"Bird's-eye" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to call Samuel Weller; for Samuel Weller stepped briskly into the box the instant his name was pronounced; and placing his hat on the floor, and his arms on the rail, took a bird's-eye view of the Bar, and a comprehensive survey of the Bench, with a remarkably cheerful and lively aspect. 'What's your ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... of such intense peacefulness that earth and life were forgotten. A milky whiteness spread more and more over the whole heavens though they were still darkened here and there by wreaths of smoke. Little by little, bright clusters of houses became plainly visible; a bird's-eye view was obtained of the whole city, intersected by streets and squares, which with their shadowy depths described the framework ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... once carried over gay parties of ladies and gentlemen, as tourists, to Liverpool or London, now carries a crew of harpooners round Cape Horn into the Pacific. And the mahogany and bird's-eye maple cabin, which once held rosewood card-tables and brilliant coffee-urns, and in which many a bottle of champagne, and many a bright eye sparkled, now accommodates a bluff Quaker captain from Martha's Vineyard; who, perhaps, while lying with his ship in the Bay of Islands, in ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... past. At length we got under way, and, as a walk over the open plain offered a pleasing variety to a man who had been feeling his way so long through the dim old woods, I determined to descend from the ridge of Beauport, and proceed over the snow-covered surface of the bay, in a bird's-eye line, to our point of destination. Winding down the almost perpendicular declivity, sometimes sliding down on our snow-shoes, with the tobaugan running before us, "on its own hook," at a fearful pace, and sometimes obliged to descend, hand under hand, by the tangled roots ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... all he walked over the country at large, to find where the best timber lay. This was a matter of tramping; though often on an elevation he succeeded in climbing a tall tree whence he caught bird's-eye views of the country at large. He always carried his gun with him, and was prepared at a moment's notice to seem engaged in hunting,—either for game or for spots in which later to set his traps. The ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... an exhilarating flight. For the first time the boys got a bird's-eye view of Fort McMurray and were surprised to find that the main settlement drifted down to the river in a long-drawn-out group of cabins. Few people were in sight, however, and all the world spread out beneath them as if frozen into silence. The big river continued its ...
— On the Edge of the Arctic - An Aeroplane in Snowland • Harry Lincoln Sayler
... Honore, though well equipped with hope, enthusiasm, and belief in himself, had hitherto failed to justify a trust in his business capacities. In fact, if his parents had been endowed with prophetic eyesight, and had been enabled to take a bird's-eye view of their celebrated son's future enterprises, which were always, according to his own account, destined to fail only by some unfortunate slip at the last, it seems doubtful whether they would have been wise to alter the ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... that landscape, Cousin Homer? Something foreign, evidently. I always think that a government office should be representative of the government. I have a print at home, a bird's-eye view of Washington in 1859, which I will send you if you like. I suppose you have an express frank? No? How mean of Congress! What did you say this ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... far as the eye could reach, the country had an appearance suggestive of a huge and dried-up lake. This idea was borne out by an odd blotchiness, for sometimes there would be half a mile or more of seeming moorland, then a sharply defined change (or it seemed sharply defined from that bird's-eye point of view). A vivid greenness marked these changes, which merged into a dun-colored smudge and again into the brilliant green; then the moor would begin ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... the busy crowd, The vain, the wealthy, and the proud, Their meaner flights pursue, Let us cast off the foolish ties That bind us to the earth, and rise And take a bird's-eye view!— ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... in front, had apparently no limit but the power of human vision. Beyond the foreground, which was formed by a series of rocky glens diverging from below the point on which we stood, the immense vale of the Saone extended like a bird's-eye view of the ocean, its relative distances marked by towns and villages glittering like white sails. Above the flat line of haze, which, at the first glance, appears to terminate the prospect at the distance of sixty miles, or more, we distinguished a faint blue ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... fire again, for he feared that she would add, "The poor creatures have been out upon the plains all day: Heaven knows what we shall do when the berries are gone." But Mrs. Graffam said nothing more. She set out the pine table, and going to an old chest brought a white cloth; it was of bird's-eye diaper. Graffam remembered well who wove it; and a pleasant vision came along with that white table-cloth. He saw his mother, as in olden times, weaving; while he stood by her side, wondering at ...
— Be Courteous • Mrs. M. H. Maxwell
... the thoughts about God out of which we are to construct our theology. Concerning this right critical use of the Bible, I propose now to offer some practical suggestions. Next Sunday I purpose giving you a bird's-eye view of the general course of the historic revelation which led up to the Christ, the Word of God. After which I shall pass on to consider with you the pre-eminently right use of the Bible, in which our souls humbly ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... slipped by, and Clara duly confided her youth and her innocence and her roses to her English husband, a little ashamed of the wedding presents her friends sent her, even a little doubtful of her parents' handsome gift of a bird's-eye maple bedroom set and a ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... the top with open crenellations in brick, along the base of which ran apparently a frieze of painted rosettes. A reference to our Fig. 47 will explain all these arrangements better than words. It is a bird's-eye view in perspective of the south-western part of the palace. The vertical sections on the right of the engraving show how the stones were bonded to the crude brick. The crenellations are omitted here, but they may be seen in ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... you but a tithe of the whole argument, the veriest bird's-eye view; neither is it romance; it is simple truth; and, that being the case, how can we afford to keep Froebel and his wonderful influence on childhood out of a system of free education which has for its aim the development of a free, useful, liberty-loving, self-governing people? It is too great ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... If a bird's-eye view of the capital had enchanted Proserpine, the agreeable impression was not diminished, as is generally the case, by her entrance into the city. Never were so much splendour and neatness before combined. ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... luxuriantly up the walls, intensified this effect. The mantelpiece was crammed with brass ornaments, and there were two complete sets of brass fire-irons in the brass fender. Above the mantelpiece a looking-glass, in a wan frame of bird's-eye maple, with rounded corners, ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... Cathedral from St. John's Tower Frontispiece The Tower from the East 2 Bird's-eye view of Norman Work 15 The Cathedral from the South-West 17 The Cathedral from North-West corner of the Cloisters 19 The Tower from the Palace Yard 21 View of the Cathedral in 1727 23 South Porch since the Restoration ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Gloucester [2nd ed.] • H. J. L. J. Masse
... as an explorer by Governor Berkeley, ascended to the summit of the Blue Ridge, in Madison County, Va.; but although he was once more on the spot the following season, with a goodly company of horsemen and Indians, and had a bird's-eye view of the over-mountain country, he does not appear to have descended into the world of woodland which lay stretched between him and the setting sun. It seems to be well established that the very next year (1671), a party under Abraham Wood, one of Governor Berkeley's ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... brought together in November of 1642,[19] our Parliamentary eloquence has now, within four years, travelled through a period of two centuries. A most admirable subject for an essay, or a Magazine article, as it strikes me, would be a bird's-eye view—or rather a bird's-wing flight—pursuing rapidly the revolutions of that memorable oracle (for such it really was to the rest of civilised Europe), which, through so long a course of years, like the Delphic oracle ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... any one place where you can get a complete bird's-eye view of it," said Jeff, "and two-thirds of it would be hid in smoke, anyway. You've got to think of a place that would take in the whole population of New England, outside of Massachusetts, and not feel as if it had more than ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... nothing to be desired. At the dinner hour she strides into our apartment without bidding, and takes her allotted place. The bird's two feet six inches of legs serve her instead of a chair, and her swan-like neck enables her to take a bird's-eye view of the most distant dish. But she never ventures to help herself to anything till the meal is actually placed on the plate before her; nor does she bolt her food like a beast, but disposes of it gracefully, ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... considering the church again, "I really must go up to the top of the tower some clear day." Then he shook his head. "What for? A bird's-eye view of Paris would have been interesting in the Middle Ages, but now! I should see, as from a hill top, other heights, a network of grey streets, the whiter arteries of the boulevards, the green plaques of gardens and squares, and, away in ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... a stream of good water on the west side of the plateau we rose again higher, obtaining a splendid bird's-eye view of the picturesque depression we had just crossed. The effects of erosion following those of volcanic activity were evident enough upon the entire landscape. On the west side we had a horseshoe-shaped vertical wall—seemingly ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... connected with any country. It is assuredly impossible to form a clear or indeed any correct idea in regard to a nation unless we know something of the manners and customs, the daily life, the amusements, the vices of its people. Unless we can, as it were, take a bird's-eye view of the people at work and at play, at their daily avocations in their homes, see them as they come into the world, as they go through life's pilgrimage, and, finally, as they pay the debt of nature ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... city men or followers of trades which had no connection with farm life. They went straight into the thick timber-land, instead of going to the rich and waiting prairies, and they crowned this initial mistake by cutting down the splendid timber instead of letting it stand. Thus bird's-eye maple and other beautiful woods were used as fire-wood and in the construction of rude cabins, and the greatest asset of ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... very simple way does the value of our educated class define itself: we more than others should be able to divine the worthier and better leaders. The terms here are monstrously simplified, of course, but such a bird's-eye view lets us immediately take our bearings. In our democracy, where everything else is so shifting, we alumni and alumnae of the colleges are the only permanent presence that corresponds to the aristocracy ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... which united the people of two distinct nationalities and extends over so wide a region—so far beyond the Acadia and Canada which France once called her own. But that the story may be more intelligible from the beginning, it is necessary to give a bird's-eye view of the country, whose history is contemporaneous with that of the United States, and whose territorial area from Cape Breton to Vancouver—the sentinel islands of the Atlantic and Pacific approaches—is hardly inferior to ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... bridge head would permit our friends to obtain a bird's-eye view of the city, while I purchased a measure of fresh-caught, shiny-scaled river fish, only to be had of the old boatman after the arrival of the Paris train. Invariably there were packages to be called for at ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... in soft water, float your engraving on the surface—picture side uppermost—and let it remain about an hour. The screen, box or table on which you wish to transfer the design should be of bird's-eye maple or other light-colored hardwood, varnished with the best ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... from their background of green and gray. How rosy the cliffs of Otter and Seal Harbor glow in the sunlight! How magically the great white flower of foam expands and closes on the sapphire water as the long waves, one by one, pass over the top of the big rock between us and Islesford! This is a bird's-eye view: not a high-flying bird, circling away up in the sky, or perched upon some lofty crag, as Tennyson ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... in a very remarkable frame of superbly carved oak, part of the woodwork of the demolished church of St.-Gery. Of historical interest, too, is a large Van der Meulen, representing the defeat of Turenne before Valenciennes in 1656, by the Spanish army under Conde. From a bird's-eye view of Valenciennes in the background of this large canvas, we may see how much the city has lost by the gradual destruction of its finest ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... her well, when she was within a league of the cliffs, he came to the opinion that the ship was a vessel of about six hundred tons, and that she was both armed and strongly manned. So far as he could judge, by the bird's-eye view he got, he fancied she was even frigate-built, and had a regular gundeck. In that age such craft were very common, sloops of war having that construction quite as often as that of the more modern deep-waisted vessel. As for the brigs, ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... the camp had been pitched told him nothing, and it was only after he had climbed a high hill a mile and a half away from the river that he began to have any indication of his whereabouts. Then with the country lying before him in a bird's-eye view he was able to learn his position. There was more than one river in view, and a chain of small lakes lay between one of them and the river where he had been left by his captors. From the last of those lakes a long portage, ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... of the new country, and made free use of the abundant wild cherry for the furniture called for by the growing prosperity of the settlements, its close grain and warm color giving it the preference over other native woods, excepting always the curly and bird's-eye maple, which were novelties to the ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... aimlessly," he decided at length, "and I'll either have to gain a bird's-eye view of the country or get Mr. Balfour to make me a map. To think that I should have discovered him, and here of all places in the world. What a sensation it will make when I tell of it. Of course I shall do so, for I'll get out of this fix all right ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... diverse views to be obtained from mountain heights. To me, personally, such a view as that from the promontory of Sunium, or, above all, from the harbor of Nauplia, exceeds in beauty and interest any bird's-eye prospect. Any one who looks at the map of Greece will see how the Acro-Corinthus commands coasts, islands, and bays. The day was too hazy when we stood there to let us measure the real limits of the view, and I can not say how near to Mount Olympus the eye may reach in a suitable atmosphere. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... away there in the north month after month and year after year. The ice is split and piled up into mounds, which extend in every direction. If one could get a bird's-eye view of the ice-fields, they would seem to be cut up into squares or meshes by a network of these packed ridges, or pressure-dikes, as we called them, because they reminded us so much of snow-covered stone dikes at home, such as, in many parts of the country, are used ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... accessible, "is one of the great drawbacks to the use of balloons in warfare. Unless a man has natural aptitude, and is specially trained for the work, his observations from a balloon are of no use, a bird's-eye view of a country giving impressions so different from the actual position ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... pills with him in the chemist's shop at Wimblehurst before he began. I was, you might say, the stick of his rocket; and after our tremendous soar, after he had played with millions, a golden rain in the sky, after my bird's-eye view of the modern world, I fell again, a little scarred and blistered perhaps, two and twenty years older, with my youth gone, my manhood eaten in upon, but greatly edified, into this Thames-side yard, into these ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... But there was an element of the grotesque in a bird's-eye view of a lady making shots at her mouth with a spoon and trying to smile and look spirituelle ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... this weighty problem without saying a word. We shall try in this chapter to present Enlightenment before the reader in a roundabout way, just as the painter gives the fragmentary sketches of a beautiful city, being unable to give even a bird's-eye view of it. Enlightenment, first of all, implies an insight into the nature of Self. It is an emancipation of mind from illusion concerning Self. All kinds of sin take root deep in the misconception of Self, and putting forth the branches of lust, anger, and folly, throw dark shadows on ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... foreigner nearly always finds London foggy. Kent does not show along its main railway line the evidence of agricultural depression: it is like a garden. Yet, in a very careful and thorough French book just published by a French traveller, his bird's-eye view of the country as he went through Kent just after landing would make you think the place a desert; he seems to have thought the hedges a sign of agricultural decay. The same foreigner will discover a plebeian character in the Commons and an aristocratic ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... often interfuse itself with their grandest impulses; and their very deeds of self-sacrifice are sometimes only the rebound of a passionate egoism. So it was with Mr. Tryan: and any one looking at him with the bird's-eye glance of a critic might perhaps say that he made the mistake of identifying Christianity with a too narrow doctrinal system; that he saw God's work too exclusively in antagonism to the world, the flesh, and the devil; that ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... of the Balkan States, all of whom were in the Federation; another was in a swift torpedo-boat, with a roving commission to cruise round the harbour as desired; another took his place on the top of the great mountain which overlooks Plazac, and so had a bird's-eye view of the whole scene of operations; two others were on the forts to right and left of the Blue Mouth; another was posted at the entrance to the Great Tunnel which runs from the water level right up through the mountains to the plateau, where the mines and ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... Fourteenth Street without its story and its associations, its motley company of memories and spectres both good and bad, its imperishably adventurous savour of the past, imprisoned in the dry prose of registries and records. Let us just take a glance, a bird's-eye view as it were, of that region which we now know as Washington Square, as it was when the city of New York bought it for a ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... noblest of those surpassingly beautiful and yacht-like ships that now ply between the two hemispheres in such numbers, and which in luxury and the fitting conveniences seem to vie with each other for the mastery. The cabins were lined with satin-wood and bird's-eye maple; small marble columns separated the glittering panels of polished wood, and rich carpets covered the floors. The main cabin had the great table, as a fixture, in the centre, but that of Eve, somewhat shorter, but of equal width, was free ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... scarlet or crimson, color, each tree commonly retaining from year to year the same color or colors, and differing somewhat from every other. The most beautiful and valuable maple-wood is taken from this tree. It is known as 'curled maple' and 'bird's-eye maple,' and the common variety looks like satin-wood. In the curled maple the fibres are in waves instead of in straight lines, and the surface seems to change with alternate light and shade; in the bird's-eye, irregular ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... all, poetry. The followers of Chaucer, and the precursors of Shakespeare, are alike real persons to him—old Langland reminding him of Carlyle's "Gospel of Labour." The product of a large store of reading has been here secreted anew for the reader who desires to see, in bird's-eye view, the light and shade of a long and varied period of poetic literature, by way of preparation for Shakespeare, [9] (with a full essay upon whom the volume closes,) explaining Shakespeare, so far as he can be ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... captures him very soon after breakfast by means of a clever little piece of diplomacy. John is really amused at the manner in which she manages this affair, and allows himself to be carried off to enjoy a bird's-eye view of the harbor which she has discovered at the end of the piazza, and which he must pass an ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... grown to be a rule that the foreground should be placed sharply in profile and often so deep in shadow that it contrasted like a silhouette with the more distant grounds. On the other hand, it is a favorite whim of the genuine pigtail age to draw bird's-eye landscapes and views of cities, in which every elevation of the earth seems flattened out as much as possible, every distinct division of the separate grounds as ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... From a bird's-eye view, these three burgs, the City, the Town, and the University, each presented to the eye an inextricable skein of eccentrically tangled streets. Nevertheless, at first sight, one recognized the fact that these three fragments formed but one body. One immediately perceived ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... difficult to obtain a comprehensive and accurate view of the blood in disease. It is for this reason that we welcome the present work in its English garb. Professor Ehrlich by his careful and extended observations on the blood has qualified himself to give a bird's-eye view of the subject, such as few if any are capable of offering; and his book now so well translated by Mr. Myers must remain one of the classical works on blood in disease and on blood diseases, and in introducing it to English readers Mr. Myers makes an important contribution to the accurate ...
— Histology of the Blood - Normal and Pathological • Paul Ehrlich
... from some look-out point near to the close of the seventeenth century, when John Evelyn, in his age, is repairing the damages that Peter the Great has wrought in his pretty Deptford home, let us take a bird's-eye glance at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... fellows, that we have yet to try," said Frank, addressing his friends. "We've been in the tanks, up in aeroplanes, and about every other place you can think of except a 'sausage' balloon. It would suit me fine to go up in one and get a bird's-eye view of 'the Rhine, the Rhine, the ...
— Army Boys on German Soil • Homer Randall
... a splendid point of vantage for a bird's-eye view of the town we may as well take a glance ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... blue eyes of the girl to the little blue bird's-eye growing on a bank of clover. She pauses while he stoops to gather ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... the day, particularly those contributing to the lustre of the 'London Magazine.' Clare was invariably present at these entertainments, though he managed to hide his person as much as possible, being occupied in watching the lions at the table, like the fair women in the street, from a convenient bird's-eye view. The view, altogether, was highly attractive, for the lions were numerous, and of a more or less superior kind. Among the first who visited Mr. Taylor's evening parties was Thomas De Quincey. Clare had read with ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... My Native Town, by Gabriele D'Annunzio; translated by G. Mantellini, with an Introduction by Joseph Hergesheimer (Doubleday, Page & Company). This anthology drawn from various volumes of Signor D'Annunzio's stories gives the American a fair bird's-eye view of the various aspects of his work. These twelve portraits by the Turner of corruption have a severe logic of their own which may pass for being classical. As diploma pieces they are incomparable, but as renderings of life they carry no sense of conviction. Mr. Hergesheimer's introduction ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... however, under the necessity of submitting to any conditions they can get, and the sovereignty of the world is left to the birds. However much all this resembles a mere farcical fairy tale, it may be said, however, to have a philosophical signification, in thus taking a sort of bird's-eye view of all things, seeing that most of our ideas are only true in a ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... been moving along a level road, but now a second turn took them up a gentle slope, from the top of which a bird's-eye view of a small stretch of country could be obtained. Behind them, to the right and the left, many companies of soldiers, afoot and on horseback, could be ...
— An Undivided Union • Oliver Optic
... a fine sight—certainly a very fine sight; such as an old seaman loves; but there must be an end to it," he said. "You will excuse me, Sir Wycherly, but the movements of a fleet always have interest in my eyes, and it is seldom that I get such a bird's-eye view of those of my own; no wonder it has made me a ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... a bird's-eye view now and hurry on, but we must certainly come back some other summer," said Mr. Sherman, when Lloyd wanted to linger in the Tower of London among the armour and weapons that had been worn by the old knights, centuries ago. He repeated it when Betty looked back longingly ...
— The Little Colonel's Hero • Annie Fellows Johnston
... devastating earthquakes,—all alike frightful defects, not in the original plan,—is not only unlike the primeval world, not very good, or, unlike the antediluvian world, tolerably good, but not good at all. "On taking a bird's-eye view of the geographical and hydrographical features or superficies of the globe," says this bold writer, "any unprejudiced person must at once admit, that in either of these departments there is scarce a ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... from such a height, I had a bird's-eye view of double patios thick with clustering shrubs, orange trees, and cypresses. The powerful glasses brought out clearly the delicate marble pillars supporting the Moorish archways of the upper gallery in one of these patios; but the other ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... again to-morrow night," said Eileen, enjoying her own comedy powers. "My poor father tried to teach me the difference between bird's-eye and shag, but I ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... about, avoiding each other as if detected in conspiracy. Miss Naylor, who for an inscrutable reason had put on her best frock, a purple, relieved at the chest with bird's-eye blue, conveyed an impression of trying to count a chicken which ran about too fast. When Greta asked what she had lost she ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... common image of God. And poetry which holds by this creed will hardly be subservient to societies and governments and legalised doctrines and conventions; it will hold to them by a long and loose chain, if at all. It flies high enough, at any rate, to take a bird's-eye view of all manner of things which in the temple, the palace, or the market-place, have come to be taken as axiomatic. It eyes them with an extraordinary 'dissoluteness'—if you will give that word its literal meaning. It sees that some accepted virtues ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... best war-eagle that could be made, and began to take lessons in military maps, bird's-eye views, and explosives. He was almost happy. He would improve on the poet's dream-ideal, "Were I a little bird, I'd fly ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... to the after-companion, where, repeating his caution, he stepped in front of the children and led the way down a narrow twisting staircase. At the foot of it he pushed open a door, and they gazed into a neat apartment, panelled with mirrors and bird's-eye maple. A swing-lamp shone down upon a white-covered table; and upon the table were bread and cheese and biscuits, with a jug of water and glasses. Alongside the table ran two bunks, ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... heights, eat a good dinner, take a nap, and live like the rest of us till the next Sabbath, when (if it is a fine day) you climb some other theological peak, far beyond the limits of perpetual snow, and there take another bird's-eye view of something that might be found very different if ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... listening to the alluring words, and bewildered by the rapid bird's-eye view of Paris which they brought before him, it seemed as if hitherto he had been using only half his brain and suddenly had found the other half, so swiftly his ideas widened. He saw himself stagnating in Angouleme ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... present, until, when I get within hail of the Psalmist's stint, I shall be most interested in childish things." These words rather staggered me, and set me thinking of geometrical loci. A man holding such views would find it difficult to obtain a bird's-eye view of history. ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... fourchette, that I have had the precaution to order, is probably waiting our appearance. It must be eaten, though under the penalty of being thought moon-struck rhymers by the whole State. Come, Ned; if you are sufficiently satisfied with looking at the Wigwam in a bird's-eye view, we will descend and put its beauties to the severer test of ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... they knew it well, yet the fascination of it never failed. On the walls were hung large framed historical and scriptural scenes, worked in cross-stitch with wool's of the brightest hues, varied by a coloured print of a bird's-eye view of the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, an almanac for the current year, and a large oleograph of a young lady und a dog wreathed in roses that put every flower in the garden to shame for size and brilliancy. But none of these could give a tithe of the pleasure the worked ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... Washington. The great city of a great nation. I have seen the Capitol in all its splendid magnificence, its pictures, its marbled floor, its fruit tables, and its underground eating-rooms. I have seen the White House, and have had a bird's-eye view of the President of these ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... curtains, the white-and-gold chairs and tables and bed, the easels, the gilded frames! Seven or eight years later she had changed all this for a heavy brass bedstead, and dark rugs on a polished floor, and bird's-eye maple chests and chairs, and all feminine Santa Paloma talked of the Whites' new things. Six or seven years after that again, two mahogany beds replaced the brass one, and heavy mahogany bureaus with glass knobs had their ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... bare in the morning. Now, it was stocked with neat cane-bottomed chairs, of bird's-eye maple. In the middle of the floor rested an ambitious little mahogany table with claw feet. A stack of green window-blinds stood against the pier between the windows, and at the bottom on the floor lay a ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... may, one thing is certain, that no solid plot of earth between its walls or hedges allows us such intricate and unexpected bird's-eye views of streets and squares, of the bustling or resting city; none gives us such a vault of heaven, pure and sunny, or creeping with clouds, or serenely starlit, as do these ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... Bird's-eye View of the town can be best obtained from the dome of the Council House, to which access may be obtained on application to the Curator. Some good views may be also obtained from some parts of Moseley Road, Cannon Hill ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... children's heads with dates without study. I give each king's reign one foot of space to the year and drive one stake in the ground to mark the beginning of each reign, and I make the children call the stake by the king's name. You can stand in the door and take a bird's-eye view of English monarchy, from the Conqueror to Edward IV.; then you can turn and follow the road up the hill to the study and beyond with an opera-glass, and bird's-eye view the rest of it ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... other side the ground to seaward swept down and then up again to the famous or infamous wood; the square of strange trees lay silently tilted on the slope, also suggesting, if not a map, or least a bird's-eye view. Only the triple centerpiece of the peacock trees rose clear of the sky line; and these stood up in tranquil sunlight as things almost classical, a triangular temple of the winds. They seemed pagan in a newer and more placid sense; and he felt a newer and more boyish curiosity and ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... gewgaw cabin in which I received them. There is no such finery on land as in the cabin of one of these ships in the Liverpool trade, finished off with a complete panelling of rosewood, mahogany, and bird's-eye maple, polished and varnished, and gilded along the cornices and the edges of the panels. It is all a piece of elaborate cabinet-work; and one does not altogether see why it should be given to the gales, and the salt-sea atmosphere, to be tossed upon the waves, and occupied ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... lose his head, and then at the end of four minutes' deliberation he had to move, he blundered desperately. He opened fire on Blue's exposed centre and killed eight men. (Their bodies litter the ground in figure 7, which gives a complete bird's-eye view of the battle.) He then sent forward and isolated six or seven men in a wild attempt to recapture his lost gun, massed his other men behind the inadequate cover of his central gun, and sent the detachment of infantry that had hitherto lurked uselessly behind the church, in a frantic ...
— Little Wars; a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books • H. G. Wells
... easily surmised that none of the high-born senoritas who demurred at appearing at the promenade when it was empty, were likely to be the first to arrive at the salon of the Casino. But as there was no side walk here, from whence they could take a bird's-eye view, and they could not keep a watch from the windows at night, these clever young ladies, as high-born as they were ingenious, hit upon a means of saving ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... sir!" answered the kindly old man. "When once you have a bird's-eye view of the ground and of the positions of the armies, even a tolerably complicated battle can be made quite comprehensible.—This sand, now, that we have before us here, could very well be made to give us an idea, in miniature, of, for example, the ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... had liked what he used to call 'a stripe of white satin,' which was the poetic for a glass of Old Tom gin. I carried a bottle of that liquor with me as a peace-offering, and a quarter of a pound of bird's-eye. He did not know me, and there was no speculation in his look; but after a drink he brightened. When I entered the room he sat in he was twirling an empty clay with a weary listless thumb and finger, and the ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... in our delightful journey, we must pause a moment, and turning square round, with our faces towards the long-ago years of the past, take a bird's-eye view of the early history of our country, that we may know exactly where we are when we come to find ourselves in the outskirts of that long and bloody struggle between the two great nations of England and France, commonly ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... importance, which is quite the same. In either case our own life is dwelt upon first. Then there is the immediate family, after that our own especial friends,—all assuming a gigantic size which puts quite out of the question an occasional bird's-eye view of the world in general. Even objects which might be in the middle distance of a less extended view are quite screened by the exaggerated size of those which seem to concern us ...
— As a Matter of Course • Annie Payson Call
... there in the hollows. Two or three miles below them nestled one of the most famous pleasure resorts of the entire region. Three or four times as distant lay the nearest town of any importance. Over the plain and through the clear atmosphere it looked like a bird's-eye-view map rather than an actual town. Far away to the left, gorgeous in coloring and grotesque in outline, could be seen the odd figures of many ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... Manhattan Island. In the screen, he had an aerial view of the grassy, rocky mounds where the earth hid the shattered and partially melted ruins of long-collapsed buildings. In the center of the screen was a bird's-eye view of a man holding a rifle. He was walking slowly, picking his way carefully along the bottom of the shallow gully that had once been ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... But connect any spot of earth with heaven, by any tie, and it must have a certain sort of grandeur. You have been working in brick and mortar to-day, Mignonette, to-morrow I must give you a bird's-eye view." ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... tribes and kings on either side—the Jutes and Anglo-Saxons, the Danes and Normans, on one side, and the Celts of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, on the other; nor yet the different dates and places; but simply take a single bird's-eye view of all the Seven Seas as one sea, of all the British Norsemen as one Anglo-Norman folk, and of all the centuries from the fifth to the twentieth as a single age; and then you can quite easily understand how the empire of the sea has been won and held by the same strong "Hardy-Norseman" ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... their sense of shyness after a time, and at length produced the inevitable siri and penang. At the close of the interview we begged their acceptance of a piece of Bristol bird's-eye each, which they at once put in their mouths and commenced chewing, and we then parted with mutual expressions ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... do all I could to make their new home so attractive to my two handmaidens that they would not wish to leave it directly. In one of Wilkie Collins' books an upholsterer is represented as saying that if you want to domesticate a woman, you should surround her with bird's-eye maple and chintz. That must have been exactly my idea, for the two rooms which I prepared for my maidservants were small, indeed, yet exquisitely pretty. Of course I should not have been so foolish as to buy any of the unnecessary ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... juncture I mounted on an up-ended barrel to investigate a promising lair above my head, and from this altitude was unexpectedly presented with a bird's-eye view of a hat with a silver band inside the railed and curtained "snug". I descended swiftly, not without an impression of black bottles on the snug table, and Katty Ann here slid in from the search ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... descending to the harbor,—by flights of old mossy stone steps,—that looking down them to the azure water you have the sensation of gazing from a cliff. From certain openings in the main street—the Rue Victor Hugo—you can get something like a bird's-eye view of the harbor with its shipping. The roofs of the street below are under your feet, and other streets are rising behind you to meet the mountain roads. They climb at a very steep angle, occasionally breaking into stairs of lava rock, ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... in bank-bills in his pocket; but with the self-possession and rapid bird's-eye view of a man accustomed to catch at all resources, he still hoped to recover himself by some one of the endless caprices of play. Montefiore had already mentioned his intention of visiting Bordeaux. Had he paid his debt on the spot, Diard would ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... up, and the two soldiers nodded. The position lay before them like a bird's-eye view; and Concepcion, in whom Spain had perhaps lost a guerilla general, had only set eyes on the spot once as he rode ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... they who are small-eyed. Now, as heretofore, weaklings cannot rise high enough to take a bird's-eye view of their own ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... people sometimes wake out of a heavy sleep. As she opened her eyes they rested on the picture that hung above the bed. It was a large engraving with a dazzling white margin enclosed in a wide frame of bird's-eye maple with an inner scroll of gold. The engraving represented a young man in a boat on a lake over-hung with trees. He was leaning over to gather water-lilies for the girl in a light dress who lay among the cushions ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... We have given a bird's-eye view of the main incidents of his boyhood, for we cannot quite agree with our author in thinking that his "old grammar laid the foundation, in part, of Abraham's future character," seeing we have previously been told that he had "become ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... help to balance the ration and to avoid an excess of protein and also to avoid a deficiency of either fat or carbohydrate, if we take a bird's-eye view of the various common foods in respect to the protein, fat and carbohydrate they contain. For this purpose the following table has ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... ground, while mine are some five feet ten. Three feet do not count for much when we are considering astronomical distances, but they make a great difference in the way things seem. There is a difference in the horizon line, and the realm of mystery begins much nearer. There is no disenchanting bird's-eye view of the counter with all things thereon. There are alluring ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... exhibit showed what that institution had been and what it is doing. Bird's-eye views of the university at different periods of its existence and a fine model of its present buildings and grounds were shown. The various departments made exhibits of ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... one end. It is the only thing approaching a theatre which the commune boasts. It is well lighted, with big windows in the sides, and a top-light over the stage. It is almost new, and the walls and pointed ceiling are veneered with some Canadian wood, which looks like bird's-eye maple, but isn't. ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... lost by this delusive retracing of footmarks. He thought that if he climbed the highest tree he could find, he would be able to get a bird's-eye view of the country round. Oh that he might behold some islet of clearing ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... of England as presenting a bird's-eye view of our history; and particularly of the various claims and privileges—and changes—of the monarchical branch of the Constitution. Some of these ceremonies, as we have seen, had their origin in those remote periods in which every believer in ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip |
