"Powdery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the midst of it, there came from outside a startling interruption: Shouts, and a loud, pistol-like cracking, powdery swirls over the windows, a frightened lowing, and heavy thumps against ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... his mind. Some of these things were as subtly intangible as the lazy sweetness that melted the facades of the walls into the soft colors of a dream city. He found himself loving the Palisades of Jersey, seen through a powdery glow at evening, and the red-gold glare of the setting sun on high-swung gilt signs. He felt with a throb of his pulses that he was in the Bagdad of the new world, and that every skyscraper was a minaret from which the muezzin rang toward the Mecca of his Art. He ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... tangled together that our efforts to extricate ourselves only led to worse confusion. We broke through the crust and floundered in soft and powdery snow. As we struggled hard—we had fled but a short distance—the avalanche struck the valley close behind us. There was first a mighty crash that made the ground tremble, next a long, deafening grind like a hundred thunderpeals in one, and then ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... foothold, and something caught her eye. She knelt down eagerly, and then, looking up, glanced round surreptitiously like a thief. She could not see the Casa Perucca. She was alone on this solitary mountain-side. Slowly she collected the debris of the broken rock, which was mixed with a red powdery soil. ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... bird shapes floated on aerial currents or sped in jubilant flight. From the chaparral came the scents of sun-warmed foliage, the pungent odor of bay, the aromatic breath of pine, and the sweet, frail perfume of the chaparral flower. This flecked the hillside with its powdery blossom, a white blur among the glittering enamel ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... there was much clatter in and about the old Britt house, tumble of timbers and rip of wainscotings and snarl of drawing nails. Out from the gaping windows floated the powdery drift of the plastering which the broad shovels had tackled. The satirists said that it was noticeable that the statue of Tasper Britt in the cemetery had settled down heavier on its heels, as if making grimly sure that Hittie was staying where she ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... dandies, the lower part of his face hidden by his beaver collar and his head slightly bent. His face was fresh and rosy, his white-plumed hat, tilted to one side, disclosed his curled and pomaded hair besprinkled with powdery snow. ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... corner of the hotel to reach Main Street he saw Luke Tweezy single-footing into town from the south. The powdery dust of the trail filled in and overlaid the lines and creases of Luke Tweezy's foxy-nosed and leathery visage. Layers of dust almost completely concealed the original colour of the caked and matted hide of Luke Tweezy's well-conditioned horse. It was ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... meat, and what is going on in the water which surrounds it? How long will it be before all the smell of putrefaction has gone and the water is clear again? For it does in time become clear, and instead of the meat we find a fine powdery substance at the bottom of the test tube. It may take weeks before this process is completed, depending on the rate at which it goes on. Now, if we take a drop of this water and examine it with the microscope, we find that it contains vast numbers ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 417 • Various
... months a slow change takes place in it. The bark becomes softened and falls from the wood. The wood also becomes more or less softened; it is preyed upon then by insect life; its density decreases more and more, until finally it crumbles into a soft, brownish, powdery mass, and eventually the whole sinks into the soil, is overgrown by mosses and other vegetation, and the tree trunk has disappeared from view. In the same way the body of the dead animal undergoes the process of the softening of its tissues by decay. The softer parts of the body rapidly dissipate, ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn
... is being diverted from my writing by a lady sitting a few yards away—the Candle we call her because so many silly young moths hover round. She is a buxom person, with very golden hair growing darker towards the roots, hard blue eyes, and a powdery white face. G. and I are intensely interested to know what is the attraction about her, for no one can deny there is one. She isn't young; the gods have not made her fair, and I doubt of her honesty; yet from the first she has been surrounded by men—most ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... attempt to assert its own reality, was braced in a set, motionless, noiseless, breathless effort to hold itself in being. What Silvester had said just now was beginning to be true of this man also. The touch of the powdery soil and the warm pebbles beneath the priest's bare feet seemed something apart from the consciousness that usually regards the things of sense as more real and more intimate than the things of spirit. Matter still had a reality, still occupied space, but it was of a subjective ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... before the threshold, his out-stretched hands almost touching it, his moccasins already covered out of sight by the powdery snow which ran and trickled incessantly—trickled between his long, dishevelled locks, and over the back of his gloves, and ran in a thin ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... office building on Dearborn Street, red-faced and tingling from the whirling drive of the powdery snow. It was so dry with frost that scarcely a flake clung to their coats when they pushed in through the storm doors. The elevator shot them up to the top floor of the building before they could catch their breath in ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... almost golden-red hair, whose silken wealth of naturally waving locks rested above the brow in two bands, like the gleaming wings of some bright-hued tropical bird, while the light of the candles, shining on the braids, struck out strange, satiny, metallic reflections, and a powdery, glimmering sparkle, as though the hair was dusted with gold or ruby powder. Her sole ornaments were a diamond star in the hair and an antique gold circlet on one of her bare arms. The white dress, trimmed on one side of the bosom to the opposite side of the ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... the little forest. It was past four o'clock and the dawn began to trill over the rim of night; the east burst into stinging sun rays, while the moving air awoke the birds and sent scurrying around the smooth green park a cloud of golden powdery dust.... ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... of was not a routine morning. On routine mornings the Tamperer rises at ten minutes to seven, the alarm clock being set for 6:45: which allows five minutes for drowsy head. The day in question was early February when snow lay white and powdery on the ground, and the 6 o'clock train from Marathon had to be caught. There is an express for Philadelphia that leaves the Pennsylvania Station at 7:30 and this the Tamperer had to take, to make a 10 o'clock appointment in the Quaker City. That was why the alarm clock ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... somewhat ignorant of his language, so, after looking in all directions to see that we were really alone, he led the way into a dark corner of the hog, where we were. There, from under a pile of garden baskets, calabashes, etc., he brought out a peculiarly-shaped gourd, full of some red, powdery substance. This, with trembling haste, he put into my hand, and seemed greatly relieved when I had it securely. Going then to the corner where I kept my goods, he took up a box of matches and made signs for me to exchange, which I did. When Timoteo ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... he cried, "I can't. I can never kiss you again. I have loved to touch you, always. I have loved your cool, sweet, powdery skin, and your lips,—I have always thought of your lips as a crimson bow in a pale pink cloud,—I—I have loved to touch you. I have always adored your face, the look of it as well as the feel of it. I have loved to ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... Storms of wind and light drifting snow, expressively called poudre by the French, and peewun by the Indians, fill the atmosphere, and render it impossible to distinguish objects at a short distance. The fine powdery flakes of snow are driven into the smallest crannies of buildings and fixtures, and seem to be endowed with a subtle power of insinuation, which renders northern joinerwork but a poor defence. It is not uncommon for the sleeper, on waking up in the morning, to find heaps of snow, where he had supposed ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... be beat," yelled Jim, as he helped me off. I stumbled into the cabin and fell upon a buffalo robe and lay there absolutely spent. Jones and Frank came in a few minutes apart, each anathematizing the gritty, powdery sand. ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... of the Cathedral, where the transepts meet, is a vast heap of bricks, stone, and powdery dirt. This heap rises irregularly like a range of hills towards the choir; it overspreads most of the immense interior, occupying an area of, perhaps, from 15,000 to 20,000 square feet. In the choir it rises to a height of six or seven yards. You climb perilously over ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... alder by the river Shakes out her powdery curls; The willow buds in silver For little ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... of contentment when a dusky figure appeared for a moment in the doorway. His weariness seemed to fall from him, and once more his companion wondered at the tirelessness of the man, as floundering on foot beside them he urged the team through the powdery drifts beneath the big birch bluff. Winston did not go in, however, when they reached the house, and when, five minutes later, Maud Barrington came out, she saw him leaning with a drawn face very wearily against ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... his short note of laughter that made her keenly conscious of his right to be proud of her. She was proud of herself, inasmuch as herself was shown in the long trail of daring blue her gown made up the stair, and the powdery blue of the aigrette that shivered in her bright, soft puffs and curls—proud that her daring, as it appeared in these things, was still discriminating enough ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... snow of the streets, and from the vapors that swam above the squalid houses. There was coal-smoke and a taste of lucifer matches in the air. In the previous night there had been such a storm as London seldom sees; the powdery, flying snow had been blown for many hours before a tyrannous northeast gale, and had settled down, like dust in a neglected chamber, over every surface of the city. Drifts and "snow-wreathes," as northern folk say, were lying in exposed places, ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... waft the powdery snow, As feet unseen did pass; While, waiting in its bed below, ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... down beside him and stood holding her skirts out of the powdery soil, while her wide eyes searched that interior through the open door. Tisdale lifted the baggage from the buggy to the porch, then the woman returned with the lantern and, followed by the dogs, went to show ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... Diego is in the midst of rice-fields. It is approached by a narrow path, powdery on sunny days, navigable on rainy. A wooden gate and a wall half stone, half bamboo stalks, succeed in keeping out men, but not the curate's goats, nor the pigs of his neighbors. In the middle of the enclosure is a stone pedestal supporting a great wooden cross. Storms ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... porphyry and greenstone, and then patches of sandstone, before the limestone and flint recur."[133] Some slopes are composed entirely of soft sandstone; many patches are of a hard metallic-sounding trap or porphyry; but the predominant formation is a greasy or powdery limestone, bare often, but sometimes clothed with a soft herbage, or with a thick tangle of shrubs, or with lofty forest trees. The ridge of the mountain is everywhere naked limestone rock, except in the comparatively few places which attain the highest ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... there was a sense of prosperity—or probable prosperity, in the house. And there was an abundance of Throttle-Ha'penny coal. It was dirty ashy stuff. The lower bars of the grate were constantly blanked in with white powdery ash, which it was fatal to try to poke away. For if you poked and poked, you raised white cumulus clouds of ash, and you were left at last with a few darkening and sulphurous embers. But even so, by ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... want to go! There was a scurrying for boots and coats, mufflers and mittens. Then they tumbled in, the sleighbells jingled, and off they flew through the deep, powdery, sparkling snow. ...
— Half-Past Seven Stories • Robert Gordon Anderson
... in his veins, murmuring like a sinful city summoned from its sleep to hear its doom. Little flakes of fire fell and powdery ashes fell softly, alighting on the houses of men. They stirred, waking from sleep, ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... extraction.) Transfer the extract with the aid of hot water to a porcelain dish containing 10 grams of heavy magnesium oxid in suspension in 100 cc. of water. (This reagent should meet the U.S.P. requirements.) Evaporate slowly on the steam bath with frequent stirring to a dry, powdery mass. Rub the residue with a pestle into a paste with boiling water. Transfer with hot water to a smooth filter, cleaning the dish with a rubber-tipped glass rod. Collect the filtrate in a liter flask ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... important. Employing three thermometers, one with the bulb an inch below the surface of powdery snow; one on the surface of the ground beneath the snow, then four inches deep; and one in the open air, forty feet above the ground, on the north side of a building, he found, at 5 P.M., the FIRST thermometer at -1.5 degrees Centigrade, ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... footprints one by one, Zigzaggedly, Where I had run; Where shrill and powdery A robin sat in ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... their evening meal. Outside the frost was almost arctic, but there was wood in plenty round Fremont ranch, and the great stove diffused a stuffy heat. The two men had made the round of the small homesteads that were springing up, with difficulty, for the snow was too loose and powdery to bear a sleigh, and now they were content to lounge in the tranquil enjoyment of the rest and warmth that followed exposure ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... day the twins were taken around the woods by the driver or some of the lumbermen who were not busy. They saw big trees cut down, but were careful not to get in the way of the great, swaying trunks. They played in the piles of sawdust, jumping off powdery wood. ...
— The Bobbsey Twins in the Great West • Laura Lee Hope
... amid the cold and powdery snow, as it were a fruit of the season, will come twittering a flock of delicate crimson-tinged birds, lesser redpolls, to sport and feed on the buds just ripe for them on the sunny side of a wood, shaking down the powdery snow there in their cheerful feeding, ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... gales it is almost necessary to dress oneself in wind clothes if one ventures outside for the briefest periods—exposed woollen or cloth materials become heavy with powdery crystals in a minute or two, and when brought into the warmth of the hut are soon wringing wet. Where there is no drift it is quicker and easier to slip ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... thing, when did you come?" she fairly bubbled, as she clasped me in the most hospitable of arms, and bestowed a slightly powdery kiss on both my cheeks. I weakly and femininely enjoyed the hug, not that a man might not have—Sallie is a dear, and I always ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... ridge, she emerged on that high altar on which, not twenty-four hours earlier, he had sunk face downward in the snow. The snow had drifted again over his footprints and the mark of his form. It was drifting still, in little powdery whirls, across a surface that caught tints of crimson and glints of fire from an angry sunset. It was windy here. As she stood above him, facing the north, her figure poised against a glowering sky, her ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... drought, etc. For instance, a heavy clay soil is difficult to plow—retains water after rains, and bakes quite hard during drought; while a light sandy soil is plowed with ease, often allows water to pass through immediately after rains, and becomes dry and powdery during drought. Notwithstanding those differences in their mechanical character, both soils may be very fertile, or one more so than the other, without reference to the clay and sand which they contain, and which, to our observation, form their leading characteristics. ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... side. Joiwind directed their course straight toward Poolingdred. From the position of the sun, Maskull judged their way to lie due north. The sand was soft and powdery, very tiring to his naked feet. The red glare dazed his eyes, and made him semi-blind. He was hot, parched, and tormented with the craving to drink; his undertone of pain emerged ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... watch fires winked from the hills. To the cry of "Roll out," and the snap of the long whip, the wagon lurched into motion, the thirst-racked animals straining doggedly as it crunched over sage stalks and dragged through powdery hummocks. The old man walked by the wheel, the long lash of his whip thrown afar, flashing in the upper light and descending in a lick of flame on the mules' gray flanks. With each blow fell a phrase of encouragement, the words of a friend who wounds and wounding himself suffers. ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... dried the leaves upon the hedge, and they touch rough—dusty rough, as books touch that have been lying unused; the plants on the bank are drying up and turning white. Heat has gone down into the cracks of the ground; the bar of the stile is so dry and powdery in the crevices that if a reaper chanced to drop a match on it there would seem risk of fire. The still atmosphere is laden with heat, and does not move in the corner of the field between ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... loaded as it is with particles of sand and gravel as it breaks upon the shore, does something towards the disintegrating process. And thus, slowly but surely, the hardest rocks are gradually ground down to a powdery substance; and the mud thus formed, coarser or finer, as the case may be, is carried by the rush of the tides, or currents, till it reaches the comparatively deeper parts of the ocean, in which it can sink to the bottom, that is, to parts where there is a depth of about fourteen or fifteen fathoms, ...
— The Past Condition of Organic Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... wound fortuitously across the whole of our front, and we were everlastingly climbing into or out of steep-sided places. The heavy traffic of the last few days had churned up the whole countryside into a powdery dust, which rose in such heavy clouds as to make breathing difficult, and to see even the man immediately in front was ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... up at me, and a strange melancholy transformed her face.... She was at a loss for words.... 'Poor Ombos—oh, poor, cranky Ombos,' she muttered. 'One morning I found him dead in his room, with all his wonderful, brown, powdery-looking books. He was leaning on a table over an old volume that he was fond of.... And then the doctors came. He had died, they afterwards said, of failure ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... leaves, passing on to the reproductive organs in the flower—calyx, corolla, stamen, and pistil. Let the child be taught to notice that all flowers have not quite the same organs, some bearing stamens only, which shed the powdery pollen and are the male, or little father flowers; while others have the pistil only, furnished with the stigma to catch the pollen, and are the females, or little mothers; that the one sort of flowers is necessary to the other in producing the ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... are stalked (Arcyria, Stemonitis) (Fig. 5, J, K), and of various colors,—red, brown, etc. The outer part of the structure is a more or less firm wall, which breaks when ripe, discharging a powdery mass, mixed in most forms with very ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... which came in through hundreds of leaks: in this wind-swept place we had found no soft snow with which we could pack our hard snow blocks. As we flensed some blubber from one of our penguin skins the powdery drift covered ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... ground The icy wind goes roaring past, The powdery wreaths go whirling round Dancing a measure ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... the night had chased all clouds to remote quarters and had with the morning suddenly gone, leaving the city to the entire mercy of the sun. It was August and very dry and in the corners of buildings huddled little heaps of dust and elusive trash, withered and powdery. On the pavements and walls the sunlight lay like white-hot gold and the shadows cast by the awnings of Bessire's department store were sharply chiselled as by a stencil. Mary Louise paused for a moment in their shelter ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... ether with a swathe of mist around their basement, soar the double peaks, the one a pyramid, the other a bold broken crystal not unlike the Finsteraarhorn seen from Furka. These are connected by a snowy saddle, and snow is lying on their inaccessible crags in powdery drifts. Sunlight pours between them into the ravine. The green and golden forests now join from either side, and now recede, according as the sinuous valley brings their lines together or disparts them. There ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... the weather increased in severity. Blinding snow-squalls swept whirling from the northeast, accompanied by a high wind. The air was full of it,—fine, dry, powdery, like the dust of glass. The men worked covered with it as a tree is covered after a sleet. Sometimes it was impossible to work at all for hours at a time, but Thorpe did not allow a bad morning to spoil a good afternoon. The instant a lull fell ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... Ankle-deep in the powdery sand, we entered the little town with its business row facing the water front. One glance at the empty levees told you of the town's dead glory. Not a steamboat's stacks, blackening in the gloom, broke the peaceful glitter of the river under the stars. But along ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... profit to himself, which was but fair. The good Regent paid the bet, and handed over to her squire the manor of Azay-le-Brule, of which the castle had long before been demolished by the first bombardiers who came from Touraine, as everyone knows. For this powdery miracle, but for the intervention of the king, the said engineers would have been condemned as heretics and abettors of Satan, by the ecclesiastical ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... one-half full, and the rest filled with gold, relying on the form of the cavity to hold the gold, regardless of its connection with the fibrous material. If the surface is not overmalleted so as to make it brittle or powdery, a strip of No. 4 cohesive gold, of four or five thicknesses, may be driven into it with a hand mallet and plugger of medium serrations; this union is largely mechanical, but of sufficient tenacity to make manipulation easy, as the material ...
— Tin Foil and Its Combinations for Filling Teeth • Henry L. Ambler
... from them more yellow yet; for each fruit-stalk and each flower-scale at the base of the nut is veined and tipped with bright orange. It pours down the stems, semi-gray on one side, then yellow, and then, on the opposite side, covered with a powdery lichen varying in colour from orange up to clear vermilion, and spreads itself over a floor of yellow sand and brown fallen nuts, and the only vegetation of which, in general, is a long crawling Echites, with pairs of large cream-white flowers. Thus the transparent ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... threshold. Like the sergeant they had stooped, hands on spread knees, necks twisted awry in the effort to pierce the thick mirk beneath the ragged arch of masonry that spanned the wide hearth where the ashes of long-dead fires lay in powdery grey drifts, and, like the sergeant, they had seen nothing. When you covered the man-hole between the platform-edge and the chimney-wall with the sooty board and the old sack, it was impossible for anyone below to see ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... hunted about until he found a dead white-birch sapling. This he easily thrust to the ground with a strong push of his hand. The jar burst here and there the hard envelope of the birch bark to expose a quantity of half-powdery, decayed wood, dry as tinder and almost as inflammable as gunpowder. Into a handful of this Sam threw the sparks from his flint and steel. The bark itself fed admirably the first flame. By the time Dick returned, the fire ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... a broader valley, jagged with spires flashing with gleams of the moon on frequent mirror-like surfaces. Ten thousand men could have been concealed in this desolate cavern. Yet it rang with emptiness as, far arear, a steel prod struck powdery fire from ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... themselves on one side. The stars are two, three, or four times as numerous on one side of the nebul as on the other. These nebul, as far as appearance goes, might be likened to rail fences, or thin hedges, against which the wind is driving drifts of powdery snow, which, while scattered plentifully all around, tends to bank itself on the leeward side of the obstruction. The imagination is at a loss to account for these extraordinary phenomena; yet there they are, faithfully giving us their images whenever the photographic plate is exposed ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... and obscurity, clothed in a dense pall of smoke. At Rome there was sunshine, but twenty miles south hung a misty veil, and twenty-five miles above Naples a zone of semi-obscurity began, blotting out the sun, whose light trickled through with a sickly glare. Everything was whitened with powdery dust; pretty white villas were daubed and dripping with mud, and people were busy shoveling ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... resolutely exposed my skin to the burning rays of the sun, which were reflected from the glittering frozen surfaces, though the sun itself was hidden by clouds. The fissures in the glacier were few and very narrow, and we employed the ladder but once or twice in the immense plain of powdery snow which, towards eight o'clock, opened before us. It was then that our real sufferings began. The heat was excessive; walking, slow and very difficult, for at each step we sank almost to our knees. Sometimes the foot could find no bottom, and when we withdrew it ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... the Mason-bee, "which rakes the roads for a dry powdery dust and mixes it with saliva to convert it into a hard cement," foresee that this mud ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... at the dam, a little cavalcade moved slowly through the darkness of a moonless, cloudy night. A southeast wind was blowing, but it was a drying wind, with no promise of rain. It had blown for days steadily, until it had sucked every vestige of moisture from the top earth, leaving it merely powdery dust. Because of it, too, no dew had fallen; the nights were as dry ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... bitterly cold, everything crisp and sparkling in the sun; but there was no sign of fresh snow, and the ski-ers began to grumble. On the mountains was an icy crust that made "running" dangerous; they wanted the frozen, dry, and powdery snow that makes for speed, renders steering easier and falling less severe. But the keen east wind showed no signs of changing for a whole ten days. Then, suddenly, there came a touch of softer air and the weather-wise began ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... thing had struck, three hundred yards across the field. We found a great funnel-shaped pit torn in the naked earth. It was a dozen yards across, fifteen feet deep, and surrounded with a powdery ring of white sand and ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... infested shoots are examined in summer, thousands of minute insects, of a pale yellow color, and covered with a powdery exudation, will be found sucking the juices of the succulent stem and leaves, causing the crimping, curling, and twisting of these ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... on. Their feet struck up the powdery snow, their breath smoked into the sharp clear air, and they were gone before the air was cleared of snow and vapour. Now and then Christian glanced up to judge, by the rising of the stars, of the coming of midnight. ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... eyelids, has gone home in a cab. Soon, in the great theatre, the lights will be put out, and the empty stage will be left to ghosts. Hark! midnight from the church tower vibrates through the frosty air. I look out on the brilliant heaven, and see a milky way of powdery splendour wandering through it, and clusters and knots of stars and planets shining serenely in the blue frosty spaces; and the armed apparition of Orion, his spear pointing away into immeasurable space, ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... but their shoes. The netting and lines became flabby. The moccasins, with which Hendrick had supplied them from the bundle he carried for his own use, were reduced to something of the nature of tripe. The damp snow, which when rendered powdery by frost had fallen through the net-work of the shoes, now fell upon it in soft heaps and remained there, increasing the weight so much as to wrench joints and strain muscles, while the higher temperature rendered exertion fatiguing ...
— The Crew of the Water Wagtail • R.M. Ballantyne
... resinous dead limbs from the pine trees, and perhaps the heart of a dead pine stub or stump. Then, with infinite patience, you may be able to tease the flame. Sometimes a small dead birch contains in the waterproof envelope of its bark a species of powdery, dry touchwood that takes the flame readily. Still, it is easy enough to start a blaze—a very fine-looking, cheerful, healthy blaze; the difficulty is to prevent its petering out the moment your ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... Slender Cliff Brake. Cryptogramma Stelleri Parsley Fern. Cryptogramma acrostichoides Alabama Lip Fern. Cheilanthes alabamensis Hairy Lip Fern. Cheilanthes lanosa Slender Lip Fern. Cheilanthes Feei Pinnae of Slender Lip Fern Powdery Cloak Fern. Notholaena dealbata Common Chain Fern. Woodwardia virginica Net-veined Chain Fern. Woodwardia areolata The Spleenworts Pinnatifid Spleenwort. Asplenium pinnatifidum Scott's Spleenwort. Asplenium ebenoides Green Spleenwort. ...
— The Fern Lover's Companion - A Guide for the Northeastern States and Canada • George Henry Tilton
... final height, an eastern wind can blow), and this wind carried I know not what dust of ice, that did not make a perceptible fall, yet in an hour covered my clothes with tiny spangles, and stung upon the face like Highland snow in a gale. With that wind and that fine, powdery frost went no apparent clouds. The sky was still clear above me. Such rare stars as can conquer the full moon shone palely; but round the moon herself bent an evanescent halo, like those one sees over the Channel upon clear nights before a ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... inconsiderable, trivial; infinitesimal, homoeopathic[obs3]; atomic, subatomic, corpuscular, molecular; rudimentary, rudimental; embryonic, vestigial. weazen|!, scant, scraggy, scrubby; thin &c. (narrow) 203; granular &c. (powdery) 330; shrunk &c. 195; brevipennate[obs3]. Adv. in a small compass, in a nutshell; on a small ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... literally threw itself into the air, bursting into flaming fragments as it rose, and then tumbling back upon itself in a smoking pile that lay projecting half into the water of the lake. There was no fire—what smoke there was drifted off mingling with the sunshine, and for a few minutes longer a powdery dust of marble drifted from the great featureless pile that had once been the house of jewels. There was no more sound and the three people were alone ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... disease of plants, particularly of cereals, which causes the plant or some part of it to become a powdery mass. ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... Dulse is first well washed in fresh water, and exposed in the air to dry, when it gives out a white powdery substance, which is sweet and palatable, covering the whole plant. The weed is presently packed in cases, and protected from the air, so that being thus preserved, it may either be eaten as it is, or boiled in milk, and mixed with flour of rye. The powdery ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... reluctant to re-enter the stream progressing along the road. The dust was ankle-deep there, choking thick when stirred by feet and hoof to a powdery cloud. In contrast, there were no clouds in the sky, and the sun promised to be a ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... of another variety, in such a way as to effect its fertilization. This is done by cutting away (with scissors) the stamens of the flower to be fertilized, a short time before they arrive at maturity, and taking a flower in which the pollen is ripe, dry, and powdery, from the stalk of the variety wished for the male parent; and holding it in the right hand, and then striking it on the finger of the left, held near the flower, thus scattering the pollen on the stigma of the pistil of the flower to be fertilized. The utmost care should be ...
— The $100 Prize Essay on the Cultivation of the Potato; and How to Cook the Potato • D. H. Compton and Pierre Blot
... the moment that his guide left him dangers beset him, and those spirits called the Mockers, which are the evil deeds of a man crying to Heaven, came crying about him from the dead white trees, breathing through the powdery air, whistling down the moonlight; so that to cheer him he called out again and again, like ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... say, four grains to the ounce of water, that the pyrites or other base began to decompose, and the iron sulphide changed to yellow oxide, the "gossan" of our lodes, and that though the gold was deposited, this occurred in an irregular way, and it was coated with a dark brown powdery film something like the "black gold," often found in drifts containing much ferruginous matter. Such were the curious Victorian nuggets ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... of St. Voltaire, as though pulled forward by a gigantic and irresistible hand, leaned from the window. Further he leaned and further until suddenly one of the stones loosened under his weight, broke from its cement with a soft powdery sound—and, first headlong, then head over heels, finally in a vast and impressive revolution tumbled the Chevalier O'Keefe, bound for the hard earth ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... snowstorm with a gale of wind. The snow here is not flaky, but fine and powdery, fills the air so you cannot see ahead, and sifts through every crevice. Thankful when the blast died down. Mrs Auld declares if the summer heat and the winter cauld were carded through ane anither Canada would have a grand climate. The two extremes ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... warm strength. I gaze lovingly at the rich brown earth, so lately freed from the frost's grasp, through which the blunt green buds are gently forcing themselves. I look down the flaming crocus throats—the imperial purple goblets with powdery gold stamens—and at the modest little pink faces of the hepaticas. All over our wood there is a faint yet certain purply shade, forerunner of the summer green, and the loud and sweet-voiced birds are abroad. O Spring! Spring! with all your ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... some saddle-horses, and rode out into the beautiful country round Exeter, but the preface to our poem was rather dry prose. We rode for about an hour between powdery hedges all smothered in dust, up the steepest of hills, and under the hottest of suns; but we had our reward when we halted at the top, and looked down upon a magnificent panorama of land and water, hill and dale, broad smiling meadows, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... thought. The snow had begun to come. She knew well that it would go on falling, not to-day perhaps, nor to-morrow, but as certainly as time would bring the following days, so certainly the snow would fall, covering the frozen surface of the earth and water with foot above foot of powdery whiteness. Far as she now was from the gay, active throng of fellow-creatures which she conceived as existing in the outer world, and with whom she longed to be, the snow would make that distance not only great, but impassable ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... is the mountain roe: 25 With many a wanton stroke Her feet disperse the powdery snow, That ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... hours—remained with him as most typical of Helen's most significant and charming self. It was her aspect of mystery and that faint hint of bitterness that he found so charming; Helen herself he never thought of as mysterious. Mystery was a mere outward asset of her beauty, like the powdery surface of a moth's wing. He didn't think of Helen as mysterious, perhaps because he thought little about her at all; he only looked and listened while she made him think about everything but herself, and ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the faint clashing swinging sound of cymbals, melting the air with his beams, and with such rapid steps the morning travels, that already his rays are gilding the distant western mountains. Meanwhile we step hastily along through the powdery snow, warmed by an inward heat, enjoying an Indian summer still, in the increased glow of thought and feeling. Probably if our lives were more conformed to nature, we should not need to defend ourselves ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... proved to be the driest known in years. Days, weeks, and even months passed without a drop of rain falling from the brassy sky, and the fine powdery dust permeated everywhere. The weather prophet lost caste, but he persisted in announcing rain, knowing that he had only to stick to it long enough to hit it in ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... no difficulty in remembering Vera, though it was more than six years since they had seen her; for Vera looked the same. Her hair still shone like copper-beech leaves; her face had still the same colour and the same sweet, powdery smell. And if these things had changed Frances would still have known her by her forehead that looked so broad because her eyebrows and her eyes were so long, and by her fine, unfinished, passionate mouth, by her pointed chin ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... then I looked back to observe the progress of the conflagration. Dark wreaths were rising higher and higher in the sky, and below them forked flames ever and anon darted up as the fire caught the more combustible vegetation. Borne by the wind, light powdery ashes fell around us, while we were sensible of a strong odour of burning, which made it appear as if the enemy was already close at our heels. The grass on every side was too tall and dry to enable us— as is frequently done under such circumstances, ...
— Adventures in the Far West • W.H.G. Kingston
... threaded its way under the window-curtain, and fell in a spot of fluid gold upon the mirror. He watched it move silently across the powdery surface: suddenly another dimpling pool appeared on the soot of the chimney-back, and his eye followed the tremulous beam to its entrance over the top of the shutter. The birds were shouting now in full voice. How fond ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... that it is in the nature of a heap of couch-grass, when kindled in calm weather, to smoulder for many days, and even weeks, until the whole mass is reduced to a powdery charcoal ash, displaying the while scarcely a sign of combustion beyond the volcano-like smoke from its summit; but the continuance of this quiet process is throughout its length at the mercy of one particular whim of Nature: that is, a sudden breeze, by which ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... here that a strange adventure came to him. It was midwinter, and he went out, long after midnight, to walk in a beautiful garden. A dry powdery snow crunched beneath his feet, and overhead the stars gleamed and quivered, so bright that he felt like stretching out his hands to them. The world lay still, and awful in its beauty; and here suddenly, unsuspected—unheralded, and quite unsought—there came to Thyrsis a strange and portentous ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... wind awakes; I hear him girding at the trees; He strikes the bending boughs, and shakes The quiet clusters of the bees To powdery drift; He tosses them away, He drives them like spray; He makes them veer and shift Around his blustering path. In clouds blindly whirling, In rings madly swirling, Full of crazy wrath, So furious and fast they fly They blur the earth and blot the sky In wild, white mirk. They ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke
... had been watching groped their way through the powdery cloud, as it swirled and eddied, towards the dark blotch at the foot of the stairs which was all that could be distinguished ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... the powdery snow, As night's dim footsteps pass; But waiting, in its grave below, Green ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... trouble in growing gooseberries successfully is the powdery mildew—a dirty, whitish fungous growth covering both fruit and leaves. It is especially destructive of the foreign varieties, the culture of which, until the advent of the potassium sulfide spray, was being practically abandoned. Use 1 oz. of potassium sulfide (liver of ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... up the bag and looked at it. It must have been unfastened, for the next instant there was an avalanche on the snowfield of the counterpane—some money, a wisp of a handkerchief, a tiny booklet with thin leaves, covered with a powdery substance—and a necklace. I drew myself up slowly ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... my 'andsome, so 'a ded!" applauded the miller, whose big form, powdery white, had appeared in ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... the Sioux, stands sentinel over the sisterhood slumbering at her feet. These are the Black Hills of Dakota, as we see them from the breaks of the Mini Pusa, a long day's march to the west. Here to our right, southeastward, rolls the powdery flood of the South Cheyenne, when earlier in the season the melting snows go trickling down the hill-sides. But to-day only in dry and waving ripples of sand can we trace its course. If you would see the water, ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... in the calmest weather, prevail there. Although, out on the plain, there was a scarcely perceptible breeze, we had to literally fight our way against the terrific gusts that swept through this narrow gorge. Fortunately, it was a fine day, but the fine powdery snow whirled up and cut into our eyes and faces, and made travelling ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... his atmosphere had already filtered away with the wind to wherever it was going. Lljub's pale glow was out for good, and his crystalline heart was as opaque as a dead eye. Only a few pieces of Urdaz's tank were visible, and Urdaz himself had already turned to a powdery food that the wind ate slowly ...
— Has Anyone Here Seen Kelly? • Bryce Walton
... in some localities the materials from which Portland cement is made are of such a powdery character that they have to be combined or moulded into balls or bricks previous to calcination in the ordinary way, thus entailing expense which would be entirely obviated by the adoption of the patent revolving furnace, as has been proved by the author in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various
... back—there is that difference between going to the city and going home. I often think the trip in is worth while for the sake of the trip out, such joy is it to pull in from the black, soughing woods to the cheer of the house, stamping the powdery snow off your boots and greatcoat to the sweet din of welcomes that drown the ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... catch the light, dust that lay upon lawns and walks and houses in deep gray accumulation ... precisely as if these were objects put away and never used and not disturbed until they were white with the inevitable powdery accretion that accompanies disuse. Indeed, he felt that way about Tawnleytown, as if it were a closed room of the world, a room of long ago, unused ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... the town, on the road that follows the Vistula northwards to Dirschau and Dantzig. The horses were tired, and stumbled on the powdery snow which was heavy, like sand, and of a sandy colour. Here and there, by the side of the road, were great stains of blood and the remains of a horse that had been killed, and eaten raw. The faces of many of the men were smeared ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... granary of western Asia. Except in the extreme south, the rainfall is small and the air dry. The heat in summer is intense, while bitterly cold northern blasts sweep the plain in winter. Whirlwinds are not uncommon; and, in the intervals of the periodical inundations, the fine, dry, powdery soil is swept, even by moderate breezes, into stifling clouds, or rather fogs, of dust. Low inequalities, elevations here and depressions there, diversify the surface of the alluvial region. The latter are occupied by enormous marshes, while the former support the ...
— Hasisadra's Adventure - Essay #7 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... back to the sleigh, on the rear of which the frozen fish was piled. I noticed that it had a faint, slightly aromatic odor. I flung the hard masses aside and scooped up a powdery substance ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... during the afternoon; and at night-time the storm grew worse. We put back supper, expecting her to come in at any minute, but she did not come. The hours went by, and still she did not come, and still the storm worsened. The wind was not very high, but the air was full of a fine, powdery, drifting snow; the night seemed full of snow; snow fell down the chimney and drifted in under the door. My uncle was too lame with sciatica to leave his bed; and my aunt, always a woman of poor spirit, was afraid of the night. At eight o'clock I could ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... winter, however, did not last long, except in the sheltered places. Fortunately for Neale, almost all of his section of the survey ran over open ground. But this fact augured seriously for his task when the dry and powdery snow of midwinter began to fall and sweep before the wind and drift over the lee side ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... and it is perfectly assimilated to the calcareous matrix. 2. Here is a mass of indurated clay; and a gentle blow has exposed part of two Ammonites, smaller than the former, but their shells are white and powdery like chalk. 3. Another fragment is laid open; and there, quite unmistakably, lie the umbo and greater portion of the Plagiostoma concentricum. 4. Another fragment of a granular gritty structure ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller |
