"Skeleton" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was clean, but unattractive, with its varnished board walls, bare floor, and wire-mesh filling the skeleton door, which a spring banged to before the mosquitoes could get in. There were no curtains or ventilator-fans, the room was very hot, and the glaring sunshine emphasized its ugliness. Then it was full of flies that fell upon boards and tables from the poisonous papers, and ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... have been conceived. The horse, for example—what can at first sight seem more unlike mankind? Yet when we compare man and horse point by point and detail by detail, is not our wonder excited rather by the points of resemblance than of difference that are to be found between them? Take the skeleton of a man; bend forward the bones in the region of the pelvis, shorten the thigh bones, and those of the leg and arm, lengthen those of the feet and hands, run the joints together, lengthen the jaws, and shorten the frontal bone, finally, lengthen the spine, and the skeleton will now be ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... not concerned with the physical ecstasies of Sex. It has no interest in such human matters. But deprive it of the fact of Sex-difference, and it drifts away whimpering like a dead leaf, an empty husk, a wisp of chaff, a skeleton gossamer. The poor, actual, warm lips, "so sweetly forsworn," may have had small interest for this "spiritual" lover, but now that she is dead and buried, and a ghost, they must remain a woman's lips forever! Nor have Edgar ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... de Gatinais said, at last, "I wish I could fatten. It is incredible that a man who eats pounds of sugar daily should yet remain a skeleton." His voice was guttural, and a peculiar slur ran through his speech, caused by the loss of his ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... Mr. Gathergold was dead and buried; and the oddest part of the matter was, that his wealth, which was the body and spirit of his existence, had disappeared before his death, leaving nothing of him but a living skeleton, covered over with a wrinkled, yellow skin. Since the melting away of his gold, it had been very generally conceded that there was no such striking resemblance, after all, between the ignoble features of the ruined merchant and that majestic face upon the mountain-side. ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... Luna, inspired by Mabini, arrested the peace delegates and charged them with treason, sentencing some to prison, some to death. This occurred in May, 1899. After that time not so much as the skeleton of any Philippine public authority—president, cabinet, or other official—existed. Later opposition to the American arms seemed to proceed in the main not from real Filipino patriotism, but from selfishness, lust of power, and ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... Needles', passed a brick meeting house, and, turning into Fourth Street, isolated frame dwellings, coming at last to a dingy wooden house with broken panes in the upper windows and a collapsing veranda at the edge of a blackened, skeleton wood. ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... as different as possible, painfully thin—scarcely more than mere skin and bones—a living skeleton with a large hooked nose, set in a long, narrow face, a huge mustache turned up at the ends, and flashing, black eyes. His excessively tall, lank figure was so emaciated that it was like a caricature of a man. The swaggering air suitable to ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... herself amidst a low scrub upon which the dead leaves still hung where the fires had scorched them. But the fire had not actually passed over them. A wide spread of barren rock intervened between the now skeleton woods and where the girl ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... how she had buried her husband in the old village church. She had taken her daughter to Egypt; she had dwindled there till there was little more than a skeleton to ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... "Skeleton key, such as burglars use. By Jove, what a wonderful burglar he would make! Courage, Miss Cameron! He will be here soon. Then comes the real adventure,—my part of it. I didn't come here to-night to get any flashy old crown jewels. I came to take ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... stones as rubbish. He abstains from flesh, fish, and wine. He never touches salt, and lives entirely on fruits and roots. I saw a female mendicant who lived upon a seer of potatoes and a small quantity of tamarind pulp daily. This woman reduced herself to a skeleton. She led a pure, chaste life, and spent her time in the mental recitation of Om. One seer of potatoes contains 3,600 grains of solid residue, which is ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... us that in the embryo skeleton there is a marked difference of general conformation in the two sexes; that in the male there is a larger chest and breathing apparatus, which, affects the whole organization, forming a more powerful muscular system, ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... rhinoceros, the bones of which were still in their true relative position. They must have been joined together by ligaments, and even surrounded by muscles at the time of their interment. The entire skeleton of the same species was lying at a short distance from the spot."* (* "Societe Roy. d'Emulation d'Abbeville" ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... of Etchingham Manor. Perhaps my aunt had even forced her to take the family name, to save appearances. The old woman was capable of anything, even of providing an obscure nephew with a brilliant sister. And I should not be thanked if I interfered. This skeleton of swift reasoning passed between word and word ... "You are no sister of mine!" I was continuing ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... Dr. Southwood Smith," she says. "On visiting him, we saw an object which I have often heard celebrated, and had thought would be revolting, but found, on the contrary, an agreeable sight; this is the skeleton of Jeremy Bentham. It was at Bentham's request, that the skeleton, dressed in the same dress he habitually wore, stuffed out to an exact resemblance of life, and with a portrait-mask in wax,—the best I ever saw,—sits there as assistant to Dr. Smith in the entertainment of his guests, and companion ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... misapplied, and perhaps some excuse was found for the misinterpretation of his meaning in his decision that his dead body should be given up for the purpose of anatomy and not buried in earth to be of service {281} only to the worms. Many of us have seen the skeleton of Jeremy Bentham clothed in his habit as he lived in a room of that University College which he ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... of the world would have trampled him underfoot, a squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood drained from her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life? His mother's prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal bestrode. She was no more: the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire, an odour of rosewood and wetted ashes. She had saved him from being trampled underfoot and had gone, scarcely having been. A poor soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... torturing us to madness, that they may laugh at our vagaries; sometimes obstructing the bile, that they may see how a man looks, when he is yellow; sometimes breaking a traveller's bones, to try how he will get home; sometimes wasting a man to a skeleton, and sometimes killing him fat, for the greater ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... abandoned on account of lameness, from which it had recovered, and had since been starving. They harnessed it up and it brought in the cart; and that night, being given a good feed of oats, it died from shock. Another skeleton was found in the morning to take its place; but this skeleton grew fat. We used to laugh at these misfortunes, but the poor horses had a cruel time, especially the English ones; no one would have recognised the Horse Artillery, ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... And this scheme, in its turn, is the more mathematical according as it expresses a more rigorous necessity. That is why we have only to follow the bent of our mind to become mathematicians. But, on the other hand, this natural mathematics is only the rigid unconscious skeleton beneath our conscious supple habit of linking the same causes to the same effects; and the usual object of this habit is to guide actions inspired by intentions, or, what comes to the same, to direct movements combined ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... house of Henderson. It was massive, imposing, the visible sign of a prosperous concern, the manifestation of business on a big scale. Groya Motors, Inc. It was lettered in neat gilt across the front. It stood forth in four-foot skeleton characters atop of the flat roof—an electric sign to burn like a beacon by night. And he was about to become a part of that establishment, a humble beginner, true, but a beginner with uncommon prospects. He wondered if Henderson senior was right, if ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... to drag further finery from the mysterious depths of the treasure-box. Her daughter cast a last incurious glance back. The glow on Mrs. Robson's face, which Claire had mistaken for youth, seemed now a thing hectic and unpleasant, and gave an uncanny sense of a skeleton sitting ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... offerings was the 'twelve he-goats, according to the number of the tribes of Israel.' These spoke of the same confidence as we have already noticed as being expressed by the designation of 'the God of Israel.' Possibly scattered members of all the tribes had come back, and so there was a kind of skeleton framework of the nation present at the dedication; but, whether that be so or not, that handful of people was not Israel. Thousands of their brethren still lingered in exile, and the hope of their return must have been faint. Yet God's promise remained, and Israel was immortal. The tribes were still ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... and shepherds, with ladies richly dressed, and peasant women spinning by their side. At the bottom boys and girls were dancing gaily, holding each other by the hand. Before the web walked the mistress of the house—an old woman, if the name woman can be given to a skeleton with bones scarcely hidden by a skin yellower and more transparent than wax. Like a spider ready to pounce upon its prey, the old woman, armed with a great pair of shears, peered at all the figures with a jealous eye, then suddenly ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... has his troubles,' he replied evasively. 'Most people indulge in the luxury of a private skeleton. Now I have often thought that Miss Hamilton and her sister would have been far happier without Miss Darrell; she has rather a peculiar temper, and I have often fancied that she has misrepresented things. It is always difficult to understand women, even the best of them,' with a smothered sigh, ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... South which so soothingly intoxicates the senses. The sea, accompanying us for half our way, gleamed and shook out its breaking surf along the shore; and the rolling slopes of the Campagna, flattered by sunlight, stretched all around us,—here desert and sparkling with tall skeleton grasses and the dry canes' tufted feathers, and here covered with low, shrubby trees, that, crowding darkly together, climbed the higher hills. On tongues of land, jutting out into the sea, stood ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... length she did; and said that the Marechale d'Estrees was continually asking her, "What are you always doing with that old woman? Why do you not associate with folks who would amuse you more than that old skeleton?" and that she said many other uncivil things of her. Maintenon told me this herself, since the death of the Dauphine, to prove that it was only the Marechale's fault that the Dauphine had been on such bad terms with ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... and fifteenth floors, working upwards from each point, the intervening floors being in the meanwhile left untouched. He explained that, in the system of steel construction, the walls did not support the building; that being done by the skeleton framework of metal, on which the walls were subsequently hung as a screen. They might, theoretically, be of paper; though as a matter of fact the material used was generally terra-cotta or some fire-proof brick. The American said that it was queer to ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... yes, but with hands and feet. That's the living skeleton, but if he keeps on eating the way he's been doing lately the boss will have to change the bills and bill him as the ...
— The Circus Boys on the Flying Rings • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... side, the contest of the most distinguished knights, and applauded their feats of daring and skill. A few paces farther, and just inside the moat, stood a frowning pile, whose sombre and repulsive front might have struck a beholder as being as much out of place as the skeleton at the feast—the ill-omened Bastile.[713] Five prisoners, immured for their conscientious boldness in its gloomy dungeons, and awaiting a terrible fate, distinctly heard, day after day, as the tourney continued, the inspiriting notes of the clarion and hautboy, ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... doubted. But the time has arrived when we may fairly gather up the fragments of evidence, clear them as far as possible from the incrustations of passion, prejudice, and malice, and place them in such order, as, if possible, to enable us to arrive at some probable conjecture as to what the skeleton of ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... brandy, and remained polite, intent and silent. Kenny, with his heart in the telling, went on to the tale of Conoclach and the first harp. Conoclach, he said, hating Cull, her husband, had run away from him toward the sea. There upon the sand lay the skeleton of a whale and the wind playing upon the taut sinews made sounds low and soothing enough to lull her to sleep. And Cull, coming up, marveled at her slumber, heard the murmuring of the wind through the sinews and made the first harp. Kenny liked ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... at Clayhidon, for instance, wrote of a poor lad, a pupil in the day-school, prostrate with rheumatic fever, in a wretched home and surrounded by bitter opposers of the truth. Wasted to a skeleton, and in deep anxiety about his own soul, he was pointed to Him who says, "Come unto Me,... and I will give you rest." While yet this conversation was going on, as though suddenly he had entered into a new world, this emaciated boy began to repeat texts such as "Suffer the ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... who had seen him? You meet so many men in dress-clothes at the Opera who are not ghosts. But this dress-suit had a peculiarity of its own. It covered a skeleton. At least, so the ballet-girls said. And, of course, it had ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... very stern and solemn to me, and said that I must not think just because my poor dear father's married life had ended in such a wretched tragedy that every other home had such a skeleton in the closet. ...
— Mary Marie • Eleanor H. Porter
... mind. It is probable that among the hundred and twenty thousand soldiers that were marshalled round Neerwinden, under all the standards of Western Europe, the two feeblest in body were the hunchbacked dwarf, who urged forward the fiery onset of France, and the asthmatic skeleton who covered ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... evidently confirmed by the examples of sick persons who have been cured by joy. Let one whom a terrible home-sickness has wasted to a skeleton be brought back to his native land, and the bloom of health will soon be his again; or let us enter a prison in which miserable men have for ten or twenty years inhabited filthy dungeons and possess at last barely strength to move,—and let us tell them suddenly they are free; the single word of ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... hesitated, looked out of the window and a brand-new thought forced its way into his mind—as if a closet had been suddenly opened, revealing a skeleton he had either forgotten or had put permanently out of sight. There WAS need of this "original cost"—instant need—something he had entirely forgotten. Jemima would soon need it—perhaps needed it at that very minute. He had, ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... when the seven little tables and forty-nine chairs were occupied. There was not room for an ordinary-sized steward to pass up and down between the tables; but our waiter was not an ordinary-sized man—he was a living skeleton in miniature. We handed the soup, and the "roast beef one," and "roast lamb one," "corn beef and cabbage one," "veal and stuffing one," and the "veal and pickled pork," one—or two, or three, as the case might be—and the tea and coffee, and the various kinds of puddings—we handed ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... walls which yet stand, proves its antiquity. A few years ago, a part of the outer walls which was remarked to have a hollow sound, was taken down, when there fell from a deep niche built therein, a skeleton, clad in a suit of the old German armor. We followed a road through the woods to the peak on which stand the ruins of St. Michael's chapel, which was built in the tenth century and inhabited for a long time by a sect of white monks. There is now but a single tower ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... Viswamitra of great intelligence Galava was filled with such anxiety that he could not sit or lie down, or take his food. A prey to anxiety and regret, lamenting bitterly, and burning with remorse, Galava grew pale, and was reduced to a skeleton. And smitten with sorrow, O Suyodhana, he indulged in these lamentations, "Where shall I find affluent friends? Where shall I find money? Have I any savings? Where shall I find eight hundred steeds of lunar whiteness? What pleasure can I have in eating? ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... are twenty inlets from three to fifteen miles in depth, generally running in an easterly and westerly direction, and reaching to the base of the high mountains described. These numerous inlets, with the bays therein embraced, leave but a skeleton land of Moresby Island and the south-western portion of Graham. Massett Inlet, the deepest indentation in the archipelago, penetrates the latter island for eighteen miles, and then expands into an open sea nearly ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden
... certain that she was alone with her son, she produced from hiding-places about her person what appeared to be three balls of worsted—her eyes gleaming, and her whole person starting at every sound. She laid her skeleton fingers over them with a start of terror, as Harold, puzzled at first, would have unwound one; but made him weigh them, parted the covering with her nail, and showed for one instant a yellow gleam. Each held a nugget of unusual size! Her urgency and her terror were excessive till they were out ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of the general stock of knowledge only after it has entered into the literature of a people. The bare skeleton of facts must be clothed with the flesh and blood of imagination, through the humanizing influence of literary expression, before it can be assimilated by the average intellectual being. The scientific investigator is rarely endowed with the gift of weaving the facts ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... that he was sorry to dissipate the hopes which the ladies had built in the tree, but that they were not gazing upon anything of intrinsic value, but on the open sepulcher of some departed brave. "It is a wonder," he remarked, laughingly, "you women didn't catch on to the skeleton ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... RAGA; he concentrates on the sentiment or definitive mood of the structural theme and then embroiders it to the limits of his own originality. The Hindu musician does not read set notes; he clothes anew at each playing the bare skeleton of the RAGA, often confining himself to a single melodic sequence, stressing by repetition all its subtle microtonal and rhythmic variations. Bach, among Western composers, had an understanding of the charm and power of repetitious ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... all these poor abandoned pages now seemed sweet, and past unhappiness was transmuted into happiness, and the nights of toil were holy. He turned over half a dozen leaves and began to sketch out the outlines of the new book on the unused pages; running out a skeleton plan on one page, and dotting fancies, suggestions, hints on others. He wrote rapidly, overjoyed to find that loving phrases grew under his pen; a particular scene he had imagined filled him with desire; he gave his hand free course, ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... would smile, and tried to do so; but his charity prepense looked no more alluring than malice prepense would have done; and, had he not been really a handsome fellow, many a woman who raved about his sweetness would have likened his frankness to that of a skeleton dancing in fetters, and his smiles to the ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... warns us against this anxiety, religious people have been the greatest sinners in laying more emphasis upon to-morrow than to-day. The element which makes most for longevity is always interesting, even if longevity is often a mistake. Almost every old parish church in England maintains some skeleton of bygone efforts which once met real needs and were ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... not abandon his wretched mother, though to continue living with her meant hunger and cold and yet worse evils. For himself, his life was supported chiefly on the three pints of liquor which he was allowed every day. His arms and legs were those of a living skeleton; his poor idiotic face was made yet more repulsive by disease. Yet you could have seen that he was the brother of Pennyloaf; there was Pennyloaf's submissive beast-of-burden look in his eyes, and his voice had something ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... bottom of the steps, with the glare of a Wells light full on him and throwing his shadow almost up to Edward Henry's feet. Around, Edward Henry could descry the vast mysterious forms of the building's skeleton—black in places, but in other places lit up by bright rays from the gaiety below, and showing glimpses of that gaiety in the occasional revelation of a woman's cloak through slits in the construction. High overhead two gigantic cranes interlaced their arms; and, even higher ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... drifts. In the first experiments both investigators used organic substances as the reagent to cause the deposit of gold on its base, and in each case these substances whether woodchips, leather, or even dead flies, were found to be so absolutely impregnated with gold as to leave a golden skeleton when afterwards burned. Timber found in the Ballarat deep leads has been proved ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... little more easily it seemed a foolish thing to bring out this old skeleton from the closet again, so a perpetual state of hush was established. Finally, the whole thing was practically forgotten except for a short paragraph in an occasional history text. But no politician or historian has ever dared ...
— Cubs of the Wolf • Raymond F. Jones
... business, solving mysteries, looking up the family skeleton, hunting out spooks. What we call ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Melodramatic Farce in Four Acts • Paul Dickey
... the southeastern declivity of the western mounds led to a burial chamber in which we found the well-preserved skeleton of an old man, apparently a priest. The body was laid on the floor, at full length, and at his head, which pointed southward, had been placed, not mortuary offerings of food in bowls, but insignia of his priestly office. Eight small objects of pottery were found on ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... gigantic skeleton composed of beams, one crossing the other. On either side of the loft was a small vaulted chamber, with a brick fire-place. Probably these chambers had been used as guard-rooms; a kind of warder's walk led from these, between the beam-palisade and the ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... their tale of grief, Their constant peril and their scant relief; Their days of danger, and their nights of pain; Their manly courage, even when deem'd in vain; The sapping famine, rendering scarce a son Known to his mother in the skeleton; The ills that lessen'd still their little store, And starved even Hunger till he wrung no more; The varying frowns and favours of the deep, That now almost engulphs, then leaves to creep With crazy oar and shatter'd strength along The tide, that yields ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... distorted, and get thee a new skin, and grow and attain to thy natural height in a more genial sphere! You, ladies and gentlemen, who may have had a matter to conceal, and find that it is oozing out: you, whose skeleton is seen stalking beside you, you know what it is to be breathed upon: you, too, are skinned alive: but this miserable youth is not only flayed, he is doomed calmly to contemplate the hideous image of himself burning on the face of her he loves; making beauty ghastly. In vain—for he is two hours ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... skeleton form of such a schedule. The hours, the food, the occupations suggested in each one will vary according to the sex, age, position, desires, intelligence, and opportunities of ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... carried over the invisible disc of the moon, which no human eye had ever seen before? It was now their prerogative to impose the limits of that selenographic science which had built up the lunar world like Cuvier did the skeleton of a fossil, and to say, "The moon was this, a world inhabitable and inhabited anterior to the earth! The moon is this, a ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... sense of the Constitution. You may waste it to a shadow, and then introduce it into the society of flesh and blood an object of scorn and derision. You may sweat and reduce it to a thing of skin and bone, and then place the ominous skeleton beside the ruddy and healthful members of the Union, that it may have leisure to mourn the lamentable difference between itself and its companions, to brood over its disastrous promotion, and to seek in justifiable discontent an opportunity for separation, and insurrection, ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... names, because he had studied them before their labels soaked off, and he knew there was no malice in them for him, though the young fishes who have soft outsides dreaded their sharp edges very much. There is sometimes some advantage in having one's skeleton on the surface, like a ...
— Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... reply, and shuffled so feebly with his feet that Marriott took his arm by way of support. He noticed for the first time that the clothes hung on him with pitiful looseness. The broad frame was literally hardly more than a frame. He was as thin as a skeleton. But, as he touched him, the sensation of faintness and dread returned. It only lasted a moment, and then passed off, and he ascribed it not unnaturally to the distress and shock of seeing a former friend in such ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... his hat from the nail behind the door, and the two men continued their conversation in the street. They did not turn up town to the club and residence quarter, but descended towards the river, passing on their way the massive skeleton of the ten-story building that was to house, when completed, the Parrott and Price business. It rose in the smoky sunset, stretching out spidery tendons of steel to the heavens, and from its interior came a mighty clangor. The Colonel paused ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... o'er the shuddering wretch bending, 5 And in skeleton grasp his fell sceptre extending, Like the heart-stricken deer to that loved covert wending, Which never again to his eyes ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... a thin skeleton pile of logs on the river's edge—set up to deceive the casual observer as he passed and approved of their industry—there was no wood and Hamilton had to set ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... partly derived from a communication to the GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE for Dec. 1791, by Sir Egerton Brydges, who chiefly compiled it from Hasted, compared with Berry's KENT GENEALOGIES, 474, where there are a few inaccuracies. It is, of course, a mere skeleton-tree, and furnishes no information as to the collateral branches, the connexion between the houses of Stanley and Lovelace, &c. Sir Egerton Brydges' series of articles on Lovelace in the GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE, with the exception of that from which the foregoing table is taken, does not contain much, ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... we were anchored and, in a moment, were besieged, ourselves as well as our luggage, by numbers of naked skeleton-like Hindus, Parsees, Moguls, and various other tribes. All this crowd emerged, as if from the bottom of the sea, and began to shout, to chatter, and to yell, as only the tribes of Asia can. To get rid of this Babel confusion of tongues ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... was right. On the next morning the poor old woman was found dead in her room, and those who prepared her for burial said that she was wasted to a skeleton. She had, in fact, starved herself in her infatuation, spending day after day in policies what she should have spent for food. Pinky's strange remark was but too true. She had become a policy-drunkard—a ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... necessary, he would sit motionless on their backs for half-an-hour or more to bring them to. There is a story current that once, in a passion, he shot his wife's favourite horse, and buried it near a quarry, where the ground, some years after, miraculously opened and displayed the skeleton; but the real fact is, that it was an act of humanity to put a poor old horse out of misery; and that, to spare it pain, he shot it with his own hands, and buried it where, the ground sinking afterwards by the working of a coal- pit, the bones came to light. The traditional ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... and ashes sometimes spread out from a volcano. This smoke, merging with the fog and the smoke from the Antwerp fires, seemed to cover the whole sky. And under that sullen mantle the dark flames of the petrol still glowed; to the right, as we looked back, was the blazing skeleton of the ship, and on the left Antwerp itself, the rich, old, beautiful, comfortable city, all but hidden, and now and then sending forth the boom of an exploding shell like ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... longer characteristically French, but a bastard Swiss. The heavy, overhanging roofs were thatched, and of enormous thickness; the walls of grey stone, with roughly carved, skeleton balconies. The peasants no longer smiled at us in good-natured curiosity, but regarded us dourly, though they were gravely civil if we had questions ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... fire. With all the energy of desperate grief I told him how I had fallen at once from bliss to misery; how that for me there was no joy, no hope; that death however bitter would be the welcome seal to all my pangs; death the skeleton was to be beautiful as love. I know not why but I found it sweet to utter these words to human ears; and though I derided all consolation yet I was pleased to see it offered me with gentleness and kindness. I listened quietly, and when he paused would again pour out my misery in expressions that ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... in a circle, and disappeared in the depths below. The consequence is that, in comparison of what then was, there are remaining in small islets only the bones of the wasted body, as they may be called, all the richer and softer parts of the soil having fallen away, and the mere skeleton of the country being ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... to the full; and it was worse than the penalty the law would have exacted. He perished, disgraced and forsaken, of starvation in Paris, the city of pleasures and of crimes. They told me that my son was little more than a living skeleton when he was found, so slowly had the end come. If I did not spare him, can I relent toward Roland? The justice I demand is, in ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... castle, and blazed up through the fir and oak and spiny thorns and dead leaves, and the bits of old bark all over blue-gray-green rot, and the young sprigs almost budding, and hissing with sap. And for one moment they saw all the skeleton and soul of the castle without its body, ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... watched the war with bated breath— Skeleton boy against skeleton death! Months of torture, how many such! 15 Weary weeks of the stick and crutch; And still a glint in the steel-blue eye Told of a spirit ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... "reading and writing," but the greater difficulty of deciphering the skeleton eastern characters places reading in the more honourable place. They say of a very learned man, "He readeth it off (readily) as one ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... moments I took stock of the poor creature. He was painfully thin; his skeleton could be clearly seen under the unadorned skin; his sunken eyes gleamed with mistrust and inquietude from out of his fleshless face, and his long black hair lay in tangled ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... his horse and leaned eagerly forward. Sammie listened, but was again too late. The dead leaves rustled close by over the sunken graves; the tall, bare trees waved their skeleton arms, while the breeze died away to a long, weary ...
— The Daughter of a Republican • Bernie Babcock
... answered Madame Marcot. "He was a spectacle. He had lost an arm; his clothing was in tatters, and he was as thin as a skeleton. But it was Monsieur de Blanchet all ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 13, 1917 • Various
... if it's really so," declared Ethel Blue, who was an especial admirer of Gertrude Merriam's and a devout believer in her ability to turn Elisabeth from a skeleton into a ...
— Ethel Morton's Holidays • Mabell S. C. Smith
... went straight home and sought out John Pendleton. He found him in the great crimson-hung library where, some years before, Pollyanna had looked fearfully about for the "skeleton in John ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... one side, limped a score or more of foot-sore, yoke-galled, skeleton oxen, that ever paused to nip at the occasional tufts of withered grass, and that ever were prodded on by the tired-faced youths who herded them. Sometimes one or another of these oxen would pause and low, ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... coral," was the reply, "and it eats and lives just in the same way, only that the coral polyp has a stony skeleton and most of the sea anemones have not. But every different one has some sort of a story to tell and I believe they get joy out of life just as we do. Else why should some of these forms be so beautiful? You note them closely when we pass ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... of the success of the U-boat starvation campaign has been thoughtlessly afforded the German Press by a London newspaper which has announced that burglars are now using practically nothing but skeleton keys. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 19, 1917 • Various
... was practiced in various forms throughout Polynesia even in such communities as rejected infanticide after birth. The skeleton of a woman, who evidently died during the operation, is preserved in the Bishop Museum to attest the practice, were not testimony of ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... nearly eleven o'clock on Sunday night before they were ready to start on their errand. Meantime Aggie had done two turns at the foreign clubs, and John Storm had led a procession through Crown Street and been hit by a missile thrown by a "Skeleton," whom he declined to give in charge. At the corner of the alley he stopped to ask Mrs. Pincher to wait up for him, and the girl's large eyes caught sight of the patch of plaster ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... little army of skeleton regiments, thus carefully drilled, was ready for the invasion of Canada. On July 5th the fight at Chippewa took place. The battle was practically between Scott's wing of Brown's army and Riall's British troops, the numbers being almost ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... preceding the French Revolution the Reformed Church in the United Provinces had become honey-combed with rationalism. The official orthodoxy of the Dort synod had become "a fossilised skeleton." By the Constitution of 1798 Church and State were separated, and the property of the Church was taken by the State, which paid however stipends to the ministers. Under King Louis subsidies were paid from the public funds to teachers of every ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... Greening's was like a pressed fern," said Winnie. "Do you remember the fad we had for pressed flowers and skeleton leaves? We used to keep them inside ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... him in their habits of thinking, and who can thus prepare for him infusions of history and science that will leave some solidifying deposit, and save him from a fatal softening of the intellectual skeleton. Among such serviceable writers, Mr. Lecky's History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe entitles him to a high place. He has prepared himself for its production by an unusual amount of well-directed reading; he has chosen his facts and quotations with much judgment; ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... Hippolyte to flash forth remarks or reflections which showed the character of his habits and of his mind. Trouble had prematurely faded the old lady's face, formerly handsome, no doubt; nothing was left but the more prominent features, the outline, in a word, the skeleton of a countenance of which the whole effect indicated great shrewdness with much grace in the play of the eyes, in which could be discerned the expression peculiar to women of the old Court; an expression that cannot be defined in words. Those fine and mobile features might quite as well ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... shivered. "That!" And he turned over and pointed with an agitated finger at a human skull and a heap of crumbled bones. "It's a man's skeleton. And you notioned as nobody 'd ever set foot in ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... worked my way into the second cloth-box, determined to continue my search as long as strength was left me. There was not much left now. I knew that what I ate was barely sufficient to sustain life, and I felt that I was fast wasting away. My ribs projected like those of a skeleton, and it was as much as I could do to move the heavier pieces of ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... a common subjection, at the last, to foreign conquerors. Subjection, aggregation of that sort, is impossible to America; but the fear of conflicting and irreconcilable interiors, and the lack of a common skeleton, knitting all close, continually haunts me. Or, if it does not, nothing is plainer than the need, a long period to come, of a fusion of the States into the only reliable identity, the moral and artistic one. For, I say, the true nationality of the States, the genuine union, when we come to a ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... hills, miles and miles of grass country, with dim distant hills, stretched before them. The great shining surface of the creek caught the rosy evening light, and every pink cloudlet in the sky looked doubly beautiful reflected in the water. Here and there out of the water arose giant skeleton trees, with huge silver trunks and contorted dead branches. On these twisted limbs were numbers of birds: Shag, blue and white Cranes, and black and white Ibis with their bent bills. Slowly paddling on the creek, with graceful movements, ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... right, if not to vote, at least to be curious. Her curiosity rid the world of a monster, and in her curiosity we see the nucleus of the new drama. That little blood-stained key unlocked for us the cupboard where the family skeleton had been left too long in the cold; it was time that he joined the festive board, or, at least, appeared on the boards: and now, I am glad to say, he has done so; and he is called new-fangled. Do not let us call things ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... know that pimento tree anywhere on account of its odd shape. It had three branches leaving the trunk, one of which ran up several feet higher than the others, a dead branch pointing to the northward like a skeleton finger. There was a rim of mountains around the lake, except for a break in the range ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood
... Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience, and Triumph of St. Francis. (The Francis between the two Angels in the "Obedience" and nearly all of the "Triumph" were executed by another hand, probably C.) R. TRANSEPT. Frescoes: Bringing to Life of Child fallen from Window; Francis and a crowned Skeleton; Two Scenes (one on either side of arch leading to the Chapel of the Sacrament) representing the Bringing to Life of a Boy killed by a falling House; (above these) Annunciation; (next to Cimabue's Madonna) ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... thought there were children laid in here also. On first opening this building, by removing the posts which formed the ends, our curiosity was raised to the highest pitch; but what added to our surprise, was the discovery of a white deal coffin, containing a skeleton neatly shrouded in white muslin. After a long pause of conjecture how such a thing existed here, the idea of Mary March occurred to one of the party, and the whole mystery was ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 388 - Vol. 14, No. 388, Saturday, September 5, 1829. • Various
... skeleton had walked into the office we could not have been more taken aback. Of all persons in the world, who would have guessed that this fellow whom we had last seen at Stonebridge House, and had never even ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... whether rum punch, or hot whisky-and-water with sugar and lemon were better, for warding off a chill. I didn't see why I shouldn't linger a little on the wide plateau, with the Dead City looming above me like a skeleton seated on a ruined throne, and half southern France spread out in a vast plain, ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... Girty, who were driven to outlaw life. Simon must not be confounded with Jim Girty, absolutely the most fiendish desperado who ever lived. Why, even the Indians feared Jim so much that after his death his skeleton remained unmolested in the glade where he was killed. The place is believed to be haunted now, by all Indians and many white hunters, and I believe ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... at the least; and between some of the more widely separated forms there ought to be thousands of intermediate varieties; as for instance between the bear and the whale; and a still greater number between the mollusk with its external shell, and the vertebrate with its internal skeleton. And we ought to find these intermediate forms closely connected with their parents and their children. For intermediate forms in another continent could not be the connecting links between the mollusks and vertebrates ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... point of washing the dishes and cooking utensils and putting them carefully away. These matters attended to, he roamed over the house which now had a new interest for him since the Congdon family skeleton had come out of its closet and danced round the dinner table. In one way and another he found it possible to make a fair acquaintance with the late inmates of the house. In a bedroom adjoining the nursery there were ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... his way one of the three or four solitary rocks which rose from the sand, the skeleton remnants of larger masses worn down by wind, wave, and weather, he heard his own name uttered by an unpleasant voice, and followed by a ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... and brightened. I threw a glance towards the door, and could distinguish without particular trouble the skeleton-like letters of Miss Andersen's winding-sheet advertisement to the right of it. It was also a good while since the clock has ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... finding out the longitude. One of our number is a Moravian who signs himself Henry XXVIII, Count de Reus. The Moravians have settled a colony at Chelsea, in Sir Hans's neighbourhood, and I believe he intended to beg Count Henry XXVIIIth's skeleton for his museum. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... against something. They proceeded till they discovered a large trunk, which with some difficulty they drew out. It had been corded round, but the cords were rotted to dust. They opened it, and found a skeleton which appeared to have been tied neck and heels together, and forced into ...
— The Old English Baron • Clara Reeve
... sat a man, unlike an ordinary human being. It was a skeleton, with tight-drawn skin, with long curly hair like a woman's, and a shaggy beard. The colour of his face was yellow, of an earthy shade; the cheeks were sunken, the back long and narrow, and the hand upon which he leaned his hairy head was so lean and skinny that it was painful to look upon. His ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... anything was ever found. They dropped clean out of sight. It became one of the mysteries of the country. Steve and I plugged away up the Stewart, and six weeks afterward that Spot crawled into camp. He was a perambulating skeleton, and could just drag along; but he got there. And what I want to know is who told him we were up the Stewart? We could have gone a thousand other places. How did he know? You tell me, ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... that he played cricket at Winchester College in 1650, one of his scores, cut on the chapel-cloister wall, being still extant; and the same writer reproduces as a frontispiece to his "opusculum" an old engraving bearing date 1743, in which the wicket appears as a skeleton hurdle about two feet wide by one foot high, while the bat is the Saxon crec or crooked stick, with which the game was originally played, and from which the name ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... and lacerated his flesh till his nails dripped with blood." With emotions somewhat analogous, Mr. Dunbar sat as participant in this judicial rouge et noir, where the stakes were a human life, and the skeleton hand of death was already outstretched. Listening to the calm, mournful voice which alone had power to stir and thrill his pulses, he could not endure the pain of watching the exquisite face that haunted him day and night; and when he computed the chances of her conviction, a maddening ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... such a dear old place," she said, "that I should like to stay here always. People say there is a skeleton in every house, but I am sure there can be none here, everything seems so peaceful ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... in triumph, to the extreme delight of his sister's classical mind. 'Oh mamma, mamma,' she cried, 'Ulysse really has got the skeleton of a Triton. It is exactly like the stone creatures in the ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... land of France, and so to Brest, yet never see sign of Notre Dame des Eaux; for it clings to a cliff somewhat lower than the road, and between grows a stunted thicket of harsh and ragged trees, their skeleton white branches, tortured and contorted, thrusting sorrowfully out of the hard, dark foliage that still grows below, where the rise of land below the highway gives some protection. You must leave the wood by the two cottages of yellow stone, about twenty miles beyond St. Pol, and go down to the right, ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... Oh, no! I can't stand your English house-parties. In England people actually try to be brilliant at breakfast. That is so dreadful of them! Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast. And then the family skeleton is always reading family prayers. My stay in England really depends on you, Sir Robert. [Sits down ...
— An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde
... and strong, accustomed to command. The body was that of an invalid. A blanket covered him to the waist, above that the flesh was sickly white, spotted with red nodules, and hung loosely over the bones. There seemed to be nothing left of the man except skin and skeleton. ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... Streets." It was, I believe, the first hint of naturalism in American letters. It was not a best-seller; it offers no solution of life; it is an episodic bit of slum fiction, ending with the tragic finality of a Greek drama. It is a skeleton of a novel rather than a novel, but it is a powerful outline, written about a life Crane had learned to know as a newspaper reporter in New York. It is a singularly fine piece of analysis, or a bit of extraordinarily faithful reporting, as ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... was a stiff, tall, bony man, of about fifty-five, and for this worthy I wrote an advertisement for a wife. He was thin, and shy, and emaciated—a breathing skeleton, in the receipt of some hundred and twenty pounds a-year; a martyr to the rheumatism, and a radical. He required but little; a moderate fortune; tolerable person; good education; perfect housewifery; implicit obedience; and, finally, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 265, July 21, 1827 • Various
... Hooper's version, the denoument was brought about by the aid of a clergyman. Men of this profession have always been considered the most efficient guardians against the powers of darkness. He, with the help of Mrs. M——, made the excavation in the cellar which brought to light the half-consumed skeleton. Here, unfortunately, is a gap in the evidence. The remains were pronounced by medical authority to be human, but was that authority reliable? was that doctor skilled in comparative anatomy? If not, the bones might have ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... Professor Wiseman who had brought up the subject, "but some time ago I articulated a skeleton brought me by an Arab slave trader and found extending from the shoulder blade two distinct bony frames which had in life apparently been covered with a thin fleshy substance of leathery like tenacity stretching thence to the wrists. I asked the slave trader where he had found ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... best studied; those of neighbouring species evidently act much in the same way, with differences only in detail. The little carpenter stops a fragment rather longer than his own body, lies on it and brings it in contact with other pieces along his own sides. He thus obtains the skeleton of a cylinder. The largest holes are filled up with detritus of all kinds. Then these materials are agglutinated by a special secretion. The larva overlays the interior of its tube with a covering of soft silk which renders the cylinder watertight and consolidates ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... building, I was next to finish and close the walls of it; the skeleton of these was composed of sticks, crossing one another checker-wise and tied together; to fill up the voids, I wove upon them the longest and most pliable twigs of the underwood I could find, leaving only a doorway on one side, between two stems of a tree which, dividing in the trunk ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... conversation dropped, but its substance was not disregarded. The next morning, the surgeon having reported that Schriften was apparently quite recovered, he was summoned into the cabin. His frame was wasted away to a skeleton, but his motions and his language were as sharp ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... near Green Lake, ninety miles distant, with the trap and connecting wood-block still attached to one of its hind legs. It had evidently dragged both around in the snow for many a mile, during a period of intense cold, and it is, therefore, not surprising that it was a 'walking skeleton' ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... "Your skeleton will be interesting to science when you are dead, Mr. Solon," hissed the Wondersmith. "But before I have the pleasure of reducing you to an anatomy, which I will assuredly do, I wish to compliment ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... Rieta, what was their horror to find their child worn to a skeleton, half starved through the falsity of a nurse. For four weeks the distressed parents coaxed him back to life, till the sweet beauty of the rounded face came again, and then they carried him to Florence, where, despite poverty and ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... fate. Not a trace of these animals has been found for a long time. The extinction of the Labrador duck and the great auk have often been deplored. Both of these birds may be regarded as practically extinct. The last skeleton of the great auk was sold for $600, the last skin for $650, and the last egg brought the fabulous sum ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... to a skeleton, sir," she answered; "he was always here nag, nag, nagging night and day. At last my poor ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... for such an induction, but would not help us toward a knowledge of the laws of any other of the properties of animals; while if, with Cuvier, we compare and class them according to the structure of the skeleton, or, with Blainville, according to the nature of their outward integuments, the agreements and differences which are observable in these respects are not only of much greater importance in themselves, but are marks of agreements and differences in many other important particulars of the structure ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... unexpectedly of Phoebe and the child? Clearly what would have been simplicity itself at first was now an awkwardness. Lord Findon would be puzzled—chilled. He would suppose there was something to be ashamed of—some skeleton in the cupboard. And especially would he take it ill that Fenwick had allowed him to run on with his diatribes against matrimony as though he were talking to a bachelor. Then the lie about the picture. It had been the shy, foolish impulse of a moment. ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... see, it isn't the skeleton that makes the difference; it's the kind of meat you put on the bones! Paradise Lost would be a howling melodrama, if some of you picture-people tried to make it. You'd take this plot of mine and make it just like these pictures I've been working in, Mr. Burns: Exciting and all that, but not the ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... said Godfrey, unequal to the considerate skill with which he would have wished to make his revelation. "It's Dunstan—my brother Dunstan, that we lost sight of sixteen years ago. We've found him—found his body—his skeleton." ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... [Gravely.] Harry, do you know there are moments when I feel that I am changing towards the sex; when I fancy I can discern the skeleton, as it were, ...
— The Gay Lord Quex - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur W. Pinero
... said, and cut at the sun-baked soil. After three strokes there rolled from under the blade of the hoe the half of a clanking skeleton that settled at Pagett's feet in an unseemly jumble of bones. The ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... she was when he last saw her.... He got tired of walking about the streets, and he made his way to the quays and passed across the gangway on to the deck of the steamer. A cool air was blowing up the Lagan from the Lough, and when he leaned over the side of the ship he could see the dark skeleton shape of the shipyard. His thoughts were extraordinarily confused, rambling about his father and Sheila Morgan and John Marsh and Mary Graham and Tom Arthurs and Ireland and ships and England and Gilbert Farlow and ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... generalizations and lets the all-important particulars—the individual living thing—slip through the meshes; whereas intuition—the eye fixed on the object—penetrates to the very heart of this individual living thing, and only drops out the skeleton framework of abstract laws. Philosophy, in these thinkers, was deeply imbued with the analogies of artistic creation. 'Beauty,' said Ravaisson, 'and especially beauty in the most divine and perfect form, contains ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... waggons, and a considerable number came to us. We had not forgotten the elephant's tusks, which Timbo had hid, and as soon as he believed his master was out of danger, he set off with one of the horses to bring them into camp. The elephant itself had long since disappeared, its skeleton alone whitened the prairie; but the tusks were safe, and were safely bestowed in the waggon, in part ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... the foundation was in and the brick walls had begun to go up, there were so few people left in the neighbourhood that she might indulge with impunity her husband's passion for having her clamber over the floor-timbers and the skeleton stair-cases with him. Many of the householders had boarded up their front doors before the buds had begun to swell and the assessor to appear in early May; others had followed soon; and Mrs. Lapham was as safe from remark as if she had been in the depth of the country. Ordinarily ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... pipe in his mouth; and every now and then he seemed to remember that he had the said whip, and took it in hand, to give it a crack which sounded like a pistol shot, with the result that the horse in the van threw up its head, which had hung down toward the road, and the other skeleton-like creature in the cart threw up its tail with a sharp whisk that disturbed the flies which appeared to have already begun to make a meal upon its body, while the scattered drove of ragged ponies and horses ceased cropping the roadside herbage, and trotted on a few yards before beginning ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... decrepit, old creature, whom he had named Bella, after the eldest of the pretty Hamilton girls, much to that young lady's disgust. In spite of old Bella's skeleton appearance and hobbling gait, Coonie took great pride in her and offered many times to trot her against Sandy Neil's racer. Her extreme lameness seemed quite appropriate, however, for in this respect she was ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... the skeleton programme of the Inverness "Character" Fair given by a farmer friend to me, who happened to be lazily rusticating in the north of Scotland during the pleasant month of July. My friend asked me to accompany him in his visit to this remarkable institution and the programme was too tempting for refusal. ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... the church caught Kermode's eye. Something was wrong with it. The skeleton tower looked out of the perpendicular; and on his second glance its inclination seemed to have increased. The snow, however, was clogging the front of his sled and he set to work to scrape it off. While he was ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... apparatus nearest the door was an upright skeleton framework of slender pillars housing in their center a cluster of coils set around a large drumlike diaphragm. Foster wondered if this were not the signal device with which Layroh had tuned in his own portable ...
— The Cavern of the Shining Ones • Hal K. Wells
... from additional values, the gesture must always precede the articulation of the initial consonant. Otherwise to observe the degree would be supremely ridiculous. The speaker would resemble a skeleton, a statue. The law of values becomes vital only through gesture and inflection. Stripped of the poetry of gesture and inflection, the application of the law ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... Arcot mused, "I've been thinking about that man's strength; an iron skeleton doesn't explain it all. He has to have muscles to move ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... sudden chasm that is fixed The sunshiny world and the shadowy betwixt, His Today with a pale wond'ring face stood alone, And over the border Tomorrow had flown. So after went he, his accounts as he could To settle and make his loose reckonings good, And left us his tomb and his skeleton under,— Two boons to his race,—to sit down on and ponder. Heaven help him! Yet heaven, I fear, he hath lost. Here lies his poor dust; but where cries his poor ghost? We know not. Perhaps we shall see by-and-by, When out of our coffins we get, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... gone—and for a moment silence reigned. Lights burned, flowers bloomed, crystal and silver shone, rare wines and rich fruits glowed. But a skeleton sat at the feast. Juan Catheron had done many evil deeds in his lifetime, but never a more dastardly ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... to me," Mr. Westcote remarked as he drew his chair up to the table. "I haven't eaten a bite since morning. I was all ready to go to the restaurant when Dobbins came to see me, and then you girls arrived. If this keeps up much longer I shall be a skeleton. But I must not remain too long," he added, as he consulted his watch. "I must be back in the city before the C. P. ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... cords are brought about by muscles. But both for the attachment of the muscles and the vocal cords themselves solid, relatively hard structures are required. Bone would prove too unyielding, but cartilage, or gristle, meets the case exactly. The entire framework of the larynx—its skeleton, so to speak—is made up of a series of cartilages united together so as to ensure sufficient firmness ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... is everything shaven in crowded Hindostan. To-day we stood and looked at a native who had led his goat into the country to pick up a meal. He bent the boughs of small trees one after another so that the goat could strip them of their leaves. The poor skeleton was ravenous. Nothing goes to waste in India, nor anywhere in the East. Garbage and sewage have value, and all is swept clean and kept clean in every hole and corner in consequence. This simplifies life very much. Our elaborate system of underground pipes, our sewers, drains, and ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... Brn. Cefn (Elwy Valley) limestone caves hold the prehistoric hippopotamus, elephant, rhinoceros, lion, hyena, bear, reindeer, &c.; Pls Heaton cave, the glutton; Pont Newydd, felstone tools and a polished stone axe (like that of Rhosdigre); Carnedd Tyddyn Bleiddian, "platycnemic (skeleton) men of Denbighshire" (like those of Perthi Chwareu). Clawdd Coch has traces of the Romans; so also Penygaer and Penbarras. Roman roads ran from Deva (Chester) to Segontium (Carnarvon) and from Deva to Mons Heriri (Tomen ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... slopes of Utah. The restless dust had settled. The Queen Hotel, the Big Tent, the rows of canvas, plank, tin, sheet metal, what-not stores, saloons, gambling dens, dance halls, human habitations—the blatant street and the station itself had subsided into this: a skeleton company of hacked and weazened posts, a fantastic outcrop of coldly blackened clay chimneys, a sprinkling of battered cans. The fevered populace who had ridden high upon the tide of rapid life had remained only as ghosts haunting a potter's ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... though he seemed but a living skeleton, Guatemoc walked straight to where the Spaniard stood, and spoke, Marina ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... N. remainder, residue; remains, remanent, remnant, rest, relic; leavings, heeltap^, odds and ends, cheesepairings^, candle ends, orts^; residuum; dregs &c (dirt) 653; refuse &c (useless) 645; stubble, result, educt^; fag-end; ruins, wreck, skeleton., stump; alluvium. surplus, overplus^, excess; balance, complement; superplus^, surplusage^; superfluity &c (redundancy) 641; survival, survivance^. V. remain; be left &c adj.; exceed, survive; leave. Adj. remaining, left; left behind left over; residual, residuary; over, odd; unconsumed, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... what you're talkin' about. He wasn't a skeleton. I saw him just as plain! And I said to myself, 'It's little Frank!' Now what do you suppose he came to me for? What do you suppose it means? It means somethin', I ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... him hear reason!" cried the other king, indignantly. "He promised us a beautiful princess, and he has sent us a skeleton, a fright. I do not wonder he has kept it shut up for fifteen years, and now he wishes to foist it ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... of a large and coarse-featured man, but wasted and shrunk as if by famine to a very skeleton. The hands and legs were cramped up, and the trunk bowed together, as if the man had died of cold or famine. Yeo drew back the clothes from the thin bosom, while the girl screamed and wept, but made ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley |
