"Slaty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... arable and orchard land, and shaded by groves of walnut and cherry. Scenes of this kind, and of that just described, so singularly opposed, and apparently brought together as foils to each other, are however peculiar to certain beds of the slaty coherents, which are both vast in elevation, and easy of destruction. In Wales and Scotland the same groups of rocks possess far greater hardness, while they attain less elevation; and the result is a totally different ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... What he does enjoy is the frank disparagement of Mr. WILFRID BLUNT, who describes him in the second volume of My Diary, just published, as "an ugly fellow, his face a pasty-white, with a red nose and a rusty red beard, and little slaty-blue eyes." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 4, 1920 • Various
... cold and the fear of death. The wolves licked their cruel lips and their eyes gleamed hungrily—but the eyes of the cow answered them, gleam for gleam. If it could be put upon canvas just as he had seen it, with the bitter, biting cold of a frozen chinook showing gray and sinister in the slaty sky— ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... salt in the same manner as on the banks of the Nile, and would, it is probable, prove no less fruitful were it irrigated with equal care. The stones on the beach, it is added, were all quartz, but of various colours; some specimens of which, having a slaty structure, emitted, when exposed to fire, a strong smell of bitumen, thereby denoting, perhaps, its ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... are of course inoffensive; and in moonshine they are always pleasing—it is a tone of light with which they accord: and the dimness of the scene is enlivened by an object at once conspicuous and cheerful. I will conclude this subject with noticing, that the cold, slaty colour, which many persons, who have heard the white condemned, have adopted in its stead, must be disapproved of for the reason already given. The flaring yellow runs into the opposite extreme, and is still more censurable. Upon the whole, the safest colour, for general use, is something ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... five brave fellows by him, slain in fight by the poisoned arrows of the Indians, in a vain attempt to penetrate the mountain-gorges of the Parima. Two more lie amid the valleys of the Andes, frozen to death by the fierce slaty hail which sweeps down from the condor's eyrie; four more were drowned at one of the rapids of the Orinoco; five or six more wounded men are left behind at another rapid among friendly Indians, to be recovered when they can be: perhaps never. Fever, snakes, jaguars, alligators, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... beach of Waikiki on the island of Oahu. Far, in the azure sky, the trade-wind clouds drift low over the blue-green turquoise of the deep sea. Nearer, the sea is emerald and light olive-green. Then comes the reef, where the water is all slaty purple flecked with red. Still nearer are brighter greens and tans, lying in alternate stripes and showing where sandbeds lie between the living coral banks. Through and over and out of these wonderful colours tumbles and thunders a magnificent surf. ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... long clear twilights of my home, Far in the pale-blue skies and slaty seas, What time the sunset dies not utterly, But withered to a ghost-like stealthy gleam, Round the horizon creeps the short-lived night, And changes into sunrise in a swoon. I found my home in homeliness unchanged: ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... the plains, others visit them in the cold weather; the majority are permanent residents of the hills. The solitary denizen of the plains—the little minivet (Pericrocotus peregrinus)—is the least resplendent of them all. Its prevailing hue is slaty grey, but the cock has a red breast and some red on the back. The nest is a cup so small as either to be invisible from below or to present the appearance of a knot or thickening in the branch on which it is placed. Sometimes two broods are reared ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... which, uniting at a short distance from the beach, formed a deep and rapid stream, near the mouth of which we landed. This spot was, I think, the most barren I ever saw, the ground being almost entirely covered with small pieces of slaty limestone, among which no vegetation appeared for more than a mile, to which distance Mr. Ross and myself walked inland, following the banks of the stream. Among the fragments we picked up one piece of limestone, on which was the impression of a fossil-shell. We saw here a great number of ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... he could raise his gun, the shrike, to his amazement, burst into an exquisite song, sweet and pure as a thrush's melody, and, spreading its slaty wings, it sailed off through ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... of wood, inner bark of trees, calico and other tissues, lead plates, and slaty stone. I knew an eminent engineer who habitually jotted his pencil memoranda on the well-starched wristband of his left shirt-sleeve, pushing back the cuff of his coat in order to expose it. The natives in some parts of Bengal, ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... and in a mongrel terrier the spot was black. Mr. Waring kindly examined for me a stud of fifteen greyhounds in Suffolk: eleven of them were black, or black and white, or brindled, and these had no eye-spots; but three were red and one slaty-blue, and these four had dark-coloured spots over their eyes. Although the spots thus sometimes differ in colour, they strongly tend to be tan-coloured; this is proved by my having seen four spaniels, a setter, two Yorkshire shepherd ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... in such weather it was impossible to embark ten mules without horse-boxes. On Sunday the waves ran high, but the gale fell about sunset to a dead calm; as usual in the Gulf, the breakers and white horses at once disappeared; and the slaty surface, fringed with dirty yellow, immediately reassumed its robes of purple and turquoise blue. The ill wind, however, had blown us some good by deluging with long-hoped-for rain the ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... there for six hours. At the draper's he learned that at two o'clock in the afternoon she had been seen going up Ballure. The sound rocket was fired as he pushed through the town. A schooner riding to an anchor in the bay was flying her ensign for help. The sea was terrific—a slaty grey, streaked with white foam like quartz veins; but the men who had been idling on the quay when the water was calm were now struggling, chafing, and fighting to go out on it, for the blood of the old Vikings was ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... that Jesus came. Strange to say, there is a shadow over His coming from the beginning. A gray chilling shadow of the sort of gray that a stormy sky sometimes shows, gray tingeing into slaty black. Yet it was the coming that made the shadow. It takes light, and some thick thing like a block, and some distance for perspective, to make a shadow. The nearer the light to the block thing the blacker the shadow. Here the light came close to some thick blocks; of ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... (the breadth and height as you please) and continuing the stone-work, and filling, and as you work, beating in the stones flat to the sides, they are made to stick everlastingly: This is absolutely the neatest, most saving, and profitable fencing imaginable, where slaty stones are in any abundance; and it becomes not only the most secure to the lands, but the best for cattle, to lye warm under the walls; whilst other hedges, (be they never so thick) admit of some cold winds in Winter-time ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... tree-stems on his right he saw glancing, a ghost on a white horse, which kept pace with him, do what he would. Now he was among the precipices on the ranges. On his left, a lofty inaccessible cliff; on the right, a frightful blue abyss; while the slaty soil kept sliding from beneath his horse's feet. Behind him, unseen, came a phantom, always gaining on him, and driving him along the giddiest wallaby tracks. If he could only turn and face it, he might conquer, but he ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... is the greenstone-trap everywhere abundant, and taking with age a creamy patina like the basalt of the Hauran. I heard, however, that at Abusi, beyond Anamabo (Bird-rock), and other places further east worked stones of a lightish slaty hue are common. About New Town and Assini these implements become very plentiful. Mr. S. Cheetham informs me that the thinner hatchets, somewhat finger-shaped, are copied in iron by the peoples of the Benin River. These expert smiths buy poor European metal and, like other West Africans, ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... rye, the yellow and green breaking the gray surface of the rocky waste; not a habitation, not a living creature, is in sight. Before us and around stretch desert upon desert of bare limestone, the nearer undulations cold and slaty in tone, the remoter taking the loveliest, warmest dyes —gold brown, deep orange, just tinted with crimson, reddish purple and pale rose. We are on the threshold of the true Caussien region. Sterility ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... effect of the haze had gathered about the island; its lofty cliffs seemed to tower on high more majestically, and to lean over more frowningly; its fringe of black sea-weed below seemed blacker, while the general hue of the island had changed from a reddish color to one of a dull slaty blue. ...
— Lost in the Fog • James De Mille
... denudation has been here effected on an enormous scale. Near the base of this hill, I observed beds of white tuff, intersected by numerous dikes, some of amygdaloidal basalt and others of trachyte; and beds of slaty phonolite with the planes of cleavage directed N.W. and S.E. Parts of this rock, where the crystals were scanty, closely resembled common clay-slate, altered by the contact of a trap-dike. The lamination ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... and the man wore a scarlet coat all powdered with pilm; and as he opened the gate and came over the graves, father saw that 'twas the dashing dragoon. His face was still a slaty-grey, and clammy with sweat; and when he spoke, his voice was all of a whisper, with ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... sun would rise next morning, and climbed laboriously deeper and deeper into the hills. After awhile he had to descend from the ridge where he found himself standing bleakly revealed against a lowering, slaty sky that dripped rain incessantly. As far as he could see were hills and more hills, bald and barren except in certain canyons whose deeper shadows told of timber. Away off to the southwest a bright light showed ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... refer is called the lark bunting in plain English, or, in scientific terms, Calamospiza melanocorys. The male is a trig and handsome fellow, giving you the impression of a well-dressed gentleman in his Sunday suit of black, "with more or less of a slaty cast," as Ridgway puts it, the middle and greater wing-coverts bearing a conspicuous white patch which is both a diagnostic marking and a real ornament. In flight this patch imparts to the wing a filmy, almost semi-transparent, aspect. The bunting is about the size ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... portrait, while the sides were four feet up the oaken wainscot which surrounded the whole room behind the tapestry, and from thence to the ceiling, plaster. The mantelpiece and fireplace were of a dark slaty stone, and of ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... just above what were commonly called (from their slaty color) the Blue Rocks; it seemed the topmost pebble left by some tide that had receded,—which perhaps it was. Nurses and children thronged daily to these rocks, during the visitors' season, and the fishermen found ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... less pleasant than she thought at first. The hills, bare of trees, exposed them to the full power of the sun, yet were covered with a growth of tall heaths, mingled with patches of the cistus ladaniferus, which covers so much of the surface of the slaty hills of this region. The close growth and gummy exudations of this plant often made the thickets impenetrable, and forced the party to many a long circuit, in their efforts to reach the ridge of the high grounds. Mrs. Shortridge at length sat, ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... ramble on the plain, and were about a quarter of a mile from home when a blackness appeared in the south-west, and began to cover the sky in that quarter so rapidly that, taking alarm, we started homewards as fast as we could run. But the stupendous slaty-black darkness, mixed with yellow clouds of dust, gained on us, and before we got to the gate the terrified screams of wild birds reached our ears, and glancing back we saw multitudes of gulls and plover flying madly before the storm, trying to keep ahead ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... part is mostly high and cliffy; and under the cliffs were lying black lumps, apparently of slaty stone, rounded by attrition. These were not particularly noticed, but Mr. Clarke, in his disastrous journey along the coast, afterwards made fires of them; and on a subsequent examination, Mr. Bass found a stratum of coal to run through the whole of ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... formations to those of the central chain. It is known that the zechstein is situated between the muriatiferous gypsum and the conglomerate (ancient sandstone); or where there is no muriatiferous gypsum, between the slaty sandstone with roestones (buntesandstein, Wern.), and the conglomerate or ancient sandstone. It contains strata of schistous and coppery marl (bituminoce mergel and kupferschiefer) which form an important object in the working of mines at Mansfeld in Saxony, near Riegelsdorf in Hesse, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... dear face,—a tint that is best unknown, that cannot be reproduced by pen or pencil. Yet, for all its pallor, you saw at once that this face was still young, had been lovely, a true New-England beauty, quaint and trim and delicate as the slaty-gray snow-bird, with its white breast, and soft, bright eyes, that haunts the dusky fir-trees and dazzling hill-side slopes when no other bird dare show itself,—a quiet, shy creature, full of innocent trust and endurance, its chirp and low repetition ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... sides were not all so steep as the one on which the house stood, but they were all rocky and steep, with here and there slopes of green grass. And down in the bottom, in the centre of the hollow, lay a pool of water. I knew it only by its slaty shimmer through the fading green of the tree-tops ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... affected with lime. Indeed, in almost every part of the County, there is an exhaustless supply of the purest spring water. This is due, in great part, to the porosity of the soil which allows the water to pass freely into the earth, and the slaty character of the rocks which favors its descent into the bowels of the hills, from whence it finds its way to the surface, at their base, in numberless small springs. The purity of these waters is borrowed from the silicious quality ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... have yielded to pressure often split easily in a certain direction across the bedding planes. This cleavage is known as slaty cleavage, since it is most perfectly developed in fine-grained, homogeneous rocks, such as slates, which cleave to the thin, smooth-surfaced plates with which we are familiar in the slates used ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... more likely to get full value for the money paid than the one who does not. About coal, it should be understood that good hard coal has a glossy black color and a bright surface, whereas poor coal contains slaty pieces. The quality of coal can also be determined from the ash that remains after it is burned. Large chunks or great quantities of ash indicate a poor quality of coal, and fine, powdery ash a good quality. Of course, even if the ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 1 - Volume 1: Essentials of Cookery; Cereals; Bread; Hot Breads • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... "front gardens," untrodden by the foot of man save as to the path from the gate to the hall door; but blighted by an intolerable monotony of miles and miles of graceless, characterless brick houses, black iron railings, stony pavements, slaty roofs, and respectably ill dressed or disreputably poorly dressed people, quite accustomed to the place, and mostly plodding about somebody else's work, which they would not do if they themselves ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... statues, broken in the middle, lie strewed upon the ground; the other, which remains whole and standing, is frightful to behold. It represents a man of gigantic proportions, with a head three feet high; the expression of the countenance is ferocious, eyes of brilliant slaty black are set beneath gray brows, the large, deep mouth gapes immoderately, and reptiles have made their nest between the lips of stone; by the light of the moon, a hideous swarm is there dimly visible. A broad girdle, adorned with symbolic ornaments, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... and he stood with it in one hand and the unlit cigarette in the other until the flame licked round his fingers. Belmont whistled. The dragoman stood staring with his mouth half-open, and a curious slaty tint in his full, red lips. The others looked from one to the other with an uneasy sense that there was something wrong. It was the Colonel who broke ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... two dogs. George, the elder, exhibited an ebony-tipped nose, surrounded by a narrow margin of pink flesh, and a coat marked in random splotches approximating in colour to white and slaty grey; but the grey, after years of sun and rain, had been scorched and washed out of the more prominent locks, leaving them of a reddish-brown, as if the blue component of the grey had faded, like the indigo from the same kind of colour ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... southeastern coast of the Province. The whole of this coast, from Cape Sable on the west to Cape Canso on the east, a distance of about two hundred and fifty miles, is bordered by a fringe of hard, slaty rocks,—slate and sandstone in irregular alternations,—sometimes argillaceous, and occasionally granitic. These rocks, originally deposited on the grandest scale of Nature, are always, when stratified, found standing at a high angle,—sometimes ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... on the solid rock-filled reach, the wharfinger's office at its head and a stone warehouse blocking the end, where the Nautilus lay with her high-steeved bowsprit pointing outward. The harbor was slaty, cold, and there was a continuous slapping of small waves on the shore. Darkening clouds hung low in the west, out of which the wind cut in flaws across the open. The town, so lately folded in lush greenery, showed a dun lift of roofs and stripping ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... The slaty limestone has grown black with the water that is dripping on it, and wherever I turn there is the same grey obsession twining and wreathing itself among the narrow fields, and the same wail from the wind that shrieks and whistles in the loose rubble ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... that loads the meads with sand, Rolls her red tide to Teviot's western strand, Through slaty hills, whose sides are shagged with thorn, Where springs in scattered tufts the dark-green corn, Towers wood-girt Harden far above the vale, And clouds of ravens o'er the turrets sail. A hardy race who never shrunk from war, The Scott, to rival realms a mighty ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... attention was first called to this subject, and I was led to make numerous experiments, by MM. Boitard and Corbie having stated that, when they crossed certain breeds, pigeons coloured like the wild C. livia, or the common dovecot, namely, slaty-blue, with double black wing-bars, sometimes chequered with black, white loins, the tail barred with black, with the outer feathers edged with white, were almost invariably produced. The breeds which I crossed, and the remarkable results attained, have ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... "White Doe of Rylstone"; nay, we more incline to doze over it than to lose our breath. Wilson differs from Wordsworth as Loch Awe, with its shaggy savagery of shore, from the Sunday quietude and beauty of Rydal-Water. The Strid of Wordsworth was bounded by the slaty banks of the "Crystal Wharf," and the Strid of Wilson, in his best moments, was as large as the valley of Glencoe. Yet Wordsworth loved intensely all the more beautiful aspects of the country, and of country-life. No angler and no gardener, indeed,—too ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... swaying had become perceptible. For a moment she remained dazzlingly white, then faded away slowly to nothing in a squall, only to reappear again, nearly black, resembling a post stuck upright against the slaty background of solid cloud. Since first noticed she had not gained on us ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... of ironic fate: One stoutly shod paces a velvet sward; And one is forced with naked feet to climb Sharp slaty ways alive with scorpions, While wolfish hunger strains to catch his throat; One lingers o'er his purple draught and laughs, One shuddering tastes his bitter cup and groans; But there is hope for all. Though not for all To sail through sunny ripples to the end, Chatting ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... don't you see, 'tes this way. Kit's House es a gran' place wi' a slaty roof an' a I-talian garden, and a mighty deal too fine for the likes of Paul an' me. But wi' Tamsin 'tes another thing. We both agree she ought to be a leddy—not but what she's a better gal than tens o' thousands o' leddies—an' more than once we've offered to get ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... smooth, solid black stone, something like the lapis lydius, of which the natives make their hatchets. But these may, probably, have been brought from other islands in the neighbourhood; for a piece of slaty, iron-coloured stone was bought at one of them, which was never seen here. Though the coral projects in many places above the surface, the soil is, in general, of a considerable depth. In all cultivated places, it is commonly of a loose, black colour, produced seemingly, in a great measure, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... stake in the pit scarred him from a little above his heel to the crest of his shoulder, leaving a white mark." Mowgli threw out his hand, and as Hathi wheeled the moonlight showed a long white scar on his slaty side, as though he had been struck with a red-hot whip. "Men came to take him from the trap," Mowgli continued, "but he broke his ropes, for he was strong, and went away till his wound was healed. Then came he, angry, by night to the fields of those hunters. And ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... but though his brigade, led by that active officer, Colonel F. H. Jenkins, pushed on as fast as it could, its progress was painfully slow. The column advancing in single file extended over a distance of nearly three miles, and as the sun rose high in the heavens the reflected heat from the bare slaty rocks became almost insupportable. There were no trees to give the men shade, or springs to slake their thirst. For the first four miles the road continued to ascend the Lashora ravine between hills on the right hand and rocky, overhanging ...
— A Soldier's Life - Being the Personal Reminiscences of Edwin G. Rundle • Edwin G. Rundle
... slaty Cleavage and Joints. Supposed Causes of these Structures. Crystalline Theory of Cleavage. Mechanical Theory of Cleavage. Condensation and Elongation of slate Rocks by lateral Pressure. Lamination of some volcanic Rocks due to Motion. Whether the Foliation ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... equipment for a poet, but still one that should not be waived or considered lightly. At the village school William was neither precocious nor dull, neither black nor white: his cosmos being simply a sort of slaty-gray, a condition of being which attracted no special attention from either his schoolfellows or his tutors. From the village school he went to Marlborough Academy, where by patient grubbing he fitted ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... season, embarrass its navigation, are laid down in the manuscript plan with great care and minuteness. It is subject to one great inconvenience, that vessels drawing more than 12 feet water, cannot enter the river, even in perfectly calm weather, on account of a stratum of slaty limestone, which runs at a depth at high water of fifteen feet, from a point on the main land to some rocks in the middle of the entrance of the harbour, and which are just even with the water's edge; which, together with the lee current that sets on the southern shore, particularly in the rainy ...
— A Succinct View of the Importance and Practicability of Forming a Ship Canal across the Isthmus of Panama • H. R. Hill
... projection to ledge, now straight down, now diagonally, and often along first one tiny ledge or cornice and then another, zig-zagging, till, at about twenty feet from the place he was making for, a slaty piece of the limestone rock by which he was holding parted, frost-loosened, from the parent rock, and he went down ...
— Cutlass and Cudgel • George Manville Fenn
... rainbow tints within the influences of the sun, and ever-changing shape. On another, when the turbulent Foehn is blowing, streamers of snow may be seen flying from the higher ridges against a pallid background of slaty cloud, while the gaunt ribs of the hills glisten below with fitful gleams of lurid light. At sunrise, one morning, stealthy and mysterious vapours clothe the mountains from their basement to the waist, while the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... which I established my home was fertile and extremely rich in tropical vegetation, the adjoining ranges were in striking contrast to it; many districts being rugged and slaty and painfully difficult to traverse on foot. There were, however, many interesting natural curiosities which ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... best comes from Pingting-chau in Shansi; the quality most in demand in central China is called the Kwang coal, and is brought from various districts in Hunan. Numerous varieties are produced in the province of Kiangsu—slaty, cannel, bituminous and anthracite. This portion of the mineral wealth of China is computed at nearly six millions of dollars. The scarcity of the supply is owing not to the poverty of the mines, but chiefly to the want of ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... appearance less than engaging. He still bore the traces of last night's debauch and of his sojourn in the police-cell. There was dry mud on the back of his coat, his shirt-cuffs and collar were of a slaty hue, his hands and face filthy. He began to eat bread and butter, washing down each morsel with a gulp of tea. The spoon remained in the cup whilst he drank. To 'Arry it was a vast relief to be free from the ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... compared with its width; the exterior presents at a glance the changes which have taken place in it, and the layers and masses of different coloured stones tell their own tale; the oldest work (comprising several periods) is constructed with dark slaty stone, having red freestone dressings; the Norman work is observed in the transept and several bays of the nave and choir nearest the transept, while the pointed work is specially noticeable in ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... older than Rosemary, and so different from her that it was hard to believe they were sisters. She was dark and massive, with black hair, thick, black eyebrows and eyes of the clear, slaty blue of the gulf water in a north wind. She had a rather stern, forbidding look, but she was in reality very jolly, with a hearty, gurgling laugh and a deep, mellow, pleasant voice with a suggestion of masculinity about it. She had ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... or tools ever met my eyes, though I was anxious to find them, and looked carefully over every ancient village we came to for many years. There is no flint to make celts, but quartz and rocks having a slaty cleavage are abundant. It is only for the finer work that they use iron tongs, hammers, and anvils and with these they turn out work which makes English blacksmiths declare Africans never did. They are very careful of ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... working blackish-brownish colour, with a little purple in it, and touches of slaty-blue. It will be the very thing for hiding in ...
— Just So Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... for some time. Craig glanced out of the window into the slaty sky, from which rain was falling. It was a day unseasonably warm and humid for early spring. "I hope it's raining in the Noda. But it's just as liable to be snow. Latisan can't do much yet awhile." He looked at his watch as if starting the Noda drives was a matter ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... uncomfortable of the whole twenty-four. After spending the night in a lively game of cup and ball, with yourself for the ball, and an amazingly hard wooden bunk for the cup, you crawl on deck, bruised and aching from top to toe. While gazing upon the inspiring landscape of gray fog and slaty blue sea, you suddenly feel a stream of cold water splashing into your boots, while an unfeeling sailor gruffly asks "why in thunder you can't git out o' the way?" Springing hastily aside, you break your shins over a spar which seems to have been put there on purpose, and get up only ...
— Harper's Young People, March 16, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... extraordinary variety of shades of blue, ranging from a sort of greyish robin's-egg to the darkest navy, in which the army is clothed. The result attained is the conviction that no blue is really inconspicuous, and that some of the harsh new slaty tints are no less striking than the deeper shades they have superseded. But to this scale of experimental blues, other colours must be added: the poppy-red of the Spahis' tunics, and various other less familiar colours—grey, and a certain greenish khaki—the ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... limit to what it could endure. The incident made it think, apparently, that the neighborhood was dangerous, for it slowly lurched off through the wood, followed by its mate and its three enormous infants. We saw the shimmering slaty gleam of their skins between the tree-trunks, and their heads undulating high above the brush-wood. Then they vanished ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... this clearing stood a rough cabin, or rather half-cabin, of logs; for the back of it was formed by a ledge of slaty rocks, some ten or twelve feet in height, which here cropped out of the hill-side. The raw clay with which the crevices between the logs had been stopped, had fallen out in many places; the roof of long ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... meridian the needle ceased to traverse but remained steady at an angle of 60 degrees. On changing the face of the instrument so as to give a South-East and North-West direction to the needle it hung vertically. The position of the slaty strata of the magnetic ore is also vertical. Their direction is extremely ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... very strong vitreous brick of dark, slaty-blue colour, used in engineering works where great strength or impermeability is desirable. These bricks are made of clay containing front 7 to 10% of oxide of iron, and their manufacture is carried out in the ordinary way until the later stages of the firing process, when they are subjected to ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... rank and seeded grasses, reeds, and shrubs, either dwarf or parasite, excluded all impression of order or of splendor. The house appeared to have been long abandoned. The roof seemed to bend beneath the weight of the various vegetations which grew upon it. The walls, though built of the smooth, slaty stone which abounds in that region, showed many rifts and chinks where ivy had fastened its rootlets. Two main buildings, joined at the angle by a tall tower which faced the lake, formed the whole of the chateau, the doors and swinging, ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... shows itself in a peculiar coloring of the skin (Argyria Fuchs), especially in the face, beginning first on the sclerotic. The skin does not always take the same color; it becomes in most cases grayish blue, slaty sometimes, though, a greenish ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... hitherto he had missed: that she had hair and eyes quite worthy of consideration. Black as night the former was, and fine and rebellious, with little curling wisps about her ears and neck. The eyes were a peculiar slaty gray and had depths inviting inspection. He found himself wishing he could see them ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... for college, and when he was sixteen, he trudged off to Cambridge and was duly entered in the Harvard Class of Eighteen Hundred Thirty-seven. At Harvard, his cosmos seemed to be of such a slaty gray that no one said, "Go to—we will observe this youth and write anecdotes about him, for he is going to be a great man." The very few in his class who remembered him wrote their reminiscences long years afterward, with memories refreshed by magazine accounts ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... triumph, but speed away before her towards the dreary north, which only a few of her hard-riding pursuivants would ever reach. For green hills he must have opal-hued bergs—for green fields the outspread slaty waters, rolling in the delight of their few weeks of glorious freedom, and mocking the unwieldy ice-giants that rush in wind-driven troops across their plains, or welter captive in the weary swell, and melt away ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... wall of granite about thirty feet high, facing the west, and nearly two miles long. At the base of the wall there is a level prairie, running parallel to it, half a mile wide. Under this strip of land, after digging through several slaty layers of rock, the red sandstone is found. Old graves, fortifications, and excavations abound, all confirmatory of the traditions clustering around the ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... was a mere speck in the canyon, and his herd was sprinkled, like bread-crumbs, over the slaty hills. But over in the Vigil yard the numberless other little Vigils were to be seen, and Jane, as she looked, began to see that some sort of excitement was stirring them. The senora herself stood staring, wide-eyed and curious. ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... the alluvial beach for two or three miles in each direction, no signs of coral were observed. Many fragments of red, gray, and purple basalt and porphyry were met with along the beach; talcose rock and slate, syenite, hornblend, quartz, both compact and slaty, with chalcedony, were found in pieces and large pebbles. Those who were engaged in dredging reported the bottom as being of coral, in from four to six or eight fathoms; but this was of a different kind from that of which the ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... remarkable change has taken place in the interval. The birds, or their descendants rather, have all become changed into the same color. The black, the white and the dun, the striped, the spotted, and the ringed, are all metamorphosed into one—a dark slaty blue. Two plain black bands monotonously repeat themselves upon the wings of each, and the loins beneath are white; but all the variety, all the beautiful colors, all the old graces of form it may be, have disappeared. ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... The scarf of greyish or slaty blue, worn by all women in Mexico, except the ladies of the Upper Ten Thousand, who use it only ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... the crest of the hill was a row of rifle pits, four feet deep in the slaty white rock. On the opposite hill, across the marshy hollow, at a distance of two hundred yards, was a line of wooden targets, painted white with black circles. Poised at intervals on the forward edge of the pits were a number of automatic rifles of the type used by the French army. ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... Thames and Severn, Tweed with his gateway of many grey arches, Clyde, dying at sunset westward In a sea as red as blood; Rhine and his hills in close procession, Placid Elbe, Seine slaty and swirling, And Isar, son of the Alpine snows, A ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... there is a reason for that name, which of course is only another word for Welsh. Though, in their first order, these slaty rocks lie deep down, they have been lifted high up, and they show us some of the grandest scenery we have in this island. The hills and precipices of Wales, and the hollows where the mountain streams ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... on board.” Lieutenant Ross “found, about two-thirds up a small peaked insulated hill of limestone, between three and four hundred feet above the level of the sea, several pieces of coal, which he found to burn with a clear bright flame, crackling much, and throwing off slaty splinters.” ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... it was inferred, from their crystalline character, that the metamorphic rocks of Anglesea were more ancient than any rocks of the adjacent main land; but it has since been shown that they are of the same age with the slates and grits of Carnarvon and Merioneth. Again, slaty cleavage having been first found only in the lowest rocks, was taken as an indication of the highest antiquity: whence resulted serious mistakes; for this mineral characteristic is now known to occur in the Carboniferous system. Once more, certain red conglomerates ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... On sea and sky a more melancholy tone had come,—dull, slaty grays crowding in from every quarter. And over the darkening waters there seemed a tragic note, half-threatening, intensified by every plunge of the steamer and by the swish of waters very near the deck. There was a touch of melancholy, also, ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... house opened suddenly and a cowboy stalked in, a lean, dark man, rather short and slim, with eyes of that peculiar light, slaty gray that have a staring effect; apparently no depth to them. These, with heavy overhanging brows and an inclination to sneer, gave him a forbidding appearance. His hat and slicker glistened with water. At his entrance ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... and stared moodily at the moon-painted pool where the trout, deceived by the brightness into thinking it was day, started widening ripple-rings here and there, where they flicked the surface with slaty noses; and the wavering rings were gold-tipped until they slid into the shadows and were lost. Dade watched three rings start in the center ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... I have resolved to use some of the horseshoes I have been saving to take me back over the stony country of South Australia. To enable McGorrerey to get them all shod on the front feet before Monday, I have camped. There is still a slaty range on each side of the river, with quartz hills close down to it; the timber the same as yesterday. The country has recently all been burned; but, judging from the small patches that have escaped, has been ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... A slaty-blue pigeon was already pecking at Ranulph's pointed scarlet shoe for a grain lodged there. The troubadour bent down, held out his hand, and the bird walked into it. He had played with birds often enough in his vagabond early years to know ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... sun had set. The twilight lay over the east, and the coast, turned black, extended infinitely its sombre wall that seemed the very stronghold of the night; the western horizon was one great blaze of gold and crimson in which a big detached cloud floated dark and still, casting a slaty shadow on the water beneath, and I saw Jim on the beach watching the schooner fall off and ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... and just as they entered the door—through which another and sadder burden had been carried but a few instants before—her eyes caught sight of the south-western sky, and, without heeding, saw white sunlight shining in shaft-like lines from a rift in a slaty cloud. Emotions will attach themselves to scenes that are simultaneous—however foreign in essence these scenes may be—as chemical waters will crystallize on twigs and wires. Even after that time any mental agony brought less vividly to Cytherea's mind the scene from the Town ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... answer. The two old men stood silent, looking down the valley, lying like a crevasse in a glacier between the towering white mountains. The sinuous course of the frozen river was almost black under the slaty sky ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... the peals of thunder; its blurred shapes vanished—dissolving utterly at times in the thick rain—to reappear clear-cut and black in the stormy light against the gray sheet of the cloud—scattered on the slaty round table of the sea. Unscathed by storms, resisting the work of years, unfretted by the strife of the world, there it lay unchanged as on that day, four hundred years ago, when first beheld by Western eyes from the ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... day when a change in the aspect of the weather so frequently takes place; and the little pool was no longer the reflection of a blue and sunny sky: it sent back the dark and slaty clouds above, and, every now and then, a rough gust shook the painted autumn leaves from their branches, and all other music was lost in the sound of the wild winds piping down from the moorlands, which lay up and beyond the clefts in the mountain-side. ...
— The Doom of the Griffiths • Elizabeth Gaskell
... moon, to appeal to any hypsometrical standard. All that is known in this respect is, that they are invariably lower than the latter, and that some sink to a greater depth than others, or, in other words, that they do not all form a part of the same sphere. Though they are more or less of a greyish-slaty hue—some of them approximating very closely to that of the pigment known as "Payne's grey"—the tone, of course, depends upon the angle at which the solar rays impinge on that particular portion of the surface under observation. Speaking generally, they are, as would follow from ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... great, calm city, with its vaporous browns and slaty blues, and its characteristic acrid smell of gasoline fumes, was another Paris, a terrible Paris, which I was that night to see. Early in the afternoon a dull haze of leaden clouds rose in the southwest. ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... much from mineral discoveries. Those parts of the country lying nearest to the sea, which are of a sandstone or slaty formation, appear to contain only deposits of excellent coal; but the entire range of the Blue Mountains has not yet been explored for minerals. The colony had not up to the time of our visit a mineralogist ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... from Bath to Painted Post, though stony, is tolerably level. The adjacent mountains have a slaty appearance, with horizontal strata. Mr. Hall was disappointed at Painted Post, to find the post gone, broken down or rotted, within the last few years. It had been an Indian memorial, either of triumph ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... never dream of in smooth weather, That toss and gore the sea for acres, Bellowing and gnashing and snarling together; Look northward, where Duck Island lies, 280 And over its crown you will see arise, Against a background of slaty skies, A row of pillars still and white, That glimmer, and then are gone from sight, As if the moon should suddenly kiss, While you crossed the gusty desert by night, The long colonnades of Persepolis; Look southward for White Island light, The lantern ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... constantly saw new beauties in the old Hulk. It always seemed to adapt itself to the changing moods of the weather,—being grave or gay as the skies lowered or smiled. In the dull November days, when the clouds drifted in straight lines of slaty gray, it assumed a weird, forbidding look. When the wind blew a gale from the northeast, and the back water of the river overflowed the marsh,—submerging the withered grass and breaking high upon the foot-bridge,—it seemed for all the world like the original tenement of old ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... be in place, which, although probable, was not ascertained beyond all question, the primitive carbonate of lime has exactly the same relation to the slaty rocks which it ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... This wonderful thing is not well known: it has been seldom exhibited, and the photograph by which it is usually judged is taken from a reproduction moulded a generation ago. The original, of rather slaty Lavagna stone, has never been photographed, and the cast, many thousands of which exist, entirely fails to show the intangible and diaphanous qualities of the original. The widespread popularity of ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... Cordillera, as they were seen occasionally peeping through their dusky envelope of clouds. During the few succeeding days we continued to get on slowly, for we found the river-course very tortuous, and strewed with immense fragments of various ancient slaty rocks, and of granite. The plain bordering the valley had here attained an elevation of about 1100 feet above the river, and its character was much altered. The well-rounded pebbles of porphyry were mingled with many ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... of Eric the Red, To the South of the West doth flee — Past slaty Helluland is sped, Past Markland's woody lea, Till round about fair Vinland's head, Where Taunton ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... the Texan put in digging a cave with a piece of slaty shale. The clay of the bank was soft and he made fair progress. The dirt he scooped out was thrown by ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... to be seated beside my uncle when the lawyer's letter arrived. He was reading 'Peter Wilkins.' He laid down the book with reluctance, thinking the envelope contained some advertisement of slaty coal for his kitchen-fire, or cottony silk for his girls' dresses. Fancy my surprise when my little uncle jumped up on his chair, and thence on the table, upon which he commenced a sort of demoniac hornpipe. But that sober article of furniture declined giving its support to such proceedings ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... a case of similar nature is that of the Blue Andalusian fowl. Fanciers have long recognised the difficulty of getting this variety to breed true. Of a slaty blue colour itself with darker hackles and with black lacing on the feathers of the breast, it always throws "wasters" of two kinds, viz. blacks, and whites splashed with black. Careful breeding from the blues shows that the three sorts are always produced in ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... architects would like to build with them. The slope of the rocks to the north-west is covered two feet deep with their ruins, a mass of loose and slaty shale, of a dull brick-red color, which yields beneath the foot like ashes, so that, in running down, you step one yard, and slide three. The rock is indeed hard beneath, but still disposed in thin courses of these cloven shales, so finely laid that they look in places more ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... huddled sheep, wildly scampering over the slaty shingle, emerged from the leaden mist that muffled the fell-top, and a shrill shepherd's whistle broke the damp stillness of the air. And presently a man's figure appeared, following the sheep down the hillside. He halted a ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... furthest outposts of the Perryman farm lie extensive wolds rising rapidly into desolate regions where sheep can scarcely find pasture. In this region Toller concealed himself. About two miles beyond the old quarry, on a slaty hillside, he found a deep pit, which had probably been used as a water-hole in prehistoric times; and here he built himself a hut. He made the walls out of the stones of a ruined sheep-fold; he roofed them with a sheet of corrugated iron, stolen from the outbuildings ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... great-grandfather recollected; for the cell, though rude, was wonderfully strong, and the stone walls were very stout and thick, after the fashion of the middle ages. There was a large flat stone to serve as a hearth, and an opening at the top for smoke with a couple of big slaty stones bent towards one another over it as a break to the force of the rain. The children might have been worse off though there was no window, and no door to close the opening. That mattered the less in the summer weather, and before ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... wintry waste, howling for food. The variegated fields are all one color now; the pastures, the stubble, the roads, the sky are the same leaden gray. The hedgerows and trees are scarcely perceptible against the bare earth, whose slaty hue they have taken on. The ground is frozen so hard that it bruises the foot to walk in the roads or in the ploughed fields. It is like an iron country, and the spirit is oppressed by its rigor and melancholy. One could easily believe that in that dead landscape the germs ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... which the Greeks call schistos. It forms in white threads upon the surface of certain stones. From the name schistos, and the mode of formation, there can be little doubt that this species was the salt which forms spontaneously on certain slaty minerals, as alum slate and bituminous shale, and which consists chiefly of sulphates of iron and aluminium. Possibly in certain places the iron sulphate may have been nearly wanting, and then the salt would ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... John Humphrey Noyes and Brigham Young were ahead of the world or behind it is really not to the point—the many would not tolerate them. So their idealism was diluted with danger until it became as somber, sober and slaty-gray as the average existence, and fades as well ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... tallest stalks that the wind in the open meadows uncovers, the snowflakes suggest a lot of dead leaves being blown through the all-pervading whiteness. Beautiful soft brown, gray, and predominating black-and-white coloring distinguish these capricious visitors from the slaty junco, the "snowbird" more commonly known. They are, indeed, the only birds we have that are nearly white; and rarely, if ever, do they rise far above the ground their plumage ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... the kingdom. The masses of pitchstone a-top, though so intensely black within, are weathered on the surface into almost a pure white; and we found lying detached among them, fragments of common amygdaloid and basalt, and minute slaty pieces of chalcedony that had formed apparently in fissures of the trap. We would have scrutinized more narrowly at the time had we expected to find anything more rare; but I did not know until full four months after, that aught more ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... and seven-eighths of an inch thick. The blade is broad at the edge, rounded in outline, and well polished. The upper end terminates in a rather sharp point that shows the rough flaked surface of the original blocking out. The middle portion exhibits an evenly picked surface. The rock is a dark slaty looking tufa, the surface of which displays ring or rosette-like markings, reminding one of the polished surface of a section of fossil coral. These markings probably come from the decomposition of the ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... was born, in 1522, Bishop Jewel of Salisbury, of whom it is recorded by that faithful biographer Fuller that he "wrote learnedly, preached painfully, lived piously, died peacefully." To the westward are Watersmouth, with its natural arch in the slaty rocks bordering the sea, and Hillsborough rising boldly to guard a tiny cove. Upon this precipitous headland is an ancient camp, and it overlooks Ilfracombe, the chief watering-place of the northern Devonshire coast. Here a ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... that all the domestic races in India have the croup blue; but this is not invariable, for I possess a very pale blue Simmali pigeon with the croup perfectly white, sent to me by Sir W. Elliot from Madras. A slaty-blue and chequered Nakshi pigeon has some white feathers on the croup alone. In some other Indian pigeons there were a few white feathers confined to the croup, and I have noticed the same fact in a carrier from Persia. ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... distributed and I saw there wasn't anything for me, I just went in and said to Slaty, I said, "Are you sure there isn't anything? Would you mind looking again?" I knew it wasn't any use and I guess he did too, but anyway, he looked and ...
— Roy Blakeley's Adventures in Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... ambitious young gentleman of aesthetic tastes might do worse than get himself up in this bird's livery. An open coat of olive-brown silk, with an oblique white band at the side; waistcoat or cummerbund, and knickerbockers, slaty grey; stockings and shoes of olive green; and, for a touch of bright colour, an orange and scarlet tie. It would be pleasant to meet him in Piccadilly. But he would never, never be able to get that quaint pretty carriage. The "Buzzard lope" ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... beautiful expanse of clear, serene, unclouded blue; while the other hung livid and threatening above us, with the promise of a raving tornado lurking within its black bosom. Immediately overhead the colour of this immense cloud curtain was a cold, slaty blue, from whence, as the eye travelled down its expanse toward the north-western horizon, the hue became darker until where it met the water it was as black as night; while, underneath it, the sea undulated restlessly, with the writhings of an ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... hastened by heat and pressure, the drying and solidification of such rocks involved their contraction, and usually, in consequence, their being traversed throughout by minute fissures. Under certain conditions of pressure, these fissures take the aspect of slaty cleavage; under others, they become irregular cracks, dividing all the substance of the stone. If these are not filled, the rock would become a mere heap of debris, and be incapable of establishing itself in any bold form. This is provided against by a ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... squalls of rain; but the weather became fine at sunset, when we again encamped on the Sweet Water, within a few miles of the SOUTH PASS. The country over which we have passed to-day consists principally of the compact mica slate, which crops out on all ridges, making the uplands very rocky and slaty. In the escarpments which border the creeks, it is seen alternating with a light-colored granite, at an inclination of 45 deg.; the beds varying in thickness from two or three feet to six or eight ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... on Blondey's hoofs, so that he was walking on snowballs. When these got about five inches high, they would drop off and begin again. It is needless to say that these varying snowballs did not help Blondey's sure-footedness, especially as the snow was just thick enough to conceal the treacherous slaty rocks beneath. For the first time I understood the phrase, to be ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... a dazzling March afternoon, with a shower of sun from the mid-blue, and a marshalling of slaty clouds behind the umber-colored hills. For nearly an hour Wyant loitered on the Lizza, watching the shadows race across the naked landscape and the thunder blacken in the west; then he decided to set out for the House of the Dead Hand. The ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton |
