the dog off, took the calf with her, ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof

... has been occupied with exploring the house, sending for food and supplies, trying to thaw the rooms, moving furniture to make things homelike, and trying to arrive at ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various

... at night, and the meadow grass turns dry and wan. The last lilac crocuses die upon the fields. Icicles, hanging from watercourse or mill-wheel, glitter in the noonday sunlight. The wind blows keenly from the north, and now the snow begins to fall and thaw and freeze, and fall and thaw again. The seasons are confused; wonderful days of flawless purity are intermingled with storm and gloom. At last the time comes when a great snowfall has to be expected. There is hard frost in the early morning, and at nine o'clock the thermometer stands at 2 deg.. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... and leave. Others are sitting in the school-room looking at pictures and talking a very little, but it is rather stiff. The door opens and in walk the Doctor and Agency Clerk. No more stiffness after this. Those would be hard hearts indeed that would not thaw in the presence of these genial countenances. Other white people come. The Captain with his family take supper. He also brings in some of the outsiders who are looking in at the windows, and pays for their suppers. The Issue Clerk is quick to see ...
— American Missionary, August, 1888, (Vol. XLII, No. 8) • Various

... surface. Of course it is too late now to talk about fall preparation. If we want a crop of onions from seed this spring, whatever preparation there is must be done between now and seeding. I should plow or spade up the soil as soon as possible, if there is a thaw out either the last of this or any part ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various

... I won't; that's as saucy little Presto takes the humour.—At night. I walked in the Park to-day in spite of the weather, as I do always when it does not actually rain. Do you know what it has gone and done? We had a thaw for three days, then a monstrous dirt and snow, and now it freezes, like a pot-lid, upon our snow. I dined with Lady Betty Germaine, the first time since I came for England; and there did I sit, like a booby, ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift

... in this; and flattery (we are told) will warm the most austere of authors—which Staff was not. He said "Oh!" and smiled his slow, wry smile; and Mr. Iff, remarking these symptoms of a thaw with interest and encouragement, ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance

... Indian. "It looks like thaw, but the Great Spirit sometimes changes his mind, and sends what we ...
— The Crew of the Water Wagtail • R.M. Ballantyne

... whispered the voice, and he began crawling along the gutter through the trickling thaw, pressing himself against the wall. They continued along it for some minutes. He seemed to pass through a hundred stages of misery, to pass minute after minute through a hundred degrees of cold, damp, and ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells

... Northern, North Eastern, and North Western parts of Asia and Europe. It is therefore possible that the Tartars, at different Periods, might have been driven on that Coast, and people the Country. Some Tartars hunting upon the Ice, on a sudden Thaw, might be carried on the Ice to America, from whence they could ...
— An Enquiry into the Truth of the Tradition, Concerning the - Discovery of America, by Prince Madog ab Owen Gwynedd, about the Year, 1170 • John Williams

... this care it seemed strange the sick girl did not get well; yet such was the case. She wasted like any snow-wreath in thaw; she faded like any flower in drought. Miss Keeldar, on whose thoughts danger or death seldom intruded, had at first entertained no fears at all for her friend; but seeing her change and sink from time to time when she paid her visits, alarm clutched her heart. She went to Mr. Helstone and expressed ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte

... follow with my eye the effects of the vacuum on the Colonel. I was entirely prevented from shutting the windows of my laboratory, from fear that a too elevated temperature might put an end to the lethargy of the subject, or induce some change in the fluids. If a thaw had come on, all would have been over with my experiment. But the thermometer kept for several days between six and eight degrees below zero, and I was very happy in seeing the lethargic sleep continue, without having to fear ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About

... mist of dull gray clouds that clung in rings about the street lamps like the damp fog of a typical February thaw, yet it was the last day of October. Such weather was uncanny. It added to the strange feeling of impending calamity which had been hanging over the business world during the summer and had broken at last into the fierce storms ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon

... during the night. Flocks of snow-birds (the harbingers of cold in autumn, and heat in spring) begin to appear, and soon the whirring wings of the white partridge may be heard among the snow-encompassed willows. The first thaw generally takes place in April; and May is characterised by melting snow, disruption of ice, and the arrival of the ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne

... welcomed us as Eskimos always do, most cordially. Our two drivers, who followed me with the wood we had brought, made a fire in a small sheet-iron tent stove kept in the shack by the missionaries for their use when traveling, and on it we placed our kettle full of ice for tea, and our sandwiches to thaw, for they were frozen as hard as bullets. One of the old women was half dead with consumption, and constantly spitting, and when we saw her turning our sandwiches on the stove ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace

... strange figure of a man, they thought, as Dan led him to the fire to thaw himself out. He was scarcely more than five and a half feet in height, with tiny hands and feet almost out of proportion even to his diminutive size. He was an old man, they would have said, though his movements were quick and agile as if he were set up on springs. ...
— The Inn at the Red Oak • Latta Griswold

... frost. Sudden changes in the barometer are followed by like changes in weather. The slow rise of the mercury predicts fair weather, and a slow fall, the contrary. During the frosty days the drop of the mercury is followed by a thaw ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics

... what time of day it wuz, pretendin' his watch had stopped, I looked full and cold in his face for several minutes before I sez in icy axents, "I don't know!" Every word fallin' from my lips like ice-suckles from a ruff in a January thaw, and then I turned my back and ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley

... Rinda reminds us of Jupiter's wooing of Danae, who is also a symbol of the earth; and while the shower of gold in the Greek tale is intended to represent the fertilising sunbeams, the footbath in the Northern story typifies the spring thaw which sets in when the sun has overcome the resistance of the frozen earth. Perseus, the child of this union, has many points of resemblance with Vali, for he, too, is an avenger, and slays his mother's enemies just as surely ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber

... reconcile their convictions with their actions—a conflict which becomes a source of torture to themselves and those about them. The Ice-Floe (1892) was a powerful drama, in which the sudden thaw, destroying what has been, but bringing with it a breath of the spring and the new life to come, admirably symbolized the passing of the old order. But it was not until the following year, which saw the publication of his Youth, that Halbe attracted serious attention outside ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various

... spiders are seen running about much, fighting with one another and preparing new webs, there will be cold weather within the next nine days, or from that to twelve: when they again hide themselves there will be a thaw. I have no doubt that much of this power of prophesying the weather is due to a perception of certain atmospheric conditions which escape ourselves, but this perception can only have relation to a certain actual and now present condition of the ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler

... day or two to thaw out and mend bruises, and then ran over to Martigny, crossed the Grand St. Bernard, the St. Gotthard, and the Grimsel passes, spent a week in William Tell's country, prowling about the ruins of old castles and the sites ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various

... officer's face was sufficient; he pressed his hand in silence, and led him to a place by the side of the baroness. An animated discussion now began concerning the weather, which was completely changed; a strong south wind had risen in the night, so there was now a thaw. The snow was all melted—the torrents were flowing once more, and the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... lofty wilderness the snow lies deep for several months of the year, but as soon as it begins to thaw it disappears rapidly, when, as in Switzerland, Nature's garden immediately blossoms forth in all its glory. It must be confessed, however, that the carpet of Alpine flowers on the Norwegian high-fjelds ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Norway • A.F. Mockler-Ferryman

... Blows the thaw-wind pleasantly, 10 Drips the soaking rain, By fits looks down the waking sun: Young grass springs on the plain; Young leaves clothe early hedgerow trees; Seeds, and roots, and stones of fruits, Swollen with sap put forth their shoots; Curled-headed ferns sprout ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti

... 42 numbers, and take therefore 8 drawn ballots, being equal to 15 in 75. He then placed in R.H. Gillet's hand 42 tickets, which he declared contained the drawn numbers, where any 3 numbers should be upon a ticket. Having explained satisfactorily his intentions, he requested Mr. J. Thaw to act as his commissioner, Mr. Thaw being well known as a gentleman ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green

... more widely known from the number of persons who were astonished at beholding it. In a certain year, it happened that such a quantity of snow had fallen from heaven, so great was the extent of the thaw when the sun melted it, that the water covered all the ground, and grew to the dimensions of a lake, which, spreading into the village, inundated all the houses, putting even that of Patrick in the greatest danger. But he, being then only ten ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca

... "To thaw them out," replied Dame Louisa; "they will very likely be wholly or partly frozen, and I have always heard that cold water was the only remedy ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins

... fifty feet long, to interrogate it, and see what I could make of it, by a cool, confidential proximity and examination. The ice was porous and spongy, as I have seen it on the shores of the Connecticut, when beginning to thaw out under the influence of a spring sun. I could see the little drops of water percolating in a thousand tiny streams through it, and dropping down on every side. Putting my ear to it, I could hear a fine musical trill and ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... annual round, Bids Zephyr breathe the Spring, and thaw the ground; Bleak Winter flies, new verdure clothes the plain, And earth assumes her transient youth again. Dream I, or also to the Spring belong Increase of Genius, and new pow'rs of song? Spring gives them, and, how strange soere it seem, ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton

... charity! She did not take the first announcement of his coming very amiably; but when I told her she was to reign in the nursery, and take care the poor little chief know the sound of a Scots' tongue, she began to thaw; and when he came into the house, pity or loyalty, or both, flamed up hotly, and have quite relieved me; for at first she made a baby of me, and was a perfect dragon of jealousy at poor Ailie's doing anything for me. It was a rich scene when Rachel began ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge

... least sympathy in my companions; but just as it would begin to feel comfortable once more, some one would run up and tell me, "Tling-yack quark" (Nose frozen), at the same time pressing a warm hand against it to thaw it out. The person who has the frozen nose is almost invariably surprised when informed of the fact. During winter travel people always have each other's noses and cheeks in charge, and one readily acquires the habit of occasionally taking hold of his nose, ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder

... like. One by one, at first shyly, and then with growing confidence as deserters from the opposition grew more numerous, the old friends returned, to be followed by many new ones. The younger generation being won over, their elders began to thaw and to exchange kindly greetings, and now and then we were invited to see their hut or tent, or to sit down outside for ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin

... ears at this, soon she and the newcomer had their heads together, and within a few minutes Gray realized that his experiment was a success. The stranger possessed enthusiasm, but it was coupled with common sense, and before her sunshiny smile even Allegheny's sullen distrust slowly began to thaw. She drew Gray aside finally, and said: "It's all right. They're perfect dears, and, now, the best thing you can do ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach

... March 15. I was conscious of my existence again on Sunday, April 1st. I opened my eyes and saw that there was a thaw. That was the first thing of which I was aware—that water was apparently dripping on every side of me. It is a strange sensation to lie on your bed very weak, and very indifferent, and to feel the world turning to moisture all about you.... My ramshackle habitation ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole

... the standard Of my prerogative in being a creature, A mist hangs o'er mine eyes, the sun's bright splendour Is clouded in an everlasting shadow. Welcome, thou ice that sit'st about my heart, No heat can ever thaw thee. ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... of the old man shrank sensitively within him for a moment. Then he said to himself, "He will know of it some day, and I may as well tell him." For the heart that had been frozen for years this youth had had power to thaw. ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge

... get your long chatty letter, and to hear that you are thawing towards science. I almost wish you had remained frozen rather longer; but do not thaw too quickly and strongly. No one can work long as you used to do. Be idle; but I am a pretty man to preach, for I cannot be idle, much as I wish it, and am never comfortable except when at work. The ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin

... death. A great many contracted asthmas and other diseases of the lungs, by inhaling steam. Most of the bridges were swept away by the sudden melting of the snows, and large stores of provisions were spoiled by the unexpected appearance and violent character of the thaw. These may be enumerated among the unpleasant consequences. Among the pleasant, we esteem a final and agreeable melioration of the climate, which regained most of its ancient character, and a rapid and distinct elongation of our caudtz, by a sudden ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper

... brought on by cold south-east winds; if these are accompanied with rain in winter, which, however, rarely happens, it would sometimes turn to sleet or even snow, or else to hard freezing at night. The snow would, however, thaw with the warmth of the sun, and so restore the temperature as before. The bracing quality of the climate mostly consists just in those variations of cool nights and warm days, and the occasional days of comparatively cold, boisterous weather. The latter ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas

... beauty, he had a passionate craze for music, and played upon the violin and flute with considerable taste and execution. The sound of a favourite melody operated upon the breathing automaton like magic, his frozen faculties experienced a sudden thaw, and the stream of life leaped and gambolled for a while with uncontrollable vivacity. He laughed, danced, sang, and made love in a breath, committing a thousand mad vagaries to make you acquainted with ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... been able to keep so large a fire as usual, on account of the smoke being driven back again by the wind, it froze so hard in the house, that the walls and the floor were covered with ice to the depth of two fingers, even in the cots where these poor people were sleeping. It was necessary to thaw the sherry, when it was served out, as was done every two days, at the ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne

... of the most charming appearance. They overtook us on a stretch of heath, reined up as they came alongside, and accompanied us for perhaps a quarter of an hour before they galloped off again across the hillsides to our left. Great was my amazement to find the unconquerable Mr. Sim thaw immediately on the accost of this strange gentleman, who hailed him with a ready familiarity, proceeded at once to discuss with him the trade of droving and the prices of cattle, and did not disdain to take a pinch from the inevitable ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... caught his eager, questioning, and almost appealing glance, but he made no advances. "He thinks I am angry because of his keen criticism of my picture. For the sake of my own pride, I must not let him think that I care so much about his opinion;" and Christine resolved to let some of the ice thaw that had formed between them. Moreover, in spite of herself, when she was thrown into his society, he greatly interested her. He seemed to have just what she had not. He could meet her on her own ground in matters of taste, and ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe

... by the enchaining frost; and icicles, or, as old-fashioned people call them, aglets, of three or four feet long, ornament the overhanging ledges, prone to fall to the beach—far, far below—when a thaw releases them from their present stations. But the air is so very keen that nothing but the briskness of our walk, and the enlivenment of an occasional spell of snow-balling, in which the seniors are tempted to join the juniors, prevent ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various

... above the microscopic vision and punctiform sensibility of those who think themselves practical, that speculative natures seem to be proclaiming another set of interests, another and quite miraculous life, when they attempt to thaw out and vivify the vulgar mechanism; and the sense of estrangement and contradiction often comes over the spiritually minded themselves, making them confess sadly that the kingdom of heaven is not of this world. As common morality itself falls easily into mythical expressions and speaks of a fight ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... saw a crag, a lofty stone As ever tempest beat! Out of its head an Oak had grown, A Broom out of its feet. The time was March, a cheerful noon—15 The thaw wind, with the breath of June, Breathed gently from the warm south-west: When, in a voice sedate with age, This Oak, a giant and a sage, [2] His neighbour ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth

... as it greased; the girls mostly stayed away—the Babbletown girls, for they had guilty consciences, I suspect; and in February there came a thaw. I stood looking out of the store window one day; the snow had melted in the street, and right over the stones that had been laid across the road for a walk, there was a great puddle of muddy water about two yards wide and ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor

... of thaw before morning, Jem?"—looking anxiously up into the night, as they rested the bucket on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various

... all they had experienced but little decent weather thus far; that would come, they hoped, when they managed to get further along in the direction of Dixie, where the warm breezes would thaw them out, and allow of lying on the deck taking ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne

... tea,' said Alma, 'and warm yourself at the fire. You will thaw presently, Mr. Thistlewood. I suppose, like other unregenerate men, you live in rooms? Has that kind of life an ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing

... its warm touch upon their backs, and there were hard black shadows upon the sand in front of them. The Dervishes loosened their cloaks and proceeded to talk cheerily among themselves. The prisoners also began to thaw, and eagerly ate the doora which was served out for their breakfasts. A short halt had been called, and a cup ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle

... with the sweat of the thaw; they gave out a sour, sickly smell. Grey smears of damp dulled the polished lid of ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair

... ecliptic of thy life; Revolve upon another axis, man; Let love, the sun of life, beam meltingly Upon thy heart and thaw it into happiness. ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith

... palaeontologists produce fossil remains of marsupials or kangaroos. As for the polar conditions, when going round for snipes I constantly saw these in miniature. The planing action of ice was shown in the ditches, where bridges of ice had been formed; these slipping, with a partial thaw, smoothed the grasses and mars of teazles in the higher part of the slope, and then lower down, as the pressure increased, cut away the earth, exposing the roots of grasses, and sometimes the stores of acorns laid up by mice. Frozen ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies

... With the spring thaw came a freshet. It came suddenly, at the end of the week; every river and stream rising into a full tide of insurrection with the melting snows of Saturday, and Saturday night bridges and mill dams went by the board. Among the rest, one of the railway ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner

... dory turning over, or a gunboat dropping on to you. Then there was a good deal of very genuine excitement to be got out of placer-mining in British Columbia, especially when there was frost in the ranges, and you had to thaw out your giant-powder. Shallow alluvial workings have a way of caving in when you least expect it of them. After all, however, I think I like the ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss

... languishing behaviour, and the easily deciphered character of a sorrowfull face, that despaire began now to threaten him destruction, she grew content both to pitie him, and let him see shee pitied him. * * * by making her owne beautifull beames to thaw away the ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman

... the Bactrian camel is the beginning and end of winter, when frost and thaw occur alternately. At such times of the year the snow falls thickly, is partially melted in the daytime, and at night freezes on the surface into a thin cake of ice. Through this crust the feet of the camel break, and the animal cuts ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various

... on it, would have answered her; my very visor began to assume life and scold with her: She told me, not thinking I had been myself, that I was the prince's jester, and that I was duller than a great thaw; huddling jest upon jest, with such impossible conveyance upon me, that I stood like a man at a mark, with a whole army shooting at me: She speaks poniards, and every word stabs: if her breath were as terrible as her terminations, there were ...
— Much Ado About Nothing • William Shakespeare [Knight edition]

... Tweedledee doesn't come and relieve me soon I shall die of frostbite and boredom." The India-rubber Man was moving towards the hatchway. "And if you're going along to the bathroom, for pity's sake see there's some hot water left that I can sit and thaw in." ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie

... denizen of the north, his accent harsh, skin white, of an angular and bony build, and self-confident and dogmatic in his opinions. The precision and quaintness of his language, as well as his eccentric remarks on common things, stimulated my mind. Our icy islanders thaw rapidly when they have drifted into warmer latitudes: broken loose from its anti-social system, mystic castes, coteries, sets, and sects, they lay aside their purse-proud, tuft-hunting, and toadying ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... into craters? Atmosphere is gas, great in volume, small in matter; where would there be room for it? Solidified by the intense cold? Possibly in the night time. But would not the heat of the long day be great enough to thaw it back again? The same trouble attends the alleged disappearance of the water. Swallowed up in the cavernous cracks, it is said. But why are there cracks? Cooling is not always attended by cracking. Water cools without cracking; cannon balls cool without cracking. Too much stress ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne

... fashionable intelligence of the popular New York Sunday editions, and one finds a good deal of confirmatory evidence in many incidental aspects of the smart American life of Paris and the Riviera. The evidence in the notorious Thaw trial, after one has discounted its theatrical elements, was still a very convincing demonstration of a rotten and extravagant, because aimless and functionless, class of rich people. But one has to be careful in this matter if one is to do justice to the facts. If a thing is made up ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... crismatory, hally bread, the rest omit ay will, Whilt hally fathers did invent fre awd antiquity, Be new received inte awr kirks with great solemnity. Bay these thaugh lemen been apprest, the clargy all het gean, Far te awr sents theis affer yifts all whilk we sall receive: Awr hally mass, thaw thea bay dere, thea de it but in vain, Far thaw ther frends frea Purgatory te help thea dea believe, Yet af ther hope, gif need rewhayre,[41] it wawd theam all deceive. Sea wawd awr pilgrimage, reliques, trentals, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley

... set in and it was remembered by New Yorkers as the hardest in many years. Miss Husted declared it was the coldest in her experience, for the plumber's presence was constantly required to thaw out the frozen pipes. Certainly Von Barwig remembered it because he had to wrap blankets around him to keep warm while he was copying music at a few cents a page. He had other uses for the money that coal would cost; besides it was very expensive. So he preferred to write in bed ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein

... available; we have blood and a beat at the heart, yet it does not circulate freely, and Nature to every man is a double of himself, so that the universe seems also cold in extremities, as though there were too little original life to fill her veins. The poet is not fire on the hearth to thaw this numbness by foreign heat. He rubs and rouses us to activity, drags us to the open air, puts us on a glowing chase, provokes us to race and climb with him till we also are thoroughly alive. No other gift of his is worth much beside this hope of reaching his side. The ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various

... SILVER-THAW. The term for ice falling in large flakes from the sails and rigging, consequent on a frost followed ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... "Thunderer" in open opposition affrights a true Titan less than a treacherous Thersites in one's own camp. But, JOHNNIE, we've got to build up this Snow Man somehow, and on some plan! I only hope (entre nous, JOHNNIE) that a thaw won't set in, and melt it out of form and feature ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 14, 1893 • Various

... broke down. His work had been almost incessant. The cold in the tent had, at night, been extreme; and, having been wetted to the skin one day, when a sudden thaw came on, his clothes had been frozen stiff when, at nightfall, the frost returned with even greater severity than before. In spite of the cloaks and blankets that Karl heaped upon his bed, he shivered all night, and in the ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty

... it is gone, the snow melts and dissolves into water, and instantly loses its whiteness, occasioned by a mixture of this spirit with a frothy moisture. Therefore at the same time, by the help of these clothes, the cold is kept in, and the external air is shut out, lest it should thaw the concrete body of the snow. The reason why they make use of cloth that has not yet been at the fuller's is this, because that in such cloth the hair and coarse flocks keep it off from pressing too hard upon the snow, and bruising it. So chaff lying lightly upon it does not dissolve ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... in the morning, the weather at last cleared, and the wind fell to a light breeze from the same quarter as before. We had a fine warm day; and, as we now began to expect a thaw, the men were employed in breaking the ice from off the rigging, masts, and sails, in order to prevent its falling on our heads. At noon, being in the latitude of 52 deg. 44', and the longitude of 159 deg., the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr

... them with verses and commendatory songs, as we do statues with gold, that they may be remembered and admired of all." Ancient men will dote in this kind sometimes as well as the rest; the heat of love will thaw their frozen affections, dissolve the ice of age, and so far enable them, though they be sixty years of age above the girdle, to be scarce thirty beneath. Jovianus Pontanus makes an old fool rhyme, and turn poetaster to please ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... for the morrow and more and more poisoned by hard and bitter thoughts. The days and weeks passed and soon I felt the breath of warmer winds. On the open places the snow began to thaw. In spots the little rivulets of water appeared. Another day I saw a fly or a spider awakened after the hard winter. The spring was coming. I realized that in spring it was impossible to go out from the forest. Every river overflowed its banks; the ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski

... this year that it froze hard twelve or fourteen hours every day, while from eleven o'clock in 'the morning till nearly four, the sun shone as brightly as possible, and it was too hot about mid-day for walking! Yet in the shade it did not thaw for an instant. This cold weather was all the more sharp because the air was purer and clearer, and the sky continually of ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... and at last a thaw set in. The ice and snow began to melt. The brooks and rivulets swiftly carried the ...
— After Long Years and Other Stories • Translated from the German by Sophie A. Miller and Agnes M. Dunne

... now came from what, in our northern latitudes, we esteem a colder quarter, it was ever so much warmer here, on account of its passing over the warm pampas of the Plate before reaching us, the effect of which soon became apparent in the melting of the snow on the ground as rapidly as when a thaw takes place at home. Properly speaking, however, the snow rather may be said to have dried up than melted, for it was absorbed by the air, which was dry ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson

... deprived of a publisher for his "Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confession" by threats of immediate prosecution; the newspapers meanwhile dedicate thousands of columns to the filthy amusements of Harry Thaw. George Moore's "Memoirs of My Dead Life" are bowdlerized, James Lane Allen's "A Summer in Arcady" is barred from libraries, and a book by D. H. Lawrence is forbidden publication altogether; at ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken

... is outwardly hard, and a trifle bitter, but I fancy sunshine would thaw her. There has not been much happiness in ...
— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro

... which had frozen his features when she seized the revolver in his hand; would it still sit there, too distant and detached to be even scornful? Would she have it to break down; must she, with the fire of her own affection, thaw out an entrance through his icy aloofness? What cost of humiliation would be the price, and would even any price be accepted? She could not know; she could only hope and pray ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead

... dinner ... that Tennyson began to thaw, and to take a more active part in conversation. People who have not known him then, have hardly known him at all. During the day he was often very silent and absorbed in his own thoughts, but in the evening he took an active part in the conversation of ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb

... matter see? I'll thaw you soon—begone to Battersea, There let thy icebergs float in ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker

... larger than those of France, bustards, turkeys, cranes, etc., as abundant, and remaining in the country through the winter. The winter was shorter and milder than "in Canada." No snow had fallen by the 22nd November. The deepest was not more than two and a half feet. Thaw set in on the 26th of January. On the 8th March the snow was gone from the open places, but a little still lingered in the woods. The streams abounded in very good fish. The ground produced more corn than was needed, besides pumpkins, beans and other vegetables in abundance, and excellent oil. ...
— The Country of the Neutrals - (As Far As Comprised in the County of Elgin), From Champlain to Talbot • James H. Coyne

... a crag, a lofty stone As ever tempest beat! Out of its head an Oak had grown, A Broom out of its feet. The time was March, a cheerful noon—15 The thaw wind, with the breath of June, Breathed gently from the warm south-west: When, in a voice sedate with age, This Oak, a giant and a sage, [2] His neighbour ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth

... whole day has been occupied with exploring the house, sending for food and supplies, trying to thaw the rooms, moving furniture to make things homelike, and trying to ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various

... hour Pierre and the girl were on their way, leaving Borotte quarrelling with the brothers, and all drinking heavily. The two arrived at Throng's late the next afternoon. There had been a slight thaw during the day, and the air was almost soft, water dripping from the eaves down the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... control. I had witnessed mistakes, blunders and accidents that would make even solemnity herself laugh, and remained serenely grave. But to see myself in the presence of that polite audience, standing at that stove, and turning from side to side, to thaw the icicles from the skirts of my coat, was too much for me. I confess it was utterly impossible to keep my face in harmony with the ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller

... a woful mien, Will be all mirth and cheerfulness within: As, in despight of a censorious race, I most incontinently suck my face. What mighty projects does not he design, Whose stomach flows, and brain turns round with wine? Wine, powerful wine, can thaw the frozen cit, And fashion him to humour and to wit; Makes even Somers to disclose his art By racking every secret from his heart, As he flings off the statesman's sly disguise, To name the cuckold's ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift

... remained unwritten, for him to consume his scanty stock of vigor in the tedious and exhaustive routine of political existence; waiting whole evenings for the vote, and then ... trudging home at three in the morning through the slush of a February thaw." He therefore spared himself as a member of Parliament, and carefully husbanded his powers in order to work upon his book. He gave himself more time for his annual vacation, yet would write when he could on the subjects which engrossed his life. His labors were too severe ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord

... went to the door again, her sister, a pretty, delicate child of fewer years, stood still, and adroitly slipped her feet out of the snowy shoes she had brought in, which she put in the corner of the fireplace to thaw and dry off; the little stocking feet standing comfortably on the rug before the blaze. It was so neatly done, the mother and elder sisters looked on and could not chide. Neatness suited the place. The room was full of warm comfort; the furniture in nice order; the work, several kinds ...
— What She Could • Susan Warner

... A wet, sloppy, snowy day, our "January thaw," Mr. H. says. I took the two children out on the sled upon the ice and pushed at the handle-bars until I was reeking with perspiration, afterwards giving Jennie her lesson at ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan

... the sun-beams shone through the tiny window in the grandfather's house, on the quiet child. The daughters of the sun-beams kissed him, they wished to thaw him, to warm him and to carry away with them the icy kiss, which the queenly maiden of the glaciers had given him, as he lay on his dead mother's lap, in the deep icy gap, whence he was ...
— The Ice-Maiden: and Other Tales. • Hans Christian Andersen

... same—bitter cold dense fog and ever silently increasing hoar- frost: but on emerging from it, the whole scene was completely changed; the air was clear, the sun shining brightly, no hoar-frost and only a few patches of fast melting snow, everything in fact betokening a thaw of some days' duration. Another thing I know about this tunnel which makes me regard it with veneration as a boundary line in countries, namely, that on every high ground after this tunnel on clear days ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler

... this while had watched like one frozen into stone, seemed to thaw to life again. Her danger was past. She could never be forced to wed that coarse, black-souled Nubian, for Rames had killed him. Yonder he lay dead in all his finery with his hideous giants about him like fallen trees, and oh! in her rebellious human ...
— Morning Star • H. Rider Haggard

... was demonstrably false. Nothing was therefore left to the conspirators but to rely entirely on the skill of Mountain. The night had been frosty, the ground quite hard; and the sun was no sooner up than a strong thaw set in. It was Mountain's boast that few men could have followed that trail, and still fewer (even of the native Indians) found it. The Master had thus a long start before his pursuers had the scent, and he must have travelled with surprising energy for a pedestrian so unused, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson

... no aspect more drear and desolate than that of a burnt prairie. The ocean when its waves are grey—a blighted heath—a flat fenny country under a rapid thaw—all these impress the beholder with a feeling of chill monotony; but the water has motion, the heath, colour, and the half-thawed flat exhibits variety in its mottling ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid

... never lucky when Christmas came without a wolf-hunt: but that year it was like to be so; for, as I have said, the snow kept falling at intervals, with days of fog and thaw between, till the night before the vigil. In my youth, the Lithuanians kept Christmas after the fashion of old northern times. It began with great devotion, and ended in greater feasting. The eve was considered particularly ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various

... of the basement lodging were covered with ice. They bore the most beautiful ice-flowers that any snow man could desire; but they concealed the stove. The window-panes would not thaw; he could not see the stove, which he pictured to himself as a lovely female being. It crackled and whistled in him and around him; it was just the kind of frosty weather a snow man must thoroughly enjoy. But he did not enjoy it; and, indeed, how could he enjoy himself ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen

... was of the stolid, heavy disposition that seems armed by outward indifference, or mayhap pride. He knew that his case was hopeless, and he would not thaw even to the priest. But Giles had been quite unmanned, and when he found that for the doleful procession to the Guildhall he was to be coupled with George Bates, instead of either of his room-fellows, ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... heroine or a culprit as she walked into Mrs. Rawlins' kitchen, but decided to give as guarded an account of the matter as she could. There would be explanations in plenty when she returned to the Parsonage. She was very glad to sit and thaw by the fire and drink hot tea, despite the difficulty of fencing with Mrs. Rawlins' questions, that good dame being consumed with curiosity, and not restrained by any feelings of delicacy from catechizing ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil

... will still call her, for simplicity, in spite of her promotion,—had become somewhat afraid of Mrs. Houghton; but now, seeing her husband's courtesy to her guest, understanding from his manner that he liked her society, began to thaw, and to think that she might allow herself to be intimate with the woman. It did not occur to her to be in any degree jealous,—not, at least, as yet. In her innocence she did not think it possible that her husband's heart should be untrue to her, nor ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope

... "There had been a three-day downpour, up to the evening of Bailey's disappearance. About nine o'clock the wind shift to the northeast, and everything froze hard. There has been no thaw since." ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... or four apples apiece, and Mr. Boyd put all his in his pockets, with a slight feeling of Christmas warmth beginning to thaw his heart. ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various

... Holy Ghost came to thaw their memories, that the words of Christ, like the voice in Plutarch that had become frozen, might at ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 71, March 8, 1851 • Various

... or poultry requires more attention than boiling or stewing; it is very important to baste it frequently, and if the meat has been frozen, it should have time to thaw before cooking. Beef, veal, or mutton, that is roasted in a stove or oven requires more flour dredged on it than when cooked before the fire in a tin kitchen. There should be but little water in the dripping pan, as that steams the meat and prevents ...
— Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers • Elizabeth E. Lea

... A thaw had begun, not yet transforming the gutters into yellow torrents rushing toward the openings of the sewer, but covering the streets with thick, black mud, over which the wheels ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa

... their crops often perished from moisture. On the Hampshire Hills many hundred lambs died in a night. Sometimes the season never afforded a chance to use the sickle: in the morning the crop was laden with hoar frost, at noon it was drenched with the thaw, and in the evening covered with dews; and thus rotted on the ground. The agent, however, did not despair, and the company anticipated a dividend in ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West

... cold, ice and snow, the city was steeped in a mournful, quivering thaw. From the far-spreading, leaden-hued heavens a thick mist fell like a mourning shroud. All the eastern portion of the city, the abodes of misery and toil, seemed submerged beneath ruddy steam, amid ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... trees. Two months have passed, the workmen are at it again. The stacks are torn down, the bundles scattered, the hemp spread out as once before. There to lie till it shall be dew-retted or rotted; there to suffer freeze and thaw, chill rains, locking frosts and loosening snows—all the action of the elements—until the gums holding together the filaments of the fibre rot out and dissolve, until the bast be separated from the woody ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen

... destruction of young trees by snow-drifts. This is done by selecting locations, and by constructing or removing fences, to allow the snow to blow off; treading it down as it falls is also very useful, both in protecting the trees from breaking down by the settling of drifts in a thaw, and from the depredations of mice under ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden

... Mr. William Thaw, vice-president of the Pennsylvania Company, writes: "This work is wholly good, both for the men and the roads which they serve." Mr. C. Vanderbilt, first vice-president of the New York Central and ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various

... who stared at it that night until their eyes ached, it seemed that it was visibly approaching. And that night, too, the weather changed, and the frost that had gripped all Central Europe and France and England softened towards a thaw. ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells

... was arranged whereby a courier from Fort Snelling and one from Prairie du Chien set out at about the same time, meeting at Wabasha's village where the packs were exchanged and each returned to his own post. On one occasion a spring thaw overtook the carrier from Prairie du Chien, who had proceeded beyond the meeting place because the messenger from the north was late. Suddenly the ice groaned and cracked, and the postman with difficulty found safety on a small island where, to his great surprise, he ...
— Old Fort Snelling - 1819-1858 • Marcus L. Hansen

... of religion; I think she was the first person to thaw the private silences that had kept me bound in these matters even from myself for years. I can still recall her face, a little flushed and coming nearer to mine after avowals and comparisons. "But Stephen," she says; "if none of these things are really true, why do they keep on telling them to ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells

... industry. For a large section of its workers it is a side line, an occupation for days that would otherwise be idle. It is the winter work of farmers, who, forced to cease their own labours owing to the deep snow and the frosts, turn to lumbering to keep them busy until the thaw sets in. ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton

... first day of the January thaw. The snow lay deep upon the housetops, but was rapidly dissolving into millions of water-drops, which sparkled downward through the sunshine with the noise of a summer shower beneath the eaves. Along ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... of that aspect in Mr. Upton Sinclair's "Metropolis," or the fashionable intelligence of the popular New York Sunday editions, and one finds a good deal of confirmatory evidence in many incidental aspects of the smart American life of Paris and the Riviera. The evidence in the notorious Thaw trial, after one has discounted its theatrical elements, was still a very convincing demonstration of a rotten and extravagant, because aimless and functionless, class of rich people. But one has to be careful in this matter if one is to do justice to ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... winter station was kept on the ice half-way across the lake. By a sudden thaw at the close of one winter the men and horses of a station were swallowed up, and nothing was known of them until weeks afterward, when their bodies were washed ashore. Since this catastrophe the entire passage of the lake, about forty miles, is ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox

... grand. The fire flames up, and the snow melting like butter all round and under, and the men's faces all aglow. One of them's roasting a piece of meat, another fish, on a skewer, and the others bring out their frozen bread and thaw it soft and fresh as if it had just come out of the oven. And I do the same, toasting a piece of meat and thawing some bread, and put one on the other and cut up your part with my knife, to neat little bits ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski

... vegetable food for the afflicted men. Though the sun was beginning to appear again, February was the coldest part of the year, and no one could be long out in the open without being frostbitten. It was not till the middle of April that a slight thaw began, and the thermometer rose to freezing point. On 1st August the ships were able to sail out of Winter Harbour and to struggle westward again. But they could not get beyond Melville Island for the ice, and after the ships had been knocked about by it, Parry decided to return to Lancaster ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge

... forward to the pleasures of summer and to a buffalo hunt which we had promised ourselves, when, after finding the heat unusually great at night, on rising in the morning, loud cracks in the ice were heard, and we discovered that a thaw had commenced. We were surprised at the rapidity with which the snow melted, and the low shrubs and the green grass appeared, and long dormant Nature seemed to be waking up ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston

... it in Lower Canada. Fresh mutton, pork, turkeys, geese, fowls, and even fish, all stiff and hard as stone, are packed in boxes and stowed away in a shed till wanted. The only precaution needful is to bring out the meat into the kitchen a few days before use, that it may have time to thaw. Yet I can tell you that winter is our merriest time; for snow, the great leveller, has made all the roads, even the most rickety corduroy, smooth as a bowling-green; consequently sleighing and toboggin parties without end ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe

... severe winter of 1709, the army suffered dreadfully from want and cold. When, early in spring, the thaw set in, the whole of those flat countries were overflowed, and long marches had to be made through complete inundations, by which quantities of stores were lost, and the powder greatly damaged. It was, as we now find, in consequence of the losses thus sustained that Charles accepted Mazeppa's proposal ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various

... 'cept a word of frien'ship an' warnin' f'um somebody dat's been kicked by more mules 'en whut you ever seen in yore whole life, an' you let dat Frank mule stay right whar he is. You kin have yore choice of de Maud mule or de Maggie mule or Friday or January Thaw; but my edvice to you is, jes' leave dat Frank mule be an' don't ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb

... encouragement, I went to school in spite of my bare feet. Often the ground would be frozen, and often there would be snow. My feet would crack and bleed freely, but when I reached home Mother would have a tub full of hot water ready to plunge me into and thaw me out. Although this caused my feet and legs to swell, it usually got me into shape for school the ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various

... passed imperceptibly and the thaw begun when the list of examinations was posted at the University, and I suddenly remembered that I had to return answers to questions in eighteen subjects on which I had heard lectures delivered, but with regard to some of which I had taken no notes and made no preparation whatever. ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy

... a thaw had begun and it was raining in torrents. The Champ de Mars was a sea of mud. The courtiers who, on the 2d of December, had so belauded the sun, representing it as a sharer in the festival, a docile slave of the Emperor, were obliged ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand

... storms, followed by freezing weather after a thaw, and the boys and girls had much fun on the ice, a number of skating races having been arranged among the ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at Snow Lodge • Laura Lee Hope

... of nature; for the melting snow was many hours in becoming saturated with its own and water from above. Nor had our travellers, for the greater part of the day, been much incommoded by the rain, or the thaw, that was in silent, but rapid progress around and beneath them; as their vehicle was a covered one, and as the hard-trodden paths of the road were the last to be affected. But, during the last hour, a great ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson

... characteristic moment of the New York year. Is not the mid-winter moment yet more characteristic? He conjures up, in the rich content of his indoor remoteness, the vision of the vile street below his flat, banked high with the garnered heaps of filthy snow, which alternately freeze and thaw, which the rain does not wash nor the wind blow away, and which the shredded-paper flakes are now drifting higher. He sees the foot-passers struggling under their umbrellas toward the avenues where the ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... purer wits, inventive eyes,— Eyes that frame cities where none be, And hands that stablish what these see: And by the moral of his place Hint summits of heroic grace; Man in these crags a fastness find To fight pollution of the mind; In the wide thaw and ooze of wrong, Adhere like this foundation strong, The insanity of towns to stem With simpleness for stratagem. But if the brave old mould is broke, And end in churls the mountain folk In tavern cheer and tavern joke, Sink, O mountain, in the swamp! Hide in thy skies, O sovereign ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... her bed with one bound. She peeped over Gyp's shoulder. A thaw the day before had made the girls very anxious, but now a sparkling crust covered the snow and the early sun struck coldly across ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott

... have chosen to tramp far into the forest, with his gun on his shoulder and his dogs at his heels. It was such a day as would have made poor Clara's lot seem easier, softening her tortured conscience in a thaw of passing satisfaction, pleasant while it lasted, transitory as the gleam of light and warmth in the dismal winter of the Black Forest. The forest itself alone was unchanged. The trees looked blacker than ever against the blue ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford

... the frequent pauses of the light, When all was dreary as a drizzling thaw, When sleep came not although he prayed for sleep, And wakeful-weary on his bed he lay, Like frozen lake that has no heaven within; Then, then the sleeping horror woke and stirred, And with the tooth ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald

... healthful. People who are very stiff and dignified are mentally sterile. The charming people are the ones who are willing and able to understand and sympathize with the aims and aspirations of others, and in order to do so it is necessary to thaw out. ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker

... their usual feeding places, but was obliged to keep them in the fold. He gave his own goats just sufficient food to keep them alive, but fed the strangers more abundantly in the hope of enticing them to stay with him and of making them his own. When the thaw set in, he led them all out to feed, and the Wild Goats scampered away as fast as they could to the mountains. The Goatherd scolded them for their ingratitude in leaving him, when during the storm he had taken more care of them than of his own herd. One of them, turning about, ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop

... vast accumulations of fact? Darwin said no one could observe without a theory; I suppose he was right; 'tis a fine point of metaphysic; but I will take my oath, no man can write without one—at least the way he would like to, and my theories melt, melt, melt, and as they melt the thaw-waters wash down my writing, and leave unideal tracts—wastes ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... men, both in this country and abroad, but the foregoing facts are distilled from this great biographical mass by skilful hands, and, like the succeeding pages, will stand for centuries unshaken by the bombardment of the critic, while succeeding years shall try them with frost and thaw, and the tide of time dash high against their massive front, only to recede, quelled ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye

... us the stove, and when we left, some time later, it was presented to one of our doctor friends out in a British hospital, where I'm sure it is doing its best to thaw the Balkan chill out of sick ...
— Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis • Various

... his aid; took Miss Grey's limp form, laid it on a lounge, and some set to work to restore her, while others helped Harry to free himself from snow and thaw himself out. ...
— Kristy's Rainy Day Picnic • Olive Thorne Miller

... time. In cold weather they crowd together in a small compass in order to keep warm; and then their breath and vapor collect in frost, in all parts of the hive, except in the region they occupy. Now, unless the weather moderates, so as to thaw the ice, the bees will be compelled to remain where they are located until their stores are all consumed that are within their reach. One winter we had cold weather ninety-four days in succession, during which time the bees ...
— A Manual or an Easy Method of Managing Bees • John M. Weeks

... is recognized even by those who estimate it at the lowest. "To yield this sentiment reasonable satisfaction," observes Professor Tyndall in one of his best known addresses, "is the problem of problems at the present hour. It is vain to oppose it with a view to its extirpation." The "general thaw of theological creeds," which Spencer remarks upon, is no sign of the loss of interest in religious subjects, but the reverse. Coldness and languor are the premonitions of death, ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton

... caused to flow over the face of the red cliffs, is now a stationary thread of silver, spell-bound by the enchaining frost; and icicles, or, as old-fashioned people call them, aglets, of three or four feet long, ornament the overhanging ledges, prone to fall to the beach—far, far below—when a thaw releases them from their present stations. But the air is so very keen that nothing but the briskness of our walk, and the enlivenment of an occasional spell of snow-balling, in which the seniors are tempted to join the juniors, prevent our stagnating into ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various

... Paper about what or whom? How stale it has become, that printed jollity about Christmas! Carols, and wassail-bowls, and holly, and mistletoe, and yule-logs de commande—what heaps of these have we not had for years past! Well, year after year the season comes. Come frost, come thaw, come snow, come rain, year after year my neighbor the parson has to make his sermons. They are getting together the bonbons, iced cakes, Christmas trees at Fortnum and Mason's now. The genii of the theatres are composing the Christmas ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... your wares should tary by the way vntill the 15. of February, when the Sunne is of some power, then is it dangerous: for the heate of the Sunne in the day causeth the deepe lakes of Ladega, and specially of Onega to cleaue: and if there should come then a sudden thaw, as oftentimes in that time of the yeere doeth, then doe these lakes open and breake, whereby many men are lost, and both men and horse drowned, although other riuers do remaine frozen a long ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt

... you are thinking of, may or may not happen; but this time, before I commit myself, I will see my ground clear. Ask whom you choose. It may not be very civil, Edith, but if you meddle in it you will mar it. She has been very farouche with me for a long time; and is only just beginning to thaw a little from her Zenobia ways. She has the making of a Cleopatra in her, if only she were a ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... presages wind. In the summer, if the weather is very warm, it announces a storm. In winter, after a frost of some duration, a rapid falling of the barometrical column announces a change of wind, accompanied by a thaw and rain; but a rising which happens during a frost which has already lasted a certain ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne

... this too, too solid Flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve it self into a Dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd His Cannon 'gainst Self-slaughter! Oh God! Oh God! How weary, stale, and unprofitable, Seem to me all the Uses of this World! Fie on't! ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous

... him. He wrestled with madness with all the strength of a strong man. If it should fall upon him, where then would be his hope and outlook? His day would be done, his night would be closed in, he would be no more than a helpless log, rolling in an ice-bound sea, and when the thaw came—if it ever came—he would be only a broken, rudderless, sailless wreck. Sometimes he would swear at nothing and fling out his arms wildly, and then with a look of shame hang down his head and mutter, "No, no, ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine

... glance, but he made no advances. "He thinks I am angry because of his keen criticism of my picture. For the sake of my own pride, I must not let him think that I care so much about his opinion;" and Christine resolved to let some of the ice thaw that had formed between them. Moreover, in spite of herself, when she was thrown into his society, he greatly interested her. He seemed to have just what she had not. He could meet her on her own ground in matters of ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe

... the great wood-pile, and praised the industry and energy of Nathan Pell, the hired man, and of his team, Dick and Doll, that were making it longer every day. She spoke of the great drifts that must be cleared away before the thaw came, of the bough which last night's wind had brought down from the elm in the corner, of the broken bit of fence beyond the gate, of anything to lead his thoughts away from the theme which for the last hour had occupied and ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson

... melts and dissolves into water, and instantly loses its whiteness, occasioned by a mixture of this spirit with a frothy moisture. Therefore at the same time, by the help of these clothes, the cold is kept in, and the external air is shut out, lest it should thaw the concrete body of the snow. The reason why they make use of cloth that has not yet been at the fuller's is this, because that in such cloth the hair and coarse flocks keep it off from pressing too hard upon the snow, and bruising it. So chaff lying ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... and water, the roads even in the best weather were bad enough—but in mid-winter they were nearly impassable except by the hardiest pedestrians, the roughest horses, and the strongest wagons. Very early in January there came a deep snow, followed by a sharp frost, and then by a warm rain and thaw, that converted the hills into seamed and guttered precipices; the valleys into pools and quagmires; and the roads into ravines and ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth

... of Loison's division, obedient to their duty, had congregated there, stacked arms and, in order to warm themselves to the best of their ability—the temperature was 30 deg. below zero R. (37 deg. below zero F.)—and to thaw the frozen bread, had lighted a fire. I cannot describe the fight among these soldiers for single pieces of bread; ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose

... Nellie were walking slowly along the road from the neat little parish church. It was a Sunday morning. Not a breath of wind stirred the balmy and spring-like air. A recent thaw had removed much of the snow, leaving the fields quite bare, the roads slippery, and the ice on the river like one ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody

... insurrections that only existed in their own guilty imaginations, filled the minds of the people with false alarms, and taught every man to distrust if not to hate his neighbour. There was no more chance of Reform under the existing regime than of 'a thaw in Zembla,' to borrow a famous simile. Cobbett was right in his assertion that the measures and manners of George IV.'s reign did more to shake the long-settled ideas of the people in favour of monarchical government than anything which had happened since the days of Cromwell. The ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid

... himself for the winter in a strong position, where his men would be less exposed to dangerous influence, and where he could hold his ground against an outbreak of the Illinois or an Iroquois invasion. At the middle of January, a thaw broke up the ice which had closed the river; and he set out in a canoe, with Hennepin, to visit the site he had chosen for his projected fort. It was half a league below the camp, on a little hill, ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman

... and yet it is snowing," said Gurov to his daughter. "The thaw is only on the surface of the earth; there is quite a different temperature at a greater height in ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... taken place in the north of Italy, owing to an excessive fall of snow in the Alps, followed by a speedy thaw, the river Adige carried off a bridge near Verona, all except the middle part, on which was the house of the toll-gatherer, who thus, with his whole family, remained imprisoned by the waves, and in momentary danger of destruction. They were discovered from the bank, stretching forth ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various

... like it very well. I have had my head and ears stuff'd up with the East winds. A continual ringing in my brain of bells jangled, or The Spheres touchd by some raw Angel. It is not George 3 trying the 100th psalm? I get my music for nothing. But the weather seems to be softening, and will thaw my stunnings. Coleridge writing to me a week or two since begins his note—"Summer has set in with its usual Severity." A cold Summer is all I know of disagreeable in cold. I do not mind the utmost rigour of real Winter, but these smiling hypocrites of Mays wither me to death. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... and felt, through his intoxication, that things were going wrong with Nikolai. He heard it dripping and dripping in the thaw outside—splash, splash! The sound came in a monotonous ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie

... sweet king-killer, and dear divorce 'Twixt natural son and sire! thou bright defiler Of Hymen's purest bed! thou valiant Mars! Thou ever young, fresh, lov'd, and delicate wooer, Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow That lies on Dian's lap! thou visible god, That solder'st close impossibilities, And mak'st them kiss! that speak'st with every tongue To every purpose! O thou touch of hearts! Think, thy slave man rebels, and by thy virtue Set them into confounding odds, that ...
— The Life of Timon of Athens • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]

... London did at last begin to exclude the country and to close us in with streets. We had made our way along roads in a far worse condition than when we had traversed them by daylight, both the fall and the thaw having lasted ever since; but the energy of my companion never slackened. It had only been, as I thought, of less assistance than the horses in getting us on, and it had often aided them. They had stopped exhausted half-way up hills, they had been driven ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... always in the seeming, she came with that shy step of hers to the feet of glooming precipices; under crests where the snow clung on she played at indifference, loitering with a new flower, knowing that little by little the thaw would answer her veiled efforts, that in the end the monarch of all the brooding mountain tops would discard the white mantle of aloofness and thrill to her embrace; knowing, too, that with each successive conquest made secure she would only laugh ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory

... with losing his wife and not being able to get any golf, he had little appetite these days—was sitting in his drawing-room, moodily polishing the blade of his jigger. Soon wearying of this once congenial task, he laid down the club and went to the front door to see if there was any chance of a thaw. But no. It was freezing. The snow, as he tested it with his shoe, crackled crisply. The sky above was black and full of cold stars. It seemed to Mortimer that the sooner he packed up and went to the South of France, the better. He was just about to close the door, ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse

... Autocrat of waltzes[317] and of war! As eager for a plaudit as a realm, And just as fit for flirting as the helm; A Calmuck beauty with a Cossack wit, And generous spirit, when 'tis not frost-bit; Now half dissolving to a liberal thaw,[em] 440 But hardened back whene'er the morning's raw; With no objection to true Liberty, Except that it would make the nations free. How well the imperial dandy prates of peace! How fain, if Greeks would ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron

... you'll never catch by hunting, It must gush out spontaneous from the soul, And with a fresh delight enchanting The hearts of all that hear control. Sit there forever! Thaw your glue-pot,— Blow up your ash-heap to a flame, and brew, With a dull fire, in your stew-pot, Of other men's leavings a ragout! Children and apes will gaze delighted, If their critiques can pleasure ...
— Faust • Goethe

... the moorland's early dews, And glowing as the woodland rose, Of hearts, his thought gives forth the hues, As richly bright as heaven's ain bow 's— With me, my native land, rejoice, And let the bard thy bosom thaw, As Spring's sweet breathing comes the voice Of him wha ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... liquor as those four gentlemen from beyond the Atlantic. They drank the strong red Cyprus as if it had been spring-water. "The dust of your Italian roads takes some cleansing, Mr. Townshend," was their only excuse, but in truth none was needed. The wine seemed only to thaw their iron decorum. Without any surcease of dignity they grew communicative, and passed from lands to peoples and from peoples to constitutions. Before we knew it we ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan

... all I find for metaphor; All else were contrast,—save that contrast's wall Is down, and all opposed things flow together Into a vast monotony, where night And day, and frost and thaw, and death and life, Are synonyms. What now—what now to me Are all the jabbering birds and foolish flowers That clutter up the world? You were my song! Now, let discord scream! You were my flower! Now ...
— Renascence and Other Poems • Edna St. Vincent Millay

... entranced, and could for ever gaze; No more the heart, that seat where Love resides, Each breath drawn quick and short, in fuller tides Life posting through the veins, each pulse on fire, And the whole body tingling with desire, Pants for those charms, which Virtue might engage, To break his vow, and thaw the frost of Age, Bidding each trembling nerve, each muscle strain, And giving pleasure which is almost pain. 330 Women are kept for nothing but the breed; For pleasure we must have a Ganymede, A fine, fresh Hylas, a delicious boy, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill

... heights which bound it, being composed for the most part of schist, mica slate, and talcose slate, large masses become detached in winter—split off by the freezing of the water behind them—when they descend, on the coming of thaw, in terrible avalanches of stone and mud. Sometimes the masses are such as to dam up the river and form temporary lakes, until the accumulation of force behind bursts the barrier, and a furious flood rushes down the valley. By one of such floods, which occurred ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles

... time. Two tears welled large in the eyes of the Gladsome Beast. Ackronnion moved the agate bowl to a suitable spot with his foot. He sang of autumn and of passing away. The the beast wept as the frore hills weep in the thaw, and the tears splashed big into the agate bowl. Ackronnion desperately chaunted on; he told of the glad unnoticed things men see and do not see again, of sunlight beheld unheeded on faces now withered away. The bowl was full. Ackronnion ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany

... the crystal vault appeared the standing hail. Such was the face without: a mountain stood Threatening from high, and overlooked the wood: Beneath the lowering brow, and on a bent, The temple stood of Mars armipotent; The frame of burnished steel, that cast a glare From far, and seemed to thaw the freezing air. A straight long entry to the temple led, Blind with high walls, and horror over head; Thence issued such a blast, and hollow roar, As threatened from the hinge to heave the door; In through that door a northern light there shone; 'Twas ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden

... and at times very contemptuous as to the superior knowledge of her instructor; but, in spite of it all, Philip went regularly on the appointed evenings to Haytersbank—through keen black east wind, or driving snow, or slushing thaw; for he liked dearly to sit a little behind her, with his arm on the back of her chair, she stooping over the outspread map, with her eyes,—could he have seen them,—a good deal fixed on one spot in the map, not Northumberland, where Kinraid ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell

... would therefore be the challenge of the strong to the weak, saved him from the sin, and he schooled himself to the endurance of middle aged arrogance. For the learning of the lesson he had practice enough: they rode every day, and Griffith did not thaw; but the one thundering gallop he had every morning along the sands with Kelpie, whom * no ordinary day's work was enough to save from the heart burning ferment of repressed activity, was both preparation ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald

... many a High School boy and girl studied the sky. There was no sign of storm, nor did the conditions seem to threaten a thaw. Saturday morning was cold and clear. The temperature, at noon, was just above freezing point, though not enough so to bring about a "thaw" in ...
— The High School Freshmen - Dick & Co.'s First Year Pranks and Sports • H. Irving Hancock

... over the fields and woods. It was mid-afternoon of an early February Sunday—the time of the mid-winter thaw, that false prophet of the ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd

... said Rabecque at his elbow. He turned, and took the cup of mulled drink from his servant. The beverage warmed him in body; but it would need a butt of it to thaw ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini

... asked for tea. While he was speaking to me, there was one peculiarity about him that I observed. Almost all men, when they stand on their own hearths, in their own homes, instinctively alter more or less from their out-of-door manner: the stiffest people expand, the coldest thaw a little, by their own firesides. It was not so with Mr. Mannion. He was exactly the same man at his own house that he ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins

... reached a ripe old age, there came a winter with much frost and snow. Time and again, some of the snow and ice would thaw, but then a hard frost would come, glazing everything in an icy coating. This went on until late in April. By that time, almost every farmer in the district had used up his hay; every one of them was at the end of his store, and nowhere was there a ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various

... rumpled old newspaper, compelled "to eat the leek of his disappointment." The wind, which had blown inveterately steady from the surly north-east, had veered, however, during the preceding night, to the west; and, as it were by the spell of an enchanter, an instant thaw commenced. In the low grounds the snow gleamed forth in patches of a pearly whiteness; but, on the banks of southern exposure, the green grass and the black trodden pathway again showed themselves. The vicissitudes ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir

... her light shoes, and with her black hair loose about her shoulders, she ran out into the rainy yard, fled round the house quickly so that none might see her and spy on them, and plunged down the thaw-wet hillside, crying out with joy, even when she slipped and fell, because her lover's arms would ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West

... had been frozen for three months, with only the one temporary thaw in November which cost Napoleon so many thousands at his broken bridge across the Beresina. Though no water had flowed beneath this bridge, many strange feet had ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman

... winter use. The flying squirrels sleep much, and in the cold season lie heaped upon each other, for the sake of warmth. As many as seven or eight may be found in one nest asleep. They sometimes awaken, if there come a succession of warm days, as in the January thaw; for I must tell you that in this country we generally have rain and mild weather for a few days in the beginning of January, when the snow nearly disappears from the ground. About the 12th, [Footnote: This remark applies more particularly to the Upper Province.] the ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill

... swollen, gingerly to the floor. He drew them up again with a jerk and sat with his teeth chattering hunched on the edge of the bed. Lyaeus burrowed into the blankets and went back to sleep. For a long while Telemachus could not thaw his frozen wits enough to discover what noise had waked him up. Then it came upon him suddenly that huge rhythms were pounding about him, sounds of shaken tambourines and castanettes and beaten dish-pans and roaring voices. Someone was singing in shrill tremolo above the din a song ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos

... Let me take off this shoe. Dear me, how it sticks! Why, you've worn it through and through. Look! What a mercy the snow was hard! If there had been thaw, now! How far you ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine

... were allowed to vote, which reminds one of the story of Baron Munchausen's horn, into which a certain coach-driver blew all manner of wicked tunes. The weather being very cold, these tunes remained frozen in the horn. When hung by the fire, the horn began to thaw out, and these wicked tunes came pealing forth to the great amazement of the by-standers. The reverend gentlemen seems to think women are full of frozen wickedness, which if they enter public life will be thawed out to the utter demolition of their "dignity and delicacy" and the disgust of society. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... will arise buoyantly to ask whether you cannot do better?—whether you cannot devise some expedient whereby the heart of your worthy father may be melted and become as other men's hearts. I don't demand a permanent or even a protracted melting—all I ask is a temporary thaw, just long enough to let me extract a promise from him to let me insure those car barns and power houses. Then he can revert to adamant and be—and welcome, so far as I am concerned. Now, Miss Maitland, have you ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble

... Kenyon's studio. But neither was the studio anything better than a dismal den, with its marble shapes shivering around the walls, cold as the snow images which the sculptor used to model in his boyhood, and sadly behold them weep themselves away at the first thaw. ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... Wounds The River-Dragon tamed at length submits To let his Sojourners depart, and oft Humbles his stubborn Heart; but still as Ice More harden'd after Thaw, till in his Rage Pursuing whom he late dismissed, the Sea Swallows him with his Host, but them lets pass As on dry Land between two Chrystal Walls, Aw'd by the Rod of ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... in a mist of dull gray clouds that clung in rings about the street lamps like the damp fog of a typical February thaw, yet it was the last day of October. Such weather was uncanny. It added to the strange feeling of impending calamity which had been hanging over the business world during the summer and had broken at last into the fierce ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon

... us, he actually went over to Chateau d'Aubepine, and brought off his niece in the carriage with him, presenting her to me in the hall like the spoils of war. She was frightened, formal, and ceremonious all super time, but I thought she was beginning to thaw, and was more afraid of the Marquis than of me. We played at cards all the evening, the Cure being sent for to make up the set, and now and then I caught her great eyes looking at me wistfully; indeed, I was obliged to avoid them lest they should make me weep; for it was almost ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge

... probability of the dory turning over, or a gunboat dropping on to you. Then there was a good deal of very genuine excitement to be got out of placer-mining in British Columbia, especially when there was frost in the ranges, and you had to thaw out your giant-powder. Shallow alluvial workings have a way of caving in when you least expect it of them. After all, however, I think I ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss

... witch-grass and canker-worms. Where is June?—the bright and beautiful, the warm and clear and balm-breathing June, with her matchless, deep, intense sky, and her sunshine, that cleaves into your heart, and breaks up all the winter there? What are these sleety fogs about? Go back into the January thaw, where you belong! What have the chill rains, and the raw winds, and the dismal, leaden clouds, and all these flannels and furs to do with June, the perfect June of hope and beauty and utter joy? Where is the June? Has she lost her way among the narrow, interminable ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton

... The anticipation of the pleasure they all so much enjoyed put them into great spirits; and if either of the younger ones had been asked what he considered the greatest misfortune that could happen to the world, he would very likely have replied, a thaw. When, however, they had exhausted the subject, or at all events the patience of their hearers, their eldest sister proposed that those who were not engaged in any manual employment should read or tell a tale. The proposal was cordially ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston

... and orchards perished in consequence of the frost. In 1609, in France, Switzerland and Upper Italy, people had to thaw their bread and provisions before they could use them. In 1639, the Harbour of Marseilles was covered with ice to a great distance. In 1659, all the rivers in Italy were frozen. In 1699, the winter in France and Italy proved the severest and longest of all. The ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... them. They grow up 6 or 8 feet in a year and that seems to be their difficulty. They do not stop growing in time to harden off before cold weather comes. I think a lot of the winter killing is also due to sun scald which would indicate an inability to retain dormancy during a January thaw. Some of the trees have lived through two winters with only minor damage and then when the right conditions come along, they are killed to the ground. Wrapping the trunks with aluminum foil has not solved the problem. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various

... too, too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself[46] into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd His canon[47] 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! O God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world![48] ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare

... seeing me here. At Paris—ah! you don't know Paris—there is a glorious ferment in society in which the dregs are often uppermost! I came here at the Peace, and here have I resided the greater part of each year ever since. The vast masses of energy and life, broken up by the great thaw of the Imperial system, floating along the tide, are terrible icebergs for the vessel of the state. Some think Napoleonism over—its effects are only begun. Society is shattered from one end to the other, and I laugh at the little rivets by which they think ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... Thackeray broached the subject to George Borrow. He had been trying to make conversation with that strangely crotchety man, but had completely failed. So, being somewhat embarrassed, he asked him abruptly, "Have you read my 'Snob Papers' in Punch?" Borrow seemed to thaw. "In Punch," he repeated sweetly. "It is a periodical I never look at." This was as bad as the Oxford University magnate when Thackeray called upon him in 1857 in reference to his lecturing-tour and mentioned his connection with Punch, the fame of ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann

... had to look it up in a musical dictionary. Meanwhile a fog came on, such a fog, such a fog, that it was more like a million pillows than a fog. And suddenly everything disappears and the great genius is crossing the frozen Volga in a thaw. Two and a half pages are filled with the crossing, and yet he falls through the ice. The genius is drowning—you imagine he was drowned? Not a bit of it; this was simply in order that when he was drowning and at his last gasp, he might catch ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... just seen your hills covered with snow, and, perhaps, have enjoyed, at first, the contrast of their fair white with the dark blocks of pine woods; but have you ever considered how you would like them always white—not pure white, but dirty white—the white of thaw, with all the chill of snow in it, but none of its brightness? That is what the colour of the earth would be without its iron; that would be its colour, not here or there only, but in all places, and at all times. Follow out that idea till you get ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin

... January 6th.—A fine day, and a fine thaw, which resulted in the removal of the snow which had fallen a short ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles

... The great annual spring thaw usually begins in May in the forest region, and in June and July on the high Sierra, varying somewhat both in time and fullness with the weather and the depth of the snow. Toward the end of summer ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir

... heads together, and within a few minutes Gray realized that his experiment was a success. The stranger possessed enthusiasm, but it was coupled with common sense, and before her sunshiny smile even Allegheny's sullen distrust slowly began to thaw. She drew Gray aside finally, and said: "It's all right. They're perfect dears, and, now, the best thing you can do ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach

... exposure to the sweep of the cold winds. Even where the thermometer is not so low as in the areas just referred to, such winds are particularly damaging to the plants when they blow fiercely just after a thaw which has removed a previous covering of snow. In some instances, one cold wave under the conditions named has proved fatal to promising crops of clover over ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw

... night. After a long frost, and a grudging thaw, westerly winds were setting in, and Spring could be foreseen. It had been pouring with rain during the concert, but was now fair, the rushing clouds leaving behind them, as they passed, great torn spaces of blue, ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... however, when the snows melt and the swamps begin to thaw, the Barren Grounds become full of life. To begin with, the sky is literally darkened with enormous flights of wild-fowl, whom instinct brings from the southern reaches of the Mississippi and its tributaries ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education

... shrinking of the snowy mantle, leaving bare patches of wet, brown earth. One day Mokwa, breaking through a thick clump of juniper bushes, came out upon the bank of the Little Vermilion, its glassy surface as yet apparently unaffected by the thaw. For a moment the bear hesitated, his little near-sighted eyes searching the opposite bank and his nose sniffing the wind inquiringly; then, as if reassured, he stepped out upon the ice and made ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer

... on the snow, mild but no thaw, fine sledding. It was a good night to come home from prayer ...
— American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 3, March, 1896 • Various

... unusually deep in the woods that winter, and toward spring there came a sudden, prolonged, and heavy thaw. The ice broke rapidly and every loosened brook became a torrent. Past the door of the camp, which was set in a valley, the Gornish River went boiling and roaring like a mill-race, all-forgetful of its ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts

... of. I understand the road is ten feet deep with snow from this to Hamilton. I have had it cut through once, but this third fall makes an attempt impossible. Heaven only knows when the road will be open, nothing but a thaw can do it—it ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde

... Juggins, see: the pasture green, Obeying Nature's kindly law, Renews its mantle; there has been A thaw. ...
— Green Bays. Verses and Parodies • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... Fred had said, they were apt to have an unusually hazardous trip on this particular afternoon, partly on account of the rough ice opening up chances for an upset, and then again because of the presence of so many weak places, where the recent thaw had ...
— Fred Fenton Marathon Runner - The Great Race at Riverport School • Allen Chapman

... and covered over whole miles of marine beach with the spoils of land and river, than that a sea-bottom should have been elevated for their production, into a fresh-water lake, and then let down into a sea-bottom again. We find it recorded in the "Shepherd's Calendar," that after the thaw which followed the great snow-storm of 1794, there were found on a part of the sands of the Solway Frith known as the Beds of Esk, where the tide disgorges much of what is thrown into it by the rivers, "one thousand eight hundred and forty ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... of 1915 comparative calm reigned over the Austro-Russian theatre of war, so far as actual hostilities were concerned. But it was not altogether the variable climatic conditions of alternate frost and thaw—the latter converting road and valley into impassable quagmires—that caused the lull. It was a short winter pause during which the opposing forces—on one side at least—were preparing and gathering the requisite momentum for ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various

... becoming Arctic kit and the steady approach of the Spring thaw, heralded by the preparation of spare bridges to replace the existing ones, we can defy the eccentricities of the climate. Even the language begins to reveal what might be termed hand-holds; though possibly, when the natives echo our ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various

... searching out those secret corners which she suspected Susan of having forgotten to dust. The vicar stood looking out of the window. The weather was grey and it seemed likely that there would be a thaw which would spoil ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford

... morning a quarter after five; I started from St. Louis, half dead and half alive; I bought me a quart of whiskey my misery to thaw, I got as drunk as a biled owl when I ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various

... same—Well, it's got me properly beat. Anyhow, crazy or no, I guess you're meat just the same, an', by the great Geewhillikins! you'll be dead meat, an' digested meat at that, before you're an hour older, my son, if I know anything o' wolves." Later, as he proceeded to thaw out his supper, "Well, I do reckon that's a blame pity," growled Willis to his fire, by way of epitaph. And for Jim Willis that was saying a ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson

... doubt," said the old man, cheerfully, "but that's not my way—not my way. Any of you froze," he went on ungrammatically, "'cause if so, out you go and thaw it ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum

... reasoning Faith grew more helpless than ever. It was like trying to melt an iceberg with a sunbeam to thaw that callous nature. Only Lou's violent temper and intense hatred of her enemies kept the woman from being adamant ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon

... afternoon in early spring when I lounged disconsolately about the streets of Winnipeg. The prairie metropolis had not then attained its present magnitude, but it was busy and muddy enough; for when the thaw comes the mire of a Western town is indescribable. Also odd showers of wet snow came down, and I shivered under my new skin coat, envying the busy citizens who, with fur caps drawn low down, hurried ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss

... Jean Like snaw when its thaw, Jean, I'm wearing awa' To the land o' the leal. There's nae sorrow there, Jean, There's neither cauld nor care, Jean, The day is aye fair In ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various

... before. And shall not nature, rising in wild wrath, Revolt against the deed? I should not marvel, Though to the lake these rocks should bow their heads, Though yonder pinnacles, yon towers of ice, That, since creation's dawn, have known no thaw, Should, from their lofty summits, melt away Though yonder mountains, yon primeval cliffs, Should topple down, and a new deluge whelm Beneath its waves all ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)

... by some that the causes now at work altering the face of the world are sufficient to account for all the changes through which it has passed: but that is not so. None of the agents Nature now employs—rain, thaw, rivers, seas, volcanoes—would have been adequate to ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... too, had been his comforting and cheering friend. Immediately the crock of gold had been taken from its ambush in the thatch, it seemed as if the chill which had frozen up her heart had been melted by a sudden thaw. Roger Acton was no longer the selfish prodigal, but the guiltless, persecuted penitent; her care was now to soothe his griefs, not to scold him for excesses; and indignation at the false and bloody charge made him appear a martyr ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... that love auld Scotland's name, A' ye that love auld Scotland's fame, A' ye that love auld Scotland's game, A glorious sicht to see, boys— Up, brothers, up, drive care awa'; Up, brothers, up, ne'er think o' thaw; Up, brothers, up, and sing hurrah— The roarin' ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... sleigh, but you couldn't possibly go with him on wheels—on the same road, at the same hour, same man, same everything, except the wheels. You agree to go out next week in a sleigh with Mr. Vancouver; but when the day comes, if it has happened to thaw and there is no snow, and he comes in a buggy, you couldn't possibly go with him, because it would be quite too improper. But I mean to, some day, just to see what they will say. I wish you would come! We would do a lot of driving ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford

... and the boys wrought steadily through the rest of the day and the following two days. Inasmuch as the summer sun in the Klondike region does not thaw the soil to a greater depth than two feet, it was necessary to pile wood upon the earth and set it afire. As this gradually dissolved the frozen ground, the refuse dirt was cleared away, so as to reach paying earth ...
— Klondike Nuggets - and How Two Boys Secured Them • E. S. Ellis

... that are computed to have a surface space equal to that which they would have had to clean had they lived up to the old rule. The department in its turn removes the accumulations piled up by their sweepers, unless a providential thaw gets ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis

... having, risen in the shade to 106 deg. of Fahrenheit, and in winter having fallen to 83 deg. below zero—making a difference of 189 deg. In this district are the enormous deposits of mammoth bones. Spring after spring, the alluvial banks of the lakes and rivers crumbling under the thaw have given up their dead; and the islands opposite to the mouth of the Yana, and, as there was reason for believing, even the bed of the ocean itself, teems with those mysterious memorials of antiquity. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various

... breakfast before dawn in order that he might make an early start, a gaunt trapper had set out from the Settlement on the return journey to his camp beyond the Big Fork. He had been in to the Settlement with a pack of furs, and was now hurrying back as fast as he could, because of the sudden thaw. He was afraid the ice might go out of the river and leave him cut off from his camp,—for his canoe was on the other side. As the pelts were beginning to get poor, he had left his rifle at home, and carried no weapon but his knife. He had ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts

... lie more off from the sun, and so are more cold and senseless; but was a man in a mountain of ice, yet if the Sun of Righteousness will arise upon him, his frozen heart shall feel a thaw; and thus it hath ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... Then the thaw came. The roads became appalling. There were only three broken-down horses on the estate and not a wisp of hay. The horses had to be fed on rye straw chopped up with an axe and sprinkled with flour. One of the horses was vicious and there was no getting it out of the yard. Another was stolen ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov

... snows melt and the swamps begin to thaw, the Barren Grounds become full of life. To begin with, the sky is literally darkened with enormous flights of wild-fowl, whom instinct brings from the southern reaches of the Mississippi and its ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education

... of the first fine afternoon to walk over to Brail. It was more than three miles by the road, but she was a famous walker. The lanes were still impassable on account of the thaw; February had set in with unusual mildness: the snow had melted, the little lake at Woodcote was no longer a sheet of blue ice, and Eiderdown and Snowflake were dabbling joyously with their yellow bills in the water and their soft plumes tremulous ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... upset all French plans, since the leaders had hoped to fall upon the Mohawk villages and to destroy them before the tribesmen could either make preparations for defense or withdraw southward. Foiled in this plan, and afraid that an early thaw might make their route of return impossible, the French gave up their project and started home again. They had not managed to reach, much less to destroy, ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro

... the morrow and more and more poisoned by hard and bitter thoughts. The days and weeks passed and soon I felt the breath of warmer winds. On the open places the snow began to thaw. In spots the little rivulets of water appeared. Another day I saw a fly or a spider awakened after the hard winter. The spring was coming. I realized that in spring it was impossible to go out from the forest. Every river overflowed its banks; the swamps became ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski

... were such good friends, he and the boys, that he was down on all-fours playing horses with them, and did some quite new tricks which they thought extremely amusing; he then invited them to come for a drive the next day. After a thaw, there had been an unusually heavy fall of snow; the town was white and the state of ...
— The Bridal March; One Day • Bjornstjerne Bjornson

... this came the first thaw of the spring; a mild sunny day cleared every bough of every tree of the last vestiges of clinging snow or ice. Then we had two days of warm rain, sometimes a drizzle, sometimes a downpour. Then, on the fourth day, the sky was clear again and ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White

... challenge of the strong to the weak, saved him from the sin, and he schooled himself to the endurance of middle aged arrogance. For the learning of the lesson he had practice enough: they rode every day, and Griffith did not thaw; but the one thundering gallop he had every morning along the sands with Kelpie, whom * no ordinary day's work was enough to save from the heart burning ferment of repressed activity, was both preparation and amends ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald

... to get your long chatty letter, and to hear that you are thawing towards science. I almost wish you had remained frozen rather longer; but do not thaw too quickly and strongly. No one can work long as you used to do. Be idle; but I am a pretty man to preach, for I cannot be idle, much as I wish it, and am never comfortable except when at work. The word holiday ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin

... was not quite so cold—a sudden and very rapid thaw had set in; and when after a hurried toilet Armand, carrying a bundle under his arm, emerged into the street, the mild south wind struck ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy

... make himself the key of all his works And eke the measure of his providence; The piercing eye of truth to whom nought lurks But lies wide ope unbar'd of all pretense. But frozen hearts! away! flie farre from hence, Unlesse you'l thaw at this celestiall fire And melt into one minde and holy sense With Him that doth all heavenly hearts inspire, So may you with my soul in ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More

... raree show was over, and that the grand folk had been properly bowed into their carriages, and had fairly driven away, there was some diversion to be had. People, without yawning, seemed to recover from a dead sleep; the state of the atmosphere was changed; there was a happy thaw; the frozen words and bits and ends of conversations were repeated in delightful confusion. The men of wit, in revenge for their prudent silence, were now happy and noisy beyond measure. Ormond was much entertained: he had an opportunity ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth

... end of December, generally, they experience their first thawing. Those which a month ago were sour, crabbed, and quite unpalatable to the civilized taste, such at least as were frozen while sound, let a warmer sun come to thaw them, for they are extremely sensitive to its rays, are found to be filled with a rich, sweet cider, better than any bottled cider that I know of, and with which I am better acquainted than with wine. All apples are good in this state, ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau

... I was conscious of my existence again on Sunday, April 1st. I opened my eyes and saw that there was a thaw. That was the first thing of which I was aware—that water was apparently dripping on every side of me. It is a strange sensation to lie on your bed very weak, and very indifferent, and to feel the world turning to moisture ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole

... kept together ten days, were discharged without being able to agree upon a verdict. Some, who were originally in favor of the defendant, became weary of their long confinement, and consented to go over to the slaveholder's side; but one of them, named Benjamin Thaw, declared that he would eat his Christmas dinner in the jury-room, before he would consent to such a ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child

... more in the same strain. Mavis found herself greatly enjoying the thinly veiled compliments which he paid her. It was the first time since she had grown up that she had spoken to a smart man, who was obviously a gentleman. If this were not enough to thaw her habitual reserve, there was something strangely familiar in the young man's face and manner; it almost seemed to Mavis as if she were talking with a very old friend or acquaintance, which was enough to justify the unusual levity ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte

... art Flood-gate of the deeper heart! Offspring of a heavenly kind! Frost o' the mouth, and thaw o' the mind! Secrecy's confident, and he Who makes religion mystery! Admiration's speaking'st tongue! Leave, thy desert shades among, Reverend hermits' hallowed cells, Where retired devotion dwells! With thy enthusiasms come, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... from this great biographical mass by skilful hands, and, like the succeeding pages, will stand for centuries unshaken by the bombardment of the critic, while succeeding years shall try them with frost and thaw, and the tide of time dash high against their massive front, only to recede, ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye

... at the lowest. "To yield this sentiment reasonable satisfaction," observes Professor Tyndall in one of his best known addresses, "is the problem of problems at the present hour. It is vain to oppose it with a view to its extirpation." The "general thaw of theological creeds," which Spencer remarks upon, is no sign of the loss of interest in religious subjects, but the reverse. Coldness and languor are the premonitions of death, not ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton

... gardener—under strict orders assuredly, or he would never have done it—sweep a space clear on the lawn and spread food for the birds; lived to ruffle his feathers and fly down; and lived to see the thaw which came that afternoon, when the warm sou'-wester came romping over the land, and winter's last stand was overcome by the forces of spring, and all the wild breathed a sigh of relief and went abroad ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars

... scrambled down from the seat of the carriage, and was so cold and numb that he couldn't walk, while Mrs. Graham had to be carried into the house by Ted and placed before the fire to thaw out. ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor

... was a mild one, and so fruitful in business belonging to the farm that Winthrop's own private concerns had little chance. Latin was pushed a little, and Greek entered upon; neither of them could be forwarded much, with all the stress that hope or despair could make. Snowstorm, and thaw, and frost, and sun, came after and after each other, and as surely and constantly the various calls upon Winthrop's time; and every change seemed to put itself between him and his books. Mr. Landholm was kept late in Vantassel, by a long session, and the early spring business ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner

... its iron grip at last and there were alternations of snow and thaw and frost when one evening a few of his scattered neighbours assembled at Allonby's ranch. Clavering was there, with Torrance, Hetty, and Miss Schuyler, among the rest; but though the guests made ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss

... cloak, and make it look more wretched. The stars, to be sure, coldly watched it when the nights and the smoke were clear enough; and all bad weather stood by it with a rare fidelity. You should alike find rain, hail, frost, and thaw lingering in that dismal enclosure when they had vanished from other places; and as to snow, you should see it there for weeks, long after it had changed from yellow to black, slowly weeping away its grimy life. The place had no other adherents. As to street noises, the rumbling ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... some day with me," said Blanche. She had no intention of spending all her days at Cloom, and she wished to win over this sulky beauty to her side. Vassie looked doubtfully at her, but began to thaw. London ... it meant all of hope and the ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... not very wholesome companions for those who are sensitively organized and predisposed to self-sacrificing love. They keep the heart in a perpetual freeze and thaw, which, like the American northern climate, is so particularly fatal to plants of a delicate habit. They could live through the hot summer and the cold winter, but they cannot endure the three or four months when it freezes one day and ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... frost had been so severe, that we were obliged to wait a little this morning for the sun to thaw the tent and tarpaulins before they would bend to fold up. After starting, we proceeded across a high barren open country, for about three miles on a W. N. W. course, passing close under a peak connected with Campbell's range, which I named Spring Hill, from the circumstance of a fine spring of ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre

... and the weather being clear, it was never quite dark. Our horses were kept, or rather starved, underground; and as for our servants, whom we hired here to look after ourselves and horses, we had, every now and then, their fingers and toes to thaw and take care of, lest they should mortify and ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe

... perfection keeps no Court, Love dresses here no wanton amorous bowers; Sorrow has made perpetuall winter here, And all my thoughts are Icie, past the reach Of what Loves fires can thaw. ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various

... breeze sprung up, which, with the prevailing influence of the sun, at length cleared the air; and they soon after, with great joy, saw the snow fall in large flakes from the trees, a certain sign of an approaching thaw: They now examined more critically the state of their invalids; Briscoe was still very ill, but said, that he thought himself able to walk; and Mr Buchan was much better than either he or his friends had any reason ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr

... distance, or if none can be found, snow or ice must be melted. Icicles are hanging from the trough here to-day, for though the sun is warm now, there were four or five degrees of frost last night, and the wind is still keen. In spring, when a thaw sets in, this little stream is a source of danger to Ramah. Its deep channel is filled with snow, and the pent-up torrent, seeking an outlet, is apt to escape from its usual bounds and start an avalanche down the steep declivity. When the thaw becomes ...
— With the Harmony to Labrador - Notes Of A Visit To The Moravian Mission Stations On The North-East - Coast Of Labrador • Benjamin La Trobe

... respectfully remind you that the expenses attendant upon taking possession of my humble abode have been very heavy. In plain English, the two thou' which you so liberally advanced as the first instalment of future bounties, has melted like snow in a rapid thaw. I want another two thou', friend of my youth and patron of my later years. What's a thousand or so, more or less, to the senior partner in the house of D., D., and B.? Make it two five this time, and your petitioner will ever pray, &c. &c. &c. ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... turkey that he had bought up the line to take home for Christmas, and which we were quite welcome to. The only drawback to the bird was that it was frozen as hard as a rock, and would probably take a lot of thawing out. If we wished, however, he would do his best to thaw it and give us fried turkey ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith

... Pierre and the girl were on their way, leaving Borotte quarrelling with the brothers, and all drinking heavily. The two arrived at Throng's late the next afternoon. There had been a slight thaw during the day, and the air was almost soft, water dripping from the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... musty and scholastic atmosphere in which he so long had dwelt. As she glanced by as lightly as a bird on the wing, she occasionally beamed upon him with one of her dangerous smiles. She then little thought or cared that his honest and unoccupied heart was as ready to thaw and blossom into love as a violet bank facing the south in spring. He soon had a vague consciousness that he was not doing just the prudent thing, and therefore rejoined his aunt and uncle. Soon after he pleaded the weariness of his journey ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe

... parlour. They rubbed his face and his hands vigorously with snow. They gave him a drink of hot tea flavoured with whiskey—or perhaps it was a drink of whiskey with a little hot tea in it—and then, as his senses began to return to him, they rolled him in a blanket and left him on a sofa to thaw out gradually, while they went on ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke

... days or a week had passed. He had slept with the dogs, fought across a forgotten number of shallow divides, followed the windings of weird canyons that ended in pockets, and twice had managed to make a fire and thaw out frozen moose-meat. And here he was, well-fed and well-camped. The storm had passed, and it had turned clear and cold. The lay of the land had again become rational. The creek he was on was natural in appearance, and tended as it should toward the ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London

... coming of the spring thaw, the river bed is filled with a freshet of water which seizes and carries the logs down stream. Many on the banks, however, have to be started on their way, and this is called "breaking out the roll ways." They often start on their water journey ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes

... brought the travellers to a rugged defile in the mountains, from which they had a view of a beautiful valley of considerable extent. During the last two days a steady thaw had been rapidly melting away the snow, so that it appeared only here and there in the landscape in dazzling patches. At the distance of about half-a-mile from where they halted to breathe the horses before commencing the descent into this vale, several thin wreaths of smoke were ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne

... I never felt so blue As I sat there gazing at that stiff and studying what I'd do. Then I rose and I kicked off the husky dogs that were nosing round about, And I lit a roaring fire in the stove, and I started to thaw Bill out. ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service

... ride alone, some carle shall find Dead in my arms in the half-melted snow, When all unkindly with the shifting wind, The thaw comes on ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris

... name or anything, he'd been so excited over gettin' it that he'd rung up the messenger office and bluffed 'em into tellin' where the call had come in from. And as long as I'd known him I've never seen Twombley-Crane thaw out so much. Why, he acts almost human as he shakes hands! Then he takes the package from under his ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford

... lasted for some days, and at that early time of the season a thaw might any hour begin. This made the two lads eager to push on; but "too much haste is bad speed," and they almost knocked up their horse before half the day's journey was over. The evening was drawing on, and they were still a long way from Roland's ...
— Taking Tales - Instructive and Entertaining Reading • W.H.G. Kingston

... looking forward to the pleasures of summer and to a buffalo hunt which we had promised ourselves, when, after finding the heat unusually great at night, on rising in the morning, loud cracks in the ice were heard, and we discovered that a thaw had commenced. We were surprised at the rapidity with which the snow melted, and the low shrubs and the green grass appeared, and long dormant Nature seemed to ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston

... our observatory south of Salem. Only here and there toward its lower rim a tatter in it revealed the giant's rugged brown muscle of volcanic rock. The top of the mountain, like that of Shasta, in direct sunlight is an opal. So far above the line of thaw, the snow seems to have accumulated until by its own weight it has condensed into a more compactly crystalline structure than ice itself, and the reflections from it, as I stated of Shasta, seem rather emanations from some interior source of light. The look is distinctly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various

... be attempted; and the Auld Lichts, at least, rested content when enough light got into their workshops to let them see where their looms stood. Wading through beds of snow they did not much mind; but they wondered what would happen to their houses when the thaw came. ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie

... more amiable, and the young wife, clinging to vain hopes, also became more cheerful. The thaw had not yet set in and a hard, smooth, glittering covering of snow extended over the landscape. Neither men nor animals were to be seen; only the chimneys of the cottages gave evidence of life in the smoke that ascended from them ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... the end of the Canadian winter. Fierce frost and sudden thaw were alternated as the north wind and the south struggled for the woods, and the heat of work in the warm sun left many ill prepared for the onset of bitter cold at dusk. Bustling everywhere, seeing that pigs were fed, pies made, and clothes mended; now in the hot kitchen, a moment later in the ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton

... over, or a gunboat dropping on to you. Then there was a good deal of very genuine excitement to be got out of placer-mining in British Columbia, especially when there was frost in the ranges, and you had to thaw out your giant-powder. Shallow alluvial workings have a way of caving in when you least expect it of them. After all, however, I think I ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss

... more snow storms, followed by freezing weather after a thaw, and the boys and girls had much fun on the ice, a number of skating races having been ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at Snow Lodge • Laura Lee Hope

... night at Ivry (not the Ivry which gained Henri Quatre his kingdom) and then continued our march over roads which I can only compare to our country roads in America during the spring thaw. In addition to this, the rain commenced early in the morning and continued all day, so that we were completely wet the whole time. The plains, too high and cold to produce wine, were varied by forests of beech and oak, and the population was thinly scattered over them in small villages. ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor

... cleared of the snow for New-Year's day, by a thaw, and a hard shower in the night. The sun rose bright and clear; and, as usual, early in the morning, that is to say morning in its fashionable sense, the greater part of the male population of the town were in motion, hurrying in all directions towards the houses ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper

... commences, with light falls of snow occasionally, and hard frost during the night. Flocks of snow-birds (the harbingers of cold in autumn, and heat in spring) begin to appear, and soon the whirring wings of the white partridge may be heard among the snow-encompassed willows. The first thaw generally takes place in April; and May is characterised by melting snow, disruption of ice, and the arrival of the first ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne

... from her bed with one bound. She peeped over Gyp's shoulder. A thaw the day before had made the girls very anxious, but now a sparkling crust covered the snow and the early sun ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott

... as if I had but just become aware of his identity, 'Why, how are you? I did not know that I had an acquaintance by my side.' He returned my warm greeting rather distantly; but there was too much at stake to mind this, and I determined to thaw him out, which I accomplished in due time. I found him a free sort of a man to talk, after he got going, and so I made myself quite familiar, and encouraged him to be outspoken. I knew he had heard something about my adventure at Mr. Willet's, and determined to get from him the stories that were ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur

... them thrust upon us by nature, who is for ever giving and blessing, at every turn as we walk. The sight of the first pale flowers starring the copses; an anemone held up against the blue sky with the sun shining through it towards you; the first fall of snow in the autumn; the first thaw of snow in the spring; the blustering, busy winds blowing the winter away and scurrying the dead, untidy leaves into the corners; the hot smell of pines—just like blackberries—when the sun is on them; the first ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim

... Brunt was head of the party in the lower kitchen. He stood at one end of the table, cutting, with his huge knife, the hard-frozen pork into very thin slices, which the rest of the company took, and, before they had time to thaw, cut up into small dice on the little boards Mr. Van Brunt had prepared. As large a fire as the chimney would hold was built up and blazing finely; the room looked as cozy and bright as the one upstairs, and the people as busy and as talkative. They had less to do, however, or they had ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell

... Gavin's discomfiture, turned Lightning down the Rashie-bog road, which would be impassable as soon as the thaw came. In summer Rashie-bog is several fields in which a cart does not sink unless it stands still, but in winter it is a loch with here and there a spring where dead men are said to lie, There are no ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie

... passion yet will I be true, Nor shall my will rebellious prove. Amid the curls of golden hair That wave those beauteous temples round, Cupid spread craftily the snare With which my captive heart he bound: And from those eyes he caught the ray Which thaw'd the ice that fenced my breast, Chasing all other thoughts away, With brightness suddenly imprest. But now that hair of sunny gleam, Ah me! is ravish'd from my sight; Those beauteous eyes withdraw their beam, And change to sadness past delight. A glorious death by all is prized; ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... of hay or newspaper—which would not have warmed the house anyhow—the old couple had gone to bed, piling over them everything that could conceivably shut out that penetrating dead cold, getting up just long enough to boil coffee, fry a little bacon and thaw out the bread. They dipped up snow at the door and melted it for water. The bread had run out, and the last scrap of fuel. They tore down the kitchen shelf, chopped it up, and the last piece of it had gone for a flame to make the morning coffee. The little ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl

... through these great blubbering waves ere we end our voyage? This night wind is worse than a Robin Hood's thaw." ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby

... now be covered, the passes choked with the soft drifts, the valleys hidden. The cattle must be moved down the mountains to the foothills where each year they wintered. The Bar L-M buildings were closed, the heavy wooden shutters put up, the corrals deserted until thaw time. Conway with his men and cattle would not come again until springtime ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory

... furiously toward the north, carrying with it the softer atmosphere from the distant ocean. The rising sun was obscured by denser and increasing columns of clouds, while the southerly wind that rushed up the valley brought the never-failing symptoms of a thaw. ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper

... your travels; but I trust will leave no consequences behind it. The weather is by no means favourable for a recovery, if it is as severe in England as at Paris. We have had two or three days of fog, rather than thaw; but the frost is set in again as sharp as ever. I persisted in going about to churches and convents, till I thought I should have lost my nose and fingers. I have submitted at last to the season, and lie a-bed all the morning; but I hope in February and March to recover the time I ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... herd to their usual feeding places, but was obliged to keep them in the fold. He gave his own goats just sufficient food to keep them alive, but fed the strangers more abundantly in the hope of enticing them to stay with him and of making them his own. When the thaw set in, he led them all out to feed, and the Wild Goats scampered away as fast as they could to the mountains. The Goatherd scolded them for their ingratitude in leaving him, when during the storm he had taken ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop

... so many Martian phenomena.[991] Changes of the hues associated respectively with land and water accompanied in lower latitudes, and were thought to be occasioned by floods ensuing upon this rapid antarctic thaw. It is true that scarcity of moisture would account for the scantiness and transitoriness of snowy deposits easily liquefied because thinly spread. But we might expect to see the whole wintry hemisphere, at any rate, ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... not a sound broke the stillness except the drip, drip from the roof, for a thaw had set in. Three o'clock came. What was that sound? Was the end nearer than he expected? Had his brother- in-law, in his impatience, come earlier than he had said? No. There was the welcome tone of a young voice crying out to some one else. Then Amos sprang ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson

... and strength, he had no power to give back life, where it had been so rudely quenched. Pure or not, the blood in those veins was frozen to ice, and though Ben heaped up wood on his hearth till the flames roared up the wide-throated chimney, there was not heat enough to thaw a single drop. At last, Ben gave up his own exertions, and laid the dead girl reverently on his own couch; kneeling meekly by her side, and then he began repeating the Lord's Prayer over her again and ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens

... the afflicted men. Though the sun was beginning to appear again, February was the coldest part of the year, and no one could be long out in the open without being frostbitten. It was not till the middle of April that a slight thaw began, and the thermometer rose to freezing point. On 1st August the ships were able to sail out of Winter Harbour and to struggle westward again. But they could not get beyond Melville Island for the ice, and after the ships had been knocked about ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge

... atmosphere—why should she have lost her atmosphere? Why should it sink into craters? Atmosphere is gas, great in volume, small in matter; where would there be room for it? Solidified by the intense cold? Possibly in the night time. But would not the heat of the long day be great enough to thaw it back again? The same trouble attends the alleged disappearance of the water. Swallowed up in the cavernous cracks, it is said. But why are there cracks? Cooling is not always attended by cracking. Water cools without cracking; cannon balls cool without cracking. ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne

... is all I find for metaphor; All else were contrast,—save that contrast's wall Is down, and all opposed things flow together Into a vast monotony, where night And day, and frost and thaw, and death and life, Are synonyms. What now—what now to me Are all the jabbering birds and foolish flowers That clutter up the world? You were my song! Now, let discord scream! You were my flower! Now let the world grow weeds! For I shall not Plant things above your grave—(the common balm ...
— Renascence and Other Poems • Edna St. Vincent Millay

... directing the hearts with the intelligences of the beholder to the central fact of the subject theme, "I am the Light of the World." The broad use and disposition of whitish pigment; I mean whitish, snowy light flecked, pimpled, dimpled with tints of orange and purple, like snow about to thaw, here and there, honeycombed or stippled to mark the intensity of its native regard for its own divine, suffering, martyred Lord, would have attracted the attention and won the curiosity, the sympathy, of many finer sensibilities. ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater

... cessation of robbery on their trap line after the inconclusive visit to the enemy's camp. But a new and extreme exasperation arose in the month of March, when the alternation of thaw and frost had covered the snow with a hard crust that rendered snowshoes unnecessary and made it easy to run anywhere ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton

... of thy life; Revolve upon another axis, man; Let love, the sun of life, beam meltingly Upon thy heart and thaw it ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith

... in the woods that winter, and toward spring there came a sudden, prolonged, and heavy thaw. The ice broke rapidly and every loosened brook became a torrent. Past the door of the camp, which was set in a valley, the Gornish River went boiling and roaring like a mill-race, all-forgetful of ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts

... cold features refused to thaw, however, under the heat of his employer's enthusiasm, seeing which Cappy slid out to the edge of his chair and gazed contemplatively at Skinner over the rims of his spectacles. "Hum-m-m!" he said. The very tempo of that throat-clearing should have warned Mr. ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne

... had promised to be, her permanent pupil, he was not always as obedient and submissive as he might have been. Even when he sat opposite to her at the dinner-table, in the presence of stranger guests, he would sometimes, contrary to her express command, tell the story of the great April thaw, and the escape of the little schoolmistress with her pupils. Of course he was rebuked for his misdemeanour; but he only protested against her strict government, and declared that she could never get over "the schoolma'am." Yet he acknowledged she ...
— Little Tora, The Swedish Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Mrs. Woods Baker

... voice, and he began crawling along the gutter through the trickling thaw, pressing himself against the wall. They continued along it for some minutes. He seemed to pass through a hundred stages of misery, to pass minute after minute through a hundred degrees of cold, damp, and exhaustion. ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells

... come over her,—a feeling that she was one of the great human family after all, and the icy mountain of reserve began to thaw just a little. Her purchases made, she concluded to take another road home. This route lay past a church. It was lighted, though early, and a few real worshipers had met to pray ...
— The King's Daughter and Other Stories for Girls • Various

... four, too feeble to fight their way, had to trust to the peaceful disposition of the natives. When they started, the prairie was turning from brown to green and the rivers were still swollen from the spring thaw. In three weeks they reached a Mandan village on the upper Missouri and were well received. It was after midsummer when they set out again and pressed on westward with a trend to the south. The country was bare and desolate. For twenty days they saw no human being. ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong

... known chemist. It is asserted that living cells containing a saccharine liquid do not permit infiltration from interior to exterior; this phenomenon occurs only when cell and tissue are dead. It is necessary that the degree of cold should be sufficiently intense, or that a thaw take place, under certain conditions, to kill tissue of walls of said cells. An interesting fact is that when cells are broken through the action of freezing, it is not those containing sugar that are the first affected. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 832, December 12, 1891 • Various

... pushed ahead on one of those interminable stages over the glacier. And on the way back, I was caught in fog. It rolled in, layer on layer, while I felt for the landing; but I managed to find the place and picked up the trail we had worn packing over the ice. And I lost it; probably in a new thaw that had opened and glazed over since I left. Anyhow, in a little while I didn't know where I was. I had given my compass to Weatherbee, and there was no sun to take bearings from, not a landmark in sight. Nothing ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson

... caught the tree closer, when it, too, leaned to fall. It hung for a moment over the steep slope, and I could not save myself. The frost had not clamped the over-hang to the solid ground. The last fall rains had cut it under; the first spring thaw would have brought it down, had not my weight been thrown ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten

... having taken place in the north of Italy, owing to an excessive fall of snow in the Alps, followed by a speedy thaw, the river Adige carried off a bridge near Verona, all except the middle part, on which was the house of the toll-gatherer, who thus, with his whole family, remained imprisoned by the waves, and in momentary danger of destruction. They were discovered from the bank, stretching forth their hands, ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various

... trees and put them in a temperature of 35 to 40 degrees below zero and bring them out to thaw gradually no harm is done. Most people buy trees and plant them in low places; that is the error. We have planted trees where the wind is very heavy throughout the winter and in the spring I found that these ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association

... have stated, the winter had been one of the most remarkable on record. From the middle of November to the middle of February, the ground was covered with snow and ice, without a thaw. The severity of the cold was terrible. Nearly all unprotected animals perished. Even bears, buffalo, wolves, and wild turkeys were found frozen in the woods. The starving wild animals often came near the settlement for food. For seventy-five ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott

... day when that happens, isn't it Kit?" asked her father. "Well, jump out then, and stamp your toes, and thaw your ears." ...
— Marjorie's New Friend • Carolyn Wells

... the stolid, heavy disposition that seems armed by outward indifference, or mayhap pride. He knew that his case was hopeless, and he would not thaw even to the priest. But Giles had been quite unmanned, and when he found that for the doleful procession to the Guildhall he was to be coupled with George Bates, instead of either of his room-fellows, he flung himself on Stephen's neck, sobbing out messages ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... play'd in the frost and the thaw, I hae play'd since the year thirty-three, I hae play'd in the rain and the snaw, And I trust I may play till I dee; And I tell ye the truth and nae lee, For I speak o' the thing I hae seen - Tom Morris, I ken, will agree - Tak' aye tent to be up ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang

... conversation took another turn; dwelling for an instant on the quantities of fish that were dying of poison in the Meuse, and finally coming around to the subject of the pestilence that menaced Sedan when there should be a thaw. Even as early as November, there had been several cases of disease of an epidemic character. Six thousand francs had been expended after the battle in cleansing the city and collecting and burning clothing, knapsacks, haversacks, all the debris that was capable ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... towards the slums, and instinctively thinks in terms of them. If he talks of segregating some incurably vicious type of the sexual sort, he is thinking of a ruffian who assaults girls in lanes. He is not thinking of a millionaire like White, the victim of Thaw. If he speaks of the hopelessness of feeble-mindedness, he is thinking of some stunted creature gaping at hopeless lessons in a poor school. He is not thinking of a millionaire like Thaw, the slayer of ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton

... he asked me what time of day it wuz, pretendin' his watch had stopped, I looked full and cold in his face for several minutes before I sez in icy axents, "I don't know!" Every word fallin' from my lips like ice-suckles from a ruff in a January thaw, and then I turned my back and went away ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley

... puces, sac a vin, mousquetaire de Piquepuce, aumonier du cheval de bronze, poulet dinde de la Rapee," etc., until they were too hoarse to continue. In 1784, the winter began by heavy frosts, which were followed by a sudden thaw which flooded the city. "Paris has become a sewer; communication has been absolutely interrupted between the inhabitants, and for several days past there have been on foot only those who were compelled to it by necessity, by ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton

... walk alone, When feather'd rain came softly down, As Jove descending from his Tower To court her in a silver shower: The wanton snow flew to her breast, Like pretty birds into their nest, But, overcome with whiteness there, For grief it thaw'd into a tear: Thence falling on her garments' hem, To deck her, froze into ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy

... taken to prevent destruction of young trees by snow-drifts. This is done by selecting locations, and by constructing or removing fences, to allow the snow to blow off; treading it down as it falls is also very useful, both in protecting the trees from breaking down by the settling of drifts in a thaw, and from the depredations ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden

... work, old fellow, in an exceptionally fine way, and I guess you'll find that he can thaw out. Mr. Thurston is probably just like other men who have to employ folks. When he finds that a man can really do the work that he's paid to do I imagine that Thurston is well satisfied and not afraid to ...
— The Young Engineers in Colorado • H. Irving Hancock

... a sudden thaw would spoil it; and, as there was plenty of good firewood on the spot, they were not going to run the risk of losing it in ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid

... arranged whereby a courier from Fort Snelling and one from Prairie du Chien set out at about the same time, meeting at Wabasha's village where the packs were exchanged and each returned to his own post. On one occasion a spring thaw overtook the carrier from Prairie du Chien, who had proceeded beyond the meeting place because the messenger from the north was late. Suddenly the ice groaned and cracked, and the postman with difficulty found safety on a small island where, to his great surprise, he found the postman ...
— Old Fort Snelling - 1819-1858 • Marcus L. Hansen

... agreeable to the dilapidated constitution of a sensitive valetudinarian. His commentators suppose he produced nothing during his marine hybernations: if the inclement season froze 'the genial current of his soul,' the aspect of the sea did not thaw it. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various

... depends on the conditions that require the airing. For instance a thaw in the winter, or a rainy spell. Again in the summer a long rainy spell. In these cases I open up the box, maybe leave ...
— Northern Nut Growers Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-First Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association

... thickness of paper, poured boiling-hot water on the top of it, and there it remained for hours without melting the ice. The paper was placed over the ice, so that the hot water could not be poured on it, which would have thawed it at once. Every man who has poured hot water into a frozen pump, hoping to thaw out the ice by this means, has arrived at the fact, if not at the theory, that ice will not melt by hot water on the top of it. If, however, a piece of lead pipe be placed in the pump, resting on the ice, and ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French

... The safest course of all, were to set the nuts in an earthen-pot, and in frosty weather, shewing it a little to the fire, the intire clod will come out with them, which are to be reserved, and set in the naked earth, in convenient and fit holes prepar'd beforehand, or so soon as the thaw is universal: Some commend the strewing a few oats at the bottom of the fosses or pits in which you transplant the naked roots, for a great promotement of their taking, and that it will cause them to shoot more in one year than in three: But to this I have already spoken. Other kinds not so ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn

... judge of any change of climate, as we have just had a change from hard frost to thaw; but every thing has the appearance of a milder atmosphere. I enquired into the reason of the want of hedges hitherto, and their abundance here, and was told, that it arose from the greater subdivision of property as well as from the number of cows: that every man almost had his little ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison

... savages, in order to go over the ice more easily, are accustomed to make a kind of wooden sledge, [167] on which they put their loads, which they easily and swiftly drag along. Some days after there was a thaw, which caused us much trouble and annoyance; for we had to go through pine forests full of brooks, ponds; marshes, and swamps, where many trees had been blown down upon each other. This caused us a thousand troubles and embarrassments, and great discomfort, as we were all the time ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain V3 • Samuel de Champlain

... disagreeable; snow six inches deep, and from rain and sleet and thaw and freeze, has formed a hard crust, so as to make bad traveling—in the roads icy and slippery. To-day cloudy, damp and cool. A few days ago the mercury reached 8 degrees below zero, the lowest of the season. It is very hard on stock, ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various

... of food, and I don't suppose we could do much prospecting with the snow on the ground," Harding paused with a thoughtful air. "When we reach the settlement I must go home, but if the money can be raised, I'll be back as soon as the thaw comes, to try for the oil, Clarke's an unusually smart man, and there's no doubt ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss

... distant in her manner, even while thoroughly hospitable in her welcome. Olivia felt the hospitality; I felt the frigidity. Julia called her "Mrs. Dobree." It was the first time she had been addressed by that name; and her blush and smile were exquisite to me, but they did not thaw Julia in the least. I began to fear that there would be between them that strange, uncomfortable, east-wind coolness, which so often exists between the two women a man ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton

... When the thaw set in, I put a couple of bricks down and put a box-lid on top, so that I could stand in a dry place. We had two picks and two shovels in that cellar in case anything happened overnight. I have been up against it. Whenever I talked to the boys there they sat with their gas-bags ...
— Your Boys • Gipsy Smith

... rushed to his aid; took Miss Grey's limp form, laid it on a lounge, and some set to work to restore her, while others helped Harry to free himself from snow and thaw himself out. ...
— Kristy's Rainy Day Picnic • Olive Thorne Miller

... crisis," replied Van Swieten, thoughtfully. "We must awake both the empress and the mother. The one must have work—the other, tears. This frozen sea of grief must thaw, ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach

... discovery of America or the landing at Plymouth Rock; these things to the Chinaman are so modern as to belong rather in the category of recent daily newspaper sensations along with the Pinchot-Ballinger controversy or the Thaw trial. If he wishes something genuinely historic, he goes back three or four thousand years. For example, a friend of mine, at a little social gathering in New England some time ago, heard a young Chinese student make a talk on his country. Incidentally he was asked about a certain Chinese ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe

... street corners of Maybole I could catch breezy glimpses of green fields. The road underfoot was wet and heavy—part ice, part snow, part water, and any one I met greeted me, by way of salutation, with 'A fine thowe' (thaw). My way lay among rather bleak bills, and past bleak ponds and dilapidated castles and monasteries, to the Highland-looking village of Kirkoswald. It has little claim to notice, save that Burns came there to study surveying in the summer of 1777, and there ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson

... you have had enough. A sudden chill runs up the arm the moment your hand touches theirs, and finally reaches the heart; you feel, if you had held that hand a moment longer, an icicle would have formed in the brain. Such people lack personal magnetism. These people now and then thaw out when you get thoroughly acquainted with them, and you find that the ice is all on the outside, and then you come to like them very well, but as a rule first impressions are lasting. Magnetism ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll

... ride in the nipping air had been a severe test of endurance, and all were glad, when the ranch was reached, to "thaw out" before the roaring fire, and sit down to the hot and hearty meal that had been prepared in ...
— American Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt • Edward Stratemeyer

... where everything is cold and inert, has been represented, has it not? as enveloped in a deep and sublime silence. But the reader must please to receive a very different impression; nothing can give any fit idea of the tremendous tumult of a day of thaw at Spitzbergen. ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams

... kill himself; but he kept on day after day, and had not even a cold until February. Then there came a south rain and a thaw, and Barney went to the swamp and worked two days knee-deep in melting snow. Then there was a morning when he awoke as if on a bed of sharp knives, and lay alone all day and all that night, and all the next day and that night, not being able to stir without ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... what you would call hot in here," said Mme. Carhaix, "but to thaw this place you would have to keep a fire going ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans

... not to be attempted; and the Auld Lichts, at least, rested content when enough light got into their workshops to let them see where their looms stood. Wading through beds of snow they did not much mind; but they wondered what would happen to their houses when the thaw came. ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie

... Ladyship, Ma'am," he said, in tones that were getting tremulous, even while they retained the deep characteristic intonations of his profession, "we old sea-dogs never stop to look into an almanac, to see which way the wind will come after the next thaw, before we put to sea. It is enough for us, that the sailing orders are aboard, and that the Captain has taken ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper

... lie there nearly all summer, just melting a little bit at times, and feeding this stream which runs right past us here. Still farther back in the mountains you'll see the glaciers—great ice-fields which never thaw out completely. These are the upper sponges of the mountains, squeezed each year by the summer sun. That is why the rivers ...
— The Young Alaskans in the Rockies • Emerson Hough

... like," said Isel, with a sigh. "When folks vanish out of your sight like snow in a thaw, one cannot ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt

... great ice block, about fifty feet long, to interrogate it, and see what I could make of it, by a cool, confidential proximity and examination. The ice was porous and spongy, as I have seen it on the shores of the Connecticut, when beginning to thaw out under the influence of a spring sun. I could see the little drops of water percolating in a thousand tiny streams through it, and dropping down on every side. Putting my ear to it, I could hear a fine musical trill ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... and Nellie were walking slowly along the road from the neat little parish church. It was a Sunday morning. Not a breath of wind stirred the balmy and spring-like air. A recent thaw had removed much of the snow, leaving the fields quite bare, the roads slippery, and the ice on the river like one ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody

... instinctively thinks in terms of them. If he talks of segregating some incurably vicious type of the sexual sort, he is thinking of a ruffian who assaults girls in lanes. He is not thinking of a millionaire like White, the victim of Thaw. If he speaks of the hopelessness of feeble-mindedness, he is thinking of some stunted creature gaping at hopeless lessons in a poor school. He is not thinking of a millionaire like Thaw, the slayer ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton

... take your child. My dying frost, which no sun's heat can thaw, Closes the powers of all my outward parts: My freezing blood runs back unto my heart, Where it assists death, which it would resist: Only my love a little hinders death, For he beholds her eyes, and cannot smite: Then go not yet, Matilda, stay awhile. Friar, make speed, and list ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various

... ye jest so sure's hell's a good place to thaw plumbin'," cried Mr. Bodge. "I've got ye placed. You was goin' to steal my brains. You was goin' to suck Bodge dry and laugh behind his back. You're ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day

... And shall not nature, rising in wild wrath, Revolt against the deed? I should not marvel, Though to the lake these rocks should bow their heads, Though yonder pinnacles, yon towers of ice, That, since creation's dawn, have known no thaw, Should, from their lofty summits, melt away Though yonder mountains, yon primeval cliffs, Should topple down, and a new deluge whelm Beneath its waves all living ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)

... a nightingale To thaw her glittering dream: No vine of Love her bosom gave, She drank no wine of Love, but grave She held them ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... let down through holes in the ice, captured them in fabulous numbers. On the heels of the retreating perch and cat-fish came the denizens of the salt water, and codfish were taken ninety miles above New York. When the February thaw came and brought up the volume of fresh water again, the sea brine was beaten back, and the fish, what were left of them, ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce

... feet deep, and in many places it drifts to fifteen or twenty feet deep. The ice on the lakes and rivers is sometimes above six feet thick; and the salt sea itself, in Hudson's Bay, is frozen over to a great extent. Nothing like a thaw takes place for many months at a time, and the frost is so intense that it is a matter of difficulty to prevent one's-self from being frost-bitten. The whole country, during these long winter months, appears white, ...
— Away in the Wilderness • R.M. Ballantyne

... leaders had hoped to fall upon the Mohawk villages and to destroy them before the tribesmen could either make preparations for defense or withdraw southward. Foiled in this plan, and afraid that an early thaw might make their route of return impossible, the French gave up their project and started home again. They had not managed to reach, much less to destroy, the villages ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro

... in the entry way) were often frozen solid and it was necessary to thaw out our mince pie as well as our bread and butter by putting it on the stove. I recall, vividly, gnawing, dog-like, at the mollified outside of a doughnut while still its frosty heart made ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... said, as if I had but just become aware of his identity, 'Why, how are you? I did not know that I had an acquaintance by my side.' He returned my warm greeting rather distantly; but there was too much at stake to mind this, and I determined to thaw him out, which I accomplished in due time. I found him a free sort of a man to talk, after he got going, and so I made myself quite familiar, and encouraged him to be outspoken. I knew he had heard something about my adventure at Mr. Willet's, and determined to get from him the ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur

... goin' right down to the new pulp mill," said Deacon Pettybone, one bitterly cold afternoon, when he came into Scattergood's store to thaw the icicles out ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland

... time they were such good friends, he and the boys, that he was down on all-fours playing horses with them, and did some quite new tricks which they thought extremely amusing; he then invited them to come for a drive the next day. After a thaw, there had been an unusually heavy fall of snow; the town was white and the state of the ...
— The Bridal March; One Day • Bjornstjerne Bjornson

... into the water, Shall strike that sharp and suddaine cold throughout, As it shall loose all vertue; and those Nimphs, Those treacherous Nimphs pull'd in Earine; Shall stand curl'd up, like Images of Ice; And never thaw! marke, never! a sharpe Justice. Or stay, a better! when the yeares at hottest, And that the Dog-starre fomes, and the streame boiles, And curles, and workes, and swells ready to sparkle; To fling a fellow with a Fever in, ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg

... it, bambina mia, if you can once awaken the dormant passion of such a man, you may produce effects wholly irresistible,—you may do anything with him! His love would be like a frozen torrent when the thaw comes! It would dash aside every opposition that could be offered it. The calculated and calculating tentatives, and coquettings and nibblings of your practised lovers, who have been in love a dozen times, would be as a trickling rill to an ocean ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope

... for ever gaze; No more the heart, that seat where Love resides, Each breath drawn quick and short, in fuller tides Life posting through the veins, each pulse on fire, And the whole body tingling with desire, Pants for those charms, which Virtue might engage, To break his vow, and thaw the frost of Age, Bidding each trembling nerve, each muscle strain, And giving pleasure which is almost pain. 330 Women are kept for nothing but the breed; For pleasure we must have a Ganymede, A fine, fresh Hylas, a delicious boy, To serve our purposes of beastly joy. Fairest of nymphs, where ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill

... understand. Conceded that we overheat our houses and our railroad trains and our hotel lobbies in America, nevertheless we do heat them. In winter their interiors are warmer and less damp than the outer air—which is more than can be said for the lands across the sea, where you have to go outdoors to thaw. ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb

... March the blizzard which had been raging a day or two moderated, and Roosevelt, hoping a thaw had set in, determined to set off after the thieves. They left Rowe as guard over the ranch and "the womenfolks," and with their unwieldy but water-tight craft, laden with two weeks' provision of flour, coffee, and bacon, started to ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn

... being ill at ease: He hated that He cannot change His cold, Nor cure its ache. 'Hath spied an icy fish That longed to 'scape the rock-stream where she lived, And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine 35 O' the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid, A crystal spike 'twixt two warm walls of wave; Only, she ever sickened, found repulse At the other kind of water, not her life, (Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o' the sun) 40 Flounced back ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... many older ones were lounging about the platform that ran the whole length of the store, for it was a very mild day in January, and the snow was rapidly leaving under the influence of what might be called a January thaw. ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin

... room," said Corentin, winking at Derville. "And do not be afraid of setting the chimney on fire; we want to thaw out the frost in ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac

... we have blood and a beat at the heart, yet it does not circulate freely, and Nature to every man is a double of himself, so that the universe seems also cold in extremities, as though there were too little original life to fill her veins. The poet is not fire on the hearth to thaw this numbness by foreign heat. He rubs and rouses us to activity, drags us to the open air, puts us on a glowing chase, provokes us to race and climb with him till we also are thoroughly alive. No other gift of his is worth much beside this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various

... voice addressed her: "Good morning, Hannah! I have been down to the bay this morning, you see, bleak as it is, and the fish bite well! See this fine rock fish! will you accept it from me? And oh, will you let me come in and thaw out my half-frozen fingers by your fire? or will you keep me standing out here in the cold?" ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth

... are Greeks, and hearts are hearts, And poetry is power, and Euthukles Had faith therein to, full-face, fling the same— Sudden, the ice-thaw! The assembled foe, Heaving and swaying with strange friendliness, Cried 'Reverence Elektra!'—cried . . . 'Let stand Athenai'! . ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne

... little in the report of Ormond to give encouragement to Charles; his last hopes were soon afterwards extinguished by the vigilance of Cromwell. The moment the thaw opened the ports of Holland, a squadron of English frigates swept the coast,[a] captured three and drove on shore two flutes destined for the expedition, and closely blockaded the harbour of Ostend.[2] The design was again postponed till the winter;[b] and the king resolved to solicit in person ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc

... Rain came, and thaw, followed by drying wind. The roads were in good order for the visitors to the Aristophanic comedy. The fifth day of Christmas was fixed for the performance. The theatre was brilliantly lighted, with spermaceti candles in glass chandeliers ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock

... seemed to him; and he could hear them moaning under the snow, which by some curious chance of circumstances was just below him. But the odd thing was that they did not seem to mind it much, only moaning piteously and impatiently, as if they were in a hurry for a thaw to come and set them free. Then one of them began to ring the bell for dinner; and another did the same; and Saxe felt that he ought to be doing something to take them food to eat—coarse bread, butter, cheese like Gruyere, full of holes, and a jug of milk, but he did ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn

... the trappers' stores, as they had calculated that they would not be able to hunt until out of Big Wind Valley and far up among the forests beyond. The frying-pan was now utilized for its proper work, while the pail was placed close enough to the fire to thaw its contents, without risking injury to it. Within an hour of breakfast being finished enough snow had been thawed to give the horses half a bucket of water each. In each pail a couple of pounds of flour had been stirred to help out what nourishment could be obtained from the leaves, ...
— In The Heart Of The Rockies • G. A. Henty

... or time. If I don't get this part of the work done before the frost comes, it's going to cost me more. It would mean using powder and making fires to thaw out the ground." ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss

... no effect upon her till deep in January, when the weather was engaged late one afternoon in keeping the promise of a January thaw in the form of the worst snow-storm of the winter. Then she came thumping with her umbrella-handle at his door as if, he divined, she were too stiff-handed or too package-laden to press the latch and let herself in, and she almost fell in, but saved ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells

... winds have their innings and bear balmier moisture from the Gulf Stream. He poked his head out and felt a soft air and warm rain. He had been hoping and half expecting that a change of weather would bring this condition—known as a January thaw. He went back to his ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day

... Russell began to gain some ascendancy, used to stand upon the watch for Vivian's appearance, and would run up the back stairs to Russell's apartment, to give him notice of it, and to be the first to tell the news. Lady Sarah—the icy lady Sarah herself—began to thaw; and every day, in the same phrase, she condescended to say to Mr. Vivian, that she "hoped the poll was going on as well as could be expected." It was, of course, reported, that Vivian was to succeed the late representative of the county in all its honours. In eight days he was ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth

... a saccharine liquid do not permit infiltration from interior to exterior; this phenomenon occurs only when cell and tissue are dead. It is necessary that the degree of cold should be sufficiently intense, or that a thaw take place, under certain conditions, to kill tissue of walls of said cells. An interesting fact is that when cells are broken through the action of freezing, it is not those containing sugar that are the first affected. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 832, December 12, 1891 • Various

... with one bound. She peeped over Gyp's shoulder. A thaw the day before had made the girls very anxious, but now a sparkling crust covered the snow and the early sun struck coldly ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott

... remarkable provision for this necessity. A fall of snow had covered the corn which had ripened in September, but was left standing in the fields by this circumstance. Thus hidden from the enemy, a sudden thaw revealed the treasure thus mercifully laid up for these patriot warriors. In addition to the corn, strong detachments made requisitions on the valleys of Pragela and Queyras, and so obtained supplies of butter, salt, wine, and other provisions. ...
— The Vaudois of Piedmont - A Visit to their Valleys • John Napper Worsfold

... Sunday afternoon, after days of rain and penetrating January thaw, when sun and air combined to cheat the earth with an illusion of spring. The buds and the mould breathed of April, and gay crowds flocked to the Park, to make the most of winter's temporary repulse. Just when things were at their gayest, with children's voices clamoring everywhere ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry

... if you wish it, you may break them in half like a rotten stick. The cattle are fed upon these fish during the winter months. But it has been proved—which is very strange—that if, after they have been frozen for twenty-four hours or more, you put these fish into water and gradually thaw them as you do the meat, they will recover and swim about again as well as ever. To proceed, ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat

... questioning, and almost appealing glance, but he made no advances. "He thinks I am angry because of his keen criticism of my picture. For the sake of my own pride, I must not let him think that I care so much about his opinion;" and Christine resolved to let some of the ice thaw that had formed between them. Moreover, in spite of herself, when she was thrown into his society, he greatly interested her. He seemed to have just what she had not. He could meet her on her own ground in matters of taste, ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe

... full of speculation. For his was not an imbecility either hereditary or constitutional. From the first there had appeared to me something abnormal in it—a suspension of intelligence only, a frost-bite in the brain that presently some April breath of memory might thaw out. This was not merely conjectural, of course. I had the story of his mental collapse from his mother in the early days of my sojourn in Bel-Oiseau; for it came to pass that a fitful caprice induced me to prolong ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes

... being unable any longer to keep up with Jones, called to him, and begged him a little to slacken his pace: with this he was the more ready to comply, as he had for some time lost the footsteps of the horses, which the thaw had enabled him to trace for several miles, and he was now upon a wide common, ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding

... the little girl's eyes fell upon it and she saw the runners, she thought of winter. Winter instantly reminded her of the muskrats in the slough below the bluff. And with that thought she could not resist starting down to see if they were busy after the thaw. ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates

... What you want to make the sap run is a good cold snap, followed by a thaw. That's just what we've been having. It's ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett

... aurora borealis flashes its splendors through the heavens. The cold is so great that old chroniclers, writing about the arctic regions, pretended that when the inhabitants tried to speak, their very words froze in coming out of their mouths, and did not thaw out till spring. It is not safe to believe all that old chroniclers tell us, and perhaps in this case they only tried, in an extravagant way, to make their readers understand how very cold it was in ...
— Harper's Young People, March 30, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... One by one, at first shyly, and then with growing confidence as deserters from the opposition grew more numerous, the old friends returned, to be followed by many new ones. The younger generation being won over, their elders began to thaw and to exchange kindly greetings, and now and then we were invited to see their hut or tent, or to sit down outside ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin

... hour the steady labour proceeded—plows ran; flat scrapers and wheeled fresnos followed, scooped up the earth, bore it to the banks above; horses tugged and strained; men toiled, pausing only to thaw their feet and hands at fires burning by the ditch or to drain great tin-cups of the scalding coffee that the cooks dipped from cans. And steadily the excavation widened and deepened hour by hour, the slope of the sides becoming apparent, the banks rising higher and the ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd

... bonds, issued in the days of eight and ten per cent interest, and gradually narrowing as they drop their semiannual slips of paper, which represent wishes to be realized, as the roses let fall their leaves in July, as the icicles melt away in the thaw ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... fulfilled on the morrow. Already over the green-brown, soaking grass one or two pioneer grackle were walking busily about; and somewhere in a near tree the first robin chirked and chirped and fussed in its loud and familiar fashion, only partly pleased to find himself in the gray thaw of the scarcely comfortable ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers

... a bright morning, wind northwest and warm enough to begin to thaw by eight o'clock, the sugar-making utensils—pans, kettles, spiles, hogsheads—were loaded upon the sled and taken to the woods, and by ten o'clock the trees began to feel the cruel ax and gouge once more. It usually fell to my part to carry the pans and spiles for one of ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs

... was chiefly occupied by the children, to whom their father was eager to show all that he had admired when little older than they were, thus displaying a perfect and minute recollection and affection for the place, which much gratified Honora. The little girl began to thaw somewhat under the influence of amusement, but there was still a curious ungraciousness towards all attentions. She required those of her father as a right, but shook off all others in a manner which might be either shyness or independence; but as she was a pretty and naturally ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... of meat that had been boiled in it, and the meal tasted delicious after nearly a week on black bread, an occasional salt fish and dubious eggs. Our own provisions were so hopelessly frozen that we seldom wasted the time necessary to thaw them ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt

... be sweet to thee, 65 Whether the summer clothe the general earth With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall 70 Heard only in the trances of the blast, Or if the secret ministry of frost Shall hang them up in silent icicles, Quietly ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... felt in them to-day," sighed Colville, "I should think the churches would begin to thaw out about the middle of May. But if one goes well wrapped up in furs, and has a friend along to rouse him and keep him walking when he is about to fall into that lethargy which precedes death by freezing, I think they may be visited even now with safety. Have you been in Santa Maria ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells

... feet above the sea, just as it happened, and with the steep cliff above us jagged with great masses of rock that looked as if they were always ready to fall rolling and crashing till they got to the broken edge, when they would leap right down into the sea. Sometimes they did, but only when a thaw came after a severe frost. There was none of that sort of thing though at midsummer, and the overhanging rocks did not trouble us as we scampered along in the bright elastic air, feeling as if we were so happy that we ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn

... obliged to do it in Lower Canada. Fresh mutton, pork, turkeys, geese, fowls, and even fish, all stiff and hard as stone, are packed in boxes and stowed away in a shed till wanted. The only precaution needful is to bring out the meat into the kitchen a few days before use, that it may have time to thaw. Yet I can tell you that winter is our merriest time; for snow, the great leveller, has made all the roads, even the most rickety corduroy, smooth as a bowling-green; consequently sleighing and toboggin parties without end are ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe

... sun—usually keeps this thin covering on the ground all winter so dry, that the deerskin moccasins, which many persons habitually wear, are scarcely moistened the season through. There are occasional upward oscillations of temperature; and, once in a series of years, a thaw in January or February; but these are rare occurrences. Rain has not fallen in winter but once in many years. The whole winter is a radiant and joyous band of sunny days and starlight nights. This inaugurates the carnival season when sleighing and merrymaking parties in both town and country ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill

... cold look which had frozen his features when she seized the revolver in his hand; would it still sit there, too distant and detached to be even scornful? Would she have it to break down; must she, with the fire of her own affection, thaw out an entrance through his icy aloofness? What cost of humiliation would be the price, and would even any price be accepted? She could not know; she could only hope and pray and ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead

... had been trying to make conversation with that strangely crotchety man, but had completely failed. So, being somewhat embarrassed, he asked him abruptly, "Have you read my 'Snob Papers' in Punch?" Borrow seemed to thaw. "In Punch," he repeated sweetly. "It is a periodical I never look at." This was as bad as the Oxford University magnate when Thackeray called upon him in 1857 in reference to his lecturing-tour and mentioned his connection with Punch, the ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann

... be true, Nor shall my will rebellious prove. Amid the curls of golden hair That wave those beauteous temples round, Cupid spread craftily the snare With which my captive heart he bound: And from those eyes he caught the ray Which thaw'd the ice that fenced my breast, Chasing all other thoughts away, With brightness suddenly imprest. But now that hair of sunny gleam, Ah me! is ravish'd from my sight; Those beauteous eyes withdraw their beam, And change to sadness ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... Martian phenomena.[991] Changes of the hues associated respectively with land and water accompanied in lower latitudes, and were thought to be occasioned by floods ensuing upon this rapid antarctic thaw. It is true that scarcity of moisture would account for the scantiness and transitoriness of snowy deposits easily liquefied because thinly spread. But we might expect to see the whole wintry hemisphere, at any rate, frost-bound, since the sun radiates less than half as much heat on Mars ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... variations of weather on the Plateau. When we first arrived in March the snow was in full thaw, and every road a sunlit, rushing torrent. We climbed about at that time in gum boots. Later it snowed again heavily and often. Sometimes for several days running we were enveloped in a thick mist, and then suddenly it would clear away. Once, I remember, ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton

... funeral train had reached the top of the altitude. Ralph had walked over the more rugged parts of the pass, and had satisfied himself that there was no danger to be apprehended on this score. The ghyll was swollen by the thaw. The waters fell heavily over the great stones, and sent up clouds of spray, which were quickly dissipated by the wind. Huge hillocks of yellow foam gathered in every sheltered covelet. The roar of the cataract ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine

... through the smaller children commenced to thaw out and lose their shyness, and talk. How they did talk! Myron said nothing (but that was expected of Myron). When at last Rosanna was tipping up the second thermos bottle to see if there was a drop of tea left, and they ...
— The Girl Scouts at Home - or Rosanna's Beautiful Day • Katherine Keene Galt

... blocked up in the memory of the oldest person, or that they ever heard of. I understand the road is ten feet deep with snow from this to Hamilton. I have had it cut through once, but this third fall makes an attempt impossible. Heaven only knows when the road will be open, nothing but a thaw can do it—it is ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde

... then to bring him a bulletin, now dozing drearily in his library downstairs. When the first gleams of the dawn stole in at the window he went out upon the terrace in the misty chill morning, all damp and miserable, with the trees standing about like ghosts. There was a dripping thaw after a frost, and the air was raw and the prospect dismal; but even that was less wretched than the glimmer of the shaded lights, the muffled whispering and stealthy footsteps indoors. He took ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant

... most deeply," she said, in a tone of real distress. "Won't you, when you come to part, take his hand for my sake, and let a little of the ice thaw?" ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe

... seem always a kind of nightmare to me. I am going to take my writing-desk and go down to Florida to F——'s plantation, where we have now a home, and abide there until the heroic agony of betweenity, the freeze and thaw of winter, is over, and then I doubt not I can write my three hours a day. Meanwhile, I have a pretty good pile of manuscript.... The letters I have got about blossoming roses and loungers in linen coats, while we have been frozen and snowed up, have made my very soul long to be away. Cold ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields

... fully two minutes after rising before Lieut. Greely could speak, so great was the outburst of enthusiasm which greeted him. He remarked that he was surprised to learn that the ground did not thaw lower at Lieut. Ray's station, which was ten degrees farther south than his own, where the ground thawed to a much greater depth—namely, twenty to thirty feet. In regard to an open polar sea, he differed from Lieut. Ray. He did not believe there was a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various

... over smart enough, an' Nell an' her new husband was mighty well continted with one another, for it was too soon for her to begin to regulate him the way she used with poor Jim Soolivan, so they wor comfortable enough; but this was too good to last, for the thaw kem an', an' you may be sure Jim Soolivan didn't lose a minute's time as soon as the heavy dhrift iv snow was melted enough between him and home to let him pass, for he didn't hear a word iv news from home sinst he lift it, by rason that no one, good nor bad, could thravel at ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... have been left to the chances of the local drivers and their vehicles. These were reduced to a single carryall and a frowsy horse whose rough winter coat recalled the aspect of his species in the period following the glacial epoch. The mud, as of a world-thaw, encrusted the wheels ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... still retains Impression of the feeling in his dream; E'en such am I: for all the vision dies, As 't were, away; and yet the sense of sweet, That sprang from it, still trickles in my heart. Thus in the sun-thaw is the snow unseal'd; Thus in the winds on flitting leaves was lost The Sybil's sentence. O eternal beam! (Whose height what reach of mortal thought may soar?) Yield me again some little particle Of what thou then ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri

... much alike, that cursory observation can scarcely detect a single feature of variety. The winter of more temperate climates, and even in some of no slight severity, is occasionally diversified by a thaw, which at once gives variety and comparative cheerfulness to the prospect. But here, when once the earth is covered, all is dreary, monotonous whiteness—not merely for days or weeks, but for more than half a year together. ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry

... by the great lake basins in the south, are usually punctual in arrival, gradual in growth, and beneficial in operation. No lakes are interposed between the mountain torrents of the upper basis of the Tigris and the Euphrates and their lower courses. Hence, heavy rain, or an unusually rapid thaw in the uplands, gives rise to the sudden irruption of a vast volume of water which not even the rapid Tigris, still less its more sluggish companion, can carry off in time to prevent violent and dangerous overflows. ...
— Hasisadra's Adventure - Essay #7 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley

... the spring, he had stayed too long in the woods. The trapping had been good and he had hated to leave while the skins were heaping up. At last a real thaw came and he had to start for Escoumains. He was about sixty miles north of here, he said, and he rushed along with his dogs wallowing in the snow at every step. When he came to the Port Neuf River, he found the ice just ready to go ...
— Bob Hunt in Canada • George W. Orton

... pillowcases; at the dull photographs of the landlady's hideous husband and children enshrined on the mantelshelf; looked at the abomination of desolation surrounding him until his soul sickened and cried out like a child's for something more like home. It was as if a spring thaw had melted his ice-bound heart, and on the crest of a wave it was drifting out into the milder waters of some unknown sea. He could have laid his head in the kind lap of a woman and cried: "Comfort me! Give me companionship or ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... moment with the ferocity of a hundred storms, are ripped and torn like hills of clay. The frosted scale of the granite, the desperate root of the cedar, the poised nest of the eagle, the clutch of the crannied vine, the split and start of the mountainside, are all as one before the June thaw. At its height Little Crawling Stone, with a head of forty feet, is a choking flood of rock. Mountains, torn and bleeding, vomit bowlders of thirty, sixty, a hundred tons like pebbles upon the valley. Even there they find no permanent resting-place. Each ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman

... one more thing," the alien was saying. Her voice had gained a wonderful fluency amid the general thaw. "I didn't dare to ask before, but if we thought of me then—I have always hoped he left some message for me ... ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various

... We started the right time. Any ordinary year we could have gone right through on the ice. But from the very day we left the landing we were in trouble. When we wasn't broke down we was looking for lost horses. When we wasn't held up by a blizzard we was half drowned in a thaw! ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner

... her welcome. Olivia felt the hospitality; I felt the frigidity. Julia called her "Mrs. Dobree." It was the first time she had been addressed by that name; and her blush and smile were exquisite to me, but they did not thaw Julia in the least. I began to fear that there would be between them that strange, uncomfortable, east-wind coolness, which so often exists between the two women ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton

... now a stationary thread of silver, spell-bound by the enchaining frost; and icicles, or, as old-fashioned people call them, aglets, of three or four feet long, ornament the overhanging ledges, prone to fall to the beach—far, far below—when a thaw releases them from their present stations. But the air is so very keen that nothing but the briskness of our walk, and the enlivenment of an occasional spell of snow-balling, in which the seniors are tempted to join the juniors, prevent our stagnating into 'pellucid pillars' ourselves. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various

... the first day of the January thaw. The snow lay deep upon the housetops, but was rapidly dissolving into millions of water-drops, which sparkled downward through the sunshine with the noise of a summer shower beneath the eaves. Along the street the trodden snow was as hard and solid as a pavement of white ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... there was nothing to do but wait patiently for the snow to cease falling and for the thaw. But how intolerable it was; for the weather continued bitterly cold for many days, and the whole country was white. During those hungry days even that poor comfort of sleeping or dozing away the time was denied him, for the danger of discovery was ever present ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson

... re-opened, and the great man be induced by philanthropic motives, and an assured sum raised by voluntary subscriptions, to gratify the whole town, as he had gratified its selected intellect? Mr. Williams, in a state of charitable thaw, now softest of the soft, like most hard men when once softened, suggested this idea to the Mayor. The Mayor said evasively that he would think of it, and that he intended to pay his respects to Mr. Chapman before he returned home, that very night: ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... the one great Frenchman whom Americans most honor at home, was called the Lafayette Escadrille. Some of its members had become famous at their profession. Names like those of Lufbery, Thaw, McConnell, Chapman, Prince, Rockwell, Hill, Rumsey, Johnson, Balsley and others became household words among readers of the great dailies in ...
— Air Service Boys Over The Enemy's Lines - The German Spy's Secret • Charles Amory Beach

... have been about the end of February—Father Meadow-Mouse looked out of the window and saw that there had been quite a thaw during the night. ...
— Grasshopper Green and the Meadow Mice • John Rae

... believe it to be a good thing; and I hope you will find something in it to like; it touches, in a dry enough manner, upon most things under heaven, and if you like me, I think you ought to like this intellectual—no, I withdraw the word—this artistic dog of mine. Thaw—thaw—thaw, up here; and farewell skating, and farewell the clear dry air and the wide, bright, white snow-surface, and all that was ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... track and horses in perfect condition, well mounted, the fastest one is apt to win. In a race that lasts for over three days and nights, however, through the roughest sort of country, in weather that may range from a thaw to a blizzard, and with fifteen or twenty dogs to manage, the Luck of the Trail is an enormous factor. One team may run into a storm, and be delayed for hours, that another may escape entirely; and a trivial accident may put the best team and driver entirely ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling

... followed by the beginning of a thaw, interrupted by a sudden and very sharp cold spell, when the mercury went down to zero and the water from the melting snow turned to ice. Richmond was encased in a sheath of gleaming white. The cold wintry sun was reflected from roofs of ice, the streets were covered ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler

... greater, was more acknowledged and more widely known from the number of persons who were astonished at beholding it. In a certain year, it happened that such a quantity of snow had fallen from heaven, so great was the extent of the thaw when the sun melted it, that the water covered all the ground, and grew to the dimensions of a lake, which, spreading into the village, inundated all the houses, putting even that of Patrick in the greatest danger. But he, being then only ten ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca

... the East winds. A continual ringing in my brain of bells jangled, or The Spheres touchd by some raw Angel. It is not George 3 trying the 100th psalm? I get my music for nothing. But the weather seems to be softening, and will thaw my stunnings. Coleridge writing to me a week or two since begins his note—"Summer has set in with its usual Severity." A cold Summer is all I know of disagreeable in cold. I do not mind the utmost rigour ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... Roland's relations with his fellow-servants and his mistress, which have nothing whatever to do with the future story; and the lady of Avenel herself disappears after the first volume, "like a snaw-wreath when it's thaw, Jeanie." The public has for itself pronounced on the "Monastery," though as much too harshly as it has foolishly praised the horrors of "Ravenswood" and the nonsense of "Ivanhoe"; because the modern public finds in the torture and adventure ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... built by our forest-rangers who help the timber jacks build these roads. You see, while frost holds good the heaviest tree trunks can be readily moved over icy swamp bottoms, but in the spring, when thaw and freshets begin, the bottoms are more like a marsh, or shallow lake, than anything else I know of. Then these corduroy roads are a make-shift for hard ground," explained Polly, while Noddy started to clip-clop ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... handiwork so beautiful and illegant, though his own was in such brutheen.* Even his barn to wrack; and he was obliged to thrash his oats in the open air when ther would be a frost, and he used to lose one-third of it; and if there came a thaw, 'twould almost brake ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton

... much greater than in hot climates, and the body is also cooled by the evaporation of water in the form of aqueous vapor. Moist air is a better conductor of heat than dry air, which accounts for much of the discomfort felt in winter when a thaw takes place as compared with the feeling of elasticity when the air is dry. In cold weather, therefore, moist air cools down the skin and lungs more rapidly than dry air, and colds consequently result. London fogs are injurious, not only on account of the various vapors ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various

... Agafea Mihalovna, it won't mildew, even though our ice has begun to thaw already, so that we've no cool cellar to store it," said Kitty, at once divining her husband's motive, and addressing the old housekeeper with the same feeling; "but your pickle's so good, that mamma says she ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy

... severe, and the thaw did not set in quickly. Now, one Sunday, on their way to mass, the farmers noticed a great flight of crows, who were whirling endlessly above the open field, and then, like a shower of black rain, descended in a heap at the same spot, ever ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant

... Paris—ah! you don't know Paris—there is a glorious ferment in society in which the dregs are often uppermost! I came here at the Peace, and here have I resided the greater part of each year ever since. The vast masses of energy and life, broken up by the great thaw of the Imperial system, floating along the tide, are terrible icebergs for the vessel of the state. Some think Napoleonism over—its effects are only begun. Society is shattered from one end to the other, and I laugh at the little rivets by which they ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... or two little spots or flecks in the iris. Hers was an impassive, emotionless face; yet she gave a distinct impression of feeling, emotion, passion held in check; it was as if her feelings had been frozen. But suppose a spring thaw should set in—what then? Would there be just a calm brook flowing underneath placid willows, or a tempestuous torrent sweeping all before ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler

... of the last few days had given place to a thaw. The melting ice in the river was streaked in strange curves, and the bare trees along the straight heights of the Palisades were blurred by a faint bluish mist, out of which white lights and yellow ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller

... clammy with the sweat of the thaw; they gave out a sour, sickly smell. Grey smears of damp dulled the polished ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair

... and he began crawling along the gutter through the trickling thaw, pressing himself against the wall. They continued along it for some minutes. He seemed to pass through a hundred stages of misery, to pass minute after minute through a hundred degrees of cold, damp, and exhaustion. In a little while he ceased to feel ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells

... reserved habits," he says, "it would take a great deal longer to become intimate here than to thaw the Baltic. I have only to 'knock that it shall be opened to me,' but that is just what I hate to do. . . . 'Man delights not me, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... night, or rather for the day, because it is considered better to travel at night and sleep at day, on account of the glare of the sun on the snow. We used to travel journeys of about ten hours, and then encamp, light our spirits-of-wine, put our kettle on it to thaw our snow-water, and after we had had our supper—just a piece of pemmican and a glass of water—we were glad to smoke our pipes and turn into bed. The first thing we did, after pitching the tent, was to lay a sort of macintosh covering over the snow; on this a piece of buffalo robe was stretched. ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton

... good deal in error, but he also saw that he was sincere in his conviction; so that the young doctor was tolerantly amused at the lofty air of the young lawyer, without the slightest feeling of real resentment. He made one or two straightforward, friendly efforts to thaw the ice of William Pressley's manner. His own was naturally frank and cordial. He always wished to be liked, which is the natural wish of every truly kind nature. And then, above and beyond this, was the right-minded lover's instinctive desire to secure the ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks

... snow-boots. Fitz-Jones and I had a little disagreement, not long ago, about the sole possession of a servant-maid. Since then there has been a coolness. Curiously enough, the hideous frost that raged at the moment (the thermometer stood at twenty-five degrees in the henhouse) seemed to thaw Fitz-Jones. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various

... With the early thaw came change. My friends moved away to Buffalo, and I was left for two months the sole occupant of the Romer homestead. My last job gave out about that time, and a wheelbarrow express which I established between Dexter-ville ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis

... surface, some brown sparrows and a robin were hopping across the snow. Not a breath stirred the laden branches, though they drooped under their snowy festoons. "I dare say the ice would be right enough for a little while, but the air feels milder, and there is danger of a thaw." ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... led a life of anxious suspense. He was always going over this interview, always thinking of the piles of wood; and, whenever he rode out, his horse's head was turned to the river, that he might watch the progress of the thaw. ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag

... the same strain. Mavis found herself greatly enjoying the thinly veiled compliments which he paid her. It was the first time since she had grown up that she had spoken to a smart man, who was obviously a gentleman. If this were not enough to thaw her habitual reserve, there was something strangely familiar in the young man's face and manner; it almost seemed to Mavis as if she were talking with a very old friend or acquaintance, which was enough to justify the ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte

... under the shadow of the dawn, was conscious of all this. The land was wrapped in the intensest quiet; the very crunch of his snowshoes seemed a profanation, though he trod lightly. When he had ascended the Point, he paused and gazed back. Already the thaw had commenced; down the still white face of the country, which lay at his feet like a shrouded corpse, the tears had begun to trinkle, though the eyes were tranquil and fast shut; the sight was as astounding to him as if a man six months dead should be seen to stir ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson

... marriage amongst the Khasis from a religious point of view. Shadwell has said that marriage amongst the Khasis "is purely a civil contract." This statement is not correct, for there is an elaborate religious ceremony at which God the creator, U'lei thaw briew man briew, the god or goddess of the State, U or ka'lei Synshar, and, what is probably more important, the ancestress and ancestor of the clan, Ka Iawbei-tymmen and U Thawlang, are invoked. There are three marriage ceremonies prevalent amongst ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon

... snow. They gave him a drink of hot tea flavoured with whiskey—or perhaps it was a drink of whiskey with a little hot tea in it—and then, as his senses began to return to him, they rolled him in a blanket and left him on a sofa to thaw out gradually, while they went ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke

... blow, one feels the foundations of his belief breaking up. This is only another way of saying that it is more difficult, if it be not impossible, to freeze out orthodoxy, or any fixed notion, than it is to thaw it out; though it is a mere fancy to suppose that this is the reason why the martyrs, of all creeds, were burned at the stake. There is said to be a great relaxation in New England of the ancient strictness in the direction of toleration of opinion, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... that after the Russian campaign the remains of our poor army were quartered along the western bank of the Elbe, where they might thaw their frozen blood and try, with the help of the good German beer, to put a little between their skin and their bones. There were some things which we could not hope to regain, for I daresay that three large commissariat fourgons would not have sufficed to carry the fingers and the toes which the ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle

... March there were slight signs of a thaw, the snow being glazed over in the evening, as if the sun had had some effect on it. We also felt a sensible improvement in the temperature, and were soon able not only to wash our clothes, but to dry them ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston

... the conditions that require the airing. For instance a thaw in the winter, or a rainy spell. Again in the summer a long rainy spell. In these cases I open up the box, maybe leave it a couple ...
— Northern Nut Growers Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-First Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association

... down the river, so the mills had no work to do, for the logs on hand at the beginning of the cold snap had been sawed into long rough planks, and piled in the lumber-yards, ready to be rafted as soon as the thaw came. The cold, still air was sweet with the fragrance of fresh pine boards, and the ground about the mills was covered with sawdust, so that footsteps fell as silently as though on velvet, instead of ringing ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland

... Sometimes they are covered with earth or stones, sometimes entirely uncovered. Some antiquaries maintain that they were always uncovered, as we see them now; others assert that they have been stripped by the action of wind and rain, and snow, frost, and thaw, until all the earth placed around them has been removed. Possibly fashions changed then as now; and it may console some of us that there was no uniformity of ritual even in prehistoric Britain. Dolmens contain no bronze ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield









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