"Crevice" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... work was suspended on account of the weather. But one day, after the pipe had been driven to a considerable depth and the rock below had been drilled for six inches, the drill suddenly fell into a crevice, and upon investigation the hole was found to be nearly ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... all its robes of darkness, Rattled like a shore with pebbles, Answered wailing, answered weeping, "Take my balm, O Hiawatha!" And he took the tears of balsam, Took the resin of the Fir Tree, Smeared therewith each seam and fissure, Made each crevice safe from water. "Give me of your quills, O Hedgehog! I will make a necklace of them, Make a girdle for my beauty, And two stars to deck her bosom!" From a hollow tree the Hedgehog, With his sleepy ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... the little men, "we can show you that!" And they led him out of the hall. In the passage outside was a great cleft or crevice in the rocks such as we call in England a chine. Above it the moon shone full and bright. A waterfall rushed down on one side; he saw ferns and dear little plants leaning over the water, growing between the cracks of the rocks. There were also glow-worms cunningly arranged in groups that looked like ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... the shallow grave; a lump of frosty earth slipped from the rugged heap above and settled into a crevice of the cloak ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... which the light came seemed, as we descended, every moment to become less and less, and the darkness at every step to increase, till at length only a few rays appeared, as if darting through a crevice, and just tinging the small clouds of smoke which, at dusk, raised themselves to the ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... plagues so dire Or in such numbers swarming ne'er she shew'd, Not with all Ethiopia, and whate'er Above the Erythraean sea is spawn'd. Amid this dread exuberance of woe Ran naked spirits wing'd with horrid fear, Nor hope had they of crevice where to hide, Or heliotrope to charm them out of view. With serpents were their hands behind them bound, Which through their reins infix'd the tail and head Twisted in folds before. And lo! on one Near to our side, darted ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... hopeless, and relief unattainable. Mrs. Maclanachan maintained a post, purely by her resolution. Mrs. Dalrymple Brigge, a half-caste woman, was rewarded with twenty acres of land, for her heroism. She drew inside her house her wounded child, barricaded her door, and fired through a crevice. The blacks attempted, first to pull down her cottage, and then to destroy it by fire. The conflict lasted more than an hour, when relief came. Another: Mrs. Connel defended her house with the musket; a little child, of four years, ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... wrapped in gloom, but a streak of light fell towards her in a line across the floor from the inner or workshop door, which was not quite closed. This light was unexpected, none having been visible through hole or crevice. Glancing in, the woman found that he had placed cloths and mats at the various apertures, and hung a sack at the window to prevent the egress of a single ray. She could also perceive from where she stood that the bar of light fell across the ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... and melancholy, how much so I am unable to express. It was just the same as living in a dungeon. There was no crevice for the daylight to shine through, and had there been we must have closed it to keep the cold out. Nothing could be imagined more gloomy to the spirits than the perpetual night of the schooner's interior. The furnace, it is true, would, ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... and narrow, with rushing, foaming stream, seemed like a crevice sliced down by a gigantic blade. Towns and villages far away amid green fields and gray olive orchards, and buildings of white and cream, luminous in the sunlight, with backgrounds of dark and rugged mountains, produced a succession ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... helpless kid that Paralus confided to my care. When we dressed the little creature in wreaths, we mourned that flowers would not grow in garlands; for it grieved our childish hearts to see them wither. Once we found, in the crevice of a moss-covered rock, a small nest with three eggs. Paralus took one of them in his hand; and when we had admired its beauty, he kissed it reverently, and returned it to its hiding-place. It was the natural ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... down the ravines, no birds were to be seen. On the other hand, there were numerous herds of kyang, which in the early mornings came to drink of the water by which the camps were pitched. By looking through a crevice of my tent I saw them distinctly, without alarming them. In one herd I ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
... tangled underbrush, I lost my way, and after wandering about for some time in the hope of finding the path, I came to a small spring that was bubbling up from a crevice in the rock. ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... tried to keep them down, but it would not be; I kept filling up, till, for a few moments, I shook with sobs. For a long time I knelt there, holding her hand; and surely it is the darkest hour I ever lived. Afterwards I stood by the open window and looked through the crevice of the curtain. The shouts, laughter, and cries of the two children had come up into the chamber from the open air, making a strange contrast with the death-bed scene. And now, through the crevice of the curtain, I saw ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... to the shaft. All the diggers within hearing were soon on the spot. They saw at a glance what had happened. It was madness to sink without timber in such treacherous ground. The sides of the shaft were closing in. Tom sprang forward and shouted through the crevice: ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... the library was still open; but a curtain had been drawn before it, on one side of which there remained a crevice. Through this crevice Victor Carrington could watch the interior of the chamber with very little ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... ventilation in the sick-room, except there be a fire-place beside the register of the furnace. With the stove or fire-place it is different: The stove continually draws off the lower strata, i. e. the worst part, of the air to feed the fire, whilst pure air will rush in through every crevice of the doors and windows to supply every cubic-inch of air absorbed by the stove. Thus the air in the room is constantly renewed, the bad air being carried off and good air being introduced. However, the openings through which the pure ...
— Hydriatic treatment of Scarlet Fever in its Different Forms • Charles Munde
... patrol officers, came to dine with us. The wind blew so hard all day that the cook and khansaman (butler) were long in despair of being able to give us any dinner at all. At last we managed to get a tent, closed at every crevice to keep out the dust, for a cook-room; and they were thus able to preserve their master's credit, which, no doubt, according to their notions, depended altogether on the quality of ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... animal gets caught by the foot in a crevice and sustains severe bruising, wrenching, or fracture of some part of the foot. In such cases cold-water packs to the injured member are of service until the fever and swelling disappear. Afterwards the animal should rest until the usefulness of the foot is restored. Sometimes ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... Traitor's Trap before him. This he managed by forsaking the roads, keeping a straighter line for the outlaws' cave, and passing on foot over the shoulder of a hill where a horseman could not go. Thus he came down on the cavern, about half-an-hour before Jake's arrival. Clambering to the crevice in the cliff against which the cave abutted, and sliding down into a hollow on its earthen roof, he cautiously removed a small stone from its position, and disclosed a hole through which he could both hear and see most of what took ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... from Farmer B's corn-field, and the game so suggest itself? Or was the game first suggested, and the talisman brought afterwards? Every crow has a secret storehouse, where he hides every bright thing he finds. Sometimes it is a crevice in the rocks under moss and ferns; sometimes the splintered end of a broken branch; sometimes a deserted owl's nest in a hollow tree; often a crotch in a big pine, covered carefully by brown needles; but wherever it is, it is full of bright ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... over him with a generous ladle in his opening speech, and each speaker bathes him with it anew from the lordly dish. The several speakers try to surpass one another in the application, searching out some corner or crevice of his personality which has escaped the previous orators, and filling it up to overflowing. The listeners exult with them in their discoveries, and roar at each triumph of the sort: it is apparently a proof of ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... Shiny-pate," said the old warrior, as he settled in a little crevice and stretched out his tired limbs, while he rolled up a tiny, tiny blade of grass for a would-be cigar, "I ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... But yet more unforgettable was the smell of the burning kelp had been more than enough—that acrid, all-permeating, unforgettable odour. His mother had never been able to endure it. When the wind drove the smoke from the beach, she would shut every door and window, and build up every crevice with a barricade of sandbags; all in vain. It crept into the house, choking the besieged, causing their eyes to smart and their heads to ache, and scenting clothes, linen, furniture. Even the food ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... else was astir he arose and stole softly downstairs. The sunlight was stealing in at every crevice, and flashing in long streaks across the darkened rooms. The dining-room into which he looked struck chill and cheerless in the dark yellow light which came through the lowered blinds. He remembered that it had the same appearance when his father lay dead in the house; now, as then, everything seemed ...
— Lady of the Barge and Others, Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... quietly the dispositions were made, for these were old soldiers whose daily trade was war. In little groups the archers formed in front of each slit or crevice in the walls, whilst others scanned the battlements with wary eyes, and sped an arrow at every face which gleamed for an instant above them. The garrison shot forth a shower of crossbow bolts and an occasional stone from their engine, ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a poor old negro who saved the Columbia express from destruction at the time of the Charleston earthquake, and vanished from human ken after his brave deed was accomplished, swallowed up, probably, in some yawning crevice of the envious earth. The story is written with that simplicity which is the perfection of art, and its subtle pathos is given full and eloquent expression. But noble as the book is, viewed as a literary performance, ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... chief good is for well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find, without question. Nature hates peeping, and our mothers speak her very sense when they say, "Children, eat your victuals, and say no more of it." To fill the hour,—that is happiness; to fill the hour and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval. We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them. Under the oldest mouldiest conventions a man of native force prospers just as well as in the newest world, ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... had poured upon the glacier gave it a calcined appearance, but the bluish-green, glassy ice still shone through it. They were obliged to go around the little ponds which were dammed up by blocks of ice; during these wanderings they came too near a large stone, which lay tottering on the brink of a crevice in the ice. The stone lost its equilibrium, it fell, rolled and the echo resounded from the deep hollow ...
— The Ice-Maiden: and Other Tales. • Hans Christian Andersen
... paced evenly over the rock of the mesa or the treacherous sand hills, and the great walled reservoir of shining green water was a constant source of delight to him. Eight times the height of a man was the depth of it, and at the very bottom in an unseen crevice was the living spring pulsing out its heart for the long line of women who brought their decorated ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... or by the incidental assumption of a fact that could not sanely be disputed, as, 'for when a fellow comes to be a man of twenty-one.' I gave a party on the occasion. She was there. It is unnecessary to name Her, more particularly; She was older than I, and had pervaded every chink and crevice of my mind for three or four years. I had held volumes of Imaginary Conversations with her mother on the subject of our union, and I had written letters more in number than Horace Walpole's, to that discreet woman, soliciting her daughter's hand in marriage. I had never had the ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... it, he was able to obtain a view of a portion of the room below. He could see a part of a long table, and looked down upon the heads of five men sitting on one side of it. He now applied his ear to the crevice. A man was speaking, and in the intervals between the gusts of wind which shook the house to its foundation, he could hear ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... who is unable to keep it to himself; who pours it out like a gushing fountain, who offers it to everybody, daily and in every form, in broad streams and in small drops, without exhaustion or weariness, through every crevice and by every channel, in prose, in verse, in imposing and in trifling poems, in the drama, in history, in novels, in pamphlets, in pleadings, in treatises, in essays, in dictionaries, in correspondence, openly and in secret, in order ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... hope drained his faith. He sat staring at the yellow, singing gaslight. Soon he walked to the bed and began to tear the sheets into strips. With the blade of his knife he drove them tightly into every crevice around windows and door. When all was snug and taut he turned out the light, turned the gas full on again and laid himself ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... attention to Prophet Elias, who had been crawling like a torpid caterpillar. For some moments he had been rigidly motionless in one spot. He was leaning against the front of the vault, his ear closely pressed to the crevice at the base of ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... valley, and the strip of mountainside along which the two lonely men plodded rose isolated from a sea of woolly vapor. They held on, however, until, when the dusk commenced to creep up the white peak above them, Weston stopped with a little start. There was a curious huddled object in a crevice of the rocks not ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... overcome the intensity of subterranean heat. Needless to say, it was an extremely hazardous undertaking, despite the very careful surveys that had been made, for the little parties of workmen could never tell when they would strike a crack or an unexpected crevice that would let down upon them with a terrible rush, the waters of the Atlantic. But hazard is adventure, and as the two little groups of laborers dug toward each other, the eyes of the press followed them with more persistent interest ...
— The Undersea Tube • L. Taylor Hansen
... crossed the divide, and not a day too soon. The snow was so deep that the trail breaker in front was in danger of going over a precipice or into a rock crevice at any time. After him came the pack, animals, so that they could make a path for us. The path was just the width of the horse, and in some places the walls of it rose above my head. In such places I had to keep my feet high up in the saddle to prevent ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... hollow bamboo serve as receptacles for milk or water. If a precipice stops a path, the Dyaks will not hesitate to construct a bamboo path along the face of it, using branches of trees wherever convenient from which to hang the path, and every crevice or notch in the rocks to receive the ends of the bamboos ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... several dwellings—all showing signs of more or less prosperous life, with the exception of one, which affords the orthodox "haunted house" belonging to every well-regulated village. The ruined walls of this old mansion, with lichen cropping out from every crevice; the unhinged doors and broken windows; the ladder rotting as it leans against the moss-grown roof, the broken well-sweep and deserted barn, offer an aspect of desolation and decay which should prove sufficient bait to tempt ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... them ready in seemly fashion by night. Heracles would have been helpless before such a vexatious task; and poor Psyche, left alone in this desert of grain, had not courage to begin. But even as she sat there, a moving thread of black crawled across the floor from a crevice in the wall; and bending nearer, she saw that a great army of ants in columns had come to her aid. The zealous little creatures worked in swarms, with such industry over the work they like best, that, when Venus came at night, she found the ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... Mrs. Jett did an unprecedented thing. She crept into the crevice of her husband's arm from behind as he stood in his waistcoat, washing his hands in the carbolic solution at the bowl and washstand. He turned, surprised, unconsciously placing himself between ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... hill country of that region, a very striking mineral fissure has been opened by Mr. S.L. Wilson, which, in both its scientific and commercial aspects, is equally important and interesting. It is a broad crevice, widened at the point of excavation into something like a pocket and filled, between its inclosing walls of gneiss, with a granitic mass whose elements have crystallized separately, so that an almost complete mineralogical separation has been effected ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... Merritt was a seething community of boys in khaki. The big spiders lurked in their webs; the repulsive little slugs, made homeless by the lifting of a damp, rotten board, hurried frantically about on the floor; a single ray of sunlight penetrated through a crevice, a slanting, dusty line, and lit up a little area of the dim, musty place. But there was no sound, not even from the scouts, save only the voice of Westy Martin as he read that old, creased, damp, all but ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... a natural bridge is formed when bowlders, or a mass of rock, tumbling into a deep crevice is wedged and held in place. In still other instances a layer of hard or slowly weathering rock may rest upon a layer of rock which weathers rapidly. In such cases, if the rock layers form the face of a cliff, natural bridges, caverns, and overhangs are apt ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... sister, which is rather a droll illustration of the manners of a French Canadian lumberer. They were walking one fine summer evening along the west bank of the Moira, and the narrator, in stooping over the water to gather some wild-flowers that grew in a crevice of the rocks, dropped her parasol into the river. A cry of vexation at the loss of an article of dress, which is expensive, and almost indispensable beneath the rays of a Canadian summer sun, burst from her lips, and attracted the ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... while Lisle leaned upon the log to steady it. Then, calling Nasmyth to take his place, Lisle went up. When he was near the top, it looked as if their progress must abruptly cease. The butt was narrow and the summit of the rock above it projected somewhat. There was not the smallest knob or crevice one could grasp, and below them in the shadowy rift the torrent boiled furiously among massy stones. It was not a place ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... MAYO.—In this district we have again a complete change of geology and of scenery. The grey limestones with rich grass and rare flowers filling every crevice are gone, and we are in a wild region of ancient metamorphic rocks—schists, quartzites, gneisses, and granites—which form wide moorlands, dotted with innumerable lakelets, with noble mountain groups rising over the wild boggy lowlands. To the student of metamorphism ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... plugged the knot holes and calked the cracks; 20 And a bucket of water, which one would think He had brought up into the loft to drink When he chanced to be dry, Stood always nigh, For Darius was sly! 25 And whenever at work he happened to spy At chink or crevice a blinking eye, He let a dipper ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... rattle in the throat of a dying man. But I could breathe more easily—even in the stupefaction of my fears—I was conscious of air. Yes!—the blessed air had rushed in somehow. Revived and encouraged as I recognized this fact, I felt with both hands till I found the crevice I had made, and then with frantic haste and strength I pulled and dragged at the wood, till suddenly the whole side of the coffin gave way, and I was able to force up the lid. I stretched out my arms—no weight of earth impeded their movements—I felt nothing but air—empty air. ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... fell head first down the almost vertical declivity. A ledge of the cliff, against which he first struck, threw him upon the loose rocks. He slowly glided downward, uttering lamentable cries; he clutched, for a moment, a little bush which had grown in a crevice of the rocks but he did not have strength enough to hold on to it, his arm having been broken in three places by his fall. He let go of it suddenly, and dropped farther and farther down uttering a last terrible shriek of despair; he rolled over twice again-and ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... the little car which he had named the Swallow, reached the quarters at the School of Fire in a rising cloud of dust. The wind had risen suddenly and the fine sand whipped around the long board buildings, driving in through every crack and crevice. All the rest of the afternoon it blew, and at six o'clock, when the Major came in, he was coated with the fine yellow dust. By nine o'clock, when Bill went to bed, a small gale was singing around, and about one o'clock he was awakened by the scream of the wind. It shrieked ...
— Battling the Clouds - or, For a Comrade's Honor • Captain Frank Cobb
... terror unspeakable, a thin blue wavering smoke-wreath, float upward from the floor, and, after curling feebly about the truncated mast, disappear in the clear sunlit atmosphere, again to arise from the same point, that of the juncture of the mast and deck, creeping through some invisible crevice, as it seemed to form itself eternally in filmy folds, and successively elude the eye as soon as it shaped to sight. I understood him then. There was fire in the heart of the ship, and I knew the hold was filled with ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... crevice where I can crowd in the fact that bits of family wash hung from the rail of the old pulpit in the Court of Oranges beside the cathedral, and a pumpkin vine lavishly decorated an arcade near a doorway which ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... door without haste. His Oriental mind worked quickly and smoothly. He would tramp back and forth the length of the shop as if musing, but neither nook nor crevice should escape his eye. He was heir to these pearls. Slue-Foot—for so Ling Foo named his visitor—would not dare molest him, since he, Ling Foo, could go to the authorities and state that murder had been done. Those tiger eyes in a boy's ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... the old fellow took a little willow creel from where it was wedged in a granite crevice, laid some sea-weed at the bottom, and then packed in ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... said, "for a rare little flower which grows on this mountainside. Perhaps you can help me find it. It is very tiny and it grows in the crevice of the rock. But I am needing a specimen ...
— Fireside Stories for Girls in Their Teens • Margaret White Eggleston
... happy for some months, took refuge in Holland; they were seized there, separated and shut up, the one in a convent and the other in the dungeon of Vincennes. Love, which, like fire in the veins of the earth, is always detected in some crevice of man's destiny, lighted up in a single and ardent blaze all Mirabeau's passions. In his vengeance it was outraged love that he appeased; in liberty, it was love which he sought and which delivered him; in study, it was love ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... me a spinner. This is the way the glories to possess, And to enjoy what no man can express. Sometimes I find the palace door uplock'd, And so my entrance thither has upblock'd. But am I daunted? No, I here and there Do feel and search; so if I anywhere, At any chink or crevice, find my way, I crowd, I press for passage, make no stay. And so through difficulty I attain The palace; yea, the throne where princes reign. I crowd sometimes, as if I'd burst in sunder; And art thou crushed with striving, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... crevice of a precipice, moist rocks sprayed with the dashing waters of a lake or some tumbling mountain stream, wind-swept upland meadows, and shady places by the roadside may hold bright bunches of these hardy bells, ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... the pack were close by. Out they leaped in twos and threes, reckless of the firelight. White teeth gleamed and snapped in every crevice of the timber. ...
— The Camp in the Snow - Besiedged by Danger • William Murray Graydon
... and coarser ferns grow in moist, shady situations, as swamps, ravines, and damp woods; while the smaller ones are more apt to be found along mountain ranges in some dry and even exposed locality. A tiny crevice in some high cliff is not infrequently chosen by these fascinating little plants, which protect themselves from drought by assuming a mantle of light wool, or of hair and chaff, with, perhaps, a covering of white powder as in some cloak ferns—thus ...
— The Fern Lover's Companion - A Guide for the Northeastern States and Canada • George Henry Tilton
... there in a sort of crevice, where the natural fall of the crumbling rocks had formed a shelter, that Courtland dropped upon his knees. Not as a spot he had been seeking for, but as a haven to which he had been led. He knelt, and all that Pat, standing, awed and uncovered, ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... guests, maintains the honour of the house and of its chief. A little is poured into a cup and handed to the house-chief, who first makes a libation to the omen-birds and to all the other friendly spiritual powers, by pouring a little on to the ground through some crevice of the floor, or by throwing a few drops out under the eaves, saying, as he does so, "Ho, all you friendly spirits." Then he drinks a little and hands back the cup to the young man who has taken charge of the jar of spirit. The latter, remaining crouched upon his heels, ladles out another ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... with family washing hanging to dry. On a third floor line was a baby's diaper, still implanted with filth. This crowded tenement was bursting at the seams, spilling out poverty and misery through every crevice. ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... was acting strangely. He lay quite flat on the floor, his nose pressed close to the crevice under the door of the little cloakroom, winding his tail slowly back and forth, excited, very eager. At times he would draw back and make a strange little clacking noise ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... a dark, low, sinister-looking place. Not a sign of life or movement was visible anywhere about it. Green stains streaked the once white facade of the chapel in all directions. Moss clustered thick in every crevice of the heavy scowling wall that surrounded the convent. Long lank weeds grew out of the fissures of roof and parapet, and, drooping far downward, waved wearily in and out of the barred dormitory windows. The very cross opposite the entrance-gate, with a shocking life-sized figure in wood ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... a devoted mother, and will die with her little ones rather than leave them. Some kinds of spiders carry their babies about with them, while others fasten their cradles to a crevice in the wall. Spiders are very useful to us in destroying the flies and troublesome insects that annoy us. Though spiders are often called cruel, they never torture their victims, but kill them at once by means of a poisonous fluid which is ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy
... had hidden his bill in a crevice in the floor of his room, but a mouse had nibbled it to bits to ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... he lay in the condemned hold, he complained often of the great interruptions those under sentence of death met with from some prisoners who were confined underneath, and who, through the crevice, endeavoured as usual, by talking to them lewdly and profanely, to disturb them even in their last moments. At the place of execution he wept bitterly, and seemed to be much affrighted at death and very sorry for his having committed those crimes which brought him thither. ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... without, by others, small and longer, bound to them by bands made of split reeds and wild vines. The whole was thickly plastered over with a kind of mortar, made of clay and straw trampled together, which filled up every chink and crevice of the wood-work, so that it appeared as if smoothed with a trowel. Throughout its whole circuit, the wall was pierced at the height of a man with loopholes, whence arrows might be discharged at an enemy, and at every fifty paces, it was surmounted ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... coral. Bermuda is a coral island, with a six-inch crust of soil on top of it, and every man has a quarry on his own premises. Everywhere you go you see square recesses cut into the hillsides, with perpendicular walls unmarred by crack or crevice, and perhaps you fancy that a house grew out of the ground there, and has been removed in a single piece from the mold. If you do, you err. But the material for a house has been quarried there. They cut right down through the coral, to any depth that is convenient—ten ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... sumptuous and sombre melancholy of Shakespeare's thought was transmitted in phrases that refused it its proper mystery. But there was always a hardness, not always from the translation, upon this feminine Hamlet. It was like a thick shell with no crevice in it through which the tenderness of Shakespeare's Hamlet could show, except for the one moment at Ophelia's grave, where he reproaches Laertes ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... above the common kinds, and such was in reality the case. This reef being remote, and being seldom visited by any of the boatmen, I was in hopes I should find some upon it, and I was determined to look narrowly for one. With this view I sauntered slowly along, examining every crevice among the rocks, and every water hole that lay ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... with. The rocky platform is about fifteen feet square, the cliff-face overhanging it above; and at its back part there is a sort of split in the rock about eight feet wide and nearly the same height. I passed in through this crevice, and at once found myself in a cave perhaps thirty feet wide and about fifty feet deep. And now comes the strangest part of the affair. It is nearly half full of bales and parcels, with several jars, apparently earthenware, their mouths tied over with what ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... gesture to keep them back, he stooped, and looked in through the crevice in the wall. Soon raising his head again, he struck twice or thrice upon the door—evidently with no other object than to make a noise there. With the same intention, he drew the key across it, three or four times, before ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... magpie comes furtively out of the house with a key in his mouth, and, seeing Sam, stops to consider if he is likely to betray him. On the whole he thinks not; so he hides the key in a crevice, and whistles ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... The sun was still far from setting; the air between the rocky walls was pleasant; and the canon held forth a fresh enticement. They walked for an hour, and though they failed to gain the end of the long mountain crevice they ascended to where the springs that fed the brook had their source, and where the rivulet trickled over ledges and among boulders, finding themselves in the heavy timber that forested the upper mountains. There they ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... agreed with Desiree; and though I could see no opening or crevice of any sort in the walls or ceiling, I was convinced that even then the eyes of ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... spoke, he entered the cave, where he perceived beautiful trees with thick foliage, quaint flowers in lustrous bloom, while a line of limpid stream emanated out of a deep recess among the flowers and trees, and oozed down through the crevice of the rock. Progressing several steps further in, they gradually faced the northern side, where a stretch of level ground extended far and wide, on each side of which soared lofty buildings, intruding themselves into the skies, whose carved rafters and engraved balustrades nestled entirely ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... cautiously uplifted, peering across the log. It was several minutes before I even ventured to creep up the sand-spit into the denser blackness of the over-hanging bank, but, once there safely, I discovered the drift had landed me at the mouth of a narrow gully, apparently a mere crevice in the rocky shore-line. It was the occasional downpour of water after rain which had caused the accumulation of debris on which my log had grounded. At times the dry gulch would hold a roaring torrent, although now it was no more than ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... low weeds to the edge of the bank. It was sheer, and the water about four feet below. He did not stand quite on the edge, but fell upon his knees a couple of yards away, wringing his hands, moaning and weeping, and staring through his watery eyes at a fine, long crevice just discernible under the matted grass, and curving outward on either ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... spear of light into the crevice, the boy glanced keenly about. The walls of the opening seemed to be smooth, and to extend only a short distance. Just below where the walls broke he could see the ...
— Boy Scouts in Northern Wilds • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... of the willow were rounded and adorned by the climbing milkania, Milkania scandens, which filled every crevice in the leafy bank, contrasting agreeably with the gray bark of its supporter and the balls of ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... variegated splendor. Trailing wreaths of scarlet flaunt from the summit downward; tufts of yellow-flowering shrubs and rose-bushes, with their reddened leaves and glossy seed-berries, sprout from each crevice; at every glance I detect some new light or shade of beauty, all contrasting with the stern gray rock. A rill of water trickles down the cliff and fills a little cistern near the base. I drain it at a draught, and find it fresh and pure. This recess shall be my dining-hall. And what the feast? ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was just on the point of being attended with the usual consequences, when, taking another peep through a crevice, constructed for putting into effect a more efficient system of examination, he beheld a phenomenon as unlooked for as it was incomprehensible. He rubbed his eyes, strongly persuaded that some rigorous discipline was necessary. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... awkward craft, and found a certain relief in the necessity for methodical work. The water trickled in again, to be sure, but less rapidly than he could empty it out. He plugged the largest crevice with his handkerchief, untied the rotting rope, and pushed out from under the shadows into the centre of the stream. Then he let the current have its way, using an oar now and then to keep the dugout from floating ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... weeds," Westy called. "Can't you get your fingers in a crack or a crevice or something and brace yourself back? We'll take off every stitch we have on and ...
— Roy Blakeley's Bee-line Hike • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... a cut or two, a tug and a stifled groan; another squeeze more violent by far than the former one, and the portly baron rolled panting through the jagged briar-covered little crevice, just as the light of the searchers illuminated the place from which he had only a moment before ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... which in June had been so delightfully secluded and retired, was undoubtedly invaded by quite a number of visitors. Children were paddling or scampering along the sands, wet heads were bobbing in and out of the water, every rocky crevice was in use as a dressing-room, picnic parties were taking tea on the rocks, and a circle of boys and girls were playing a noisy game at the brink of the waves. Very ruefully Mavis and Merle descended to swell the throng. It was not at ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... Through a crevice he saw the entrance of a stout, good-natured-looking young man, whistling a popular song. He was probably a clerk or young mechanic, who, after a hard day's work, had been to some cheap place of amusement. Wholly unconscious ...
— Frank and Fearless - or The Fortunes of Jasper Kent • Horatio Alger Jr.
... as if they were in the room with me, and directly before my eyes. I could see them passing through the floors, and the ceilings, and the walls of the house, from one apartment to another, in all directions, without a door, or a keyhole, or crevice being open to admit them. I could follow them with my eyes to any distance, or directly through or just beneath the surface, or up and down, in the midst of boards and timbers and bricks, or whatever else would stop the motion or intercept the visibleness of all other objects. These appearances ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... heavy snowstorm with a gale of wind. The snow here is not flaky, but fine and powdery, fills the air so you cannot see ahead, and sifts through every crevice. Thankful when the blast died down. Mrs Auld declares if the summer heat and the winter cauld were carded through ane anither Canada would have a grand climate. The two extremes ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... a gigantic crevice half way to the crest of Mount Baker may yet be seen the outlines of an enormous canoe, but I have ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... Hoodlum, Gamin, Rat of the Air! Notwithstanding these more or less deserved names, however, one cannot view a number of homeless Sparrows, presumably the last brood, seeking shelter in any corner or crevice from a winter's storm, without a feeling of deep compassion. The supports of a porch last winter made but a cold roosting place for three such wanderers within sight of our study window, and never did we behold them, 'mid a storm of sleet and rain, huddle down in their cold, ill-protected beds, ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [December, 1897], Vol 2. No 6. • Various
... did, else wherefore are men canonized who dip their hands in the blood of Saracens?—The Saxon porkers, whom I have slain, they were the foes of my country, and of my lineage, and of my liege lord.—Ho! ho! thou seest there is no crevice in my coat of plate—Art thou fled?—art ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... automatic pistol was in his pocket, questioned the dull sounds of the riverside for a moment, looking about him anxiously, and then, using the leaning post as a stepping-stone, he succeeded in wedging his foot into a crevice in the wall. By the exercise of some agility he scrambled up to the top, and presently found himself lying upon ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... horror nothing human could equal, an ideal stove for corpses that wanted to endure for ever. The limestone, on which for that matter no rain ever falls from the changeless sky, looks to be in one single piece from summit to base, and betrays no crack or crevice by which anything might penetrate into the sepulchres within. The dead could sleep, therefore, in the heart of these monstrous blocks as sheltered as under vaults of lead. And of what there is of magnificence the centuries have taken care. The continual passage of winds ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... having my hatchet in hand, I set about cutting away bush and vines, and forcing wide the door (the which swung 'twixt great beams like jambs, clamped to the rock) I stepped into the cool dimness beyond. The place was irregular of shape but very spacious and lighted by a narrow, weed-choked crevice high up that admitted a soft, greeny glow very pleasing after the glare of the sun; by which light I perceived that from this cave two smaller caves opened. Now seeing this place had once been the abode of some poor castaway, I sought ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... had already disgorged their luggage. Only one man, but he absolutely the butler, awaited them, and they entered, at once conscious of Clara's special pot-pourri. Its fragrance steamed from blue china, in every nook and crevice, a sort of baptism into luxury. Clara herself, in the outer morning-room, smelled a little of it. Quick and dark of eye, capable, comely, perfectly buttoned, one of those women who know exactly how not to be ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... down, colorless, matted together, as if they had been bleached and ironed; hideous crawling creatures, some of them coleopterous or horny-shelled,—turtle-bugs one wants to call them; some of them softer but cunningly spread out and compressed like Lepine watches; (Nature never loses a crack or a crevice, mind you, or a joint in a tavern bedstead, but she always has one of her flat pattern live timekeepers to slide into it;) black, glossy crickets, with their long filaments sticking out like the whips of four-horse stage-coaches; motionless, slug-like creatures, young larvae, perhaps ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... the nobility Could not go in so free, Who proudly had assumed Each one a helmet plumed; We know not, truly, whether For honour's sake the feather, Or foes to strike with terror; But, truly, 'twas their error. Nor hole, nor crack, nor crevice Will let their head-gear in; While meaner rats in bevies An easy passage win;— So that the shafts of fate Do chiefly ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... on it build a little fire of paper and fine kindling, pour on the powdered sulphur, and leave to smudge and smoke for twenty-four hours. The closet must be sealed up as tight as possible, every crack, crevice, and keyhole being stuffed with newspaper to prevent the fumes from escaping, the entering door, of course, being sealed after the fumes are started. If one desires the sealing to be doubly sealed, newspaper strips two inches wide and pasted together to ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... spoke the wicked Queen began to shrivel, and she shrivelled and shrivelled to a horrid wrinkled toad that hopped down the castle steps and disappeared in a crevice. ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... themselves in order to pounce upon their victims. In the sea, when wishing to surprise a meaty, toothsome oyster, they waited in hiding until the two valves should open to feed upon the water and the light, and had often introduced a pebble between the shells and then inserted their tentacles in the crevice. ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... to the perpendicular face of the cliff, on the top of which my body was sprawled; there was an upright crack in the face of the stone wall, and as I examined the fracture I saw that a piece of wood had lodged in the crack; a piece of wood in a crevice in a rock is not so unusual an occurrence as to excite remark; but when it occurred to me that we were then far above the timber line, my interest and curiosity were at ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... will happen," exclaimed the last, as he was shot out of the pea-shooter; and as he spoke he flew up against an old board under a garret-window, and fell into a little crevice, which was almost filled up with moss and soft earth. The moss closed itself round him, and there he lay, a captive indeed, but ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... sweeping vigorously, and collecting into a pan the dust which like pepper filled every crevice in the floor. ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... ice are strangely agitated, it appears to me," observed Woodburn to his companions, as they stood looking on the scene before them. "See how like a pot the water boils up through that crevice yonder! Then hear that swift, lumbering rush of the stream beneath! The whole river, indeed, seems fairly to groan, like some huge animal confined down by an insupportable burden, from which it is laboring to free itself. I have noticed such appearances, I think, when the ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... walking the slippery decks once trodden by Spanish grandees and soldiers, and the scene of many a bloody fight I'll be bound. Their skeletons lay about the deck, wrapped in sea-tangle, and from every crevice of the galleon, tall, red, and green, and yellow, and purple weeds had sprung, that waved and shivered with the motion of the sea. Her decks were strewn with shells and sand, and in and out of her rotted ribs frightened fish darted at ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... to the sea without the exact quantitative restitution of that heat. There is nothing gratuitous in physical nature, no expenditure without equivalent gain, no gain without equivalent expenditure. With inexorable constancy the one accompanies the other, leaving no nook or crevice between them for spontaneity to mingle with the pure and necessary play of natural force. Has this uniformity of nature ever been broken? ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... Dan, so bruised and hurt he couldn't move, and so faint with hunger and pain he could hardly speak. As soon as Gulliver called, Moppet scrambled down, and fed the poor man with her scraps, brought him rain-water from a crevice near by, and bound up his wounded head with her little apron. Then Dan told them how his boat had been run down by a ship in the fog; how he was hurt, and cast ashore in the lonely cove; how he had lain there half dead, for no one heard his shouts, ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... gleamed brilliantly in the transparent water but Colin had barely time to notice what a conspicuous object it was when in a swirl of water a score of small fish of all sorts surrounded the morsel. But the groupers followed hotfoot and the little fish fled. Then came retribution, for, from a crevice in a near-by rock, out shot the eel-like form of a green moray and disposed of one of the groupers in ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... recalled that night in which she had witnessed his interview with the strangers of the East, and had trembled lest the altar should be kindled upon the ruins of his fame. For Cleonice was wholly, ardently, sublimely Greek, filled in each crevice of her soul with its lovely poetry, its beautiful superstition, its heroic freedom. As Greek, she had loved Pausanias, seeing in him the lofty incarnation of Greece itself. The descendant of the demigod, the champion of Plataea, the saviour of Hellas—theme for song till song should be no more—these ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... moon," which gradually increased in size as the moon moved away from it, and was visible during about a minute and a quarter.[182] He was satisfied that it belonged to the sun because of its fiery colour and growth in magnitude, and supposed that it was occasioned by some crevice or inequality in the moon's limb, through ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... March. The large ones stretching along the north shore of Lake Mesantic are no exception to this statement. A high wind from the northeast was driving before it particles of ice, and now and then a snow flurry. It penetrated every crack and crevice of the huge buildings, the second and largest of which covered a ground space of more than an acre. Every gust made itself both felt and heard among the rafters. Near the great doors the ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... papers—always the papers—of which I thought. I opened his tunic and I felt in his shirt. Then I searched his holsters and his sabre-tasche. Finally I dragged off his boots, and undid his horse's girth so as to hunt under the saddle. There was not a nook or crevice which I did not ransack. It was useless. They were ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the work she became really very much interested in it. She had put a clean white quilt upon the bed, and looped up the curtain with a handsome crimson ribbon, taken from the stock in the wardrobe. She had swept and dusted every corner and crevice; she had displayed all her ornaments to the best advantage, and put fresh cologne in the bottles. She had even brought from some sanctum, where it was folded away in the dark, a very choice silk flag about four inches long, that she had made when the war ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... the light, was of heavy oak. There was no crack or crevice in it anywhere. Standing close to the door they listened intently for any sound from the other side. Everything was absolutely quiet. All that they could hear was their ...
— Army Boys on German Soil • Homer Randall
... dry passage lined with beautiful glittering onyx like clear ice banded with narrow lines of red, of which broken fragments covered the narrow floor and made a dazzling, but distressingly painful rug to crawl over. This is the West Passage and leads to the Grand Crevice, of which only a small portion has been surveyed; midway of the passage are the Epsom Rooms, two in number, and well supplied with epsomite or native Epsom salts; this is sometimes called the Windy Passage, on account of a rushing current of air met suddenly at ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... lamp on the table threw the crevice caused by the slight opening of the door in shadow, and all was blank darkness beyond. But, looking in that direction, Jack caught the gleam of a pair of eyes, peering from the gloom like the orbs of a jungle tiger gathering himself for a spring. Nothing could be seen ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... the woodman's wife had been watching the bear through a crevice, and holding her breath for fear of discovery; but, at last, what with being asthmatic, and having a cold in her head, she could hold it no longer, and just as the khichrî pot was quite full of ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel
... moment the situation of the hostile parties;—the Spaniards in the utmost disorder, many of them without arms, and staggering under the weight of their fatal booty; while their enemies were seen gliding like so many demons of darkness through every crevice and avenue of the inclosure, in the act of springing on their devoted victims. This appalling spectacle, vanishing almost as soon as seen, and followed by the hideous yells and war-cries of the assailants, struck a panic into the ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... I waited in one of the Boxes till the Chamberlain had looked over his Parcel, I heard an old and a young Voice repeating the Questions and Responses of the Church- Catechism. I thought it no Breach of good Manners to peep at a Crevice, and look in at People so well employed; but who should I see there but the most artful Procuress in the Town, examining a most beautiful Country-Girl, who had come up in the same Waggon with my Things, Whether she was well educated, could forbear playing the ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Blanche!" spake the thoughtless husband, Not unkindly. "Weeping always." "Yes, Charles, I could ne'er have slumbered Had I gone to bed," she answered. Then she rose to shut the night out, But the stubborn wind resisted, And, for spite, dasht through the crevice Of the window. "Foolish girl, then, Thus to wait for me!" he muttered. When a shriek—so wild, so piercing— Weirdly wild—intensely piercing— Struck him like a sharp stiletto. Then another—and another! Purging ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... store-house or ertnatulunga, as the Arunta and Unmatjera call it. This store-house is always situated in one of the local totem centres or oknanikilla, which, as we have seen, vary in size from a few yards to many square miles. In itself the sacred treasure-house is usually a small cave or crevice in some lonely spot among the rugged hills. The entrance is carefully blocked up with stones arranged so artfully as to simulate nature and to awake no suspicion in the mind of passing strangers that behind ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... he approached a crevice in the rocks, near the falls. With another hasty look about, he reached in ...
— The Romance of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... the city, for new houses are thrust in everywhere. Wherever it has been possible to cram a tumble-down tenement into a crack or corner, in it has gone. If there be a nook or angle in the wall of a church, or a crevice in any other dead wall, of any sort, there you are sure to find some kind of habitation; looking as if it had grown there, like a fungus. Against the Government House, against the old Senate House, round about any large ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... craving strongly stamped in man. It springs from the instinct after perfection, inherent in all organic beings. The plant that stands in a dark room, stretches and strains, as though endowed with consciousness, towards the light that falls from some crevice. Just so with man. An instinct implanted in man, consequently a natural instinct, must be rationally gratified. The conditions of future society will not balk the instinct after change; on the contrary, they promote its gratification with all: it is facilitated by the highly ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... raft to the rock, in doing which I had the ill luck to drop my hatchet into the deep water, and, notwithstanding the evil omen, made my way into the crevice. I passed over the rough bottom of the chasm until I came to the steps; these I ascended. At a height of about a hundred feet I came to a wall of rock, the top of which I could just reach with the ends of my fingers. By a great ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various |
