"Thinness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... worms is indicated by irritation of the membrane of the nose, causing the child to thrust its finger into the nostrils; by irritation of the lower part of the body; by thinness, excessive appetite and restlessness in sleep. Children suffering from worms should eat meat freely and not take so much bread, vegetables, and farinaceous food as children generally do. They should have as much exercise as possible in the open air, and be sponged with cold water every ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... rolling mill, where they go dashing back and forth upon rollers and between rollers—the latter working in pairs like the rollers of large wringers, squeezing the blooms, in their successive passages, to greater length and greater thinness, until at last they take the form of long, red, glowing rails; after which they are sawed off, to the accompaniment of a spray of white sparks, into rail lengths, and run outside to cool. And I may add that, ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... on the 18th ultimo, is still visible. Considerable as is the cultivation, it bears a very small proportion to the great extent of waste, and probably untillable land, untillable from the extreme thinness of the soil and its superabundant stones. Cratoegus occurred near ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... souls, therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to airy thinness beat. If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two; Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show To move, but doth if th' other do. And though it in the centre sit, Yet, when the other far doth roam, It leans, ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... him who was her plaything and her god. It was left for Irene herself to beg him to eat more, to rest in the hot part of the day, to take a tonic, and so forth. But she did not tell him that she was the a cause of his thinness—for one cannot see the havoc oneself is working. A man of eighty-five has no passions, but the Beauty which produces passion works on in the old way, till death closes the eyes which crave ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... thin shaft of golden light streamed in through the narrow opening above my head, and, striking on the opposite wall, gleamed there for a few minutes in radiant and dazzling beauty, passing obliquely upward the while until it grew narrower and more narrow, dwindled down to the thinness of a thread, and finally vanished. I had witnessed the last gleam of earthly sunlight I was ever ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... indicate a very great degree of thinness. Specimens of sheet gold ornaments found in the tombs are thicker, but are sufficiently thin to indicate that, if actually made by these people, almost any degree of thinness could be attained by them. It would probably ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... attentive ears. Robert listened eagerly. Unitarianism was not a familiar subject of thought to him. He had never dreamt of joining the Unitarians, and was indeed long ago convinced that in the beliefs of a Channing no one once fairly started on the critical road could rationally stop. That common thinness and aridity, too, of the Unitarian temper had weighed with him. But here, in the person of Murray Edwardes, it was as though he saw something old and threadbare revivified. The young man's creed, as he presented it, had grace, persuasiveness, even unction; and there ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... under consideration, and to the genuineness of the religious life of these men is well worth quoting. After describing the arid condition of his time, the prevailing tendency of ministers to seek pomp and luxury, and the apparent thinness of the preaching of the day, he adds: "Some {290} few exceptions are to be made; but so few, that if a new set of men had not appeared of another stamp, the Church had quite lost her esteem over the nation." He then designates this group of Cambridge scholars. ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... big game while she waited for him. Flushed, excited, he stood there on the white bearskin rug midway between the bed and the wood-fire, while she felt his charm stealing like a drug over her senses. Though she had begun to realize the thinness of his mental qualities, she was still as completely in the power of his physical charm as she had been on the day of her wedding. In the flickering light of the fire he appeared to diffuse the glamour of romance, of adventure; and she felt that this single ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... she had become! And those eyes, which at last he saw, now looked tearfully out from their large orbits, but more innocently than a bird from its nest. Over her broad forehead she had wound a large silk handkerchief in turban fashion. It hung down behind. She wished to conceal the thinness of her hair. He smiled to recognise her again in this. More spiritualised, more ethereal in her beauty, her innermost aspirations shone forth without effort. Her thin hands caressed his hair, and now ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... circle—the little round window; then little by little Gusev could distinguish his neighbour in the next hammock, Pavel Ivanitch. The man slept sitting up, as he could not breathe lying down. His face was grey, his nose was long and sharp, his eyes looked huge from the terrible thinness of his face, his temples were sunken, his beard was skimpy, his hair was long.... Looking at him you could not make out of what class he was, whether he were a gentleman, a merchant, or a peasant. Judging from ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... a charming frankness and abruptness in his speech, but who was in reality the most specious flatterer of the entire party. Mr. Jenks rejoiced in the following personal advantages: red hair, a blue nose, goggle eyes, and jaws of transparent thinness. ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... lasted, but it cooled the air and rendered the return journey a little more supportable; and when we arrived at the house, we also arrived at the decision that never again to a picnic, as far as we were concerned, should thinness and rotundity ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... gimlet-eyed, wearing a musty brown coat, soiled black stock, unspeakable linen, and skin-tight trousers held to his rusty shoes by wide straps—showing not only the knuckles of his knees but the streaked thinness of his upper shanks—(Cruikshank could have drawn him to the life)—sidled into the room, mopping his head with a red cotton handkerchief which ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... a tear in her eye, but with a thinness of lip and severity of manner which were presumably not more than past events justified; 'since you speak like that to me, I'll speak honestly to you. For these three years you have taken no thought for us. You left home with a good supply of money, and strength ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... was tired and lay stretched on the ground. He looked bloodless and wan, the grizzled beard not able to hide the thinness of his face. The healthful vigor he had found on the prairie had left him, each day's march claiming a dole from his hoarded store of strength. He knew—no one else—that he had never recovered the vitality expended at the time ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... Russell denies the existence of poisonous snakes in Northern Syria, and states that the last instance of death known to have occurred from the bite of a serpent near Aleppo took place a hundred years before his time. In Palestine, the climate, the thinness of population, the multitude of insects and of lizards, all circumstances, in fact, seem very favorable to the multiplication of serpents, but the venomous species, at least, are extremely rare, if at all known, in that country. I have, however, ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... weighed and found that I had lost all four of those last surplus pounds and two more in three days. Those two extra pounds might be construed to prove love, but exactly on whom I was utterly unprepared to say. I didn't even enjoy the thinness, but took a kind of already-married look in my glass and tried to slip the egg past my bored lips and get myself to chew it down. It was work; and then I took up the judge's letter, which also was work ...
— The Melting of Molly • Maria Thompson Daviess
... that no part of our Union is more exposed to invasion by the numerous avenues leading to it, or more defenseless by the thinness of the neighboring population, or offers a greater temptation to invasion, either as a permanent acquisition or as a prize to the cupidity of grasping invaders from the immense amount of produce deposited there, than the city of New Orleans. It is known also that the seizure ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 2: James Monroe • James D. Richardson
... pinned to the possible effect of a continuance of easterly wind. Again the call is for patience and again patience. Here at least we seem to enjoy full security. The ice is so thin that it could not hurt by pressure—there are no bergs within reasonable distance—indeed the thinness of the ice is one of the most tantalising conditions. In spite of the unpropitious prospect everyone on board is cheerful and one foresees a ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... made the round of the garden, they came suddenly upon Mr. Hale, whose whereabouts had been quite forgotten by them. He had not yet finished the pear, which he had delicately peeled in one long strip of silver-paper thinness, and which he was enjoying in a deliberate manner. It was like the story of the eastern king, who dipped his head into a basin of water, at the magician's command, and ere he instantly took it out went through the experience of a lifetime. I Margaret ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... waiting. A thousand apologies," said a voice at my back. I turned to face a gentleman who must have entered from the front room; so at least the draperies, still slightly swaying, attested. A tall man, gray-haired, and of an extraordinary thinness—a caricature of Don Quixote himself, if such a thing ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... in the performance of all his duties, yet that he was still suffering very much might be observed in the abiding paleness and wasting thinness of his face, and in a certain languor and ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... on the ordinary "modern style" in use in England, which is in fact the Bodoni type a little reduced in ugliness. The design of the letters of this modern "old style" leaves a good deal to be desired, and the whole effect is a little too gray, owing to the thinness of the letters. It must be remembered, however, that most modern printing is done by machinery on soft paper, and not by the hand press, and these somewhat wiry letters are suitable for the machine process, which would not do justice to letters of ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris
... forests. Nor is it, indeed, more countenanced by the ancient modes of life, no way favorable to population. I apprehend that these first settled countries, so far from being overstocked with inhabitants, were rather thinly peopled, and that the same causes which occasioned that thinness occasioned also those frequent migrations which make so large a part of the first history of almost all nations. For in these ages men subsisted chiefly by pasturage or hunting. These are occupations which spread the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Jemmy appeared in it, had been for more than an hour assembled, but the thinness of the attendance not only proved the woful prevalence of sickness and distress in the parish, but sharpened the pedagogue's vinegar aspect into an expression of countenance singularly peevish and gloomy. When the lad entered, ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... next room through a low door, all three of them having to bow their heads as they entered, and there they saw a gigantic machine at work between whose revolving cylinders depended the long gold ingots which were gradually reduced to the proper thinness for making ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... veins of the temples and eyelids were painfully apparent; and with the eyes so large and clear as to be more like veronicas than ever, made the effect almost ghastly, together with excessive fragility of the form, and the shadowy thinness of the hand that held Phoebe's. Bertha's fingers, at her weakest, had been more substantial than these small things, which had, however, as much character and force in their grasp ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... passed thirty, but the premature thinness of his hair in front, the listless droop of his heavy shoulders, and the bluish pallor about his firm jaw contrived to make him appear older than he was. There was a kindliness in the wrinkles about his eyes, and his mouth, though solid, was not lacking in indications of intuitive understanding. ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... and partly along the side of the steep, went driving a procession of yellow vapoury clouds from the sea-quarter towards the mountain Scawfell. Their colours I have called yellow, but it was exquisitely varied, and the shapes of the rocks on the summit of the ridge varied with the density or thinness of the vapours. The effect was most enchanting; for right above was steadfastly fixed a beautiful rainbow. We were a party of seven, Mrs. Wordsworth, my daughter, and Miss Fenwick included, and it would be difficult to say who was most delighted. ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... myself once more, I confess, in the curiosity of analysing the structure. By what process of logical accretion was this slight "personality," the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl, to find itself endowed with the high attributes of a Subject?—and indeed by what thinness, at the best, would such a subject not be vitiated? Millions of presumptuous girls, intelligent or not intelligent, daily affront their destiny, and what is it open to their destiny to be, at the most, that we should make an ado about it? The novel is of ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... faded into a deadlier pallor and her form wasted to a ghastlier thinness. And this was real, for she was demon-haunted—a victim of remorse, not ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... It was a universal principle with the French builders of the great ages to use the stones of their quarries as they lay in the bed; if the beds were thick, the stones were used of their full thickness—if thin, of their necessary thinness, adjusting them with beautiful care to directions of thrust and weight. The natural blocks were never sawn, only squared into fitting, the whole native strength and crystallization of the stone being thus kept unflawed—"ne ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... course, takes a hand at helping a yarn get from house to house but nobody makes such a specialty of this sort of social work as Fanny Foster. There are some Green Valley folks who attribute Fanny's up and down thinness to this wearing industry yet both men and women are always glad to see her and her reports always drive blue cares away and provoke ripples ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... spoke he ran his fingers through his hair, as if in its thinness and fading color ...
— The Daughter of a Republican • Bernie Babcock
... not for me to determine which of our English porcelains is the best; probably, indeed, one will be found superior in hardness, another in whiteness, a third in the thinness and evenness of the glaze, a fourth in the form of the articles, a fifth in the design, and a sixth in the colours. In hardness and in fusibility, they are probably all inferior to the Dresden and to the Sevres porcelain; for pieces in biscuit and in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 548 - 26 May 1832 • Various
... above, besides an inkstand, represents an open book. The thinness and yellowish color of the leaves, which are tied together with ribbon, denotes that it was made ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... to the prejudices of mankind. The sternness of age and the austerity of censoriousness are now silent. Now pleasure wears a freer garb; and the manners of enjoyment are more frank and unrestrained. The thinness of indiscretion and the airy forms of inadvertence are lost and annihilated amid the ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... prove that, owing to the planet's distance from the sun, and the thinness of its atmosphere, the temperature of Mars must be very low, probably below freezing-point even at the equator. Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace has gone further than this, and suggests that the temperature ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... and sentiments—punch, puns and witticisms, were handed about in abundance; in the mean time, the room began to wear an appearance of thinness, many of the boxes were completely deserted, and the Knights of the Bound Table were no longer surrounded by their Esquires—still the joys of the bowl were exhilarating, and the conversation agreeable, though ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... altered, but she was startled by the extent of the change; for being naturally fair and high-coloured, he was a person on whom the traces of illness were particularly visible. The colour was totally gone, even from his lips; his cheeks were sunken, his brow looked broader and more massive from the thinness of his face and the loss of his hair, and his eyes themselves appeared unlike what they used to be in the hollows round them. He seemed tranquil, and comfortable, but so wan, weak, and subdued, and so different from himself, that she was very much shocked, as smiling and holding out a hand, ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was lying on the bed, in a loose white robe, over which fell the long braids of her dark hair. The warm coloring had entirely faded from her cheeks, leaving only that faintest reflection of gold which she inherited from her mother; and the thinness and pallor of her face made her large eyes seem larger and darker. They were open, but strangely veiled; as if shadows were resting on the soul, like fogs upon a landscape. When Gerald bent over her, she did not see ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... the general awakening. I retain her wedding-ring, the gift of Donald Roy. It is a sorely-wasted fragment, worn through on one of the sides, for she had toiled long and hard in her household, and the breach in the circlet, with its general thinness, testify to the fact; but its gold is still bright and pure; and, though not much of a relic-monger, I would hesitate to exchange it for the Holy Coat of Treves, or for waggon-loads of the ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... into the loose folds of his Oriental garment and brought out a roll of thin vellum like onion-skin, painted in Chinese characters. It was of immense length, but on account of the thinness of the vellum, the roll wound on a tiny cylinder of wood was not above two inches ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... rope, for was not the Gordion knot tied with it? and could be whittled down as fine as a knitting needle without breaking, and still keeping its strength; it could be pounded into basket stuff, separating the layers to almost any degree of thinness. It handled every tool, from a pitchfork to an awl, and made the whole of a rake, the bows, teeth, head and staff. Besides, it had medicinal virtues; it was good for nose-bleed ever since it staunched the ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... that I think on the whole we shall have a happier day if we pass it quietly together, and simply have the children to dine. So many of the people of whom we were fond at the time we were married have passed away, that I am sure we should be appalled by the thinness of the ranks when we began to reckon who are left. Besides, I don't think that a notice not to bring silver would really protect the poor wretches who didn't wish to bring any. It would seem too evidently ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... British had secured all the French colonies in the West Indies, excepting Guadeloupe. In Hayti they held nearly all the coast towns, and maintained an intermittent blockade over the others; but their position was precarious owing to the thinness of their garrisons, the untrustworthiness of their mulatto auxiliaries, and the ravages of disease. It seems probable that, with ordinary precautions and some reinforcements, the garrisons might ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... define a form in outline and give it different qualities of expression by altering the quality and consistency of our outline, and we may obtain very different kinds of decorative effect by the use of lines of various degrees of thickness or thinness; but if we want to give it force and colour, and to distinguish it from its background more emphatically, we must ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... the colour of the hair, but also its thinness (according to all pictures and busts we have of Shakspere, he was bald-headed), seems to have been satirised by Jonson in his 'Poetaster.' In act ii. sc. 1, Chloe asks Crispinus, who, excited by her love and her beauty, pretends becoming a poet, whether, as ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... different-looking person from Badcock. He was remarkably handsome, or rather would have been but for the thinness of his lips, and a look of too great firmness and inflexibility. His features were a good deal like those of Leonardo da Vinci; moreover he was kempt, looked in vigorous health, and was of a ruddy countenance. He was ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... shelterless plains or ridges to us. So far, therefore, Boer cunning has proved itself more than a match for Staff-College strategy, and nothing can restore the balance now but a strong blow struck quickly and surely from our side. Against that the Boers are naturally weak in proportion to the thinness of their investing line, which stretches round a perimeter of nearly twenty miles; but on the other hand, their greater mobility, owing to the fact that every rifleman is mounted, gives them a surprising power of rapid concentration on any point that happens to be threatened. This is a factor ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... are interesting as music, and the workmanship is skilful. If one can get over the thinness of the part-writing, especially in the slow movements, there is much to enjoy in them. The style of movement—Tempo di Menuetto—in No. 2 recalls Emanuel Bach's ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... a momentary twinge, gone almost before he had realised it, a sudden clear conception of his great loneliness. The satisfaction he strove to extract from improving his estate for the benefit of his brother Gustav appeared to him at that moment to bear a singular resemblance, in its thinness, to Frau Dellwig's charitable soup. He got off his horse to speak to her, and rested his eyes, tired by looking at the hideous passions on the brawler's face, on hers. "To-day is the important day, is it not?" he asked, glancing from her ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... that. She's hung on. She just wouldn't die, though she was pretty close to skin and bone all wrapped around a bit of fire when she went out with the sheep. Oh, she's thin now. Never will be fat. But it's the prettiest thinness I ever saw, and when I get back, and the trees begin to bear, and the kids get going to school, she and I are going to do Paris. I don't think much of that burg, but she's just hankered for it ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... strained. My fame had become annoying for my enemies, and a little trying, I confess, for my friends. But at that time all this stir and noise amused me vastly. I did nothing to attract attention. My somewhat fantastic tastes, my paleness and thinness, my peculiar way of dressing, my scorn of fashion, my general freedom in all respects, made me a being quite apart from all others. I did not ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... the irrepressible Sam, "unless it is that it is in my blood; for one of the last things I heard my mother say, ere I left home, was that, to judge by the thinness of the milk furnished by the farmer who supplied us, he much reminded her of Pharaoh's daughter, as he took a ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... 4: When the inner tube is strengthened by means of wire, the initial or natural stresses in the latter may be neglected on account of its thinness; but when the thickness of the hoops is reduced, and the number of layers thereby increased, then the value of the initial stresses in these hoops is a very important factor with respect to the decrease or increase Of the powers of resistance ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... moderate increase of it, the structure breaks down altogether. The great thing to be desired therefore in a material for the construction of boats is to secure the stiffness of wood in conjunction with the thinness and tenacity of iron. This object is attained in the manufacture of Mr. Francis's boats by plaiting or corrugating the sheets of metal of which the sides of the boat are to be made. A familiar illustration of the principle on which ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... question of the affection of the object of his tender passion. It is only necessary for you to wear a philter upon the forehead and you can obtain the love of any woman," and giving Mesrour some directions, the Nubian brought to his master a minute bag of silk an inch square and of wafer thinness, which, both from its appearance and the rare odor of musk which it exhaled, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... Francis Hawkesworth, rather to the surprise of Lady Emily, who wondered that he had been able to discover the real worth veiled beneath a formal and retiring manner, and to admire features which, though regular, had a want of light and animation, which diminished their beauty even more than the thinness and compression of the lips, and the very pale ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fishing-rod will supply material for the fire-saw. Cut off a piece of bamboo about fifteen inches long, split it, and sharpen the edge of one piece to a knife-like thinness. Lay the other half down with the curved surface up and cut a slit in it through which the sharp edge of the saw can be passed. One or two girls can work this. When there are two, one girl holds the slit bamboo down firmly, while the other does the ...
— On the Trail - An Outdoor Book for Girls • Lina Beard and Adelia Belle Beard
... as if the hoarfrost still continued to form. It looked heavy, and yet it was nearly without weight. Not a twig was bent down under its load, yet with its halo of frost it measured fully two inches across. The crystals were large, formed like spearheads, flat, slablike, yet of infinite thinness and delicacy, so thin and light that, when by misadventure my whip touched the boughs, the flakes seemed to float down rather than to fall. And every one of these flat and angular slabs was fringed with hairlike needles, or with featherlike needles, and longer needles stood in between. There ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... said, with a penetrating glance at Susan. What a pretty girl Susan must have been, so soft and pale and appealing, a little human wood-anemone! She would be very pretty again when she had got over the scared look and the thinness which was almost emaciation. And how well that print suited her! Lady O'Gara had sent down a bundle of things to the South lodge, so that Susan might not appear as a scarecrow to the people. The print had pale green leaves sprinkled over a white surface. It suggested a snowdrop, perished ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... jerked his rod and brought up a fingerling which he silently unhooked and threw back overboard. "Considering the thinness of the air where you came out, maybe half a cubic mile of it had to transpose into your time to let ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... rounded out your lot, your duties are before you. Now beware the mediocrity that threatens middle age, its limitation of thought and interest, its dulness of fancy, its too external life, and mental thinness. Remember the limitations that threaten every professional man, only to be guarded against by great earnestness and watchfulness. So take care of yourself, and let not the intellect more ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... his eyes he showed no emotion. John noticed that his features were cast in the antique mold. The pallor and thinness of his face accentuated his powerful features, and once more John was reminded of the portraits of the young Napoleon. Could there be such a thing as reincarnation? But he remembered that while a new mind like ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... sat down and rested for five minutes. Then they began their difficult climb upward. And difficult it was. There was no semblance of a path. The way led over jagged masses of rock, through dense little stands of trees, and among growths that were hard to penetrate because of their very thinness; for where the stand was sparse the trees had many low limbs to catch and trip and pull at those who ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... written in fluent, graceful, and smooth elegiacs, and rose even to lofty heights as occasion demanded. The style was cleverly varied, in some places it soared, in others it was subdued; passing from the grand to the commonplace, from thinness to richness, and from lively to severe, and in each case with consummate skill. The sweetness of his voice lent it an additional charm, and his modesty made even his voice the sweeter, while his blushes and his nervousness, which were very plain to see, still further set off the ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... saw Madame Vauthier close behind them. Godefroid, who examined him attentively, was astonished at the degree of thinness to which grief, perhaps hunger, perhaps toil, had reduced him. There were signs of all those causes upon that face, where the parched skin clung to the bones as if it had been burned by the sun of Africa. The dome of the forehead, high and threatening, overshadowed a pair of steel-blue ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... each other well; Howard knew them only as he had seen their names in the "fashionable intelligence" columns of the newspapers. Mrs. Carnarvon was a small thin woman in a black velvet gown which made her thinness obtrusive and attractive or the reverse according as one's taste is toward or away from attenuation. Her eyes were a dull, greenish grey, her skin brown and smooth and tough from much exposure in the hunting field. Her cheeks were beginning to hang slightly, so that one said: "She is pretty, ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... this is nothing new. The school of Pope in verse ended by wire-drawing its phrase to such thinness that it could bear no weight of meaning whatever. Nor is fine writing by any means confined to America. All writers without imagination fall into it of necessity whenever they attempt the figurative. I take two examples from Mr. Merivale's 'History of the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... of this same Call-duck (fig. 40, B), the two branches of the haemal spine stand much closer together than in the wild duck (A), and the descending haemal processes are much shortened. In the Penguin duck the neck from its thinness and erectness falsely appears (as ascertained by measurement) to be much elongated, but the cervical and dorsal vertebrae present no difference; the posterior dorsal vertebrae, however, are more completely anchylosed to {284} the pelvis than in the wild duck. The Aylesbury ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... on her dressing table in front of her. She sat with her glorious blue-black hair unbound, and falling over her shoulders, which gleamed pink through the filmy thinness of her robe. ...
— The Golf Course Mystery • Chester K. Steele
... speed of the current are diminished, soon comes to a stage where it is engaged in an endless struggle with the terrace materials. In times of flood, the walls of the terraces compel the tide to flow over the tops of these accumulations. Owing to the relative thinness of the water beyond the bed, and to the growth of vegetation there, the current moves more slowly, and therefore lays down a considerable deposit of the silt and sand which it contains. This may result during a single flood ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... appearance of them all. How many times he had watched them or their duplicates striding and mincing and bounding by, each moving like an animated note of interrogation! They were long, and medium, and short. There were women of a thinness beyond comparison, sheathed in skirts as featly as a rapier in a scabbard. There were women of a monumental, a mighty fatness, who billowed and rolled in multitudinous, stormy garments. There were slow eyes that drooped on one heavily as a hand, and quick ones ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... beneath his mustache three of the broad front middle teeth whereof two are the common portion. For the remainder, a slight beard veiled the character of his chin and jaw and a little disguised the thinness of his throat. Above a large forehead his dark hair rose on end in a bristling bank, like that of most Italian men at the time. He looked solitary, unsociable, critical, but not altogether ungentle. His forehead was full of the suggestion of thoughts, his ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... very picturesque and striking figure. Not so tall probably as he seems at first sight from his extreme thinness, but the pose and air could not be otherwise described than as distinguished. Head of fine type, carried well on the shoulders and in walking with the impression of being a little thrown back; long brown hair, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... horses that passed were made to carry double. Here would ride past a man with a woman behind him; there a couple of girls, or two elderly females. Elsewhere appeared a priest of tremendous length and thinness, with feet much too near the ground, and further on a boy, so small as to resemble a monkey, with behind him a woman so old as to suggest the idea he had taken his great-grandmother out for a ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... made Brent look at her with more attention than he would ordinarily have given. She was a tallish girl, whose figure would have been unusually good had it been properly filled out; as it was, she was thin, but only too thin for her proportions—her thinness, had she been three inches shorter, would have passed for a graceful slenderness. But Brent took this in at a glance; his attention was more particularly concentrated on the girl's face—a delicate oval, framed in a mass of dark ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... for all, in fact; and it was quite one o'clock before the lunch was ended, and wraps of just the right thickness and thinness were chosen, and the party were comfortably placed under the striped linen canopy of the gondola, which they had from a public station, the house-gondola being engaged that day. They rowed through the narrow canal skirting the garden out into the ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... and commanded a wage of $2.50 per day for ordinary work; the laborers mixing concrete were paid $2.75 per day. Another source of much relative expense was the high cost of lumber and carpenter work on the forms. On account of the thinness of the walls and roof, the cost of lumber and labor required per cubic yard of concrete was considerable. A part of the lumber was used the second time in forms, but it was found impracticable to delay the work by waiting for the concrete to harden before beginning ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... was flung unbuckled on the same sod. The Emir was in the very flower of his age, and might perhaps have been termed eminently beautiful, but for the narrowness of his forehead and something of too much thinness and sharpness of feature, or at least what might have seemed such in a European ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... Arnaud, who loved its luster, nor an unsympathetic bold scrutiny, a scrutiny of brass, should see that she was getting gray. There was no fault about her figure; she had that for her satisfaction; she was more graceful than Jean's square thinness, more slim ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the comet's surpassing thinness and lightness is not a mere speculative opinion. It rests upon incontrovertible proof. In 1770, Lexell's Comet passed within six times the moon's distance of the earth, and was considerably retarded in its motion by the terrestrial attraction. If its mass had been of equal amount with the earth's ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... also to be come presently a change and a seeming of thinness into the air; and the Maid to remark upon this, and likewise that the water-powder now to be that it not to fizz ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... her added cares in the thinness of her face and certain drawn lines about the mouth, but it had ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... the western farmer has now and then some leisure, because the frozen ground renders many of his usual operations impossible. Wandle had a stack of cordwood ready cut, and though he needed some logs for an addition to his stable which he meant to build, the thinness of the snow, which had been disturbed by a strong wind, would make the work of hauling them home too difficult. He was, however, an active man, who rarely wasted time or money; and as he looked about, the ash-heap caught his eye. It ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... mere wealth and respectability of the most esteem'd life appears too faint for the eye to observe at all, when little and large alike drop quietly aside at the thought of the prudence suitable for immortality. What is the wisdom that fills the thinness of a year, or seventy or eighty years—to the wisdom spaced out by ages, and coming back at a certain time with strong reinforcements and rich presents, and the clear faces of wedding-guests as far as you ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... the true nature and mode of formation of chalk can be determined with the greatest ease. In the case of the harder varieties, the examination can be conducted by means of slices ground down to a thinness sufficient to render them transparent; but in the softer kinds the rock must be disintegrated under water, and the debris examined microscopically. When investigated by either of these methods, chalk is found to be a ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... shouldn't have done either, and we have bought experience and paid for it. Never mind! experience is nearly always worth its price. And I have nearly lost my cough, and Robert is dosing me indefatigably with cod's liver oil to do away with my thinness.... ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... suddenly from a dense into what was probably a very light one. If possible, I intended to land upon the summit of a mountain, so high as to be untenanted and of difficult access. At the same time it would not do to choose the highest point of a very lofty range, since both the cold and the thinness of the air might in such a place be fatal. I wished, of course, to leave the Astronaut secure, and, if not out of reach, yet not within easy reach; otherwise it would have been a simple matter to watch my opportunity and descend ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... a sofa, her face emaciated to a surprising thinness for the comparatively short interval since her attack. 'Come in, sir,' she said, as soon as she saw him, holding out her hand. 'Don't let me ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... the French are seldom guilty, because the thinness of their Plots prevents them from it: but few Englishmen, except BEN. JOHNSON, have ever made a Plot, with variety of Design in it, included in twenty-four hours; which was altogether natural. For this reason, I prefer the Silent Woman ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... a Greek and kept an open-all-night chop-house, a mean hole in the wall two doors from the corner, where Cake's surpassing thinness made her invaluable at the sink. Also the scraps she carried home in her red, water-puckered hands helped out materially. Then her mother took a boarder and rested in her endeavours, feeling she had performed ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... had everything "gradely" about her. The table-cloth was not only snow-white and beautifully mended, but of fine quality; the spoons were silver, worn to egg-shell thinness, but resplendently bright; the teapot, a heavy, old-fashioned Britannia metal one, was polished till it might have been of the same precious ore; the cups and plates were of delicate transparent china. Margaret came of good old north-country stock, ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... which led him to believe in the existence of an open sea. In a second trip he actually saw this sea with its drifting ice, and came back convinced of the impossibility of going further in a sledge on account of the thinness of the ice. ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... about the middle height, but the thinness of his body, and the length of his legs, gave him the appearance of being much taller. The green coat had been a smart dress garment in the days of swallow-tails, but had evidently in those times adorned a much shorter man than the stranger, for the soiled and faded sleeves ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... to smooth over the commonplace with a not indecorous make-up. You can see this in many poems and epigrams of Buchanan, Borbonius, and Barleius. If the reader is not quite attentive such poems will often deceive him, but being re-read and examined they beget a kind of distaste because of the thinness of the matter. Consequently, we have looked carefully for this fault, and have eliminated many poems that are melodious in this way and ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... any other instance in our literature of a perfection of technique so unerring, so uniform, that it becomes actually fatiguing? It has often foolishly been said that the dazzling brilliance of Swinburne's form is apt to disguise a certain thinness or poverty of substance. It seems to me, on the contrary, that we are often in danger of overlooking the imaginative subtlety of phrases and epithets which are presented to us and withdrawn from us in a flash, on the turn ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... the little world that missed him was astray. The first day of his return his heart was smitten by the thinness of the congregation. Had he, then, accomplished nothing; had he made no impression, established in his shifting flock no habit of continuance in well-doing that could survive even his temporary withdrawal? The fault must be his. He ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... have at present a shagbark that will anything like meet the pecan of the South, yet the consensus of opinion of the people I know who have eaten both, decides in favor of the shagbark. The quality of a very ordinary shagbark is better than the best of pecans. What then, is lacking? Size, shape, thinness of shell, cracking qualities, color, everything but flavor is lacking in most shagbarks. Don't misunderstand me. I am not condemning what we have, for I believe that if as many years are spent by as many people in finding or developing ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... luxurious and indolent ease, Shif'less Sol Hyde, who had attained a great reputation for laziness by incessantly claiming it for himself, but who was nevertheless a hunter and scout of extraordinary skill. Jim Hart, a man of singular height and thinness, whom Sol disrespectfully called the "Saplin'"—that is, the sapling, a slim young tree—was doing the cooking. The others were typical frontiersmen—lean, big ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... face was not set off by the severity of her toilet; there was no touch of spring or brightness anywhere, no look or note which should belong to one so young, unless it was the extreme thinness of ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... Kate could not hide the eminent unsuitability of the feast itself to its elegant surroundings. True, the bread and butter was of wafer-like thinness, there were hot cakes of the crispest, finest variety, and the plum-cake which was Martha's welcome to the bride was of the richest, most ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... error (the error of believing that matter can be intelligent for good or evil), we can catch clear glimpses of God only as the mists disperse, 205:18 or as they melt into such thinness that we per- ceive the divine image in some word or deed which indicates the true idea, - the supremacy and real- 205:21 ity of good, the nothingness ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... mother, consequently if the diet is of such a nature as to induce over-abundance of fat, the child will be born too fat. This does not mean a healthy child by any means, and it may mean considerable extra pain for the mother. A mother inclined to thinness need not fear that this diet will reduce her. The taking of cream, eggs, bacon and other fat foods often has the opposite effect from that desired. A thin person adopting the above light diet will generally get into ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... prepuce immediately adjoining the corona, or they may be in the loose folds in the neighborhood of the frenum, the retention of the virus seemingly being assisted by the topographical condition and relation of the parts, and its absorption facilitated by the thinness of the mucous membrane, as well as by the active circulation and moisture and heat of the parts. It must be evident that but for these favoring conditions the inoculation or infection would and could not be either as sure ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... Linen, and a chearful Air, were to a poor Dependent the same that working Tools are to a poor Artificer. It was no small Entertainment to me, who knew his Circumstances, to see him, who had fasted two Days, attribute the Thinness they told him of to the Violence of some Gallantries he had lately been guilty of. The skilful Dissembler carried this on with the utmost Address; and if any suspected his Affairs were narrow, it was attributed to indulging ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... alimentary canal; the mucous membrane thickens, the valve of the pylorus becomes indurated and forms a scirrhus, of which the patient dies. Well, I have reached that point, my dear friend. The induration is proceeding and nothing checks it. Just look at my yellow skin, my feverish eyes, my excessive thinness. I am withering away. But what is to be done? I brought the seeds of the disease home with me from the emigration; heaven knows what I suffered then! My marriage, which might have repaired the ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... case and removing the piece of ice, it was found that a cork having slipped, one of the edges of the platina had been all but in contact with the inner surface of the tin vessel; yet, notwithstanding the extreme thinness of the interfering ice in this place, no sensible ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... humour gives us a certain impression of thinness. It is pressed too far, and spun out too long. Compare De Quincey's mode of beating out his one joke through pages of laboured facetiousness, with Swift's concentrated and pungent irony, as in the proposal for eating babies, or ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... 'It is not thinness,' she said, 'but I had carried about with me the bright daring open face of my own boy. I shall learn ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Whistler more as a pure painter than any of the other canvases. This doubtless belongs to the period when he was under Courbet's influence. The richness of pure paint, dexterously applied, is scarcely found in the many portraits on the same wall, in which a certain thinness of paint is too much in evidence, no matter how distinguished and suggestive these canvases are. His sense of composition, of the placing of areas of different tones and colour, is markedly evident in all of his work, no ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... peopled by two only, and those two so indistinguishably blended, as it were, that they would appear as one to the casual observer. So I practised repression, though the wall of my reserve is worn to the thinness of thread-paper, and I tried to keep my mind on the droning minor canon, and not to look at her, 'for that way ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... to the men of marching feet—. Now and then he sang for them in that thin old voice whose thinness was so overlaid by the passion of his patriotism that those who listened found ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... lightly, being so bandied. Now I think on it, 'twere possible his legs were cushioned thus to hide a senile thinness! 'Tis human nature when badgered by excess of limit to flounder into limitless excess. Look upon the Burgomaster at thy feet with a surfeit of good round legs, he is unfortunate for being in excess, he cannot whittle down. ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... Unalashkan throwing-stick. It would be better to call this form the Southern type. The noticeable features in all our specimens are the parallel sides, the hard material, thinness, the carving for the fingers, but above all the reappearance of the eccentric cavity for the index finger. This cavity is not a great perforation, as in the Point Barrow type, but an eccentric pocket, ...
— Throwing-sticks in the National Museum • Otis T. Mason
... her hair shining like the raven's wing, her delicate mouth, the whole effect of this beautiful face on the mind of those who beheld her was that of a deep melancholy and sweetness, impressing itself once and for ever. Tall and slender, but without the excessive thinness of some young girls, her movements had that careless supple grace that recall the waving of a flower stalk in the breeze. But in spite of all these smiling and innocent graces one could yet discern in Robert's heiress a will firm ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... Rae! a good man as Friend, Husband, Father. He did his best! but his person is so insignificant, tho' a handsome man off the stage—and, worse than that, the thinness and an insufficiency of his voice—yet Ordonio has done ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... it from me," said Houadir, "to see my generous benefactress deceived; but the thinness of inhabitants, occasioned by the tyranny of Almurah, is the cause that your provisions are more plentiful; but yet I insist upon bearing my part in the burden of the day, and Urad shall ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... is here to spread cracks with its roots—nothing. The only aging factors here are the erosion of the wind—and that's negligible in this atmosphere—and the cracks caused by changing temperature. And one other agent—meteorites. They must crash down occasionally on the city, judging from the thinness of the air, and the fact that we've seen four strike ground ...
— Valley of Dreams • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... looking up with a pleased smile, and at the same moment a tall man arose from a seat near the fire. He was a very fine-looking gentleman, faultlessly dressed and slightly pompous in manner. A certain stoutness of figure and thinness of hair told that he had passed his youth. He had, moreover, the air of a man who has reached a high rung ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... He prepared it with the utmost care, and to "make assurance doubly sure," committed it to memory, a thing he rarely did. His turn came. There was an expectant rustle through the audience, some almost audible comments on his clothes, his height, his thinness. He cleared his voice. He started to say the first word. It was gone. Frantically he searched his memory for that speech. His mind was a blank. Again he cleared his voice and wrestled fiercely with his inner consciousness. ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... these surfaces and an arrangement of scale levers provided so that the pressure exerted on the nut could be weighed. The surfaces were brought together till the nut was cracked and the pressure required was noted. This measures the thinness of the shell or more properly the strength of the shell, the weakest shell of course being the one that takes the least pressure to crack. This pressure was measured in kilograms for by doing so it was possible to utilize some stock apparatus. After the pressure required to crack has been ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... primitive warfare. Of the hundreds who unavoidably saw the apparition (for apparition it certainly seemed) not one will ever forget it or remember it without a shudder. The figure was that of a very tall man, evidently of immense natural strength, with a face shrunk to skeleton thinness and terrible staring eyes rendered more fearful by the heavy red beard and long matted hair. It was dressed in what appeared to be white trousers, but barefoot; and its upper clothing seemed to be a shirt beneath and a loose flowing white robe hanging from the shoulders. In ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... thin, but it was a deceptive thinness. His capacity for storing away free liquids was awe-inspiring and ...
— You Should Worry Says John Henry • George V. Hobart
... a plain yellow robe, of a hue almost identical with that of his smooth, hairless countenance. His hands were large, long and bony, and he held them knuckles upward, and rested his pointed chin upon their thinness. He had a great, high brow, ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... deal to make the man, externally at least, and the change of clothes in Arnold's case had transformed him from a superior looking tramp into an aristocratic and decidedly good-looking man, in the prime of his youth, saving only for the thinness and pallor of his face, and a perceptible stoop ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... esophageal lumen. The determination of the advisability of the removal of keloidal scars would require careful consideration of the particular case, and the same may be said of very large growths of any kind. The extreme thinness of the esophageal walls must be always in the mind of the esophagoscopist if he ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... of watching Captain West. In a way he bears a sort of resemblance to several of Washington's portraits. He is six feet of aristocratic thinness, and has a very definite, leisurely and stately grace of movement. His thinness is almost ascetic. In appearance and manner he is the perfect old-type New ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... His small pictures are superior to his large ones. His execution displays the greatest ease; the leafing of his trees is light, his skies are admirable: his small figures have an exquisite expression and a most lively touch, and the characters are marked out with the greatest truth. From the thinness of the colours his works seem to have been finished at once; they are generally clear in all their parts, and Teniers had the art, without dark shades, to relieve his lights by other lights, so well managed as to produce the effect ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... at the twisted base of the old trees, seemed to have the drowsy hum of mid- summer —with that charm of Italian vegetation that comes to us as its confession of having scenically served, to weariness at last, for some pastoral these many centuries a classic. In a certain cheapness and thinness of substance—as compared with the English stoutness, never left athirst—it reminds me of our own, and it is relatively dry enough and pale enough to explain the contempt of many unimaginative Britons. But it has an idle abundance and wantonness, a romantic shabbiness ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... and, as she fixed them on him, their glances seemed to penetrate his very soul. A piece of old blanket was fastened across her shoulders, and she had no other clothing except a petticoat. Her arms and feet were uncovered, and of almost skeleton thinness. Her features were meagre, and ghastly white, and had the fixed and horrible stamp of insanity. Her head had been shaved, and around it was swathed a piece of rag, in which a few straws were stuck. Her thin ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... lamination and stratification was observed almost universally in the sediment brought up from all points except where the sandy layers above alluded to occurred. Mr. Horner attributes this want of all indication of successive deposition to the extreme thinness of the film of matter which is thrown down annually on the great alluvial plain during the season of inundation. The tenuity of this layer must indeed be extreme, if the French engineers are tolerably correct in their estimate of the amount of sediment formed ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... beyond measure. A hoarse sound like the neighing of a pony was all that came out of his throat, and each time he did this, shrieks of laughter rose from the crowd, while comical jokes and sarcastic remarks were freely passed at the thinness of his legs, the condition of his skin, and the loss of the lower half of his face. Oh! it was shocking and revolting, though it must be said for them that the same people who chaffed him were also the first ones to fill his ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... occasionally met, a certain meagreness, (Heaven forbid that I should call it scrawniness!) a deficiency of physical development, a scantiness, so to speak, in the pattern of their material make, a paleness of complexion, a thinness of voice,—all of which characteristics, nevertheless, only made me resolve so much the more sturdily to uphold these fair creatures as angels, because I was sometimes driven to a half-acknowledgment, that the English ladies, looked ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... surmise whence she had come, or why she was there. She was a woman probably something over thirty years of age. She had thick black hair, which she wore in curls,—unlike anybody else in the world,—in curls which hung down low beneath her face, covering, and perhaps intended to cover, a certain thinness in her cheeks which would otherwise have taken something from the charm of her countenance. Her eyes were large, of a dark blue colour, and very bright,—and she used them in a manner which is as yet hardly common ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... in elk-hunting, as the plains are so boggy that they would be hock-deep every quarter of a mile. Thus no person can thoroughly enjoy elk-hunting who is not well accustomed to it, as it is a sport conducted entirely on foot, and the thinness of the air in this elevated region is very trying to the lungs in hard exercise. Thoroughly sound in wind and limb, with no superfluous flesh, must be the man who would follow the hounds in this wild country—through jungles, rivers, plains and deep ravines, ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... care we had taken to prevent the galleon from passing us unobserved, we had not been inattentive to the means of engaging her to advantage, when we came up with her: For, considering the thinness of our hands, and the vaunting accounts given by the Spaniards of her size, her guns, and her strength, this was a consideration not to be neglected. As we supposed that none of our ships but the Centurion and the Gloucester were capable of lying alongside of her, we took on board ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... both and filled their glasses with wine. Then, as he ate, he leaned back in his chair and watched them. For all her strange beauty, Julia, too, was one of the suffering children of the world. The lines of her figure, which should have been so subtle and fascinating, were sharpened by an unnatural thinness. Aaron's cheeks were almost like a consumptive's, his physique was puny. There was something in their expression common to both. Maraton was conscious of a wave of pity as he ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... notice him. His dress has been laboriously genteel, but is torn and soiled. A detective, with small eyes set close together, and a nose like a yacht's rudder, whisperingly calls the notice of one of these spectators who can see the prisoner's face to the fact that, for all its thinness and bruises, it is not a bad one. All can see that the man's hair is fine and waving where it is not matted ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable |
