"Excrescence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Dickson made the passage slowly and miserably, sometimes crying out with pain as his toes struck a sharper flint, once or twice sitting down on a boulder to blow like a whale, once slipping on his knees and wetting the strange excrescence about his middle, which was his tucked-up waterproof. But the crossing was at length achieved, and on a patch of sea-pinks he dried himself perfunctorily and hastily put on his garments. Old Bill, who seemed to be regardless of wind or water, squatted beside him and whistled ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... in all the world. The grim towers rise boldly without ornament or decoration of any kind, and are cowled by a peculiarly strange roofing. The triple porch is denuded of its decorative statues, and there is a rank Renaissance excrescence in the rear which is unseemly, but for all that, as a mediaeval religious monument of rank, it appeals to all quite as forcibly as the brilliantly florid cathedral at Beauvais, or the richly proud Amiens, its nearest ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... but of a couple of line-of-battle ships abreast. The island had the appearance of being simply the topmost ridge of a mountain rising with a tolerably even continuous slope from the bottom of the sea; and the barrier reef was merely an excrescence or wall of coral built on to one side of it, and founded at a depth of ten fathoms below the surface of the ocean, as our lead presently told us. The basin thus formed had, during the course of ages, become partially filled with sand, forming a beautifully smooth, and ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... of the allies which it brings to the aid of its cause. When the genuine spirit of liberty animates the body of a people to a thorough examination of their affairs, it leads to the excision of every excrescence which may have fastened itself upon any of the departments of the government, and restores the system to its pristine health and beauty. But the reign of an intolerant spirit of party amongst a free people seldom fails to result in a dangerous accession to the executive power ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... supplied by its fellow part. If, therefore, the combination made is to be harmonious, the artist must induce in each of its component parts (suppose two only, for simplicity's sake,) such imperfection as that the other shall put it right. If one of them be perfect by itself, the other will be an excrescence. Both must be faulty when separate, and each corrected by the presence of the other. If he can accomplish this, the result will be beautiful; it will be a whole, an organized body with dependent members;—he is an inventor. If not, let his separate ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... development; and he was bound in return to perform arduous and complicated duties. How far he performed them well is another question. At least, he did whatever was done in the way of governing, and therefore did not sink into a mere excrescence or superfluity. I must try to point out certain results which had a material effect upon English opinion in general and, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... of crimson lacquer, with its floating moons of luminous colour—this bow of prismed stone leaping to the weird isle crowned by the anomalous, aureate excrescence—the half human batrachians-the elfland through which we had passed, with all its hidden wonders and terrors—I felt the foundations of my cherished knowledge shaking. Was this all a dream? Was this body of mine lying somewhere, fighting a fevered death, and all these but images floating ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... the soft flabby excrescence should be seized by a pair of catch-forceps, and it should be cut off close to its base with a knife, or, what is better, a pair of curved scissors. Any little vessel which jets may then be secured. If, instead of numerous individual tumours, a ring of skin round the anus be involved, the whole ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... the honour of writing, with the accompaniments you so kindly forwarded, have my warm and grateful acknowledgments. The selection of ten miles square for the seat of government appeared to me at the time, and has continued, an excrescence on the Constitution, like a wart on a fair skin. Neither the foreign ministers nor the resident citizens in the federal city have any thing to alarm them under state laws. There is no finger of blood in the laws of Maryland or Virginia. I am of Mr. Bacon's opinion—return ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... Bates the corn-merchant. It was one of the few stone houses of the district, a compact snug-looking nucleus from which an irregular wing, rather higher than the main building, advanced to the very edge of the roadway. A much smaller wing, merely an excrescence, on the other side, seemed as if it had gone as far as it could in the direction of making a quadrangle and had then given over the task to a broad low wall. The square piece of garden, though untidy and neglected, derived a great air of dignity from its ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... detail with which its great surface is wrought all over, like the chasing of a lady's jewel-box, and yet so grand! There is a dwelling-house on one side, gray with antiquity, which has apparently grown out of it like an excrescence; and though a good-sized edifice, yet the cathedral is so large that its vastness is not in the least deformed by it. If it be a dwelling-house, I suppose it is inhabited by the person who takes care of the cathedral. This morning, while listening to the tedious chanting and lukewarm sermon, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... half a mile distant. The meeting was held in a little chapel built out like an architectural excrescence at the side of the great, oblong, wooden structure, with its piercing steeple. The chapel windows blazed with light. People were flocking in. As they entered, a young lady began to play on an out-of-tune piano, which Judge Josiah ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... GRUNDY has written three Acts of a play which must have been powerful had he not extended it to five, and, had he not attempted to centre the interest on a character which, charming as an incidental sketch, is, as an essential, an excrescence. Practically the play is at an end with the finish of the Third Act. Why lug in the Abbe ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 19 April 1890 • Various
... to a Cornish belief, the first blackberry seen will banish warts. Watercress laid against warts was formerly said to drive them away. A rustic specific for whooping-cough in Hampshire is to drink new milk out of a cup made of the variegated holly; while in Sussex the excrescence found on the briar, and popularly known as "robin red-breast's cushion," is in demand. In consumption and diseases of the lungs, St. Fabian's nettle, the crocus, the betony, and horehound, have ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... excrescence on a good book, and a vain apology for a worthless one; but, in the present instance, a ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... Street; and the portico of the Society of Artists' rooms stood over the pavement then. With these exceptions I only know one more building that has not been pulled down, or so altered as to be unrecognisable. The exemption is the excrescence called Christ Church, which still disfigures the very finest site in ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... characterized by some fungus and dry rot. How has Canada escaped so much of this fungus excrescence of representative government? To get at the reason for this it is necessary to trace back for a little space the historic growth of Canada's form of government. We speak of Canada's constitution being the British North America Act. As a matter of fact, Canada's constitution is more ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... respect them, in their proper place. As an adornment to the Church I am sure they will continue to shine. In the State they have become an excrescence and an impediment." ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... tail hanging a short distance beneath the bough. The dark reddish color of the hair of his skin, dashed with blackish tints, harmonized and blended well with the hue of the bark, so that at a distance, to an unpracticed eye, he appeared like a huge excrescence on the tree, or a large butt of a branch that had ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... masterpiece, "Adonais," in fire and grandeur. There is no incongruity in "Adonais" like the introduction of "the pilot of the Galilean lake"; its invective and indignation pour naturally out of the subject; their expression is not, as in "Lycidas," a splendid excrescence. There is no such example of sustained eloquence in "Lycidas" as the seven concluding stanzas of "Adonais" beginning, "Go thou to Rome." But the balance is redressed by the fact that the beauties of "Adonais" are the inimitable. Shelley's eloquence is even too ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... that one muscle or limb may acquire excessive strength, and an unnatural size, at the expense of the health of the whole body: I cannot think this desirable, either for the individual or for society.—The unfortunate people in certain mountains of Switzerland are, some of them, proud of the excrescence by which they are deformed. I have seen women vain of exhibiting mental deformities, which to me appeared no less disgusting. In the course of my life it has never been my good fortune to meet with a female whose mind, in strength, just proportion, ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... higher than the dry land. Proof: Water could only be higher than the Earth, 1. If it were excentric, or 2. If it were concentric, but had some excrescence. ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... aboriginal word, Kamilaroi Dialect of New South Wales. [W. Ridley, 'Kamilaroi,' p. 25, derives it from Kulu, seed, but it is just as likely from Kolle, water.—J. Mathew.] A hollowed knot of a tree, used as a seed vessel, or for holding water. The word is applied to the excrescence on the tree as well as to the vessel; a bush hand has been heard to speak of a hump-backed man ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... can't throw one away. Supposing there's no truth in what I hold About the need of trial to man's faith, Still, when you bid me purify the same, To such a process I discern no end. Clearing off one excrescence to see two, 740 There's ever a next in size, now grown as big, That meets the knife: I cut and cut again! First cut the Liquefaction, what comes last But Fichte's clever cut at God himself? Experimentalize on sacred things! I trust nor hand ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... with excitement. How could Creno be wrong? He knew everything as soon as the facts were in his mind. Yet here now were living things crawling toward the machine, just like the excrescence at one end but in no way a part of it! The feeling of willed effort as they crawled slowly toward it, white and pink striped, reaching grasping feelers into the turgid product, taking it in, then rising on easing legs as the food ...
— Sweet Their Blood and Sticky • Albert Teichner
... of his said brain, The stomach, like a belt. like an auger. The pylorus, like a pitchfork. The worm-like excrescence, like The windpipe, like an oyster- a Christmas-box. knife. The membranes, like a monk's The throat, like a pincushion cowl. stuffed with oakum. The funnel, like a mason's chisel. The lungs, like a prebend's ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... from the murderer; quaint, wise world Yea: shudder at sight of him; sanctified world! Go: plume him up deftly; clever old world! Till he shines like a gilded excrescence: Then strangle him dog-like—a civilised plan! Quick! trample his life out: he's not of the clan: He stinks in the nostrils of saintly man, Though fit for the ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... was answered by a sallow-faced, red-haired, sulky boy, who, after surveying Mr. Gabriel Parsons through the glass, applied a large key to an immense wooden excrescence, which was in reality a lock, but which, taken in conjunction with the iron nails with which the panels were studded, gave the door the appearance of being subject ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... dense forest on the side of a mountain. The sitting bird was disturbed as I passed beneath her. The whirring of her wings arrested my attention, when, after a short pause, I had the good luck to see, through an opening in the leaves, the bird return to her nest, which appeared like a mere wart or excrescence on a small branch. The hummingbird, unlike all others, does not alight upon the nest, but flies into it. She enters it as quick as a flash, but as light as any feather. Two eggs are the complement. They are perfectly ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... wondrous golden harvest is being gleaned. The tidings go forth over the whole earth. Sail and steam, trains of creaking wagons, troops of hardy horsemen, are all bent Westward Ho! Desertion takes the troops and sailors from camp and fleet pell-mell to the Sacramento valley. A shabby excrescence of tent and hut swells Yerba Buena to a town. In a few months it leaps into a city's rank. Over the prairies, toward the sandy Humboldt, long emigrant trains are crawling toward the golden canyons of the Sierras. The restless blood of the Mexican War pours across the Gila ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... the 29th we anchored in Holdfast Road, in 4 1/2 fathoms, Mount Lofty,* a slight excrescence on the highest part of the range of hills eastwards, bearing North 80 degrees East; a flagstaff at a straggling village under it pointed out the township of Glenelg. At the foot of this we made our observations, which place it in latitude 34 degrees 58 minutes 30 seconds South and longitude ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... une mention honorable at the Salon for his portrait of a toreador. Why this honour was conferred upon him it is difficult to guess. It must have been the result of some special influence exerted at a special moment, for ever after—down to the year of his death—his pictures were considered as an excrescence on the annual exhibitions at the Salon. Every year—down to the year of his death—the jury, M. Bouguereau et Cie., lamented that they were powerless to reject these ridiculous pictures. Manet had been placed hors ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... a pitiable air, and his grimy tears appear so real, and he lies in the corner up against the hoarding so like a growth of fungus or any unwholesome excrescence produced there in neglect and impurity, that Allan Woodcourt is softened towards him. He says to the woman, "Miserable ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... confuted by subsequent annotators, or were too minute to merit preservation. I have sometimes adopted his restoration of a comma, without inserting the panegyrick in which he celebrated himself for his achievement. The exuberant excrescence of his diction I have often lopped, his triumphant exultations over Pope and Howe I have sometimes suppressed, and his contemptible ostentation I have frequently concealed; but I have in some places shown him, as he would have shown himself, for the reader's diversion, that the inflated emptiness ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... this unsafe topic, are Lord Alvanley's description of a man who "muddled away his fortune in paying his tradesmen's bills;" Lord Orford's definition of timber, "an excrescence on the face of the earth, placed there by Providence for the payment of debts;" and Pelham's argument, that it is respectable to be arrested, because it shows that ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... Panchamas were a part of Hinduism, its rejection would be a paramount duty both for them and for those like me who would not make a fetish even of religion and condone every evil in its sacred name. But, I believe that untouchability is no part of Hinduism. It is rather its excrescence to be removed by every effort. And there is quite an army of Hindu reformers who have set their heart upon ridding Hinduism of this blot. Conversion, therefore, I hold, ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... Convexity. — N. convexity, prominence, projection, swelling, gibbosity[obs3], bilge, bulge, protuberance, protrusion; camber, cahot [obs3][N. Am.], thank-ye-ma'am [U.S.]. swell. intumescence; tumour[Brit], tumor; tubercle, tuberosity[Anat]; excrescence; hump, hunch, bunch. boss, embossment, hub, hubble [convex body parts] tooth[U.S.], knob, elbow, process, apophysis[obs3], condyle, bulb, node, nodule, nodosity[obs3], tongue, dorsum, bump, clump; sugar loaf &c. (sharpness) 253; bow; mamelon[obs3]; molar; belly, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... overlooking us had the black gloss of empty darkness within. Seen by starlight with a troubled eye, the house had one salient feature in the shape of a square tower, which stood out from the facade fronting the river, and rose to nearly twice the height of the main roof. But this curious excrescence only added to the forbidding character of as gloomy a mansion as one could wish to approach by stealth at ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... smoothest writer of his day; Lay stress upon the fact that he'd to seek In his own mind what others find in Greek; Grant all you please, in turn you must allow, Had fate postponed his life from then to now, He'd prune redundancies, apply the file To each excrescence that deforms his style, Oft in the pangs of labour scratch his head, And bite his nails, and bite them, till they bled. Oh yes! believe me, you must draw your pen Not once nor twice but o'er and o'er again Through what you've written, if you would entice The man that ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... under each seat; and a drop box fastened on behind. There were pockets beneath each window, and, curious relic in name and nature of the time when every gentleman carried his weapon, there was the sword case, an excrescence behind the back of the best seat, accessible by lifting a cushion, where weapons used to be carried, but where in our peaceful times travellers bestowed their luncheon ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... half-obliterated inscription—the Latin word "Effode"—which he remembered to have carved in the bark of the tree with a whole day's toil when he had first begun to muse about his exalted destiny. It might be accounted a rather singular coincidence that the bark just above the inscription had put forth an excrescence shaped not unlike a hand, with the forefinger pointing obliquely at the word of fate. Such, at least, was its appearance in ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... dishonorable persons, especially satyrs, fauns, and sensual powers, consisted in irregular excrescence and decrement of features, especially in flatness of the upper part of the nose, and projection of the end of it into a ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... they stood eyeing each other. The elephant, although much the larger, knew his antagonist well. He had met his "sort" before, and knew better than to despise his powers. Perhaps, ere now, he had had a touch of that long spit-like excrescence that stood ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... here." He stepped up to the very tree against which George was standing, showed him an excrescence on the bark, made two clean cuts with his tomahawk, pulled out a huge white worm and offered it George. George turned from it in disgust; the wild chief grinned superior and ate it himself, and smacked his lips ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... not quite fulfil her expectations; it was neither remarkable for age nor beauty; the masonry was in a sort of chessboard pattern, alternate squares of freestone and of flints, the windows were not casements as she thought they ought to have been, and the long wing, or rather excrescence, which contained the drawing-room, was by no means ornamental. It was a respectable, comfortable mansion, and that was all that was to be said in its praise, and Beatrice's affection had so embellished it in description, ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Sage; "the first man went about with only one ear; the second man made himself remarkable with three—and the cut-off ear, although alive and successful, felt itself an excrescence." ...
— The Damsel and the Sage - A Woman's Whimsies • Elinor Glyn
... a process, I discern no end. Cutting off one excrescence to see two; There is ever a next in size, now grown as big, That meets the knife. I cut and cut again; First cut the Liquefaction, what comes last But Fichte's clever cut at ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... the back?" I asked, walking around the odd, dangling figures, hanging like bloated metal skeletons from their chains. I had thought the bodies were perfect globes; I could see now that at the rear there was a humplike excrescence across ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... dry knoll in a garden as to be below frost. Leaves piled above them ensure safety. Make sure that the boxes are buried where no water can collect either on or beneath the surface. Before new roots can be made by a cutting, a whitish excrescence appears at both its ends, called the callus, and from this the rootlets start out. This essential process goes on throughout the winter, and therefore the advantage of making cuttings in the fall. Occasionally, in the fall, we may obtain a variety ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... discovered a panacea for the ills of society: the old was to be cleared away and all things were to become new. In Marx's own thought evolution and revolution were tangled and alternated. The evolutionary side was essential to it; the idea of revolutionary catastrophe is almost an excrescence. But to the Marxians (of whom Marx once observed that he was not one) this excrescence became the whole thing. People were divided into those who advocated the revolution and those who did not. The business of propaganda was to increase the number of adherents ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... giving us that unseasonable delight, when we know he could have given us a better and more solid. He might have left that task to others who, not being able to put in thought, can only makes us grin with the excrescence of a word of two or three syllables in the close. It is, indeed, below so great a master to make use of such a little instrument. But his good sense is perpetually shining through all he writes; it affords us not the time ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... extricate his foot only draw it into a slot at the end of which lies a little dark-brown body. In a newly-opened flower five of these little bodies may be seen between the horns of the crown, at equal distances around it. This tiny brown excrescence is hard and horny, with a notch in its face. It is continuous with and forms the end of the slot in which the visitor's foot is caught. Into this he must draw his foot or claw, and finding it rather tightly held, must give a vigorous jerk to get it ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... familiar enough in various shapes; and in the reproaches which Southey brings against the manufacturing system we have an anticipation of other familiar lamentations. Our manufacturing wealth is a 'wen,' a 'fungous excrescence from the body politic';[153] it is no more a proof of real prosperity than the size of a dropsical patient is a proof of health;[154] the manufacturer worships mammon instead of Moloch;[155] and wrings his fortune from the degradation of his labourers as his warlike ancestors ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... represented his views better than those who are in favor of immediate emancipation. In explanation of his views on this subject the President said that in his speeches he had frequently used as an illustration the case of a man who had an excrescence on the back of his neck, the removal of which in one operation would result in the death of the patient, while tinkering it off ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... full, the gatherer of worms enters a neighbouring wood, and selects a young palmiste tree. This is a tree of the palm order, exceedingly stately and graceful, growing sometimes to the extraordinary height of eighty feet. From the roots upwards, it has not a single branch or shrubby excrescence, but grows beautifully smooth and straight, tapering towards the top. At its top, an abundance of the richest and most beautiful leaves spread out in graceful symmetry, and bend down on all sides, forming a figure like an umbrella; ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... parapets. Rose bushes gave no real cover; one step to right or left of them, and the person wishing to be private was discovered. Only the north-west corner was a little place jutting out from the great wall, a kind of excrescence or loop, no doubt used in the old distrustful days for observation, where it was possible to sit really unseen, because between it and the house was a ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... back, just over the shoulder. At first he could not make out what this was, as he had never heard of such a protuberance, besides, the tail half hid it from his view. All of a sudden the animal turned its head backwards, touched the hunch with its snout, gave itself a shake, and then the odd excrescence fell to the ground, and proved to be a young ant-eater, with bushy tail and long snout, the "very image of its mother." The large one was thus seen to be a female that had been carrying ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... the Court's conception of what at a particular time constitutes 'civilized decency' and 'fundamental liberty and justice.' * * * [This] 'natural law' formula, [he further contends] * * * should be abandoned as an incongruous excrescence on our Constitution. * * * [The] formula [is] itself a violation of our Constitution, in that it subtly conveys to courts, at the expense of legislatures, ultimate power over public policies in fields where no specific provision of the ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... The curious excrescence on the bill of the drake nukta or comb-duck is now much enlarged. This betokens the approach of the nesting season for ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... ruggedness of poor human nature than there lay any clear hint of it in the open-eyed, loving" young Maynard? Because "it is with men as with trees: if you lop off their finest branches into which they were pouring their young life-juice, the wounds will be healed over with some rough boss, some odd excrescence, and what might have been a grand tree, expanding into liberal shade, is but a whimsical, misshapen trunk. Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow which has crushed and maimed the nature just when it was expanding ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... to produce neither the security of a free Government, nor the energy of a Monarchy that is absolute. Accordingly, the Crown has dwindled away in proportion to the unnatural and turgid growth of this excrescence on the Court. ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... lowest Jew is sufficiently informed to know that he will not be raised by becoming a bad Christian, or an infidel. It is equally clear that a bad Jew will never make a good Christian: and I am not quite sure if we ought not to be thankful for the removal of such an excrescence ...
— Suggestions to the Jews - for improvement in reference to their charities, education, - and general government • Unknown
... (Cephalopterus ornatus). It resembles in size and colour the common crow. In addition to this umbrella-like ornament on its head, it has what may be called a pelerine suspended from the neck, formed by a thick fan of glossy steel-blue feathers which grow on a long fleshy lobe or excrescence. This lobe is connected with an unusual development of the trachea and vocal organs, undoubtedly assisting the bird to utter its strange note. While singing, it draws itself up on the bough, spreads widely out the umbrella-formed crest, ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... and no bird; but it had a very wondrous likeness to a bird; so much so that I went up to it, to see if my eyes had deceived me. Yet it seemed no more than a freak of nature, though most wondrous in its fidelity; being but an excrescence upon the trunk. With a sudden thought that it would make me a curio, I reached up to see whether I could break it away from the tree; but it was above my reach, so that I had to leave it. Yet, one thing I discovered; for, in stretching towards the protuberance, I had placed a hand upon the tree, ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... congested veins, purple in ordinary circumstances, but now pale violet, for even with his back to the fire the cold pinched him on the other side. His cowl had half fallen back, and made a strange excrescence on either side of his bull neck. So he straddled, grumbling, and cut the room in half with the shadow of ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... into the text associations which are not really found there." (p. 391.)—Lastly, he complains of "the error of interpreting every particle, as though it were a link in the argument; instead of being, as is often the case, an excrescence of style." ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... an essentially effeminate system. His opponents were certainly not effeminate; but they were masculine only in the sense in which the soldier is masculine, in his sturdy contempt for the arts of peace; whereas to Hugh the soldier was only an inevitable excrescence on the community, a disagreeable necessity which would disappear in the light of a ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... instantly perceive, without the aid of any elaborate illustration, that there must always be an immense disproportion between the objects of federal and state expenditures. It is true that several of the States, separately, are encumbered with considerable debts, which are an excrescence of the late war. But this cannot happen again, if the proposed system be adopted; and when these debts are discharged, the only call for revenue of any consequence, which the State governments will continue to experience, will be for the mere support of their respective ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... is a certain cure:—There is a God of Boils. If you have a boil you will plaster the offending excrescence without avail, if that be all you plaster; to get relief you must at the same time plaster the corresponding area on the image of the God. Go into his temple in Western China, and you will find this deity dripping with plasters, with scarcely an ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... to the telephone. "It's altogether too crooked (or too straight). Off with its head!" and, hey presto! the offending herb is not. Or, "That hill at C 39.d.7.4" is quite absurd; it's ridiculously lop-sided. I think we'll have a valley there instead." And lo! the absurd excrescence goes west ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... will dig his own grave and lay himself down in it, covering his body up to his neck with sand. There he will quietly, with Eastern philosophy, await his end. He knows that the four winds will bring drifting sand to the spot where his body lies; it will gather and gather, as it does against any excrescence, until his body is well covered. In the desert many are the ships that pass ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... waistcoat pocket. With the glasses on his nose he subjected his bonds to a critical examination. Each rounded steel band ran unbroken except for the smooth, almost jointless hinge and the small lock which sat perched on the back of the wrist in a little rounded excrescence like a steel wart. In the flat center of each lock was a small keyhole and alongside of it a notched nub, the nub being sunk in a minute depression. On the inner side, underneath, the cuffs slid into themselves—two notches on each showing where the jaws might ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... still look north, in the middle distance, jutting out into the sea, is a low black line of land, with one excrescence. This is Cape Royds, with Shackleton's old hut upon it; the excrescence is High Peak, and this line marks the first land upon the eastern side of McMurdo Sound which you can see, and indeed is actually the most eastern point of Ross Island. It disappears abruptly behind a high wall, ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... reduced everything to the common standard of conventional propriety; and the most exquisite refinement or sublimity produced an effect on his mind, only as they could be translated into the language of measured prose. To him an excess of beauty was a fault; for it appeared to him like an excrescence; and his imagination was dazzled by the blaze of light. His writings neither shone with the beams of native genius, nor reflected them. The shifting shapes of fancy, the rainbow hues of things, made ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... growing out at the nape of his neck, which his wife wants him to have cut off; but I think it rather an agreeable excrescence—like his poetry—redundant. Hone has hanged himself for debt. Godwin was taken up for picking pockets.... Beckey takes to bad courses. Her father was blown up in a steam machine. The coroner found it Insanity. I should not like him to ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... vouchsafed to Colonial governors causes him to place the administration buildings so far beyond the walls that the modern colony grouped around them remains entirely distinct from the old town, instead of growing out of it like an ugly excrescence. ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... and with hysterical sounds akin to what is vulgarly called blubbering, his fine new waistcoat sprinkled with his own blood, which flowed from his nose,—nose that seemed to Lenny Fairfield's feelings to be a nose no more, but a swollen, gigantic, mountainous Slawkenbergian excrescence; in fact, he felt all nose! Turning aghast from this spectacle, Mr. Stirn surveyed, with no more respect than Lenny had manifested, the stranger boy, who had again seated himself on the stocks (whether to recover his breath, or whether ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... very painful to be rudely awakened to distrust of those whom once we have too implicitly, too fondly believed. Lincoln has now become accustomed to Seward, as the hunchback is to his protuberance. What man who has an ugly excrescence on his face does not dread the surgeon's knife, although he knows that momentary pain will be followed by ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... himself in his second edition, except when they were confuted by subsequent annotators, or were too minute to merit preservation. I have sometimes adopted his restoration of a comma, without inserting the panegyrick in which he celebrated himself for his achievement. The exuberant excrescence of diction I have often lopped, his triumphant exultations over Pope and Rowe I have sometimes suppressed, and his contemptible ostentation I have frequently concealed; but I have in some places shewn him, as he would have shewn himself, for the reader's diversion, that the inflated ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... fallopian tubes convey the ova (eggs) from the ovaries to the cavity of the womb. They are two in number, one on each side, situated in the free border of the broad ligaments and extend from each horn, an excrescence of the womb that looks like a horn, of the womb outward to the sides of the pelvis; each is about five inches in length, and has a small canal beginning at the womb in a very small opening called the internal mouth (ostium internum). This ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... towns whose antiquity and picturesqueness are more popular than the attractions of Whitby, the railway deposits one in some distressingly ugly modern excrescence, from which it may even be necessary for a stranger to ask his way to the old-world features he has come to see. But at Whitby the railway, without doing any harm to the appearance of the town, at once gives a visitor as typical a scene of fishing-life as he will ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... honor human nature not the less because the writer knows how to manage it, to raise a smile at its absurdities, to rally, pique, and guide it into health and good-humor. He is very clever with the edge-tools in his surgeon's-case; he whips you out an excrescence before you are quite aware that he meditated an operation, and you find that he had chloroformed you with a shrewd writer's best anaesthetic, a humorous ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... that as he set foot on a car leaving a great city a young lady grabbed him by the coat-tail and cried: "Say, Mr. Asterisk, what are your views on a future life?" Not in the grand manner, all this; but, if you like, a sign of vitality and interest; a mere excrescence. But are not these excrescences symptoms of a fever lying within our modern civilisation, a febrility which is going to make achievement of great ends and great work more difficult? We Britons, as a breed, are admittedly stolid; we err as much on that score as Americans on the score ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... the ex's with the ports. An ex, as a preposition, belongs to a prolific family but not one of established and unimpeachable dignity. Hence the ex's, though they marry right and left, lead the other words to the altar and are never led thither themselves. Witness exclude, excommunicate, excrescence, excursion, exhale, exit, expel, expunge, expense, extirpate, extract; in no instance does ex fellow its connubial mate—it invariably precedes. The ports, on the other hand, are the peers of anybody. Some of them choose to remain single: port, porch, portal, portly, porter, portage. ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... their grandfather in the oriel room, so called because of the great oriel window, which was a small room in itself, although it looked, as you approached the castle, no bigger than a swallow's nest on the face of the solid masonry, being the only excrescence visible above the trees from that point of view. The castle stood on a hill which descended precipitously from under the oriel, so that the latter almost overhung the valley in which the city lay below, and commanded a magnificent view of the flat ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... dependent on the Assembly. The broad principle on which Sieyes acted was that the Commons were really the nation. The upper classes were not an essential part of it. They were not even a natural and normal growth, but an offending excrescence, a negative quantity, to be subtracted, not to be added up. That which ought not to exist ought not to be represented. The deputies of the Third Estate appeared for the whole. Alone they were sufficient to govern it, for alone they were ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... confining it to pious uses. But there is a school of literary historians who hold that there was no direct adoption of a form intentionally dramatic, and that the modern sacred drama—the only drama for centuries—was simply an expansion of or excrescence from the services of the Church herself, which in their antiphonal character, and in the alternation of monologue and chorus, were distinctly dramatic in form. This, however, is one of those numerous ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... sporting two to one, Jeeves, judging from what you have seen of him, that this chappie is not a blighter or an excrescence?" ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... upon her three hundred Gods, upon Erebus, chaos, and the three-faced Hecate. She sprinkles around the waters of Avernus, and adds certain herbs that had been cropped by moonlight with a sickle of brass. She brings with her the excrescence which is found upon the forehead of a new-cast foal, of the size of a dried fig, and which unless first eaten by the mare, the mother never admits her young to the nourishment of her milk. After these preparations, Dido, with ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... without branches, and generally about thirty or forty feet high; at the top are twelve leaves, ten feet long, and half a foot broad; above the leaves, grows a large excrescence in the form of a cabbage, excellent to eat, but taking it off kills the tree. The cocoa is a ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... been cobbled, I see, by some purblind ultra-crepidarian—McCready's friend, Walker, very likely; but nevertheless, I maintain 'tis a good play, and might have been rendered very effective by docking it of the whole fifth act, which is an excrescence,—re-creating Novall, and making Beaumelle a great deal more ghost-gaping and moonlightish. The cur-tailor has taken out the most purple piece in the whole web—the end of the fourth Act—and shouldered himself into ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... upon its pages of stone the mysterious tables of the law. If it were thus,—as there comes in all human society a moment when the sacred symbol is worn out and becomes obliterated under freedom of thought, when man escapes from the priest, when the excrescence of philosophies and systems devour the face of religion,—architecture could not reproduce this new state of human thought; its leaves, so crowded on the face, would be empty on the back; its work would be mutilated; its book would ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... the most plain and simple diet. Every animal but man keeps to one dish. Herbs are the food of this species, fish of that, and flesh of a third. Man falls upon every thing that comes in his way; not the smallest fruit or excrescence of the earth, scarce a berry, or a mushroom can ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... coat. Rather ragged, rather ancient are these coats, originally of very varied kinds. But the etiquette of the bush does not demand much in coats. So long as your shirt is clean and whole, your coat may be a little off colour, so to put it. People are not so particular about the coat. It is an excrescence, not an essential garment ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... party made its appearance in the politics of Coldriver, and Marvin Towne was announced as its candidate for the legislature. It seemed a spontaneous excrescence, but, nevertheless, it caused a visit from that great man and citizen, Lafe Siggins, as well as a call from Mr. Crane, of Crane & Keith. Both astute gentlemen viewed the situation, and their alarm subsided. Indeed, ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... beings, the most debased upon earth, who neither enjoy the blessings of freedom, nor are yet in the bonds of slavery, is a great national evil, which every friend of his country most deeply deplores. They constitute a large mass of human beings, who hang as a vile excrescence upon society—the objects of a low debasing envy to our slaves, and to ourselves of universal suspicion and distrust.' * * 'If this process were continued a second term of duplication, it would produce the extraordinary result of forty white men to one ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... Forehead (Vol. viii., p. 292.).—Your correspondent H. P. will find the love charm, consisting of a fig-shaped excrescence on a foal's forehead, and called Hippomanes, alluded to by Juvenal, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 208, October 22, 1853 • Various
... was always painted in a gibbous attitude—first quarter, you know—with his back turned to you, and his face just visible over his lawn sleeve," said Father Payne, "but that was in order to hide an excrescence on his left cheek. Do you remember what Lamb said of Barry Cornwall's wen on the nape of his neck? Some one said that Barry Cornwall was thinking of having it cut off. 'I hope he won't do that,' said Lamb, 'I rather like it—it's redundant, like his poetry!' I rather agree with Lamb. I like people ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... they sow, and joyn very curiously with thread made of cedar-roots, and divers other domestical utensils, as baskets, baggs, with this tree, whereof they have a blacker kind; and out of a certain excrescence from the bole, a fungus, which being boil'd, beaten, and dry'd in an oven, makes excellent spunck or touch-wood, and balls to play withal; and being reduc'd to powder, astringent, is an infallible remedy in the hoemerhoids. They ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... was a big two-story frame affair, built of California lumber, with a galvanized iron roof. So disproportionate was it to the slender ring of the atoll that it showed out upon the sand-strip and above it like some monstrous excrescence. They of the Malahini paid the courtesy visit ashore immediately after anchoring. Other captains and buyers were in the big room examining the pearls that were to be auctioned next day. Paumotan servants, natives of Hikihoho, and relatives of the owner, ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... of the gateway and in many other parts of the building might be seen the arms of the family; while the tall twisted stacks of chimneys, which appeared to spring from all parts of the roof, were carved and built in such curious and quaint devices that they were rather an ornament than an excrescence. When you entered the quadrangle, you found one side solely occupied by the old hall, the huge carved rafters of whose oak roof rested on corbels of the family supporters against the walls. These walls were of stone, ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... you, consists in a sense of proportion; a habit, abiding and prompt at command, of seeing all human, affairs in their just perspective, so that its happy possessor at once perceives anything odd or distorted or overblown to be an excrescence, a protuberance, a swelling, literally a humour: and the function of Thalia, the Comic Spirit, as you may read in Meredith's "Essay on Comedy," is just to prick these humours. I will but refer you to Meredith's "Essay," and here cite you ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... this grove there stood an oak, which, though shapely and tall on the whole, bulged out into a large excrescence about the middle of the stem. On this a pair of ravens had fixed their residence for such a series of years, that the oak was distinguished by the title of the Raven-tree. Many were the attempts of the neighbouring youths to get at ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... must die, paralyzed or withered. Motion, use, are the law of life, and the frog of the horse's hoof with a function as essential and well-defined as any portion of his body is subject to the general law. Without use it dries, hardens, and becomes a shelly excrescence upon a foot, benumbed by the percussion of heavy iron upon hard roads. This is a loss nature struggles in vain to repair, the horse begins to fail at once. The elastic step, which in a state of nature spurned the dull earth, becomes heavy and ...
— Rational Horse-Shoeing • John E. Russell
... of high religious profession, these blemishes have become conspicuous. The moon, when it eclipses the sun, appears as a blemish in the body of that luminary. So a public departure from publicly professed principles will always be noticed, because it will be an excrescence or blemish, too large and protuberant, to be ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume II (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... worse crime against his own race. The father of this girl had been guilty of a sin against society for which others—for which he, George Tryon—must pay the penalty. As slaves, negroes were tolerable. As freemen, they were an excrescence, an alien element incapable of absorption into the body politic of white men. He would like to send them all back to the Africa from which their forefathers had come,—unwillingly enough, he would admit,—and he would like especially to ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... drawn the bolt within, as I invariably did while bathing, and with a feeling of proud security I stood and surveyed the scene beneath and around me. The angle of vision did not, it is true, embrace objects immediately below me, owing to the projecting cornices of the flat roof (a mere excrescence from the original structure, as this was), but beyond this the eye swept ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... carrying water for short distances, or for storing it in camp, may be made of the bark of a tree, either taken off in an entire cylinder, and having a bottom fitted on, or else of a knot or excrescence that has been cut off the outside of a tree, and its woody interior scooped out; or of birth bark sewed or pegged at the corners, and having its seams coated with the gum or resin of the pine-tree. Baskets with oiled cloth inside, make efficient ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... over-excited, servile monkeys each imitating the other, and each corrupting the other to, through sophistication, end up in worry and boredom. Human culture, accordingly, is in itself bad, while the fruit it produces is merely excrescence or poison.—Of what use are the sciences? Uncertain and useless, they afford merely a pasture-ground ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... concluding by some observation upon "modest merit," and the power of gold over the sex. As a remembrance of his passion, he pointed out a heart carved on the bark of one of the trees; but which, in the process of time, had grown out into a large excrescence; and he showed me a lock of her hair, which he wore in a true lover's knot, ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... grand—quite out of our beat; and in parish work I am only an estimable excrescence. It is very well that I am not wanted, for Miss Headworth requires a good deal of attention, and it is only the old Adam that regrets the days of ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... replaced a portion of the prison wall, the outlines of a gibbet were descried; and from the cross-beam there hung three ropes, terminating in nooses, just perceptible above the upper edge of the curtain which extended thence to the ground. The grim excrescence seemed to possess a horrible fascination for the multitude. Those in position to see it best stirred not from their post, but faced the fatal cross-tree, the motionless ropes, the empty platform, with an untiring, ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... bought in an open and legal market; but according to the obligation of being not repugnant to the laws of England, I do not see how we can have any title to our slaves likely to be supported by the laws of England." In fact, the Colonial system is an excrescence upon the English Constitution, and is constantly at variance with it. There is not one English law, which gives a man a right to the liberty of any of his fellow creatures. Of course there cannot be, according to charters, ...
— Thoughts On The Necessity Of Improving The Condition Of The Slaves • Thomas Clarkson
... wellnigh inconceivable that the land of sage-brush and silence could, within walking distance of desolation, show such wealth of young timber, such shade and beauty. Her noiseless footfalls scarce startled a sage-hen that, realizing too late her presence, froze to the dead stump—a ruffled gray excrescence with glittering bead eyes that stared at her furtively, the one live thing ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... is highly complicated; it implies the livelihood of millions; and must be reformed, when it can be reformed at all, with prudence. This French business, on the other hand, is a nostrum and a mere excrescence. No native industry was to be encouraged: the poison is solemnly imported. No native habit was to be considered: the vice has been gratuitously introduced. And no creature profits, save the Government at Papeete—the not very enviable gentlemen ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Cricket has departed the shell remains distended, smooth, intact, of the purest white, with the circular lid hanging to the mouth of the door of exit. The egg of the bird breaks clumsily under the blows of a wart-like excrescence which is formed expressly upon the beak of the unborn bird; the egg of the Cricket, of a far superior structure, opens like an ivory casket. The pressure of the inmate's head is sufficient to ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... fond of whiskey; to the rest she after a few weeks became numb—no new or strange phenomenon in a world where people with a cancer or other hideous running sore or some gross and frightful deformity of fat or excrescence are seen laughing, joining freely and comfortably in the company of the unafflicted. In her affliction Susan at least saw only those affected like herself—and that helped not a little, helped the whiskey to confuse and distort ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... perhaps, as a sick man consciously incurable consults at last only his lawyer: that was what made him so different from every one else. Ralph had something of this same quality, this appearance of thinking that life was a matter of connoisseurship; but in Ralph it was an anomaly, a kind of humorous excrescence, whereas in Mr. Osmond it was the keynote, and everything was in harmony with it. She was certainly far from understanding him completely; his meaning was not at all times obvious. It was hard to see what he meant for instance by speaking ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... of drawing humorous characters; Miss Bates, Mr. Woodhouse, and Mrs. Elton in the first class, and Harriet Smith in the second. And the humour is always essential to the delineation of character—it is never an excrescence. It also depends more on what is said than on any tricks of speech; there are no catch-words, and every one speaks practically the same excellent English. Besides this, Emma also gives a very good instance of the author's habit of building ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... one in a pleasant country, getting to the top of one hill to see a prospect, and to the bottom of another to enjoy a shade, and what wonder if my course has been devious and desultory, and many of my excursions altogether unprofitable to the advance of my journey. The Dwarf Page is also an excrescence, and I plead guilty to all the censures concerning him. The truth is, he has a history, and it is this: The story of Gilpin Horner was told by an old gentleman to Lady Dalkeith, and she, much diverted with his ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... its best, a needless excrescence. There are those who consider it ornamental, and would regard a face deprived of its assistance with pity or derision; but it is doubtful whether our esteem is dictated so much by a sense of its absolute beauty as by the vitiating effect of a universally prevalent fashion. In the case of bicycle ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... agree with the view that criminals are executed because they are above the level of the average. For the most part they are the excrescence of society, just as perverted, though in a different manner, as are those criminal types whom you consider below the ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... moonbeam, that he must be black, with a white triangular spot on the forehead, the likeness of an eagle on his back, and on his side the crescent moon. There must be two kinds of hair on his tail, and on his tongue an excrescence in the form of the sacred ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and maddened. Never had she felt so strongly the unworthiness of the existence to which she was condemned. That contemptible review, and now her father's ignoble passion—such things were enough to make all literature appear a morbid excrescence upon human life. ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... we need not blame Gerard when he boldly said that "this excrescence hath not any roote, neither doth encrease himselfe of his seed, as some have supposed, but it rather commethe of a certaine moisture gathered together upon the boughes and joints of the trees, through the barke whereof ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... sir; must have annoyed you dreadful!" remarked the commiserating barber, as he passed the preparatory scissors round his customer's jaw, mowing the great golden sheaf at one sweep. He spoke of it as though it were a cancer or other painful excrescence, the removal of which would be to the sufferer a ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... considered as something like an excrescence on the face of nature. It runs imperceptibly into the fantastical and grotesque. Fairies and satyrs are picturesque; but they are scarcely ideal. They are an extreme and unique conception of a certain thing, but not of what the mind delights in or ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... go then—a big one," cried the lad, as with a rushing, heavy beating sound of its wings, a great bird flow directly over their heads, uttering a hoarse cry, and with its huge curved bill bearing a curious, nearly square, excrescence on the top, plainly seen ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... spur, whose base ran to within two or three hundred yards of our resting-place. In appearance it roughly resembled a mighty Napoleonic nose. The butts ran right up the ridge of that organ; and nine hundred feet above where we sat, just below an excrescence locally known as "The Pimple," ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... round the base of Blackman's Hanger, as fast as her clever mare could carry her with any degree of comfort to either. The clever mare was somewhat skittish from want of work, and inclined to show her cleverness by shying at every stray rabbit, or crocodile-shaped excrescence in the way of fallen timber, lying within her range of vision; but Ida was too anxious to be disconcerted by any such small surprises, and rode on without drawing rein to the banks of the trout-stream which wound its silvery way through the valley on the other side of Blackman's ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... house, the absence of barn or stable or garden, or any token of thrift or energy, marked the man as an excrescence in this theatre of hope and fruitful toil. It all belonged to some degenerate land, some exhausted civilisation, not to this field of vigour where life rang ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker |
