"Dwindling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... knew the year of waiting had managed to fill itself with sweetness for them. Their hopes had been alternately raised and dashed to earth; one day it seemed not improbable that they were to be millionaires, the next that beggary awaited them after the dwindling of their small stock of money; but they had shared their emotions and borne ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... are quite as strong as our forefathers, and a great deal wiser! "Such a craze, however, is too widely diffused, and falls in with too obstinate a preconception [17] in the human race, which has in every age hypochondriacally regarded itself as under some fatal necessity of dwindling, much to have challenged public attention. As real paradoxes (spite of the idle meaning attached usually to the word paradox) have often no falsehood in them, so here, on the contrary, was a falsehood which had in it nothing paradoxical. It contradicted all the indications ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... Crossman rose to replenish the dwindling fire, he saw him, followed by Aurore, enter the northern end of the timber limit. Were they leaving, Crossman wondered. Had the silent woodsman asserted his power over the woman? Crossman took down the field-glasses from the nail on the wall. They were the sole reminder, here in the North Country, ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... retail Spirits," his drunkery was thronged with customers. But he sold his groceries chiefly to loose girls who paid him in their coin, which, although it answered his purpose, would neither buy him goods or pay his rent, and he found his stock rapidly dwindling away without his receiving any cash to replenish it. By dissipation and inattention his new business proved unsuccessful to him. He resolved to abandon it and again try the sea for a subsistence. With a hundred dollars in his pocket, the remnant of his property, ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... has the obstinate legend run for centuries—there still dwell cave-men, the dwindling remnant of their race. And here it was that I came ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... of Patagonia been also dwindling, though, there, if anywhere, still lies the Cape of Bad Hope for the apostles of human degeneracy. Pigafetta originally estimated them at twelve feet. In the time of Commodore Byron, they had already grown downward; yet he said of them ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... were uncongenial to it. His younger acquaintances in the Nonjuring body, however sincere and generous in temperament, were men of a different order. It was but natural that, as the schism became more pronounced and Jacobite hopes more desperate, the Church views of a dwindling minority should become continually narrower, and lose more and more of those larger sympathies which can scarcely be altogether absent in any section of a great ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... our van into the one leading up to the first capital we were to visit. Then I found myself between miles and miles of stately white pillars, rising and sinking as the road found its natural levels, and growing in the perspective before us and dwindling behind us. I could not keep out of my mind a colonnade of palm-trees, only the fronds were lacking, and there were never palms so beautiful. Each pillar was inscribed with the name of some Altrurian who had done something for his country, written some beautiful ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... repeated, the sharpness of his frightened voice dwindling breathlessly. "Commines, Philip, what—what ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... of the glory of Bar-Wul-Yann was gone, yet still the pink cliffs glowed, the fairest marvel that the eye beheld—and this in a land of wonders. And soon the twilight gave place to the coming out of stars, and the colours of Bar-Wul-Yann went dwindling away. And the sight of those cliffs was to me as some chord of music that a master's hand had launched from the violin, and which carries to Heaven or Faery the tremulous ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany
... fighting front, the nadir of public opinion in the North was reached in the summer of '64, when every expert knew that the resources of the South were nearing exhaustion and that the forces of the North could certainly wear out Lee's dwindling army even if they could not beat it. The trumpet gave no uncertain sound from Lincoln's lips. "In this purpose to save the country and its liberties no class of people seem so nearly unanimous as the soldiers in the field and the sailors afloat. Do they not have the hardest ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... reached the point where it could be termed an unusually large accumulation of wealth. For larger accumulations existed upon the earth. A descendant of a man once known as John D. Rockefeller possessed an accumulation of great size, but which, as a matter of fact, was rapidly dwindling as it passed from generation to generation. So, let us travel ahead another one hundred years. During this time, as we learn from our historical and political archives, the socialists began to die out, since they at last realized the utter futility of combating the balance of power. ...
— John Jones's Dollar • Harry Stephen Keeler
... when I got up and looked out. The sandy paths were dry, showing that there had been no fresh rain in the night. Moreover, the hillsides were open to view, the silver rills that veined the rugged steeps were dwindling, there was a blue sky, and great ranges of wooded or desolate mountains were in clearly cut outline—the first time since the wet period set in. Over the shoulder of the huge pyramid to the east there was actual sunshine, and the fleecy clouds ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... resources dwindling fast. One by one his old commissions were paid and disappeared down the hopper of household expenses. He took to thinking of what would happen when the commissions were all paid, and to haunting Fisher's office. Fisher was his contractor client and owed him five hundred dollars. But ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... are equally founded on fact and will be recognized by the dear but fast dwindling fraternity of good old-timers. The mother of the boy still lives her steadfast beautiful creed on the Upper Missouri; and the old frontiersman still lives on the Saskatchewan, one of the most picturesque and heroic figures in the West to-day. I may say that both missionaries support ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... another cheer at this, and the men stood fast as ever—a dwindling party, hard beset, of the defenders of the mess-room veranda, their breast-work for the most part consisting of the bodies ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... Japan there is a barrier of great mountains, beyond which is the land of the Hairy Men." These were the Aino, so named from the word in their own language signifying "man." Over most of the country of these rude and helpless indigenes the Japanese have long since spread, only a dwindling remnant of them still inhabiting the island of Yezo. Since the early days when a couple of them were sent as curiosities to the Emperor of China their uncouth looks and habits have made them objects of interest to more civilised nations. Many European ...
— Aino Folk-Tales • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... pulpit.—"Awake, thou that sleepest!" Why, the text is quite opposed to DOZINESS! But what of this, if the preacher be addicted to drawling, the weather unobligingly sultry, and you yourself have gradually been dwindling from an uncongenial state of wakefulness into a sleepy calm? 'Tis too much for beldame Nature, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various
... half-joking reproof. This fired my boy's wicked little heart with furious resentment; he gathered up his books after school, and took them home; a good many other boys had done it, and the school was dwindling. He was sent back with his books the next morning, and many other parents behaved as wisely as his. One of the leading men in the town, whose mere presence in the schoolroom sent a thrill of awe through the fellows, brought his son in after such ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... waistcoat had prevented him from catching stray glimpses of his patent-leathered toes. Little BEN was not made for the country, that was certain. A life of Clubs and dinner-parties would have suited him to perfection. In his Club he could always pose before a select and, it must be added, a dwindling circle as a man of influence. "There is no Club, however watched and tended, but one dread bore is there." BEN might have developed into a prime bore, but as he was plentifully supplied with money and had a good cook ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 17, 1891 • Various
... one is used in Ireland to the tragedy that is bound up with the lives of farmers and fishing-people; but in this garden one seemed to feel the tragedy of the landlord class also, and of the innumerable old families that are quickly dwindling away. These owners of the land are not much pitied at the present day, or much deserving of pity; and yet one cannot quite forget that they are the descendants of what was at one time, in the eighteenth century, a high-spirited and highly cultivated aristocracy. The ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... the Fatherland by reason of its dwindling birth rate. The cradles of Germany are empty to-day; it is your duty to see that they are filled. You bachelors, when your leave comes, marry at once the girl of your choice. Make her your wife without delay. The Fatherland needs healthy children. You married men and your ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... the first promulgation of Christianity, and continued to be performed for centuries after it. A stream of miraculous pretension, in fact, has flowed through all human history, deep and broad as it has passed through the darker ages, but dwindling down to a thread as it has entered days of enlightenment. The evidence was too hackneyed and commonplace to make any impression upon those before whom the Christian miracles are said to have been performed, and it altogether failed to convince the people to whom the Revelation was primarily ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... Praeneste is mentioned as the typical country town. Her inhabitants are laughed at because of their bad pronunciation, despised and pitied because of their characteristic combination of pride and rusticity. Yet despite the dwindling fortunes of the town she was able to keep a treaty with Rome on nearly equal terms until 90 B.C., the year in which the Julian law was passed.[166] Praeneste scornfully refused Roman citizenship in 216 B.C., when it was offered.[167] This refusal Rome never forgot ...
— A Study Of The Topography And Municipal History Of Praeneste • Ralph Van Deman Magoffin
... northwestward were the rugged blue crags of the Catskills, covered with patches of milk-white snow, and just in front, winding like a huge serpent among the picturesque foothills, was the sparkling Hudson, dwindling away to a mere silver thread in the north, tapering away in the same manner toward the south, where it lapped the piers of the city of New York and immediately afterward lost itself in the waters of the Upper Bay. Although the great skyscrapers ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... that Germany's forces were rapidly dwindling, a blow must be struck now—a sensational blow—which would, it was hoped, break the power of France before those British reinforcements could reach her. Later, Germany might still have strength to tackle Britain ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... it," said Evelyn, reassuringly, to herself, although at the same time she felt uneasiness enough to send her out into the hall to a gable window over the porch, which commanded a view of the camp. Nothing stirring was to be seen, except the dwindling flame of the evening camp-fire, burned every night for cheer, not for warmth. Evelyn crept to a side window. As she reached it a white figure could be seen ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond
... backward. When first I had looked upon the place I had sensed its immensity; now I began to realize how vast it must really be—for already the gateway through which we had come glimmered far away on high, shrunk to a hoop of incandescent brass and dwindling fast. ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... husband as the wages of her continual self-sacrifice; who saw nothing in her but the woman; and who either did not think it worth while, or (wrong quite as deep) did not think at all of troubling himself about her pleasures, of inquiring into the cause of her low spirits and dwindling health? And the Marquis, like most men who chafe under a wife's superiority, saved his self-love by arguing from Julie's physical feebleness a corresponding lack of mental power, for which he was pleased to pity her; ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... Jo Portugais, straining his eyes through the night, for a kind of low roar, dwindling to a loud whispering, and then a noise of hurrying feet, came down the stream, and he could dimly see dark figures running away into the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Wordsworth, not long before his death), 'London streets and faces cheer me inexpressibly, though of the latter not one known one were remaining.' He traces the changes in streets, their distress or disappearance, as he traces the dwindling of his friends, 'the very streets, he says,' writes Mary, 'altering every day.' London was to him the new, better Eden. 'A garden was the primitive prison till man with Promethean felicity and boldness sinned himself out of it. Thence ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... depart. The night is fresh, silent, exquisite, the eternal song of the cicalas fills the air. We can still see the red lanterns of my new family, dwindling away in the distance, as they descend and gradually become lost in that yawning abyss, at the bottom of which ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... turned out by our English School. By all means let us study the great writers of the past for their own sakes; but let us study them for our guidance; that we, in our turn, having (it is to be hoped) something to say in our span of time, say it worthily, not dwindling out the large utterance of Shakespeare or of Burke. Portraits of other great ones look down on you in your college halls: but while you are young and sit at the brief feast, what avails their serene gaze ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... father had said. All very well, but I needed money. While I had been making with Eleanore those long and delightful explorations of the harbor and ourselves, at home my father's bank account had been steadily dwindling, and all that I had been able to make ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... ripeness of the modern sense is brought to it and the wood-cutter plays with difficulties as the brilliant Americans do to-day, following his original at a breakneck pace. An illusion is produced which, in its very completeness, makes one cast an uneasy eye over the dwindling fields that are still left to conquer. Such art as Alfred Parsons'—such an accomplished translation of local aspects, translated in its turn by cunning hands and diffused by a wonderful system of periodicity through vast and remote communities, has, I confess, ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... trained by long stormy nights of watching, was following in its dwindling, mysterious course that misty vision in which he ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... each Moreau had blended this animal with that. One perhaps was ursine chiefly, another feline chiefly, another bovine chiefly; but each was tainted with other creatures,—a kind of generalised animalism appearing through the specific dispositions. And the dwindling shreds of the humanity still startled me every now and then,—a momentary recrudescence of speech perhaps, an unexpected dexterity of the fore-feet, a pitiful attempt ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... even while he looked, a ruby light moved on that highway out from the pillars of the bridge, and then another and another. Everywhere was the glitter of lights; fixed, flashing like a star on the curve, or again growing slowly from a pin's point to an orb, and then dwindling to a point and vanishing. And on every side, too, Drake heard the quick beat of horses, and the rattle of wheels struck out not from silence, but from a dull eternal hum like the hum of a mill, sharp particular notes emerging incessantly from a ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... into an offended silence, and the professor, also silent, looked with a gradually dwindling ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... blandishments of a husband's love. She was only true, faithful, and kind, till the birth of a child lent its reconciling power to the efforts of duty. Some time afterwards John Carr died—an event which carried in its train the subsequent death of his wife. There was left to the son-in-law a dwindling business, and a very small sum of money, for the father had met with misfortunes in his declining years, which impaired health prevented him from resisting. Time wore on, and showed that the power of the martyr-spirit is not always that of the champion of worldly ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... and hunting knife Ben prepared a complete set of furniture for their little abode. His first Work was a surpassing-marvelous dining-room suite of a table and two chairs. Then he put up shelves for their rapidly dwindling supplies of provisions and cut chunks of spruce log, with a bit of bark remaining, for fireside seats. And for more than a week, Beatrice was forbidden to enter a certain covert just beyond the glade lest she should prematurely discover an even greater wonder that Ben, ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... could hardly be agreeable to the King; and yet it is not certain that he could have accomplished his purpose in any other way. Moreover, the achievement was one of a projected series by which he meant to re-vindicate his dwindling authority. He was weary of playing the hypocrite, and convinced that he and his monarch were both abhorred by the Netherlanders. Peace was impossible—war was forbidden him. Reduced almost to a nullity by the Prince of Orange, it was time for him to make a stand, and in this impregnable fastness ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... apostles of war, who maintain that war is a Divine and providential institution, one of the eternal verities. In Germany the paradoxes of de Maistre are the commonplaces of historians and moralists. To an Englishman war is a dwindling force, an anachronism. It may still sometimes be a necessity, a dura lex, an ultima ratio, but it is always a monstrous calamity. In other words, to an Englishman war is evil, war is immoral. On the contrary, to the German war is essentially moral. Indeed, it ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... the low flooded lands. Four or five species of armadillo inhabit the valley. These little nocturnal burrowing edentates are the puny representatives of the gigantic Glyptodon of Pleistocene times, and the sloths are the dwindling shadows of the lordly Megatherium. There are two species of three-toed sloths—one inhabiting the swampy lowlands, the other confined to the terra-firma land. They lead a lonely life, never in groups, harmless ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... pigeon, the pearl-bearing molluscs may be greatly diminished in numbers or even exterminated by the greed of man and his fearfully destructive methods of harvesting nature's productions. In fact, the fisheries have been dwindling in yield for some time, and most of the fine pearls that are marketed are old pearls, already drilled, from the treasuries of Eastern potentates, who have been forced by necessity to accept the ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... backed up the ladder. There was a stirring over by the hangars. The mechanic who had taxied the plane to this spot was a dwindling speck, no more than a third of the way across the field. But even from the distant hangars it could be ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... sheltered drifts would lie undiminished and when summer really came, they gave birth to scores of trickling rills. Vegetation sprang up in that moist, needle-mulched soil as luxuriant as any in the tropics. From the time the furry anemone lifted its lavender-blue petals above the dwindling snow patch, until the apples formed on the wild rose bushes and the kinnikinic berries turned red, it was a continuous nosegay. Indian paintbrush, marigolds, blue and white columbines as big as my hand and nearly ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... perhaps, after all, he might find an opportunity of crossing to England, without waiting for its arrival. And Alexander, with the same regularity, had been informing his master that the troops in the Netherlands had been daily dwindling from sickness and other causes, till at last, instead of the 30,000 effective infantry, with which it had been originally intended to make the enterprise, he had not more than 17,000 in the month ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... did not answer. He was watching with an extraordinary suspense. He seemed not to hear. And on the ceiling the shadow moved, and changed its shape, now dwindling, now growing larger again, now disappearing altogether as though the intruder stooped below the level of the lamp; and once there was flung on the white plaster the huge image of an arm which had something in its hand. Was the ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... in the mean time was the evacuation of Fort Lee, a hasty retreat through New Jersey, the dwindling away of the army, the advance of the British towards Philadelphia, the removal of Congress to Baltimore, and an increase of despondency throughout the country.[223] Washington with the remnants of his army had taken post on the right bank of the Delaware, and, still strong in hope, ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... water is dwindling. Organized and juvenile crimes cost the taxpayers millions of dollars each year, making it essential that we have improved enforcement and new legislative safeguards. The denial of constitutional rights to some of our fellow Americans on account of race—at the ballot box and elsewhere—disturbs ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... himself adrift; he was on the great stream. Whither would it lead him? Well—was it not the great stream? Had not all mankind, for all the ages, been floating on it? Or was it but a desert-river, dwindling away beneath the fiery sun, destined to lose itself a few miles on, among the arid sands? Were Arsenius and the faith of his childhood right? And was the Old World coming speedily to its death-throe, and the Kingdom of God at hand? Or was Cyril right, ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... matter to simmer for the present. But that did not mean that Bill would wear "blinders," or that he would sleep with his head under his tarp for fear of finding out what black-hearted renegade had sacrilegiously borrowed Jake. Black-hearted renegade, by the way, was but the dwindling to mild epithets after Bill's more colorful vocabulary had been worn to rags ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... for the commissariat of his army. Thus the difficulties of the Imperial treasury increased. Justinian became more and more unwilling to loosen his purse-strings for the sake of a province which showed an ever-dwindling return. The pay of the soldiers got more and more hopelessly into arrear. They deserted in increasing numbers to the standard of the brave and generous young king of the Goths. Hence, it came to pass, that in the spring of ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... each stone was carefully cut, and fitted with exact nicety in its place. There was no rubble, no mere filling. Here was a lavishness of expenditure, a conscience in building, rare in modern times. Leigh looked down the long succession of massive archways, dwindling into the distance, with vague thoughts of the Castle of Chillon and the Man with the Iron Mask. When he ascended again into the warmth and sunlight of the open air, he had a passing sense of having ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... powers. Afterward the House of Austria was weakened by the division made by Charles the Fifth of his dominions, between his son, Philip the Second of Spain, and his brother Ferdinand; and has ever since been dwindling to the weak condition in which it now is. This is a most interesting part of the history of Europe, of which it is absolutely necessary that you should be exactly ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... increasing proportion of people—more especially in our suburban areas—who are, so far as our old divisions go, delocalized. They represent, in fact, a community of a new sort, the new great modern community, which is seeking to establish itself in the room of the dwindling, little, highly localized communities ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... Arthur and his queen. But unfortunately these last are not confined to Arthurian experience; and, as we have seen, Arthur's fights with the Saxons, except the last when they joined Mordred, are of ever-dwindling importance for the Romance. ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... "You're dwindling to a most interesting skeleton, Vic," he used to say. "Catch me bothering myself about anything I wrote in the ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... his hard wrath suddenly dwindling like a crumbling mountain. Ah, Marguerite! His voice was tremulous and despairing. Could it be possible that everything between these two was going to end thus simply? Were her former vows mere lies? . . . They had been attracted to each other ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Hastings, and her coronet by Viscount Morpeth; the Duchess of Gloucester, her train borne by Lady Caroline Legge, and her coronet by Viscount Evelyn. (The royal generation next that of George III. was fast dwindling away when these three ladies represented the six daughters and the wives of six of the sons of the old King and Queen. But there were other survivors, though they were not present to-day. The Queen-dowager; Princess Augusta, an aged ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... slightly convex and crisscrossed by millions of fine lines like those upon a spectroscopic plate, but with this difference—that within each line I sensed the presence of multitudes of finer lines, dwindling into infinitude, ultramicroscopic, traced by some instrument compared to whose delicacy our finest tool would be as a crowbar to the needle ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... solicitor to whom my father was now assistant. Stillwood, Waterhead and Royal dated back to the Georges, and was a firm bound up with the history—occasionally shady—of aristocratic England. True, in these later years its glory was dwindling. Old Mr. Stillwood, its sole surviving representative, declined to be troubled with new partners, explaining frankly, in answer to all applications, that the business was a dying one, and that attempting to work it up again would be but putting new wine into worn-out ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... in grammatical inflexion, the beginnings of Italian here and there appear. The case-forms of the different declensions are beginning to run into one another: the plural, for example, of insignis is no longer insignes, but, as in Italian, insigni; and the case-inflexions themselves are dwindling away before the free use of prepositions, which was already beginning to show ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... the United States at the present day is about equal to that of France, but that, when we analyse the facts, the fertility of the old native-born American population of mainly Anglo-Saxon origin is found to be lower than that of France. This element, therefore, is rapidly dwindling away in the United States. The general level of the birth-rate is maintained by the foreign immigrants, who in many States (as in New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Minnesota) constitute the majority of the population, and altogether number considerably ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... units of bushes and grasses consisted of globules, glossy spheres of scarlet that ranged in size from pinheads to the bulk of large pumpkins. The branches of the vegetation were formed from strings of the globules set edge to edge and tapering in size like graduated beads strung upon wire, dwindling in bulk until the tips of the branches were as fragile as the fronds of maidenhair fern. The bulk of the shrubbery was head-high, and so dense that Powell could see for only a couple of yards into the ...
— Devil Crystals of Arret • Hal K. Wells
... motor cars pursued her, and were evaded. She put her hope in God, and explained so breathlessly to the furious street. One cyclist who took corners on trust she cursed by the Ineffable Name, but instantly withdrew the malediction for luck, and addressed his dwindling back with an eye of misery and a voice of benediction. For a little time neither she nor her daughter spoke of the change in their fortunes saving in terms of allusion; they feared that, notwithstanding their trust, God might hear and shatter them with His rolling laughter. ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... each day a day of adversity and giving no hint, he recognized, yet refused to admit, the dawn of defeat when defeat was far past its dawning. Upon the world of allied assailants that pressed him back—back—ever back on dwindling millions and then shrinking hundreds of thousands he turned a fierce and unsurrendering face. To himself he said even now that his ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... Albert, so named by Captain Stokes during his marine survey of the north coast. A.C. Gregory rectified the error in after years, and gave the river the name of the lost explorer for whom he was then searching. With fast-dwindling supplies, lagging footsteps, and depressed spirits, the expedition travelled slowly on to the south-west corner of the Gulf where, in crossing a large river, the Roper, four of the horses were drowned in consequence of the boggy banks. This misfortune so limited their means of carriage that ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... movements which in the early part of the century had inspired millions with high hopes of social regeneration and rekindled the beacon fires of faith in the world. The Saint-Simonians had, as an organized body, disappeared; the Fourierists were a dwindling sect, discouraged by the failure of the one great trial of their system, the famous Brook Farm experiment, in the United States; the Owenite movement had never recovered from the failures of the experiments at New Harmony ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... 1781, that Lord North got this news, taking it "as he would have taken a ball in his breast." He recognized at once that "all was over," yet for a short time longer he retained the management of affairs. But his majority in Parliament was steadily dwindling, and evidently with him also "all was over." In his despair he caught with almost pathetic eagerness at what for a moment seemed a chance to save his ministry by treating with the States secretly and apart from France. He was a man not troubled with convictions, and having ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... ahoys in wilder and wilder alternations of beseeching and rage. The lessening craft flew straight on, no ear in her skilled enough to catch the distant cry, and no eye alert enough to scan the dwindling sand-hills. He ceased to call, but still, with heavy notes of distress to himself, waved and waved, now here, now there, while the sail grew smaller and smaller. At length he stopped this also and only stood gazing. Almost on first sight of the craft he had guessed that the men in her had taken ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... perspective in the Elgin Marbles, and even the essentially angular angels in mediaeval stained glass almost always (as it says in "Patience") contrive to look both angular and flat. There is something intrinsically disproportionate and outrageous in the idea of the distant objects dwindling and growing dwarfish, the closer objects swelling enormous and intolerable. There is something frantic in the notion that one's own father by walking a little way can be changed by a blast of magic to a ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... Review—a poor business, truly! Is there a reason for a man's wits dwindling the moment he gets into a critical High-place to hold forth?—I have only glanced over the article however. Well, one day I am to write of you, dearest, and it must come to something rather ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... who accompanied him was magnificent, worthy the descendants of the victors at Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt; and the good behaviour of their followers—with a few rare exceptions—had been equally signal. But now the army was dwindling to a ghastly array of scarecrows, and the recruits, as they came from England, were appalled by the spectacle presented by their predecessors. "Our old ragged rogues here have so discouraged our ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... limited, continued. Some of the outstanding players who competed right after the War in a dwindling number of tourneys were eight times national champion H. Robert Reeve, Barry Ryan, Frank Hanson, Joseph Sullivan, Howard Rose, (still very active in his sixties) J. Lennox Porter, and ...
— Squash Tennis • Richard C. Squires
... second. Kygpton itself was a world as large as your entire solar system, with a diameter roughly of four billion miles. Our ancestors knew that Kygpton was dying, that the store of our most precious element Sthalreh was dwindling. But already our ancestors had mastered the forces of our universe, had made inventions that are beyond your understanding, had explored the limits of our universe in space-cars that were propelled by the free energies in space and by the ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... fifty or a hundred years, they may have kept some sort of dwindling civilization. Probably the English language for a while continued, in ever more and more corrupt forms. There may have been some pretense of maintaining the school system, railroads, steamship lines, newspapers and churches, ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... his familiar reminiscences my dwindling interest vanished, and I noticed again, through the window, the house fronts of the place I knew once, when Poplar was salt. The lost sailor himself was insignificant. What was he? A deck hand; one who tarred iron, and could take a trick at the wheel when some one ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... in thy sensual fleece, O turn aside,—and take, I pray, That he below may rest in peace, Thy ever-dwindling ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... Life was such a little thing, she reflected, so very quickly done; how foolish, then, to forget so constantly that everything that vexed her and made her sorry was flying past and away even while it grieved her, dwindling in the distance with every hour, and never coming back. What she had done and suffered last year, how indifferent, of what infinitely little importance it was, now; and yet she had been very strenuous about it at the time, ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... Highlanders held their own, and inflicted a distinct defeat upon Cumberland's army. Again, when they were once more upon Scottish soil, they struck a damaging blow at Hawley's army at Falkirk. But the end came at last on the day when the dwindling, discouraged, retreating army tried its strength with Cumberland ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... increased by the fact that his programme of exploration had taken longer than he calculated, and now ominous snow-clouds, a rapidly dwindling food supply, and his own importunate heart, urged an immediate start for the terrible Wakhan Valley and the Darkot Pass. It meant a race for life—that he saw plainly enough. The chances were ten to one against the Pass being open after the 1st of October—the ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... contracting. The ratio of colored inhabitants to the aggregate, in 1790 19.26 per cent., or one-fifth, fell in 1860 to 14.12, or one-seventh, and in 1870 to 12.65, or an eighth. The next census will beyond doubt point more strongly in the same direction. If, whilst dwindling in magnitude, the dusky shape perplex us by assuming suddenly a novel form, we may yet be assured that it is the same in substance and in manageability. Its hue is whitening with the fleece of five millions of cotton bales. The cloud has a silver ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... warriors holding mailed blonde women in their arms, of queens with golden ornaments on their arms leaning over parapets and agitating their scarves, of women throwing themselves into the sea upon which ghastly barks were dwindling, of oldish men and young girls conversing teasingly through a window by a lilac-bush, that were Wagner. There were books with stories of magical swans and hordes of gold and baleful curses, of phantasmal storm ships and ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... me, Gaultier, at the ball, Ripe lips, trim boddice, and a waist so small, With clipsome lightness, dwindling ever less, Beneath the robe of pea-y greeniness! Dost thou remember, when with stately prance, Our heads went crosswise in the country dance; How soft, warm fingers, tipp'd like buds of balm, Trembled within the squeezing of thy palm; ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... the last of the dwindling pines behind, and pushed on along a slope that was strewn with shattered rock and debris which made walking arduous. Then they reached a scarp of rock ground smooth by the slipping down of melting snow, ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... Children of nine or ten years are dragged from their squalid beds at two, three, or four o clock in the morning and compelled to work for a bare subsistence until ten, eleven, or twelve at night, their limbs wearing away, their frames dwindling, their faces whitening, and their humanity absolutely sinking into a stone-like torpor, utterly horrible ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... views of his capacity. On December I he broke down the bridges in his rear over the Raritan, and marched through Jersey with a dwindling army. At Princeton he had but three thousand men; destroying every boat, he wisely put the broad Delaware between his army ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... Fire flared back past his shoulder. The rocket flashed away, its trail dwindling as it sped toward the great bulk above. It reached brennschluss and there was darkness. Rip held his breath for long seconds, then he gave a weak ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage
... over the lands newly raised above the sea. The animals and insects living on these modified plants, would themselves be in some degree modified by change of food, as well as by change of climate; and the modification would be more marked where, from the dwindling or disappearance of one kind of plant, an allied kind was eaten. In the lapse of the many generations arising before the next upheaval, the sensible or insensible alterations thus produced in each species would ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... had been like a sudden awakening. His anxiety over his dwindling finances and his disappointment over Carlin's news had been put to flight by the suffering of the man who had tried to rob him. There were depths, then, to which human suffering might drive a man, depths he himself had never imagined or reached—horrible, deadly depths, ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... I objected strenuously. We had already embarked on enough enterprises, and running a store had no place among them. But practical Ida was really interested in the project. It wasn't such a bad idea, she decided. Our money was dwindling, the newspaper would not become a paying proposition for some time, and the only revenue from the post office was the meager ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... the flea probably started on its downward course as a comparatively large insect, probably larger than the Ornithomyia. That insect has been able to maintain its existence, without dwindling like the Leptus into a mere speck, through the great modification in organs and instinct, which adapt it so beautifully to the feathery element in which it moves. The bush-tick, wingless from the beginning, and diverging in another direction, has probably been ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... portion of the people live more than twelve hundred miles from the centre, one body cannot legislate for the whole. He apprehends the abolition of the State constitutions by a species of under-mining, predicts their immediate dwindling into insignificance before the comprehensive and dangerous power vested in Congress. He believes that all rich men are vicious and intemperate, and sees nothing but despotism and disaster in the ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... January thaw the Olifants had cut the rest of the large wood about the pond and curtailed the Cottontails' domain on all sides. But they still clung to the dwindling Swamp, for it was their home and they were loath to move to foreign parts. Their life of daily perils went on, but they were still fleet of foot, long of wind, and bright of wit. Of late they had been somewhat troubled by a mink that had wandered up-stream to their quiet nook. A little ...
— Lobo, Rag and Vixen - Being The Personal Histories Of Lobo, Redruff, Raggylug & Vixen • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... As taught in straitest schools— The hammer of the Crammer Forging Bellona's tools— Or words that humbly stammer Regardless of the rules? And what availeth fretting, Deep sighs, and dwindling waist, And what the sad forgetting Of culinary taste, Since still thou fondly spurnest Five hundred thou. (or "thee."?) And on young STONEY turnest Love's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, March 4, 1893 • Various
... making out a satisfactory history of every ingot he was liable to severe penalties. This Act was, as might have been expected, altogether ineffective. During the following summer and autumn, the coins went on dwindling, and the cry of distress from every county in the realm became louder and ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a hard frost set in, and until Christmas a strong gale from the southeast blew. No succour could reach the town. The garrison were dwindling fast, and ammunition falling short. It required fully 4000 men to guard the walls and forts, while but 2500 remained capable of bearing arms. It was known that the archduke soon intended to make an assault with his whole force, ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... Yedinstvo. A very small and dwindling group, composed almost entirely of the personal following of Plekhanov, one of the pioneers of the Russian Social Democratic movement in the 80's, and its greatest theoretician. Now an old man, Plekhanov was extremely patriotic, too conservative even for ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... back the animated picture of the little settlement wherein we figured but a moment before gradually faded into distance. The wild-looking assembly was blotted from the shore. But still above the rapidly dwindling buildings waved the flag of the oldest chartered trading association in the world—the ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... the main track after all,—no, it was dwindling away. She must go back. The road was soft here, with deep treacherous ruts lying under the surface. She turned the car carefully, her eyes intent on the road before her, leaning over the wheel to watch. Yes, this was right,—she should have turned to the left. How stupid of her. Here was the ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... Don't you know it is not my door at which you knocked?" she said, looking up into his face as simply and kindly as of old. She whirled round the dancing-room with him in triumph, the other beauties dwindling before her: she looked more and more beautiful with each rapid move of the waltz, her colour heightening and her eyes seeming to brighten. Not till the music stopped did she sink down on a seat, panting, and smiling radiant—as ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... through the lower thousand and two thousand-foot lanes. The lights of Tappen were dwindling beneath us. The interior of the Cometara was humming with the whirr of its circulators and air-receivers, mingled with the throb of air pressure pumps. At three thousand feet I started the air-rocket engines. They came on with a gentle purring. The fluorescence from them streamed along our hull ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... paint their parish magazines pink. So generous laymen may haply decide That it may be worth their while to provide Each KENNEDY BELL with stepping-stones To rise to the height of a KENNEDY JONES. But others, a small and dwindling crew, Possibly fit, but certainly few, And cursed with a most pronounced capacity For suffering from inept vivacity, Would gladly be reckoned as unenlightened Could they keep ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... can you call him husband who forcibly snatched you from Jivaji to whom you had been sacredly affianced? I shall never forget that night! In the wedding hall we sat anxiously expecting the bridegroom, for the auspicious hour was dwindling away. Then in the distance appeared the glare of torches, and bridal strains came floating up the air. We shouted for joy: women blew their conch-shells. A procession of palanquins entered the courtyard: but while we were asking, "Where is Jivaji?" ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore
... aspect of the Thames Valley in English history dwindles with the dwindling of military energy in our civilisation, and passes with the passing of a governing class that was military ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... wave of bitterest disappointment passed over Wilbur as he saw his $30,000 dwindling to nothing. Then the instincts of habit reasserted themselves. The taxpayer in him was stronger than the freebooter, after all. He felt that it was his duty to see to it that the girl had her rights. Kitchell must be ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... to him, and he could not say he was free from resentment or pride, but he did make for them what excuse lay in the fact that the congregation had been dwindling ever since the curate at the abbey-church began to speak in such a strange outspoken fashion. There now was a right sort of man! he said to himself. No attempted oratory with him! no prepared surprises! no playhouse tricks! no studied graces in ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... often followed by precipitate decay. This had been the case with the eastern caliphate, and was now so with the western. During the life of Alhakem's successor, the empire of the Omeyades was broken up into a hundred petty principalities; and their magnificent capital of Cordova, dwindling into a second-rate city, retained no other distinction than that of being the Mecca of Spain. These little states soon became a prey to all the evils arising out of a vicious constitution of government and religion. Almost ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... queer story," she said, "of what they say they used to do, in old Roman Catholic times and places, when they wanted to keep up a beehive that was in any danger of dwindling or growing unprofitable. I read it somewhere in a book of popular beliefs and customs about bees and other interesting animals. An old woman once went to her friend, and asked her what she did to make ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... Nature their guide, they seek the pouting teat That plenteous streams. Soon as the tender dam 90 Has formed them with her tongue, with pleasure view The marks of their renowned progenitors, Sure pledge of triumphs yet to come. All these Select with joy; but to the merciless flood Expose the dwindling refuse, nor o'erload The indulgent mother. If thy heart relent, Unwilling to destroy, a nurse provide, And to the foster-parent give the care Of thy superfluous brood; she'll cherish kind The alien offspring; pleased thou ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... Xavier Archambault, employed at the Fall as assistant to look after the bridge and dam, helped at odd moments in the business of the estate, thus making in all six servants, a rather large contingent for a dwindling concern; and Ringfield, listening to these wonders, could not fail to observe that their united wages must reach a ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... them with a more tender care, and to console them as it may for the inevitable parting near at hand. Now, within three or four days of the end, the kitchen is as scrupulously and vigilantly perfect as it could be in the height of the season; and our dwindling numbers sit down every night to a dinner that we could not get for much more love or vastly more money in the month of August, at any shore hotel in America. It is true that there are certain changes going on, but they are going on delicately, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... information for themselves other than under the headings of the Daily Mail; unable to talk a foreign language; and with no knowledge of the sciences which are of military use."[15] To this may be added the fact that these young dullards, the supply of whom is dwindling, are, on joining the service, encouraged and accepted rather with reference to their sporting and social qualities ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... national feeling of Germany against England, nowhere was it so bitter as in Hamburg. Here the hate was born of more than national sentiment; it was of the pocket; of seeing fortunes that had been laboriously built dwindling, once thriving businesses in suspended animation. There was no moratorium in name; there was worse than one in fact. A patriotic freemasonry in misfortune took its place. No business man could press another for the payment of ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... heretofore been the theatre of our glorious achievements as a people! This is the grand thought of the Union men of America. This is the principle of their organization, and this it is which gives them hope, and strength, and courage. What weakness, what degeneracy, what dwindling of power for good and retrogression of thought and aim would be the consequence of permanent division! What a lamentable fall in our position among the nations of the earth, and what a diminution of our capacity for progress among ourselves and for usefulness to mankind! It is our duty and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... charity school, in connection with Dartmouth college, may have, in times past, founded and endowed schools for the education of the natives of the forest; nor would we dampen the faith and hopes of those philanthropists who still believe in the redemption of that dwindling race by the aids of science and civilization; but we confess our inability to perceive any general results, flowing from the attempts of that character, at all adequate to the pains and outlay bestowed on the experiment. And we think ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... was capped by a still more fully developed decision to brave it out, and out, and out, rather than return to ask the help of those whose hand-clasp had weakened in ratio to the dwindling of ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... yet I entered! Night And Doubt mocked at the dwindling light: Strange claw-like hands flung me their shadowy hate. I clomb the dreadful stairways of desire Between a thousand eyes and wings of fire And ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... kill plant life with chemicals which were not harmful to man. Lawton took dangerous risks, increasing the unwholesomeness of their rapidly dwindling air supply by spraying out a thin diffusion of ...
— The Sky Trap • Frank Belknap Long
... blank pervaded the mind as the eye expectantly watched the fast dwindling mail in the hands of the N.C.O. bawling out each name. The exhilarating thrill of glad delight with which you realised YOUR name and number had been called almost at the end of the file ... the sense of lonely desolation when there has been nothing for two ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... common custom, ought to draw forth symptoms of a lachrymose nature. This morning B—— suggested an examination of our funds, for we had neglected keeping a strict account, and what with being cheated in Bohemia and tempted by the amusements of Vienna, there was an apparent dwindling away. So we emptied our pockets and purses, counted up the contents, and found we had just ten florins, or four dollars apiece. The thought of our situation, away in the heart of Austria, five hundred miles ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... mindful of his drooping friend. By night and day, at all times and seasons: always watchful, attentive, and solicitous, and never varying in the discharge of his self-imposed duty to one so friendless and helpless as he whose sands of life were now fast running out and dwindling rapidly away: he was ever at his side. He never left him. To encourage and animate him, administer to his wants, support and cheer him to the utmost of his power, was now his constant ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... dwindling ruins are now very scanty, and in point of architecture present nothing worthy of an antiquary's (p. 010) research. They are washed by the streams of the Monnow, and are embosomed in gardens and orchards, clothing the knoll on which they stand; the aspect of the southern ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... had come to him with the first breath of dawn, to shake the dwindling world from his pinions, to plunge upward towards the stars never to return—he wished to Heaven he had yielded ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... beside the rail, staring out across the widening water, clearly dissatisfied, but finally waved his hand in a command to me to resume our course. Shortly after he crossed the deck to the wheel, and stood there beside me, still watchful of the dwindling vessel ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... for reading the books too much, or for being oneself a fool. In my case it does not matter which was my trouble. The trouble itself was the fact. The condition of the fact was mine. For me the life, and light, and sparkle of human intercourse were dwindling. ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... now become rare birds. The dwindling of his visitors had at first scarcely attracted his notice; it had been so gradual, like the rest. But at last Dutton found himself alone. The old solitude of his youth had re-knitted its shell around him. Now ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... commanded, it turned fiercely upon its remorseless pursuers, and compelled them to give ground for a time. But when it sought to march on again the cavalry of Sheridan and the infantry of Grant followed closely once more, continually cutting off the fringe of the dwindling army. ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... felt more and more that his love must be dwindling to make him act as he did. I thought it all over wearily enough and asked myself whether I had done everything I should to hold my husband's love. I had kept him in at nights. I had cut down his smoking. I had stopped ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... him on the grass. He looked up and watched the great bird that had cast the shadow sailing away on the wind, dwindling to a point, and vanishing ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... the dim and distant hunt Diminished in a trice: The steeds, like Cinderella's team, Seemed dwindling into mice; ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... we are Indians; What a gulf their stares proclaim! They are mounting; we are dying; All our heritage they claim. We are dying, dwindling, dying, Strait and smaller grows our bound; They are mounting up to heaven And ...
— Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure • W.D. Lighthall
... Darwinian hypothesis allows for no petty tact in the process of evolution. Starling Tucker was unfit to survive into the new age. Unable to adapt himself, he would see the Mansion's stable become a noisome garage, while he performed humble and gradually dwindling service to ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... lean, ragged, abandoning their wagons and crowding to hear the news from Oregon. I recall the picture well enough to-day—the sun-blistered sands all about, the short and scraggly sage-brush, the long line of white-topped wagons dwindling in the distance, the thin-faced figures which ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... it seemed that their claim was dwindling. The chronometer which they were to use for the steamer's benefit was lost; the tow-line which they were to furnish had been given back to them; the course to New York which they chalked out had not been accepted; the abandoning of their ship by the ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... Edward Bumpus and his wife might have gone. One in particular, which he passed on his way to the mill, with its terraced steeple and classic facade, preserved all the outward semblance of the old Order that once had seemed so enduring and secure. He hesitated to join the decorous and dwindling congregation,—the remains of a social stratum from which he had been pried loose; and—more irony—this street, called Warren, of arching elms and white-gabled houses, was now the abiding place of those prosperous Irish who had moved thither ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... seats in the windows. But all these tokens of past grandeur were miserably decayed and dirty; rot, damp, and age, had weakened the flooring, which in many places was unsound and even unsafe. Some attempts had been made, I noticed, to infuse new blood into this dwindling frame, by repairing the costly old wood-work here and there with common deal; but it was like the marriage of a reduced old noble to a plebeian pauper, and each party to the ill-assorted union shrunk away from ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... Polish defences, they would waste their strength against the second Russian fortified line; and even if that were broken through, St. Petersburg and Moscow would still be far distant, and Russia's immense resources in men would enable her to bring up body after body of reserves against the dwindling ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... her effects at random, and seems only to increase the beautiful illusion by that infinite variety of decoration in which she revels, binding tree to tree in a tangle of anaconda-like lianas, and dwindling down from these huge cables to airy webs and hair-like fibres that vibrate to the wind ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson |
