"Zero" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it. We clamber down the bank, and step upon the frozen lake, It was snow-covered for a considerable time; but the rain overspread it with a surface of water, or imperfectly melted snow, which is now hard frozen again; and the thermometer having been frequently below zero, I suppose the ice may be four or five feet thick. Frequently there are great cracks across it, caused, I suppose, by the air beneath, and giving an idea of greater firmness than if there were no cracks; round holes, which have been hewn in the marble ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... its equatorial zone a gloomy marsh and the rest of the planet locked in eternal ice. There was Bifrost, which always kept the same face turned to its primary; one side blazingly hot and the other close to absolute zero, with a narrow and barely habitable twilight zone between. There was Mimir, swarming with a race of semi-intelligent quasi-rodents, murderous, treacherous, utterly vicious. Or Niflheim. The Uller Company had the franchise for Niflheim, ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... the plants, the roots of the trees, and the worms, insects, and smaller animals in the ground! It is a veritable fleece, beneath which the shivering earth ("the frozen hills ached with pain," says one of our young poets) is restored to warmth. When the temperature of the air is at zero, the thermometer, placed at the surface of the ground beneath a foot and a half of snow, would probably indicate but a few degrees below freezing; the snow is rendered such a perfect non-conductor of heat mainly by reason ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... On the wall opposite there was a row of dials which told automatically every fact about our condition that the most nervous of men could wish to know. One of them shows the pressure of air in the main compartment of the boat, another registers vacuum, and when both are at zero, Mr. Lake knows that the pressure of the air is normal, the same as it is on the surface, and he tries to maintain it in this condition. There are also a cyclometer, not unlike those used on bicycles, to show how far the boat travels on the wheels; a depth gauge, which keeps us ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... at zero hour and blasted out of the weird green wilderness they had not dared to explore, lifting into the arch of the sky, depending upon Rip's knowledge to put them safely ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... sparkled on the white world without. When he got out of bed a second time, he found the room so hot that he had to pull down his window-sash, and he dressed in a temperature of twenty degrees below zero without knowing that the dry air was more than fresh. Mrs. Durgin called to him through the open door of her parlor, as he entered the dining-room: "Cynthy will give you your breakfast, Mr. Westover. We're all done long ago, and I'm busy in here," and the girl appeared with the coffee-pot and the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... sufficient to air the room from another room unless that other room has in it an open window. Even then the nursery windows should be opened wide from fifteen minutes to half an hour night and morning, while the child is in another room; and this even when the weather is at zero or below. It does not take long to warm up room that has been aired. Perhaps the best means of obtaining the ingress of fresh air without creating a draft upon the floor, where the baby spends so much of his time, is to raise the window six inches at the top or bottom and ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... be over the top all right," declared Jerry, when, one evening, they received their final instructions. The attack, preceded by a brief artillery preparation, was to take place at dawn, the "zero hour" selected. ...
— Ned, Bob and Jerry on the Firing Line - The Motor Boys Fighting for Uncle Sam • Clarence Young
... know how incredibly long winter seems in climates where for weeks together the thermometer stands at zero? There is something hopeless in such cold. You think of summer as of a thing read about somewhere in a book, but which has no actual existence. Winter seems the only reality ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... except a rainy one, in which a man need be kept from his work. It is a fact, though as startling as some of the dogmas of the Edinburgh school of political economy, that the thermometer is no judge of warm or cold weather. Thus, with us in Canada, when it is low, (say at zero,) there is not a breath of hair, and you can judge of the cold of the morning by the smoke rising from the chimney of a cottage, and shooting up straight like the steeple of a church, then gradually melting away in the beautiful clear blue of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 559, July 28, 1832 • Various
... against them, shipped a sea every moment, which the wind threw against the carcass of the corporal, who was now quite exhausted with more than four hours' exposure to a wintry night, the temperature being nearly down to zero. All the corporal's stoicism was gone; he talked wildly, crouched and gibbered in his fear, when he was suddenly roused by a heavy shock. He raised his head, which had sunk upon his chest, and beheld something close to him, and to the gunnel of the boat. It was a thin, tall figure, holding ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... perpetual full dress, jerks at us his expressive tail and is off at the first thaw, black coat, white vest, and all. No tropics or sub-tropics for him. He can stand our climate and our company with a certain condescending tolerance so long as we keep the temperature not too much above zero, but grows contemptuous when Fahrenheit grows effeminate and forty. Nothing for it then but to cool off his thin and unprotected legs and toes in the snows of Canada. "The white North hath his" heart. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... began to arrive, and throughout the whole night, the M. O. and his staff were busy at their work. On the arrival of the zero ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... dilletante reader, all the foregoing, from the first Chapter, might go by the board—that is, as far as the Baron can make out. He speaks only for himself. The Chapter describing the sale by auction is first-rate; no doubt about it. The Baron's spirits, just now down to zero, rose to over 100 deg.. On we go: Throw over OSBOURNE, and come along with Louis STEVENSON of Treasure Island. Bah! that exciting Chapter was but a flash in the pan: brilliant but brief: and "Here we are!" growls the Baron, "struggling ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 30, 1892 • Various
... leaving everything peaceful and happy, but when I got back to luncheon—Great Chaos, it was awful! The two ladies were not on speaking terms, and I had to put on a fur overcoat to keep from freezing to death in the atmosphere that had arisen between them. It was six inches below zero—and the way those two would sniff and sneer at each other ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... any other man. Black he is, indeed, but comely, like the daughters of Jerusalem.—To begin with the hat which he has honoured with a preference—what are your operas or your fire-shovels beside it? they must instantly (on a fair comparison) sink many degrees below zero in the scale of contempt. In a word, I would make bold to assert that it unites in perfection the two grand requisites of a head covering, beauty and comfort. Gentlemen may smile at this if they will, and take exception to my taste; but, I ask, does the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume X, No. 280, Saturday, October 27, 1827. • Various
... the sight of these buildings. He had reckoned on their resembling in some respect the prison in Glasgow, and at the sight of these formidable fortresses with their lofty walls and flanking towers, their moats and vigilant sentries, his hopes fell to zero. It would, he saw at once, be absolutely impossible to open communication with a prisoner of whose whereabouts he was wholly ignorant and of whose very existence he was doubtful. The narrow slits ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... shut myself up from other influences proper to my time and nation. You cannot go back to the old naked barbarism, and you cannot reduce the influence of Christianity, even considered merely as one of the characteristics of the times, to zero. You may fancy you are letting it alone, but it does not let you alone; it is here, and you cannot shut ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... forgotten now except by the gods; and silently gave away their life, before those countries could become fencible and habitable! Nay, my friend, it is our lot too: and if we would win honor in this Universe, the rumor of Histories and Morning Newspapers,—which have to become wholly zero, one day, and fall dumb as stones, and which were not perhaps very wise even while ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... a week down at Shrimpton; 'Tis zero or less in the shade; You can paddle your feet in the principal street And bathe on the stony parade; But still on our holiday pleasures No thoughts of discomfort intrude, As we whisper, "This sight is a bit of all right," For the sea's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 19th, 1914 • Various
... purpose that; reduces one's courage to zero," the Swede said suddenly, as if he had been actually following my thoughts. "Otherwise imagination might count for much. But the paddle, the canoe, the ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... way into the stricken territory. While a blizzard raged in Ohio from Cleveland to Cincinnati, with the temperature down to twenty-eight degrees above zero, the railroads—which means all the railroads in every section, the New York Central, the Pennsylvania, the Erie, the Baltimore and Ohio, and their allied lines—threw into the battle thousands upon thousands of men, trainload after trainload of ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... who thinks intensely of the figures. Some one in the audience thinks of the number fifty-seven. The performer asks him to think of the first figure, then he grasps his hand and counts slowly from zero to nine. After that he asks him to think of the second figure, and counts once more. Immediately after he will announce rightly the two digits. Again there is no mystery in it. He knows that the man ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... face and wistful brown eyes, had been lecturing in the interest of the amendment in the country districts of New York, riding from village to village in an open sleigh, with the thermometer many degrees below zero, and speaking sometimes in unwarmed halls. She did not expect to take a day's rest until the 6th of next November, and then if the amendment carried, she said quietly, she should be willing to lie down ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... time between seeing that the work was done, and going to and fro to his brother's couch, now feeling hopeful as he fancied that he was sleeping more easily. At the second visit, too, his hopes grew more strong; but at the third they went down to zero, for to his horror the heat flush and violent chill returned with terrible delirium, and the boy began to blame himself for not doing something more about getting a doctor, for Emson seemed to be worse than he was at ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... by the thousand, to see it. Shall the thing be abolished utterly,—as perhaps were proper, had not our Crown-Prince been there, with eyes very open to it, and yet with thoughts very shut;—or shall some flying trace of the big Zero be given? Riddling or screening certain cart-loads of heavy old German printed rubbish, [Chiefly the terrible compilation called Helden-Staats und Lebens-Geschichte des, &c. Friedrichs des Andern (History Heroical, Political and Biographical ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... man to sell all that he has and give it to the poor, he will inform us that such an operation is impossible. If he sells his shares and his lands, their purchaser will continue all those activities which oppress the poor. If all the rich men take the advice simultaneously the shares will fall to zero and the lands be unsaleable. If one man sells out and throws the money into the slums, the only result will be to add himself and his dependents to the list of the poor, and to do no good to the poor beyond giving a ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... live and wriggling dinosaurs. Haleakala is the Hawaiian name for "the House of the Sun." It is a noble dwelling, situated on the Island of Maui; but so few tourists have ever peeped into it, much less entered it, that their number may be practically reckoned as zero. Yet I venture to state that for natural beauty and wonder the nature-lover may see dissimilar things as great as Haleakala, but no greater, while he will never see elsewhere anything more beautiful or wonderful. Honolulu is six days' steaming from San Francisco; ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... placed himself at the head of the company and drew sword, the chill breath of distrust sent the mercury of his self-confidence down to zero. It looked so easy to command a company when some one else was doing it; it was hard when he tried it himself. All the imps of confusion held high revel in his mind when he attempted to give the orders which he had conned until he supposed he had them "dead-letter perfect." he felt his usually-unfailing ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... starting-point shall not have been NIL. The big ball implies the little ball, as small as you please. Now, in harking back to the origin of these acquired habits, if I interrogate the possibilities I obtain zero as the only answer. If the animal does not know its trade thoroughly, if it has to acquire something, all the more if it has to acquire everything, it perishes: that is inevitable; without the little snow-ball the big snow-ball ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... had managed to sustain her spirits so far, dropped to zero at this bad news. There she was, penniless, in a strange town; and how could she get through all the long, weary hours until the evening? Gulping down a lump in her throat, she asked the sailor if the cargo vessel were already in the ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... the market is to rise, because having to fall eighty centimos, the value of the coupon, every quarter, if the market didn't rise to offset that loss, shares would reach zero...." ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... present time the proportion of juveniles under sixteen to the rest of the local prison population is only a little over two per cent. and it is not likely that it will ever reach a higher figure. It might easily be reduced almost to zero if children destined for Reformatories were sent off to these institutions at once, instead of being detained for a month or so in prison till a suitable school is found for them. Some persons object to the idea of sending children to Reformatories at once, on the ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... cool retreat, smelling faintly of tobacco juice deposited by some of its clients, the mercury was swelling toward ninety. It was April Fools' day, and unless Miss Tennant was cool, nobody was. She looked cool. If the temperature had been 40 deg. below zero she would have looked warm; but she ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... broke clear and cold. The thermometer was down to twenty-five below zero, and a chill wind was blowing which drove the frost through clothes and flesh to the bones. For the first time in many weeks Dennin stood upon his feet. His muscles had remained inactive so long, and he was so out of practice ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... discovered that the wire was superconductive. A superconductor is a material which has no electrical resistance whatever. In current Earth science tin and mercury and a few alloys could be made into superconductors by being cooled below 18 deg. Kelvin, or four hundred odd degrees Fahrenheit below zero. Above that temperature, superconductivity did not exist. But the children's wire was a superconductor at room temperature. A thread the size of a cobweb could carry all the current turned out by Niagara without heating ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... is "an abominable pillage;" the gendarmes and soldiers placed there to maintain order, "make a rush for the wood and carry it away together with the crowd." Bear in mind that on this day the thermometer is sixteen degrees below zero, that one hundred, two hundred other lines of people likewise stand waiting at the doors of bakers and butchers, enduring the same cold, and that they have already endured it and will yet endure it a month and more. Words are wanting to describe the sufferings of these long lines of motionless ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... evident to residents in the high latitudes by many facts of daily occurrence; and I may mention that the drying of linen furnishes a familiar one. When a shirt, after being washed, is exposed in the open air to a temperature of 40 deg. or 50 deg. below zero, it is instantly rigidly frozen, and may be broken if violently bent. If agitated when in this condition by a strong wind, it makes a rustling noise like theatrical thunder. In an hour or two, however, or nearly as quickly as it would do if exposed to the ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... saw him go, and joined him. "Down to zero, my lad," he said. "That would make people at home stare. But it's only the mercury that's down to zero; our spirits must be up to a thoroughly ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... structural changes. The mere fact, for instance, that there is a growing tendency to throw the stress automatically on the first syllable of a word may eventually change the fundamental type of the language, reducing its final syllables to zero and driving it to the use of more and more analytical or symbolic[149] methods. The English phonetic laws involved in the rise of the words foot, feet, mouse and mice from their early West-Germanic ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... in midsummer! And below zero! How cold it got, there is no one to say. The abandoned recording instrument in the Weather Bureau was found, at 2:16 A.M., the morning of June 12, 1935, to have touched minus ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... consideration for the removal of the word "love." It can do no good, and there are many substitutes for it. It can easily be eliminated without revolutionizing the whole scoring system. It is far easier to substitute the words "zero," "nothing," for "love" than cause such an upheaval as was proposed. In my opinion the best way to obviate the matter is to use the player's name in conjunction with the points won by him, when his opponent has none. If the first point is won by Williams, ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... or for many years. Sometimes they lose the use of their limbs, which shrink and shrivel away. The agony of their cramped position is beyond the power of words to describe. Even in winter, when the temperature drops, as it sometimes does, to sixty degrees below zero, they are given only a single sheepskin for covering. How it is possible to live in indescribable filth, half-fed, well-nigh frozen in winter, and suffering the tortures of the damned, is beyond my ken—only a Mongol could ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... the ground. We sow our winter wheat the last of August, or the first and second week in September. Before winter sets in, the wheat-plant often throws out a bunch of roots a foot in length. During the winter, though the thermometer goes down frequently to zero, and sometimes 10deg. to 15deg. below zero, yet if the land is well covered with snow, it is not improbable that the roots continue to absorb more or less food from the ground, and store it up for future use. In the spring, the wheat commences to grow before we can get the ...
— Talks on Manures • Joseph Harris
... have had its history, its stages of development, but we can only with difficulty trace them out. It cannot have sprung into existence full-grown any more than the other sciences; it must have started from zero, and men must have slowly fought their way from one observation to another, with gradually widening conceptions, before they could bring it even to that stage of development in which it was when the observers of the Museum of Alexandria began ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... showing my picture to everybody, Mr. Bradford included, who pronounced him a noble boy, and admired him to my satisfaction. Then came a letter from Lilly, saying mother had decided to remain in Clinton, and wanted us to join her there. O my prophetic soul! My heart went below zero! Then Colonel Allen sent to Port Hudson for the band to serenade us, and raised my spirits in anticipation of the treat. While performing my toilet in the evening, Waller Fowler arrived, on his way ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... by the beginning of a thaw, interrupted by a sudden and very sharp cold spell, when the mercury went down to zero and the water from the melting snow turned to ice. Richmond was encased in a sheath of gleaming white. The cold wintry sun was reflected from roofs of ice, the streets were covered with it, icicles hung like rows of spears from the eaves, and the human ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... would have been rather startled at such an enunciation of her practice, but she was devoted to it as a practice: she would give her own chair to the cat and sit on the settle herself; get up at midnight, if a mew or a bark called her, though the thermometer was below zero; The tenderloin of her steak or the liver of her chicken was saved for a pining kitten or an ancient and toothless cat; and no disease or wound daunted her faithful nursing, or disgusted her devoted tenderness. It was rather hard on humanity, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... this individual fireplace, were exquisite beyond description. A wood-fire is a particularly cheerful thing. Those who have never seen one can form but a faint idea of its splendour; especially on a sharp winter night in the arctic regions, where the thermometer falls to forty degrees below zero, without inducing the inhabitants to suppose that the world has reached its conclusion. The billets are usually piled up on end, so that the flames rise and twine round them with a fierce intensity that causes them to crack and sputter cheerfully, sending innumerable sparks of fire ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... ice in a glass of water at zero degrees Celsius exhibits certain properties and performs certain actions at its surface. Some of the molecules drift away, to become one with the liquid. Other molecules from the liquid become attached to the crystalline ice. But, the ice cube remains essentially an ...
— What The Left Hand Was Doing • Gordon Randall Garrett
... other crops, tea is or ought to be sprayed. The northern limit of tea is Niigata, where the bushes must be protected from the snow, which may fall in that prefecture to a great depth. The region in which tea cannot be grown is that in which the temperature falls below zero for two months. Tea is not grown, as in India and Ceylon, by tea planters, but in small areas and as a side-line at that. I never saw a plantation of more than five acres. Most areas are much smaller. The ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... slant tunnel's axis and that of the vertical from the selected central point would lie in the same vertical plane. The object of the tunnelling would, in fact, be to determine how far apart the vertical planes through these points lay, and the odds would be great against the result proving to be zero. ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... to 4 G's, noting that RVS registered about a mile per second away from station, and suddenly became aware that the red light was on for loss of air. The cabin pressure gauge read zero, and his heart throbbed into his throat as he remembered that pinging sound, just as they passed the enemy ship. He told Garrity to see if he could locate the loss, and any other damage, and was shortly startled by a low amazed whistle in ...
— Slingshot • Irving W. Lande
... contrary, he plundered the whole nation for his own individual advantage. In the patriarchal relation that hypocritically concealed the slavery of the worker, the latter must have remained an intellectual zero, totally ignorant of his own interest, a mere private individual. Only when estranged from his employer, when convinced that the sole bond between employer and employe is the bond of pecuniary profit, when the sentimental bond between them, which stood not the slightest ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... for March 32 deg., and 43 deg. for April. A more equable and gradual transition from midsummer heat to midwinter cold cannot be shown by any locality on this continent. Seldom does the mercury rise above ninety during our warmest summers, or fall below zero in our most severe winters. In J. Disturnal's work, entitled "The Influence of Climate in North and South America," published by Van Nostrand, in 1867, the climate of Buffalo is thus characterized: "From certain ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... the amount of stock which they had sold; they had never expected to do any such thing. What they did was promptly to close the business. The price of the stock dropped immediately to the neighborhood of zero, millions of values were canceled, and thousands of investors were made to suffer loss. But the direct consequences were seen in the village whose prosperity was suddenly destroyed. Fifteen hundred men and women were deprived, at a stroke, of employment and livelihood. In many homes there was destitution ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... sank to zero again, for there was the oblong of the inclosed bath occupying the left of the long, narrow place, and only just leaving room for ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... of the rest of the house is down almost to zero. Luckily it is not a cold winter, but it is very damp, as it rains continually. I have an armchair there, a footstool, and use the kitchen table as a desk; and even then, to keep fairly warm, I almost sit on top ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... stood in the motley crowd inside the barnlike room where Fats ran a bar along one wall, and filled the rest of the space with assorted tables—all worn. Gordon was sweating slightly as he stood at the roulette table, where both zero and double-zero ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey
... and he wound up by telling her that she could have his clams at ten per cent discount for cash. By this time she was about as mad as she could be, and she pitched into both of them, looking cross, and sung like blazes, went away up the musical ladder to zero, and wound up by telling them both, to their face, that she would see them in Chicago before she would buy a condemned clam. And then they all went off the stage as though they had been having a regular fight, and Brignoli acted as though he would like to eat her raw. That's ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... the landscape with an impenetrable veil. Thunder echoes through the rocky caves with incessant reverberations, and rain settles down in a drenching flood. The chill of the wooden Hotel penetrates to the bone; enthusiasm wanes below zero, and even scorching Sourabaya appears preferable to this wet and windy refuge on the storm-swept heights. The hurricane proves brief in proportion to the violence displayed, and the walk to Poespo at dawn, behind ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... slept, and now they were all imprisoned and helpless. Trot and Cap'n Bill were sure to freeze to death in a short time, for only a tiny air space remained between their bodies and the ice, and this air was like that of a winter day when the thermometer is below zero. ...
— The Sea Fairies • L. Frank Baum
... and by the mere force of latitude alone? Where, for instance, does its northern limit cross the Adriatic? I learn, that the olive tree resists cold to eight degrees of Reaumur below the freezing-point, which corresponds to fourteen above zero of Fahrenheit: and that the orange resists to four degrees below freezing of Reaumur, which is twenty-three degrees above ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... seventeen degrees below zero; it was the middle of a Massachusetts winter, and the cold intense. The moon was at the full, and the night as bright as day; not a stone but was visible on the iron-hard road, that rang under our horses' hoofs. ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... nothing equals that now in triumphant practice in the lists of literature. From Zoilus to the penny newspapers, never has there been criticism, penned or spoken, so bitterly pungent as some of the grave laudatory articles, by which authors are now quizzed down to zero in the popular reviews. Satan Montgomery is bantered with the name of Isaiah; Miss Landon by a comparison with La Rochefoucault; and Don Trueba, with Pigault le Brun. This is a refinement in cruelty. It is twining the rack with flowers; and hanging ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 564, September 1, 1832 • Various
... live in one like it. There is no water except what the water man brings every day. This little house has eighteen rooms around a court. It means four separate roofs and going outdoors to get from one to another. When the mercury is at twenty below zero it would mean that just the same. All the ground floors have stone floors. We did not see all the rooms; there are paper windows in some and glass windows in some. In summer they put on a temporary roof of mats over the court. It is higher than the roofs and so allows ventilation and gives ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... swirling chaos outside the rim of light made by his fire and listened to the moaning of the wind over the treetops. Beyond the circle of light the dry snow, which crunched like sand under his feet, was lost in ghostly gloom. It was forty degrees below zero. And he was glad, even with this sickness of despair in his heart, that she was not a ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... should have replied to it, but tell her I think so. Alas for sonnetting, 'tis as the nerves are; all the summer I was dawdling among green lanes, and verses came as thick as fancies. I am sunk winterly below prose and zero. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... distribution, the farther its Lorenz curve from the 45 degree line and the higher its Gini index, e.g., a Sub-Saharan country with an index of 50. If income were distributed with perfect equality, the Lorenz curve would coincide with the 45 degree line and the index would be zero; if income were distributed with perfect inequality, the Lorenz curve would coincide with the horizontal axis and the right vertical axis and the ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... novelty I found, however, was the superb autumn weather, the bright, strong, electric days, lasting well into November, and the general mildness of the entire winter. Though the mercury occasionally sinks to zero, yet the earth is never so seared and blighted by the cold but that in some sheltered nook or corner signs of vegetable life still remain, which on a little encouragement even asserts itself. I have found wild flowers here every month of the year; violets in December, a ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... Great Estates was a perfect delight! I am afraid my work at the office this morning was down to zero in efficiency; so perhaps it is just as well, if I am to keep my job, that the average week-end in the country is different—very. Thank you all the same, for the wonderful time you gave us ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... the rain and the spray, had come near us all the time; for we were on an allowance of fresh water; and who would strip and wash himself in salt water on deck, in the snow and ice, with the thermometer at zero? ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... thermometer placed on the net over the fire indicated a temperature of 38°; when removed two or three feet from this situation it fell to 31°, and placed close to the wall stood at 23°, the temperature of the open air at the time being 25° below zero. A greater degree of warmth than this produces extreme inconvenience by the dropping from the roofs. This they endeavour to obviate by applying a little piece of snow to the place from which a drop proceeds, and this adhering is ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... annihilated: and Friedrich was ordered, furthermore, to produce proofs within six months that his subjects too were absolved of all oaths or the like regarding it, and that in fact the Transaction was entirely abolished and reduced to zero. Friedrich complied, had to comply: very much chagrined, he returned home: and died next year,—it is supposed, of heartbreak from this business. He had yielded outwardly: but to force only. In a Codicil appended to his last Will, some ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... build up a tremendous velocity in space. Lance cleared the ecliptic by a hundred million miles; then with the Solar System spread out flat below him, he opened up his flight orders. His destination, he discovered, was Groombridge 34, a visual double star. Right ascension: zero hours, thirteen minutes. Declination: forty-three and four-tenths degrees. Nearly twelve ...
— Next Door, Next World • Robert Donald Locke
... had now fallen to 4 deg. C.—as near as possible to that of the inner surface of the walls and windows. A careful use of the thermometer indicated that the metallic surface of the former was now nearly zero C., or 32 deg. F. The inner surface of the windows was somewhat colder, showing that the crystal was more pervious to heat than the walls, with their greater thickness, their outer and inner lining of metal, and massive interior of concrete. I directed a current from the thermogene ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... thinks Mr. Phillips? I saw one set; dreadfully ugly Books, errors in every page;—and to this hour I have never heard of any other! The amount remains zero net; and it would appear there was simply one copy "printed," the ugly one sent to myself, which I instantly despatched again somewhither! On second thought perhaps you had better not tell Mr. Phillips this story, at least not in this way. His integrity ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... be seen that the ten names contain eight but only eight different vowels, 0 and 4 having the same vowel aw, while 5 and 9 have ai. Both these pairs caused confusion; the first of them was cured by substituting the name of the letter O for the name of the zero cipher, which happens to be identical with it in form,[9] and this introduced a ninth vowel sound ou ( owe), but the other pair remained such a constant source of error, that persons who had their house put ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... it aside. Her mother mind was running upon a hot supper for her boy. "I was just worried to death at you folks sitting around guessing. Winter got me beat by just two weeks, and now the snow's falling in lumps, and it's mighty near down to zero. ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... supernatural light—what fearful obscurity! Heaven and Hell war in his soul! Strange visions traverse his intellect, throwing their lurid light into the vague depths of his heart. His power to love and feel seems boundless—his power to know almost at zero. What can he predicate even of himself, with his boundless desires for he knows not what—his fleeting emotions and insatiable wishes! Ah! if the language of poetry, of music, of the arts, came not to gift these passing images with external life, to fix ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... clerical and lay, remained under the grinding force of many-sided oppression, and until long after the accession of George III. had scarcely a consciousness of political existence. As long as the great bulk of the nation could be equated to zero, the Episcopal monopolists had no motive for cultivating the good-will of the Presbyterians, who like the Roman Catholics maintained their religion, with the trivial exception of the Regium Donum, by their own resources, and who ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... caused many of the events planned for the second inauguration to be abandoned. The thermometer did not rise much above zero all day, persuading many to avoid the ceremony on the East Portico of the Capitol. The oath of office was administered by Chief Justice Salmon Chase. A parade and a display of fireworks were featured later that day, as well as a ball in a temporary wooden structure ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... heavens with the radiance of eternal day. The disappearance of the sun only adds to their beauty; they alone seem to know no night. As we travelled round under the shadow of these giants the temperature fell many degrees below zero, and the cold from the water penetrated the carriages, necessitating fires and warm furs, in spite of the ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... the base of the indicator is attached to another small nail driven in the beam on the neutral plane midway between the end nails. All three nails should be in place before the beam is put into the machine. The indicator is adjustable by means of a thumb-screw at the base and is set at zero before the load is applied. Deflections are read to the nearest 0.001 inch. For rate of application of load see SPEED OF TESTING MACHINE, above. The speed should be uniform from start to finish without stopping. Readings must be ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... to Chambly, and he was obliged to separate from his wife for a time. He used to drive in occasionally to Montreal to visit her, but at this season of the year the roads were very bad, and, as the thermometer sometimes fell 20 or even 30 degrees below zero, the journey was usually attended with much discomfort and even some danger. On Christmas Day, Mrs. O'Grady wished her husband to remain at Chambly and dine at the mess, but he insisted on coming ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... wayward to again present herself to the world as the spoiled child of fortune, and deliver over her new acquisition according to the well-remembered precedent of Corfu, the monetary value of all property in Cyprus would descend to zero, and the "Cypriote Fraternity," if householders or landowners, would raise the Greek ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... therefore a piston speed of 600 feet per minute. Divide this card into any convenient number of ordinates, distant dx feet from each other, writing upon each the absolute pressure measured upon it from the zero line XX. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 520, December 19, 1885 • Various
... began to spread over his face. His gaze flicked to dials and gauges; he nodded very slightly, and brought both hands down like an organist playing a mighty chord. He watched the gauges. The needles were still, lying on their zero pins, and where lights should have flickered and flashed there was nothing. Paresi glanced at Anderson and met a worried look. Hoskins had his head cocked to one side, listening, puzzled. Ives rose from the couch and came ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... was, upon searching those trains, only one hundred and fifty pairs of boots and shoes and six hundred pairs of stockings were found provided for an army of two thousand men, and some of the soldiers already had nothing but moccasins to cover their feet, with the thermometer at 16 degrees below zero,—while there were found one thousand leather neck-stocks and three thousand bed-sacks, articles totally useless. "How not to do it" had evidently been the motto of the Quarter-master's Department. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... to absorb heat; yet we find the base of this material projectile uncomfortably warm, though, should we expose a thermometer in the shade in front, we know it would show a temperature of three hundred to four hundred degrees below zero—were the instrument capable of recording it." Artificial darkness having been obtained, the travellers were soon asleep, Bearwarden's dreams being regaled with thoughts of his company's triumph; Ayrault's, naturally, ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... against each name (as far as he knew) the annual income of the different appointments held by that person. In the mean time, I performed the same operation on his list, against some names of which I was obliged to place a ZERO. The result of the comparison was an average of nearly 1200L. per annum for the six French SAVANS whom I had named. Of the average amount of the sums received by the English, I only remember that it was very ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... that all of it was secured upon the finest real estate in France, and that penalties in the way of fines, imprisonments and death were enacted from time to time to maintain its circulation at fixed values, there was a steady depreciation in value until it reached zero point and culminated in repudiation. The aggregate of the issues amounted to no less than the enormous and unthinkable sum of $9,500,000,000, and in the middle of 1797 when public repudiation took place, there was no less than $4,200,000,000 in face value of assignats ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... females and by n 1, n 2, n 3, etc. males, the sum of m n remaining constant, but one of the sexes being partly permuted into the other. The ultimate conclusion even cannot be disregarded: we must admit a set of eggs represented by m - m, or zero, females and of n m males, one of the sexes being completely replaced by the other. Conversely, it must be possible for the feminine series to be augmented from the masculine series to the extent of absorbing it entirely. It ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... different when met in New York. Some whom he called on were civil enough to him; but as soon as he broached his business they froze up. The suggestion that he had coal-property to sell sent them down to zero. Their eyes would glint with a shrewd light and their faces harden into ice. One or two told him plainly that they had no money to embark ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... self-contradiction—viz., that in the act of creation God limits His own infinity, no matter to how infinitesimal an extent. On the alternative supposition we have ultimately to think of God and man either as All plus something or All plus zero—which is absurd. Mr. Chesterton has rendered useful service by insisting that in creating the world God distinguishes Himself from the world, as a poet is distinct from his poem—a truth which he has condensed into an aphorism, ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... in the blood. These errors are quite inconsiderable for the above-mentioned instruments, since here the blood is so highly diluted with water that the possible original differences are thereby reduced to zero. ...
— Histology of the Blood - Normal and Pathological • Paul Ehrlich
... up around the ship, so as to rise a couple of feet above our bulwarks, five feet above our deck. They are very often ten and twelve feet high, and threaten to overwhelm us. Add to this, darkness, snow, cold, and the absolute destitution of surrounding shores." The temperature fell below zero and the ships seemed destined to winter in Wellington Channel, but fortunately a strong northwest gale, in conjunction with heavy tides, disintegrated the main pack and set ships, ice and all, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... of solids, instead of being sensibly constant at all temperatures, are found to diminish rapidly in the low temperatures now available in liquid air or hydrogen and apparently tend to disappear at absolute zero. "All takes place," says Poincare, "as if these molecules lost some of their degrees of freedom in cooling—as if some of their articulations froze ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... other of these conditions always exists, and always under two others: pressure and heat. When the air around water reaches the temperature of thirty-two degrees by the scale of Fahrenheit, or or zero by the Centigrade scale, and is exposed to this temperature for a time, it becomes ice. At two hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit it becomes steam. Between these two temperatures it is water. But the change to steam which is so rapid and visible at the temperature above mentioned ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... agreed with her, that it was painful to see gentle English girls clad, or rather un-clad, after the fashion of our enemies across the Channel; now, unhappy nation! sunk to zero in politics, religion, and morals—where high-bred ladies went about dressed as heathen goddesses, with bare arms and bare sandalled feet, gaining none of the pure simplicity of the ancient world, and losing all the decorous dignity of ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... above the level of the sea; and cold in the tierra fria, or region at an elevation exceeding six thousand feet. In the first named the extreme heat is 100 deg. Fahr.; in the last the extreme of cold is 20 deg. above zero. In the national capital the mercury ranges between 65 deg. and 75 deg. Fahr. throughout the year. In fact, every climate known to the traveler may be met with between Vera Cruz and the capital of ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... zero hour for collies' coats. Yet, this year, Lad had not yet begun to shed his winter raiment; and he was still in full bloom. This fact decided the Mistress. Not one collie in ten would be in anything like perfect coat. And the prize cup grew clearer and nearer, to her mental vision. ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... completely fertile; one, however, was nearly so, yielding 96 per cent of the proper number of seeds. From this high degree of fertility we have many descending gradations, till we reach an absolute zero, when the plants, though bearing many flowers, did not produce, during successive years, a single seed or even seed-capsule. Some of the most sterile plants did not even yield a single seed when legitimately ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... filled with glycerine, which is the fluid recommended by Mr. Wm. Denny, though water or any other liquid will answer the purpose. At one side of the gauge is the circular scale, C, capable of being revolved round its vertical axis, as well as adjusted up and down, so as to bring the zero pointer exactly to the top of the fluid when the vessel is without list. Round the top of the scale, at D, are engraved four different draughts, and under these are the metacentric heights. Test ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... pounds, or a solid steam pressure. The temperature was maintained at this point for the number of hours required to reduce the hurds, which was found to be about five, after which the rotary was stopped and steam relieved until the pressure was reduced to zero, when the head was removed and the stock was emptied into a tank underneath, measuring 5-1/2 by 6 by 2 feet deep, where it was drained and washed. Samples of waste soda solution or "black liquor," which were taken from some of the "cooks" for analysis, were drawn while the stock was being thus ...
— Hemp Hurds as Paper-Making Material - United States Department of Agriculture, Bulletin No. 404 • Lyster H. Dewey and Jason L. Merrill
... Guru was saying to Kennedy, "I can secure you one of the love-pills from India, but it will cost you - er - ten dollars." I think he hesitated, to see how much the traffic would bear, from one to one hundred, and compromised with only one zero after the unit. Kennedy appeared satisfied, and the Guru departed with alacrity to secure ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... sleighing parties. Sometimes a logging-bee was made to clear a special lot for a neighbor, and a band of wood-choppers worked all day together. It was cheerful work, though the men had to stand all day in the snow, and the thermometer was below zero. But there was no cutting wind in the forest, and the exercise kept the blood warm. Many a time a hearty man would drop his axe to wipe the sweat from his brow. Loose woollen frocks, or long-shorts, two ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... And wrings the Bel and toles it, and sweeps paths; And for these servaces gits $100 per annum; Wich them that thinks deer let 'em try it; Gittin up before starlite in all wethers, and Kindlin fiers when the wether is as cold As zero, and like as not green wood for kindlins, (I wouldn't be hierd to do it for no sum;) But o Sextant there are one kermodity Wuth more than gold which don't cost nuthin; Wuth more than anything except the Sole of man! I mean ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... candle smoke there is here!' Alfred cried. 'And the room must be five or six degrees below zero. Let's go ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... by contract, insist upon a supply of fresh air for your workroom with the same emphasis you use in demanding sufficient heat in zero weather. ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... port-hole was opened, and Captain Robers, accompanied by half his crew, prepared to descend. They were all bundled in heavy garments, for the temperature of Callisto, never high, frequently drops to sub-zero readings. Winford stood at the port and watched the men climb down the rope ladder ...
— The Space Rover • Edwin K. Sloat
... of sense is at zero, Use words that run smoothly, whatever they mean; Leander and Lilian and Lillibullero Are much the same thing ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... civilian life, despite the lost arms and legs which they scarcely seem to regret; their souls still triumph over the body and the temporal. As they hobble through the streets of London, they display the same gay courage that was theirs when at zero hour, with a fifty-fifty chance of death, they hopped over the top ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... fell so far below zero that no living thing moved on the wide, white waste. The snows seemed never at rest. One storm followed another, till the drifting, icy sands were worn as fine as flour. The house was like a cave. Its windows, thick with frost, let in only a pallid light at midday. There was little ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... impressed by the exhibition. The work went steadily on among the rocks in front of Chance Along for ten days, and then came twenty-four hours of furious wind and driving snow out of the northwest. This was followed by a brief lull, a biting nip of frost that registered thirty degrees below zero, and then fog and wind out of the east. After the snowy gale, during the day of still, bitter cold, relief parties went to Squid Beach and Nolan's Cove and brought in the half-frozen watchers. For a day the look-out stations ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... was then taken and another trial was made. With repeated rests for the trainer and the animal, the day's lesson proceeded. The trainer was in profuse perspiration, though it was 38 degrees below zero. My host said to me: "This exercise is repeated day after day until the animal submits to it. They are in their prime at seven or eight years and can work till the age of fifteen or seventeen years. The reason we have to wander so much ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu
... simply a very sensitive and accurate pressure gauge; the other was an instrument for registering the weight of the ship, or the pressure with which she bore upon the ground. The index hands of both dials were travelling backwards towards zero along their respective graduated arcs; and simultaneously with the registration by the pressure gauge of a pressure of six pounds—which indicated the air-pressure in the air-chambers of the ship—the other dial registered zero, thus indicating ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... and walked briskly, their impoverished blood was not vigorous enough to produce a reaction against the sharp wind of the zero night which nosed through their few thin garments and bit into their bodies as if they were naked. They came to a vast department store. Each of its great show-windows, flooded with light, was a fascinating display of clothing for women upon wax models—costly jackets and cloaks of wonderful ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... to him, and he did it first. He had the splendid ability to say "No" when he should, a thing many good men can not do. At such times his mouth would shut like a steel trap and his blue eyes would send the thermometer below zero. No one could play horse with H. H. Rogers. He, himself, was always ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... spring-like weather in mid-winter, and then the thermometer went hurrying down towards zero with alarming rapidity. Evening closed in with a temperature so mild that fires were permitted to expire in the ashes; and morning broke with a cold nor-wester, whistling through every crack and cranny, in a tone that made you ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... a dozen people in the hall; had a social chat with them and returned to our hotel. Lost more here at Dansville than we gained at Mount Morris. So goes the world.... January 9: Mercury 12 deg. below zero but we took a sleigh for Nunda. Trains all blocked by snow and no mail for several days, yet we had a full house and good meeting." Extracts from one or two letters written home will give some idea ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... the morning: and that it is then, as a consequence, that the mind is least able to contemplate the present with equanimity, the future with fortitude, and the past without regret. Every thinking man, however, knows that this is not so. The true zero hour, desolate, gloom-ridden, and specter-haunted, occurs immediately before dinner while we are waiting for that cocktail. It is then that, stripped for a brief moment of our armor of complacency and self-esteem, we see ourselves as ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... appropriate to the Sheriff of the County of Surrey, which office I then held. On the Tuesday before the luncheon I was sleeping at Queen Anne's Gate, but went as usual to The Spectator office in the morning, transacted my business, and got back half-an-hour before "zero," which was 1.30, so that I might arrange the places of my guests, a task in which I was helped by Sir Eric Drummond, then Mr. Asquith's Private Secretary. Unfortunately I have not a record of all the people who were ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... upon us. We had only the remains of our summer clothing and few blankets, so that when the thermometer registered 11 degrees F. above zero ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... was booked to sail at 3.30 a.m., and this time had to be kept regardless of our convenience. As she was still aground at that hour the order was given to disembark. All this time we had been lying shivering on the dust and stones, waiting for our turn, and now, with our spirits at zero, we marched back to our base, reaching it at 4.45 as light was showing in the east, so that we got back none too soon. The long wait we had put in, with a cold wind blowing, had chilled us all thoroughly. All had some ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... Afterwards, Madame Edmond Adam.] is really charming; you would like her a great deal, and then you have it 18 degrees above zero down there, and here we are in the snow. It is severe; moreover, I rarely go out, and my dog himself doesn't want to go out. He is not the least amazing member of society. When he is called Badinguet, he lies on the ground ashamed and despairing, and ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... next thing is to graduate a scale, which will most conveniently be established in indelible pencil on a carefully smoothed strip of white wood 1 inch wide. First make a zero mark squarely across the strip near the bottom, and at the unit distance above it a similar mark, over which "One Inch" should be written plainly. The distance between the marks is next divided by 1/2-inch ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... did those long-ago people manage? Their walls were not sheeted, and they did not know the use of building-paper. Our old wide siding had been laid directly on the bare timbers, the studding; every crevice under the windows, every crack in the plaster, was a short circuit with zero. We decided to take off the antique siding, cut out the bad places, and relay it flat, as sheeting. Over it we would lay building-paper, and on top of this, good substantial shingles, laid wide to the weather in ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... have experienced the sufferings and hardships of camping out in the forest with the temperature ranging from thirty to sixty degrees below zero, will agree that to escape two or three nights of it ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... spars, 32 feet by 16, covered with canvas, was, during the month of November enclosed, and the roof covered with snow, from 4 to 7 feet thick, which being saturated with water when the temperature was fifteen degrees below zero, immediately took the consistency of ice, and thus we actually became the inhabitants of an iceberg during one of the most severe winters hitherto recorded; our sufferings aggravated by want of bedding, clothing and animal food, need not be dwelt upon. Mr. C. Thomas, the carpenter, was the ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... pleasure, but provided interest for young friends at home, to whom I may detail my winter journey on a sunny autumn afternoon at Hebron. A real midwinter Labrador sledge journey, with the thermometer far below zero of Fahrenheit and the wind blowing hard and cold, is not so pleasant, especially if the dogs be quite invisible because of the driving snow. Should the traveller then be pitched off the sledge, and the drivers not perceive his absence at once, they may lose one another for ever. ...
— With the Harmony to Labrador - Notes Of A Visit To The Moravian Mission Stations On The North-East - Coast Of Labrador • Benjamin La Trobe
... vegetation and ice to bind the rivers and snow to enrich our fields, and then you will have to enlarge your hospitals and your cemeteries. "A green Christmas makes a fat grave-yard," was the old proverb. Storms to purify the air. Thermometer at ten degrees above zero to tone up the system. December and January just as important as May and June. I tell you we need the storms of life as much as we do the sunshine. There are more men ruined by prosperity than by adversity. If we had our ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... evenness of our own, and the reports I know thee has heard to the contrary are mistaken. The mercury not unfrequently falls to thirty-five and forty degrees below zero in many localities, but the air is dry, and does not try one as much, perhaps, as thee would imagine: the bitter winds, however, sweep across these prairies and through and about the valleys until it verily seems, Friend Amos, that the unaccustomed limbs ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... them from draughts. There are usually so many windows in a German sitting-room that those near the plants need never be opened in winter; and even when the temperature sinks several degrees below zero outside, the air of the flat is kept artificially warm, so warm that English folk gasp and flag in it. At the first sign of winter the outside windows, removed for the summer, are brought back again. Our windows are unknown on the continent, ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... grave yard at midnight, with no rabbits foot in his pocket. The sales ladies in this emporium are always in high speed, with the throttle wide open when it comes to chatter; at another counter I asked the young lady to show me the thinnest thing in underwear. Flashing a 40 below zero look she lisped, "I'm very sorry sir, but she's ...
— Love Letters of a Rookie to Julie • Barney Stone
... three glances we felt that we were both men, and we ceased to fear each other. The nearest of all to me was a peasant with a swollen face and a red beard, in a tattered caftan, and patched overshoes on his bare feet. And the weather was eight degrees below zero. {24a} For the third or fourth time I encountered his eyes, and I felt so near to him that I was no longer ashamed to accost him, but ashamed not to say something to him. I inquired where he came from? he answered readily, and we began to talk; others approached. He was from Smolensk, ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... Bouvard's books, which he pronounced to be "a veritable labyrinth." After he had compared the day-book, the correspondence, and the ledger covered with pencil-notes and discharges, he realised the truth: no goods to sell, no funds to get in, and in the cash-box zero. The capital showed a deficit ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... hadn't conspired against the government. For a year she had given the best of her body to nourish that little bewildered bit of veal—and now we were to eat what was left of her.... Also I passed through a certain railway yard of a big city last holidays. You recall the zero weather? Tier on tier of crated live chickens were piled there awaiting shipment—crushed into eight-inch crates, so that they could not lift their heads. Poe pictured an atrocious horror like that—a man being held in a torture-cell ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... to the movements of that capricious old gentleman known as the clerk of the weather. I cannot conceal my interest in the behavior of that patriarchal bird whose wooden similitude gyrates on the church spire. Winter proper is well enough. Let the thermometer go to zero if it will; so much the better, if thereby the very winds are frozen and unable to flap their stiff wings. Sounds of bells in the keen air, clear, musical, heart-inspiring; quick tripping of fair moccasined feet on glittering ice pavements; bright eyes ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the snow and ice, me without snowshoes and it thirty below zero. Yes, sir!" went on Walky, beginning to stuff the tobacco into his own pipe from Mr. Day's proffered sack. "That was some job! Miz Bob Kittridge, the old lady's darter-in-law, give me the dollar and the job; and ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... inherited, can affect the chromosomes, then the evidence concerning unit factors no longer contradicts the possibility of a character gradually increasing, under the influence of external stimuli acting on the soma from zero to ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... is a very fearful one, and reminds us painfully of those tyrants who used to extinguish the eyes of rebellious subjects. And if designed as a reformatory process, we question its efficiency. The zero of ignorance is unbelief, and its minus scale marks errors. You cannot make dissenters so ignorant thereby to make them Christians; and, even though you made them savages, they might still remain seceders. However, this ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... realized that night how desperate his need had been. He lay in his berth on board a train for the city—while back at his "open-camp" a wild blizzard was raging, and the thermometer stood at forty degrees below zero. But Thyrsis was warm and comfortable; and also he was brown and rugged, once more full of health and eagerness for life. All night he listened to the pounding of the flying train; and fast as the music of it went, ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... things to trifle with. All in vain. More theorems went on to my cuff than into my head. Never did chalk do so much work to so little purpose. And, therefore, it came that Furnace Second was reduced to zero in Professor Surd's estimation. He looked upon me with all the horror which an unalgebraic nature could inspire. I have seen the Professor walk around an entire square rather than meet the man who had no mathematics ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... speculation he had decided that the Caves must be situated in the Inferno Range, a place so particularly vicious that no man, so far as was known, had ever explored it. During the day the heat would boil eggs, and at night the sub-zero cold cracked great scales off the granite boulders. And here, too, lay the Trap-Door ...
— Loot of the Void • Edwin K. Sloat
... Amherst, where good Dr. Hitchcock felt as deeply interested for girls as for the boys in his college. One January morning, with the thermometer below zero, three or four hours before sunrise, he and Miss Lyon started on the stage for Worcester. Each was wrapped in a buffalo robe, so that the long ride was not unpleasant. A meeting was to be held, and a decision made as to the location of the seminary, ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... as a rainbow in orange chaps, red flannel shirt, and a buckskin waistcoat. His coat tied behind the cantle suggested that he either had become overheated or at only twelve below zero had not yet felt the need of it. His horse was snorting steam like a locomotive and icicles of frozen breath were pendent ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... unscrupulous himself, he overshot his mark when he sought to propitiate her further by offering to represent as hers acts of charity which she had not performed. The winter of 1783 was one of unusual severity. The thermometer at Paris was, for some weeks, scarcely above zero; scarcity, with its inevitable companion, clearness of price, reduced the poor of the northern provinces, and especially of the capital and its neighborhood, to the verge of starvation. The king, queen, and princesses gave large ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... referring to experiments that had been made in foreign climates, said: "Climatic trials have been carried out all over the world, and they have so far proved eminently satisfactory. The Arctic cold of the winter in Canada, with the temperature below zero, and the tropical sun of India, have as yet failed to shake the stability of the composition, or abnormally injure its shooting qualities." Dr Anderson is of opinion that cordite should not be stored in naval magazines near to the boilers. ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... only a few inches. The climate is continental in character, being marked by fierce winds and great extremes both in temperature and moisture. In midsummer the temperature may reach one hundred and ten degrees, while in midwinter it has been known to reach ninety degrees below zero. ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... a few steps beside Clay. The little puncher followed them dejectedly. His confidence had gone down to chill zero. ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... other extensive heritages, making Deed of Brotherhood with Kur-Brandenburg;—Deed forbidden, and so far as might be, rubbed out and annihilated by the then King of Bohemia, subsequently Kaiser Ferdinand I., Karl V.'s Brother. Duke of Liegnitz had to give up his parchments, and become zero in that matter: Kur-Brandenburg entirely refused to do so; kept his parchments, to see if they would ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... had then only four feet water to spare; the former, immediately they struck, turned bottom up, and all hands perished, being instantly covered with the ice. The thermometer, in January 1809, sank to forty-five degrees below zero; the Sound and Belt were completely frozen over, and many passed between Sweden and Denmark ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez. Vol II • Sir John Ross
... only the dog's heavy breathing, the snap of the fire, or the crack of a timber in the deadly frost broke the silence. Inside it was warm and bright and homelike; outside it was twenty degrees below zero, and like some vast tomb where life itself was congealed, and only the white stars, low, twinkling, and quizzical, lived—a life of sharp ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... charged more for the privilege of sleeping somewhere on the floor than for all the refined elegancies of the Fifth Avenue. The board-walks along the street, where they exist at all, plainly typify this absence of a well-defined dead level or zero-point in the popular sentiment; for the various sections are built each upon the same eccentric plan that obtains in the corresponding house. The result is an irregular succession of steps equally irregular, with enough literal jumping-off places to relieve any possible monotony attending ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... set in on the day of David's call lasted and deepened for a week. On Saturday evening, when Mrs. Tom came down for a jug of cream, the mercury of the little thermometer thumping against Josephine's porch was below zero. The gulf was no longer blue, but white with ice. Everything outdoors was crackling and snapping. Inside Josephine had kept roaring fires all through the house but the only place ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... he linger Before on the finger Of Lucie he fitted a ring: A month or two later They made him dictator, In place of the elderly king: He was lauded by pulpit, and boomed by press, And no one had ever a chance to guess, Beholding this hero Who ruled like a Nero, His valor was zero, Or ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... is indeed more frequent—the reader's fainting spirits are repaired not by the excellence of the manuscript before him, but by its absolute literary nonentity, a kind of intellectual Absolute Zero. Lack of merit may be so complete, so grotesque, that the composition affords to the sophistic eye a high order of comedy. A lady submits a poem in many ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... is what we might call zero hour. I gave you a haven here not particularly because I was sorry for you, but because I wanted those emeralds. Once upon a time Gregor showed them to me. Until I examined your wallet I supposed you had smuggled ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... on the return of the commissioner by observing again at the St. Francis bridge before mentioned on the night of the 10th of December, with the thermometer ranging during these observations from 11 to 15 deg. below zero of Fahrenheit's scale, there being then near 4 feet of snow upon the ground. The commissioner then proceeded by the Grand portage road, and the road which pursues the margin of Temiscouata Lake and the valleys of the Madawaska and St. John rivers, to the mouth of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... exigencies of the public service might require.' With much shrewdness he pointed out that the actual presence of a minister hi a place so uncongenial, especially during the winter months, when the thermometer falls to 40 deg. below zero, might possibly be to the Mandarin mind less awe-inspiring than the knowledge of the fact that he had the power to take up his abode there whenever the conduct of the Chinese Government gave occasion; and that thus the policy which he recommended would 'leave in the hands of Her Majesty's ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... Boys' Race arrived, a day clear, and beautiful, and only a degree or two below zero, it seemed as if all of Nome had decided to celebrate the momentous occasion; going in crowds to the starting place, which was a broad, open thoroughfare on the outskirts of town. Those especially interested in the individual teams gathered ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling |
