"Half-moon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... In vain I sought for stick or stone. Even the river, though I took to it, would not save me if they meant mischief. When they saw me they slackened their pace. I did not move. They then halted, and forming a half-moon some thirty yards off, squatted on their haunches, and began at intervals to throw up their ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... to make port, had now sought another harbour. Others suggested, that, if it really was a supernatural apparition, as there was every natural reason to believe, it might be Hendrick Hudson, and his crew of the Half-Moon; who, it was well-known, had once run aground in the upper part of the river, in seeking a north-west passage to China. This opinion had very little weight with the governor, but it passed current out of doors; for indeed it had already been reported, that ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... Right in the pirates' front was a troop of horsemen armed with lances, swords, and pistols, drawn up in very good order, and ready to advance. The pirates on their coming from the wood formed into a semicircle or half-moon shape, the bow outwards, the horns curving to prevent the cavalry from taking them in flank. They had drums and colours in their ranks. The drums beat out a bravery, the colours were displayed. The men halted for a moment to get ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... thinking of Mrs. Tresham, and the woman so simply dressed and veiled in black made no impression on anyone. She left her trunk in the baggage-room and went by the familiar road down the cliff-breast. It had been raining, of course, and the ground was heavy and wet; but the sky was clear, and the half-moon made a half-twilight among the bare branches and shed a faint bar ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... the form of a half-moon, with a sandy beach round it, and at its head a fresh-water river, having a bar across its mouth, which makes it navigable only for boats. He mentions also the height of the land which forms its sides. All these particulars are noticed by Cook. ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... his whole court stood on the shore, expecting the issue of this great adventure. They saw the ships move forward in a large half-moon, but could not discern me, who was up to my breast in water. When I advanced to the middle of the channel, they were yet more in pain, because I was under water to my neck. The emperor concluded me to be drowned, and that the enemy's fleet was approaching in a hostile ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... whole glorious procession. From block to block I flitted, like some aspiring bird on the crest of a wave. My heart was full, my eyes fixed on one object—that tall, noble figure, with a blue watered silk scarf across his royal bosom, and a half-moon hat, with dipping points, gracefully lifted from his head. He must have been dazzled; he must have been impressed by this proof that republics scorn monarchies and trample them ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... A half-moon host of churls with flags and sticks Hallooed and hurtled up the partridge brood, And Death clapped hands from all the echoing thicks, And trampling envy spied ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... half a rifle-shot of him; another half rifle-shot behind followed the wolves, flung out fan-shape, their gray bodies moving like specters in a half-moon cordon, and their leaders almost abreast the caribou a ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... wisely from the point of view of men unwilling to be taken by surprise. Far away over to our right, appearing and disappearing as I watched them, were a number of tiny black dots in sort of wide half-moon formation, and a larger number of rather larger ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... established a sort of eye-flirtation of many days' standing; on one morning appealing to my taste by an insinuating streak of white lead over each of her bright eyes; on the next, giving my heart a stab from under a crimson half-moon; and on the third, killing me quite by a broadside from each chubby cheek, the right having at me with a ball of fiery red, the left ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... not long until these outlines were plainly visible to the unaided vision. The Earth appeared as a great, softly shining, greenish half-moon, with parts of its surface obscured by fleecy wisps of cloud, and with its two gleaming ice-caps making of its poles two brilliant areas of white. The returning wanderers stared at their own world with their hearts in their throats as Crane, who was at the board, increased the retarding ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... his cap, a sort of head-piece that swelled over a peak shaped like a half-moon, the model of which he had taken from ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... on the deck, according to the custom of all brides, let their colour be what it may; manifested a proper degree of confusion, then curtsied, turned her full moon-face so as to resemble a half-moon, and answered, with a very suspicious ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... there is nothing but clean gravel in the bottom of the dish. You work this off carefully, turning the dish about this way and that and swishing the water round in it. It requires some practice. The gold keeps to the bottom of the dish, by its own weight. At last there is only a little half-moon of sand or fine gravel in the bottom lower edge of the dish—you work the dish slanting from you. Presently the gold, if there was any in the dirt, appears in 'colours', grains, or little nuggets along ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... sea and the long black land; And the yellow half-moon large and low; And the startled little waves that leap In fiery ringlets from their sleep, As I gain the cove with pushing prow, And quench its speed ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... plain in front of us, from which just then a puff of wind rolled away the mist. It was black with advancing men! As yet they were a considerable distance away—quite two miles, I should think—and coming on very slowly in a great half-moon with thin horns and a deep breast; but a ray from the sun glittered upon their countless spears. It seemed to me that there must be quite twenty or thirty thousand of them in this breast, which was in three divisions, commanded, as I learned afterwards, ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... They lay in a half-moon, with the westering sun striking full upon the windows of their high, castellated poops. Their great guns gleamed; mast and spar and rigging made network against the blue; high in air floated bright pennants and the red cross in the white field. ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... The half-moon formed by the crescent-shaped carriage-way and the wall bordering the road was filled with rather unkempt shrubbery, laurels and rhododendrons for the most part, from amid which arose several big trees. In the blaze of the afternoon sun the place looked commonplace enough with estate ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... and bear for the French coast. The wind was however so light; that the whole day was spent before Seymour with his ships could cross the channel. At last, towards seven in the evening; he saw the great Spanish Armada, drawn up in a half-moon, and riding at anchor—the ships very near each other—a little to the eastward of Calais, and very near the shore. The English, under Howard Drake, Frobisher, and Hawkins, were slowly following, and—so soon as Lord Henry, arriving from the opposite shore; had made ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... returned, and relatives and guests began to pour into the room and offer us their congratulations. First came my cousins, who were too much troubled about their own bedraggled appearance to pay much attention to mine. Then Aunt Bridget, holding on to her half-moon bonnet ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... my cabin I went up on deck to take a look round. It was a most glorious night, still a breathless calm, the heavens perfectly clear, save for a low cloud bank hanging over the land, the stars shining brilliantly, and a half-moon shedding a soft, mysterious radiance upon the scene powerful enough to enable us to distinguish with tolerable clearness the nearer islands and some half a dozen craft lying becalmed within two miles of us, inshore. The moon would set about midnight; yet even then we should still have the stars, ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... his inquiring eyes was a gallant figure in a glittering steel corselet crossed by a silken sash, who bore at his side a long sword with a magnificent handle, and upon his shoulder a lance of some six feet in length, headed with a long scarlet tassel, and brass half-moon pendant. "Is not Crichton victorious?" asked Ogilvy of Captain ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... would not bear the fatigues and toils of real war, though he had no shame in showing off in the arena, and is said to have fought there seven hundred and fifty times, besides killing wild beasts. He boasted of having slain one hundred lions with one hundred arrows, and a whole row of ostriches with half-moon shaped arrows which cut off their heads, the poor things being fastened where he could not miss them, and the Romans applauding as if for some noble deed. They let him reign sixteen years before he was murdered, and then a good old soldier named Pertinax began to reign; but the ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... o'clock in the afternoon that Barnabas knocked at the door of the Viscount's chambers in Half-moon Street and was duly admitted by a dignified, albeit somewhat mournful gentleman in blue and silver, who, after a moment of sighing hesitancy, ushered him into a small reception room where sat a bullet-headed man ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... other to-night; but at our public dinners, about December 21st, we are very apt to get into the Mayflower and sail around the New England coast. I think it will be good for us to-night to take another boat quite as good, and sail around New York harbor in the Half-Moon. ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... dull, and there was an exact sufficiency about its furnishings. Yet there was a certain dignity about it; it was unmistakably a best room, and not a place where one might make a litter or carry one's every-day work. You felt at once that somebody valued the prim old-fashioned chairs, and the two half-moon tables, and the thin carpet, which must have needed anxious stretching every spring to make it come to the edge of the floor. There were some mourning-pieces by way of decoration, inscribed with the names of Mrs. Patton's departed friends,—two worked in crewel to the memory ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... man, thrown into a lawyer's clerkship straight from the sixth) and the picture of the superbly groomed associates of his friend's brother, Marmaduke Fenton, are cases in point, though I don't think Winchester would have been so absurdly abashed by the glories of bachelordom in Half-Moon Street. So too is the lecture of Parbury, the neo-decadent, on the cultivation of "that sacred and imperishable flower, the white unsullied bloom of an Intensely Useless Life," even if it be only a belated cutting ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various
... not far to go. Inanda's Kraal was a cluster of kyas and rondavels, shaped in a half-moon, with a flat space between the houses, where grew a big merula tree. All around was a medley of little fires, with men squatted beside them. Here and there a party had finished their meal, and were swaggering about with ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... stands in the form of a half-moon on the banks of this mighty stream, and before it are moored craft of every description— backwood boats, keel boats, steamers and ships, brigs and schooners, from every part of the world. I may remark ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... the Malay bring his Indian violin. It was like those of to-day, but instead of four strings it had only three, the upper part of it was covered with a bluish snake-skin, and the slender bow of reed was in the form of a half-moon, and on its extreme end glittered ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... about half-way through Martha's appetising cake and had taken three good half-moon bites out of a slice of hot bread, thinking deeply the while, and munching mechanically with his mouth full, but quite unconscious of the flavour of that which he ate, when the door was thrown open and Bella entered, making the boy jump and ...
— The New Forest Spy • George Manville Fenn
... at Erfurt was in the form of a half-moon; and at the upper end, and consequently at the rounded part, of this table their Majesties were seated, and on the right and left the sovereigns of the Confederation according to their rank. The side facing their Majesties was always empty; and there stood M. de ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... had pitched upon a site for the fort, every man set to work, some to build the fort, others to pitch the tents, fell trees and make clapboards to reload the ships, others to make gardens and nets. The fort was in the form of a triangle with a half-moon at each corner, intended to mount four ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... could be imported into that country, and he had examined every buckle of girth and headstall as he fastened them. He also rode, for lightness, in a thin deerskin jacket which fitted him closely, with a rifle across his saddle, gazing with keen eyes across the shadowy waste when now and then a half-moon came out. Once he also drew bridle and sat still a minute listening, for he fancied he heard the distant beat of hoofs, and then went on with a little laugh at his credulity. The Cedar was roaring in its hollow and the birches moaning in a bluff, but as the damp wind that brought the blood ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... mighty Armada steered in the shape of a half-moon, with the wind from the south-west, on the 21st of July of that year. While Lord Howard began the battle by attacking in his own ship, called the Ark Royal, one of the large ships of the Armada, Drake, Hawkins, and Frobisher soon joined him, for two days pursuing and attacking ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... a bad man would not sing that song.—As she opened the door, a soft spring wind blew upon her full of genial strength, as if it came straight from those dark blue clefts between the heavy clouds of the cast. Away in the clear west, the half-moon was going down in dreaming stillness. The dark figure of a little man stood leaning against the ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... set light sails, hauling the tacks well out and making the sheet fast after the southern fashion, and then swaying away at the halyards, till the white canvas was up to the mast-head, bellying full, and as steady as the upper half of a half-moon. ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... agreed, and on the second night we lay in camp in a burnt forest. We were all tired and hungry, and—for Johnston was silent—a melancholy settled down upon the camp, while I lay nearly frozen under two blankets, watching a half-moon sail slowly above the fretted ridge of firs. At ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... Half-Moon Bar, Thursday, June 7th.—A head-breeze prevailed all day, strong enough to fan us into a sense of coolness, but leaving the water as unruffled as a mill-pond; thus did we seem, in the vivid reflections of the early morning, to be sailing ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... friend, the Englishman Henry Hudson, while in the employ of the Dutch East India Company, in his vessel of ninety tons, the Half-Moon, being in search of a northwest passage south of Virginia, cast anchor outside of Sandy Hook, September 3, 1609, and on the 11th passed up through the Narrows into the present bay of New York. Under the firm conviction that he was on his way to the long-sought Cathay, a day later he entered ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... Peter's, the broad gleam of a mildly glorious sunset; not so pompous and magnificent as many that I have seen in America, but softer and sweeter in all its changes. As its lovely hues died slowly away, the half-moon shone out brighter and brighter; for there was not a cloud in the sky, and it seemed like the moonlight of my younger days. In the garden, beneath her window, verging upon the Tarpeian Rock, there was shrubbery and one large tree, softening the brow of the famous precipice, adown ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... over these details as he lay on his back, he pushed up the stair over his face and let the front of it with the step of the next swing inwards; the light was stronger now, and poured in, though still dim, through three half-moon windows, glazed and wired, that just rose above the level of the ground outside. Then he extricated himself, closed the steps behind him, and went up ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... myself with a spare shirt, and then lay down on my blanket beside the fire to listen contentedly to the clamour of the rain upon the roof. About two in the morning the downpour ceased, the sky cleared, and a fair half-moon of silvery brightness shone out above the tops of the white gum forest. Fifty yards or so away, in front of the door, a shallow pool had formed in a depression of the hard, sun-baked soil, and as the soft light of the moon fell upon it there came ...
— "Five-Head" Creek; and Fish Drugging In The Pacific - 1901 • Louis Becke
... swept the horizon with his half-fevered gaze. To the south lay the rugged shore line with its sea-corroded cliffs, indented at one point into a half-moon of glistening beach and sweeping on again into vanishing and ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... presently put on Winston's old fur coat and tattered fur cap. Had Winston seen his unpleasant smile as he did it, he would probably have wheeled the black horse and returned at a gallop, but the farmer was sweeping across the waste of whitened grass at least a league away by this time. Now and then a half-moon blinked down between wisps of smoky cloud, but for the most part gray dimness hung over the prairie, and the drumming of hoofs rang stridently through the silence. Winston knew a good horse, and had bred several of them—before a blizzard ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... away," continued Madame Balnokhazy, touched to the quick. "Kindly greet, in our names, dear Czipra and dear Fanny. We are very fond indeed of the good girls, and wish you much good fortune with them. The arms of Aronffy, too, find an explanation therein: the half-moon will in one case mean a horse-shoe, in the other a bread-roll. Adieu, dear ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... section. About the middle of the afternoon, I reached Broughton Hill, and looked off upon the most beautiful and magnificent landscape I have yet seen in England. It was the Belvoir Vale; and it would be worth a hundred miles' walk to see it, if that was the only way to reach it. It lay in a half-moon shape, the base line measuring apparently about twenty miles in length. As I sat upon the high wall of this valley, that overlooks it on the south, I felt that I was looking upon the most highly-finished piece of pre-Raphaelite artistry that could be found in the world,—the artistry of the plough, ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... late—close on to dawn. The silvery half-moon hung low in the west accompanied by great cohorts of stars that shone with a brilliancy she had never before seen, and which seemed to be waiting with the moon to usher in the new dawn. All was silence and mystery—all earthly ties seemed ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... anything but complete, we resort last of all to the argument from analogy. If this can illumine the obscurity, it will all be on the positive side of the inquiry. At present the question resembles a half-moon: analogy may show that the affirmative is waxing towards a full-orbed conviction. We open with Huyghens, a Dutch astronomer of note, who, while he thinks it certain "that the moon has no air or atmosphere surrounding it as we have," and ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... submission, but that trick has been played too often. "This damned nonsense is too late," said the sergeant, and with levelled bayonets his sections swept away the chance of treachery. So the story runs, and at any rate our men pushed forward without further opposition until they formed a half-moon overlooking the darkness in a deep valley that might have been full of foes. Into that darkness, therefore, they poured steady volleys for half an hour, while the engineers were trying to destroy the captured howitzer. Their first attempt failed owing to a defective fuse, but ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... the apse, assuming in most cathedrals the form of a semicircle. There are exceptions; to mention three: at Poitiers, at Laon, and in Notre Dame du Fort at Etampes the wall is square, as in the ancient civic basilicas, and does not describe the sort of half-moon, of which the significance is one of the most beautiful ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... not a petard beneath these walls; and the Marechal de la Meilleraie told me this morning that he had proposed to bring some with which to open the breach. It was neither the Castillet, nor the six great bastions which surround it, nor the half-moon, we should have attacked. If we go on in this way, the great stone arm of the citadel will show us its fist a long ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the room that had been his since his first coming to Glenfernie, he gazed out of window before turning to go down-stairs. The snow had ceased to fall, and out of a great streaming floe of clouds looked a half-moon. Under it lay wan hill and plain. The clouds were all of a size and vast in number, a herd of the upper air. The wind drove them, not like a shepherd, but like a wolf at their heels. The moon seemed the shepherd, laboring for control. Then the clouds themselves seemed the wolves, ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... protected the extreme left flank. This long line of troops, who were visible to each other but divided by the deep broad nullahs which intersected the whole plain, fell back slowly, halting frequently to keep touch. Seven hundred yards away were the enemy, coming on in a great half-moon nearly three miles long and firing continually. Their fire was effective, and among other casualties at this time Lieutenant Crawford, R.A., was killed. Their figures showed in rows of little white ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... the carriage, the half-moon in the dark blue sky, making heavy shadows on the trees and mansions, lit her cheek and Greek-knotted hair on the side next me with a glamour so that her head and shoulders shone softly in it ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... circumference, and so high and steep in many places that it is almost impregnable, and they have built forts in such places as are accessible. The only port is before the capital, named Angra, and as it is in the form of a half-moon, it is called the Half-Moon of Angra. At each horn of this half-moon there is a mountain, which are called the Brazils, which project out into the sea, appearing from a distance as if two islands; and these mountains are so high that one may see ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... not know where to go. I applied at several places for lodging, but they all wanted money, and that was what I did not have. Knowing nothing else better to do, I walked the streets. In doing this I passed by many food-stands where fried chicken and half-moon apple pies were piled high and made to present a most tempting appearance. At that time it seemed to me that I would have promised all that I expected to possess in the future to have gotten hold of one of those chicken legs or one of those pies. But I could ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington
... they say, Become some women best, so that there be not Too much hair there, but in a semicircle, Or a half-moon made with a ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... the road eastward between the mountains and the sea. It was a beautiful region of desolation. There were rocky glens cutting across the road, and occasionally a brawling stream ran down to the salt water, breaking the line of cliffs with a little bay and a half-moon of yellow sand. The heather covered all the hills. There were no trees, and but few houses. The chief signs of human labour were the rounded piles of peat, and the square cuttings in the moor marking the ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... hundred and thirty thousand. The space formerly covered by rice fields and vegetable gardens is now laid out in well-built, wide thoroughfares, smoothly macadamized and faultlessly clean and neat. The town extends along the shore, which is level, but is backed by a half-moon of low, well-wooded hills, among which are the private dwellings of the foreign residents, built after the European style, on the location known as the Bluff. The two principal hotels, the club-houses, and some consular business residences, ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... were ushered into a room very little bigger than ours at Pentonville. A man and woman and four boys live in this room, joint tenants with nine snakes, most of them such as no remedy has been discovered for their bite. We walked into the middle, which is formed by a half-moon of wired boxes, all mansions of snakes,—whip-snakes, thunder-snakes, pig-nose-snakes, American vipers, and this monster. He lies curled up in folds; and immediately a stranger enters (for he is used to the family, and sees them play at cards,) ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... going very well with him. For one thing, the Half-Moon Trust Company had finally terminated all dealings with the gorgeous marble-pillared temple of high finance of which he was a director. For another, he had met the men of the West, and for them he had done things which he did not always ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... we came on more and more fortifications. A formidable blockhouse had been constructed by dragging out big steel safes, looted from the various European offices in this abandoned area, and building them into a thick half-moon of stone and brick, making a shell-proof defence. On the ground brass cartridge-cases and broken straps and weapons were littered more and more thickly, but of any sign of life there was absolutely none. Absolute stillness reigned around us. We might have been in a city ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... took down the mandore, drew near the couch on which Poeri was stretched, leaned the head of the lute against the wooden bed-head hollowed out in the shape of a half-moon, stretched her arm to the end of the handle of the instrument, the body of which was pressed against her beating heart, let her hand flutter along the strings, and struck a few chords. Then she sang in a true, ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... Canyon Trail, I had two most delightful swims—one on the night of the arrival of our party, the other by starlight next morning. Though there is an ugly rapid at this place, one may go up stream far enough to get away from danger, for a half-moon-shaped mass of rock affords safe shelter, and deep enough water for swimming. The night swim was so refreshing that I could not resist the allurement to take another in the morning, before we left camp. The order had ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... be exposed to the fire of the whole fleet." To this Captain Douglas, in his report of the occurrences, adds the suggestive particular that the Carleton, by a lucky slant of wind, fetched "nearly into the middle of the rebel half-moon, where she anchored with a spring on her cable." The position was one of honorable distinction, but likewise of great exposure. Her first officer lost an arm; her captain, Lieutenant Dacres, was so severely wounded that he was about to be thrown overboard as dead; and Pellew, thus left ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... farther side, he was to spy directly below in the flat for Tourdestelle. He crossed the wooded neck above the valley, and began descending, peering into gulfs of the twilight dusk. Some paces down he was aided by a brilliant half-moon that divided the whole underlying country into sharp outlines of dark and fair, and while endeavouring to distinguish the chateau of Tourdestelle his eyes were attracted to an angle of the downward zigzag, where ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the castle marching out to surprise him, but his exertions were baffled by the want of judgment and incompetency of those beneath him in command. The guard was placed near the weigh-house at the foot of the Castle-rock, so that the battery of the half-moon, as it was termed, near the Castle-gate, bore upon it, and many of the guard within would have perished upon the first firing. This was not the only mistake. Mr. O'Sullivan, one of Prince Charles's officers, one day placed a small guard near the West Kirk, which was not only ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... that the Catskill Mountains had always been haunted by strange beings; that it was affirmed that the great Hendrick Hudson, the first discoverer of the river and country, kept a kind of vigil there every twenty years, with his crew of the Half-moon, being permitted in this way to revisit the scenes of his enterprise, and keep a guardian eye upon the river and the great city called by his name; that his father had once seen them in their old Dutch dresses playing at ninepins in a hollow of ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... circled in the sky, darting down again and again upward. Through an open passage was a glimpse of a quadrangle, with its weed-grown spaces and litter of yellow leaves. A tawny streak, a red fox, sped through it as Dundas looked. A half-moon, all a-tilt, hung above it. He saw the glimmer through the bare boughs of the leafless locust-trees here and there still standing, although outside on the lawn many a stump bore token how ruthlessly the bushwhackers had ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... the general satisfaction, a strong tempest during the night between the 11th and 12th of December cleared the atmosphere, and the half-moon was distinctly visible on the dark background of ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... houses on the Boulevard de Sebastopol at the end of the Rue de la Cossonnerie were still black; but above the sharp line of their slate roofs a patch of pale blue sky, circumscribed by the arch-pieces of the covered way, showed like a gleaming half-moon. Claude, who had been bending over some grated openings on a level with the ground, through which a glimpse could be obtained of deep cellars where gas lights glimmered, now glanced up into the air between the lofty pillars, as though scanning the dark roofs ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... held in his hand when he pushed open the door of the sitting-room and stood before the inmates in his rough pea-jacket, his ruddy face crimson with the cold, his half-moon whiskers all ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Aunt Mary and her green plaid waist in the middle and flanked her with purple violets and red carnations. The ear-trumpet was laid upon the orchids just where she could reach it easily. Then her escorts took positions as a sort of half-moon guard behind and each held two or three American Beauties straight up and down as if they were the insignia of his ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... shutting of the swinging door a round-bodied, round-headed man in his shirt sleeves comes into view. Covering his forehead, shielding his eyes from the glare of the overhead gas jet, is a half-moon of green leather held in place by strings tied behind his ears. The line of shadow caused by this shade makes a blank space about his eyes and brings into relief his pale, flabby cheeks, hard, straight mouth, and coarse chin. Only when he lifts his head to give some order, or holds ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Mr. Burke, however, not returning soon, Governor Semple said, 'Gentlemen, we had better go on, and we accordingly proceeded. We had not gone far before we saw the Bois-brules returning towards us, and they divided into two parties, and surrounded us in the shape of a half-moon or half-circle. On our way, we met a number of the settlers crying, and speaking in the Gaelic language, which I do not understand, and they went on to ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... There was a half-moon in the sky, which was pitilessly clear, for cloudiness might have made it warmer; when the firelight sank, the slender spruce trunks cut sharply against the silvery radiance and the hard glitter of the snow. Everything was tinted with blue and ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... the last red glow had faded from the western sky, which was now lit only by the soft light of a half-moon. All the world lay bathed in peace and beauty; even the stern outlines of the surrounding mountains seemed softened, and the pale waters of the Dead Sea and the ashen face of the desert gleamed like silver new cast from the mould. ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... down on the Arab camp, and above it on the dark mass of the castle, where, in the watch-tower, Sigbert had left a lamp burning, they halted just as the half-moon was dipping below the heights towards the Mediterranean. Here the Lady Mabel and her guard were to wait until they heard the sounds which to their practised ears would ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... morning he had come to the weekly market with Auld Jock, a farm laborer, and the Grassmarket of the Scottish capital lay in the narrow valley at the southern base of Castle Crag. Two hundred feet above it the time-gun was mounted in the half-moon battery on an overhanging, crescent-shaped ledge of rock. In any part of the city the report of the one-o'clock gun was sufficiently alarming, but in the Grassmarket it was an earth-rending explosion directly overhead. It needed to be heard but once there to ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... receiving whip-castigation at a cart's tail, a punishment frequently inflicted of old upon women of that description, as many authors testify: soldiers with halberds, &c., as before, march on either side of the cart, which at the moment is passing a house with the sign of the Half-moon hanging out from the wall by ornamented iron-work. The eight of spades is upon the proverb, "Two of a trade can never agree;" and in the engraving, a couple of fish-wives, who have thrown down their baskets of plaise, flounders, &c., are fighting furiously, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 58, December 7, 1850 • Various
... The red half-moon is dipping to the west, And the cold fog invades the sleeping land. Lo! how the grinning skulls in the level light Litter the place! Methinks that every skull Is a most lifelike portrait of my Sen, Drawn by the hand of Death; each fleshless pate, Cursed ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... His teeth won't be anything to the crown we'll put on him. But I mustn't lose a square inch of the rind. He must have ears too—a half-moon on each side—and you can let any amount of blaze shine ...
— Harper's Young People, October 26, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... the planet Mars does not always present the appearance of a circular disc. When near opposition the full disc of the planet is visible, but at all other times it is gibbous, and approaches nearest to that of a half-moon ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... ears, stranger, or turn from Ghost Glen now, For the paths are grown over, untrodden by men now; Shut your ears, stranger," saith the grey mother, crooning Her sorcery runic, when sets the half-moon in. ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... anatomy, which makes sky-searching so uncomfortable a habit. This outlook was probably developed to a greater extent during the war than ever before; and I can remember many evenings in Paris and London when a sinister half-moon kept the faces of millions turned searchingly upward. But whether in city or jungle, ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... strengthens in the most artful manner, by putting in the mouths of his characters various reflections to substantiate the narrative. For example, in the description, on page 263, of the savages who lined the perilous channel in a half-moon, where the European ship lay, we find the afterthoughts are added so naturally, that they would carry conviction to any judge ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... a contrast, these half-moon lines of blocky men, to the lank, slouch-hatted, low-collared country delegates—farmers, school teachers, country doctors and country lawyers—who filled the seats behind them and on beyond them. To the one group politics was a business in which there was money to be made and ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... more we were in the open air. It was a still night, with an odour of damp earth, and a hint of green buds in it. A pale half-moon hung in the sky, now and then hidden by the clouds that swept across it, for there was wind in the heavens, though upon earth all was still. I offered Judy my arm, but she took my hand, and we walked on without a word till ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... she succeeded in getting out, a half-moon hung in the east: a new lamp had come, she thought, and all would ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... in a gigantic bonnet like a half-moon, with her white cap visible beneath it; and Nancy Joe appeared behind her, be-ribboned out of all recognition, and taller by many inches for the turret of feathers and flowers on the head that was ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... A half-moon rose above the black tops of the pines, and a faint light, which the snow flung back, filtered down between the motionless branches upon the narrow trail that wound sinuously in and out among fallen trunks and thickets draped with ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... inconspicuous, persistent teeth. Corolla four times longer than the calyx, of 5 fleshy, fluted petals, their borders overlapping, much broader above. Stamens very numerous, arranged around and along a column. Filaments long. Anthers of half-moon shape. Style 1, very thick. Stigma cleft in 5 parts, which are twisted in spiral form. Seed vessels about the size of a filbert, 5-sided, with 5 apartments each containing 5 ovoid seeds attached by separate seed stalks to the central axis of the ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... the moon's age. How small and thin it was—just like a curving rim of pale light upon the dark sky; but as you watch this crescent—or growing—moon, you will see it constantly getting larger and brighter, until from being half-moon it has become full-moon, for it faces the sun, and is bright all over that part which is turned towards you. When we speak of the "face of the moon," we mean that side which is always turned towards ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... were about two miles' distance from the shore, came on board and brought me word that there was good anchoring in thirty or forty fathom water, a mile from the isle, and within a reef of the rocks which lay in a half-moon, reaching from the north part of the island to the south-east; so at noon we got in and anchored in thirty-six fathom, ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... eastern edge of Hooker's Bend, drawn in a rough semicircle around the Big Hill, lies Niggertown. In all the half-moon there are perhaps not two upright buildings. The grimy cabins lean at crazy angles, some propped with poles, while others hold out against gravitation at ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... to avoid plunging headlong upon a reef projecting from the northern extremity of a small island, of the existence of which Dyer declared himself to be utterly ignorant. Luckily for the adventurers, there was a half-moon riding high in the sky, which, together with the highly phosphorescent state of the sea, and the admirable look-out which was being maintained by George's orders, enabled them to detect the danger in time to ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... thereabouts, and the shining facets of frost upon the blades of grass seemed to move on with the shadows of those they surrounded. The masses of furze and heath to the right and left were dark as ever; a mere half-moon was powerless to silver ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... among the stubble belts that engirdled it—an empty wilderness the mettlesome team swung across, and during the first few minutes the cold struck through them with a sting like the thrust of steel. A half-moon hung low above it, coppery red with frost, and there was no sound but the crunch beneath the runners, and the beat of hoofs that rang dully through the silence like a ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... think that I am nervous," he said. "But I am not. During one period of the battle of Aiken the firing between ourselves on this spot and the enemy intrenched where the club-house now stands, and spreading right and left in a half-moon, was fast and furious. Once they charged up to our guns; but we drove them back, and after that charge yonder fair green was one infernal shambles of dead and dying. Among the wounded was one of the enemy's general officers; he whipped and thrashed and squirmed like a ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... at the southwest of the island and is half-moon in shape, with reaches of white sands, red crags, and brush covered dunes, and immediately back of these, an ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... brave white men, and my friends; Infadoos, my uncle, and chiefs; my heart is fixed. I will strike at Twala this day, and set my fortunes on the blow, ay, and my life—my life and your lives also. Listen; thus will I strike. Ye see how the hill curves round like the half-moon, and how the plain runs like a green tongue towards us ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... off power, and waited to see whether the companion boat succeeded in reaching the calm waters of the big lake as successfully as they had done. As it was now pretty close to dark, in spite of the half-moon that hung overhead, seeing the partly hidden rocks was not ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Afloat • George A. Warren
... out otherwise. The treaty of surrender was, as it were, begun, nay, some say concluded, when some of the out-guards of the Imperialists finding the citizens had abandoned the guards of the works, and looked to themselves with less diligence than usual, they broke in, carried an half-moon, sword in hand, with little resistance; and though it was a surprise on both sides, the citizens neither fearing, nor the army expecting the occasion, the garrison, with as much resolution as could be expected under such a fright, flew to the walls, twice beat the Imperialists off, ...
— Memoirs of a Cavalier • Daniel Defoe |
