"Bigness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Evremond had blue, lively, and sparkling eyes, a large forehead, thick eyebrows, a handsome mouth, and a sneering physiognomy. Twenty years before his death, a wen grew between his eye-brows, which in time increased to a considerable bigness. He once designed to have it cut off, but as it was no ways troublesome to him, and he little regarded that kind of deformity, Dr. Le Fevre advised him to let it alone, lest such an operation should be attended with dangerous symptoms in a man of his age. He would often make merry with himself on ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... consolidated railroad enterprise, skillfully and successfully administered. The great weakness of Commodore Vanderbilt and his associates, and of those who later imitated his work was their fundamental conception of the railroad as a private venture. Success consisted in bigness, great profits, crushing or buying out competitors, and administering the business for the best good of the few owners, regardless of the interests of the region through which the railway passed. Vanderbilt and many of his contemporaries were men of business ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... it. Do you know, she has a strange look of you? When I was half off my head I used to mix you up together. She has such a generous and holy bigness—the generosity of the All-woman." ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... strength, and bigness of conceptions. A mere wrist gesture suggests littleness, flippancy, weak traits. Similarly if a man walks from his hips, he suggests the characteristic of strong personal opinion. If he walks principally from ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... confessing in his turn, Thus spoke in tones of deep concern:— 'I happen'd through a mead to pass; The monks, its owners, were at mass; Keen hunger, leisure, tender grass, And add to these the devil too, All tempted me the deed to do. I browsed the bigness of my tongue; Since truth must out, ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... Frederick G. R. Roth, are interesting artistically, not only for the eager sweep and sense of bigness not usual in the narrow scope of a spandrel, but especially for their warm decorative value to the wall surface and the aspiring way in which they follow the rising line of the archway over which they are placed. The spandrels are made in very ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness or your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur, territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs true sublimity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is, what are you going to do with all these things? ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... sitting in a big game—sitting on the edge, perhaps, but rubbing shoulders with some of the men who actually shaped the affairs of the business world. The realization stimulated him, lifted him up. And when he went to claim his next dance with the social arbiter, he felt more of an equal with "bigness." ...
— Skinner's Dress Suit • Henry Irving Dodge
... presently she hushed her singing and thought only of gazing out over the wide, open world before her. Suddenly she flung out her arms as if wanting to take it all into her embrace—all this wealth and power and bigness from which she had been shut out ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... for you, what you did for me ... others ... new courage, example of bigness—Why! what's the matter ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... 80l. St. a year, and is very lately gone to London to be Chaplain to the Sardinian Minister: he has carried with him a quantity of coloured Glass Seals with the Pretender's Son's Effigy, as also small heads made of silver gilt about this bigness [example] to be set in rings, as also points for watch cases, with the same head, and this motto round ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... the Mississippi Valley, stopping every night in some town that had something which was advertised as the biggest in the world. On Friday I reached a sleepy little village which seemed the picture of contented mediocrity. Here, thought I, I shall find no bigness to molest me or make me afraid. But when I sat down to write a letter on the hotel stationery I was confronted with the statement, "This is the biggest little hotel ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... masher. Now add to them a ladleful of gravy or broth, with a few bread crumbs; set it over the fire and boil; strain it through a strainer, or sieve, to the thickness of a cream, and put half of it to your lobsters, and save the other half to sauce them with after they are baked. Put to the lobster the bigness of an egg of butter, a little pepper and salt; squeeze in a lemon, and warm these over the fire enough to melt the butter, set it to cool, and sheet your patty pan or a plate or dish with good puff paste, then put in your lobster, and cover it with a paste; bake it within three-quarters of ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... the woodland far to the eastward, and wound its way over broad prairie billows, past bluffy-banked streams, along crests of low watersheds, until at last it slid down into an open endlessness of the Lord's earth—just a vasty bigness of landstuff seemingly left over when geography-making was done. It was untamed stuff, too, whereon one man's marking was like to the track of foam in the wake of one ship in mid-ocean. Upon its face lay the trail, broad and barren of growth as the dusty old National pike road making ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... vast new far-off love, this new daily sense of mutual service, this whole round world to measure one's being against. Crowds wait on me in silence. I tip nations with a nickel. Who would believe it? I lie in my berth and laugh at the bigness ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... foolish to begin digging a tunnel through a mountain with a mere pick and spade. We must assemble for the task great mechanical contrivances. And so with our energies of will; a slight tool means a slight achievement; a huge, aggressive engine, driving on at full blast, means corresponding bigness of results. ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... his last scene is generally garnished with some singular circumstances. Thus the Duke of Lauderdale is said, through old age but immense corpulence, to have become so sunk in spirits, 'that his heart was not the bigness of a walnut.' ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... born into a world that had seemed—so falsely—fair and sweet, and in reality was black and detestable. Her acceptance of the act—for Lise—was a function of the hatred consuming her, a hatred which, growing in bigness, had made Ditmar merely the personification of that world. From time to time her hands clenched, her brow furrowed, powerful waves of heat ran through her, the craving for action became so intense she could scarcely refrain from rising in ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... national intellectual spirit at least as valuable a service as he could through a study of some legend of ancient Britain or some epic of an extinct race. As Mr. Percy Boynton has said, "To foster in a whole generation some clear recognition of other qualities in America than its bigness, and of other distinctions between the past and the present than that they are far apart is to contribute towards the consciousness of a national individuality which is the first essential of national life.... We must put our minds upon ourselves, we must look to our past and ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... warning, she fled; her features were lost; his power of imagining them wrestled with vapour; the effort contracted his outlook. But if she left him blind of her, she left him with no lessened bigness of heart. He frankly believed in her revelation of a greater world and a livelier earth, a flying earth and a world wealthier than grouped history in heroic marvels: he fell back on the exultation of his having seen her, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... line, observe this rule: first, let your hair be clean washed ere you go about to twist it; and then choose not only the clearest hair for it, but hairs that be of an equal bigness, for such do usually stretch all together, and break all together, which hairs of an unequal bigness never do, but break singly, and so deceive the angler ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... of it was that the danger was all over already. There was no danger any more. The supposed nephew's appearance had a purpose. He had come, full, full to trembling—with the bigness of his news. There must have been rumours already as to the shaky position of the de Barral's concerns; but only amongst those in the very inmost know. No rumour or echo of rumour had reached the profane in the West-End—let alone in the guileless marine suburb of Hove. The ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... pleased my whim to symbolise them as a mastodon and a rogue elephant. Morrison, the dreaded agent and operator, was unquestionably the finer creature. He moved more precisely and with a sense of wieldy power. His phrases cut where Vogelstein's merely smote. His bigness had something genial about it. He looked the amateur, and indeed does not the rogue elephant trample down villages chiefly for the joy of the affray? One felt that something more than Morrison's preposterous winnings had been involved in the clashes of railroads and cataclysms ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... cornel, which struck so deep into the ground that no one of many that tried could pluck it up; and the soil, being fertile, gave nourishment to the wood, which sent forth branches, and produced a cornel-stock of considerable bigness. This did posterity preserve and worship as one of the most sacred things; and therefore, walled it about; and if to any one it appeared not green nor flourishing, but inclining to pine and wither, he immediately made outcry to all he met, and they, like people hearing ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... for the teapot and poured herself a cup of tea. As she sipped it, she said to the twins, "Did you ever hear of the Leprechauns? Little men they are, not half the bigness of the smallest baby you ever laid your two eyes on. Long beards they have, and little pointed caps on the ...
— The Irish Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... only know that an informal gathering was called, and that whoever the professors and churchmen were who listened to Columbus's story, they were mostly narrow-minded; they had no imagination. Instead of trying to see the bigness and the wonder of his belief, they looked at Columbus suspiciously and said that they could find no mention of a round world in the Bible, and it was heresy to believe anything that could not be found in the Bible. Others, believing in the sphere, still ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... not merely as a voice. But he seemed never to seek to do so. He was without ambition; and, though curiously careful sometimes about preserving his own dignity, and beyond question sensitive by temperament, he showed marked respect, and even humility, to the worldly-successful. Despite his bigness and simplicity there was something small about him which came out in odd trifling details. Thus it was characteristic of Big James to ask Edwin to be waiting for him at the back gates in Woodisun Bank when he might just as easily have met him at the side door by ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... certain breadth; their bellies are short and narrow. Their heads have a likeness to the stag's, and they imitate the swiftness of that animal. These horses are gentle from their extreme plumpness; very swift, for all their bigness, pleasant to look upon, yet more pleasant to ride. For they have gentle paces and do not fatigue their riders with insane curvetings. To ride them is rest rather than labour; and being broken in to a delightfully steady pace, they have great staying power ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... as he called them, were American women. He burst out into a "tyee-e-e-e!" of amazement, and asked with a wondering look, "Are all the women in your country as big as that at the bottom?" It was a severe reflection upon our ladies' dress, and I did not venture to tell him that the bigness was artificial, but merely replied sadly that they were. He looked curiously down at my feet and then at the picture, and then again at my feet, as if he were trying to trace some resemblance between the American man and the American woman; but he failed to ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... it out at arm's length to get a good squint at its bigness and its redness. Then he turned to look wonderingly after the disappearing automobile with the lady who had tossed him the apple for directing her to the post office. A long trail of dust rose from the unpaved ...
— The Circus Comes to Town • Lebbeus Mitchell
... down as a quiet gentleman first, as a sheriff next. She enjoyed his low, good-humored laugh and laughed back with him, even while she experienced again the unaccustomed thrill at the sheer physical bigness of him, the essentially masculine strength of a hardy son of the southwestern outdoors. Not once had he referred to the affair at the Casa Blanca or to his part in it; not a question did she ask him concerning it. He told himself that so utterly human, so perfectly ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... the verb; yet there are three instances in which it becomes such, before a noun: viz., to-day, to-night, to-morrow. If it is a "particle," so is any other preposition, as well as every small and invariable word. If it is a "little word," the whole bigness of a preposition is unquestionably found in it; and no "word" is so small but that it must belong to some one of the ten classes called parts of speech. If it is a "sign of the infinitive," ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... bowed to him, shook the lines, and the old horse moved on. Just before reaching a bend in the road, she looked back at him. How powerful was his bearing, how strong his stride; and with all his bigness he was not ungraceful. ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... some very red, some of a paler color; none of them but have chains, earrings, or collars of this metal. They had some of their arrows herewith, much like our broad arrow-heads, very workmanly made. Their chains are many hollow pieces cemented together, each piece of the bigness of one of our reeds, a finger in length, ten or twelve of them together on a string, which they wear about their necks: their collars they wear about their bodies like bandeliers a handful broad, all hollow pieces like the other, ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... end I fell to musing over a bar of common laundry soap on the stationary wash-stand. It was impossible not to contrast this humble detergent—for it was of a bigness and coarse yellowness to suggest the largest possible quantity for the smallest possible price—with the dead man's wealth, and to wonder a little at such petty economies as were signified by it, by the paraffin candles, the absence of servants, ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... rather go through two or three such fights, than encounter such another storm as we had off the coast of Portugal, for four days. It seemed that we must be lost, the waves were of such exceeding bigness—far surpassing anything I had ever seen before. My heart was in my mouth scores of times, and over and over again I thought that she would never rise again, so great was the weight of water that poured over her. Truly it was the ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... air of imperfect wooden things inspired with wicked activity, the crabs trundled and scuttled into holes. On the right, whither Attwater pointed and abruptly turned, was the cemetery of the island, a field of broken stones from the bigness of a child's hand to that of his head, diversified by many mounds of the same material, and walled by a rude rectangular enclosure. Nothing grew there but a shrub or two with some white flowers; nothing but the number of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Knolly Gawalls. Bruise ym it must stand & be stirred 3 or 4 times in ym Day & then Strain out out all ye gawells all ten Days and 2 Ounces of Clear Gummary Beck & 1/2 an Ounce of Coperous 1/2 an Ounce of Rock Alum half an Ounce of Loafe sugar ye Bigness of a Hoarsel nut of Roman Vitterall Bray ym all small Before they be put in it must be stirred very well for ye ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... boys of China are a little closer, too, to the American boys of this particular group whenever "skin the snake" is played. It is altogether too bad that the play-life of the adolescent in non-christian lands is so meager, for here in physical prowess is a real contact for the American boy. The bigness of life is the sum ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... Goethe story with the prayer of little Larry H., son of an eminent Harvard biologist. Larry, at the age of six, was taken by his mother to the top of a Vermont hill-pasture, where, for the first time in his life, he saw a herd of cows and was thrilled by their glorious bigness and nearness and novelty. When he said his prayers that night, he was enough of a poet to change his usual ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... stubbornly in the course he was pursuing. He could even enjoy a certain martyr-like satisfaction under undeserved censure, all censure being equally incomprehensible and undeserved. Rachael had once seen in this quality a certain godlike supremacy, a bigness, and splendidness of vision that rose above the ordinary standards of ordinary men; now it filled her ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... not until the 15th of April that they again touched the land, and landed at Guatulco; whence, after a stay of a few hours, they departed; "not forgetting," the chronicler says, "to take with them a certain pot, of about a bushel in bigness, full of royals of plate, together with a chain of gold, and some other jewels; which we entreated a gentleman Spaniard to leave behind him, as he was ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... the step and took her hand with one gesture. She shut the door. He waited in suave silence. There was barely space for them together in the narrow lobby, and she scarce dared look up at him. He easily dominated her. His bigness subdued her, and the handsomeness of his face and his attire was like a moral intimidation. He had a large physical splendour that was well set off and illustrated by the brilliance of his linen and his broadcloth. ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... with a wrong idea regarding city and country life. Born in the country he is free, his thoughts and ambitions can feed on a pure atmosphere, but he thinks his conditions and his surroundings are circumscribed; he longs for the city, with its bigness, its turmoil, and its conflicts. He leaves the old homestead, the quiet village, the country people, and hies himself to the city. He forgets to a large extent the good boy he used to be, in the desire to keep up with the fashions and to make the people ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... lightning rods protecting the chromium, glass, and plastic home of Neal Cloud. Those rods were adequately grounded, grounded with copper-silver cables the bigness of a strong man's arm; for Neal Cloud, atomic physicist, knew his lightning and he was taking no chances whatever with the safety of his lovely wife and their three ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... least one of them says, really believed there could be no true beauty without bigness, that thought certainly is most specious in regard to architecture; and the thirteenth-century church of Amiens is one of the three or four largest buildings in the world, out of all proportion to any Greek building, both in that and in ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... on the size of the vibrations, just as one feels a blow from a large object, other things being equal, more than from a small one. The ear drum-head is in the case of a large sound beaten, as it were, more powerfully. The singers that give us bigness of sound instead of quality belabor our ears, so to speak; they treat us as persons of mean understanding—dull intellects; the ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... July. This is the crater of the mine of Beaumont Hamel. Until recently it was supposed to be the biggest crater ever blown by one explosion. It is not the deepest: one or two others near La Boisselle are deeper, but none on the Somme field comes near it in bigness and squalor. It is like the crater of a volcano, vast, ragged, and irregular, about one hundred and fifty yards long, one hundred yards across, and twenty-five yards deep. It is crusted and scabbed with yellowish tetter, like sulphur or the rancid fat on meat. The inside ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield
... full purse and a lean soul, is a sign of a great curse. O it is a sad grant, when the desire is only to make the belly big, the estate big, the name big; when even by this bigness the soul pines, is made to dwindle, to grow lean, and to look like an anatomy! Like a man in a dropsy, they desire this world, as he doth drink, till they desire themselves quite down to hell—(Bunyan's Desire of the Righteous, vol. 1, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... is an unsatisfying creed; the word "Why?" is apt to creep into the back of a man's mind, and the word "Why?" when the intelligence is low, is a dangerous one. For the word "Why?" can only be satisfactorily answered by the realisation of the bigness of the issue; by the knowledge that individual effort is imperative if collective success is to be obtained; by the absolute conviction that no man can be a law unto himself. To the ten per cent. these facts were clear; but then, to the ten per ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... of Arthur Davison Ficke runs a note of bigness that compels attention even when one feels that he is still groping both for form and thought. In "Mr. Faust" this note has assumed commanding proportions, while at the same time the uncertainty manifest in some of ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... old, his father determined to emigrate to America, and for that purpose went to Liverpool to embark for the United States. But when he had got as far as the docks, Mrs. Gibson, good soul, frightened at the bigness of the ships (a queer cause of alarm), refused plumply ever to put her foot on one of them. So her husband, a dutiful man with a full sense of his wife's government upon him, consented unwillingly ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... thoughts to a mean eagerness for gold, a pride in dress, or the building of palaces, which when achieved are not so much as a single grain of dust upon an ant-hill. In a universe, whose arithmetic employs worlds for the ciphers of its reckoning, bigness as associated with man sounds ridiculous; and the biggest fortune or the biggest grief are alike infinitesimal. But when the desire of bigness passes from a man's mind, humility becomes pleasurable, ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... the victory. This was not what she had looked for, but it was good enough; she was necessary to him and always would be; she was sure of that, yet she constantly repeated it; moreover, she loved his bigness and his physical strength and the way the lines round his eyes wrinkled when he smiled; she knew how to make him smile and now and then they had happy interludes when they talked about crops and horses, profit and loss, the buying and selling of stock, ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... the real bigness of the woman caught my allegiance and fixed it. She had sacrificed the thing which was most precious to her to keep her ideal of honor unsullied. I felt that I could never have made a similar sacrifice, but I mentally saluted her for her power to ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... the size of the grapes, which scarcely were hid by the foliage. Shady and well-cover'd in, the middle walk at the top was, Which was ascended by steps of rough flat pieces constructed. And within it were hanging fine chasselas and muscatels also, And a reddish-blue grape, of quite an exceptional bigness, All with carefulness planted, to give to their guests after dinner. But with separate stems the rest of the vineyard was planted, Smaller grapes producing, from which the finest wine made is. So she constantly ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... was able to enjoy the girl's beauty and study her individuality. Pretty as she was—and more than pretty—it was her personality which pleased him—the bigness of her nature, the evidence of her wide-mindedness and her quick grasp of fresh subjects, and above all, in her, as in Freddy, there was the ring of unquestionable honour ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... them cedars noddin' to us, or like's not he'll take a notion to strike in a leetle mite higher up, and slosh down till he kin git acrost by them big rocks. Take your time, friend, and if ye see him comin' your way, let him come on and don't shoot till he turns and ye kin see the hull bigness of him." ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... papers do not compete with those of the new in the matter of quantity of news. But just here comes in one of the chief faults of the American journal, one of the besetting sins of the American people,—their well-known love of "bigness," their tendency to ask "How much?" rather than "Of what kind?" There is a lack of discrimination in the daily bill of fare served up by the American press that cannot but disgust the refined and tutored palate. It is ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... knew that, if I should go to sleep under so dire an omen, I must needs perish. So I ordered him to get a light as best he could. He went away and raked up the ashes, and found a bit of coal about the bigness of a cherry all alight, and caught hold of it with the tongs. At the same time I had little hope of getting a light, but he applied it to the wick of a lamp and blew thereon. The wick was lighted without any flame issuing from ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... a plain, dusty trail, the grass is so dry it's almost dead, the scenery is conspicuously absent, the smell of leather and horseflesh isn't especially pleasant—and yet you are not noticing these things. The bigness and the newness of the land have got you, Miss Burnaby. You don't know it and you can't put it into words—I can't myself—but the feeling is there. You are ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... inconsiderable degree, did not endow the Church, but consented in the most solemn way to its being endowed by the gifts of private donors, as it now consents to the endowment in this way of other religious bodies. Does the bigness of the property entitle the State to claim it? This is a formidable doctrine for other religious bodies, as they increase in influence and numbers. Is it vexatious that the Church should be richer and more ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... fruits of the island and drank of its waters; then I set out along the foot track and ceased not walking till I reached the mainland. Now when there remained between me and the city but a two hours' journey behold, a great serpent, the bigness of a date palm, came fleeing towards me in all haste, gliding along now to the right then to the left till she was close upon me, whilst her tongue lolled ground wards a span long and swept the dust as she went. She was pursued by a Dragon[FN324] who was not longer than ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... plants as they grew with brackish water and the burnt ashes; then, when they flowered, mated the male and female blossoms, glorious funnels of golden hue big enough for one to live in; and when the young fruit was of the bigness of an ordinary bolster, how they slipped it into a double mould of open reed-work something like the two halves of a walnut-shell; and how, growing day by day in this, it soon took every curve and line they chose to give it, even the hanging keel below, the strengthened bulwarks, and ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... through this valley, I perceived it was strewed with diamonds, some of which were of surprising bigness. I took pleasure in looking upon them; but shortly saw at a distance such objects as greatly diminished my satisfaction, and which I could not view without terror, namely, a great number of serpents, so monstrous that the least of them was capable of swallowing an elephant. They retired ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... they turned back, and were seventy days in getting to the aforesaid Cape Diab. The ship having touched on the coast to supply its wants, the mariners beheld there the egg of a certain bird called Chrocho, which egg was as big as a butt.[3] And the bigness of the bird is such that between the extremities of the wings is said to be 60 paces. They say too that it carries away an elephant or any other great animal with the greatest ease, and does great injury to the inhabitants of the country, and is ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... was taken from the original one, made of iron, at Newcastle-under-Lyme, wherein the letter a shows the jointed collar that comes round the neck; b, c, the loops and staples to let it out and in, according to the bigness and slenderness of the neck; d, the jointed semicircle that comes over the head, made forked at one end to let through the nose, and e, the plate-iron that is put into the mouth and keeps down the tongue. Which, being put upon ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews
... the square, the tramp of the dancers and vacant laughs and discordant music, the door flung wide and the entrance of the cowboy. She did not recall how he had looked or what he had done. And the next instant she saw him cool, smiling, devilish—saw him in violence; the next his bigness, his apparel, his physical being were vague as outlines in a dream. The white face of the padre flashed along in the train of thought, and it brought the same dull, half-blind, indefinable state of mind subsequent to that last nerve-breaking ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... dusty little half-civilized town there on the plateau. Even as a child I felt the intolerable difference between the place and its surroundings. Men ought to be better up there, but they aren't. They just magnify faults with the bigness of the hills around. Lots of it was romantic, lots of it ought never to be lost, the frank freedom, the vital living, the joy of uncertain victory over the dirt of the mines. It made men wild, wild to the last degree, that ever ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... open her hand and look for the mustard seeds, but in her interest in Mrs. Hunt's news she had let them fall to the floor and but one clung to her moist fingers. She tasted it and found it strong and biting. "It can't be the bigness," she murmured; "it must mean the hotness and strongness." This view of the matter gave her a better understanding, according to her own ideas, and she was glad she had tasted the small seed. After all, there were pleasant things opening ...
— Little Maid Marian • Amy E. Blanchard
... profusion of red blossoms. And, ever since the unfolding of the first bud, a multitude of humming-birds had been attracted thither. At times, it seemed as if for every one of the hundred blossoms there was one of these tiniest fowls of the air,—a thumb's bigness of burnished plumage, hovering and vibrating about the bean-poles. It was with indescribable interest, and even more than childish delight, that Clifford watched the humming-birds. He used to thrust his head softly out of the arbor to see them the better; all the while, too, motioning Phoebe to ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the dim surface except a few clumps of rushes and my unfortunate head. The outside of this member gradually assumed to its inside a gigantic magnitude; it had always annoyed me at the hatter's from a merely animal bigness, with no commensurate contents to show for it, and now I detested it more than ever. A physical feeling of turgescence and congestion in that region, such as swimmers often feel, probably increased the ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... bills his little game as that of a 'magnetic healer,' an' allows in words a foot high that he's out to 'make the deef hear, the blind see, the lame to walk an' the halt to skip an' gambol as doth the hillside lamb.' Also, on them notices, the same bein' the bigness of a hoss-blanket an' hung up lib'ral in the Red Light, the post office, the Dance Hall, an' the Noo York store, is a picture of old Satan himse'f, teachin' Professor Propriety Pratt—that bein' the name this yere neecromancer ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... the narrow ways behind the Exchange that, as I think, Genoa seems most herself, the port of the Mediterranean, the gate of Italy. Yet what I prefer in Genoa are her triumphant slums, then the palaces and villas with their bigness, so impressive for us who came from the North, which seem to be a remnant of Roman greatness, a vision as it were of solidity and grandeur. Something of this, it is true, haunts almost every Italian city; ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... (OCTAVO), CHAPTER IV. (KILLER).—Of this whale little is precisely known to the Nantucketer, and nothing at all to the professed naturalist. From what I have seen of him at a distance, I should say that he was about the bigness of a grampus. He is very savage—a sort of Feegee fish. He sometimes takes the great Folio whales by the lip, and hangs there like a leech, till the mighty brute is worried to death. The Killer is never hunted. ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... isn't only the broomsedge, though that goes admirably with your hair—it's the bigness, the space, the simplicity. You take up too much room among lamps and palms, you trip on a waxed floor, and down goes poor Bessy. But out here you are natural and at home. The sky sets off your head—and it's really very fine if you only knew it. Out here, ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... taught to speak. Such as are beautiful for Colour. A strange Bird. Water-Fowls resembling Ducks and Swans. Peacocks. The King keeps Fowl. Their Fish, How they catch them in Ponds, And how in Rivers. Fish kept and fed for the King's Pleasure. Serpents. The Pimberah of a prodigious bigness. The Polonga. The Noya. The Fable of the Noya ana Polonga. The Carowala. Gerendo. Hickanella. Democulo, a great Spider. Kobbera-guson, a Creature like an Aligator. Tolla-guion. The people eat Rats. Precoius Stones, Minerals, and other Commodities. The ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... say that perhaps he is neither just what his friends or his foes think him. One must make allowances for his training and temperament, and for that quality of bigness in him. 'Mediocre men go soberly on the highroads, but saints and scoundrels meet in the jails,'" ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... toward the East seeking but never finding that all elusive Grail which seemed ever ahead of them. Strange lands they passed through and it left them with wonderment at the bigness of the world in which ...
— In the Court of King Arthur • Samuel Lowe
... ships 140. tunnes emptie Caske, that is 94. tunnes shaken Caske and 46. tunnes whole, and ten thousand hoopes, and 480. wrethes of twigs: they may be doing with that till they can prouide other timber, which we would be glad to heare of. They haue an example with them of the bigness of the Caske they shall make. Neuerthelesse, all such Buttes and Hoggesheads as may be found to serue we will shalbe ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt
... timber I saw here was prodigious, as well in quantity as in bigness, and seem'd in some places to be suffered to grow only because it was so far off of any navigation, that it was not worth cutting down and carrying away; in dry summers, indeed a great deal is carried away to Maidstone and other parts on the Medway; and sometimes ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 6. Saturday, December 8, 1849 • Various
... the vast luminary, see unscathed its prodigious vents spouting flame and smoke, and hear the roar of its furnaces; or softly alight upon fields of dark stones, and watch with awe the imagined progress of forms intolerably huge, swollen as with the bigness of nightmare. Here was the strange contrast, that science was all on fire to learn the truth; while the incomprehensible essence of the soul, with its limitless visions, was capable of forming conceptions which ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the stream. What then? Shall not man bring his nature out into the fullest illumination, and surprise himself by the things that he might do? Oh! the littleness of the lives that we are living! Oh! the way in which we fail to comprehend, or when we do comprehend, deny to ourselves the bigness of that thing which it is to be a man, to be a child of God! Sometimes it dawns upon us that we can see it opening into the vision of these men and women in the New Testament. Sometimes there opens to us the picture of this thing that we might ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks
... pressed on it with all my strength in a certain fashion. Even after the lapse of many years the stone swung round, showing a little opening, through which a man might scarcely creep. As it swung, a mighty bat, white in colour as though with unreckoned age, and such as I had never seen before for bigness, for his measure was the measure of a hawk, flew forth and for a moment hovered over Cleopatra, then sailed slowly up and up in circles, till at last he was lost in the bright light ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... Take nothing by those intervals away From bulk of flames; and to the sight the fire Is nothing shrunken. Therefore, since the heat And the outpoured light of skiey sun Arrive our senses and caress our limbs, Form too and bigness of the sun must look Even here from earth just as they really be, So that thou canst scarce nothing take or add. And whether the journeying moon illuminate The regions round with bastard beams, or throw ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... usual, but pale, and very nearly like the moon of a morning. But few of them were visible, and these ten times larger (as well as I could judge) than they seem to the inhabitants of the earth. The moon, which wanted two days of being full, was of a terrible bigness. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... tell, when I found her under a beech-tree, sucking her thumb, but she hadn't. She only looked up at me—oh, so sweetly! SHE will never go bad and grow big! When they begin to grow big they care for nothing but bigness; and when they cannot grow any bigger, they try to grow fatter. The bad giants are ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... to the great injury of the Christians, in contempt of Christ and his holy religion, but had also taught the idolaters both how to make and use them. While I remained in Calicut, I saw them give a mould to the idolaters, by which they might cast brass cannon of sufficient bigness to receive a charge of 105 cantaros or measures of powder. At this time also there was a Jew in Calicut who had built a handsome brigantine, in which were four large iron cannons; but Providence soon after gave him his due reward, as he was drowned ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... only know the fullness of the firmament, the myriad of suns and planets, the brilliancy of the constellations, and the overpowering revelation of the infinite above. In less fervent latitudes one can never feel the bigness of the vault on high, nor sense the intimacy one had here with the worlds that ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... all, for crawling together on flat tables of rock or letting themselves drop into the sea with loud reports I beheld huge slimy monsters—soft snails, as it were, of incredible bigness—two or three score of them together, making the rocks ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... me shudder and my flesh creep to touch that hand that had lain there undisturbed for so many thousands of years, and yet was like unto living flesh. Underneath the hand, as though guarded by it, lay a huge jewel of ruby; a great stone of wondrous bigness, for the ruby is in the main a small jewel. This one was of wondrous colour, being as of fine blood whereon the light shineth. But its wonder lay not in its size or colour, though these were, as I have said, of priceless rarity; but in that the light of it ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... like it. I go to the others sometimes, above all to Notre Dame, which also is venerable and dear, and where one may worship well. But always I return here; for the great church seems to carry my prayers away, and they are half lost in such bigness, and it is not so bright and so joyous as this. For here the color lifts the heart, and I seem to rise in my soul also, and I know every pillar and ornament, for my eyes study often when my lips pray; but it is all one worship, madame, else I should shut them close. But the ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... novelty and intellect, and fine scorn of homespun truth and loyalty. Were I a woman, I should esteem the size of my husband's heart, and the sweetness of his temper, matter of more importance than the bigness of his brain, or the freshness ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... princess of the dervish's prayers?" To which the first answered, "You do not know, it seems, that she is possessed by a genie. But I well know how this good dervish may cure her. He has a black cat in his convent, with a white spot at the end of her tail, about the bigness of a small piece of Arabian money; let him only pull seven hairs out of the white spot, burn them, and smoke the princess's head with the fumes. She will not only be immediately cured, but be so safely delivered from the genie that he will never ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Anonymous
... that make up the whole picture. Suddenly she darted out her hand like a flash, making me start at the unexpected motion, and quickly withdrawing it, held up a finger before me. From its tip a minute gossamer spider, about twice the bigness of a pin's head, appeared suspended from a fine, scarcely visible line three or ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... soon as he was old enough to think for himself, or make others listen to him, 'amending the great errors of naval sea cards, whose common fault is to make the degree of longitude in every latitude of one common bigness;' inventing instruments for taking observations, studying the form of the earth, and convincing himself that there was a north-west passage, and studying the necessities of his country, and discovering the remedies for them in colonisation ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... was startled by a dull and jarring detonation from within. This was followed by a monstrous hissing and simmering as from a kettle of the bigness of St. Paul's; and at the same time from every chink of door and window spurted an ill-smelling vapour. The cat disappeared with a cry. Within the lodging-house feet pounded on the stairs; the door flew back, emitting clouds of smoke; and two men and an elegantly dressed young lady tumbled ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... finally of the myriad infra that have swarmed from the press during the last century. But, when we walk through a library that offers a representative collection of books from the invention of printing to the present, we realize that the bigness of the folios and quartos has deceived us as to their relative number, all forms of literature ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... transcribe her thoughts. She thought that it was not exactly fear, but an overpowering realization of her own atomity; a sort of cringing of the soul away from the utter vastness of the world; a growing consciousness of the unlimited bigness of things; an insight of the infinite power of God—the yearning of the soul for understanding of the mysteries ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... purple cloth, strait to her shape, and thick set, on each side, down to her feet, and round the sleeves, with pearls of the best water, of the same size as their buttons commonly are. You must not suppose, that I mean as large as those of my Lord ——, but about the bigness of a pea; and to these buttons large loops of diamonds, in the form of those gold loops, so common on birth-day coats. This habit was tied, at the waist, with two large tassels of smaller pearls, and ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... obey, scurrying like scared rats, glancing at him in timid hate. He came striding along the weather side of the deck from the remote, august poop; he was like a dreadful god making a dreadful visitation upon his faithful. Short-legged, tending to bigness in the belly, bearded, vibrant with animal force and personal power, his mere presence cowed them. His gross face, the happy face of an egoist with a sound digestion, sent its lofty and sure regard over them; it had a kind of unconsciousness of their ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... whether bigness of soul can be cultivated, and my optimism inclines to a vote in the affirmative. I spent a part of one summer in the pine woods far away from the haunts of men. When I had to leave this sylvan retreat it required eleven hours by stage to reach the railway-station. There for some weeks I lived ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... and every knight and lady, who had been transformed into birds and beasts, returned to their proper shapes, and the castle, though it seemed to be of vast strength and bigness, vanished away like a cloud; whereupon universal joy appeared among the released knights and ladies. This being done, the head of Galligantus was conveyed to ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... my voice for a minute's space. I forgot, in my fear, that he was secured. You would have forgot too, for 'tis incredible how such a monster can be confined in small gauzy-looking wires. I dreamed of snakes in the night. I wish to heaven you could see it. He absolutely swelled with passion to the bigness of a large thigh. I could not retreat without infringing on another box, and just behind, a little devil not an inch from my back, had got his nose out, with some difficulty and pain, quite through the bars! He was soon taught better manners. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... an iron shot of three or four inches diameter on the mouth of a clean, dry glass bottle. By a fine silken thread from the ceiling, right over the mouth of the bottle, suspend a small cork ball about the bigness of a marble, the thread of such a length as that the cork ball may rest against the side of the shot. Electrify the shot, and the ball will be repelled to the distance of four or five inches, more or less, according to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... make the terriblest little cloud o' dust iver raised, an' not a bit o' wind in it at all," so that a fairy migration is sometimes the talk of the county. "Though, be nacher, they're not the length av yer finger, they can make thimselves the bigness av a tower when it plazes thim, an' av that ugliness that ye'd faint wid the looks o' thim, as knowin' they can shtrike ye dead on the shpot or change ye into a dog, or a pig, or a unicorn, or anny ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... thousand cl, so strong was the ice, that the Thames could be crossed over by people on horseback. In the [Sidenote: The iiij^{th} year of king John.] year one thousand ccij such great rains, thunder and hail fell, that quadrangular stones, to the bigness of eggs descended from the sky mixt with rain; by which trees, vines, and cornfields were much destroyed; men were bruised, and birds flying through the air seemed [Sidenote: The same year.] to bear lighted coals in their beaks, and to set the houses on fire. ...
— A Chronicle of London from 1089 to 1483 • Anonymous
... there were several apartments for lodging the officers of his household; and the intermediate spaces, between the other walls, were appointed for the habitation of the people: the first and largest enclosure was about the bigness of Athens. The name ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... was confused, painfully conscious of his inarticulateness. He had felt the bigness and glow of life in what he had read, but his speech was inadequate. He could not express what he felt, and to himself he likened himself to a sailor, in a strange ship, on a dark night, groping about in the unfamiliar running rigging. Well, he decided, it was up to him to get acquainted in ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... wealth in all commodities, and in the energy and ability which turn wealth to account, there is something sublime in the vista of the future. Do not suppose that I am pandering to what is commonly understood by national pride. I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness, or your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs a true sublimity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is what are ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... having besides within the compass of a circuit of seven miles, seven small seas: he saw also therein many fair places, and goodly buildings, the duke's palace, and the mighty strong castle, which is in a manner half the bigness of the town. Moreover, it liked him well to see the hospital of St. Mary, with divers other things: he did there nothing worthy of memory, but he departed back again towards Bologna, and from thence to Florence, where he was well pleased to see the pleasant walk of merchants, ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... and tattered, the landward side and all the pleasant hollows between are fairly held against such gales as on Long Island blow the lower dunes hither and yon. The sheep graze in the valleys at some points; in many a little pocket of the dunes I found a potato-patch of about the bigness of a city lot, and on week-days I saw wooden-shod men slowly, slowly gathering in the crop. On Sundays I saw the pleasant nooks and corners of these sandy hillocks devoted, as the dunes of Long Island were, to whispering lovers, who are here as freely and fearlessly affectionate ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... its conception and strikes many great live topics of the day—the feminist movement and the back-to-the-soil doctrines being two of the most conspicuous. There is a spirit of the open spaces about this story—a bigness that suggests that Miss Cather has taken more than her title from Whitman's hymn to progress, ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... Esq., is, perhaps, as complete as anything that can be obtained. Much depends upon having a well-constructed kiln. For the convenience of putting the hops on the kiln, a side hill is generally chosen for its situation; it should be a dry situation. It should be dug out the same bigness at the bottom as at the top; the side walls laid up perpendicularly, and filled in solid with stone to give it a tunnel form: twelve feet square at the top, two feet square at the bottom, and at least eight feet deep, is deemed a convenient size. On the top of the walls sills ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... aid of the Entente, having had the strength to resist the Bolshevik troops, Poland is now in a state of permanent anarchy; consumes and does not produce; pays debts with a fantastic bigness and does not know how to regulate the incomings. No country in the world has ever more abused paper currency; her paper money is probably the most greatly depreciated of any country on earth. She has not succeeded in organizing ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... oxen are of the bigness and colour of our bulls, but their bones are not so great. They have a great bunch upon their fore-shoulder, and more hair on their fore part than on their hinder part, and it is like wool. They have as it were an horse-mane upon their backbone, and much hair and very long from ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... the honey; and then put in the whites of 3 or 4 Eggs well beaten, to make the scum rise. When the honey is throughly melted and ready to boil, put in an Egge with the shell softly; and when the Egge riseth above the water, to the bigness of a groat in sight, it is strong enough of the honey. The Egge will quickly be hard, and so will not rise; Therefore you must put in another, if the first do not rise to your sight; you must put in more water and honey proportionable to the first, ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... you know of what the North will be? You know it only as it has been—as it is, perhaps. But, of its future you know nothing. I tell you the North will change! It is a hard land—cruel—elemental—raw! But it is big! And, when it awakens, its very bigness, the virile force and strength of it, will turn against its savagery, its cruelty, its brutishness; and above all other lands it will stand for the protection of the weak and for the right of ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... tore the letter into a thousand half-pence] [i.e. into a thousand pieces of the same bigness.] This is farther explained by a passage in ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... everything done for her. The next beyond is Mrs. O'Neil's. She looks as Irish as her name sounds, and you will remember her by that. So each bed comes to mean a certain patient, and each patient comes to suggest the ones on either side of her—her neighbors. Blondeness and bigness together call Mrs. Blake to mind. Broken hip means Mrs. Meade, etc. Each individual on that side of the ward becomes associated with a name which stands ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... the very beginning of national consciousness in Canada, one begins to understand the grim, rough, dogged determination that became part of the race. Canada was never intoxicated with that madness for Bigness that seemed to sweep over the modern world. What cared she whether her population stood still or not, whether she developed fast or slow, provided she kept the Faith and preserved her national integrity? Flimsy culture had no place in her schools ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... spectre, so the epaulettes fell over his shoulders, the waist flapped loosely eight inches above his trousers, and the short swallow-tails did not sufficiently cover the spot which the venerable darky usually placed on the chair to hide a patch, the bigness of a frying-pan and of a different material from the breeches themselves, that Juno's affectionate care had strengthened her liege lord's garments with—which garments, far more pastoral than military, and forced by suspenders as near ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... most threatening and angry gesture. At the same moment, the moonlight shining full upon him, Barnaby could see him as plain as daylight—a large, stout gentleman with a round red face, and clad in a fine, laced coat of red cloth. In the stern of the boat near by him was a box or chest about the bigness of a middle-sized travelling-trunk, but covered all over with cakes of sand and dirt. In the act of passing, the gentleman, still standing, pointed at this chest with his cane—an elegant gold-headed staff—and roared out in a loud voice: "Are you come after this, Abram Dowling? Then come and ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle
... only in their novels, but almost invariably in personal contact and conversation with a more or less educated Russian. This is not imaginary and fantastic; it is a definite sensation, and immediately apparent. Bigness in early environment often produces a certain comfortable largeness of mental vision. One has only to compare in this particular a man from Russia with a man from Holland, or still better, a man from Texas with a man from Connecticut. The difference is easy to see, and ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... o'clock that evening this amazing Cossar, with no appearance of hurry at all, had got all the stuff for his fight with insurgent Bigness out of Urshot and on the road to Hickleybrow. Two barrels of paraffin and a load of dry brushwood he had bought in Urshot; plentiful sacks of sulphur, eight big game guns and ammunition, three light breechloaders, with small-shot ammunition for the wasps, a hatchet, two billhooks, a pick and ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... shore, we lay by all night. The island seemed very pleasant to the eye, with many woods, I may as well say the whole land was woods. There being a rock lying above water to the eastward of it, where an innumerable company of fowls, being of the bigness of a small goose, which fowls would strike at our men as they were aloft: Some of them we killed and eat: They seemed to us very good, only tasted somewhat fishly. I sailed along that island to the southward, and about the south-west side of the island there seemed ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... than he did himself; and so much more than either of his mates that he would feel entirely at ease—as he could not with them—in trusting the navigation of the brig in my hands. As to the practical part of the work, that was a matter that with my quickness I would pick up in no time; and my bigness and strength, he added, would come in mighty handily when there was trouble among the crew, as sometimes happened, and in keeping the blacks in order, and in the little fights that now and then were necessary ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... a hot, blistering journey, but of immense interest, for none of them had traveled through the Northwest, and the wonder and grandeur of it all, its scenery, its bigness, its mighty agriculture, impressed them. Clemens in his notes refers more than once to the "seas" and ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Trouts, that are good in Winter; but there are not many that are so, for usually they be in their perfection in the month of May, and decline with the Buck: Now you are to take notice, that in several Countries, as in Germany and in other parts compar'd to ours, they differ much in their bigness, shape, and other wayes, and so do Trouts; 'tis wel known that in the Lake Lemon, the Lake of Geneva, there are Trouts taken, of three Cubits long, as is affirmed by Gesner, a Writer of good credit: and Mercator sayes, the Trouts ...
— The Complete Angler 1653 • Isaak Walton
... passing this mount in winter, arises from a ball of snow, which is blown down from the top by the wind, or falls down by some other accident; which, gathering all the way in its descent, becomes instantly of such a prodigious bigness, that there is hardly any avoiding being carried away with it, man and beast, and smothered in it. One of these balls we saw rolling down; but as it took another course than ours, we had no apprehension of danger ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... sweeps in splendid curves, producing an ever-growing sense of bigness and dignity. Some of its reaches are very wide, and have more the appearance of an inland lake than a river. On such sand-banks as are not already occupied by fishermen, flocks of wild-goose, storks, and other waders are roosting or fishing in the shallow pools. Kingfishers ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... snouts, so that they could not open their mouths, as is done (in Europe) with mastiff-dogs so that they may not bite: they were of such savage aspect that none of us dared to take one away, thinking that they were poisonous: they are of the bigness of a kid, and in length an ell and a half: their feet are long and thick, and armed with big claws: they have a hard skin, and are of various colors: they have the muzzle and face of a serpent: and from their snouts ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... an atmosphere of bigness about the Court of the Universe, created not only by the architectural features, but by the symbolism of the final meeting of the Nations of the World, made possible by the completion ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt
... reputed to be skilful, to make a washing, near a village called Boshowitz; and I saw with pleasure, that with much dexterity, and in a few minutes time, they cleared in the trough, the value of some groshes of gold: they showed me likewise among their gold dust, some pieces of remarkable bigness." ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... binary compounds in the way of combining by means of their six sides; for if the atoms possessed no distinction of parts (and hence filled no space), a group of even a thousand atoms would not differ in extension from a single atom, and the different kinds of extension—minuteness, shortness, bigness, length, &c.—would never emerge. If, on the other hand, it is admitted that the atoms also have distinct sides, they have parts and are made up of those parts, and those parts again are made up of their parts, and so on in infinitum.— But, the Vaiseshika may object, ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... bigness of it all as they swept quickly past the irrigated district close to the town and sped out on the open unfenced range. For miles the country was level with here and there arroyos cross-sectioning into the river ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... for a good many years, I know as Hankey cannot know, how much of his strength lies in his personal touch and presence:—spread his powers too wide he loses that touch. Felt the better for my talk with Hankey. He can grasp the bigness of what we are up against and can yet keep his head and see that the game is worth the candle and that it is in our hands the moment we make up our minds to pay the price of ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... what an outing is for—to strip one down to the lean essentials, press in upon one the glorious privilege of being one's self, unique in all the universe of innumerable unique things. Crouched close to your wilderness campfire, the great Vision comes easily out of the smoke. Once again you feel the bigness of your world, the tremendous significance of everything in it—including yourself—and a far-seeing sadness grips you. Living in the flesh seems so transient, almost a pitiful thing in the last analysis. But somehow you feel that there is something bigger—not beyond it, but all about ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... Historia Histrionica[582] tells us that the Cockpit differed in no essential feature from Blackfriars and Salisbury Court, "for they were all three built almost exactly alike for form and bigness." Since we know that Blackfriars and Salisbury Court were small rectangular theatres, the former constructed in a hall forty-six feet broad and sixty-six feet long, the latter erected on a plot of ground forty-two feet broad and one hundred and forty feet long, we are not left entirely ignorant ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... their guests, and drove them to the house in their carriage, watching for compliments on their district, on the rapid vegetation, on the condition of the roads in the department, on the cleanliness of the peasants' houses, on the bigness of the cattle they saw in the fields, on everything that met the eye as far as the edge ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... about me, they were attracted by a great tree that grew near by, a tree of vast girth and bigness. And, as I looked, I saw that it was an oak-tree, near the root of which there was ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... expressed by the "vast cousinship" which constitutes Charleston society, but it is to my mind expressed much better in the way bicyclists leave their machines leaning against the curb at the busiest parts of main shopping streets. Its bigness, upon the other hand, is expressed by the homes from which some of those bicyclists come, by the cultivation which exists in those homes, and has existed there for generations, by the amenities of life as they are comprehended and observed, by the wealth of the city's tradition and the ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... may be some two hundred houses, all compassed with walls; and, I think, that, with the rest of the houses which are not so walled, they may be together five hundred. There is another town near this, which is one of the seven, and it is somewhat bigger than this, and another of the same bigness that this is of, and the four are somewhat less; and I send them all painted unto your Lordship with the voyage. And the parchment wherein the picture is was found here with other parchments. The people of this town seem unto me of ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... said—she was sitting beside him by the outdoor fire—"I want you always to remember that I am more grateful than words can express for your—bigness, your wonderful understanding. I did not expect that even you, Lyn, ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... little busy Bees, innumerable Beetle, that we tread on Beggar, dumb, may challenge double pity Beggary in the love Bell, silence that dreadful —, sullen, sounds as a Bell, church-going Belle, 't is vain to be a Dells jangled, out of tune Bent, fool me to the top of my Bezonian? under which king Bigness which you see Bird of dawning —that shunn'st the noise of folly Birth is but a sleep Black spirits and white —to red began to turn Blackberries, if reasons were as plenty as Bladder, blows a man up like a Blessed, more, to ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various
... to prepare is the Line, which though easy, yet admits of some Rule; wherefore to make it neat, handsome and strong, twist the Hair you make it of even, having seen if the Hair be of an equal bigness; then steep your Line in Water, to see if the Hairs shrink, if so, you must twist them over again. The Colour of the Hair is best of Sorrel, White and Grey; Sorrel for muddy boggy Rivers, and the two last for clear Waters. Nor is the Pale ...
— The School of Recreation (1684 edition) • Robert Howlett
... well-found ship, full equipment, and high hopes. That was all of tangible things; but in memories we were rich. We had pierced the veneer of outside things. We had "suffered, starved, and triumphed, grovelled down yet grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole." We had seen God in His splendours, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... leaned up against the tree-roots; we each sat astride facing each other, the bigness of the tree making it rather an uneasy seat; I slung the wallet round and placed it between us, and had just thrust in my hand, while Pomp wrenched himself round to hang the ammunition pouches close to the gun ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... attracted by the idea that he represented, of wide spaces and primitive adventures. She had always longed to travel in untrodden ways, and had loved stories of romantic barbarism. And then, too, some queer glamour of the man had got hold of her. She was intensely susceptible to personal influence—his bigness, his simplicity, his strength and daring, and the feeling that he was quite capable of mastering her, not only by brute force—which always appeals to a certain type of woman—but by power of will, by a tenacity of passion which she recognised even through ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... of the thin, clear mountain air! So this was Virginia's country! It was a big land! She understood now what Virginia had meant by talking about the bigness of everything. The plains, stretching on and on, gray-green with sagebrush, the gaunt mountain spurs, the far-away real mountains, blue and snow-furrowed, the great, clear sky over all! It must be wonderful at night with countless stars and a moon ...
— Virginia of Elk Creek Valley • Mary Ellen Chase
... that we had plenty of matter for talk now, since the raiding of our village seemed by long odds the greatest event that had really ever occurred in the world; for although these dull peasants may have thought they recognized the bigness of some of the previous occurrences that had filtered from the world's history dimly into their minds, the truth is that they hadn't. One biting little fact, visible to their eyes of flesh and felt in their own personal vitals, became ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... gorge the bread and meat I earn by sweating and freezing, and you keep your sluggish mountain of bones covered. A year or two ago I'd have urged you along with a stick. I used to get some work out of you then. But you think you're too big for that, now, don't you? You fancy I'm afraid of your bigness, eh? Well, do you want me to try it out? ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt |
