"Serpentine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mines, and quarries of marble, granite, onyx, serpentine, limestone and sandstone—beds of fire clay, kaolin, fire and potter's clays, talc and asbestos and many prospects ...
— A Review of the Resources and Industries of the State of Washington, 1909 • Ithamar Howell
... bright river he saw rise a line of brighter palaces, arched and pillared, and inlaid with deep red porphyry, and with serpentine; along the quays before their gates were riding troops of knights, noble in face and form, dazzling in crest and shield; horse and man one labyrinth of quaint colour and gleaming light—the purple, and silver, and scarlet fringes flowing over the ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... I remember with what contempt, in his sweet forgivable way, the old man spoke of much that passes nowadays for criticism. He said Hazlitt was exactly the opposite of Lord Chesterfield, who advised his son, if he could not get at a thing in a straight line, to try the serpentine one. There were no crooked pathways in Hazlitt's intellect. His style is brilliant, but never cloyed with ornamentation. Hazlitt's paper on Gifford was thought by Procter to be as pungent a bit of writing as had appeared in his day, and he quoted this paragraph ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... in my uncle Toby, a singleness of heart which misled him so far out of the little serpentine tracks in which things of this nature usually go on; you can—you can have no conception of it: with this, there was a plainness and simplicity of thinking, with such an unmistrusting ignorance of the plies and foldings of the heart of woman;—and so naked and defenceless ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... is Mompava, about sixteen miles to the northward of Pontiana, and the second port belonging to the sultan. The river is shallow, narrow, extremely serpentine, and constantly running down with great rapidity. The country around is a paradise in comparison with Pontiana. It is upon an elevated site, and, wherever the eye reaches, it is clear of jungle, and of fine rich mold, susceptible of the highest culture. ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... waters like a gigantic whip, and writhes like a worm that you tread on. The water is splashed for a long way around. The spray almost blinds us. But soon the reptile's agony draws to an end; its movements become fainter, its contortions cease to be so violent, and the long serpentine form lies a lifeless log on the ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... we left Camp 68 at 11.40; it is situated on the west bank of the creek. When we had followed the creek down for about twenty miles on its west bank where we encamped. Following the creek took us in a serpentine course and in generally a north-westerly direction. When we had travelled twelve and a quarter miles or thereby we crossed our track from Camp 67. In the first half of today's journey, to avoid losing the creek, we had to keep very near to it because of ...
— Journal of Landsborough's Expedition from Carpentaria - In search of Burke and Wills • William Landsborough
... times the wail is renewed, and their bodies lacerated as at the interment. At Boga Lake, I saw a grave with a very neat hut of reeds made over it, surmounted by netting, and having a long curious serpentine double trench, of a few inches deep, surrounding it; possibly it might have been the burial place of the native mentioned by Major Mitchell, as having been shot by his black, ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... said he, at length. 'How different from those Cyclopean blocks and walls along the Exmoor cliffs are these rich purple and olive ironstone layers, with their sharp serrated lines and polished slabs, set up on edge, snapped, bent double, twisted into serpentine curves, every sheet of cliff scored with sharp parallel lines at some fresh ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... Representing in terms of weight the mineralogical changes in the katamorphism of serpentine rocks to iron ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... The road to the ford skirted the hill to the left till it reached the bank, then ran parallel with the creek to a point about on a line with the farm house, where it turned to the left and, crossing the stream, took a serpentine course up the opposite slope. This latter was wooded and dotted on both sides of the road with piles of rails behind ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... alone has, instinctively, comprehended that there was, beneath this outward sign, an inward and mysterious grace: it followed the action of the piece in all its serpentine windings; it listened for four hours, with pious attention (avec recueillement et religion), to the sound of this rolling river of thoughts, which may have appeared to it new and bold, perhaps, but chaste and grave; and it retired, with its head on its breast, like a man who had just perceived, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Queen-dowager was wise and good, and tried her best to make her people happy. The only thing she had to vex her was the absence of her daughter; for the fairies, for reasons of their own, determined to bring up the little Princess Serpentine ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Various
... is indeed a grand animal, growing to the height of the tallest ox, and endowed with wonderful activity, as well as power. See him as he dashes through the forest, his branched horns separating in serpentine curves, six feet from tip to tip, laid close over his back as he makes his way amid the trees. His head is of a lively, yellowish-brown hue, the neck covered with reddish and black hairs, the latter of considerable length, descending ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... knowledge of the world was small, her enthusiasm great—and evidently she believed in Harriet's faithlessness—so that love added to the impatience of youth, which could not foresee the dreadful future. Without doubt, could they both have imagined the scene by the Serpentine three years later, they would have shrunk from the action which was a strong link in the chain ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... recent experience at the whip, he should meet with any mishap; but, picturing to himself the awkwardness of three in such circumstances, Bob would not hear of this; and nothing more serious happened to his driving than that the wheel-marks formed two serpentine lines along the road during the first mile or two, before he had got his hand in, and that the horse shied at a milestone, a piece of paper, a sleeping tramp, and a wheelbarrow, just to make use of the opportunity of ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... sometimes the name of the place of their manufacture, but more generally a text from the Koran, in letters of gold. Amongst those in my possession is one with a blade of singular construction: it is very broad, and the edge notched into serpentine curves like the ripple of water, or the wavering of flame. I asked the Armenian who sold it, what possible use such a figure could add: he said, in Italian, that he did not know; but the Mussulmans had an idea that those of this form gave a severer wound; and liked it because it was "piu ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... up the dry river bed, with the Great Wall on the left stretching its serpentine length across the hills, and on the right picturesque cliffs two hundred feet in height. At their bases nestle mud-roofed cottages and Chinese inns, but farther up the river the low hills are all of loess—brown, wind-blown dust, packed ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... Then he and eight other gentlemen of about the same age went down in a body to Kew one Saturday, with the idea of hiring a boat there, and pulling to Richmond and back; one of their number, a shock-headed youth, named Joskins, who had once or twice taken out a boat on the Serpentine, told them it ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... this time the whole of the otter's head was visible as it swam up-stream. The animal was flagging, and on reaching shoaler water it sprang out altogether now and then, rising and falling in the stronger stream with a curious serpentine motion. In fact, as head and body bent in the same sinuous curves, it looked less like an animal than a plunging fish. The men guarding the rapid stood ready with their poles, and more were wading and splashing up both sides of the pool. The otter's pace ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... the external finish of life; there were others when they gave a sharper edge to the meagreness of her own opportunities. This was one of the moments when the sense of contrast was uppermost, and she turned away impatiently as Mrs. George Dorset, glittering in serpentine spangles, drew Percy Gryce in her wake to a confidential ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... him go into the country until he was considered old enough to go with one of the annual school treats. His mother told him that the country in Cornwall was infinitely more beautiful than Kensington Gardens, and that compared with the sea the Serpentine was nothing at all. The sea! He had heard it once in a prickly shell, and it had sounded beautiful. As for the country he had read a story by Mrs. Ewing called Our Field, and if the country was the tiniest part as wonderful as ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... door on its hinges, while it opened and shut behind the undulating shape in the aperture. Then a low throaty ejaculation—the black's call of warning. And now with a quickness incredible, the wriggling movement of two blanket-shrouded serpentine shapes round the hide-house—in and out among the grass tussocks and the low herbage, now hidden for a moment by friendly gum shadows in the dimness, now dark moving blurrs upon the lesser darkness, and ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... cross this quivering wavering bridge in the total darkness? Beneath our feet it swayed and leaped like rotten ice on the magic Serpentine. ...
