"Billowing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... after hours of burning toil he had insensibly grown nearer to his comrade. He reflected that after a few weeks in the desert he had always become a different man. In civilization, in the rough mining camps, he had been a prey to unrest and gloom. But once down on the great billowing sweep of this lonely world, he could look into his unquiet soul without bitterness. Did not the desert magnify men? Cameron believed that wild men in wild places, fighting cold, heat, starvation, thirst, barrenness, facing the elements ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... singular or plural), and we went home. But before we went we held a hurried council and collected what money we could from the little we had with us (it was ninepence-halfpenny), and wrapped it in an old envelope Dicky had in his pocket and put it gently on the billowing middle of the poor tramp's sleeping waistcoat, so that he would find it when he woke. None of the dogs said a single syllable while we were doing this, so we knew they believed him to be poor but honest, and we always find it safe to take their word ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... this continent of ours the resentment of winter is visited. All around me is the mellow grace of sunshine, roses, lilies, heliotropes, carnations, marigolds, nasturtiums, marguerites, and geraniums are a-bloom; and as far as the eye can reach, the green velvet of billowing acres is blended with the passion of wild poppies; the olive, the orange, and the lemon abound; yonder a vineyard lies fast asleep in the glorious noonday; the giant rubber trees in all this remarkable ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... a small gray-red goatee, sticking straight out from a cleft in the chin like a dab of a sandy sheep's wool. Also, as the speaker swung himself further round, I took note of a shirt of plaited white linen billowing out over his chest and ending at the top in a starchy yet rumply collar that rolled majestically and Byronically clear up under his ears. Under the collar was loosely knotted a black-silk tie such as sailors wear. His vest was unbuttoned, ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... the fields and into the tangle of the forest it is easy to see this wind from far Cathay moving pictures of Oriental magic and mystery. Gray djinns stalk across the open spaces in the gathering dusk and what magician from Samarcand or what prince or princess of India may float to earth on these billowing praying-carpets of rain gusts it is impossible to tell. In the open fields and on the forest edges the effect of ghostly mystery is enhanced by the strange personality which all things take on. The most familiar path becomes new to us and each shrub and stump stands forth, ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... saw but did not heed. She was under the spell of the guns, the sound rose against the brightness of the day as a black cloud rises across the sky or a sorrow across one's life, insistent, rhythmical, a pall of sound now billowing, now sinking, as though blown ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... exhibited a more extraordinary feature. In fact, it exhibited the extraordinary feature of not being an island at all. A long, curving neck of sand, as smooth and wet as the neck of the sea serpent, ran out into the sea and joined their rock to a line of low, billowing, and glistening sand-hills, which the sinking sea had just bared to the sun. Whether they were firm sand or quicksand it was difficult to guess; but there was at least no doubt that they lay on the edge of some larger land; ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... and forgot her momentary displeasure as the insistent appeal of the landscape crowded everything else from her mind. The white road lay like a carelessly flung thread on the billowing plateau land. The air was crisp with the magic of the upper altitudes. Gray clumps of sagebrush stood forth like little islands in the sea of grass. A winding line of willows told where a small stream lay hidden. The shadows of late afternoon were filling ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... pedestal of green bronze—with an inset panel representing the tragedy—rose upward in the shape of billowing curling waves supporting a marble Christ standing erect with outstretched pitying hand, ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... skirts with an easy turn of her pretty hands and wrists, pointed a charming foot, so small that it made Mollie gasp, and began to sink slowly down. Down, down, down she swept, her skirt billowing out around her, her shoulders square, her head erect—down till she all but touched the floor, and how she kept her balance was a perfect miracle; then slowly up, with an indescribably graceful curve of neck and elbows, till once more she stood erect, pleased and triumphant, ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... all night and were drenched with cold dew, hungry to desperation, and my spirits were of lead. Suddenly we got out from behind the granite wall, and there she was, standing, where I had seen her so often, beside the little waterfall that she calls the happy one. She was looking straight up at the billowing mist that dipped down the mountain, mammoth saffron rolls of it, plunging so madly from the impetus of the wind that one marvelled how it could be noiseless. Ah, you do not know Judith! That strange, unsophisticated, sometimes ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... Saturn," and Stevens projected the visiray beam out toward the mighty planet. It was now an enormous full moon, almost five degrees in apparent diameter,[1] its visible surface an expanse of what they knew to be billowing cloud, shining brilliantly white in the pale sunlight, broken only ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... there avoiding the intercourse of men. Most wearisome had their gabble become; almost unearthly. But indeed all was unearthly in that humor. The gushing of my native brooks, the sough of the old solitary woods, the great roar of old native Solway (billowing fresh out of your Atlantic, drawn by the Moon): all this was a kind of unearthly music to me; I cannot tell you how unearthly. It did not bring me to rest; yet towards rest I do think at all events, the time had come when I behoved to quit it again. I have been here since September ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... indeed. In the steady hum of their powerful motor the young aviators found consolation in that lonely ride through the billowing fog-banks. At all events, there was no sign of ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... gullied by twisting little water courses, dry as a chip at the moment, and some of them so deep as to afford cover even for the biggest pony of the wild warriors of the plains. Then, to the front, the barrier ridges, streaked with deep winding ravines, were now billowing against the northward sky, and once among those tangled land waves no chances could be taken now that it was known that the Sioux had declared for war, and that Stabber's band was out to join their red brethren ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... like a guppy with my head, sounding out the boundary of that deadness, ducking down as soon as the mental murk gave me a faint perception of the wall and ceiling above me. Then I'd move aside and sound it again. Eventually I found a little billowing furrow that rose above the floor level and I crawled out along the floor, still sounding and moving cautiously with my body hidden in the deadness that rose and fell like a cloud of murky mental smoke ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... listen! As I found thee at first— In arrowy flame As thereafter thou fleddest— In fluttering fire; As I dealt with thee once, I wield thee to-day! Arise, billowing blaze, And fold in thy fire the rock! Loge! Loge! Aloft! Who fears the spike Of my spear to face, He will ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... were mingling now and expanding: they blossomed and mushroomed, and the light of the moon came in pale iridescence from their billowing folds. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... city Eva found turmoil there. The first of the American troops to be sent to France were leaving. Michigan Boulevard was a billowing, surging mass: flags, pennants, banners, crowds. All the elements that make for demonstration. And over the whole-quiet. No holiday crowd, this. A solid, determined mass of people waiting patient hours to see the khaki-clads go by. ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... then I cite the closing act of her life as valid on her behalf, were all other testimonies against her. The executioner had been directed to apply his torch from below. He did so. The fiery smoke rose upward in billowing volumes. A Dominican monk was then standing almost at her side. Wrapped up in his sublime office, he saw not the danger, but still persisted in his prayers. Even then, when the last enemy was racing up the fiery ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... back and forth, hands clasped about his knees, looking not at her at all, but away over the billowing hills. ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... fondest of those pieces which we heard him play himself, and therefore we shall mention first of all the first one in A flat, which is rather a poem than an etude. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that he brought out every one of the little notes with distinctness; it was more like a billowing of the A flat major chord, swelled anew here and there by means of the pedal; but through the harmonies were heard the sustained tones of a wondrous melody, and only in the middle of it did a tenor ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... we shipped, and after taking him aboard we were soon out of the harbor of Prairie Flower, and bearing away across the plain to the southwest. In twenty minutes we ware among the billowing sunflowers, standing five or six feet high on other side of the road, which seemed like a narrow crack winding through them. Ollie reached out and gathered a handful of the drooping yellow blossoms. The pony was tied behind ...
— The Voyage of the Rattletrap • Hayden Carruth
... hose-streams of fire. Answering German shells revealed which of the chalky scars on the slope was the British first-line trench, and from this, as steam from a locomotive runs in a flying plume along the crest of a railway cutting, rose a billowing wall of smoke which was harmless, not even asphyxiating, its only purpose being to screen the infantry attack, with a gentle breeze sweeping it on into the mantle over Contalmaison as the wind carries the smoke of a prairie fire. Lookout Mountain was known as the battle in the clouds, ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... vaster with each passing moment. It had changed from a disc to a globe, and now, as the molten silver of its surface seemed swiftly clouding, it turned grey; then they saw its true appearance, a vast field of rolling, billowing clouds! ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... the cool dimness of her own drawing-room, Evelyn Desmond sank gratefully into a chair, her skirts billowing softly ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... bending low, you will hear him, you shall know he is sobbing for children that are not. One lonely, distraught, mystified, sorely-beleagured, and still surely-trusting man,—this is the audience. The scene is a tawny desert, once sown to oases of flowers, and billowing grain, and stately palm-tree, and olive-groves, now harvestless, flowerless, palmless. Once a stately palace rose beside a fountain here, and from its open doors ran genial hospitality, to greet the coming guest and the wayfarer overtaken by the night and weariness; ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... shout of delight: for before us, at a distance of a short quarter of a mile, was the extremity of the gorge, a mere narrow slit between two mighty walls of overhanging sandstone, through which we caught a glimpse of an open, grassy, sun-bathed plain, the long rich grass billowing to the sweep of a fresh breeze, and its wide stretches of level surface darkened here and there with the rich purple shadows of slow-moving clouds, promising a welcome change from the close, suffocating, enervating, insect-haunted ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... water the multi-coloured massing of the houses is broken up and softened by the vividness of the parks and the green billowing of the trees that line most of the streets. Landing, the newcomer is at once steeped in the depressing air of a seaport town that has not troubled to keep its houses in the brightest condition. As many ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... was up, broad and bright, burning over the darkened wheat-fields, when Kurt and Jerry reached home. Kurt had never seen the farm look like that—ugly and black and bare. But the fallow ground, hundreds of acres of it, billowing away to the south, had not suffered any change of color or beauty. To Kurt it seemed to smile at him, to bid him ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... permit the craft to rise, Tom guided the Sea Hound back to the surface. Then he reversed blade pitch for air flight and gunned the atomic turbines. The seacopter rose steeply above the billowing ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... called up Mrs. Morton on the telephone and asked her to talk to him on the wireless. A moment later their invisible messages were speeding back and forth over the miles of billowing pine tops that intervened between the two little forest homes, and no listener in on the department telephone system could either know that they were talking or tell what they said. Charley was overjoyed when Mrs. Morton told him that her husband was about ready to come back to ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... seats slightly elevated, not far from the dais, his attention was at length challenged by an upheaving and billowing of purple and black. He looked, and in the same instant what seemed to have been a kind of storm centre resolved itself cloudily into Mrs. Medora Hastings, breathlessly resuming her seat, while Mr. Augustus Frothingham, in indescribably ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... the aurora; changed to vast billowing curtains. The faceted wheel at the top of the central spire of the cones swung upward; a light began to stream from the cones themselves—no pillar now, but a vast circle that shot whirling into the ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... was all Miss Ann said, but she sought the girl's hand and held it a moment in the folds of her billowing lace dress. ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... only a telegraph office, flanked by a water-tank on a siding. There was no waiting hotel bus, no cab, no vehicle of any kind. The small building rose like an islet out of a gray sea. Far off through billowing swells one other islet appeared, but these two passengers the eastbound had left were like ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... to employ the technical terminology of other arts, but against my judgment. Read Mr. W. F. Apthorp's disheartening dictum in "By the Way." "The entrancing phantasmagoria of picture and incident which we think we see rising from the billowing sea of music is in reality nothing more than an enchanting fata morgana, visible at no other angle than that of our own eye. The true gist of music it never can be; it can never truly translate what is most essential and characteristic ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... slowly withdrawing her waning silvery light from the billowing mass of tawny hair, tumbling in lavender-scented masses around the girl; lingering for a moment on the eyes staring from under the unblinking eyelids, and for a second upon the glint of even teeth showing through the lips moving ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... to the window, looking out on a great, golden, billowing sea where a wild wind was harping. For a few moments there was silence in the little dark-walled room. Then he turned and looked down into Anne's sympathetic face ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Grosville's ear. She nodded smiling towards the standing pair—struck by the fine straight lines of Mary's satin dress, the roundness of her fine figure, the oval of her head and face, and then by the little, vibrating, tempestuous creature beside her, so distinguished, in spite of the billowing flounces and ribbons, so direct and significant, amid ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Madonna, as Messer Pordenone had painted her in the Church of Santa Chiara at Piacenza; the dress, the lilies, the sweet pale visage, all were known to me, even the billowing cloud upon which one little ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... earth, fountains of earth rise, leaping, Spouting like shocks of meeting waves, Death's fountains are playing, Shells like shrieking birds rush over; Crash and din rises higher. A stream of lead raves Over us from the left ... (we safe under cover!) Crash! Reverberation! Crash! Acrid smoke billowing. Flash upon flash. Black smoke drifting. The German line Vanishes in confusion, smoke. Cries, and cry Of our men, 'Gah, yer swine! Ye're for it', die In a hurricane ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... city Eva found turmoil there. The first of the American troops to be sent to France were leaving. Michigan Boulevard was a billowing, surging mass: Flags, pennants, banners crowds. All the elements that make for demonstration. And over the whole—quiet. No holiday crowd, this. A solid, determined mass of people waiting patient ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... his housekeeper and me—-that he weighs practically nothing; that he is a mere boring mass of assimilatory matter, mere clouds in clothing, niente, nefas, the most inconsiderable of men. There he sits watching until I have done this writing. Then, if he can, he will waylay me. He will come billowing ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... to the window to draw the shutters, stopping for an instant to peer out into the gloom along the stony path that ran from his house to an old foot-bridge about fifty feet away. Curling up from the gorge, mist seemed to play among the rotted planks; it rose and fell in great billowing blankets, sometimes concealing the structure ...
— The White Feather Hex • Don Peterson
... off from the brow of the mountain over fifteen miles of billowing green, to where, far across a far stretch of pale blue lay a dim purple line that we knew was Staten Island. Towns and villages lay before us and under us; there were ridges and hills, uplands and lowlands, woods and plains, all massed and mingled in that great silent sea of ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... nothing of the antagonistic origins when I opened my window to the sunny morning which smiled at the notion of the overnight tempest, and lighted all the landscape on that side of the hotel. The outlook was over vast plowed lands red as Virginia or New Jersey fields, stretching and billowing away from the yellow Tagus in the foreground to the mountain-walled horizon, with far stretches of forest in the middle distance. What riches of gray roof, of white wall, of glossy green, or embrowning foliage in the city gardens the prospect included, one should have the brush rather than ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... seeking to enjoy, social pleasure; they seek also, and have need to seek continually, both through books and men, intellectual growth, fresh power, fresh strength, to keep themselves ahead or abreast of this moving, surging, billowing world of ours; especially in these modern times, when society revolves through so many new phases, and shifts its aspects with so much more velocity than in past ages. A king, especially of this country, needs, beyond most other men, to keep himself in a continual ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... light that shone from the coming day, Travelling unseen to the East away. In his cloudy robes that lay shadowing wide, I stretched myself motionless by his side; And his eyes with their calm, unimpassioned power, Soothing my heart like an evening shower, Led in a spectral, far-billowing train, The hours of the Past through my ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... he would neither eat nor drink. His thoughts were full of the Princess Helena, who was as lovely as a dream. Is that a white gull he sees flying towards the shore, or is it a sail? No, it is no gull, it is the wonder-ship flying along with billowing sails. Its flags wave, the fiddlers play on the wire rigging, the anchor is thrown out and the crystal plank laid from the ship to the pier. The lovely Helena steps across the plank. She shines like the sun, and the stars of heaven seem ...
— The Crimson Fairy Book • Various
... in not only was a gypsy, she was dressed as a gypsy. Her blouse was white, and quite frilly. She had on a billowing red skirt, liberally encrusted with embroidered beads of a darker red. The tattered hem of a petticoat hung below it. Her hair had been dark once, but it was shot with threads of silver. There was a lot of it, and piled up high so ...
— Tinker's Dam • Joseph Tinker
... practice. The bricks jammed even when they were undermined, and the wall was four bricks thick to its further side. Moreover, every alternate course was cross-pinned, and the workman was rapidly becoming asphyxiated by the terrible reek which came billowing in ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... leveled, washes and arroyos filled, ditches would be made to the company canals, and in place of the thin growth of gray-green desert vegetation with the ragged patches of dun earth would come great fields of luxuriant alfalfa, billowing acres of grain, with miles upon miles of orchards, vineyards and groves. The fierce desert life would give way to the herds and flocks and the home life of the farmer. The railroad would stretch its steel ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... covered a great many thousand square miles of territory, and yet we had seen nothing in the way of a familiar landmark, when from the heights of a mountain-range we were crossing I descried far in the distance great masses of billowing clouds. ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... insensible the street population was to the grandeur of the storm. While the thunder was billowing and ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... tried it once, and failed. Now she realized that it would be but a matter of minutes ere the whole space between the north and the south would be a seething mass of billowing flames. ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... telegraph poles that marked the course of the railway and a traveling column of smoke indicated the busy course of a railway train. This was the setting within which lay the broad stretches of the Athi Plains, billowing in waves ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... an honest admiration of her sister's daring, and an equally honest embarrassment at the notice she attracted. Zara swam and glided about the streets, to the hilarious amazement of the population; floated feather-light, billowing here, depressing there, with all the waywardness of a child's balloon; supported—or so it seemed—by two of the tiniest feet ever bestowed on mortal woman. Aha! but that was one of the chief merits of "the hoops," declared Zara; that, and the possibility of getting still more stuff into your ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... And knights whose lives were flights of eagles' wings, And lives like snakes' lives of engendering kings; And all the ravin of all the swords that reap Lives cast as sheaves on heap 350 From all the billowing harvest-fields of fight; And sounds of love-songs lovelier than ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Rockies go rolling and billowing far out to the east, and the entire stretch of country, from what are called the "Black Hills of Wyoming," in contradistinction to the Black Hills of Dakota, far east as the junction of the forks of the Platte, is one ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... blue, the billowing fields sailed away the gray steamer, cutting a path that sprayed and sang after. Sunlight danced and lay whitely as far as the eye could reach. It prolonged for those on shore the contour of the line of faces above each deck; it picked points of light from off ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... Pacific was not to be found in northern New York. He turned, therefore, and drifted slowly downward with the steady current, while the matchless lines of the American autumn glowed every day more sumptuously from the far-billowing woods. What sunrises and what sunsets dyed the waters with liquid splendor: what moons, let us hope, turned the glories of day into the spiritual mysteries of fairyland! Hudson was not born for repose; his fate was to ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... the billowing fields, mounting the grassy hills, threading the matchless forests of uncut timber, he sees all. He sits plotting and dreaming on the porch by the lake side. Thousands of horses and cattle, now crossed and improved, are wealth wandering at will on every ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... getting there. The crowd around the port looked smaller, or was it simply huddling closer? Then suddenly, a wail of fear and despair went up, and there was a roar of water. The observation room walls had given. I saw the green surge of waves, and a billowing deluge rushed down upon us. I had been ...
— The Worlds of If • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... forty-four days before, now smiled with friendly faces. There was much waving of hats and many shouts of farewell from the little group on the shore, but Rezanov saw only the figure of a tall graceful girl with the soft folds of a mantilla billowing about her head and shoulders and heard only the murmur of love from the rosy lips. 'Two years,' he whispered back to her, as the ship passed out through the Gulf of the Farallones and became but a ...
— The Lure of San Francisco - A Romance Amid Old Landmarks • Elizabeth Gray Potter and Mabel Thayer Gray
... brumbies, or wild horses, consisting of some seven or eight mares and foals, led by a flea-bitten old grey stallion, who snorted angrily as he saw Finn, and minced forward toward the Wolfhound, his long chisel teeth bared, his four-foot tail billowing out behind him like a flag, and his black hoofs (the feet of mountain-bred brumbies are prodigiously hard and punishing in the attack) rising and falling from the dewy earth like ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... arch a train, a billowing tumult of white, firelit smoke, and a long caterpillar of lighted windows, went flying south—clatter, clatter, clap, rap, and it had gone. A dim group of people talked in the gate of one of the houses in the pretty ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... the boat nodded to the leeward of the rock, with its mast stepped, its sail billowing with a rustle in the faint air, and Mungo at the sheet. The dawn came slowly, but fast enough for the departing, and the landward portion of the rock was still in shadow when Olivia stepped forth with a tear-stained face and a trembling hand on Victor's ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... indeed firing up "furiously", as Milsom had said; for dense clouds of black smoke were now continuously pouring and billowing out of both funnels of the cruiser, to the outspoken scorn and derision of Macintyre, who had his own ideas upon the subject of "firing", his theory being that to make steam quickly, and keep it when made, one should "fire" lightly ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... sad billowing base of grey and rose, Stung with sharp lamps in its most velvet gloom; Drowsy with smoke, and loud with voice and glass, Where wine-whipped animations pass and pass— Beauty breaks sudden blossoms all around In happy riot of rhythm, colour, and pose. The radiant hands, the swift, delighted ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... billowing of the lower, less stiff part of her garments, she sailed to the cloudy mirror over the magazine-filled bookcase and inspected her cap of false curls, with many prods of her large firm hands which flashed with Brazilian diamonds. Though he had heard the word "puffs," he did not know that ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... god was stationary with his lyre, and seemed looking down upon the fiery ruins that were so rapidly approaching him. Suddenly the supporting timbers below him gave way; a convulsive heave of the billowing flames seemed for a moment to raise the statue; and then, as if on some impulse of despair, the presiding deity appeared not to fall, but to throw himself into the fiery deluge, for he went down head foremost; and in all respects, the descent had the air of a voluntary act. What ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... his grandfather swear disgustedly. Not long later, a badly battered, blackened, scuffed old spacecraft came rolling up on rocket-impulse and stopped with a billowing of rocket fumes. Hoddan threw a switch and used the landing grid field he'd used on Walden in another fashion. The ships came together with fine precision, lifeboat-tube to lifeboat-tube. He heard his grandfather swear ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... doing," muttered Hanson, and even as he spoke his eye was taken by a movement on the horizon line, a billowing as if the desert were rising like the sea. And truly it did. It lifted in waves that mounted almost to the sky and swept forward with a savage eagerness as if to bear down upon and engulf and obliterate the little oasis of a village with its green productive fields, ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... is a subtle harmony of color and exquisite adjustment of line and mass. The luminous night which enwraps the Palisades is a solemn mighty chord. The white rhythm of this statue caresses the eye that follows it. This symphony is an intricate and wonderful wave-pattern upon a sea of billowing sound in which the listener immerses himself voluptuously. The essential significance of a work of art is not to be received apart from its form, but the form is more than merely sensuous in its appeal. Finally, ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... the best part of an hour, each man's eyes on the distant conflagration that had begun now to light up the whole of the sky ahead of them. They still rode in darkness, but they seemed to be approaching the red rim of the Pit. Huge, billowing clouds of smoke, red-lit on the under side, belched upward to the blackness overhead, and a something that was scarcely sound—for it was yet too distant—warned them that it was no illusion they were riding into. The conflagration ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... channel between the bar of sand dunes on the one side and a steep, high, frowning red sandstone cliff on the other. We appreciated its significance the first time we saw a splendid golden sunrise flooding it, coming out of the wonderful sea and sky beyond and billowing through that narrow passage in waves of light. Truly, it was a golden gate through which one might sail to ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... reach, concertedly, for their weapons; she saw smoke streaks stabbing the heavy atmosphere of the big room; heard the roar and crash of pistols; saw men falling, to land in grotesque positions; saw Shorty, huge and terrible amid the billowing smoke, shoot a man who tried to leap over the bar, so that he fell across it limply, as though sleeping. She observed another man—one of Slade's—dodge behind a card table, rest his pistol for an instant on its top, and shoot ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... at Canton Magna, following an early and somewhat peripatetic breakfast. Notwithstanding his excellent health and youthful energy, mind and body alike were somewhat spent. He made short work of preparation, slipped in between the fine cool linen sheets, and laid his brown head upon the soft billowing pillows, impatient neither to think nor feel any more but simply ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... and warm there, and whatever the weather the gaunt old mother wolf could always find just the right spot to sleep away the afternoon. Best of all it was perfectly safe; for though from the door of her den she could look down on the old Indian's cabin, like a pebble on the shore, so steep were the billowing hills and so impassable the ravines that no human foot ever trod the place, not even in autumn when the fishermen left their boats at anchor in Harbor Weal and camped inland on the paths of ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long
... muddy bed wondering at the slim grace of the shaft with its crown of yellow atop. Her hair waved about her like a flag; she should have been planted in a castle; instead, Giovanna the stately calm, with her billowing line, staid lips, and candid grey eyes, was to be seen on her knees by the green water most days of the week. Bare-armed, splashed to the neck, bare-headed, out-at-heels, she rinsed and pommelled, wrung and dipped ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... forcing her nearer and nearer to the table which was his goal. In the struggle one of the large shell hair pins which she wore fell to the floor. In another second she heard it ground to pieces under his heel. A long strand of hair came billowing ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... box of the stage. Lone Tooth Hank and the cow-punchers chivalrously raised their sombreros with a simultaneous spontaneity that suggested a flight of rockets. The driver cracked his whip and turned the horses' heads towards the billowing sea of foot-hills, and the last cable that bound Mary ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... into the north. That whole region of the sky was aflame from zenith to horizon with spectral fires. It was the aurora. Not the pale, ragged glow, sputtering like the ghost of a huge lamp-flame, which is familiar to every one, but a billowing of color, rainbows gone mad! In the northeast the long rolling columns formed—many-colored clouds of spectral light whipped up as by a whirlwind—flung from eastward to westward, devouring Polaris and the Wain—rapid sequent ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... thatched farmhouses dozed in gardens full of roses and hollyhocks, and the hedges above the duck-ponds were weighed down with layers of elder-blossom. On all sides wheat-fields skirted with woodland went billowing away under the breezy light that seemed to carry a breath of the Atlantic on its beams. The road ran up and down as if our motor were a ship on a deep-sea swell; and such a sense of space and light ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... and the golden, O'er the billowing meadows blown, Were still as by magic holden From the ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone
... the tunnel, then he would give up the key of the situation, and be swiftly surrounded. If he did not, the roasting flame and the masses of billowing smoke would render the inner cave untenable. Yet, before the bundle of reeds had rolled down to the mass below, the question had been ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... over the folds of the hills as though billowed up by a mighty wind beneath. And the lights, the mists, the drifting cloud shadows! Why had Juno not wanted him to see them? And when he took to horseback and mounted through that billowing rug, through ferns stirrup-high, with flowers innumerable nodding on either side of the trail and the air of the first dawn in his nostrils—mounted to the top of the Big Black, rode for miles along its gently ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
... in the nerves of the spectators; and—what had been was not! The wall was gone! But high above and all around the place where it had hung over the street with its threat of death there appeared, swiftly billowing outward in every direction, a faint, bluish cloud. It was the scattered ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... pleasure so keen it was pain, As I patted my Salvator's soft, silken mane; And a sweet shiver shot from his hide to my hand As we passed by the multitude down to the stand. The great wave of cheering came billowing back As the hoofs of brave Tenny ran swift down the track, And he stood there beside us, all bone and all muscle, Our noble opponent, well trained for the tussle That waited us there on the smooth, shining course. My Salvator, fair to the lovers ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... open and fairly level, the trail cutting across a bend in the stream. Just ahead towered Good Heart Butte, with its glistening, gilded crest throwing a black shadow half-way up the billowing westward slopes. Over at the east across the stream, bold and beautifully rounded, the bluffs went rolling away, knoll after knoll, shoulder after shoulder heavily wooded and fringed at their bases ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... ears; the sleeping camp was awaking amid a tumult that rose and filled the dark vault of heaven. Hoarse voices were shouting orders, bugles were sounding, drums beating, and from the naked fields shadowy forms were seen emerging in indistinguishable masses, a surging, billowing sea whose waves were already streaming downward to the road beneath. The fires on the banks of the stream were dying down; all that could be seen there was masses of men moving confusedly to and fro; it was not even possible ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... Doctor said to one who had been under his anxious care for a few, vivid days. The little brown-bearded man with the grey- brown hair nodded in reply, but his gaze was on the billowing waste of snow, which stretched as far as eye could see to the pine-hills in the far distance. He nodded assent, but it was plain to be seen that the Young Doctor's suggestion was not in tune with his thought. His nod only acknowledged the reasonableness of the proposal. In his eyes, however, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... man stood, overlooking the crowd. A soft breeze, playing about the torches, sent shadows billowing across the massed folk on the ground. Shrewdly set with an eye to theatrical effect, these phares of a night threw out from the darkness the square bulk of the man's figure, and, reflecting garishly upward ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... where the buck and doe were only half afraid; copses alive with small game; rare openings where the squatter's wooden ploughshare lay forgotten; dark chasms scintillant with the treasures of the chemist, if not of the lapidary; outlooks that opened upon great seas of billowing forest, whence blue mountains peered up, sank and rose again like ocean monsters at play; glens where the she-bear suckled her drowsing cubs to the plash of yeasty waterfalls that leapt and whimpered to be in human service, but wherein the otter played all day unscared; crags where ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... were summoned at that moment, not to an orderly retreat, but to instant flight. At one end of the street were seen the rebel pikes and bayonets, and fierce faces already gleaming through the smoke; at the other end, volumes of fire, surging and billowing from the thatched roofs and blazing rafters, beginning to block up the avenues of escape. Then began the agony and uttermost conflict of what is worst and what is best in human nature. Then was to be seen the very ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of pines, with tops like ungainly tendrils feeling for the sky. On the right was a long bare stretch of hills veiled in the thin smoke of the evening, and between, straight before him, was a wide lane of unknown country, billowing away to where it froze into the vast archipelago that closes with the summit of the world. He experienced now that weird charm which has drawn so many into Arctic wilds and gathered the eyes of millions longingly. Wife, child, London, civilisation, were forgotten ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... known to be near. A half mile nearer and the acrid taste in the air turned to a defined veil of smoke, intangible and unreal, at first, which merely seemed to hang about the trunks of the mighty trees and make them seem dim and far away. Nearer yet, and the air grew hard to breathe, the smoke was billowing through the foliage of the pines, which sighed wearily and moaned in a vague fear of the enemy they ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... narrow entrance through which the avengers had disappeared; but they were halted by the guards and forced to content themselves by greeting every shot with an exultant cry. The streets in all directions were tossing and billowing like the waves of the sea; men capered and flung their arms aloft, shrieking; women and children waved their aprons and kerchiefs, sobbing and spent with excitement. It was a wild and grotesque scene, unspeakably terrible, ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... had had no glimpse of the sea; but Robert turned the car, and driving between two gigantic hotels, ran down to a beach with sands of gleaming gold, and a background of wind-blown dunes billowing away as far as the eye could reach. The very wildness of this background gave a bizarre sort of charm to the fantastic buildings which made up ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... blind panic a knot of the people in the square thought that the granite stone was too solid to be overturned, and saw in it an oasis of safety. They flocked towards it, many of them dragging themselves up the steep deep high steps on hands and knees because their feet had been injured by the billowing ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... commencement. The classic note of their grave youthfulness is drowned in the joyful uproar; in the clamor of a thousand greetings one does not listen to these voices which say farewell. From the nucleus of these busy, black-clad young fellows, the folds of their gowns billowing about light, strong figures, the stern lines of the Oxford cap graciously at odds with the fresh modelling of their faces—down from these lads in black, the largest class of all, taper the classes,—fewer, grayer, as the date is older, till a placard on a tree in the campus tells that the ...
— The Courage of the Commonplace • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... Everything gazed upon you. A briefless lawyer, when I took you to the Prado to dine, you were so beautiful that the roses seemed to me to turn round, and I heard them say: Is she not beautiful! How good she smells! What billowing hair! Beneath her mantle she hides a wing. Her charming bonnet is hardly unfolded. I wandered with thee, pressing thy supple arm. The passers-by thought that love bewitched had wedded, in our happy couple, the gentle month of April ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo |
