"Narrowing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to make two lines of lettering of the same length, although they contain an unequal number of letters, this may be effected—provided, of course, that the number of letters does not vary too greatly—by broadening or narrowing the letters that occur in one line but not in the other, and by varying the spacings about the I's and the open letters. Note, for example, the spacing of the upper lines in the poster by Mr. Crane, ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown
... consistently declined to entangle himself with associations or to encumber himself with functions which, however he might believe in them, he felt were duties for other men and not for him. Even the care of his garden, "with its stoopings and fingerings in a few yards of space," he found "narrowing and poisoning," and took to long free walks and saunterings instead, without apology. "Causes" innumerable sought to enlist him as their "worker"—all got his smile and word of sympathy, but none entrapped him into service. The struggle against slavery ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... you are in danger of perverting the minds of Southern girls with prejudice, a noble kind of prejudice, I admit, because so closely allied with what they regard as patriotism, but narrow and narrowing nevertheless. That old flag yonder means one people, one broad country, and all equally free under the ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... sailing high, which poured whiteness into the court, making its cobbles embedded in the earth look like milky bubbles and drawing clear-cut shadows of the well-top and the gables and chimneys of the house. The man slowly circled the court beginning close to the walls and narrowing till he made a loop about the well, and then, reversing, worked in widening orbits as far as the walls again. His wife, looking out at him through one of the windows, thought that, in the moonlight, followed by his own squat, active shadow, he looked like a huge spider weaving a web. This ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... admitted, Mr Mill proceeds to reason as if men had no desires but those which can be gratified only by spoliation and oppression. It then becomes easy to deduce doctrines of vast importance from the original axiom. The only misfortune is, that by thus narrowing the meaning of the word desire the axiom becomes false, and all the doctrines consequent ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... you know about the 'sacerdotal directors' as you call them, of Rome?" asked Gherardi slowly, his eyes narrowing at the corners, and his whole countenance expressing ineffable disdain, "Do you think we give out the complex and necessary workings of our sacred business to the ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... houses gleaming, and a great wall of mountain, and far blue peaks in the north. And so at least I came to the place. The track went up a gentle slope, and widened out into an open space with a wall of thick undergrowth around it, and then, narrowing again, passed on into the distance and the faint blue mist of summer heat. And into this pleasant summer glade Rachel passed a girl, and left it, who shall say what? I did not ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... sake, accept another narrowing of the field. The effect of the Bible and its religious teaching, on the writer himself is a separate study, and is for the most part left out of consideration. It sounds correct when Milton says: "He who would not be frustrate of his Power to write well ought ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... to go about the end of it. It was still the roughest kind of walking; indeed the whole, not only of Earraid, but of the neighboring part of Mull (which they call the Ross) is nothing but a jumble of granite rocks with heather in among. At first the creek kept narrowing as I had looked to see; but presently to my surprise it began to widen out again. At this I scratched my head, but had still no notion of the truth; until at last I came to a rising ground, and it burst upon me all in a moment that I was cast upon a ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... all time, is one of the problems which requires the highest wisdom for its solution. It is easy to become entirely absorbed in one's age, or it is easy to detach one's self from it, and study it in a cold and critical temper; but to get its warmth and vitality and escape its narrowing and limiting influence is so difficult that comparatively few men succeed in striking the ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... at Layson with a curiosity which was almost calm, as, for a moment quite bewildered, he ran from side to side of their rapidly narrowing space of safety, endeavoring to find a weak spot in the wall of flames through which they might escape, but failing everywhere. For a moment she thought that he had lost his head, and thus proved all too true those tales which she had heard of "foreigners." It was almost as one ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... Villages, and woody patches and favorable spots; all looking in upon Minden, from a distance of five or seven miles; forming a kind of arc, with Minden for centre. He will march up in eight Columns; of course, with wide intervals between them,—wide, but continually narrowing as he advances; which will indeed be ruinous gaps, if Ferdinand wait to be attacked; but which will coalesce close enough, if he be speedy upon Contades. For Contades's line is also of arc-like or almost semicircular form, behind it Minden as centre; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... on the ground, and raising itself straight on end, in the attitude it assumes on desert roads to attract travelers, began to sway from right to left, following the rhythm of the music. The Aissoua, whirling more and more rapidly in constantly narrowing circles, plunged his hand once more into the basket, and pulled out two of the most venomous reptiles of the desert of Sous; serpents thicker than a man's arm, two or three feet long, whose shining scales are spotted black or yellow, and whose bite sends, as it were, a burning fire through ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... Olga repeated, and by the sudden narrowing of her eyes, as though she were all at once "on guard," Diana knew that her shot in the dark had gone home. "What ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... fortunately the sky was clear, for the Strand was ill lighted. St. Mary's Church, not long since consecrated, St. Clement's Church, loomed large and shadowy in the narrow roadway, narrowing still more towards Temple Bar past the ill-favoured and unsavoury Butcher's Row on the north side of the street, where the houses of rotting plaster and timber with overhanging storeys frowned upon the passer-by and suggested deeds of ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... hear sudden loud rustlings and shakings on the hardwood ridge above you, as if a small cyclone were perched there for a while, amusing itself among the leaves before blowing on. Then, if you steal up toward the sound, you will find Mooween standing on a big limb of a beech tree, grasping the narrowing trunk with his powerful forearms, tugging and pushing mightily to shake down the ripe beechnuts. The rattle and dash of the falling fruit are such music to Mooween's ears that he will not hear the rustle of your approach, nor the twig ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... beyond it, the slime of the water of the Bristol Channel; and nearer, on one side, the spire of Elmwood Church looked up, and, on the other, the woods round Elmwood House, and these ran out as it were, lengthening and narrowing into a wooded cleft or gulley, Hermit's Gulley, which broke the side of the hill just below where Steadfast stood, and had a little clear ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... quite useless for a family merely to continue from generation to generation piling up possessions, and narrowing its interests. It must do this for a time to become solid, and then it should take a vaster view, and begin to help the world. Nearly everything is spoiled in all civilisation because of this inability to see beyond the nose, this ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... and are no longer a little boy." Narrowing her old eyes, she asked, "My grandchild, when are you going to bring here a handsome young woman?" I stared into the fire rather than meet her gaze. Waiting for my answer, she stooped forward and through the long stem drew a flame into the ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... her arm, and listened, intently, watching the little appearing and disappearing green spark, spelling off the words with narrowing eyes. ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... while they had now wherewith to live; and if it seem to my reader that the horizon of hope was narrowing around them, it does not follow that it must have seemed so to them. For what is the extent of our merely rational horizon at any time? But for faith and imagination it would be a narrow one indeed! Even what we call experience is but a stupid kind of faith. It ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... diameter at the base, and ten at the top, and is divided into five distinct parts or stories, one above another, each fitted with an outer gallery and adorned with colossal inscriptions in bold relief. The whole exterior is fluted from the bottom to the top, narrowing gradually as it ascends, and affording a good view of the present Delhi, twelve miles away, while it overlooks that broad region of dead and buried cities. Though the Katub Minar has stood for so many centuries, not the least crack in the masonry can be discovered, either ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... the forests of California. They were arranged in a semi-circle. The carpet of verdure, which stretched at their feet, after bordering the stream for some hundreds of feet, gave place to a long beach, covered with rocks, and shingle, and sea-weed, which ran out into the water in a narrowing point to the north. ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... he gazed on, then let the parted bushes spring back, and, crossing over to the other side of the fort, surveyed the vaster emptiness of the great gulf. The Isabels stood out heavily upon the narrowing long band of red in the west, which gleamed low between their black shapes, and the Capataz thought of Decoud alone there with the treasure. That man was the only one who cared whether he fell into the hands ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... top began to whirl. Faster ... faster.... Now it was revolving so fast that it had become totally invisible. But Cliff was almost surrounded by the wall of jelly. Only his back could be seen, and then space was narrowing fast. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... court, and then climbed up the spiral stone stairs to the battlements at the top of the tower, where they looked at the house-tops of Rouen close beneath, and the river Seine, broadening and glittering on one side in its course to the sea, and on the other narrowing to a blue ribbon, winding through the green expanse of fertile Normandy. They threw the pebbles and bits of mortar down that they might hear them fall, and tried which could stand nearest to the edge of the battlement without being giddy. Richard was pleased to find that he ...
— The Little Duke - Richard the Fearless • Charlotte M. Yonge
... circle, three or four miles around the country adjacent to the opening, and gradually closing up are almost sure to enclose a large body of game, which, by shouts and skilfully hurled Javelins, they drive into the narrowing [Page 35] walls of the Hopo. The affrighted animals rush headlong to the gate presented at the end of the converging hedges and here plunge pell-mell into the pit, which is soon filled with a living mass. Some escape by running over the others; and the natives, ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... at such "full speed," as a swampy and partially made road would allow. So our dreams of breakfast ended in cups of stewed tea, given to us by a half-naked Chinaman, and, to our chagrin, we had to go back to the boat and be poled up the shallowing and narrowing river for four hours more, getting on with difficulty, the boat-men constantly jumping into the water to heave the boat off ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... like a person, has a mind—a mind that must be kept informed and alert, that must know itself, that understands the hopes and the needs of its neighbors—all the other nations that live within the narrowing circle ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... beauty grew till drawn in narrowing arcs The southing autumn touch'd with sallower gleams The granges on the fallows. At that time, Tir'd of the noisy town I wander'd there. The bell toll'd four, and by the time I reach'd The wicket-gate I ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... told him to get breakfast; and most of that day and the next one they drifted with the tides through narrowing waters, though now and then for a few hours they were wafted on by light and fickle winds. At length, they crept into the inlet where they had landed on the previous voyage, and on the morning after their arrival they set out on the march. There was on this occasion reason to expect ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... ask it of Roger, as she stood looking down upon him. Patience?—with a man who could never sympathize with her intellectually or artistically?—the relations of married life with a husband who made assignations with an old love, under the eyes of the whole neighbourhood?—the narrowing, cramping influences of English provincial society? No! she was born for other and greater things, and she would grasp them. "My first duty is to myself—to my own development. We have absolutely no right to ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... we are losing this—all this! And yet we have won it! Mon Dieu, have we not won it? Yet for whom, alas? Maximilian?—Faw, an ungrateful puppet such as that, to have, to take from us, such as—this! Now suppose," her lips formed the unuttered words, while her gray eyes closed to a narrowing cunning, "just suppose that we—that someone—reminds His Majesty how ingratitude falls short ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... the ravine ran straight towards the castle. They hurried on, and when they had gone fifty yards stood at the edge of a roughly circular pit. It was seventy or eighty feet across, narrowing at each end. At one end was the ravine at whose mouth they were standing, and directly opposite, in what might be called the neck of the bottle, stood the Castle of the Demons. It was some fifty feet in width, and as it stood back about forty feet up the neck it could hardly be seen at ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... surrounded by oval garlands of the palest amethyst, topaz, sapphire, and turquoise which I could find, each garland being of only one kind of stone, a mere oval ring two feet wide at the sides and narrowing to an inch at the top and bottom, without designs. The galleries are five separate recesses in the outer walls under the roofs, two in the east facade, and one in the north, south, and west, hung with pavilions of purple, blue, rose and white silk ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... about fifty feet in diameter at the base and ten at the top, with a height from the ground of two hundred and fifty feet, divided into five stories, each fitted with an outer gallery and adorned with colossal inscriptions. The whole exterior is fluted from base to top, narrowing gradually towards the summit. ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... drawbridge and the walled court were gone. I stared stupidly at a heap of crumbling ruins, ivy-covered and grey, through which great trees had pushed their way. I crept forward, dragging my numbed foot, and as I moved, a falcon sailed from the tree-tops among the ruins, and soaring, mounting in narrowing circles, faded and vanished ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... of dwarf trees and bushes; and, motionless above the sombre tumult of the slopes, the monumental stretch of bare rock rose on high, level at the top, and emitting a ghastly yellow sheen in the flashes. The thunderclaps rolled ponderously between the narrowing walls of that chasm, that was all aflame one moment, and all black the next. A torrent springing at its head, and dashing with inaudible fury along the bottom, seemed to gleam placidly amongst the ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... and bade him leave her, narrowing her shoulders on the breast to let it be seen that the dark household within was ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... brick red, 2 to 5 inches broad, fleshy, bell-shaped or almost conical, then convex, dry, smooth, marked with reddish specks, darker toward the centre, flesh white, turning red and narrowing toward the margin. Stem 3 to 6 inches long, 1/2 inch thick, solid, firm, slightly tapering toward the apex, very bulbous at base, same color as cap, stuffed with brown pith inside. There are two or three reddish ...
— Among the Mushrooms - A Guide For Beginners • Ellen M. Dallas and Caroline A. Burgin
... log house, where the restraining banks of the river draw closer together, the lazy current awakens to quickening movement. Looking down the stream, one could see the waters leaving the broad and quiet reaches of The Bend above and rushing away with fast increasing speed between the narrowing banks until, in all their vicious might, they dashed full against the Elbow Rock cliff, where, boiling and tossing in mad fury, they roared away at a right angle and so around the point and on to another ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... ongoing challenges include increasing government revenues, negotiating further assistance from international donors, upgrading both government and private financial operations, curtailing drug trafficking and rampant crime, and narrowing the trade deficit. Given Guatemala's large expatriate community in the United States, it is the top remittance recipient in Central America, with inflows serving as a primary source of foreign income equivalent to nearly two-thirds ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... of a body that had flung itself straight at his throat. He reeled at the lip of the shallow cup at the base of the slab, slipped upon its polished curve, fell and rolled with that which had attacked him, kicking and writhing, straight through the narrowing portal into ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... any time to waste on him. Whether she swam or not, the current drew away from the land just the same. A half hour went by, and the shark began to grow bolder. Seeing no harm in her he drew closer, in narrowing circles, cocking his eyes at her impudently as he slid past. Sooner or later, she knew well enough, he would get up sufficient courage to dash at her. She resolved to play first. It was a desperate ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... Keep the stack evenly trodden, or it will settle unevenly, and the stack will lean to one side accordingly. 4. Increase the diameter from the ground upward until ready to draw in or narrow to form the top. 5. Aim to form the top by gradual rather than abrupt narrowing. 6. Top out by using some other kind of hay or grass that sheds the rain better than clover. 7. Suspend weights to some kind of ropes, stretching over the top of the stack to prevent the wind from removing the material put on to ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... success, A. is broadening and becoming something of an idealist. B. is narrowing and through failure is losing his ideals. This is not an uncommon effect of success and failure. Where success leads to arrogance and conceit it narrows, but where the character withstands this result the increased experience ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... to tell me where I have seen you before—and where you have met me before," she said swiftly, and with a sudden and dangerous narrowing ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... a street with a carriage way, at one end narrowing to a footway only. On one side a row of small houses, on the other a very high blank wall. Costermongers' barrows and carts stood in the carriage way at night; clothes-lines with ragged garments hung across the street in the day. One dark night prowling about, cunt-feeling ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... William Colleton, on the other hand, with means hourly increasing, exhibited a disposition narrowing at times into a selfishness the most pitiful. He did not, it is true, forego or forget any of those habits of freedom and intercourse in his household and with those about him, which form so large a practice among the people of ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... globular and usually much flattened dorso-ventrally. The anterior portion is very much reduced and is somewhat head-like or cap-like. The longitudinal furrow extends through the entire posterior body length and is apparently capable of widening and narrowing. It is probably naked (see here Klebs, Pouchet, Buetschli), although Stein maintained that there is a delicate cuticle-like shell. Chromatophores of brown or green colors present and usually grouped radially about a central amylum granule. ...
— Marine Protozoa from Woods Hole - Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission 21:415-468, 1901 • Gary N. Galkins
... couldn't ye wait until the yams, were in the copper, bad luck to ye—and them all scraped too! I do believe, if they even had been taties, it would have been all the same to you." We stood on, the channel narrowing still more the rocks rising to a height of at least five hundred feet from the water's edge, as sharply and precipitously as if they had only yesterday been split asunder; the splintered projections and pinnacles ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... that dwellers in the chilly spiritual clime of Unitarianism can be cured of their faith in that icy creed by being subjected to the horrors of a polar winter. Far more clearly does the novel show the falling-off in his artistic conceptions and the narrowing process his opinions were undergoing. At the rate this latter was taking place it seems probable that had he lived to write another novel on a theme similar to this, his hero would have been compelled to abandon ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... There lay the narrowing channel, smooth and grim, A hundred deaths beneath it, and never a sign; There lay the enemy's ships, and sink or swim The flag was flying, and he was head of ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... bare rock did not predominate. A clear trail led up a dusty, gravelly slope, upon which scant greasewood and cactus appeared. Half an hour's climbing brought Slone to where he could see that he was entering a vast valley, sloping up and narrowing to a notch in the dark cliffs, above which towered the great red wall and about that the slopes of cedar and ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... not they,—these younger philosophical realists—but he, the great urbane humanist, who restricts his scope, narrowing it down to oft-repeated types and familiar scenes, which, as the world swings forward, seem to present themselves over and over again as an integral and classic embodiment of the permanent forces of life? It might seem so sometimes; especially when one considers how little ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... short distance on the next day, Aug. 13, a loud roar was heard in the distance, and a course was laid for the river at the nearest point. The river at this point, about one mile above the falls, was 500 yards wide, narrowing to fifty yards a short distance below, where great clouds of spray floating in the air warned the weary travelers that their object had been attained. Quickly they proceeded to the scene, and a magnificent ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... must awake—here in the hiding-place of Diana! He often held consistories or received ambassadors under huge old chestnut-trees, or beneath the olives on the greensward by some gurgling spring. A view like that of a narrowing gorge, with a bridge arched boldly over it, awakens at once his artistic sense. Even the smallest details give him delight through something beautiful, or perfect, or characteristic in them—the blue fields of waving flax, the yellow gorse which covers the hills, even tangled thickets, ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... started and whirled around. In the rush of incoming passengers, they had been looking for some one smaller, more childish than this tall girl who stood before them. She was not at all pretty. Her brown hair was too straight and lank and light, and her grey eyes had a trick of narrowing themselves to a line; but her expression was frank and open, and she wore her simple grey suit with an air which spoke volumes for her past training. Across her arm hung a bright golf cape with a tag end of grey fur sticking ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... bearing down and opening fire on their captor; or as a small boy at school, who is being fagged against rules by the right of the strongest, feels when he sees his big brother coming around the corner. The help which he had found was just what he wanted. There was no narrowing of the ground here—no appeal to men as members of any exclusive body whatever to separate themselves and come out of the devil's world; but to men as men, to every man as a man—to the weakest ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... least toleration or indulgence. They imposed a hundred tests, but could never be prevailed with to dispense with, or take off the smallest, nor even admit of occasional conformity;[18] but went on daily (as their apostle Tindal expresseth it) narrowing their terms of communion; pronouncing nine parts in ten of the kingdom heretics, and shutting them out of the pale of their Church. These very men, who talk so much of a comprehension in religion among us, how came they to allow so little of it in politics, which is their sole religion? ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... for these fierce brutes live in hot countries; but they sent hundreds of hunters into the woods for many miles around. These bold fellows drove the deer, bears, wolves, and the aurochs within an ever narrowing circle towards the pits. Into these, dug deep in the ground and covered with branches and leaves, the animals fell down and were hauled out with ropes. The deer were kept for their meat, but the bears and wolves were shut up, in pens, facing the great enclosure. When maddened with hunger, ...
— Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks • William Elliot Griffis
... which appear blacker in the writing than the space between them, because they fill with ink, which afterwards dries and produces a thicker layer of black sediment than those elsewhere. The variations of pressure upon the pen can be easily noticed by the alternate widening and narrowing of the band between these two furrows. The tracing appears knotty and uneven when made by an untrained hand, while it appears uniformly thin, and generally tremulous or in zigzags when made by a weak ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... resolve the conflict between the deep instinctive and the newer rational life. Hence, those who realize the nature of their own mental processes sin against the light if they do not do with them the very best that they possibly can: and the penalty of this sin must be a narrowing of vision, an arrest. The laws of apperception apply with at least as much force to our spiritual as to our sensual impressions: what we bring with us will ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... sharp scoldings, and some threats of punishment. Every morning two of us woke with a start and a shudder, saying, as the days flew along, "Only ten days left;" "only nine days left;" "only eight;" "only seven." Always it was narrowing. Always Nikolaus was gay and happy, and always puzzled because we were not. He wore his invention to the bone trying to invent ways to cheer us up, but it was only a hollow success; he could see that our jollity had no heart in it, and that the laughs ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... looked for an instant into the narrowing gray eyes, noted a certain tightening of the square jaw and the clenching of a pair of very capable fists, and tarried not upon further orders. Sweeping the money into their pockets they quit the compartment, casting venomous back glances toward ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... girl must marry, of course; for years that has hung over me like a bad dream. But it's natural and right and for the best. But, Belle, since she has grown up and her marriage has become a question of narrowing time—especially since that French nobleman, De Joinville, was buzzing around last year—I have had an ambition for grandchildren that can say 'grandpa' in a language I understand. That is the way I ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... clear space in the rapidly narrowing ribbon of shade, and there I soon saw Mrs. Lascelles settled with her book (a trashy novel, that somehow brought Catherine Evers rather sharply before my mind's eye) in an isolation as complete as ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... the offensive on May 24, by advancing due east of Jaroslav, capturing Drohojow, Ostrov, Vysocko, Makovisko and Vietlin all in one day. Radymno was occupied by the Austro-Hungarians under General Arz von Straussenburg, still further narrowing the circle and compelling the Russians to fall beyond the San. On the twenty-fifth the Austrians followed them over, captured the bridgehead of Zagrody, the village of Nienovice and the Heights of Horodysko, while Von Mackensen's troops ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... beefiness, felt a vague and inward stirring as he finally lifted his head and looked at her. He looked into the shadowy eyes under the level brows. He could see, as he had seen before, that they were exceptional eyes, with iris rings of deep gray about the ever-widening and ever-narrowing pupils which varied with varying thought, as though set too close to the brain that controlled them. So dominating was this pupil that sometimes the whole eye looked violet, and sometimes green, according ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... of the practice of expectation, was never disappointed. To set against this negative gain there may have been some positive losses from a certain narrowing of the higher tastes and sensations which it entailed. But limitation of the capacity is never recognized as a loss by the loser therefrom: in this attribute moral or aesthetic poverty contrasts plausibly with material, since those who suffer do not mind it, whilst ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... catch was, however, by no means as complete as might have been desired. Three hundred men in khaki slipped through between the two columns in the early morning. Another large party escaped to the southwards. Some of the Boers adopted extraordinary devices in order to escape from the ever-narrowing cordon. 'Three, in charge of some cattle, buried themselves, and left a small hole to breathe through with a tube. Some men began to probe with bayonets in the new-turned earth and got immediate and vociferous ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... gave a fleeting smile, a bare curving of lips together with an almost imperceptible narrowing of amused eyes—goading the other to the last stage of exasperation—then calmly ignored the fellow, returning indifferent attention to the progress ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... may fancy how terribly my poor Nina must have been disappointed. Nevertheless I admit that I was very bungling with the dear child. As you say, I wanted to go ahead too rapidly, I frightened her. It was my part gently to modify all that the rather narrowing and false education of the convent and the sentimental dreams of the Aunt had effected, leaving the provincial perfume time to evaporate. However all this can be repaired since she is returning. She is returning, my dear ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... listened with narrowing eyes, and his lips moved in an effort to find words with which to break in upon this impious declaration. When Armitage ceased speaking the old man sank back and glared ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... only way through. Missing it will bring you to ever-narrowing ledges, until at last you end at a precipice, and there is no room to turn your horses around for the return. Some of the great box canons thousands of feet deep are practicable by but one passage,—and that steep and ingenious in its utilization of ledges, crevices, little ravines, ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... the horse advanced round the little bend in the ever-narrowing cliffs, and there in front of me, under the gigantic mass of overhanging rock, appeared the kraal of Zikali surrounded by its reed fence. The gate of the fence was open, and beyond it, on his stool in front of the ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... cooperative marketing, and we might well inquire into the benefits of cooperative buying. Admittedly, the consumer is much to blame himself, because of his prodigal expenditure and his exaction of service, but Government might well serve to point the way of narrowing the spread of price, especially between the production of food ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Warren Harding • Warren Harding
... a silvery serpent through the stretch of green, succulent grass, narrowing gorge and obtruding rock and boulder. Now and then the path led across the water, which was so shallow that it only plashed about the fetlocks of the horses. Captain Dawson, in his impetuosity, kept a few paces in front of the other two, as if he were the leader. When the space increased too ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... desires put up one last defence. Was he not narrowing art within the borders of nationality? In the service of beauty was there either Greek or Roman? Alas! Atticus had beaten that down already. Art was no fungus, growing on a rotten stump of national life. Greeks had been artists only when ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... hostile feeling toward the nation of Republicans, then pressing upon the domain of the savages. The suspension of the world's commerce had diminished the amount of their traffic in furs, and the rapid extension of American settlements northward of Ohio was narrowing their hunting grounds and producing a rapid diminution of game. The introduction of intoxicating liquors among the savages by white traders and speculators had widely spread demoralization, with consequent ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... a compelling force more dominant than the strong will of a man, Sledge Hume rode the one trail open to him. It was as though the deeds of his life were now grown tangible separate squares of rock cemented into sheer walls rising about him, narrowing, forcing him into the ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... spillikins. But that style also had a quality that could be felt; it had a military edge to it, an acies; and there was a kind of swordsmanship about it. Thus all the circumstances led, not so much to the narrowing of Stevenson to the romance of the fighting spirit; but the narrowing of his influence to that romance. He had a great many other things to say; but this was what we were willing to hear: a reaction against ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... that art is antagonistic to hurry? The argument neglects the fact that this present complex life is such because it has added one by one these separate interests to those which it has received as an inheritance, each of which in its own narrowing niche having been preserved under ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... uncanny solitude for in all its length there moves no living creature. It changes from beet-fields to plowed land, to pastures and back to the eternal beet-fields again. It runs across farms and over hills, through cities and under forest trees. It varies in width, here narrowing to a few feet, there widening to several hundred yards. Five minutes would be ample time to walk across it anywhere, and yet it is the most impassable frontier ever marked out by man anywhere on the surface of mother earth. No person may cross it, no matter how exalted his position nor how ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... Things were narrowing down. There was a restlessness about the court; time was getting on and everything pointed one way. After some discussion with the jury, the foreman of it, a stout, pretentious fellow, rose to his feet and whispered a few hurried words ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... looking round, "the thing's narrowing. Let Mr. Wing there help by getting some news of Chuh Fen, if possible; as for me, I'm going to follow up the Netherfield line. I think we shall track these fellows yet—you never know how unexpectedly a clue ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... so he sets himself, in the first part of this letter, with all his might, to shame and to argue the Corinthian Christians out of their wrangling. This great text is one of the considerations which he adduces with that purpose. In effect he says, 'To pin your faith to any one teacher is a wilful narrowing of the sources of your blessing and your wisdom. You say you are Paul's men. Has Apollos got nothing that he could teach you? and may you not get any good out of brave brother Cephas? Take them all; they were all meant for your good. Let no ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... flashed past him into a thicket. So quickly did it pass that he scarcely saw it; nevertheless a burning desire to capture and possess the beautiful strange creature filled his breast. He instantly ordered his attendants to form a ring round the thicket, and so encircle the hind; then, gradually narrowing the circle, he pressed forward till he could distinctly see the white hind panting in the midst. Nearer and nearer he advanced, till, just as he thought to lay hold of the beautiful strange creature, it gave one mighty bound, leapt clean ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... was roaming the meadow for mushrooms at the very time we lost Mr. Fett: yet Billy came to no harm. To be sure, the enemy, having thinned us down to two, may venture more boldly; but if I keep the camp here while you take the path down to the creek, and nothing happens to either, we shall be narrowing the zone ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... The narrowing of the tower from east to west, and the insertion of secondary north and south arches to carry the slender octagonal tower is unusual and ingenious. The whole length was 250 feet, and the transepts were 96 feet from north to south. The nave and ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Churches of Coventry - A Short History of the City and Its Medieval Remains • Frederic W. Woodhouse
... beauty outspread before them. Perhaps it was by contrast with the monotony of the forest that the scene below them seemed to them all to be the most beautiful that had ever gladdened the eyes of men. Imagine a valley about five miles in length, narrowing at each end, and opening out about the centre to a width of two miles, the sides of grass sloping up to a buttress of rock, and rippling along the whole length into folds, with little valleys in between—narrow at the summit, where they joined the rock-wall, and wide at the base, ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... the usual strip of alluvial plain, bordered by not very lofty undulating ground, the Nile suddenly sweeps into a gap between two imposing masses of rock that overhang the stream for above a mile on either hand. The appearance of the precipices thus hemming in and narrowing so puissant a volume of water, covered with eddies and whirlpools, would be picturesque enough in itself; but we have here, in addition, an immense number of caves, grottos, quarries, and rock-temples, dotting the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 462 - Volume 18, New Series, November 6, 1852 • Various
... morai, merits description. It is formed by walls of great thickness, like that at Tahiti. It is an irregular parallelogram, two hundred and twenty-four feet long, and a hundred wide. The walls on three sides are twenty feet high and twelve feet thick, but narrowing towards the top. The wall nearest the sea is only eight feet high. The only entrance is by a narrow passage between two high walls leading up to an inner court, where stands the grim god of war, with numerous ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... either extremity of this crescent its two "gates," the smaller to the right, the larger one at the left, stretched forth—one a dwarf and the other a colossal limb—into the water, and the bell tower, almost as tall as the cliff, wide below, narrowing at the top, raised its pointed ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... plenty of troops and money at command, would have brought the heroic champion of Catholicism to the ground. He was hemmed in upon all sides; he was cut off from the sea; he stood as it were in a narrowing circle, surrounded by increasing dangers. His own veterans, maddened by misery, stung by their King's ingratitude, naked, starving, ferocious, were turning against him. Mucio, like his evil genius, was spiriting ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... length of the long, narrow cubicle lay to her left, with a slight recess at its further end, so that from the threshold of the doorway she could not see into the distant corner. Swift as a lightning flash the remembrance came back to her of proud Marie Antoinette narrowing her life to that dark corner where the insolent eyes of the rabble soldiery could not spy ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... one who has traversed a long gallery of pictures, and, turning to look back upon all that he has passed, sees a straight track narrowing away into the dimming distance, and only the last few life scenes standing out lustrous and clear, so the school-master, gazing down this long vista, beheld at the far end of it a little girl, whom he did not know, playing on the ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... little during the trip. The tenseness of suspense held them in thrall, and, for the most part, they sat in grim silence, staring out of the windows at the swiftly flitting panorama of moonlit landscape, wherein the fertile level areas changed to narrowing valleys, and these, in turn, to wild gorges, where the river ran in bellowing riot beneath lofty ramparts of stone. Sutton's thoughts veered from pity for his young friend to keen calculation of profits to come from the locust timber of the slopes. ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... motive a liberal- minded man of the world must of necessity outgrow these things. With the self-deception of his kind, he thought he was broad and liberal in his views, when in reality he had lost all distinction between truth and error, and was narrowing his mind down to things only. Jew or Gentile, Christian or Pagan, it was becoming all one to him. Men changed their creeds and religions with other fashions, but all looked after what they believed to be the main chance, and he proposed ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... of solitary life at Fawley with a calm which was deeper in its gloom than it had been before. The experiment of return to the social world had failed. The resolutions which had induced the experiment were finally renounced. Five years nearer to death, and the last hope that had flitted across the narrowing passage to the grave, fallen like a faithless torch from his own hand, and trodden out by ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