— HE • Andrew Lang
... imagine," writes Sir Alexander Burnes, "a plain about twenty miles in circumference, laid out with gardens and fields in pleasing irregularity, intersected by three rivulets which wind through it by a serpentine course, and dotted with innumerable little forts and villages, he will have before him one of the meadows of Cabul." To complete the picture the reader must conceive the grey barren hills, which, contrasting strongly with the fertility of the plains they encompass, ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... Church, on Ninth and West streets, is a large Gothic temple, seating nearly eight hundred persons—warmed, frescoed and heavily carpeted inside, and walled externally with brownstone mixed with the delicate pea-green serpentine of Chadd's Ford. The architect was a native Wilmingtonian—Thomas Dixon—now of Baltimore. The windows, including a very brilliant oriel, are finely stained: the font is a delicate piece of carving, the organ is grand, and the accommodations for Sunday-schools ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... one of those neglected gardens near Moscow, laid out in the days of Catherine. He had an excellent reason for doing so, since this statue, though highly artistic, in the rococo style, with plump little arms, tossing curls, a wreath of roses round the bare bosom, and a serpentine figure, was obtained by him, the agent, for nothing. And so to this day the mythological goddess stands, with one foot elegantly lifted, above the tomb of Tihon Ivanovitch, and with a genuinely Pompadour simper, gazes at the calves and ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... philosophy of Initiation may be summed up as—, 322-u. Septenary unites the triangle of Idea to the square of Form, becoming the Crown, 321-l. Septenary universally in repute, 635-u. Serapis represented with a human head and serpentine tail, 500-m. Serapis, the name of the Sun to his adorers on the Nile, 587-l. Serpent an emblem of eternity and immortality, 496-l. Serpents and Dragons have something divine in their nature, 494-m. Serpent and the bull used as symbols in Bakchian Mysteries, 420-u. Serpent, brazen, erected ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... Bredon Hill hides the sight both of it and Tewkesbury smoke: just below on either side the Broadway lie the grey houses of the village street ending with a lovely house of the fourteenth century; above the road winds serpentine up the steep hill-side, whose crest looking westward sees the glorious map I have been telling of spread before it, but eastward strains to look on Oxfordshire, and thence all waters run towards Thames: all about ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... don't know many of the boys who sail boats in the Serpentine: you will have to make their acquaintance yourself. But I know one boy whom I must bring to the house. He is a German-Jew boy, who is going to be another Mendelssohn, his friends say. He is a pretty boy, with ruddy-brown hair, big black eyes and a fine forehead; and he really sings ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... were the only intelligent beings occupying this world before our tenancy of it; nor that we are even now the exclusive occupants. On the contrary, it makes very distinct allusions to other races, capable of assuming serpentine, swinish, and human bodies, and of meddling disastrously in earthly affairs in former times; though, as it does not profess to teach us truths which do not concern us, it gives us no narration of the creation or history of pre-Adamite animals or men. But there is no more ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... fine terrace crowns its summits. A bridge of boats, over which you pass into France, is immediately in view. Upon the whole, these gardens, which seem to be laid out in the English fashion, and which are occasionally varied by some pleasing serpentine walks, are left in a sad state of neglect. The breeze from the river plays freely along the osiers and willows, with which its banks are plentifully planted; and I generally felt refreshed by half an hour's walk upon the broad, ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... for one of centre. But the stiffening of the fold by the thorn which holds it out is very like the action of a ship's spars on its sails; and absolutely in many cases like that of the spines in a fish's fin, passing into the various conditions of serpentine and dracontic crest, connected with all the terrors and adversities of nature; not to be dealt with in ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... Here the serpentine lie invents new forms. At first it usurps divine power. It is supposed to say 541:24 in the first instance, "Ye shall be as gods." Now it repudiates even the human duty of man ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... to shoot out a thousand serpentine heads or knots of water, which wriggle down deliberately through the air and expend themselves in mist before half the descent is over. Then a new set burst from the body and sides of the fall, with the same ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... did draw and cast down abundance of the stars of heaven to the earth. Rev. 12:4; Isa. 9:14,15. The prophet that speaketh lies either by opinion or practice, he is the tail, the dragon's tail, the serpentine tail of the devil. Isa. 9:14,15. And so in his order, every professor that by his iniquity draweth both himself and others down to hell, he is the tail. Nor can Satan work such exploits by any, as he can by unrighteous professors. These he useth in his hand as the giant useth his club; he, ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... longed for a trail—a faint, meandering trail that would swing from the road, dip into a sand arroyo, edge slanting up the farther bank, wriggle round a cluster of small hills, shoot out across a mesa, and climb slowly toward those hills to the west, finally to contort itself into serpentine switchbacks as it sought the crest—and once on the crest (which was in reality but the visible edge of another great mesa), there would be grass for a horse and cedar-wood for a fire, and water with ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... committed an economy in placing in my original title-page, that the question between him and me, was whether "Dr. Newman teaches that Truth is no virtue." It was a "wisdom of the serpentine type," since I did not add, "for its own sake." Now observe: First, as to the matter of fact, in the course of my Letters, which bore that title-page, I printed the words "for its own sake," five times ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... in the king's garden at Paris, a species of serpentine aloe without prickles, whose large and beautiful flower exhales a strong odor of the vanilla, during the time of its expansion, which is very short. It does not blow till towards the month of ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... rapidly produce a pressure of nine atmospheres or more by direct heating. The flanges of the tubing are provided with a cut-off of angle iron identical with that of the tube, D. By means of this arrangement the cocks and the flanges, E, permit of communication between the serpentine tubing, R, and the boiler being interrupted; while the heat developed by the fire-place, F, causes an active circulation in both ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... towering cliffs, and behind a lonely rock, pierced with many caves and blow-holes through which the sea in storm time sent its thunderous voice, together with a fountain of drifting spume. Hence, it wound westwards in a serpentine course, guarded at its entrance by two little curving piers to left and right. These were roughly built of dark slates placed endways and held together with great beams bound with iron bands. Thence, it flowed up the rocky bed ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... meeting," Pedro said. All peered around. None saw anything but the upstanding roots, the forest jumble, the misty serpentine lianas. None heard any sound but their own hoarse breathing, the solemn drip of water, the insect hum, and the occasional melancholy notes of birds. The place seemed bare of life. Yet upon McKay came again ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... the work advanced. At first the walls took a beeline track up the hillside, but when they reached the higher ground, where scars of rock and patches of reedy swamp lay in their path, their progress became serpentine. But whether straight or winding, the white walls mounted ever upwards, and Peregrine knew that his doom was sealed. The moors which Ibbotsons had shepherded for two hundred years would soon pass out of his charge; the most ancient of callings, ...
— Tales of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... 541, which shows the fourth part of the square 4 times larger than full size, it is easy to see how the framework is darned. When the latter is entirely darned, work the patterns in the different squares in button-hole stitch. The circular and serpentine patterns consist of 3 rows of button-hole stitch; the patterns which imitate whole rosettes and half rosettes are worked in rows of button-hole stitch. For each row the thread must be first drawn from one place to the other, as ...
— Beeton's Book of Needlework • Isabella Beeton
... do not think you are wise to have asked a large circle of distinguished French sporting friends to bring their rods over with a view to salmon-fishing in the Serpentine. Trout, there may be; no doubt, there are, but we have some doubts about salmon. Your suggestion that if you can't get a rise you might perhaps "bang away" at the waterfowl, certainly has a more promising sound, but we would advise you to commence ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 29, 1890 • Various
... with his father and mother; she had brought her knitting so as not to waste a minute; and while they talked of him, her needles clicked rapidly to and fro. Mrs. Wallace was lying in a long chair, coiled up in a serpentine, characteristic attitude; every movement wafted to him the oppressive perfume she wore; the smile on her lips, the caress of her eyes, were maddening. He loved her more even than he had imagined; his love was a fury, blind and destroying. ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... the purest ivory alone can give an idea of the dazzling whiteness of her polished satin skin, of a texture so fresh and so firm, that some drops of water, collected and still remaining about the roots of her hair from the bath, rolled in serpentine lines over her shoulders, like pearls, or beads, of crystal, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... hanging down—somewhat in the attitude of the amazons of Hyde Park or the Bois de Boulogne on horseback. She was so small that her swinging foot did not reach the table, over which the trail of her dress extended in a serpentine line. But her face and figure were those of an adult. The fulness of her corsage and the roundness of her waist could leave no doubt of that, even for an old savant like myself. I will venture to add that she was very handsome, with a proud mien; for my iconographic ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... had formerly lent to the Egyptian magi. Of this fact, however, Goodman Brown could not take cognizance. He had cast up his eyes in astonishment, and, looking down again, beheld neither Goody Cloyse nor the serpentine staff, but his fellow-traveller alone, who waited for him as calmly as if nothing ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... glanced down at the parterre he had so fondly fostered. The golden moonlight mellowed every object, and not the gorgeous pictures of Persian poets surpassed the quiet scene that greeted the master. The shelled serpentine walks were bordered with low, closely clipped cassina hedges; clusters of white and rose oleander, scarlet geraniums, roses of countless variety, beds of verbena of every hue, and patches of brilliant annuals, all looked up smilingly at him. Just beneath the window the clasping ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... the Emperor Justinian in 537 A.D. (fire having destroyed the edifice originally erected by Constantine and replaced by the church built by Theodosia, which was also burned). The dome is one hundred and eighty feet from the floor. To adorn it, the Temple of Diana at Ephesus was ravaged of eight serpentine columns, and eight more of porphyry were taken from the Temple of the Sun at Baalbek to add to its beauty. It is alleged that its cost approached $64,000,000, including the "graft." Its artistic value ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... of the numerous accidents occasioned by skaiting on the Serpentine River, measures are taking to put a top ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... evening dress, and looked eminently refined, although worn and haggard in appearance. Denzil noted two peculiar marks about him; the first, a serpentine cicatrice extending on the right cheek from lip almost to ear; the second, the loss of the little finger of the left hand, which was cut off at the first joint. As he examined the man a second and more violent fit of coughing ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... Nomentana, we came to a strange place, situate in an oasis in the wilderness, or rather in what is already the beginning of a new country—the mere mounds of tufo turning into high slopes, and a few trees (it is odd how they immediately give a soul to this soulless desert), leafless at present, serpentine along the greener grass. And there, with the russet of an oakwood behind, rises a square huddle of buildings, a tall brick watch-tower, battlemented and corbelled in the midst, and a great bay-tree at each corner. On the tower, immediately below the battlements, is the inscription, in ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... which is so well supplied with water that almost every house has a fountain of curious workmanship, many of them splendidly ornamented with embossed or carved work. Outwardly their houses are very plain, but the insides are beautifully adorned with various ornaments of the stone called oplus or serpentine marble. The city contains many temples which they call mosques, the most beautiful of which is built after the manner of St Peters at Rome, and as large, only that the middle has no roof being entirely open, all the rest of the temple being vaulted. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... of these amulets preserved in museums it is seen that any greenish stone was selected, preferably those yielding a high, vitreous polish, as jadeite, turquoise, emerald, chlormelanite or precious serpentine. The color gave the sacred character, and this, it seems to me, was distinctly meant to be symbolic of water and its effects, the green of growing plants, and hence of fertility, ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... pipes. And after this, in the summer, we would walk in Kensington Gardens and see the Rank and Fashion. In those days the Rank and Fashion were not above showing themselves in the Kensington Gardens of a Sunday afternoon, crossing the Serpentine Bridge again and again ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... light shimmered from the sea, Until she slept, and saw the sea in dreams. Except in stormy nights, when all was dark, And the wild tempest swept with slanting wing Against her refuge; and the heavy spray Shot through the doorway serpentine cold arms To seize the fore-doomed morsel of the sea: Then she slept never; and she would have died, But that she evermore was stung to life By new sea-terrors. Sometimes the sea-gull With clanging pinions darted through the arch, And flapped ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... of two human feet, right and left, with the impressions of the toes very distinctly cut, like the marks left by a person walking on the soft sandy shore of the sea. They are surrounded by a number of waving circular and serpentine lines exceedingly curious. On Calais pier may be seen a footprint where Louis XVIII. landed in 1814; and on the rocks of Magdesprung, a village in the Hartz Mountains, a couple of hundred feet apart, are two immense footprints, which tradition ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... universe and the repetition in miniature of this constitution in the human body which contains various nervous centres and subtle channels for the passage of energy unknown to vulgar anatomy. Thus the Sakti who pervades the universe is also present in the body as Kundalini, a serpentine coil of energy, and it is part of Sadhana to arouse this energy and make it mount from the lower to the higher centres. Kundalini is also present in sounds and in letters. Hence if different parts of the body are touched to the accompaniment of appropriate mantras (which ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... have got over a third of the distance between the Bayswater Road and the Serpentine, when he was aware of a small, thin ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... serpentine curves the road wound through a wood of small beech trees—so small that in the November dishevelment the plantations were like brushwood; and lying behind the wind-swept opening were gravel walks, and the green spaces of the cricket field with a solitary divine reading his breviary. ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... sat at her desk and, without any palpable hesitation, wrote to Stanley asking him to meet her within an hour by the bridge over the Serpentine in St. James's Park." ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 9, 1919 • Various
... casually distributed chairs. I had a queer feeling that whenever I wasn't looking at them straight they went askew, and moved about, and played a noiseless puss-in-the-corner behind my back. And the cornice had a serpentine design with masks—masks altogether ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... and shine, you tripe-hounds!" ... Broken dreams on a smelly, straw-stuffed pillow and lumpy straw-stuffed pallet, dreams of "Circle and cha-a-a-a-a-a-a-nge" "On the Fore-hand, Right About" "Right Pass, Shoulder Out" "Serpentine" "Order Lance" "Trail Lance" "Right Front Thrust" (for the front rank of the Queen's Greys carry lances); dreams of riding wild mad horses to unfathomable precipices and ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... Canadian forts play all sorts of tricks with gunpowder and slow fuse so I just adopted some of them. It was easy enough, after they laid the powder train, with the initials of you, Sam, and Bony, to change them into a general serpentine twist with their initials in the midst of it. By ramming some of the powder down into the holes in the foundation it exploded with quite ...
— Jack Ranger's Western Trip - From Boarding School to Ranch and Range • Clarence Young
... extent of Kensington Gardens, when reckoned together with Hyde Park, from which it is separated only by a fence of iron rods, is very great, comprising miles of greensward and woodland. The large artificial sheet of water, called the Serpentine River, lies chiefly in Hyde Park, but comes partly within the precincts of the gardens. It is entitled to honorable mention among the English lakes, being larger than some that are world-celebrated,—several miles long, and perhaps a stone's-throw across in the widest part. It forms ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... forth on horseback. Handsome and graceful still, Leopold Travers when in London is pleased to find himself scarcely less the fashion with the young than he was when himself in youth. He is now riding along the banks of the Serpentine, no one better mounted, better dressed, better looking, or talking with greater fluency on the topics which ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... tall figure, in a summery gray suit and a gray felt hat. He was sauntering in a leisurely way toward her, stopping now and then to admire some beautiful dog sniffing the scent of water-rats in the weeds, or a group of babies tumbling on the sand, or a half-naked undergraduate sculling along the serpentine reaches of the river, or a college crew cleaving the waters with the precision of an arrow, to a long, rhythmic swing of eight slim bodies and a low, brief grunt of command. The rich October light striking silvery ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... the table. This is called a "running fire"; and this is the structural principle of a good many plays. We feel that the playwright is, so to speak, inventing as he goes along—that the action, like the child's fantastic serpentine of blocks, might at any moment take a turn in any possible direction without falsifying its antecedents or our expectations. No part of it is necessarily involved in any other part. If the play were ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... development of volcanic rocks—lavas, tuffs and agglomerates—of Arenig age, their horizon being defined by graptolites occurring in cherty mudstones and black shales interleaved in lavas and agglomerates. These volcanic materials are pierced by serpentine, gabbro and granite. The serpentine forms two belts running inland from near Bennane Head and from Burnfoot, being typically developed on Balhamie Hill near Colmonell. Gabbro appears on the shore ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... agate, chalcedony, serpentine, nephrite, steatite, quartz, crystal, glass, jade (white and green), and chrysoprase. Mention is also made of rakan, but the meaning of the term is obscure. Probably it was ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... the village, it is evident that something unusual is going on; they pass people moving in the same direction, with eager and expectant faces, to one of whom Mr. Webster ventures these questions: Can his serpentine majesty be seen to-day? and where to the best advantage? Receiving satisfactory replies, the coachman is ordered to drive to the old wind-mill, where they arrive in a few moments,—from the shady side of this quaint structure, whose merrily revolving ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various
... but I suspected that an animal or a reptile of some kind was at the bottom of the mystery at a prior period. That is why I wanted the flour. Look! Do you see where I sifted it over this spot near the Patagonian plant? And do you see those serpentine tracks through the middle of it? The Mynga Worm is there in that box, at the roots of that plant. ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... and other encumbrances—but the variety of such tenants never fails to excite curiosity. That which is illustrated accommodated another oyster of delicate texture, a thorny clam (which has the reputation of being poisonous), a mass of seaweed, a serpentine mollusc, two species of coral—the red organ-pipe and a mushroom—three burrowing crabs, besides a number of smaller animals, fixed and mobile, in addition to the congregation of less obvious life critical examination would undoubtedly ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... night of the 22nd of February a very singular spectacle was got up on the Serpentine. Late in the evening a fine "brass band," attended by near a thousand torchbearers, suddenly marched on to the ice on the ornamental water in Kensington Gardens, and struck up popular airs; as ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... be honored as a mother. She reckened and numbered carefully the days and months that passed, and beeing never with child before, did marvel greatly that in so short a time her belly should swel so big. But those pestilent and wicked furies breathing out their Serpentine poyson, took shipping to bring their enterprise to passe. The Psyches was warned again by her husband in this sort: Behold the last day, the extream case, and the enemies of thy blood, hath armed themselves against us, pitched their campe, set their ...
— The Golden Asse • Lucius Apuleius
... up of several concentric rings, presenting variegated coloring—erythema iris; or a more or less extensive patch may spread with a sharply-defined border, the older part tending to fade—erythema marginatum; or several rings may coalesce, with a disappearance of the coalescing parts, and serpentine lines ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... stretches along the south bank of the Piscataqua, about two miles from the sea as the crow flies—three miles following the serpentine course of the river. The stream broadens suddenly at this point, and at flood tide, lying without a ripple in a basin formed by the interlocked islands and the mainland, it looks more like an island ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... standing in the street below, dressed equally in his best clothes, and looking the finest boy on earth. They were going into Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, and he had promised to take her in a boat on the Serpentine, if one could be hired, and somewhere to tea, and at night to the Marlborough Theatre in Holloway Road. It was worth while to lose him for a time in order to recover a Toby more dear, and so much more extravagant ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... while the stained-glass doors of the dining-room, with its lofty frescoed ceiling and deep bow-windows, led by two white marble steps out on the terrace, whence two more steps showed the beginning of a serpentine gravel walk winding down to an octagonal hot-house, surmounted by a richly carved pagoda-roof. Two sentinel statues—a Bacchus and Bacchante—placed on the terrace, guarded the entrance to the dining-room; and in front of the house, where a sculptured Triton threw jets of water into a gleaming ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... were clear and clean We bowled along a road that curved a spine Superbly sinuous and serpentine Thro' silent symphonies of summer green. Sudden the Forth came on us—sad of mien, No cloud to colour it, no breeze to line: A sheet of dark, dull glass, without a sign Of life or death, two spits of sand between. Water and sky merged blank in mist together, The Fort ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... down. He glimpsed a razor-clawed reptilian body, ten feet from wing to wing, its serpentine neck darting wickedly. Latham threw himself aside as the tremendous whirr of wings beat the air above his head. Close upon it came three others, and Latham hit the mud. Looking back, he saw that one of the creatures in its mad rush had hurtled into a giant fern, impaling ...
— One Purple Hope! • Henry Hasse
... latter of which there was a grand display of fireworks; while, still further to amuse the John and Jenny Gulls of the cities of London and Westminster, there was a sham naval engagement got up on the Serpentine River, representing a battle between the British and American fleets. Of course the British fleet was victorious, and the Americans struck their colours, amidst the huzzas and shouts of the family of the Gulls, who, having for nearly a quarter ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... this the defile opens up to close again between serpentine cliffs. It then crosses the 2 Ponts de Parabuja and the viaduct de l'Inzecca, and reaches the entrance to the Passage de l'Inzecca, 7 m. from Ghisoni, 985 ft. above the sea, where the road is cut through great serpentine rocks. This is the most difficult ...
— Itinerary through Corsica - by its Rail, Carriage & Forest Roads • Charles Bertram Black
... from the height, and the noises will sink to a scarcely audible murmur, and you will be able to see the lie of the country, and, as it says in the context, 'your eyes shall behold the land that is very far off.' Yes! the hilltop is the place for wide views, and for understanding the course of the serpentine river, and it is the place to discover how small are the mightiest things at the foot, and how little a way towards the sun the noises of human praise or censure can ever travel. 'He shall dwell on high,' and he will ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... really a bridge at all. It was only the eastern extremity of the Serpentine; but as the boy leant over the stone balustrade, and gazed upon the artificial flood, broadening out indefinitely in the darkness, it might have been the noblest river in the world. Its banks were muffled in a feather ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... dears, there is no "of course" at all in the matter! Can any of you, for example, see the creatures that float about and fight in a drop of water from the Serpentine River? No, certainly not! except through a microscope. Well, but why not?—you do not know. That I can easily believe! But then you must never again say that "of course" a Giant could see a ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty
... roll back on itself by the convulsions of the earth. On the other side hung a black and dreadful cloud, bursting with fiery and serpentine vapors. Naught was heard in the darkness but the shrieks of women, the screams of children, and the frenzied cries of men calling for children, for wives, for parents,—all lifting hands to the gods, ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... calm of the speaker, sometimes showing itself in an unusually deep guttural, sometimes in an unusually serpentine sibilant, lurked the frenzy of hatred which in the past had revealed itself occasionally in wild outbursts. Momentarily I expected such an outburst now, but it ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... and unearthly. Floating in the sky were serpentine tendrils as thick as a man's wrist, purplish flowers and ropy fungus growths. They twisted and writhed and shot out in all directions, creating a tangle immediately beneath him and curving up toward the ship amidst a welter ...
— The Sky Trap • Frank Belknap Long
... the open door at her as she glided across the hall, swift and elastic, yet serpentine, and graceful and stately ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... reflecting on a singular little fact which made itself clear to her just then. She was certainly not a child; she was not even a very young girl, at twenty-four; she had never been prudish, and she did not affect the pre-Serpentine innocence of Eve before the fall. Yet it was suddenly apparent to her that because she was a singer men treated her as if she were a married woman, and would have done so if she had been even five years younger. Talking to her as Margaret Donne, in Mrs. Rushmore's house, two years earlier, ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... they of the city had thrown out to keep the hold. Therewith made she one stepping place after another, till, with much travail, she climbed the wall. Now the forest lay within two crossbow shots, and the forest was of thirty leagues this way and that. Therein also were wild beasts, and beasts serpentine, and she feared that if she entered there they would slay her. But anon she deemed that if men found her there they would hale her back into the town to ...
— Aucassin and Nicolete • Andrew Lang
... hired at a rental of L20 from a Turkish merchant, had been greatly enlarged, and the gardens, with their summer-houses, covered alleys, and serpentine walks, were superior to most English gardens of the same size. Lady Hester's constant outlay in building arose from her idea that people would fly to her for succour and protection during the revolutions that she believed to be impending all over the world; her camels, ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... exhilarating things, on a breezy spring morning, than a spurt across that wonderful rus in urbe—Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park—for a prospective dip in the Serpentine, where, at specified hours every morning and evening, water-loving London is privileged to disport itself in its congenial element. So congenial is it, in fact, that some enthusiastic individuals do not limit themselves to warm summer mornings, or the cooler ones of springtide ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... Where wavering masses bulge and gape Mysterious, and shape to shape Dies momently through whorl and hollow, And form and line and solid follow Solid and line and form to dream Fantastic down the eternal stream; An obscure world, a shifting world, Bulbous, or pulled to thin, or curled, Or serpentine, or driving arrows, Or serene slidings, or March narrows. There slipping wave and shore are one, And weed and mud. No ray of sun, But glow to glow fades down the deep (As dream to unknown dream in sleep); Shaken translucency illumes The hyaline of drifting glooms; The strange soft-handed ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... polite world. Our gracious Sovereign was holding levees and drawing-rooms at St. James's: the bow-windows of the clubs were crowded with the heads of respectable red-faced newspaper-reading gentlemen: along the Serpentine trailed thousands of carriages: squadrons of dandy horsemen trampled over Rotten Row, everybody was in town, in a word; and of course Major Arthur Pendennis, who was ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... they crawled nearer and nearer, with gliding serpentine motion, till their heads almost touched the white line of coral. But not a man of them all went one inch beyond it. They stopped there and gazed at him. Felix signed to them with his hand, and pointed vaguely to the sky, as much as to say he was not responsible. At the gesture the whole ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... spot where he presumed he should be heard, raised his voice, and, in an authoritative tone, commanded the refractory animals to quit his estates. Not one dared to refuse; and great was the rustling, and hissing, and sliding, and coiling as the serpentine nation prepared to demenager, much against their inclination no doubt, but forced, by a power they could not withstand, to obey. None of these creatures interrupted our route, although there has long ceased to be a lord at Puy Taille, and we arrived before day-break ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... Islam stigmatises "Faith" as "an obscene worm." The sonnet on the Fall of Bonaparte concludes with a reference to "Bloody Faith, the foulest birth of time." Shelley frequently conceives Faith as serpentine and disgusting. In Rosalind and Helen ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... calculated, was 1190 yards long and about 700 wide; the smaller nearly circular, and upwards of 300 yards across. The lava continued rising till it overflowed a large portion of the hitherto black surface, in some places appearing like a vast sheet of liquid fire, in others running along in serpentine courses. As their time was short, as soon as the party who had gone round the crater arrived, the tents were packed up, and they commenced their descent by the ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... place is bleak Where, outside, rain and wind combine With a furtive ear, if I strive to speak, With a hostile eye at my flushing cheek, With a malice that marks each word, each sign! O enemy sly and serpentine, Uncoil thee from the waking man! Do I hold the Past Thus firm and fast Yet doubt if the Future hold I can? This path so soft to pace shall lead Thro' the magic of May to herself indeed! Or narrow if needs the house must be, Outside are ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... Lawrence, the Hudson, the McKenzie, and many others, compared to which the Thames is but a rivulet, may be excused if he cannot view its not very limpid waters with the same extravagant admiration as the Londoner, who calls the Serpentine a river, and dignifies a pond of a few roods in extent with the name of a lake. Yet there is one feature about the Thames, of which he can scarcely be too proud, and which is unparalleled perhaps in the world,—the often-noticed "forest of masts," extending farther ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... almost impossible to keep your name out of the papers. Culture is so catholic that celebrities who in the old days would have been monopolised by esoteric cliques are common property. The paleographer and the coleopterist claim a share of our admiration equally with the serpentine dancer and the record-breaking cyclist, and the judicious editor prints their "interviews" at equal length. We have an impartial acquaintance with the tastes and views of cardinals and comic singers; and the future ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... which, as the sun began to sink, we saw now and again the white gleam of falling water. One of my companions touched my arm as we swept round the base of a hill and opened up the lofty, snow-covered peak of a mountain, which seemed, as we wound on our serpentine way, to be ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... but for sandals. They wander about in sheepskins and goatskins, eschewing flesh for their food, and vegetables for their clothing. They plunge distracted into boiling water. Shudderingly, they break the frosty Serpentine. They absorb the sun's rays like pigeons upon the housetops, or shiver naked in suburban chambers that they may recover the barbaric tang. They walk through rivers fully clothed, and shake their vesture as a dog his coat; or are hydrophobic for their skins, fearing to wash ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... express the vulgar wrath now raging there. We are Mob-ruled indeed—when Courtly Nob Apes, near his Prince, the manners of the Mob! The hoot is owlish; there are just two things That hiss—one venom-fanged, one graced with wings. Anserine or serpentine, ye well-dressed rowdies? Dainty-draped dames, or duffel-skirted dowdies, They who in rudeness thus their spite would slake, Have plainly head of goose, and heart of snake! So why indulge in indignation blind 'Gainst those who hiss or ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 27, 1893 • Various
... large species of Ophiuridae are to be met with at Trincomalie, crawling busily about, and insinuating their long serpentine arms into the irregularities and perforations in the rocks. To these they attach themselves with such a firm grasp, especially when they perceive that they have attracted attention, that it is next to impossible to procure unmutilated specimens without previously depriving them of life, or at least ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... doorway of a house in the rue Serpentine, was speaking angrily. He said he didn't care whether Hartman liked it or not; he was telling ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... equal to the fish of the great deep, which defies arithmetical computation, and can be expressed only by their sacred numerals. The people have a more certain faith in them than in most of their divinities, because they see them so often; every cloud with a curious configuration or serpentine tail is a dragon. "We see him," they say. The scattering of the cloud is his disappearance. He rules the hills, is connected with feng-shui (geomancy), dwells round the graves, is associated with the Confucian worship, is the Neptune of the sea, ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... valley of the Aar. That is the name of the stream which flows through it. It is one of the most remarkable valleys in Switzerland. I have been studying it in the guide book and on the map. It is about fifty miles long, and it winds in a serpentine manner between two lofty ranges of mountains, so steep and high that it is not possible to make any ...
— Rollo in Switzerland • Jacob Abbott
... there, coiled rather than seated on the easy chair; everything from the curves of his smooth limbs to the coils of his silvered hair suggesting the circles of a serpent more than the straight limbs of a man—the unmistakable, splendid serpentine gentleman we had seen walking in North London, his eyes ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... refracted images, of the grey stones at the bottom of the sea for twenty yards out and more. The sea had no power, it splashed in weak and hopeless waves, sucked itself away inward, came back again with a little run, and feebly toppled over. The high-water line was shown by a serpentine strip of jetsam winding along the whole of the shore. There was no yellow in the sands; clouds and sunshine struggled overhead, but beneath them all was grey. The wind rustled in the giant grasses like the sound ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... wines, and thinking that, although he had never learned to swim, some recollection he had of an essay on swimming would ensure his safety, he betted his friends a hundred guineas that he would swim to a certain point, and flinging himself into the Serpentine, would have drowned before their eyes but for the help of Mr. Percival. The breach caused by this affair induced Sir Philip Baddely, a gentleman who always supplied "each vacuity of sense" with an oath, to endeavour to cut him out ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... the head and called out "Forward." Hurstwood moved with the line. Across Fifth Avenue, through Madison Square by the winding paths, east on Twenty-third Street, and down Third Avenue wound the long, serpentine company. Midnight pedestrians and loiterers stopped and stared as the company passed. Chatting policemen, at various corners, stared indifferently or nodded to the leader, whom they had seen before. On Third Avenue they marched, a seemingly weary way, to Eighth Street, where ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... fifteen minutes we halted between two hedges and rows of tall trees. The policeman told me the men could sit against the banks of the hedges, so that first rest was good. In ten minutes we were off again. The road seemed to wind in and out in serpentine curves. The land on either side was taken up with truck ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... God | must be subject to that use for which God | hath granted it; which is the benefit and | relief of the state and society or man; | for otherwise all manner of knowledge | becometh malign and serpentine, and | therefore as carrying the quality of the | serpent's sting and malice it maketh the | mind of man to swell; as the Scripture | saith excellently, KNOWLEDGE BLOWETH UP, | BUT CHARITY BUILDETH UP{40}. And again the | 40. 1 Corinthians ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... furrowed and the fall is rapid; irrigation is consequently difficult and navigation impossible. The course of the Iskr is remarkable: rising in the Rilska Planina, the river descends into the basin of Samakov, passing thence through a serpentine defile into the plateau of Sofia, where in ancient times it formed a lake; it now forces its way through the Balkans by the picturesque gorge of Iskretz. Somewhat similarly the Deli, or "Wild," Kamchik breaks the central ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... family. Not only does the mighty ocean obey this wonderful influence in the ebb and flow of its tides, but the Earth, as she rotates upon her axis, obeys this mighty power and manifests in her depths and heights in her serpentine movement ...
— Within the Temple of Isis • Belle M. Wagner
... generative power. The second denotes the passive nature or female principle or the emblem of water. The third symbol indicates the destroyer, the reformer or the renewer, (the uniter of the two) and thus the preserver or perpetuator eternally renewing itself. The universality of serpentine worship (or Phallic adoration) is attested by emblematic sculptures or architecture all ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II
... be exactly master of every spot where one another is writing, or reading, or sauntering. This view of the castle(397) is what I have just finished, and is the only side that will be at all regular. Directly before it is an open grove, through which you see a field, which is bounded by a serpentine wood of all kind of trees, and flowering shrubs, and flowers! The lawn before the house is situated on the top of a small hill, from whence to the left you see the town and church of Twickenham encircling a turn of the river, that looks exactly like a ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... channels. Indeed, nearly all of these first four miles demanded frequent leaps from the boats to direct their swift and crooked course, until we came to a stretch of savanna country, through which the river washes its way in serpentine windings for nine miles with a gentle current from thirty to sixty feet wide, bordered by high grass, bearing the appearance and having the even depth of a canal. An easy, monotonous paddle through these broad meadows brought us to the head of the first rapids, the scene of our two ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... the slope is the same, and the method of making roads in the serpentine style to reach a gate leading to the important part of town, is not only the common method employed for hill towns, but the natural and necessary one, not only in ...
— A Study Of The Topography And Municipal History Of Praeneste • Ralph Van Deman Magoffin
... bob-tailed catamount swung over a pole, like the mighty cluster of grapes from Eshcol, and another conveying with wise precaution that monstrous snapping-turtle which those of our friends who wish to see will find among the specimens marked Chelydra, Serpentine in the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... England, except in Devonshire, where everybody doted on him. He was "a man of desperate fortunes," and he did not shrink from violent methods. In studying his life we are amused, we are almost scandalised, at his snake-like quality. He moves with serpentine undulations, and the beautiful hard head is lifted from ambush to strike the unsuspecting enemy at sight. With his protestations, his volubility, his torrent of excuses, his evasive pertinacity, Sir Walter Raleigh is the very opposite of the "strong silent" type of soldier which ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... the lawn from the direction of the Serpentine; he looked unusually alert, vigorous, and bustling; by his side, hurrying to keep pace with him, was the New York detective. And Fullaway's keen eyes, roving about, fell on Allerdyke and the chief and he made through the crowd in their direction, ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... high trees were growing, and where he again found a safe, but uncomfortable, sleeping-place. He wandered about for many days on the wooded mountains, and again reached a high ridge, over which he passed, until he arrived at a valley through which a brook ran, in a serpentine direction, among verdant meadows. He traced the brook through the valley, and reached a spot where it flowed into a river. He now followed the course of the river, and as night came on before he perceived any human habitations, he lay down on the ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... Park, I remarked that his countenance wore an ominous and tragic appearance, which seemed to deepen as he neared me. I thought he had been toying affably with a nursery-maid the moment before, who stood with some of her little charges watching the yachts upon the Serpentine. Howbeit, espying my approach, F. B. strode away from the maiden and her innocent companions, and advanced to greet his old acquaintance, enveloping his face with shades of ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... work in the rick-yard. I had heard the monotonous thrumming of its wheels a good way off. The scene is one of great animation, the machine is drawn up against the conical-shaped haystack, its black smoke stretches out in serpentine coils against the sky. A dozen men are busy about her: those who work her, old Anderson, son Robert—a dreadful lout he is too, quite unlike his sister—various other louts of the same calibre, the two little boys, very ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... the idea of such a course had become incongruous to him. He passed beneath that architectural effort and walked into the Park till he got upon the spreading grass. Here he continued to walk; he took his way across the elastic turf and came out by the Serpentine. He watched with a friendly eye the diversions of the London people, he bent a glance almost encouraging on the young ladies paddling their sweethearts about the lake and the guardsmen tickling tenderly with their bearskins the artificial flowers in the Sunday ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... Strichen. Though consisting mainly of biotite granite, these later intrusions pass by intermediate stages into diorite, as in the area between Balmoral and the head-waters of the Gairn. The granites have been extensively quarried at Rubislaw, Peterhead and Kemnay. Serpentine and troctolite, the precise age of which is uncertain, occur at the Black Dog rock north of Aberdeen, at Belhelvie and near Old Meldrum. Where the schists of sedimentary origin have been pierced by these ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... long may be called a toy ship, but it is a toy that can teach much to an Admiral, and I should not like to have as my comrade on a voyage the man of forty who can pass the Serpentine without a glance at the little ragged urchin there, who is half in the water himself while he reaches with a twig his tiny lugger after its long voyage across the lake among ducks, and row-boats, ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... There was serpentine wisdom in these words, for their very vagueness attracted German liberals. Wilson did not demand a republic; he did not insist upon the Kaiser's abdication, for which Germany was not then prepared; all that he asked ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... a curious sidelong movement, half-winning and half-serpentine. She was aged fourteen, a very fair and very slight girl, with a thin face and thin lips, and extraordinarily slender hands; in general appearance fragile. She wore a semi-circular comb on the crown of her head, and her abundant hair hung over her shoulders ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... are usually of different colours and composition; one series being white, and composed of carbonate of lime—whilst the laminae of the second series alternate with the preceding, are green in colour, and are found by chemical analysis to consist of some silicate, generally serpentine or the closely-related "loganite." In some instances, however, all the laminae are calcareous, the concentric arrangement still remaining visible in consequence of the fact that the laminae are composed alternately of lighter and ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... a little farther on, he saw old Lord Thrapston tottering along on his stick. Lord Thrapston hated a parson, and scowled at poor Mr. Taylor as he went by. Mr. Taylor shrank from meeting his eye, and hurried along till he reached the Serpentine, where he stood still for a few minutes, drinking in the fresh breeze. But the breeze could not blow his puzzle out of his brain. Was it a crime, or merely an escapade? What had she said to the ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... changed the subject and began to flatter me. I liked it for a few moments, but she flattered me so very grossly that the pleasure was soon over. She had a serpentine way of coming close at me when she pretended to be vitally interested in the friends and localities I had left, which was altogether snaky and fork-tongued; and when she made an occasional bounce upon Startop (who ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... afterwards he was caught among the horses of a settler on the Serpentine, perfectly sound ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... I marry six wives, I shall still be in love with my cousin—a little fair girl, with great grey eyes and the prettiest ways and a heart of the purest gold. And now shall we cry here or by The Serpentine?" ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... intermingled with most desperate wickedness. I verily believe that it is the predominant of every man, good and bad, except in so far as it is mortified by grace. O the turnings and windings of the heart upon itself, in all the most apparently direct motions towards God and the good of men! What serpentine and crooked circumgirations and reflections are there in the soul of man when the outward action and expression seems most regular and directed towards God's glory, and others edification! Whoever of you have any ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... Sakei and Semang aborigines. The State is about eighty miles wide at its widest part, and thirty at its narrowest, and is estimated to contain between four and five thousand square miles. The great artery of the country is the Perak river, a most serpentine stream. Ships drawing thirteen feet of water can ascend it as far as Durian Sabatang, fifty miles from its mouth, and boats can navigate it for one hundred and thirty miles farther. This river, even one hundred and fifty miles from its mouth at Kwala Kangsa, ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... charms upon them. Each tuft of upland grass is musked like a bouquet with perfume. The balmy breeze swings to and fro like a censer. On one side the eye follows for the space of an eagle's flight, the serpentine mountain chains, southwards from the great purple dome of Taconic—the St. Peter's of these hills—northwards to the twin summits of Saddleback, which is the two-steepled natural cathedral of Berkshire; while low down to the west the Housatonie winds on in her watery labyrinth, ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... (g) There are verandahs resembling those at Angkor Wat. They have sloping stone roofs, sculptures in relief on the inside wall and a series of windows in the outside wall. (h) The doors of the Linga shrines have a serpentine ornamentation and are very like those of the Bayon. (i) A native gentleman told me that he had seen temples with five towers in this neighbourhood, but I have not seen ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... a pair of winding, such as we now call lantern stairs, whereof the steps were part of porphyry, which is a dark red marble spotted with white, part of Numidian stone, which is a kind of yellowishly-streaked marble upon various colours, and part of serpentine marble, with light spots on a dark green ground, each of those steps being two-and-twenty foot in length and three fingers thick, and the just number of twelve betwixt every rest, or, as we now term it, landing-place. In every resting-place ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... appears to extend up both those rivers many miles and back to the mountains. the extreme point to which I can see the S. W. fork bears S. 30 W. distant about 12 miles. this stream passes through a similar country with the other two and is more divided and serpentine in it's course than either of the others; it also possesses abundanly more timber in it's bottoms. the timber here consists of the narrowleafed cottonwood almost entirely. but little box alder or sweet willow the underbrush thick and as heretofore discribed in the quarter of the missouri. a range ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... omkring, around. omlind|a (-ade, -at), to entwine. omsider, at last. omstrl|a (-ade, -at), to surround with light. omjlig, impossible. ond, evil, angry, bad. ondig, unnecessary. opp, upp, up. ord (-et, —), word. orm (-en, -ar), serpent. ormsling|a (-an, -or), serpentine ring or figure. orolig, disturbed. ort (-en, -er), place, locality. orknelig, innumerable. ortt, wrong. ortt (-en), injustice, wrong. osedd, unseen. oskadd, uninjured. oskapelig, unshapely. oskuld (-en), innocence. oskuldsfull, innocent. oss, us. osviklig, unfailing. ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... to see the joyous serpentine, to watch Jimsy's struggles to get down from the shoulders of his adorers who bore him the length of the field and back, and then Carter drove them home and went back for the Captain, who would be showered and dressed by that time. They were both dining ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... submerged forests. The omniscient schoolboy must often have watched in aquariums the habits and manners of the common sea-horses, twisted together by their long thin bodies into one inextricable mass of living matwork, or anchored firmly with a treble serpentine coil to some projecting branch of coralline or of quivering sea-wrack. Bad swimmers by nature, utterly unarmed, and wholly undefended by protective mail, the pipe-fish generally can neither fight nor ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... Harry landed a fine fellow, which gave a serpentine sort of a wriggle, and regained ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... Vermilion by overmuch grinding may be attributed to the Grindstone, or muller, for that some of their parts may be worn off and mixt with the colour, yet there seems not very much, for I have done it on a Serpentine-stone with a muller made of a Pebble, and yet observ'd the ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke |
