"Flinty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... acting of sacrifice in your belle cousine to-night! Pasta herself could not do it better. There is a look of 'Oh, ye just gods! what a victim am I!' and with those upturned eyes so charming! Well, and seriously it is a sad sacrifice. Fathers have flinty hearts by parental prescription; but husbands—petit Bossus especially—should have mercy for their own sakes; they should not strain ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... The instinct of a dumb beast is unexplainable yet unerring. The owner of a horse may choose a range that seems perfect in every appointment, but the animal will spurn the human selection and take up his abode on some flinty hills, and there thrive like a garden plant. Cattle, especially steers, locate slowly, and a good summer's rest usually fortifies them with an inward coat of tallow and an outward one of furry robe, against the wintry storms. I was anxious to get ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... hard for Jasper that harvest from the clear cold dawning until long after the broad red moon swung up above the prairie. Day by day the tinkling knives of the binders rasped through the flinty stems, and the tossing wooden arms caught up the tall wheat that went down before them and piled it in golden sheaves upon the prairie. This one machine has done great things for the Western Dominion, for without it when wheat ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... insinuating of pieces of stone, splinters of wood, etc., between the claws of the hoof, or in the wearing, splitting, or bruising of the horn, and consequent abrasion of the sensible foot; by walking for an undue length of time, or a long distance upon gravelly or flinty roads, or other hard and eroding surfaces. It is sometimes ascribed, indeed, to a wet state of the pasture; but moisture merely predisposes to it, by softening the hoof and diminishing its power of ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... and hilly; and in the west, hilly and mountainous. There are some prairies, some thickly timbered land, some heavy timbered. The country is generally a timbered country. Some parts are sandy, some rocky, and some flinty. ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... can't stand that young fellow Girdlestone. I'll have to chuck him up. He's such a cold-blooded, flinty-hearted, calculating sort of a chap, that—" The remainder of the major's sentence was lost in the ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and barges low caste humanity, driven by the lash to tortured effort, swarmed and sweated and groaned that some high priest or royal personage might in mummied grandeur await his soul's return to its foul, flinty, wrinkled and desolate home. Near, floating northward with the tide, was a great obelisk of granite weighing more than forty tons, held upon the surface by parallel rafts of buoyant logs and ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... But how delightful to reflect, that uncultured barbarism should have produced for us so worthy[135] a fellow-citizen with the saints and member of the household of God.[136] He who brings honey out of the rock and oil out of the flinty rock[137] Himself did this. His parents,[138] however, were great both by descent and in power, like unto the name of the great men that are in the earth.[139] Moreover his mother,[140] more noble in mind than in blood, took pains, in the very beginning of his ways,[141] to show to ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... little bark she view'd, Moor'd beside the flinty steep; And now, upon the foamy flood, The tranquil breezes seemed to sleep. The moon arose; her silver ray Seem'd on the ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... no doubt," said Barnard in a slow, positive manner, "that the decision to substitute a space race between us as a means of awarding the contract was well considered by the Solar Council." He turned and shot Brett a flinty look. "And under the circumstances, I, for one, accept their decision." He ...
— Treachery in Outer Space • Carey Rockwell and Louis Glanzman
... have leapt In transport from my flinty couch, to welcome The thunder as it burst upon my roof, And beckon'd to the lightning, as it flash'd And ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... He pours To clay-built cisterns, or to lead-lined towers; Fresh through a thousand pipes the wave distils, And thirsty cities drink the exuberant rills.— 275 There the vast mill-stone with inebriate whirl On trembling floors his forceful fingers twirl. Whose flinty teeth the golden harvests grind, Feast without blood! and ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... not mounted half a mile higher when, coming to a flinty piece of road, the poor devil lost a second shoe, and from off his other forefoot. I then got out of the chaise in good earnest, and seeing a house about a quarter of a mile to the left hand, with a great deal to do I prevailed upon the postilion to turn ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... the northwest, and possibly over a hundred miles distant. Thus freed from any restraint, we held a due northward course for several days, or until we encountered some rocky country. Water was plentiful and grass fairly good, but those flinty hills must be avoided or sorefooted beeves would be the result. I had seen trails of blood left by cattle from sandy countries on encountering rock, and now the feet of ours were a second consideration to their stomachs. But long before the herd reached ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... cried Millie, twisting her fingers. "I don't want any supper—I'm going crazy, I think! Oh, what a hard, flinty, unfeeling heart you must have, ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... and buried seven years before he thought of now; she was the second woman he had known, his mother the first. And from the cold precipice of his mother he had fled into the flinty fields of Moyra Dolan.... He felt a little sorry for the boy he was seven years before—so young, so gallant, so wrong.... He had thought that all there was in life was a home to return to, a wife, children.... He had wanted an acre of land in the sun, where all the world was his. When one was young, ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... these rocks and dug these valleys? One would almost as soon expect the wings and feet of the birds to wear away the forests they flit through. The wings of time are feathered also, and as they brush against the granite or the flinty sandstone no visible particle is removed while you watch and wait. Come back in a thousand years, and you note no change, save in the covering of trees and verdure. Return in ten thousand, and you would probably find the hills carrying ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... there was a revealer of more merit, as she so well and bitterly knew. He could raise the veil—a dark and dangerous necromancer, with a flinty heart and a hand that had waited long to strike. Had it struck ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... half of them exprest in the Figure, there were several great and deep scratches, or furrows, such as gh and ik, which made the surface yet more rugged, caus'd perhaps by some small Dust casually falling on the Hone, or some harder or more flinty part of the Hone it self. The other part of the Razor ll, which is polish'd on a grinding-stone, appear'd much rougher then the other, looking almost like a plow'd field, with many parallels, ridges, and furrows, and a cloddy, as 'twere, or an uneven surface: nor shall we wonder at the roughnesses ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... I stayed my hand, almost persuaded to have faith in it still. I began multiplying excuses for Quarriar, figuring him as misled by his neighbours, more skilled than he in playing upon philanthropic heart-strings; he had been told, doubtless, that two daughters made no impression upon the flinty heart of bureaucratic charity, that in order to soften it one must 'increase and multiply.' He had got himself into a network of falsehood from which, though his better nature recoiled, he had been unable ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... teachers of mankind How from the least of things the mightiest grow, What marvel jealous Nature made thee blind, Lest man should learn what angels long to know? Thou in the flinty rock, the river's flow, In the thick-moted sunbeam's sifted light Hast trained thy downward-pointed tube to show Worlds within worlds unveiled to mortal sight, Even as the patient watchers of the night,— The cyclope gleaners of ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Waverley's mind as he paced his horse slowly through the rugged and flinty street of Tully-Veolan, interrupted only in his meditations by the occasional caprioles which his charger exhibited at the reiterated assaults of those canine Cossacks, the COLLIES before mentioned. The village ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... I!—and at every court, from the court of Cain in Mesopotamia to the court of Victoria in this present, flinty-hearted London; only the truth is, as I have travelled I have changed my name. Bless you, half the Proverbs given to Solomon are mine. What I have lost by keeping company with kings, not even Joseph ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 24, 1841 • Various
... were flinty, thorny, Were I sure it led to Thee, Could I pass one day forlornly, Home and rest so ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... follow each other in ceaseless succession in this world. We cannot escape suffering while in the body. But we can receive it with a faith that robs it of its terror, and extracts from it richest blessing; from the flinty rock will gush forth living waters, and the carcase of the lion will furnish ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... eyes, and described the Babylonian influences by which I had sought to seduce him. He had gone, she said, at the call of duty to accomplish what good he might, but never in the whole course of his professional experience had his words fallen on a more flinty and barren soil. And then, as if it were not enough to flaunt in the face of my old master the extravagances most hostile to the theories of which he was the advocate, I had sought to tempt him with money to become a perpetual presence at ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... on a fence, twisted the awful rope round the branch of a tree, and then, coiling it about his neck, determined that this day should be a killing day; vainly supposing, in the disordered state of his mind, that the flinty-hearted Molly would probably esteem her 'dear' (like venison) the better for being hung! Mystically muttering 'adoo!' three times, in the most pathetic tone, he swung off and in an instant came to his ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... league, and they reminded me too forcibly of the rapid flight of the summer days by their haste—their unnecessary haste, as I thought—in passing from the flower to the seed. A sprig of lithosperm stood like a little tree laden with Dead Sea fruit, for the naked seeds clung hard and flinty where the flowers had been. The glaucium, although still blooming, had put forth horns nine inches long, and the wild barley, so lately green, was now a brown fringe along the dusty road. And thus all these familiar forms of vegetable ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... wear and tear. As those of the front row are broken or worn down, the next succeeding row occupies the frontal position. The teeth are deeply set in the bony base of the inverted palate, or rather obtrude but slightly above the surface, their office being to break down and grind to powder flinty food. ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... wrapt in a woman's hide! How could'st thou drain the life-blood of the child, To bid the father wipe his eyes withal, And yet be seen to bear a woman's face? Women are soft, mild, pitiful and flexible; Thou—stern, obdurate, flinty, rough, remorseless. Third part of ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... the late Prince of Prussia's,—Goltz, Winterfeld, Ziethen, Schmettau and others? Winterfeld and the Prince are both dead; Schmettau is fallen into disaster; Goltz is still in good esteem with the King. A stalwart, swift, flinty kind of man, to judge by the Portraits of him; considerable obstinacy, of a tacitly intelligent kind, in that steady eye, in that droop of the eyebrows towards the strong cheek-bones; plenty of sleeping fire in ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... observe a series or a progress in those forming and destroying operations, by which, on the one hand, the flinty bodies, already formed in the mineral region, were again destroyed, in being diminished by their mutual attrition; and, on the other hand, those diminished bodies were again consolidated into one mass of flinty stone, ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... the duke, "if you do not relent and become softer than a ripe fig, you finger no government. It were good indeed, that I should send my islanders a cruel flinty-hearted governor; one who relents not at the tears of afflicted damsels, nor at the entreaties of wise, awful, and ancient enchanters, and sages. In fine, Sancho, either you must whip yourself, or let others whip you, or be ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... toboggans were hitched behind the Mackenzie River dogs, and while 'Merican Joe plodded ahead, Connie had all he could do at the tail rope. An hour later the wind suddenly changed and came roaring out of the north. The whole sky became overcast and stinging particles of flinty snow were driven against their faces. The storm increased in fury. The stinging particles changed to dry, powdery snow dust that whirled and eddied about them so thickly that Connie could not see the dogs from ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... a flinty race. We never forgive insults; never condone wrongs; and expecting loyalty in our own blood, we cannot live long enough to pardon its treachery. Once, I made an idol of my beautiful, graceful, high-bred girl; but she stabbed ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... built Studebaker will stand a lot of this kind of banging, but it is not wholly indestructible. So it happened that half-way down the hill the left hind axle snapped at the hub. Thereupon some two hundred dozen ears of early green-corn were strewn along the flinty face of the highway, while Uncle Enoch was hurled, seat and all, accompanied by four dozen eggs and ten pounds of Aunt Henrietta's ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... the world; And mounted Sleipner, and in darkness rode To Asgard. And the stars came out in heaven, High over Asgard, to light home the King. But fiercely Odin gallop'd, moved in heart; And swift to Asgard, to the gate, he came. And terribly the hoofs of Sleipner rang Along the flinty floor of Asgard streets, And the Gods trembled on their golden beds Hearing the wrathful Father coming home— For dread, for like a whirlwind, Odin came. And to Valhalla's gate he rode, and left Sleipner; and Sleipner went to his own stall; And in Valhalla Odin laid him down. But ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... in this flame!" Dost thou not hear them say, "Send one from the dead, to prevent my father, my brother, my father's house, from coming to this place of torment!" Shall not these mournful groans pierce thy flinty heart? Wilt thou stop thine ears and shut thine eyes? And wilt thou NOT regard? Take warning, and stop thy journey before it be too late. Wilt thou he like the silly fly, that is not quiet unless she be either entangled in the spider's ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... not reckoned with the flinty core which lay beneath her fair and delicate seeming. Her frugality of utterance, which charmed and chained him, really implied no reserve. She did not speak, because she had nothing to say, did not reveal herself, because she knew of no mystery. She was at once ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... was the condition of things when the Latest Arrival appeared on the scene, fresh from head-quarters, some ninety miles northwest and two thousand feet higher. He had come late the previous afternoon. He had skated down the flinty scarp of Misery Hill, with the wheels of his buckboard locked, and hauled up at the adjutant's in a cloud of dust and misapprehension, with barely time for a bath and a shave before dinner. He was a new aide-de-camp ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... what you've been saying all along. But you're looking at the thing by and large, and I'm figuring on the flinty details. For example: you'll admit that we can't work to any advantage west of the mountains until we have made a standard gauge out of the Plug Mountain branch. How much time have you been allowing ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... who smelt metals found that out long enough ago, and it is the same with making glass. If you expose some minerals separately to great heat they merely become powder; but if you combine them—say flinty sand with soda or potash—they run together and become like molten metal. I believe if ironstone and limestone are mixed, the ironstone becomes fluid, so that it can be cast like a metal—in fact becomes the ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... the like of which was never pressed from purple grapes, meat which cattle on a thousand hills never furnished, and fruit no man ever gathered in royal gardens— the fruit of the Spirit. You will find it a lamp unto your feet and a light unto your path, a hammer for breaking the flinty rocks by the way, a fire that will burn out the stain of sin, and warm benumbed fingers for ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... done." Ronny's gray eyes grew flinty. "Those particular girls took an unusually bold stand against her. I am surprised that they did not attempt to haze her ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... way from her tongue's tip, with her chin lifted up; and sending the vowels on a prolonged hushed breath, that seemed to print them on the hearing far more distinctly than a volume of sound. Wilfrid fell back on monosyllables. He could not bring his mouth to utter flinty negatives, so it appeared that he assented; and then his better nature abused him for deluding her. He grew utterly ashamed of his aimless selfish double-dealing. "Can it be?" he questioned his own mind, and listened greedily ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and they were now engaged in eating. So soon as these men caught sight of me they uttered exclamations in an unknown tongue and seizing weapons that lay by them, bows and arrows and wooden clubs set on either side with spikes of flinty glass, they made towards me as though to kill me. Now I lifted up my hands praying for mercy, and seeing that I was unarmed and helpless the men laid down their arms and addressed me. I shook my head to show that I could not understand, and pointed first to the sea and then to my swollen features. ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... search in this part of Alabama for caves presenting indications that they may have been habitable, or the reverse, in ages past. The native rock is a cherty or flinty limestone, crumbling easily, and readily susceptible to changes from atmospheric influences, and especially so to the action of water. New subterranean channels are continually developing, with consequent changes in the interior of ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... Wilt thou not, in thy own wise way, speak to the thoughtless man who feels content to grovel with the miserable diamond, who takes his lessons from the dead, dead rock, and feeds his soul upon such flinty food. Open his ears to hear thy words of life and light, and may he see in thee the brighter mirror reflecting the God ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... cry misunderstood it, or cruelly pretended to do so, in order to find fresh food for mockery. 'Eloi' sounded like enough to 'Elijah' to suggest to some of the flinty hearts around a travesty of the piteous appeal. They must have been Jews, for the soldiers knew nothing about the prophet; and if they were Scribes, they could scarcely fail to recognise the reference to the Twenty-second Psalm, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... immense stone? How many hundreds of tons it may weigh, I hardly dare guess. Geologically speaking, it is a 'stranger rock,' not in any way related to the rocks of this mountain, nor of the mountains near here. It is a mammoth conglomerate of such an interestingly curious compound and of such flinty hardness. At the time of its formation enormous pressure, coupled with the most intense heat, must have molded this strange mass together. Coarse and fine gravel, smooth, round pebbles, from the size ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... sorry for a lot of men in my life. Glad enough I was to get below into the fo'lk'sle for supper, and a brief rest and respite from that cruelty on deck. A bit of salt junk and a piece of bread, i.e. biscuit, flinty as a pantile, with a pot of something sweetened with "longlick" (molasses), made an apology for a meal, and I turned in. In a very few minutes oblivion came, making me as happy as any man ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... cushma, of closely-twilled cotton, woven by the women. Their weapons are two-edged battle-axes of hard wood, as palo de sangre, and bows and arrows. The arrows, five or six feet long, are made from the flower-stalk of the arrow-grass (Gynerium), the head pointed with the flinty chonta and tipped with bone, often anointed with poison. At the base two rows of feathers are spirally arranged, showing the Indian's knowledge of the rifle principle. When they have fixed abodes several families live together under one roof, with no division separating the women, ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... of the same order (Chickweed) as the Alsine and the small Chickweed. Their second name, Holostea, signifies "all bones," because the whole plant is very brittle from the flinty ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... gleamed amid the heavy braids of Julia's hair. Wherever she went she was followed by a train of admirers, who had little thought that that soft smile and beautiful face concealed a heart as hard as the flinty rock. ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... Nor race divine, Nor Dardan sire, nor Goddess mother thine! Form'd in the flinty womb of rocks accurst, 455 Begot by Caucasus, by tygers nurst. What need I more? why doubt of what is plain? One sigh, one look, did all my tears obtain. How name his crimes? did loves extremest woe, Move that hard heart, or cause one tear to ...
— The Fourth Book of Virgil's Aeneid and the Ninth Book of Voltaire's Henriad • Virgil and Voltaire
... then comes the humorous sally,—"With a little oatmeal for food and a little sulphur for friction, allaying cutaneous irritation with one hand and grasping his Calvinistical creed with the other, Sawney ran away to the flinty hills, sung his psalm out of tune his own way, and listened to his sermon of two hours long, amid the rough and imposing melancholy of the tallest thistles." But from the graver historian, developing the historic significance ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... Patricia," he exclaimed in a carefully impassioned tone; "do you not know that I am your slave, the captive of your bow and spear, that I adore you? I adore you! and you, flinty-hearted goddess, give no word of encouragement to your prostrate worshiper. You trample upon the offering of sighs and tears which he lays at your feet; you will not listen when he would pour into your ear ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... ferocis ingenii puer, et ad arma quam ad literas paratior), had not imbued me indelibly with some of the holy rage of Frere Jean des Entommeures, I should be, at this moment, lying on the table of some flinty- hearted anatomist, who would have sliced and disjointed me as unscrupulously as I do these remnants of the capon and chine, wherewith you consoled yourself yesterday for my absence at dinner. Phew! I have a noble thirst upon me, which I will quench ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... flinty, hard as steel? Nay, more than flint, for stone at rain relenteth: 200 Art thou a woman's son, and canst not feel What 'tis to love? how want of love tormenteth? O! had thy mother borne so hard a mind, 203 She had not brought ...
— Venus and Adonis • William Shakespeare
... I endeavoured to accelerate my steed. The roads were rough and stony, and I had scarcely got the tired animal into a sharper trot, before—whether or no by some wrench among the deep ruts and flinty causeway—he fell suddenly lame. The impetuosity of Tyrrell broke out in oaths, and we both dismounted to examine the cause of my horse's hurt, in the hope that it might only be the intrusion of some pebble between the shoe and the hoof. While we were ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... who are glad Jesus died for them who know nothing about "suffering with Christ." Yet the Bible is filled with allusions to it. The Heavenly Bridegroom wants a companion who will understand Him. This cold, hard, flinty, wicked world does not. "He came unto His own and His own received Him not." He knocked at the door of His own vineyard and the husband-men said, "Come, let us kill the Son." The divine Lord hungers for some ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees
... the cave he pressed—back into the unknown dark. The flinty sides were cool. He stopped to press his cheeks against them, then licked them with his dry tongue. Back—back away from the temptation to jump, he staggered. Another step, for all he knew, might plunge him into some dark well; but even so, it wouldn't matter much. There might be water at the bottom. ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... where it had lain there still remains a depression, and one can make out where the arms and legs lay.... Round about the seaweed seems tousled, and the traces of one man's footsteps are discernible; they go across the down, then disappear on reaching the flinty ridge. ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... Sea, until He knows all passions of the senses; all The great emotions of the heart; and each Exalted aspiration of the soul. Then may he sit beside the sea and say: 'I, too, have flung myself against the rocks, And kissed their flinty brows with no return; And fallen spent upon unfeeling sands. I, too, have gone forth yearning, to far shores, Seeking that something which would bring content; And finding only what I took away; And I have looked up, through the veil of skies, When all the world was still, ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... have rummaged the cupboard of thy fancy for musty scraps and flinty crusts to feed thy spleen withal,—inattentive to the dainties which a blue-eyed Hebe had culled in the garden of Hope, and had poured from out her basket ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... Mindanao had I been fascinated and attracted by that delightfully original tribe of heathen known as the head-hunters. Those grim, flinty, relentless little men, never seen, but chilling the warmest noonday by the subtle terror of their concealed presence, paralleling the trail of their prey through unmapped forests, across perilous mountain-tops, adown bottomless chasms, into ...
— Options • O. Henry
... wholly siliceous. I have been surprised at finding that crockery and porcelain of all kinds will make a spark, and sometimes a very good one. There are cases where a broken teacup might be the salvation of many lives in a shipwrecked party. On coral-reefs, and other coasts destitute of flinty stones, search should be made for drift-wood and drifted sea-weed. In the roots of these, the pebbles of other shores are not unfrequently entangled, and flint may be found among them. The joints of bamboos occasionally contain enough silex to ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... are singular from the extreme variability of their mineralogical composition. Every intermediate form is present, between flinty-slate, clay-slate passing into grey wacke, pure limestone, sandstone, and porcellanic rock; and some of the beds can only be described as composed of a siliceo-calcareo-clay-slate. The formation, as far as I could judge, is at least a ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... not expect an answer, for he straightened up once more and proceeded to whittle. The pitter-patter of the trotting horse, and the clatter of the wheels upon the flinty road, broke rudely upon the familiar little noises of the quiet summer morning. One sidewise glance satisfied Orn that the men in the vehicle were from Auburn prison. He stopped whittling but a moment ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... seizes every breast—a stifled cry of dread: "Who sheds the blood of innocence, the blood on his own head!" That pack'd and perjured jury shrink in conscience-struck dismay, And wish their hands as clear of guilt as they were yesterday. Mackenzie's cold and flinty face is quivering like a leaf, Whilst with quick and throbbing finger he turns o'er and o'er his brief; And the misnamed judges vainly try their rankling thoughts to hide Beneath an outward painted mask of loftiness and pride. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... like bumbee's byke— I'll no be handled unleddy like— I winna hae ye, ye worryin' tyke, The road ye came gae 'lang!" He loupit on wi' an awsome snort, He bang'd the fire frae the flinty court; He's aff and awa' in a snorin' sturt, As hard ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... way. With a little oatmeal for food, and a little sulphur for friction, allaying cutaneous irritation with the one hand, and holding his Calvinistical creed in the other, Sawney ran away to his flinty hills, sung his psalm out of tune his own way, and listened to his sermon of two hours long, amid the rough and imposing melancholy of the tallest thistles. But Sawney brought up his unbreeched offspring in a cordial hatred of his oppressors; ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... cease. The sharp-eyed Faraday has been following far away this Proteus, with a strong suspicion that it changes at last into gravity, in which shape it returns straight to the sun, carrying down with it, probably, those flinty showers of meteors which, striking fire in the atmosphere of the prime luminary, replenish its overflowing fountain of life. But we are not aware that he has yet discovered the anastomosis of this conversion, or quite established the fact. We ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... physiognomy of the place—if we may venture to use the term—has been singularly preserved. Few towns have it is true suffered more from the destructive frenzy of the Revolution; gay boulevards have replaced "the flinty ribs of this contemptuous city," the walls which play their part in Shakspere's 'King John'; the noblest of its abbeys has been swept away to make room for a Prefecture; four churches were demolished at a blow to be replaced by the dreariest of squares; the ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... chap, we all worship Joan—at a distance. She is not to be painted. Tears and prayers are useless. She has a flinty father—a fisherman, who looks upon painting as a snare of the devil and sees every artist already wriggling on the trident in his mind's eye. Joan has also a lover, who would rather behold her dead ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... of the world, In sullen humor locked his charms all up Within a diamond casket, firmly clasped, And threw the key into the sea, and died. The manikins here tried with all their might; In vain! no tool can pick the flinty lock; His magic arts still slumber, like their master. A shepherd's child, along the sea-shore playing, Watches the waves, in hurrying, idle chase. Dreaming and thoughtless, as young maidens are, She dippeth her white fingers in the flood, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... brightness in the N.N.W. that omened the wind coming from that direction. At midnight the change came. Orders were given to let the reefs out of the topsails, but it took a considerable time to do this as the reef points and errings were covered with hard, flinty ice, and it was not until marline spikes were used that any progress was made. The men's hands, already covered with wounds, had their fingers badly cut with the icy ropes and sails in carrying out this order, but it was not until they had been running ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... "Somewhat flinty about the soul; I remember the man well; and so, David, good night; you will come and see me, if you are ever in town. Good ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... firm, solid, compact, impenetrable, unimpressible, unyielding, rigid, adamantine, dense, insoluble, flinty, indurate, indurated, infrangible; arduous, laborious, wearisome, onerous, burdensome, toilsome, tiresome, exhausting, difficult, knotty, intricate, puzzling, incomprehensible; irresistible, uncontrollable; severe, rigorous, unendurable, oppressive, unjust, grievous, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... Their absence is eloquent, and tells a tale of widespread destruction. Standing near the Tower on the Moor we can see in the distance, stretching from north-west to south east, the range of hills called the “Wolds,” which, with a “cap” of marls, or sandy and flinty loams, are composed almost entirely of chalk; from them, near Cawkwell Hill (the hill par excellence of chalk), comes the water supply of Horncastle and Woodhall. They extend for a length of some 45 miles, ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... the scene of destruction with a gaze of flinty penetration. The groveling crone at her feet affected her like something unclean, and she spurned the old woman with her foot, stepping aside with a gesture of disgust. Then she raised her right hand, and cried with ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... air, you see coral plants of every hue and shape imaginable:—antlers, tufts of azure, waving reeds like stalks of grain, and pale green buds and mosses. In some places, you look through prickly branches down to a snow-white floor of sand, sprouting with flinty bulbs; and crawling among these are strange shapes:—some bristling with spikes, others clad in shining coats of mail, and here and there, round ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... which we traveled during the morning ran over an exceedingly rough lava formation—a spur of the lava beds often described during the Modoc war of 1873 so hard and flinty that Williamson's large command made little impression on its surface, leaving in fact, only indistinct traces of its line of march. By care and frequent examinations we managed to follow his route through without much delay, or ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... that the point demanded judicial decision. The authorities were also silent on the subject of alimony. But the woman's feet were bare. The trail to Hogback Mountain was steep and flinty. ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... this ogress and child-queller was in a steep bye-street at Brighton; where the soil was more than unusually chalky, flinty, and sterile, and the houses were more than usually brittle and thin; where the small front-gardens had the unaccountable property of producing nothing but marigolds, whatever was sown in them; and where snails were constantly discovered holding on to the street ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... generated brine Which is from the Corina, To replenish the flood Over seas disappearing; The second, without injury It will fall on us, When there is rain abroad. Through the whelming sky; The third will appear Through the mountain veins, Like a flinty banquet. The work of the King of kings. You are blundering bards, In too much solicitude; You cannot celebrate The kingdom of the Britons; And I am Taliesin, Chief of the bards of the west, Who will loosen Elphin Out of ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 3 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... I know! I'm not saying he wasn't an awful old screw. But somehow I don't believe he meant to be so flinty-hearted. You see, he came and talked to me to-day—talked like a regular human being. You could have knocked me over. It seems—a funny thing—that kid I picked up out of the street the other ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... dear mountain-rivulet To waken laughter from cold stones, beheld A riven wheatfield cracking for the wet, And seed like infant's teeth, that never swelled, Apeep up flinty ridges, milkless round. Teeth of the giants marked she where thin ground Rocky in spikes rebelled Against the hand here slack as ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sky was cloudless, the desultory breezes that swept the plains blighted growing things, raising little whirlwinds of fine, flinty alkali dust and spreading it over the face of the world. The storm that had caught Hollis on the Dry Bottom trail had covered only a comparatively small area; it had lasted only a brief time and after its passage the country ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... that of the hills is different, changing as you ascend them into variously coloured earth and marl. The beds of the streams and rivers, which swell into torrents during the rainy season, consist of stones and gravel, often of a flinty nature, and often also containing particles of iron. Some basaltic appearances in one of the districts into which the island is divided, and several precipices among the mountains, evidently produced by sudden ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... enemies. These shells are full of tiny holes, through which the pseudopods are extended in their search for food, and for purposes of movement. Some of these shells are composed of secreted lime, and others of a flinty substance, the "selection" of these substances from the ether mineral particles in the water, evidencing a degree cf "thought," and mind, even in these lowly creatures. The skeletons of these tiny creatures form vast deposits ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... Reformed but the old Rabbinical school of the orthodox; and then cheated him like a pure Teuton, only with more amenity, in his charge for a book quite out of request as one "nicht so leicht zu bekommen." Meanwhile at the opposite counter a deaf and grisly tradesman was casting a flinty look at certain cards, apparently combining advantages of business with religion, and shoutingly proposed to him in Jew-dialect by a dingy man in a tall coat hanging from neck to heel, a bag in hand, and a broad low hat surmounting his chosen nose—who ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... race went up the river ratting. We were back in time to have Pike's trout (which ranged between two ounces and one-half pound) fried for the early dinner; and here it may be lawful to remark that the trout of the Culm are of the very purest excellence, by reason of the flinty bottom, at any rate in these the upper regions. For the valley is the western outlet of the Black-down range, with the Beacon hill upon the north, and Hackpen long ridge to the south; and beyond that again the Whetstone hill, upon whose ...
— Crocker's Hole - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore
... of open blooms: Now only of lean lands most lean: it seems A flinty desert bitter with shrill screams: But one strange ...
— Silverpoints • John Gray
... sad plaints returned to his lips, there was evoked for him a suburban, flinty and gloomy site where a succession of silent bent persons, harassed by life, filed past into the twilight, while, steeped in bitterness and overflowing with disgust, he felt himself solitary in this dejected landscape, struck by an inexpressibly melancholy and stubborn distress whose ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... same hollow, small portions of quartz incrusted with an impure salt, and nodules of clay extremely compact. Near the edge of the valley there lie scattered on the sand considerable portions of flinty slate; and amid the common clay, which forms the basis of the soil, are perpendicular layers of a lamellated brown argil, assuming, as it were, the slaty structure. Dr. Clarke noticed among the pebbles near the Lake of Tiberias pieces of a porous ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... sings, on earth your Muse supplies The important loss, and heals our weeping eyes; Correctly great, she melts each flinty heart, With EQUAL ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... them to the hallowed ground of the Temple. More, I led them towards it myself. But advance was checked. Piles of cloud, whose darkness was palpable even in the midnight, covered the holy hill. I attempted to pass through it, and was swept downward by a gust that tore the rocks in a flinty shower around me. ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... a stranger in your hall, Who wears no common mien; Hard were the heart, as flinty wall, That ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... it down into its proper element. Many a farmer, too, whose lands sloped down to a small harbor, or stream, set up by the water side the frame of a vessel, and worked patiently at it during the winter days when the flinty soil repelled the plough and farm work was stopped. Stout little craft were thus put together, and sometimes when the vessel was completed the farmer-builder took his place at the helm and steered her to the fishing banks, or took her through Hell Gate to the great and ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... And this is my reward for obeying orders! Take care, my Lady. It suits you now to throw me aside like a—(casting about for an original simile)—like a old glove, because this innocent grandchild of yours has touched your flinty 'art. But where will you ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 1, 1890 • Various
... boundary line between California and Nevada. The trouble continued for some time, with occasional bloodshed. The next letter is an exultant one. There were few enough of this sort. We cannot pretend to keep track of the multiplicity of mines and shares which lure the gold-hunters, pecking away at the flinty ledges, usually in the snow. It has been necessary to abbreviate this letter, for much of it has lost all importance with the years, and is merely confusing. Hope is still high in the writer's heart, and confidence in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... down some dangerous emotion as he spoke, 'I have done nothing to deserve thanks. Even if you had not asked me this, do you think I would have gone on my own way, like the Levite in the parable, and left that poor fellow to shift for himself? No, my dear, no; I am not quite so flinty-hearted. Unless Blake will have none of my help—unless he absolutely repulse me—I will try as far as lies in my power to put him on his ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... a daughter, Fierce through despair, frantic with fear, and anguish. Hear me ye dread unknown: Yon flinty man Ne'er knew a father's care, and knows not now What 'tis to love, what 'tis to lose a father. But ye, (if e'er a parent's hand hath dried Your infant tears; if e'er your eyes have streamed To see him weep, knowing ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... gallants vied; While some, in close recess apart, Courted the ladies of their heart, 195 Nor courted them in vain; For often, in the parting hour, Victorious Love asserts his power O'er coldness and disdain; And flinty is her heart, can view 200 To battle march a lover true— Can hear, perchance, his last adieu, Nor own her share ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... had a drive been brought through without some disaster. Much blasting had been done, and a number of obstacles blown away. But for all that there were rocks which defied the skill of man to remove. Two flinty walls reared their frowning sides for several rods along the brook. Between these an immense boulder lifted its head, around which the waters incessantly swirled. But when the stream was swollen high enough the logs would clear this obstacle at a bound, ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... look-out man sitting at the far end of a long tunnel of rock and stone; when we fired he gave the signal, and the Boers got into cover; and twenty seconds afterwards, when our shell, beautifully aimed and timed, arrived on the hill, it spent itself upon the flinty rock. Then the Boers showed their heads and fired; and their shell swept through its arc and exploded, ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... conscience were most likely on a par in their flinty qualities, and the dour Scot would be glad to bargain with the Duchess again on similar terms, eliminating the ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... see what I find, my lad. I expect it will be nothing. There's a nice fragment of onyx," he continued, picking out and pitching up a piece of flinty-looking rock to the lad. "I dare say there are some good agates here too, ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... of his dangerous position, endeavoured to direct him by a speaking trumpet and signals; but the captain could neither see nor hear, on account of the darkness of the night, the roaring of the winds, and the tremendous swell of the sea. The vessel in the meantime grounded on a flinty bottom, at a short distance from the advanced jetty. Boussard, touched with the cries of the unfortunate crew, resolved to spring to their assistance, in spite of every remonstrance, and the apparent impossibility of success. Having tied one end of a rope round his waist, and fastened the other ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... we passed through a gate where soldiers were stationed—so much I could see by lamplight; then, having left behind us the miry Chaussee, we rattled over a pavement of strangely rough and flinty surface. At a bureau, the diligence stopped, and the passengers alighted. My first business was to get my trunk; a small matter enough, but important to me. Understanding that it was best not to be importunate or over-eager about luggage, but to wait and watch quietly the ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... eastern skirts; and gets on march again, by its own route. Steadily southward;—and from Liegnitz, and the upland Countries, there will be news of Schwerin and it before long. Rain ending, there ensued a ringing frost;—not favorable for Siege-operations on Glogau:—and Silesia became all of flinty glass, with white peaks to the Southwest, whither Schwerin ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... into good dry stone probably 11/2 inches, making the stone hard and flinty, as any stone cutter will soon find out if he ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... made from the stem of a hollowed tree, generally of the palm-tribe, as the centre is pithy and the skin flinty. It is covered by the skin of a lizard or shark, and beaten with the fingers. It is used throughout the tropics, and produces a hollow monotonous sound. In the East Indies it is used to proclaim public notices, and to draw attention ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... spires flashing with gleams of the moon on frequent mirror-like surfaces. Ten thousand men could have been concealed in this desolate cavern. Yet it rang with emptiness as, far arear, a steel prod struck powdery fire from the flinty path. ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... creatures wound round her little finger, and slavishly ready to fetch and carry for her. And all the time you go about and boast of your conquest to one another, and imagine that you have subjugated her. But she sits at home and laughs at you, and despises you all from the flinty bottom of her heart. Bah! you're a pack of fools, and I've no patience with you. As for you personally, if you must write any more, tell your fellow men something about their own follies. It won't ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 28, 1891 • Various
... corpulent friars; It carries the corn, and the oil, and the wine, The honey and milk from the shores of the Rhine. The oxen are weary and spent with their load, They pause, but the driver doth recklessly goad; Up yon steep, flinty rise they have staggered and reeled, Even devils may pity dumb beasts of ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... faces so as not to be altogether suffocated while again after a while a fierce blast of wind driving downward would hurl the smoke away and dashing it against the other side of the crater gather it up in dense volumes of blackest smoke in thick clouds which rolled up the flinty cliffs and reaching the summit bounded fiercely out into the sky to pass on and be seen from afar as that dread pennant of Vesuvius which is the sign and symbol of its mastery over the earth around it and the inhabitants thereof ever changing and in all its changes watched with awe by fearful ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... should enjoy in telling the tale that evening. Meantime I hastened to rescue the melon from my pet, but his strong hands had already rent it asunder, and to my astonishment there rolled from its interior and broke open upon the flinty road a little casket for which the rind had ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... the Arkansas a short distance from where the railroad crosses the creek, and at this point, too, the trail from Fort Leavenworth merges into the Old Santa Fe. The broad pathway is very easily recognized here; for it runs over a hard, flinty, low divide, that has never been disturbed by the plough, and the traveller has only to cast his eyes in a northeasterly direction in order to see ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... cultivated for malting (see MALT) to prepare spirits and beer (see BREWING), but it is also largely employed in domestic cookery. For the latter purpose the hard, somewhat flinty grains are preferable, and they are prepared by grinding off the outer cuticle which forms "pot barley." When the attrition is carried further, so that the grain is reduced to small round pellets, it is termed "pearl barley." Patent barley is either pot or pearl barley reduced to flour. Under the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... at once the string which united the shoes which he had hung round his neck gave way, and both fell with a great thump on the roof. Ben made a clutch for them in which he lost his own hold, and made a hurried descent in their company, alighting with his bare feet on some flinty gravel stones, which he ...
— Paul Prescott's Charge • Horatio Alger
... bundles from their backs and prepared to spend the night where they were. The blankets were spread on the flinty floor, and Deerfoot, setting down his gun beside theirs, helped to gather the wood with which to keep a fire burning. The three were so active that it took but a short time to collect all that was needed. This was thrown into one pile, from which it ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... bends; But Ajax, watchful as his foe drew near, Drove through the Trojan targe the knotty spear; It reach'd his neck, with matchless strength impell'd! Spouts the black gore, and dims his shining shield. Yet ceased not Hector thus; but stooping down, In his strong hand up-heaved a flinty stone, Black, craggy, vast: to this his force he bends; Full on the brazen boss the stone descends; The hollow brass resounded with the shock: Then Ajax seized the fragment of a rock, Applied each nerve, and swinging round on high, With force tempestuous, let the ruin fly; The ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... chivalry of the deep, the tiny knights with lance and cuirass, and oval bossy shield carved in quaint conceits and ornamental fashion. Nor must we despise them when we reflect upon their power of accretion. The Gallionellae, invisible to the naked eye, can, of their heraldic shields and flinty armor, make two cubic feet of Bilin polishing slate in four days. By straining sea-water, a web of greenish cloth of gold, illuminated by their play of self-generated electric light, has been collected. Humboldt and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... never are wet with the falling dew, But in bright and changeful beauty shine, Far down in the green and glassy brine. The floor is of sand, like the mountain drift, And the pearl-shells spangle the flinty snow; From coral rocks, the sea-plants lift Their boughs, where the tides and billows flow; The water is calm and still below, For the winds and waves are absent there, And the sands are bright as the stars that glow In the motionless fields of upper air. There, with ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... so as to make it a flinty steel. The harder the better, so that it will preserve the magnetism ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... earth. To one standing at the mouth of the cave, especially at night, they afford a picturesque spectacle. Gathered round the forge, their bronzed and naked bodies, illuminated by the flame, appear like figures of demons, while the cave, with its flinty sides and uneven roof, blackened by the charcoal vapours which hover about it in festoons, seems to offer no ...
— The Pocket George Borrow • George Borrow
... rock with lichens of various rich tints: its beetling brow is 150 feet above the level of the sea, upon a stratum of mouldering rock, apparently scorched with violent heat, and having beneath it a close flinty sandstone. Its crown is girt with walls and towers, which on the land side have been nearly all repaired. The outer gateway stands between two fine old towers, with time-worn heads; twelve paces within it is a second gate, which is machicolated, and has a portcullis; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 548 - 26 May 1832 • Various
... task. Now that our party had become tired of gazing through their goggles at the sun, our guides led us in the direction where this work was in progress. On the way we passed a single unfilled crater, a deep pit in the flinty quartz sand that spread a protecting blanket over the solid structure of the roof. These craters in the sand proved quite harmless except for the labour involved in their refilling. Further on we came to another, now half-filled from a spouting pipe with ground quartz ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... Capital of the Dukes of Anjou, and the home of Margaret of Anjou, daughter of Rene, who married Henry VI. of England; likewise the cradle of the first Plantagenets; and immortalized by Shakespeare's King John, who soliloquizes anent "The flinty ribs of this contemptuous town." With all this, Angers has perhaps a supreme claim for English consideration. In spite of all this, and the added attraction of a "real castle," such as is seldom found outside ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... time they had cut a large loop in the desert the sun was well up in the sky, the daily heat begun. Their course took them through a chain of low, flinty hills that cut their speed almost to zero. They ground ahead in low gear while Telt sweated and cursed, struggling with the controls. Then they were on firm sand and picking up ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... of pillars supporting a triangular thing called a pediment. You see this form every day in your banks and clubhouses, and churches and chapels; you are told that it is the perfection of architectural beauty; and yet suppose Sir Walter Scott, instead of writing, "Each purple peak, each flinty spire," had written, "Each purple peak, each flinty 'pediment.'"[12] Would you have thought the poem improved? And if not, why would it be spoiled? Simply because the idea is no longer of any value to you; the thing spoken of is a nonentity. These pediments, and stylobates, and architraves never ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... feet to the line, straight and strong, carrying just sufficient bulk to temper his restless energy without impairing its power. Nor did the face offer any shock of disappointment to the promise given by the splendid figure. Salient-jawed and forceful, set with cool, flinty, blue-gray eyes, no place for weakness could be found there. One might have read a moral callousness, a colorblindness in points of rectitude, but when the last word had been said, its masterful capability, remained ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... writing to Mr Rule, being wishful "not to offend him." None the less he felt that he had not been well treated. To Mr Brandram he wrote reminding him "that all the difficulty and danger connected with what has been accomplished in Spain have fallen to my share, I having been labouring on the flinty rock and sierra, and not in smiling meadows refreshed ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... strength, and capable of performing a journey of a hundred leagues in a week's time, but he was unbroke, savage, and furious. A cargo of Bibles, however, which I hoped occasionally to put on his back, would, I had no doubt, thoroughly tame him, especially when labouring up the flinty hills of the north of Spain. I wished to have purchased a mule, but, though I offered thirty pounds for a sorry one, I could not obtain her; whereas the cost of both the horses, tall powerful stately animals, scarcely amounted to ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... cold, rain and drought, the winds in relation to the points of the compass, were nearest their wants and supplies, and were never out of their thoughts. In each province they had found the best springs, beds of clay, paint, soapstone, flinty rock, friable stone for sculpture and hard, tenacious stone for tools, and used ashes for salt. The vegetal kingdom was no less familiar to them. Edible plants, and those for dyes and medicines, were on their lists, as well as wood for tools, utensils and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... objects of my present exertions were the comte and comtesse de Louerne. Both husband and wife were deeply loaded with debts, a thing common enough with the nobility of the time; these debts they never paid, another thing by no means unusual; their creditors, whose flinty hearts were but little moved by the considerations of their rank and high blood, sent officers to enforce payment, when the Louernes opposed them with positive force and violence, and the laws, thus outraged, condemned ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... Englishmen, who command the ocean and are sole masters of the deep, must quietly suffer two thirds of their shipping to be dismantled and lie useless in little rivers or before empty warehouses. Their seamen, to earn a little salt junk and flinty biscuits, must spread themselves like vagabonds over the face of the earth, and enter the service of any nation. If, on the contrary, the Government continue to enforce the Orders, trade will still remain in its present deplorable state; an American war will follow, and poor Canada will bear ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... the cooling mountain, gave birth to glaciers that, uniting edge to edge, at length formed one grand conical glacier—a down-crawling mantle of ice upon a fountain of smouldering fire, crushing and grinding its brown, flinty lavas, and thus degrading and remodeling the entire mountain from summit to base. How much denudation and degradation has been effected we have no means of determining, the porous, crumbling ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... baskets. One was a shallow tray filled with the finished heads in great variety of material and color. There were white carnelian, delicately striped with prophetic red, blood-stone deep-colored and hard as ruby, agates of every shade and marking, flinty jasper, emerald-banded malachite, delicate rose color, and purple ones made from shells, and various crystals with whose names Father Francois Xavier was unfamiliar. There was one shading from dark green through to red, only a drop ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... companion led into great buildings and a place of offices where excited officials stood in knots about news-casting cones; then they were in a quiet room, in the presence of a lean-bodied man whose hawklike face turned flinty at ...
— The Hammer of Thor • Charles Willard Diffin
... family passions broke out afresh. He had been the one living creature for whom Madam Rachel's flinty breast had nursed a spark of love, and at fourteen he had rewarded her by trying to set fire to her skirts as she dozed in her chair. At nineteen, in a fit of drunkenness, he struck his father. He married a tap-room girl from St. Austell, and beat her. She gave him two ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... what he required to eat, loaded their outfits upon some poor patient beast and drove him without feed until, weakened and insecure of foot, he slipped and fell on some one of these cruel ledges of flinty rock. ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... perceived one. It then struck me that the eternal intercession might have been equally odious to her. To find herself prostrate for ever, weeping like Niobe, and, if the Gazette was to be believed, refusing to raise herself from the mud or the flinty pavement till I had been forgiven, and reinstated in my rank—ah, how loathsome that must have been to her! Ah, how loathsome the whole cycle of favours were to me, considering from whom they came! Then we had ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... 7 Our heart, that flinty stubborn thing, That terrors cannot move, That fears no threat'nings of his wrath, Shall ...
— Hymns and Spiritual Songs • Isaac Watts
... audacity, the storm lashed itself over the top of the dune. They could hear the hissing whine of fine hard snow tearing above their heads like volleys of shot, and the force of the wind reached them even in their shelter, bringing with it the flinty sting of the snow-dust. Beyond them the black barren was filled with a dismal moaning. Looking up, and yet seeing nothing in the darkness, Peter understood where the weird shriekings and ghostly cries came from. It was the wind whipping itself up the side ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... past him through a gap in the trees at a white flinty road that struggled up to the distant downs. "Yes," she said very softly, as if fearing to quench a vision she saw there, "yes, that is a great and a good ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... of liberalizing the missionary, of humanizing the sharks of trade, of infusing the conscientious drop into the flinty bosom of policy, of saving the Indian from immediate degradation, and speedy death. The, whole sermon may be preached from the text, "Needs be that offences must come, yet we them by whom they come." Yet, ere they depart, I wish there might be some masterly ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... made of White Stones or Flinty Pebbles, the harder the Stones are which 'tis made of, the better it is for Building. That which is made of soft Spongy Stones, ...
— An Abridgment of the Architecture of Vitruvius - Containing a System of the Whole Works of that Author • Vitruvius
... before I quitted her, that if I had ten thousand a-year, and she was as poor as my dear Judith was, that she should have taken her place—that's the truth. I thought that I never could love again, and that my heart was as flinty as a pawnbroker's; but I found out my mistake ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... thousands come, The deaf and the dumb, To the tomb of our monarch here— The sick and the blind Of every kind They throng to the holy bier. With heads all bare They breathe their prayer As they kneel on the flinty ground: God hears their sighs, And the sick men rise All ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various |
