"Bracing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sea-bread from morning to night under the pressure of a real sea appetite, is not a greater luxury than the choicest viands on shore. To me it certainly was; and surely I had reason to be deeply thankful to the Lord, who, by means of that delicious voyage, and its bracing exhilarating effects, prepared me for a trying winter in the singular climate for which I ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... into the tree-grown sheltered wing of the garden. By interlacing paths, from the tremulous gray willows under the somber, clashing eucalyptus spears, under dark wings of cypress they were moving. She was bracing in every nerve against the unnerving ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... T or the base of the triangle, as the case may be, is used uppermost. This rod must be pierced in three places for the vertical masts employed in the bracing of the rod, trussing the main plane, and adjusting the elevator. These are spaced out in Fig. 130, which shows a side elevation of the model. Their sectional dimensions are 1/16 by 1/4 inch; their respective lengths ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... never hold a ferule nor snap children's ears being incomparable fluting-irons. Next the sash was scornfully untied, and tightened to suggest something resembling a waist. The chastened bows that had been squat, dowdy, spiritless, were given tweaks, flirts, bracing little pokes and dabs, till, acknowledging a master hand, they stood up, piquant, pert, ...
— The Flag-raising • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... to the walk, but she couldn't help finding it pleasant. The open air was very sweet and bracing; the exercise was inspiriting, and the threatened talk went well with both. There was nothing whatever formidable about it; the words and thoughts seemed to play, like the sunlight, on anything that came ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... from the poop, and Wilbur, his arm around the boy, followed. Kitchell was already out of hearing, and Wilbur was bracing himself upon the rolling deck, steadying the young fellow at his side, when the latter heaved a deep breath. His throat and breast swelled. Wilbur stared sharply, ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... sturdy earth thumpers seemed to be overworked in the bracing air of the dam top, and they certainly looked picturesque with their white and blue towels round their heads. Indeed, with all the singing and movement, not to speak of the refreshment stalls, the scene was not unlike a fair. When ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... "this country life is great. Early to bed and early to rise makes a man's stomach digest mince pies—how's that? Notice the air out here? How pure and fresh and bracing! You ought to go out and run ...
— Back to the Woods • Hugh McHugh
... sunshine. She opened the long French window to the balcony and stepped out. It was snappily cold, so she went back long enough to catch up a wrap. The apple blossom kimono was the first thing she saw, so she slipped into it, and went out on the balcony. The bracing air was delightful, and she walked up and down, drawing long deep breaths of ozone. There was a low railing round the little balcony and Patty sat down on it. The ground was only about eight feet below her, for the house was built on a side hill, ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... fixture. She was a large steam-launch to be hoisted on the deck of a steamer no larger than the Guardian-Mother; but the task was satisfactorily accomplished by lunch-time. The afternoon was used in bracing the craft in her position, and putting everything ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic
... than that for which the particular author—be his name Chaucer or Chesterton, Shakespeare or Shaw—designed it; as neither can Oxford nor Cambridge nor any University study English Literature, to understand it, unless by bracing itself to consider a living art. Origins, roots, all the gropings towards light—let these be granted as accessories; let those who search in them be granted all honour, all respect. It is only when they preach or teach these preliminaries, these accessories, to be more ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... up hill. Which makes stiffer climbing? Usually the one you are doing seems the harder. Sometimes the road is a dead level between hills. And dead level walking—the monotonous dead-a-way, with no bracing air, no inspiring outlook—is often much harder than down hill or up. And so it too is climbing. Following means climbing. He climbed. He made the high climb all alone. No other ever had the courage ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... for the rearing of sheep; but the island is totally destitute of mineral wealth. It is highly favoured in climate. The intense heat of a North American summer is here tempered by a cool sea-breeze; fogs are almost unknown, and the air is dry and bracing. Instances of longevity are very common; fever and consumption are seldom met with, and the cholera has never visited its shores. Wages are high, and employment abundant; land is cheap and tolerably productive; but though a competence may always ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... cultivator soon learns to make many deft applications of ingrafting. Sometimes a piece of bark may be used as a patch. In the bracing of crotches in young trees, the two trunks may be joined by uniting a small branch from either one, twisting them together to form a bridge like a bolt; they can be made to grow together, forming a solid union. Bolting the parts with iron rods, or holding them together ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... for more than an hour, when I heard steps, steps soft and slow, I knew not where, I was unable to locate them, but bracing myself up, I called out anew, whereupon I perceived a glimmer of light in ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... be many visitors who go there to search in its bracing air for the health they have lost during many years of toil and anxiety, and to whom the words of an unknown poet would ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... thought of confiding in Lord Selsey was at once soothing and bracing. He was a widower with no children, and Cecil was by way of being his heir. Since the death of his wife he lived in a kind of cultured retirement in a large old house standing a little by itself ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... bough to bough; when the light of heaven is so over all, that even the dun-colored earth, the decayed leaves and rotten branches, which the autumn blast has laid low, look beautiful, and seem to whisper resurgam; when a cold, bracing wind sends the warm blood bounding through our hearts—tinting our cheeks, and warming our extremities, until we bless it, as we do the strong hand which leads us in childhood; and we listen, with docile tenderness, to its teachings, ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... numerous rivers and streams flow down, and thoroughly irrigate the greater part of this lovely island: indeed, it may well be looked on as the Paradise of the East; for though, in the low country, the climate is relaxing and enervating to European constitutions, in the higher regions the air is bracing and exhilarating ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... ashore in the boat that was to carry Alan away. Beyond them, the lights of the Huntress showed where she was getting up sail. Martin made the landing with some difficulty, climbed the ladder to the wharf, and stood bracing himself against the ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... brightly and the air was never more clear and bracing than when Sinclair helped his wife off the train at Pawnee Junction. The station-master's face fell as he saw the lady, but he saluted the engineer with as easy an air as he could assume, and watched for an opportunity to ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... firing doubts at me obliquely across the table. "You can't run a country through its spoilt children," he said. "What you call aristocrats are really spoilt children. They've had too much of everything, except bracing experience." ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... same material, and the fur cap was drawn tightly about his head and ears. The slender-barreled rifle lay across his shoulder, and the blanket and deer meat made a light package on his back. Only his face was uncovered, and that was rosy with the sharp but bracing cold. But the resolute blue eyes seemed to have grown more resolute in the last six months, and the firm jaw was ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... love and hate, in the clear briny depths above and beneath! If the angels ever look out of their sphere of intense spiritual realities to indulge in a laugh, methinks such a lonely tripod-sitter, cased over with his invulnerable, non-conducting cloak and hood,—shrinking, dodging, or bracing himself up on the defensive, as the crowd fans him with its rush or jostles up against him,—like the man who fancied himself a teapot, and was forever warning people not to come too near him,—might furnish a subject for a planetary joke not unworthy of translation into ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... interest as a figure appeared farther up the road, and recognizing the fine poise and vigorous stride, she stopped and waited. Lisle was a bracing person to talk to, and she wanted to see him. He soon came up with her and she greeted him cordially. Unlike Gladwyne, he was a real man, resolute and resourceful, with a generous vein in him, and she did not resent the fact that he looked ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... down suddenly to hide the tears that stung my eyelids. But I winked them away in an instant, and was bracing myself to make him laugh by mimicking the man who had introduced us: Nebuchadnezzar of ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... of the lower order acquire from novel-reading a cultivation which they previously lacked, the higher seem proportionately to sink. They lose that aspiring pride which arises from the sense of walking in intellect on the necks of a subject crowd; they no longer feel the bracing influence of living solely among the highest forms of art; they become conformed insensibly, to the general opinion which the new literature of the people creates. A similar change is going on in every department of man's activity. The history of thought in its artistic form is parallel ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... interesting. Brigades marching at route step, bivouac fires, around which groups were eating their breakfast, orderly sergeants insisting in very naughty yet impressive language on the use of sand paper on muskets already bright, musicians rehearsing some new march, little boys bracing up drums half as high as themselves, important adjutants riding to and fro to hurry up the formation of their respective regiments, elegantly attired aides-de-camp galloping like mad and endeavoring to avoid mud puddles, batteries thundering along, ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... the stimulus of the bracing early morning air. A new inspiration seemed to fire him, altogether dissimilar to the glow which he was wont to feel when plunging into a dangerous phase of a professional case. He slowly drew from his pocket the typed note-paper which had nestled in such enviable intimacy ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... extremity of which a thin purple line indicated a range of hills. Here Tolly Trevor, unable to restrain his joy at the prospect of adventure before him, uttered a war-whoop, brought his switch down smartly on the pony's flank, and shot away over the plain like a wild creature. The air was bracing, the prospect was fair, the sunshine was bright. No wonder that the obedient pony, forgetting for the moment the fatigues of the past, and strong in the enjoyment of the previous night's rest and supper, ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... have given ourselves away in any situation with a pound of tea. Therefore, perhaps, it was well for us that, a peremptory summons to town reaching me after seven days of comradeship with William, I must make shift to collect my faculties with my effects, and return to the more bracing climate of Fleet Street. ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... Fenneben himself, with his tall figure and striking presence outlined against the gray stone columns of the veranda. All this because it was mid-October, a heaven-made autumn day in Kansas, with its gracious warmth and bracing breath; with the Indian summer haze in shimmering amethyst and gold overhanging the land; and the Walnut Valley, gorgeous in the glow of the October frost-fires, winding down between broad seas of rainbow-radiant prairies. And all this gladness ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... seen something about the strong, wholesome, well-groomed Englishman that pleased her, perhaps she was simply glad to be alive upon that glorious morning, with the bracing breeze blowing fresh from the lake, and the sun sending his welcome rays down upon the mountainside. At all events, her lips parted in the merest shadow of a smile as she walked along the gravelled path with the veriest air of ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... it was perhaps peculiar to the writer more immediately to feel for the safety of the whole. Each log or upright beam of the beacon was to be fixed to the rock by two strong and massive bats or stanchions of iron. These bats, for the fixture of the principal and diagonal beams and bracing chains, required fifty-four holes, each measuring two inches in diameter and eighteen inches in depth. There had already been so considerable a progress made in boring and excavating the holes that the writer's hopes of getting the beacon erected this year began ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... enjoyed—without having been disturbed by anything. One would have supposed that, after so much hardship, they would have got up somewhat wearied. Strange to say, it was not so, for they arose quite refreshed. This Lucien attributed to the bracing influence of the light dry atmosphere; and Lucien was right, for, although an arid soil surrounded them, its climate is one of the healthiest in the world. Many a consumptive person, who has crossed the prairies with flushed cheek, uttering his ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... snowboat, made off, hauling it with a rope over white banks and hollows toward the big timber. The dog, Bony, came along with them, wallowing to his ears and barking merrily. Since morning the sun had begun to warm the air, and a light breeze had risen. The boy sat bracing on a rope fastened before and looped around him. As they went along he was oversown with sparkling crystals. They made his cheeks tingle, and almost took his breath as he went plunging into steep hollows. Often he tipped over and sank in the white deep. Then Trove hauled him out, ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... name of Mr. Heathcliff's dwelling. 'Wuthering' being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times, indeed: one may guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... He reached out his spear as far as he could. It touched a soft object. The object, whatever it was, surged violently beneath the touch. His flesh crept, and the shaggy hair uplifted on his neck. "Back!" he hissed, thrusting A-ya off to arm's length and bracing his spear point before him to receive the expected attack. A pair of faintly phosphorescent eyes, small, but so wide apart as to show that their owner's head must have been enormous, flashed round upon them. There ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... laughed—a young spontaneous laugh—the first since she had come home. She kept Betty gossiping for half an hour, and as the stream of the village life poured about her, in Betty's racy speech, it was as though some primitive virtue entered into her and cheered her—some bracing voice from the Earth-spirit—whose purpose ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... domination, and particularly (it is pleasant to remember) from the girls. After the slipshod training and the incomplete accomplishments of a girls' school, there was something at first annoying, at last exciting and bracing, in this high ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... man in, and Mrs. Cody got breakfast for us. He refused the drink I set out for him. I felt that I needed a good deal of bracing in this writ of replevin business, so I drank his as well ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
... but it is only a small sample of a vast crop of a similar nature which you have in Western Ontario, for as I am informed by my honourable friend on my right, Mr. Mackenzie, the peaches are often given to the pigs. (Great laughter.) The pleasant and bracing seasons of Canada can be enjoyed in a country without its equal, for nowhere has the settler a more varied range of choice in the scenery, the locality, the soil which will finally determine him where to found a home. His fortune may be compared to that of a man entering one ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... faded and shrivelled indeed, after another year or two of anything but hospitality as generous as that of New York. Well-nourished and undimmed, however, it concealed for them admirably the fact that it was the hospitality they were after, and not the bracing climate or the desire to see the fascinating Americans of London and Paris at home. New York found them agreeable specimens of high-spirited young English people, and played with them indefinitely. Miss Forde, when she sat imperturbably ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... left the diner and swayed back into the Pullman she experienced a surging rush of energy and wondered if she was feeling the bracing air of which Harry had spoken. This was the North, the ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... for the table. Rick reached out and grabbed an ankle. Bracing his legs, he gave a mighty heave. Striped shirt went over backward in front of Barby, who stamped with both bare feet on his stomach. The breath went out of ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... islands to south and east, and with the hotly golden rice flats of the Val Maggia to the north. And because it was a remote and insignificant place, far away out of the crowding tragedies of that year of disaster, away from burning cities and starving multitudes, bracing and tranquillising and hidden, it was here that there gathered the conference of rulers that was to arrest, if possible, before it was too late, the debacle of civilisation. Here, brought together by the indefatigable energy of that impassioned humanitarian, Leblanc, the French ambassador at Washington, ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... cienega the dogs stopped before a thicket, bristled their backs and growled impatient remonstrance to the superintendent's efforts to shove them into the brush with his foot. In response to urgent encouragement, the collies, bracing back, barked furiously at the thicket, while the herders edged away to climbable trees, and the superintendent waited with tense nerves for the rush of a ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... question Maggie had been bracing herself for: "How about Dick Sherwood? Did he finally come ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... around and she couldn't go through. My natural gallantry got the better of my resentment, and I went out to help her over, notwithstanding what she had said when I was under the counter. Planting one foot firmly in the center of the puddle and bracing the other against the curb-stone, I ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... fellows! Hold 'em!" encouraged the men of the upper seats, bracing themselves against the broad ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... requisition; and, luckily, hares and Khorassan partridges were tolerably abundant. At times, even our guides confessed themselves at fault, so difficult was it to make our way through such a country. However, one thing was greatly in our favour—we had a splendid, bracing climate the whole way, the nights and mornings being "rayther" too cold, the thermometer ranging at that time between 20 and 30 degrees. The poor Sepoys and camp-followers, however, suffered severely. We experienced scarcely the slightest annoyance from the inhabitants ...
— Campaign of the Indus • T.W.E. Holdsworth
... the bushes and the sward, breaking into a thousand diamonds as it caught the rays of the stars. On went the horses briskly, their breath steaming against the fresh air, and their hoofs sounding cheerily on the hard ground. The rapid motion of the carriage, the bracing coolness of the night, and the excitement occasioned by anxiety and the forethought of danger, all conspired to stir the languid blood of Lord Mauleverer into a vigorous and exhilarated sensation, natural in youth to his character, but utterly contrary to the nature he had imbibed ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to play a little at Monte Carlo and cruise a little in the Mediterranean—to kill time through the detestable winter, which made itself felt wherever he was; and she went to London to see about Francie's gown, and up north to bracing Scotland, and down to Wellwood for Christmas, and back to the racket of London in the spring; and neither of them had spent a lonelier time in all their lives. Quite a fresh and peculiar sense of homelessness and uncomforted old age ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... opened a door looking out over the black sea, bracing his arm against it. The wind tore in, beating his whitening beard over his shoulders, and with it came a deluge of rain that drenched him as he stood there. He forced the door shut and faced Alan, a great, gray ghost of a man in the yellow glow ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... more bracing here than at Cannes, but on the whole the climate is more equable, there being no such sudden fall in the temperature after sunset; it is, however, I fear, less suited for invalids of a consumptive nature than other parts of the Riviera. It ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... my bear-hunting adventures. One day, when I had nothing else to do, I saddled up an extra pony express horse, and arming myself with a good rifle and pair of revolvers, struck out for the foot hills of Laramie Peak for a bear-hunt. Riding carelessly along, and breathing the cool and bracing autumn air which came down from the mountains, I felt as only a man can feel who is roaming over the prairies of the far West, well armed, and mounted on a fleet and gallant steed. The perfect freedom which he enjoys is in itself a refreshing stimulant ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... tonic and bracing to watch one's friend burst into bloom!... I needed the stimulus, too. ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... her go, honey, when you get hold of her," said Jimmy to Gabriella in a sympathetic aside "What she needs is bracing up—I was saying so to Pussy only this morning. 'If you could just brace up Cousin Fanny, she'd be as well as you or I,' was what I said to her Now I don't believe there's a better place on earth to brace a body up than old New York. I remember I took my poor old father ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... and the three horses pressed on abreast, the powerful sweep of the gray Caliente and the chestnut Don Fernando, and the snappy, nervous leaps of the little bay that Jo was riding. With the bracing sea air and the exhilarating speed, ...
— Frontier Boys on the Coast - or in the Pirate's Power • Capt. Wyn Roosevelt
... D'Hubert, liberated without remark, returned to his regimental duties, and Lieutenant Feraud, his arm still in a sling, rode unquestioned with his squadron to complete his convalescence in the smoke of battlefields and the fresh air of night bivouacs. This bracing treatment suited his case so well that at the first rumour of an armistice being signed he could turn without misgivings to the prosecution of ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... Clare, bracing herself against the chiffonier which she had moved away from the door, "just a little shaky from the drugs—but all right. Don't bother about me, now. I can take care of myself. I'll feel better in a minute. Upstairs— that is where I think that ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... to that door, you! Back up!" Sandy's voice was almost conversational but it was profoundly convincing. The bully obeyed him, standing at the door in the place of the assayer, who stepped aside, feeling a little sick at the stomach, Sam bracing him in friendly fashion ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... and striking into a canter the two men made for the open country. The excitement and motion combined with the bracing air drove the fumes of the liquor from Cook's head, and before many miles had been passed he was comparatively free from the terrible malady which threatened ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... told it, and she knew, too, what harm would come to her bairn if that kind of gossip got abroad in the village. She was no longer the gentle, loving nurse with the soft caressing hand, but a woman of purpose. The sudden terror aroused in her heart had the effect of tightening her grip and bracing her shoulders as if the better to withstand some ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... way utterly to fear, and not so terrified but that she could note all Hemstead did; and for some reason she believed he would be equal to the emergency. His confidence, moreover, communicated itself to her. She saw that he did not jerk or saw on the reins at first, but, bracing his large powerful frame, drew steadily back, and that the horses yielded somewhat ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... of verdure and blossoms,—the whole lit up by the mellow light of the setting sun, whose rays scintillated in every fantastic form amongst this gorgeous tropical vegetation, whilst the snow-wreathed evergreens, surrounding the conservatory waved their palms to the orb of day in our clear, bracing Canadian atmosphere—summer and winter combined in one landscape; the tropics and their luxuriant magnolias, divided by an inch of glass from the realms of old king frost and his hardy familiars, the pine and the maple. Charming was the ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... town," answered Fortune. "Why, there aint a person in Madersley who don't know Delaney Manor; and strangers, when they come there, drive out to see Delaney Manor as they would any other big place, and folks at this time of year travel from far to stay at Madersley, because the place is bracing and the coast good for bathing. So you see, Mr. Dolman, there'll be lots of people who will read my descriptions, and when they read 'em they'll begin to talk about the children, and there's no ...
— A Little Mother to the Others • L. T. Meade
... Tom had elected to take with him seemed to resent being separated from his companions. Bracing his feet well apart, the ...
— Tom Swift in Captivity • Victor Appleton
... of it, for he was chilled, in spite of the toilsome climb. The dark boughs wailed above him, tossing athwart his path a haze of sliding snow, but he caught a faint and reassuring clink of drills, and straightened himself as he clambered down between the trees. The sound had a bracing effect on him, and he felt a curious little thrill as the clamour of the river came up to him in long pulsations. The sound of the waters was growing louder when Gordon, with a big axe in his hand, materialized out of the shadows, and strode forward impulsively ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... that score, he would get no satisfaction, she thought. She owed it to Frank. Her pretty face strengthened and hardened on the instant. Her small, white teeth set themselves in two even rows; and her father saw quite plainly that she was consciously bracing herself for an attack of some kind. He feared by this that she was guilty, and he was all the more distressed, ashamed, outraged, made wholly unhappy. He fumbled in the left-hand pocket of his coat and drew forth from among the various papers the fatal communication so cheap in its physical ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... was running free when we first sighted her, but just as she was passing astern of us, she began to come slowly about. I could see a great number of men swaying in unison against the helm that controlled the gigantic rudder. Others were bracing the ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... tired after his long spell of arduous work in Paris, and was glad to rest his brains, so they spent most of the time boating on the lake, or strolling in the woods, getting new-made-over in the fresh, bracing country air. The car they had hired was to meet them at Lancaster. They went thus far south by train, then motored to Liverpool. Loveday, ready with suit-case packed, was eagerly expecting them. From the window of her aunt's drawing-room she watched the big six-seater car arrive at ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... followed him, always ready to hold him up or keep him back, if his six-year-old arms grew feeble during those exercises. All that benefited little Jack, whom sickness had made somewhat pale; but his color soon came back on board the "Pilgrim," thanks to this gymnastic, and to the bracing sea-breezes. ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... sailors knotted the ends of their sashes around the mast. Tonet tied the little boy securely to a ring astern; but seeing that his brother, for a show of bravado, had sat down beside the tiller free, he crouched at the railing, bracing himself against a chock on the deck. A funereal silence settled on the Mayflower. The sea was now in such commotion that the kelp on the bottom showed its streamers in the troughs of the waves. The crests of foam were turning a dirty yellow from the mud stirred ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... across the rolling plains and gently sloping hill sides, covered with waving cane, and interspersed with provision grounds, contributed with the fresh bracing air of the morning to make the drive pleasant ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... of fairy tales, and as she was invited to spend the next summer in the lovely New Hampshire village of Walpole, she thankfully accepted the invitation, and decided to write the new book there in the bracing air of the hill town. In Walpole, she met delightful people, who were all attracted to the versatile, amusing young woman, and she was in great demand when there was any entertainment on foot. One evening she gave a burlesque lecture on "Woman, and Her Position, by Oronthy Bluggage," which created ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... in the early winter, but the day came out bright and clear. Greatly the boys enjoyed the bright sunshine and the bracing air as they took their way through the woods, crossing the river at last, and following a much used trail which took them toward the Delawares' village. This was a new route to them, but it was the course the ...
— Far Past the Frontier • James A. Braden
... once but busied himself with his ponderous fur coat, which he buttoned, as if bracing himself for the start. Beneath her lashes she looked sideways at the deliberate hands and the lean strong face, burnt to a red-brown by sun and snow, half hidden in the fur collar of his ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... friend of the brad-awl with cries of grief and sympathy, and then, turning upon me, they brandished their knives and howled at me like the gang of assassins that they were. So frantic were their gestures that I was convinced that my end had come, and was just bracing myself to meet it in a manner which should be worthy of my past reputation, when one of them gave an order and I was dragged roughly across the little glade to the brambles from which ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... answer?" asked the Ranchero, bracing himself for a strong pull. "You had better ponder the matter well before you decide. What do you suppose your uncle will think, when he comes home and finds you hanging to this hook? He had rather lose the money a thousand times over ...
— Frank Among The Rancheros • Harry Castlemon
... does lie over the mountains. There are difficulties. The Christian course is like a Roman road which never turned aside, but went straight up and on. So much the better. A keener air blows, bracing and health-giving, up there. Mosquitoes and malaria keep ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... clear of the speeding komatik, pitching over and over, and finally sliding to a stop, dazed and bewildered, but in time to see the komatik, bottom up, at the very brink of the chasm. Toby was sprawling just above it. The dogs, with traces taut, stood above him bracing themselves to hold the sledge ...
— Left on the Labrador - A Tale of Adventure Down North • Dillon Wallace
... bracing himself up for another attack when suddenly there came a sound of voices from the stairs. One voice was a mere murmur, but the other was sharp and unmistakable, the incisive note of Lora Delane Porter. It brought Steve and Mamie to ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... already wriggling his way down between the smooth rock walls, bracing himself with back and knees. Within a few seconds he had reached the bottom, some ten feet below. It was a sloping, uneven floor of earth, lighted dimly from above and from the south, where the ledge shelved off ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... state of health appeared to be so infirm and shattered that her brother-in-law, Mr. Hoare, offered her the loan of his house at Cromer. She accepted the offer for a couple of months, and found a little benefit for the bracing air. She mentioned in her diary at this time that she had "an undue fear of an imbecile or childish state"—a not unlikely feeling to be cherished by an energetic woman accustomed all her life long to ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... power cable branched off downward, at a sharp angle, overhead. Ray was able to turn about and get his feet in front of him; Yetsko had to crawl on until he had passed it, and then back into it after Ray had entered. Bracing one foot on either side, Ray inched his way down the forty-degree slope, hoping that the two hundred pound weight of Doug Yetsko ...
— Null-ABC • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... of great brilliancy was shining, and over him arched the high skies of the great west. The air was thin and cool, easy to breathe and uplifting, and in the bracing morning he did not feel the loneliness and immensity of the wilderness. Boyd had already built a little fire among the bushes, and was warming some strips of dried beef over ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... simple forms, after so much exciting thought of Art and Man. The day passed in the St. Bernardin, with its lofty peaks and changing lights upon the distant snows,—its holy, exquisite valleys and waterfalls, its stories of eagles and chamois, was the greatest refreshment I ever experienced: it was bracing as a cold bath after the heat of a crowd amid which one has listened to ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... oat-straw and turnips. Not a handful of hay or of meal is given them. The calves are allowed to suck their dams at pleasure. He is convinced that with this simple system of feeding, together with the bracing air of Aberdeenshire, he has obtained a tribe of animals of hardy and robust constitutions, of early maturity, well calculated to improve the general ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... hushing of it up may, in a perfectly candid and honest mind, grow into a deliberate religious policy, or parti pris. Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the phenomenon. It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer's inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight; its sting so often departs and turns into a relish when, after vainly seeking to shun it, we agree to face about and ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... sneaking down the companionway. For an instant I was in a panic of terror and chagrined that I had lingered long enough to give the enemy time to return. But I determined that I might as well fight there as anywhere else, and, bracing myself against the bunks, I drew my knife and raised the belaying-pin, prepared to begin the attack as soon as my visitor ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... the carriage, bracing his courage for the emergency. He could take a cushion, jump out and attack the man with that. It was not a deadly weapon, and would require considerable force back of it to do damage. The whip might ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... something bracing and sustaining about it; and the days in which Hugh learnt the truth about himself had nothing of gloom or sadness about them. The discovery indeed surprised him with a certain lightness and freshness of spirit. He smiled ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... you see, I had rather entertained a sort of hope that when I had revealed to him the Bassett's mental attitude, Nature would have done the rest, bracing him up to such an extent that artificial stimulants would not be required. Because, naturally, a chap doesn't want to have to sprint about country houses lugging jugs of orange juice, unless ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... not in loveliness of character and demeanour, nor even much in the always gentle and tender expression of countenance; but the animal spirits and frame, that should have had all the strong cherishing and bracing that affection and wisdom together could have applied, had been left to wear themselves out under trials his father had shrunk from, and other trials his father had made. And Mrs. Rossitur it was hard for Fleda to remember the face she ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... cheered Peter to meet someone who talked of the possibility of his fighting again. Soon the two were deep in technicalities, the appalling technicalities of the airman. It was no good listening to their talk, for you could make nothing of it, but it was bracing up Peter like wine. Archie gave him a minute description of Lensch's latest doings and his new methods. He, too, had heard the rumour that Peter had mentioned to me at St Anton, of a new Boche plane, with mighty engines and stumpy ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... breadth. Ranges of wooded hills bound this valley on both sides. After the first twenty miles you come to Mount Morambala, which rises with steep sides to 4000 feet in height. It is wooded to the top, and very beautiful. A small village peeps out about half-way up the mountain. It has a pure, bracing atmosphere, and is perched above mosquito range. The people on the summit have a very different climate and vegetation from those on the plains, and they live amidst luxuriant vegetation. There are many species of ferns, some so large ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... books as to a playground to forget our cares and to blow off the cobwebs of business, let us make sure that we find what we seek. It is there, sure enough. The playgrounds of literature are indeed wide, and alive with bracing excitement, nor is there any limit to the variety of the games. But let us be sure, when we set Out to be amused, that we really are amused, that our humorists do really make us laugh, and that our story-tellers have stories to tell and know how to tell them. ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... always something going on outdoors worth seeing," says Charles Dudley Warner, and of no part of the world is this more true than of these apparently desolate plains at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. Rich is the reward of the daily stroller, not only in the inspiration of its pure, bracing air, the songs of its meadow-larks, and the glory of its grand mountain view, but in ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... little more inclined now to bet on calmness than on passion, he decided to take a seat in the parlor, and keep it, at least, till he could dispose of his present doubt. Easily might he have measured three miles over the Waltham hills, in the bracing morning-air, with his own locomotive apparatus, while he had been looking in vain for artificial conveyance. But if that plan had occurred to him at all at first, it would have been dismissed with contempt as unbusinesslike. He ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... to whom she thus wrote, saw how the poor over- taxed system needed bracing, and accordingly sent her a shower- bath—a thing for which she had long been wishing. The receipt of it was acknowledged ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... gleamed every now and then in the sun. Two more were seen the next day, and at 6.22 A.M. on December 9, noon position 65 deg. 8' S., 177 deg. 41' W., the pack was sighted ahead by Rennick. All that day we passed bergs and streams of ice. The air became dry and bracing, the sea was calm, and the sun shining on the islands of ice was more than beautiful. And then Bump! We had just charged the first big floe, and we were in ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... the air—covert smiles—the whole detestable atmosphere of intrigue with which they would have surrounded her, had vanished as by a spell before the magic word fiancee. She was breathing air like that upon the mountain-tops. It was sweet and clean and bracing. ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... boundless grassy plains; there is all the grandeur of monotony and yet continual change. Sometimes the distances are broken by blue buttes, or rugged bluffs. Over all there is a sparkling atmosphere and never-failing breeze; the air is bracing even when most hot, the sky is cloudless, and no rain falls. A solitude which no words can paint, the boundless prairie swell conveys an idea of vastness which is the overpowering feature of the Plains.... The impression is not merely one of size. There is perfect ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... Bath), you will hear it said that everybody is well in London, but in London you will find that the hygienic critics or authorities distinguish. All England, indeed, is divided into parts that are relaxing, and parts that are bracing, and it is not so strange then that London should be likewise subdivided. Mayfair, you will hear, is very bracing, but Belgravia, and more particularly Pimlico, on which it borders, is terribly relaxing. Beyond Pimlico, ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... Arthur, "we must all pass through the discipline of life. The time will soon come when you will assume woman's duties, and it is well that you go forth awhile to gather strength and wisdom, to meet and fulfil them. You need something more bracing and invigorating than the atmosphere of love that ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... had been made, for tall glasses stood in the centre of the tables filled with ripe grasses and pretty autumn leaves, but, strange to relate, we were more interested in the contents of our soup plates and what was to follow. The cold and bracing air during our short walks on deck had given us all famous appetites, and we ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... split apart down the back, and a slender form, adorned with two pairs of crumpled, wet wings, struggled three-quarters of its length from the shell. For a short time it clung motionless, gathering strength. Then, bracing its legs firmly on the edges of the shell, it lifted its tail quite clear, and crawled up the weed a perfect dragon-fly, forgetful of that grim husk it was leaving behind. A few minutes later, the good sun having dried its wings, it went darting and hurtling over ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... felt as strong as usual, and it is a great treat to get away from the schoolroom and out into the open air, which is bracing and delightful. I believe I have enjoyed this outing more than any I have taken since I came North; and you must allow me to tell you how earnestly I thank you for your considerate remembrance ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... director of the theatre orchestra once asked father Brahms not to play so loud; whereupon he replied with dignity, "Herr Kapellmeister, this is my double-bass, I want you to understand, and I shall play it as loud as I please." The music of Brahms in its bracing vigor has been appropriately compared to a mixture of sea air and the timbre ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding |
