"Bird's-eye" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... two soldiers nodded. The position lay before them like a bird's-eye view; and Concepcion, in whom Spain had perhaps lost a guerilla general, had only set eyes on the spot once as he rode ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... up the changes for better or for worse in the use and treatment of the room, in the manners and habits of the children and in their reading. She will have to retire a little from her work, take a bird's-eye view of it, and decide if on the whole progress is making toward her ideal. Without identifying itself with any of the movements such as the kindergarten, child-study, and social settlement, without losing control ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... allow to a small volume, which might excel in genius, and yet be likely not to be long remembered! All this is labour which never meets the eye. It is quicker work, with special pleading and poignant periods, to fill sheets with generalising principles; those bird's-eye views of philosophy for the nonce seem as if things were seen clearer when at a distance and en masse, and require little knowledge of the individual parts. Such an art of writing may resemble the famous Lullian method, by which the doctor illuminatus enabled any one ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... to tell me again to-morrow night," said Eileen, enjoying her own comedy powers. "My poor father tried to teach me the difference between bird's-eye and shag, but I ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... large and diverse views to be obtained from mountain heights. To me, personally, such a view as that from the promontory of Sunium, or, above all, from the harbor of Nauplia, exceeds in beauty and interest any bird's-eye prospect. Any one who looks at the map of Greece will see how the Acro-Corinthus commands coasts, islands, and bays. The day was too hazy when we stood there to let us measure the real limits of the view, and I can not ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... the curb just ahead, and out piles a wide-shouldered gent with freckles on the back of his neck. Course, I don't let on I can spot anybody I've ever known just by a sectional glimpse like that. But this was no common case of freckles. This was a splotchy, spattery system of rust marks, like a bird's-eye view of the enemy's trenches after a week of drum fire. Besides, there was the ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... initial-letters—an invention further developed later on by C. H. Bennett, Mr. Ernest Griset, and Mr. Linley Sambourne—and his cartoons were reinforced by the famous series of "Brown, Jones, and Robinson," "Mr. Pips hys Diary," "Bird's-eye Views of English Society," and "Ye Manners and Customs of Ye Englyshe," their manner of presentation having been created by the artist, who was forthwith dubbed by his comrades "Professor of Mediaeval Design." When Doyle was first called to ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... of us being seen," he said, planting his transit in the sand, but making no effort to adjust it to a level. "That ridge there overlooks the claim. I'll climb up alone and take a bird's-eye view." ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... submit instances in civilization itself for your own judgment. Only then shall I return to Edward Carpenter, to give a resume of his position, and to point out how far and why I agree with him, and at what stage I part company with him and for what reasons. Then I shall attempt to present a bird's-eye view of the steps in human advancement towards civilization as the best anthropologists have traced them. Thus, we shall be able to see our historic social order in right relation to that ideal humanity which our own spiritual constitution projects prophetically above the threshold ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... real spring day. I returned with my nerves strung and my mind determined. I will make this plunge, and with little doubt of coming off no loser in character. What is given in detail may be suppressed, general views may be enlarged upon, and a bird's-eye prospect given, not the less interesting, that we have seen its prominent points nearer and in detail. I have been of late in a great degree free from wafered letters, sums to make up, notes of hand wanted, and all the worry of an embarrassed ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... mighty good thing if we could put a lot of the professors at work in the offices and shops, and give these canned-culture boys jobs in the glue and fertilizer factories until a little of their floss and foolishness had worn off. For it looks to an old fellow, who's taking a bird's-eye view from the top of a packing house, as if some of the colleges were still running their plants with machinery that would have been sent to the scrap-heap, in any other business, a hundred years ago. They turn out a pretty fair article as it is, but with improved ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... bird's-eye view of the cathedral can be obtained from the castle, either from the keep itself, or from a convenient opening in the outer wall. On the church's own level good views can be obtained of almost all the principal parts, though in some directions buildings ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer
... the house, and in her own dignified and elevated position in it. For Valentine had taken one of the big boxes next the stage on the first tier, and Cuckoo had never been in such a situation before. She could survey the endless rows of heads in the stalls with a completeness of bird's-eye observation never previously attained. What multitudes there were. Endless ranks of men, all staring in the same direction, all smoking, all with handkerchiefs peeping out of their cuffs, and gold rings on their little fingers. Some of them ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... either side—the Jutes and Anglo-Saxons, the Danes and Normans, on one side, and the Celts of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, on the other; nor yet the different dates and places; but simply take a single bird's-eye view of all the Seven Seas as one sea, of all the British Norsemen as one Anglo-Norman folk, and of all the centuries from the fifth to the twentieth as a single age; and then you can quite easily understand how the empire of the sea has been won ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... told him nothing, and it was only after he had climbed a high hill a mile and a half away from the river that he began to have any indication of his whereabouts. Then with the country lying before him in a bird's-eye view he was able to learn his position. There was more than one river in view, and a chain of small lakes lay between one of them and the river where he had been left by his captors. From the last of those ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... ships that now ply between the two hemispheres in such numbers, and which in luxury and the fitting conveniences seem to vie with each other for the mastery. The cabins were lined with satin-wood and bird's-eye maple; small marble columns separated the glittering panels of polished wood, and rich carpets covered the floors. The main cabin had the great table, as a fixture, in the centre, but that of Eve, somewhat ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... University exhibit showed what that institution had been and what it is doing. Bird's-eye views of the university at different periods of its existence and a fine model of its present buildings and grounds were shown. The various departments made exhibits ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... equipped with hope, enthusiasm, and belief in himself, had hitherto failed to justify a trust in his business capacities. In fact, if his parents had been endowed with prophetic eyesight, and had been enabled to take a bird's-eye view of their celebrated son's future enterprises, which were always, according to his own account, destined to fail only by some unfortunate slip at the last, it seems doubtful whether they would have been wise to ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... followers of trades which had no connection with farm life. They went straight into the thick timber-land, instead of going to the rich and waiting prairies, and they crowned this initial mistake by cutting down the splendid timber instead of letting it stand. Thus bird's-eye maple and other beautiful woods were used as fire-wood and in the construction of rude cabins, and the greatest asset of the ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... regard to the principles of justice forms the basis of every transaction, and regulates the conduct of the upright man of business. The following statements afford a bird's-eye view, as it were, of his habits, practice, and ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... It had always seemed to me that the happy strangers mounted on the tiers of seats that rise from front to back on the motor-chariots for seeing New York and looking down, even from the lowest place, on the life of our streets had a peculiar, almost a bird's-eye view of it which I might well find the means of a fresh impression. But I never had the courage, for reasons which I have not the courage to give, though the reader can perhaps imagine them. In Rome I did not feel that the like reasons held; of all the unknown, ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... not beautiful, and they knew it well, yet the fascination of it never failed. On the walls were hung large framed historical and scriptural scenes, worked in cross-stitch with wool's of the brightest hues, varied by a coloured print of a bird's-eye view of the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, an almanac for the current year, and a large oleograph of a young lady und a dog wreathed in roses that put every flower in the garden to shame for size and brilliancy. But none of these could give a tithe of the ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... the hands of some disinterested and powerful statesman of publicity—some great organizer of the attention of a world. He would have to be a practical passionate psychologist, a man gifted with a bird's-eye view of publics—a discoverer of geniuses and crowds, a natural diviner or reader of the hearts of men. He shall search out and employ twenty men to write as many books addressed to as many classes and types of employers ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... way—to make such a facing? It looked as though the old fellow were in some scheme with another to get him interested. As he drew closer, he saw radiations of some twelve inches, all over the face of the coal, star-shaped, and he almost gasped. It was not only cannel coal—it was "bird's-eye" cannel. Heavens, what a find! Instantly he was the cautious man ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... Cathedral from St. John's Tower Frontispiece The Tower from the East 2 Bird's-eye view of Norman Work 15 The Cathedral from the South-West 17 The Cathedral from North-West corner of the Cloisters 19 The Tower from the Palace Yard 21 View of the Cathedral in 1727 23 South Porch since the Restoration ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Gloucester [2nd ed.] • H. J. L. J. Masse
... furnish them captive ascensions from the university campus. As if specially for the occasion, there came three days of delightful May weather with a propitiously quiet atmosphere. To the natural elevation of the location were added several hundred feet of rope, affording a bird's-eye view of Cayuga Lake, the town and far-famed adjacent scenery. Two or three hundred persons were "sent up," including several university professors. Donaldson was in his element, and kept everybody laughing at his jokes and amusing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... one place where you can get a complete bird's-eye view of it," said Jeff, "and two-thirds of it would be hid in smoke, anyway. You've got to think of a place that would take in the whole population of New England, outside of Massachusetts, and not feel as if it had more than ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Steppes and the African Metidja, these wastes are a mosaic of blossoms. The foot-sure, hardy and leisurely traveller must not content himself with the bird's-eye view of this dolomite city just described. He should spend hours, nay, days here, if he would conscientiously explore the stone avenues, worthy to be compared to Stonehenge or Carnac; the amphitheatre, vast as that of Nimes or Orange; the fortifications, with bulwarks, ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... face full of character, the strong lines and features of which were further accentuated by his silvery hair. He was a smart old gentleman, too, well and scrupulously attired and groomed, and his blue bird's-eye necktie, worn at a rakish angle, gave him the air of something of a sporting man rather than of a follower of Thespis. His fellow members of the Oliver company seemed to pay him great attention, and at various points of the proceedings whispered questions ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... poetry. The followers of Chaucer, and the precursors of Shakespeare, are alike real persons to him—old Langland reminding him of Carlyle's "Gospel of Labour." The product of a large store of reading has been here secreted anew for the reader who desires to see, in bird's-eye view, the light and shade of a long and varied period of poetic literature, by way of preparation for Shakespeare, [9] (with a full essay upon whom the volume closes,) explaining Shakespeare, so far as he can ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... "The poor creatures have been out upon the plains all day: Heaven knows what we shall do when the berries are gone." But Mrs. Graffam said nothing more. She set out the pine table, and going to an old chest brought a white cloth; it was of bird's-eye diaper. Graffam remembered well who wove it; and a pleasant vision came along with that white table-cloth. He saw his mother, as in olden times, weaving; while he stood by her side, wondering at the skill with which she sent the shuttle through its ...
— Be Courteous • Mrs. M. H. Maxwell
... horizon at the back of the bird's-eye prospect is the high ground stretching from the Bisamberg on the left to the plateau of Wagram on the right. In front of these elevations spreads the wide plain of the Marchfeld, open, treeless, and with scarcely ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... treat such subjects as The Church, Her Books, Her Sacraments, in half-hour Lectures; but, in spite of obvious drawbacks, there may be two advantages. It may be useful to take a bird's-eye view of a whole subject rather than to look minutely into each part—and it may help to keep the Lecturer ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes
... has endeavoured to follow the same general plan as in "Famous Singers," viz., to give a "bird's-eye view" of the most celebrated violinists from the earliest times to the present day rather than a detailed account of a very few. Necessarily, those who have been prominently before the public as performers are selected in preference ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... . Wonderfully condensed . . ." "It reads like a romance." "Can be finished in less than an hour, yet gives a full bird's-eye view of a country and people. The author's style is charming." "Accidentally running across your cute little History of Spain, I was so taken with it as an epitome of the sort that I have long believed there was room for, that I would ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 2, No. 23, June 9, 1898 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... Africa into the Congo region on the Western side, returning afterward to the East for a bird's-eye view of the Abyssinians, the Somali, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... count. My baby. Get well, Lilly. Mamma's been cross at times, but never again. We'll do everything to make you happy. You can read your eyes out and mamma won't turn out the light on you. Mamma will buy you books and a box of paints and a little bird's-eye-maple room all your own. Lilly, mamma's baby. We're going housekeeping—your own piano—your own room. Aren't we, Ben? ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... way does the value of our educated class define itself: we more than others should be able to divine the worthier and better leaders. The terms here are monstrously simplified, of course, but such a bird's-eye view lets us immediately take our bearings. In our democracy, where everything else is so shifting, we alumni and alumnae of the colleges are the only permanent presence that corresponds to the aristocracy ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... been very few fogs in London of late, but your foreigner nearly always finds London foggy. Kent does not show along its main railway line the evidence of agricultural depression: it is like a garden. Yet, in a very careful and thorough French book just published by a French traveller, his bird's-eye view of the country as he went through Kent just after landing would make you think the place a desert; he seems to have thought the hedges a sign of agricultural decay. The same foreigner will discover a plebeian character in the ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... a Futurist painter, who painted everything in Trafalgar Square, and nothing that did not appear in it. The painter, however, selected a really wonderful aspect of the Square, seen from a most strange angle, a sort of bird's-eye view of it, which could only have been obtained from a balloon. So remarkable was the perspective that the entire Square, as seen in the picture, appeared as if it were being gradually drawn sideways up to Heaven. The great Nelson column and all the four lions ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... of the evidence in favour of organic evolution. Of course in such a meagre outline it has not been possible to do justice to that evidence, which should be studied in detail rather than looked at in such a bird's-eye view as I have presented. Nevertheless, enough, I hope, has been said to convince all reasonable persons, that any longer to withhold assent from so vast a body of evidence is a token, not of intellectual prudence, but of intellectual incapacity. With ...
— The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution • George John Romanes
... by a very imaginative writer, that "when a poet floats in the empyrean, and only takes a bird's-eye view of the earth, some people accept the mere fact of his soaring for sublimity, and mistake his dim vision of earth for proximity to heaven." And in like manner, when a thinker frees himself from all the trammels of fact, and propounds a "bold hypothesis," people mistake the vagabond erratic ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... leaned upon the parapet of the terrace, whence they had a bird's-eye view of the big square immediately below, and the picturesquely irregular buildings, above whose gabled red roofs grim watch-towers and quaint spires or cupolas rose here and there. Down in the square swarms of tiny figures were clustering round the public fountains, ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... easily surmised that none of the high-born senoritas who demurred at appearing at the promenade when it was empty, were likely to be the first to arrive at the salon of the Casino. But as there was no side walk here, from whence they could take a bird's-eye view, and they could not keep a watch from the windows at night, these clever young ladies, as high-born as they were ingenious, hit upon a ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... "the good wife is the very best jewelry. Those are two dollars. But only study this pair. Hold those up to the light and take a bird's-eye view through those lovely stones, so round and large like green peas. Now look. So! Now ...
— Five Hundred Dollars - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... lodgers. This was an arrangrment with which I was particularly gratified. Her cottage lay half way up on the side of a hill which was crowned with thick clumps of the noblest trees. Long, winding, narrow foot-paths, carried us picturesquely to the summit, where we had a bird's-eye view of the town below, the river beyond—now darting out from the woods and now hiding securely beneath their umbrage—and fair, smooth, lawn-looking fields, which glowed at the proper season with the myriad green and white pinnies of ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... this bird's-eye view from the Citadel (of course, I had to trot them up again for the sunset), my charges let themselves be led from mosque to mosque, from tomb to tomb. Some, possessed with a demoniac desire to get their money's worth ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... a fine sight—certainly a very fine sight; such as an old seaman loves; but there must be an end to it," he said. "You will excuse me, Sir Wycherly, but the movements of a fleet always have interest in my eyes, and it is seldom that I get such a bird's-eye view of those of my own; no wonder it has made me ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... and with my wife to church, it being Whitsunday; my wife very fine in a new yellow bird's-eye hood, as the fashion is now. We had a most sorry sermon; so home to dinner, my mother having her new suit brought home, which makes her very fine. After dinner my wife and she and Mercer to Thomas Pepys's ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... on high, in a peaceful suburb, in the midst of green gardens; made up of paper panels, and taken to pieces according to one's fancy, like a child's toy. Whole families of cicalas chirp day and night under our old resounding roof. From our veranda we have a bewildering bird's-eye view of Nagasaki, of its streets, its junks, and its great pagodas, which, at certain hours, is illuminated at our feet like some scene ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... nephew. I was hanging on to his coat-tails all the way through. I made pills with him in the chemist's shop at Wimblehurst before he began. I was, you might say, the stick of his rocket; and after our tremendous soar, after he had played with millions, a golden rain in the sky, after my bird's-eye view of the modern world, I fell again, a little scarred and blistered perhaps, two and twenty years older, with my youth gone, my manhood eaten in upon, but greatly edified, into this Thames-side yard, into these ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... sometimes of a bright scarlet or crimson, color, each tree commonly retaining from year to year the same color or colors, and differing somewhat from every other. The most beautiful and valuable maple-wood is taken from this tree. It is known as 'curled maple' and 'bird's-eye maple,' and the common variety looks like satin-wood. In the curled maple the fibres are in waves instead of in straight lines, and the surface seems to change with alternate light and shade; in the bird's-eye, irregular snarls of fibres ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... of delight on the human sea through which the procession had lately passed. The higher they the incline, the more did the Place du Rosaire and the avenues and paths of the gardens expand below them, black with the swarming multitude. It was a bird's-eye view of a whole nation, an ant-hill which ever increased in size, spreading farther and farther away. "Look!" Berthaud at last exclaimed to Pierre. "How vast and how beautiful it is! Ah! well, the year won't have been ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... they staved off the edge of their hunger with a few biscuits, and, trudging on, covered the last mile in such quick time that Leonard declared it reminded him of a paper-chase. It was rather a steep pull to gain the highest point, yet they were well rewarded when they reached it by the bird's-eye view of the landscape around them, farms, churches, and distant village looking like so many toys, and the fields like ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... fifty-two short essays of this volume I have presented familiar objects from unusual points of view. Bird's-eye glances and insect's-eye glances, at the nature of our woods and fields, will reveal beauties which are wholly invisible from the usual human view-point, five feet ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... some ways, crucial. I have spoken with Jesuits and Plymouth Brethren, mathematicians and poets, dogmatic republicans and dear old gentlemen in bird's-eye neckcloths; and each understood the word "facts" in an occult sense of his own. Try as I might, I could get no nearer the principle of their division. What was essential to them seemed to me trivial or untrue. We could come to no compromise as to what was, or what was not, important in the life ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... got under way, and, as a walk over the open plain offered a pleasing variety to a man who had been feeling his way so long through the dim old woods, I determined to descend from the ridge of Beauport, and proceed over the snow-covered surface of the bay, in a bird's-eye line, to our point of destination. Winding down the almost perpendicular declivity, sometimes sliding down on our snow-shoes, with the tobaugan running before us, "on its own hook," at a fearful pace, and sometimes obliged to descend, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... spring are purple with the flowers of ground ivy, which flowers with exceptional freedom. One bank, or waste spot, that was observed was first of all perfectly purple with ground ivy; by degrees these flowers faded, and the spot became a beautiful blue with veronica, or bird's-eye; then, again, these disappeared, and up came the larger daisies on stalks a foot high, whose discs touched each other from end to end of the bank. Here was a succession of flowers as if designed, one taking the other's ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... our faces eastward through the afternoon, unaware that we were about to take a last bird's-eye view of the great Naval and Military Base of Mudros, and a first peep at the Gallipoli Peninsula, where in less than a hundred hours we should be digging ourselves ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... most dangerous place immediately accessible, "is one of the great drawbacks to the use of balloons in warfare. Unless a man has natural aptitude, and is specially trained for the work, his observations from a balloon are of no use, a bird's-eye view of a country giving impressions so different from ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... "A seaman who tells the truth about anything startling that happens on board a passenger boat gets fired. The convention is to wrap the thing in mystery, if it can't be denied. Besides, the ability to take what you might call a quick, bird's-eye view isn't a British gift; an Englishman would have concentrated on some particular point. Anyhow, I can't see how the boat came to be where she was at the time mentioned." He turned to Dick and ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... This bird's-eye view and lack of information about the details do less than justice to the crucial battle, which Maud'huy under Foch's general direction waged against the Germans round Arras and both they and the French regard ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... had found the horses in a small but extra dense bunch of scrub not twenty yards from the spot where he had tied his horses up. While I was away he had gone on top of the little stony eminence close by, and from its summit had obtained a bird's-eye view of the ground below, and thus perceived the two animals, which had never been absent at all. It seemed strange to me that I could not find their tracks, but the reason was there were no tracks to find. I took it for granted when ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... a sense of such intense peacefulness that earth and life were forgotten. A milky whiteness spread more and more over the whole heavens though they were still darkened here and there by wreaths of smoke. Little by little, bright clusters of houses became plainly visible; a bird's-eye view was obtained of the whole city, intersected by streets and squares, which with their shadowy depths described the framework ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... cries of gratitude and joy were heard on all sides; then musicians assembled to give a serenade to the chief of state, and proceeded to form themselves into orchestras; and there was dancing the whole night through. I have never seen a sight more striking or more joyous than the bird's-eye view ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... I could to make their new home so attractive to my two handmaidens that they would not wish to leave it directly. In one of Wilkie Collins' books an upholsterer is represented as saying that if you want to domesticate a woman, you should surround her with bird's-eye maple and chintz. That must have been exactly my idea, for the two rooms which I prepared for my maidservants were small, indeed, yet exquisitely pretty. Of course I should not have been so foolish as to buy any of the unnecessary and dainty fittings ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... cigars at Havanna prices, but as the Customs pass very few of the genuine cigars, it is a mystery where they all come from. Yet they say smuggling is a thing of the past! Or do the gentle tradesmen, to discourage smuggling, manufacture their own Havannas? Good tobacco, shag and bird's-eye, may be had at ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... goes on away there in the north month after month and year after year. The ice is split and piled up into mounds, which extend in every direction. If one could get a bird's-eye view of the ice-fields, they would seem to be cut up into squares or meshes by a network of these packed ridges, or pressure-dikes, as we called them, because they reminded us so much of snow-covered stone dikes at home, such as, in many parts of the country, ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... stores are armed only with the usual perfunctory fasces of facts,—cording information into stiff, labeled bunches, marshaling details into cramped and characterless order, scrutinizing the ground with a microscope, never surveying it in bird's-eye view. Two recent novels we eagerly buy, hearing that their scenes are laid in that vicinity; but each merely speaks, in easy omniscience, of the "distant chain of blue mountains," or of the "far-off snow-peaks ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... material damage from the recent conflicts, though the garrison of the citadel have thrown a few shots at its tower, most probably with a view to drive curious eyes out of it, the great height enabling one to get a complete bird's-eye view of what is going on within their walls. The celebrated Rubenses were cased in massive timber to render them bomb-proof, and, ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the Holy Port in 1862, when Messieurs Blandy's steamship Falcon was not in existence. And now as the Luso steamed along shore, no external change appeared. A bird's-eye view of the islet suggests a podao or Madeiran billhook, about six miles by three. The tool's broken point is the Ilha da Cima, facing to north-east, a contorted pile which resembles a magnified cinder. The handle is the Ilheu Baixo, to the south; and ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... the blue eyes of the girl to the little blue bird's-eye growing on a bank of clover. She pauses while he stoops to ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... upon an afternoon, that he was very busy at a map, or bird's-eye view of an island, whereon was a great castle, and at the gate thereof a dragon, terrible to see; while in the foreground came that which was meant for a gallant ship, with a great flag aloft, but which, by reason of the forest of lances with which it was crowded, looked ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... church again, "I really must go up to the top of the tower some clear day." Then he shook his head. "What for? A bird's-eye view of Paris would have been interesting in the Middle Ages, but now! I should see, as from a hill top, other heights, a network of grey streets, the whiter arteries of the boulevards, the green plaques of gardens and squares, and, away in the distance, ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... side of the Peak, composed of boulders and debris of all shapes and sizes, through which appeared broad, smooth ribs of reddish-colored granite, looking as if they upheld the towering rock mass above. I usually dislike bird's-eye and panoramic views, but, though from a mountain, this was not one. Serrated ridges, not much lower than that on which we stood, rose, one beyond another, far as that pure atmosphere could carry the vision, broken into ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... Quong carried in a couple of pails full of boiling water; we laid out shaving tackle, an old suit of grey flannel, a pair of brown shoes, and the necessary under-linen. A blue bird's-eye tie, I remember, was the last touch. Then Ajax shrugged his shoulders and said significantly, "You know ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... Rubein people went about, avoiding each other as if detected in conspiracy. Miss Naylor, who for an inscrutable reason had put on her best frock, a purple, relieved at the chest with bird's-eye blue, conveyed an impression of trying to count a chicken which ran about too fast. When Greta asked what she had lost she was heard to ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... was an element of the grotesque in a bird's-eye view of a lady making shots at her mouth with a spoon and trying to smile and look spirituelle ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... quarter. For these reasons I think Sir George White's force the centre of gravity of the situation. If the Boers cannot defeat it their case is hopeless; if they can crush it they may have hopes of ultimate success. That was the bird's-eye view of the whole situation a week ago, and it still holds good. The week's news does not enable us to judge whether the Boers have grasped it. You can never be too strong at the decisive point, and a first-rate general never lets a single man ...
— Lessons of the War • Spenser Wilkinson
... been described, in the after part of the vessel, and occupied its entire width. It was fitted up with bird's-eye maple, ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... by Gabriele D'Annunzio; translated by G. Mantellini, with an Introduction by Joseph Hergesheimer (Doubleday, Page & Company). This anthology drawn from various volumes of Signor D'Annunzio's stories gives the American a fair bird's-eye view of the various aspects of his work. These twelve portraits by the Turner of corruption have a severe logic of their own which may pass for being classical. As diploma pieces they are incomparable, but as renderings of life ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... inverted umbrella, imprinted upon a favorite tea-plate, we often sallied forth in fancy to explore the Chinese world as portrayed in blue or pink upon earthen table-ware of the olden time. And what a world! How artfully adapted to childish notions, how convenient for bird's-eye views, this arrangement of lofty mountain peaks, deep gorges, and rocks of fantastic forms, tangled up with examples of nature subdued by Chinese art in landscape gardening and ornate architecture. In the near distance (far and ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... outlines stand out most clearly defined. It had almost grown to be a rule that the foreground should be placed sharply in profile and often so deep in shadow that it contrasted like a silhouette with the more distant grounds. On the other hand, it is a favorite whim of the genuine pigtail age to draw bird's-eye landscapes and views of cities, in which every elevation of the earth seems flattened out as much as possible, every distinct division of the separate grounds ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... find in your welcome letter some hint of an intention to visit England. I can't. I have held it at arm's length, and taken a bird's-eye view of it, after reading it a great many times, but there is no greater encouragement in it this way than on a microscopic inspection. I should love to go with you—as I have gone, God knows how often—into Little Britain, and Eastcheap, and Green ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... is that landscape, Cousin Homer? Something foreign, evidently. I always think that a government office should be representative of the government. I have a print at home, a bird's-eye view of Washington in 1859, which I will send you if you like. I suppose you have an express frank? No? How mean of Congress! What did ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... Furley groaned. "They'll have a bird's-eye view of the whole affair, those people who write our requiem or our eulogy. You noticed the Press this morning? They're all hinting at some great move in the West. It's about in the clubs. Why, I even heard last night that we were in Ostend. It's all a rig, of course. ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... infinitely varied. Many are blue, some green, some golden, and some wine-colored, in all gradations of tone; and could we soar aloft and take of them a bird's-eye view, the glittering basin might seem to us a silver shield, studded with rubies, emeralds, turquoises, and sapphires. Moreover, these miniature lakes are lined with exquisite ornamentation. One sees in them, ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... the return of the States of the Union to their normal relations, and also marked the disappearance of the negro problem as the central feature in national politics. From that time to the present we shall take but a bird's-eye view of the fortunes and the mutual relation ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... four minutes' deliberation he had to move, he blundered desperately. He opened fire on Blue's exposed centre and killed eight men. (Their bodies litter the ground in figure 7, which gives a complete bird's-eye view of the battle.) He then sent forward and isolated six or seven men in a wild attempt to recapture his lost gun, massed his other men behind the inadequate cover of his central gun, and sent the detachment of infantry that had hitherto lurked ...
— Little Wars; a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books • H. G. Wells
... of the cross fallen awry. All the other thoroughfares on all sides of that hill were full of the pulsation and the pain of battle, full of shaking torches and shouting faces. When at length they had risen high enough to have a bird's-eye view of the whole campaign, Turnbull was already intoxicated. He had smelt gunpowder, which was the incense of his ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... separate copy: "We should then have the present races represented by the countless branchlets forming the flat-topped summit" of a genealogical tree, in which "all we can do is to map out the summit as it were from a bird's-eye view, and under each cluster, or cluster of clusters, to place as the common trunk an imaginary type of a genus, order, or class according to the depth to which we would go.") My recent work leads me to differ from him on one point—viz., ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... skirts the mountain side to the west, and goes up it to the horse station situated in a most desolate spot. From this point one gets a bird's-eye view of the whole lake. Its waters, owing to evaporation, seem to withdraw, leaving a white sediment of salt along the edge. The road from the Khafe-khana runs now in a perfectly straight line S.W., and, with the exception of the first short incline, is afterwards quite flat, passing ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... in the direction of the Bimbel ranch," suggested Spouter. "I'd like to get a bird's-eye ...
— The Rover Boys at Big Horn Ranch - The Cowboys' Double Round-Up • Edward Stratemeyer
... lapse of time and the intrinsic ambiguity of the subjects connected with it. Let us borrow for a moment the wings of Historic Imagination, and, hovering lightly over the Oxford of the thirties, take a rapid bird's-eye view. ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... were finished, there came a Sunday when I was allowed to go to the Mission Church with Kitty Purcell, the baker's little daughter, and I felt wonderfully fine in my pink calico frock, flecked with a bird's-eye of white, a sun-bonnet ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... by climbing the Calton Hill. He remained at the summit quite a long time, constructing a rough bird's-eye plan of the streets and buildings below him; and having descended to earth, proceeded on a series of voyages ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... especially as the new volume, commencing in January, will be rendered as attractive as means, energy, industry and application can make it. We shall soon lay before our hundred thousand readers our new Prospectus, in which will be given a bird's-eye view of the plan of our prospective operations. Nothing will be promised that we will not fully and faithfully perform; and, unrivaled as this "Magazine" has heretofore been, we intend so to improve upon it, that the new volume shall bear ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... just to look at this orchard of yours. See here, wait a minute." He unbuttoned his heavy coat and, finding a pocket, drew out a time-card. "You will have a couple of hours to waste in Wenatchee between trains. Give me half an hour, long enough to show me a bird's-eye view of the project—that's all I want in this snow and I guarantee to put you in Wenatchee on time for your eastbound. The road is in good shape; driver ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... on a parlor car. About every so often he'd clap his hands to his side and groan: "Oh, my heart! My poor heart!" It was as touchin' as the heroine's speeches to the top gallery. On the way down Leonidas gave us a bird's-eye view of the kind of Jim Crow settlement we were heading for. It was one of those places where they date things back to the time when Lem Saunders fell down cellar with a lamp ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... Balgasun, on the left bank of the Orkhon, north of Erdeni Tso, and the Ho-lin or Karakorum of the Mongols, would be 70 li (about 30 miles), and such is the space between Erdeni Tso and Kara Balgasun. M. Marcel Monnier (Itineraires, p. 107) estimates the bird's-eye distance from Erdeni Tso to Kara Balgasun at 33 kilom. (about 20-1/2 miles). "When the brilliant epoch of the power of the Chinghizkhanides," says Professor Axel Heikel, "was at an end, the city of Karakorum fell into oblivion, and towards ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... peasants lay in a single able and enterprising leader. She admired the genius of the minister who, sitting in his study, had been able to grasp the true way of procuring peace. She thought she understood the considerations which act on the minds of men powerful enough to take a bird's-eye view of an empire; men whose actions, criminal in the eyes of the masses, are the outcome of a vast and intelligent thought. There is in these terrible souls some mysterious blending of the force of fate and that of destiny, some prescience which ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... that I want your advice. Hart-Smith has left things in excellent condition, and I only hope that I shall be able to keep everything as straight as he has done. What I really want from you is some sort of bird's-eye view as to the whole situation. The Chapter, for instance. Of course, I've been here for some months now and have a little idea as to the people in the place, but you've been here so long that there are many things that ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... white sepulchres are packed here! How different this congestion of sorrow from the mossy latitude of God's Acre in the country! The dead are crammed together as closely as the living seemed in that bird's-eye view from the Archway. There is no ample shadow of trees, no tangled corners where mother earth may weave flower garlands over her returning children. The monuments positively jostle and elbow each other for ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... continue to come about to the end of time. The great agent in this development of life has been competition. This has culled species after species, and secured that those alone should survive which were best fitted for the conditions by which they found themselves surrounded. Endeavour to take a bird's-eye view of the whole matter. See battle after battle, first in one part of the world, then in another, sometimes raging more fiercely and sometimes less; even as in human affairs war has always existed in some part of ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... without finding him, Elizabeth went to the window, with the intention of making a bird's-eye survey of the street. She was not hopeful, for she had just come from the street, and there had been ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... of rock. We agreed that one should watch while the other two slept; this Hastings undertook to do, as he was not inclined to sleep. At daylight he woke Romer and me, and we made our breakfast. From the place we were concealed in, we had a bird's-eye view of the farmhouse, and of what ...
— Masterman Ready • Captain Marryat
... and its accomplishment greater. After we have studied Caesar for some years, the name comes to represent the epitome, the bird's-eye view of a great man. A similar thing is true of our study of other men and movements and things. Single words come to represent a multitude of experiences. Then these words become associated and organized in accordance with the principles of association discussed above, so that ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... something to report now. This little runt moon makes tracks around Earth in probably two hours minus. If I remember my Spacenautics right I'm already looking down over the Grand Canyon, heading west. I'm going to get a pretty terrific bird's-eye view of the whole world in two more hours, which is just about how much oxygen I've ...
— Shipwreck in the Sky • Eando Binder
... yachting is on water, how vastly more interesting and fascinating it is for a man to have a yacht in which he can fly to Europe in one day, and with which the exploration of tropical Africa or the regions about the poles is mere child's play, while giving him so magnificent a bird's-eye view! Many seemingly insoluble problems are solved by the advent of these birds. Having as their halo the enforcement of peace, they have in truth taken us a long step towards heaven, and to the co-operation and higher civilization ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... the first eminence, and let us take a bird's-eye view of the city, always keeping in mind that the Kremlin is the great nucleus from which it all radiates. What a vast, wavy ocean of golden cupolas and fancy-colored domes, green-roofed houses and tortuous streets circle around this magic pile! what ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... the course of this half-century, conscientious research has so actively been prosecuted that we can now gain at least a bird's-eye view of the whole course of our literature. Some stretches still lie in shadow, and it is not astonishing that eminent scholars continue to maintain that "there is no such thing as an organic history, a logical development, of the gigantic ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... higher parts for a bird's-eye view of the city, and the scene is entrancing. We look down upon the calm-flowing Exe threading its way through the valley till it debouches at Exmouth; on the riverside beneath us is the quay, with coasting schooners and barges moored alongside, and sundry bales of merchandise heaped ...
— Exeter • Sidney Heath
... off. Lieutenant Lapenotiere, erect and sombre, cast a look around the apartment, into which he had never before been admitted. The candles lit up a large painting—a queer bird's-eye view of Venice. Other pictures, dark and bituminous, decorated the panelled walls—portraits of dead admirals, a sea-piece or two, some charts. . . . This was all he discerned out in the dim light; and in fact he scanned the walls, the furniture ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... been executed quite twenty years earlier—for King's drawing, issued in 1656, shows the north-west tower already partly destroyed; so it is necessary to conclude that the drawing for the "Monasticon" was done before 1656, but after 1610, when Speed's map, or bird's-eye view, of the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Chichester (1901) - A Short History & Description Of Its Fabric With An Account Of The - Diocese And See • Hubert C. Corlette
... the martyr'd Raleigh, He cursed the mild cigar, He traced to pipe and cabbage leaf Consumption and catarrh; He railed at simple bird's-eye, By freshmen only tried, And with rude and bitter jest assailed ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... to penetrate so far into this new world, and that he has been able to interest us in so many fascinating problems, was due to the fact that he had also "taken a wide bird's-eye view through all the windows of creation." His universal capabilities, his immense culture and almost encyclopaedic science have enabled him to utilize, thanks to his studies, all the knowledge allied to his subject. He is not one of those ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros |
