"Focus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... latitude of speech on the part of the acting personages to prevent monotony and to render intellectual scintillations of the compiler comparatively unnecessary. Occasionally, for the sake of sharper focus on the portrait of some leader, Dio will introduce this or that trivial incident and may perhaps feel called upon immediately, under the strictness of his self-imposed regime, ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... deck, with no other object in view than that of giving vent to my excited feelings. Then I went below for the telescope, and spent nearly ten minutes of the utmost impatience in vainly trying to get a focus, and in rubbing the skin nearly off my eyes, before I discovered that having taken off the large glass to examine the phosphoric water with I had omitted to put ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... latter part, the "Royal Society for the improvement of Natural Knowledge" had already become famous, and had acquired a claim upon the veneration of Englishmen, which it has ever since retained, as the principal focus of scientific activity in our islands, and the chief champion of the cause ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... above said, that all great European art is rooted in the thirteenth century; and it seems to me that there is a kind of central year about which we may consider the energy of the middle ages to be gathered; a kind of focus of time which, by what is to my mind a most touching and impressive Divine appointment, has been marked for us by the greatest writer of the middle ages, in the first words he utters; namely, the year 1300, the "mezzo del cammin" of the life ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... First, hypermetropia, or morbidly long sight: in this affection, the organ, instead of being spherical, is too flat from front to back, and is often altogether too small, so that the retina is brought too forward for the focus of the humours; consequently a convex glass is required for clear vision of near objects, and frequently even of distant ones. This state occurs congenitally, or at a very early age, often in several children of the same family, where one of the parents has presented ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... suspense. It was to be the grand realization of my hopes, the utter, the inevitable defeat of the minions of pride, prejudice, caste. Nor would such consummation of hopes affect me only, or those around me. Nay, even I was but the point of "primitive disturbance," whence emanates as if from a focus, from a new origin, prayer, friendly and inimical, to be focused again into realization on one side and discomfiture on the other. My friends, my enemies, centre their hopes on me. I treat them, one with earnest endeavor ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... sir, I was going to," retorted the lieutenant irritably; "but the idiot who uses this glass ought to be turned out of the service for being short-sighted. I shall never get it to the right focus." ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... 10% annually over the past six years. This growth has led to an overheated situation characterized by a tight labor market, strong inflationary pressures, and a rapidly rising current account deficit. Policymakers have stated they will focus attention on slowing inflation. In any event, the economy will remain the envy of the great majority of the world's peoples. GNP: purchasing power equivalent - $273 billion, per capita $6,300; real growth rate 8.7% (1991 est.) Inflation rate (consumer prices): 9.7% (1991) Unemployment rate: ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... statute book has seldom been so barren. Its principal acts were to narrow the county electorate to an oligarchy, to restrict the choice of constituencies to resident knights and burgesses, and to impair its own influence as a focus of public opinion. It was not content with legislative authority; it interfered with an executive which it could hamper but could not control. It was possessed by the inveterate fallacy that freedom and strong government are things incompatible; that the executive is the natural enemy of the Legislature; ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... which Altamont felt himself to be the focus of attention; not obtrusively, but, nonetheless, insistently. However, this was Loudon's field and Altamont preferred not ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... of the rebellion? No, he does not even pretend to do so. "But," says he, "in my travels I was obliged to avoid Fyzabad, upon account of the suspected rebellion there." Another chief-justice would have gone fifty miles about to avoid Lucknow, for everybody knows that Lucknow was the focus and centre of extortion, corruption, and peculation, and that a worse air for the lungs of a chief-justice could not be found in the world. If his lungs wanted the benefit of pure air, he would even have put himself in the focus of a rebellion, to have kept at a distance ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... city and the face slid out of focus; the vision faded like a darkened magic-lantern, and the grayness moved ...
— The Street That Wasn't There • Clifford Donald Simak
... exception of perhaps 6000, who attacked General Moore (ten and a half years later, the Moore of Corunna) when marching on the 26th towards Wexford, had been concentrated; and to this point, therefore, as a focus, had the royal army, 13,000 strong, with a respectable artillery, under the supreme command of General Lake, converged in four separate divisions, about the 19th and 20th of June. The great blow was to be struck on the 21st; and the plan was, that the royal forces, moving to the assault of ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... from Barcelona toward the celebrated mountain of Montserrat, whose hermitages, piled up one above another en amphitheatre, excite the traveller's wonder. Close in its vicinity lay the city of Manresa, the focus of the Catalonian insurrection. The German troops advanced in close column, although surrounded by infuriated multitudes, by whom every straggler was mercilessly butchered. The two regiments, nevertheless, succeeded in making themselves masters of Manresa, where they ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... space. We wish to describe a few of these intricate instruments, and mention several far-reaching discoveries made by their use; beginning with mechanism for the manipulation of light. Optics is based on the accidental discovery that a piece of glass of certain shape will draw light to a focus, forming an image of any object at that point. The next step was in learning that this image can be viewed with a microscope, and magnified; thus came the telescope revealing unheard of suns and galaxies. The first telescopes ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... duty to admire the world's standard, official heroes. But it is wrong to revere them to the exclusion of folk less showy but perhaps no less essential. It is almost as wrong as it would be for the judges at the horse-show to put the dog-cart before the horse and then focus their admiring glances so exclusively upon the vehicle that they forgot the very existence of its ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... outcries of Celich, Heerbrand, and Dieterich, he pondered over the problem in his little Saxon parsonage, until in 1681 he set forth his proofs that comets are heavenly bodies moving in parabolas of which the sun is the focus. Bernouilli arrived at the same conclusion; and, finally, this great series of men and works was closed by the greatest of all, when Newton, in 1686, having taken the data furnished by the comet of 1680, demonstrated that comets are guided in their movements ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... question more and more difficult. The old markets, some of the types of which still exist in various parts of Paris, were built of masonry and wood. They were massive structures into which the air and light penetrated with difficulty, and which consequently formed a dangerous focus of infection for those who occupied them, and for the inhabitants of the neighboring houses. So the introduction of iron into the construction of markets will bring about a genuine revolution whose influence ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... but it stands in the calm, unchanging strength that yonder mountain would maintain, were it surrounded by children shooting against it with arrows. Believe me, I do not fear for the Bible. If all the light of human knowledge were turned upon it in one burning focus, its intrinsic truth would only be revealed more clearly; and if superstition, as in the past, or infidelity, as was the case in France, creates temporary darkness, the moment that, in the light of returning reason, ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... was in 1680 that Newton discovered how to calculate the orbit of a body moving under a central force, and showed that if the force varied as the inverse square of the distance, the orbit would be an ellipse with the centre of force in one focus. The great discovery, which made the writing of his "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica" possible, was that the attraction between two spheres is the same as it would be if we supposed each sphere condensed to a point at its centre. ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... he fixes his attention on the eyes and the voice. He couldn't give me any very clear description of what he found in the eyes. I couldn't quite make out, anyhow, what he meant, unless it was a sort of meaninglessness, a want of what you might call intellectual focus. ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... laying his hand upon his heart and trying desperately to focus her with an eye that would waver in spite of him, "Sally Ruth, somebody's got to do something for you, and it might as well be me. My God, Sally Ruth, you're settin' like clabber! It's a shame; it's a cryin' shame, for you're a fine woman. I don't mean to scare or flutter you, Sally ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... way there was bred in Taunton a fiercer and more soldierly spirit than is usual in an English country town, and this flame was fanned by the unwearied ministerings of a chosen band of Nonconformist clergymen, amongst whom Joseph Alleine was the most conspicuous. No better focus for a revolt could have been chosen, for no city valued so highly those liberties and that creed which ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... trace in matters really and directly practical. Throughout the whole seventh century the annual public elections to the civil magistracies, especially to the consulship and censorship, formed the real standing question of the day and the focus of political agitation; but it was only in isolated and rare instances that the different candidates represented opposite political principles; ordinarily the question related purely to persons, and it was for the course of affairs a matter of indifference ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... stopped, gazed hard, rubbed his eyes, gazed again, and then said to Jose, "Jose, your eyes are better than mine: what is that in the village?" Jose's eyes were already starting from his head, as if to get a better focus on what he saw. "Padre," he said, almost in a whisper, "I think it is the yellow thing that Pio stole. The sergeant made it open when we went for the package, and it was like that." "Holy Saints!" cried the Father; "it looks like that to me, too, but it cannot be. How could my umbrella get to ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase
... but he is indifferent to accuracy in his sketches of the persons who came into contact, and often into collision, with Gordon. In this he resembles those French painters, such as Bastien Lepage, who focus their eye on one portion of their canvas, and work that up to a high perfection, while leaving the rest of the picture misty and vague. Even in that case the subordinate figures, if subdued in fogginess, should not be falsely drawn, but Mr. Strachey, intent upon the violent portrait ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... was carried by 236 votes to 24.[616] The Social-Democratic Federation resolved: "That this Conference declares that the time has arrived when equal rights of citizenship be extended to all women and men of full age; urges all members to take advantage of the present suffrage agitation to focus public opinion upon the only logical solution of the question, viz. the abolition of existing franchise qualifications and the establishment of universal adult suffrage; and calls upon them actively to work for this practical measure of reform." This resolution was carried by ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... time—the only thing, that is, that I wanted to do. It seemed like I couldn't get away fast enough." It was brazen of him, she thought, to treat it all so coolly. "And out here," he added thoughtfully, "I could get the proper focus on Myrt—which ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... Princeton University Library, while helpful in tracing the Urban League's contribution to the Navy's integration policy, lack the focus and comprehensiveness of the Forrestal Papers in the National Archives' Office of the Secretary of the Navy file. Another collection of particular interest for the naval aspects of the story is the Dennis ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... think the importance of the idea is, that once stated on paper, there is no difficulty in keeping it up. That it presents an odd, unsubstantial, whimsical, new thing: a sort of previously unthought-of Power going about. That it will concentrate into one focus all that is done in the paper. That it sets up a creature which isn't the Spectator, and isn't Isaac Bickerstaff, and isn't anything of that kind: but in which people will be perfectly willing to believe, and which is just mysterious and quaint enough to have a sort of charm for their ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... hundred and seventy-one pictures of different phases of range life, not counting as many that were over-exposed or under-exposed or out of focus. He had six unfinished stories, in each of which the heroine had big, blue-gray eyes and crimply hair, and the title and bare skeleton of a seventh, in which the same sort of eyes and hair would probably develop later. He had proposed to Mona three ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... wish to be inspired about. Let us say I am writing about the humble heroisms; for ten minutes before I go into the trance I think of nothing but orphans supporting their little brothers and sisters, of dull work well and patiently done, and I focus my mind on such great philosophical truths as the purification and uplifting of the soul by suffering, and the alchemical transformation of leaden evil into golden good." (Denis again hung up his little festoon of quotation marks.) "Then I pop off. Two or ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... all my heart. But it's coming to a focus soon, Hannah. Be patient and it may end better than ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... have told me the same thing. There the army begins to pour into the funnel, so to speak, that leads to France and the front. There all sorts of lines are brought together, all sorts of scattered activities come to a focus. There is ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... rock began to shake in an alarming way. Only it must not be forgotten that the significance of Jerusalem to Isaiah did not arise from the temple of Solomon, but from the fact that it was the city of David and the focus of his kingdom, the central point, not of the cultus, but of the sovereignty of Jehovah over His people. The holy mount was to him the entire city as a political unity, with its citizens, councillors, and judges (xi.9); his faith in the sure foundation on which Zion rested was nothing ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... gallery two quietly dressed young, women, one of them with her arm in a sling, leaned forward breathlessly and waited Laska's eyes glowed with deep fire. She was living her hour of hours, and the man who stood with such quiet courage the focus of that roar of rage ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... the compass, say, of this room; but the problem has baffled me. The invisible rays which this machine sends out, and which will penetrate stone, iron, wood, or any other substance, must unite at a focus, and I have not been able to bring that focus nearer me than something over half a mile. Last summer I went to an uninhabited part of Switzerland and there continued my experiments. I blew up at will rocks and boulders ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... in its ranks, and the white devotees of the game outnumber the colored five to one. Among the patrons of the policy-shops which, despite police raids and surveillance, still flourish in the district, of which the Post Office may be considered the focus, may be seen lawyers, journalists, advertising agents, book-keepers, mechanics, liquor-dealers, bar-tenders, peddlers, insurance agents, etc. Gamblers, as a class, are very superstitious, and the white policy-player is hardly less so than his colored brother. ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... We want to make the sun's rays converge to a common focus, and ice will do as much good ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... types: refractors and reflectors. A refracting telescope consists of an object-glass composed of two or more lenses, mounted at the upper end of a tube, which is pointed at the celestial object. The light, after passing through the lenses, is brought to a focus at the lower end of the tube, where the image is examined visually with an eyepiece, or photographed upon a sensitive plate. The largest instruments of this type are the 36-inch Lick telescope and the 40-inch ...
— The New Heavens • George Ellery Hale
... lines of their written words; it is a History; not alone of the American Negro on the "tented field"; the bloody trenches of France and Belgium, it is also a History and an arraignment, a warning and a prophecy, looking backwards and forward, the Negro being the objective focus, ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... diplomatists that the proceedings of the Poles was a violation of the treaty of Vienna, and that it was necessary to the integrity and peace of the Austrian empire that Cracow should be no longer a focus of rebellion. The Western governments satisfied themselves with protests, and the last green spot of Polish independence had its life stamped out by the foot ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... rational one. Let us suppose this exclamation: "It is admirable!" Some say it starting from the shoulder, others from the chest, others from the abdominal focus. These are three very distinct modes. There is more intelligence when the movement is from the thoracic centre. This concerns the honor, ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... a good-natured way of showing her interest in anything that her husband might happen to be talking about. But when he answered, "Anthony March," she came into focus directly. ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... picturesquely set forth in Emerson's "Journal." The War had unrolled a map of the Union, he said, and hung it in every man's house. There was a universal shifting of attention, if not always from the province or section to the image of the nation itself, at least a shift of focus from one section to another. The clash of arms had meant many other things besides the triumph of Union and the freedom of the slaves. It had brought men from every state into rude jostling contact with one another and had developed a new social and human curiosity. It may serve as another illustration ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... down from the galleries of the House of Representatives. The immense area below is supplied with two hundred and fifty-three seats, with desks arranged in semi-circular rows, having a point in front of the Speaker's desk as a focus. On the right of the spectator, as he looks from the gallery in front of the Speaker, is the Republican side of the House. But this prosperous organization has grown so rapidly since its birth, ten years ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... locality, and paid from local funds. None of these can be said to be matters of local, as distinguished from national importance. It would not be a matter personally indifferent to the rest of the country if any part of it became a nest of robbers or a focus of demoralization, owing to the maladministration of its police; or if, through the bad regulations of its jail, the punishment which the courts of justice intended to inflict on the criminals confined therein (who might have come from, or committed their offenses in, any other district) might ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... been the scholarly activity displayed and the fertility resulting, that it seems both desirable and timely to focus, as it were, the array of facts connected with the religions of the ancient world in such a manner that the summary resulting may serve as the point of departure for ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... with the greatest refinement of design and execution, and the aid of sculpture, both in relief and in the round, was invoked to give splendor and significance to the monument. The statue of the deity was the focus of internal interest, while externally, groups of statues representing the Olympian deities or the mythical exploits of gods, demigods, and heroes, adorned the gables. Relief carvings in the friezes and metopes commemorated the favorite national myths. ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... come to see the duel: and how strange is the fact, that as much as human nature is prone to shudder at death under the gentlest circumstances, yet men will congregate to be its witnesses when violence aggravates the calamity! A public execution or a duel is a focus where burning curiosity concentrates; in the latter case, Ireland bears the palm for a crowd; in the former, the annals of the Old Bailey can amply testify. Ireland has its own interest, too, in a place of execution, but not in the same degree as England. They have been too used to hanging in ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... people from their homes, submerges farmlands, and squanders economic resources. Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC) - represents the 145,000 Inuits of Russia, Alaska, Canada, and Greenland in international environmental issues; a General Assembly convenes every three years to determine the focus of the ICC; the most current concerns are long-range transport of pollutants, sustainable development, and climate change. metallurgical plants - industries which specialize in the science, technology, and processing of metals; ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... sunlight as it falls in a flood through the window upon our desk. This diffuse sunlight will brighten the desk top and slightly increase its temperature, but no striking effects are seen. But now take this same amount of sun energy and, passing it through a lens, focus it on a small spot on the desk top—and the wood bursts almost at once into flame. What diffuse energy coming from the sun could never do, concentrated energy easily and quickly accomplished. Attention is to the mind's energy what the lens is to the sun's energy. It gathers the mental power into ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts
... business, or goes to sleep while this unseen judge weighs and balances, collects related facts, looks first at one side of the question and then at the other, and finally sends up into consciousness a decision full of conviction, a decision that has been formulated so far from the focus of attention that it seems to be something ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... as the six yoked mules dragged the carcass of the bull away. She was placidly putting up her book, the unmoved focus of a hundred eager and curious eyes. She smiled slightly as she saw me. "I was just telling Mr. Briggs what an extraordinary creature it was, and how you knew him. He must have had great experience to do that sort of thing so cleverly and safely. ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... being connected with some more central body of water. Having however gained a position so much higher to the north, and almost on the same meridian, and having crossed so remarkable a feature as the Stony Desert (which, as I suppose, was once the focus of a mighty current, to judge from its direction passing to the westward), I no longer encouraged hopes which, if realized, would have been of great advantage to me, or regretted the circumstances by which I was prevented from more fully examining the north-east and ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... speck moving on a distant spur of the mountain? The atmosphere was deceptive, but surely it was some animal approaching in his direction. He had up till then forgotten his binoculars, but he was now wide awake and, looking first to his rifle, he got out his glasses and twisted them into focus upon the moving object in the distance. A startled exclamation rose to his lips as the field-glasses covered the moving spot; it was a man. Yes running, stumbling, crouching and at times almost crawling the object which he saw was ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... nation's focus for a morning, adjusting it one way or the other. A President can set the focus for four years. But only a book can set the focus for a nation's next hundred years so that it can act intelligently and steadfastly on its main line from week to week ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... hatchets, had been despatched to the various Indian tribes of the region, and wherever these emblems of butchery had been accepted the savage hordes were gathering, and around their bale-fires in the midnight pantomimes of murder were concentrating their excitable natures into a burning focus which would light their path to ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... cost and sacrifice for the accommodation of all travelers. Each one of you who reaches the lower end of this valley should take the Mountain Trolley and spend a season at those schools. They occupy some of the grandest buildings in the world. Focus your glasses and behold ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... and Bernhardi. Bourdon (67) thinks Germany is jealous of the culture and the glory and the political and literary prestige of France. Collier (68) says that Germany is forever looking into a mirror rather than out the open window and even sees herself a little out of focus. The seriousness of the Germans, others think, is an indication that ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... is the product of all fine tendencies, is likewise their centre or focus out of which they start again, with some chance of fulfilment;—and we may judge in how many directions Friedrich was willing to expand himself, by the multifarious kinds he was inviting, and negotiating for. Academicians,—and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... vision can build eternal realities. "Are we to beg and cringe and hang on the outer edge of life,—we who should walk grandly? Is it for man to tremble and quake—man who in his spiritual capacity becomes the interpreter of God's message,—the focus ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... back, reluctant, frogless. He entered upon an exhaustive account of the use of frogs for bait, and as he talked he constantly flung stones. Di grew restless. There was, she had found, a certain amount of this to be gone through before Bobby would focus on the personal. At length she was obliged to say, "Like me to-day?" And then he entered upon personal talk with the same zest with which he had ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... completes the evolution of Lincoln as a political thinker. It is his third, his last great landmark. The Peoria speech, which drew to a focus all the implications of his early life, laid the basis of his political significance; the Cooper Union speech, summing up his conflict with Douglas, applied his thinking to the new issue precipitated by John Brown; but in both these he was still predominantly a negative thinker, ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... to focus the attention of the would-be guides upon certain important essentials, the ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... mop was the only bad article on board, and I left it out loose in perfect confidence. Often and often it had evidently been turned over, but on examination it was found supremely bad, worse than the thief's own mop, and not worth stealing. At last, however, and in Cowes, too, the focus of yachting, if not of honesty, my mop was stolen. The man who took it is to be pitied, for, clearly, before he coveted a bad mop, he must have been ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... latter having a deeper swish, deeper and longer drawn-out. Their voices were so high and shrill that the singing of the jungle crickets seemed almost contralto in comparison. Finally, I began to feel myself the focus of one or more of these winged weasels. The swishes became more frequent, the returnings almost doubling on their track. Now and then a small body touched the sheet for an instant, and then, with a soft little tap, a ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... Blood alone and very far gone in drink—a condition in which no man ever before remembered to have seen him. As Wolverstone came in, the Captain raised bloodshot eyes to consider him. A moment they sharpened in their gaze as he brought his visitor into focus. Then he laughed, a loose, idiot laugh, that yet ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... in antiquities without being already trained archaeologists. It is the outcome of a recommendation made by the Archaeological Joint Committee, a body recently established, on the initiative of the British Academy and at the request of the Foreign Office, to focus the knowledge and experience of British scholars and archaeologists and to place it at the disposal of the Government when advice or information is needed upon matters connected with archaeological science. The Committee is composed of representatives of the principal ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... is able, when relaxed, to focus light accurately from objects which are twenty feet or more away and to accommodate itself to objects as near as five inches. An eye is said to be myopic, or short-sighted, when it is unable to focus ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... House. Don't remember what the subject was, but never forget CALDWELL's seething indignation, his righteous anger, his withering wrath. ROBERTSON smiled in affected disregard; but very soon after he found it convenient to withdraw from the focus of CALDWELL's eye, and take refuge on the Scotch Bench. As for CALDWELL, he withdrew his support from Ministers, tore up his ticket of membership as a Unionist, and returned to the Gladstonian fold. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 14, 1892 • Various
... labor force by replacing foreign expatriate workers with local workers. Oman actively seeks private foreign investors, especially in the industrial, information technology, tourism, and higher education fields. Industrial development plans focus on gas resources, metal manufacturing, petrochemicals, and ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... secondary importance and the mind as everything. Now I am firmly convinced that the mind of man, so far from being a thing apart from the objects that form its environment, is, in fact, nothing else but a mirror or focus upon which objects register their impressions and that all the thinking in the world is done not really by the mind but by the objects that form our thoughts and the reasons, utterly divorced from what we call human reason, that connect together the ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... little wonder that the Browning Palace was for so many years a focus for all who revered and loved the wedded poets, Robert and ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... the capital city a carpenter named Focus. He was a diligent workman, laboring at his trade from early morning till late at night. One year, when the prince's birthday came round, he continued ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... their audiences. Such questions of chance influence of trifles upon the greater events of life is a constant theme of speculation among the pragmatics; no petty detail is overlooked in the possibility of its portentous consequences. Walter Shandy's hyperbolic philosophy turned about such a focus, the exaltation of insignificant trifles into mainsprings of action. Shandy bristles ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... to judge distance is due principally to our possessing two eyes situated in slightly different positions, from which we get two views of objects, and also to the power possessed by the eyes of focussing at different distances, others being out of focus for the time being. In a picture the eyes can only focus at one distance (the distance the eye is from the plane of the picture when you are looking at it), and this is one of the chief causes of the perennial difficulty in painting backgrounds. In nature they are ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... was of the last opinion. I read on. She was in a difficulty; but she did not say what the difficulty was. For one unworthy moment the thought of money entered my mind, to be ejected the next, as the Catherine of old came more and more into the mental focus. Pride was the last thing in which I had found her wanting, and her letter indicated no change in ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... reaching from your finger-tips, from your ears, your eyes, and every portion of your body come to a focus in your brain and carry information to it about the things you taste, see, hear, feel, and smell, so the wires of a telephone system come together at the central station. And as it is necessary for your right hand to communicate with your left through your brain, so it is ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday
... persons, almost out of focus and talking very interestedly together at one side. They are down in front at one side and their figures are larger than—-why, Billy, they ...
— The Hilltop Boys on the River • Cyril Burleigh
... Their course has been filled up between the wharf of the water-works and the end of the canal in St. James's-Park; and the Isle of St. Peter's is no longer to be traced. It is singular that such a marsh should have become the focus of the government, jurisprudence, and power, of this great empire! Yet, so it is, the offices of Government, the Houses of Parliament, and the Supreme Courts of Law, stand on the lowest ground in or near the metropolis; the greater part of which is still the swamp ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... principle, that some part of the Polish nation should retain an independent and separate existence. For this reason, therefore, I consider the existence of Cracow as a state, having been thus secured by general treaty—whatever the complaints the three Powers had made that Cracow was the focus of disturbances; that revolutionary intrigues there found a centre and a means of organization; that there arose from that small state insurrection against the three surrounding Powers; that it was impossible to preserve those Powers from this insurrection: that if these ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... the religious experience, that felt communion with a Person which is the clou of the devotional life, we get as it were the link between the extreme apprehensions of transcendence and of immanence, and their expression in the lives of contemplation and of action; and also a focus for that religious-emotion which is the most powerful stimulus to spiritual growth. It is needless to emphasize the splendid use which Christianity has made of this type of experience; nor unfortunately, the exaggerations to which it has led. ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... and autocrat[o]r). From this time there were two Bulgarias—eastern and western. The eastern half was now little more than a Byzantine province, and the western became the centre of national life and the focus of national aspirations. ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... And bade them loose his chain. The boar from that day forward Still followed in her train; Nor ever to the wildwood Attempted to return, But in the focus of Desire ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... Madame as a person to be recognized. Buckingham regarded her as a coquette deserving the cruelest tortures, and De Guiche looked upon her as a divinity; the courtiers as a star whose light might some day become the focus of all favor and power. And yet Louis XIV., a few years previously, had not even condescended to offer his hand to that "ugly girl" for a ballet; and Buckingham had worshipped this coquette "on both knees." De Guiche had once looked upon this divinity ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... to power if it had not been that the Greek nation and its emperors were paralysed by political and moral corruption. Justice was dormant in the state, Christianity was torpid in the Church, orthodoxy performed the duties of civil liberty, and the priest became the focus of political opposition. By the middle of the fourteenth century the Othoman Turks had raided Thrace, Macedonia, the islands of the Aegean, plundered the large town of Greece, and advanced to the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... the two had entered one observer's mind, who also notes that the young Prince, greatly interested by all he saw of free England and its rulers, was above all taken with the "perfect domestic happiness which he found pervading the heart, and core, and focus of the greatest empire in the world." Four years later the Prince was again visiting England, a guest of the royal family in its Scottish retreat of Balmoral, where they had just been celebrating with beacon fires and Highland mirth and music the glad news of the fall of Sebastopol. He ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... other in the land. It is an aggregation from all the other portions of the country; it is the result, the precipitate, of the whole. It has no distinctive, individual character of its own; it is a condensation of all the rest, a focus. Thither all the country goes at times. Restless, fitful, changing, yet still the same in its change; like the waves of the sea, that toss and roll and move away, and still the mighty mass is ever there. New York, in its various phases and developments, its crowded and cosmopolitan ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... Philip II had ever thought or planned was thus concentrated as it were into one focus. The moment was come when he could subdue England, become master of the European world, and re-establish the Catholic faith in the form in which he professed it. When the fleet (on the 22nd July 1588) sailed out of Corunna, and the long-meditated, ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... In this focus of decaying vegetation, nothing is so much to be dreaded as inactivity. We had, therefore, to find what exercise and amusement we could, when hunting was not required, in peering about in the fetid swamps; to have gone mooning about, in listless idleness, would have ensured fever in its worst ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... piety, good-nature, and good-humor of the people of England, from the dreadful pestilence which, beginning in France, threatens to lay waste the whole moral and in a great degree the whole physical world, having done both in the focus of its ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... knees, at the window, and prayed for strength, wisdom, and courage. She could realise absolutely nothing. She had thought so much and so continuously, that all mental vision was out of focus and had become a blur. Even his dear face had faded and was hidden from her when she frantically strove to recall it to her mental view. Only the actual fact remained clear, that in a few short minutes she would be taken to the room where ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... beings. Sometimes I felt myself touched, but not by them; invisible hands touched me. Once I felt the clutch as of cold soft fingers at my throat. I was still equally conscious that if I gave way to fear I should be in bodily peril; and I concentrated all my faculties in the single focus of resisting, stubborn will. And I turned my sight from the Shadow—above all, from those strange serpent eyes—eyes that had now become distinctly visible. For there, though in nought else round me, I was aware that there was a WILL, and a will of intense, creative, ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... by the Lares and Penates consecrated by Adrian. Now and then for purposes of airing and dusting, she entered the awful room—neither servants nor friends were allowed to cross the threshold; but otherwise it was always locked and the key lay in her jewel case. Adrian was the focus of her being. She put heavy tasks on Jaffery. There was to be a fitting monument on Adrian's grave, over which she kept him busy. In her blind perversity she counted on his cooeperation. It was he who carried ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... be a burning-glass That diligence to worship may succeed, That I may catch God's glories as they pass, And focus to ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... by Christian, Jewish, and heathen writers, that the Temple of Jerusalem was never built again, for as the foundation was about to be laid, fire broke out of the ground accompanied by an earthquake. The same earthquake also destroyed Delphi, "the centre of the earth," and the focus of the religious and ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... knowing why or wherefore, she was vaguely conscious that in some way she was different from what she was before she came to Carver House, and she also knew that things would never be just as they were before. Somehow or other the focus had changed, a corner had ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... not mad, most noble Festus! but in sober sadness I have suffered this day more bodily pain than I had before a conception of. My right cheek has certainly been placed with admirable exactness under the focus of some invisible burning-glass, which concentrated all the rays of a Tartarean sun. My medical attendant decides it to be altogether nervous, and that it originates either in severe ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... previous, when he had been working on a number of valuable inventions, unscrupulous men had tried to steal his ideas and models. To prevent this Tom had arranged a system of burglar alarms, and had also fitted up a wizard camera that would take moving pictures of anyone coming within its focus. The camera could be set to work at night, in connection with ...
— Tom Swift and his Photo Telephone • Victor Appleton
... the kissing made it almost an insult to the Janseniuses to identify with Henrietta the person he had seen. Jane suggested dragging the canal, but was silenced by an indignant "sh-sh-sh," accompanied by apprehensive and sympathetic glances at the bereaved parents. She was displaced from the focus of attention by the appearance of the two policemen who had been sent to the chalet. Smilash was between them, apparently a prisoner. At a distance, he seemed to have suffered some frightful injury to his head, but when he was brought into the midst of the company it appeared that ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... warmer winter climate, and the ruby-crown's chief distinguishing characteristics are told. These rather confusing relatives would be less puzzling if it were the habit of either to keep quiet long enough to focus the opera-glasses on their crowns, which it only rarely is while some particularly promising haunt of insects that lurk beneath the rough bark of the evergreens has to be thoroughly explored. At all other times ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... stood at the door and flashed on his electric torch long enough for the photographer to get the focus. Although it was less than five seconds that he stood with his back only a foot from the door from which Cummings and Gibson were to emerge, John's imagination created a terrible fear that they would come upon him in the helpless ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... as the lagoon: so that I was irresistibly reminded of what I had read of nebular convulsions. A thin cloud overspread the area of the reef and the adjacent sea—the dust, as I could not but fancy, of earlier explosions. And, a little apart, there was yet another focus of centrifugal and centripetal flight, where, hard by the deafening line of breakers, her sails (all but the tattered topsail) snugly furled down, and the red rag that marks Old England on the seas beating, union down, at the main—the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the officer commanding, so that practically nobody was hurt on either side. One force or the other would surrender after being caught in an impossible situation. Not any more. These days, they want blood. Plenty of blood. And they want the Telly cameras to focus right into ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... moment. I have succeeded. Tomorrow I shall bring to you the fact and the substance. I have lifted up the curtain and flooded it with the light of day. You shall have the fact for your senses. Tomorrow I shall explain it all. I shall deliver my greatest lecture; in which my whole Me has come to a focus. It is not spiritualism nor sophistry. It is concrete fact and common sense. The subject of my lecture tomorrow will ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... viewed, minute transparent specks, scarcely bigger than a pin's point. When the picture is backed with black lacquer, you have consequently small black spots, which deform the positive, especially when viewed through a lens of short focus. A friend of mine {452} cures this defect very easily. After having applied the amber varnish, he stops out the spots with a little oil-paint that matches the lights of the picture; of course the paint is put upon the varnished side of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... voice recalled her to the game, and she made an effort to focus her attention on the cards. But it was quite useless. Her play grew wilder and more erratic with each hand that was dealt, until at last a good no-trump call, completely thrown away by her disastrous tactics, brought the rubber to ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... before a clearance is made, for the oxyhydrogen charge has such terrible force that it completely pulverizes the rock, scooping out, even in granite, a deep wide pit of parabolic section of which the spot where the charge was is the focus. The dust is blown out in a cloud ...
— The Dominion in 1983 • Ralph Centennius
... Polaris," reported the traffic officer, his face in focus on the teleceiver screen. "Your orbit has been cleared for blast-off. Orbit number 3847—repeat, 3847—raise ...
— On the Trail of the Space Pirates • Carey Rockwell
... cameras was invented. One consisted of a film-feeding mechanism which moves the film step by step in the focus of a single lens, the duration of exposure being from twenty to twenty-five times as great as that necessary to move an unexposed portion of the film into position. No shutter was employed. As time passed many other improvements were made. An ingenious Frenchman ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... came in contact. He was strong, self-contained and deliberate in speech, and having been an industrious student and an acute thinker all his life, his opinions always commanded attention and respect. It so happened that his services brought him into the very focus of events on more than one occasion. It so happened also that I was more or less intimate with him to the time of his death, from the date of my entry into the Military Academy, where I had the good fortune ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... nest. Why, she's half killing herself in all kinds of places and weather to teach people to love and protect the birds. She's that plum careful of them that Jim's wife says she has Jim a standin' like a big fool holding an ombrelly over them when they are young and tender until she gets a focus, whatever that is. Jim says there ain't a bird on his place that don't actually seem to like having her around after she has wheedled them a few days, and the pictures she takes nobody would ever believe who ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter
... to a focus"; it describes a "looped orbit round the sun." The eclipse of the sun is thus explained: "At the time of eclipses, the image is more or less so directly before or behind the earth that, in the case of new moon, bright rays of the sun fall and bear upon the spot where the figure of the earth ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... reason there is immobility of labor, there is always lowering of the wage rate. The trades and general industries for which women are suited are highly localized. They focus in the cities and large towns, and women must seek them there. Great manufactories drain the surrounding country; yet even with these opportunities an analysis of the industrial statistics of the United States by General Walker showed that the women workers of the country made up but seven per cent ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... at the times as they are, and see how the business of life is transacted. Manhattan Island has something over 2,500,000 inhabitants, and is surrounded by a belt of population, several miles wide, of 12,000,000 more, of which it is the focus, so that the entire city contains more than 14,500,000 souls. The several hundred square miles of land and water forming greater New York are perfectly united by numerous bridges, tunnels, and electric ferries, while the ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... absorption in the precise present. We promptly forgot a difficulty as soon as we were by it: we had not time to think of those still ahead. All outside the insistence of the moment was blurred and unimportant, like a specialized focus, so I cannot tell you much about the scenery. The only outside impression we received was that the canon floor was slowly rising ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... the irritated sportsmen generally beheld a tableau of inverted pocket-flasks, and feats of strength with a rapidly lightening ale-keg. But, although our friends bore the proximity of these city gunners with great patience for a while, an event soon occurred which brought matters to a focus. ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... in, were not contemplated, but they have led to our opening a path into the fine cotton-field in the North. You will see that the discoveries of Burton and Speke confirm mine respecting the form of the continent and its fertility. It is an immense field. I crave the honor of establishing a focus of Christianity in it, but should it not be granted, I will submit as most unworthy. I have written Mr. Venn twice, and from yours I see something is contemplated in Cambridge.... If young men come to this country, they must lay ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... closed off by a road barrier quite some distance away and tightly parked cars testified to the attraction of the expanding grass. Scorning these idle sightseers, I pushed and shoved my way forward to what had now become the focus of all my interests. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... where I told you," Quest replied, "I can see it. I promise you that. There, that's right. Hold it steady. I've got the focus of it now. Say, French, where did you say ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... no more questions, but bent his head to see the last of this wonderful craft. The sight of it, and what he had heard about it, suddenly gave point and focus to his thoughts. He knew at last what it was that had lurked, formless and undesignated, these many days in the background of his dreams. The picture rose in his mind now of Celia as the mistress of a yacht. He could see her reclining in a low easy-chair upon the polished deck, with the big ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... were silent—Trent with the bitter, brooding silence of a man who has battered uselessly against the bars that hem him in, and who at last recognizes that they can never be forced asunder, Herrick trying to focus his vision to that of the man ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... will be seen a wonderful volcanic tract. So vast, in fact, that Professor Johnstrup has termed it the Fire Focus of the North. To the north-east, again, is found a large lake, called 'Myvata,' or 'Midge Lake,' with a volcanic range of mountains which stretch from north to south; the most famous of these are 'Leivhnukr,' and 'Krafla,' ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... memory. Thus, in the very act of knowing anything at all, something greater than the physical object known is present. And Eucken would insist, therefore, that the mental and spiritual are present from the very beginning and bring to a mental focus the impressions of the senses. In the interpretation of Eucken's philosophy several writers [p.49] have missed the author's meaning here. They have, through the ambiguity of the term "spiritual" in English, conceived of "spiritual life" as something entirely different from the mental life. ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... of all is that of the Greyhounds, which evolves in gigantic spirals round a dazzling focus, and then loses itself far off in the recesses of space. Fig. 24 gives a picture ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... Greeks collected into one focus all that they found of beauty in art from many distant sources—Egyptian, Indian, Assyrian—and thus fired their inborn genius, which thenceforth radiated its splendour over the ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... no judge," he said. "To begin with, you cannot focus properly. You have a crooked eye. I have told you ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden
... lounging: about the square. As I found it impossible to think of rest until the truth or falsehood of my information was settled, I next wandered along the Boulevarde, in the direction of the Faubourg St Antoine, the focus of all the tumults of Paris; but all along this fine avenue was hushed as if a general slumber had fallen over the city. The night was calm, and the air was a delicious substitute for the hot and reeking atmosphere of this populous quarter ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... vicious grinding noise from the walled end of the passage. A moment later a blinding ray of light swung in, to focus upon them. ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... was a thing called a Tourograph, which differs from most other cameras in having the plate-holder on top of the box. The plates are dropped into a groove below, and then moved into focus, after which the cap is removed ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... become not only the capital of Greece, but the center of art and refinement, and, at the same time, of those democratical theories which formed the beau ideal of the Athenian notions of government." Athens became the center and capital of the most polished communities of Greece; she drew into a focus all the Grecian intellect, and she obtained from her dependents the wealth to administer the arts, which universal traffic and intercourse taught her to appreciate. The treasury of the state being placed in the hands of Pericles, he knew no limit to expenditure ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... upon our marriage at once!' Stephen answered, seeing a ray of hope in the very focus of her remorse. 'I hope he may, even if we had still to part till I am ready for you, as ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... devastated did not exceed twenty yards at most. One other tree, yet fixed in the soil, presented an awful example of the might of the tornado. It was a chestnut of the largest size, the trunk near the base being seven or eight feet in circumference; it reclined at what seemed to have been the very focus of the whirlwind; its roots yet clung to earth; but, through the resistance thus offered, the tree had been literally twisted round and round, until it was split into laths, the trunk having the appearance of a great bundle of saplings peeled and twined together by the hand of a Titan, as lads ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... from New York with a mingled sense of pleasure and the feeling that his place was unsupportably empty. The loneliness of which he had been increasingly conscious seemed to have its focus in his house. The following morning he walked restlessly down the short, steep descent to the Forge, lying on its swift water diverted from Canary Creek. Unlike a great many iron families of increasing prosperity, the Pennys had not erected ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... was not exactly a Paradise yet, though it is in a fair way of becoming one. It is a spot of some fifty acres reclaimed from the scrubbiest part of Wormwood Scrubbs, and made the focus of a club of working men, of whom I am very proud indeed to be one. Indeed, I do not see why throughout the remainder of this article I should not use the first person plural. I will. Well, then, we secured this spot, and we have got in the first place one of the finest—I believe ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... instantly reminded me of the removal of the obstacle. He was a good deal surprised at my collecting the rays of the sun upon my own hand, supposing that I was callous to the pain, from which he had himself before shrunk; but as I held the glass within the focus distance, no painful sensation was produced; after which he presented me his own arm, and allowed me to burn it as long as I chose to hold the glass, without flinching in the least, which, with greater reason, equally ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... D'Artagnan is, of course, the focus of the Romances. Dumas frequently admitted that D'Artagnan was the man he could never be. In The Vicomte de Bragelonne, the character expands even further. Although his primary symbolic representation is that of the virtue of Loyalty, he is not devoid of other virtues. He has ...
— Dumas Commentary • John Bursey
... enables you to see what is going on in another room. The focus may be altered in range so that the faces of those in the room may be recognized and the act of passing money or signing cheques, for instance, may be detected. The instrument is fashioned somewhat after the cytoscope of ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... Cyrus H. McCormick might be named. The inventor of the reaper and builder of the first American business which covered the world was not a man of extraordinary intellect, wit, or judgment. He had, however, the will and power to focus his attention on a single question until the answer was evolved. Again and again, his biographers tell us, he pursued problems which eluded him far into the night and he was frequently found asleep at his desk the morning following. When roused, ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... French Ministry, beset as they are with difficulties, and holding their offices de die in diem, may think a war the best expedient for occupying the nation and bringing all the restless spirits and unquiet humours into one focus. I have long been of opinion that such mighty armaments and such a nervous state of things cannot end without a good deal of blood-letting. [The Prussians did not support the Dutch, the French did march, and war did not ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... toward maturity his talents begin to focus and his interests to direct themselves toward some special life occupation. The matter of Vocational Guidance is the most vital thing in education to-day, but wisdom in this field is far to seek. Changes in the industrial world are so rapid that books giving ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... managed to get the tube pointed accurately, and then requested the astronomer to focus the lenses so as to bear upon ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... and geology of the region furnish topics of interest, which help to fill up pauses in the intervals of business. By making my office a focus for collecting whatever is new in the unexplored regions, excitement is kept alive, and knowledge in the end promoted. Lewis Saurin Johnston, of Drummond Island, sends me a box of specimens from that locality. This gentleman, who occupies a situation in ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... Worth turned toward the hearth, pushed the cedar logs on it to a focus, and at their leaping blaze lighted the pipe which he took from his pocket. "Lopez," he said, "it strikes me that I am just in time to prevent some infamous plan of Fray Ignatius and my ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... pleased when we see the further subdivision of labor going on, because the quantity of the output is increased thereby, and we apparently are unable to take our attention away from the product long enough to really focus it upon the producer. Theoretically, "the division of labor" makes men more interdependent and human by drawing them together into a unity of purpose. "If a number of people decide to build a road, and one digs, and one brings stones, ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams |
