"Sifting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... some of the incidents which would render the narrative too complicated to be interesting to those who wish more for a view of noted characters in remarkable situations, than for a minute and accurate sifting of ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... among the troops. The officers were impatient and snappy, their countenances clouded with the tales of misfortune. The troops, sifting through the forest, were sullen. In the youth's company once a man's laugh rang out. A dozen soldiers turned their faces quickly toward him and ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... when there is anything to be done, then there is a sifting! But now we have you, with all our own Lily's spirit, I shall be happy about Jane for this winter ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... or in New Zealand, you will be the more rejoiced because it will bring before you the memory of the youthful and blooming student who inspected your hospitals with such keen appreciation, so impartially sifting the ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... sat on the back porch in the after luncheon hour to get with the freshness of October what sunshine the westerning sun was sifting through the red and gold of the maples beyond the garden walls. He was in the undress uniform of the artillery, and still wore the trefoil of the Second Corps. An effort by Ann to remove his soiled army garb and substitute his lay dress caused an outbreak of anger which ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... of one onion. Put all through grinder, salt, pepper to taste. Roll in small soft balls. Enclose neatly in cabbage leaves, secure with toothpicks. Place in Dutch oven which has previously melted one-fourth pound of butter with a little chopped parsley. Alternate layers with a small sifting of flour until all are in pan. Let simmer in one pint of water (boiling) without allowing any steam to escape for two hours; remove and thicken broth with yolks of five ...
— Stevenson Memorial Cook Book • Various
... bad influences and results. I am so much alone that I find this pouring out of my thoughts and feelings a certain satisfaction; but unfortunately one's book is only a recipient, and not a commentary, and I miss the sifting, examining, scrutinizing, discussing intercourse that compels one to the analysis of one's own ideas and sentiments, and makes the society of any one with whom one communicates unreservedly so much more profitable, as well as pleasurable, than this everlasting self-communion. ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... debasing forms of worship, to subterranean caverns of gross superstition, and lurking demons of cruelty and despair. While Nevil was imbibing impressions of Indian Art, Lilamani was secretly weighing and probing the Indian spirit that inspired it; sifting the grain from the chaff—a process closely linked with her personal life; because, for India, religion and ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... his opinion, to make use of it instead of my own. I have the satisfaction to think that whatever may be the value of the other sections of this enquiry, this at least is thoroughly sound, and based upon a really exhaustive sifting of the data. ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... gloomy—that small sifting rain driving on an eastern gale which intermits not. Wrote letters to Lord Melville, etc, and agreed to act under the Commission. Settled to be at Melville Castle, Saturday 24th. I fear this will interfere consumedly with business. I corrected proof-sheets, and wrote a good deal, but intend ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... anything with motion and excitement; then, after the fever of the day, he was drawn to a few friends and a good cigar. But back behind his straightforward democratic temperament there was a dash of good blood, the sifting down of generations of gentlemen and gentlewomen, that accounted for Harvey's inherent good taste. He could not criticise the technique of a picture, but he never selected a poor one. And the few books he really liked were the kind one can read once ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... that he had rediscovered in those mines the ancient treasures which, it is stated in the Old Testament, King Solomon of Jerusalem had found in the Persian Gulf. Whether this be true or false is not for me to decide. These mines cover an area of six miles. The miners, in sifting some dry earth gathered at different places, declared that they had found such a great quantity of gold hidden in that earth that a miner could easily collect three drachmas in a day's work. After they had explored that region, the ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... by the last-named biographer to such good purpose that he has superseded all predecessors. Thoroughness is the chief characteristic of Navarrete's work. Besides sifting, testing, and methodising with rare patience and judgment what had been previously brought to light, he left, as the saying is, no stone unturned under which anything to illustrate his subject might possibly be found. Navarrete has done all that industry and acumen could ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... to which Lee Haines had to listen, impatient, sifting the chaff from the grains of truth. Down upon Alder, exactly at midnight, had ridden a cavalcade headed by that notorious, half-legendary man-slayer, Dan Barry—Whistling Dan. While his crew of two-score hardened ruffians held the doors and the windows with leveled ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... taught in the prison were as follows, and none of them were dangerous to health except the cement-sifting by females on treadles, which had ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... in the winter, when searching for open places under the roof through which the snow was sifting, wetting the ceiling of the room below, I found in the attic a number of curious things, and among them a child's cradle. Not all the thought of the good man had been given to the needs of the "grown-ups," but the small, weak and ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... had been racing over baked deserts, a cloud of dust sifting into the car and making life miserable for the more tender passengers, though the hardy Pony Riders gave no heed to such trivial discomforts as heat and dust. They were used to that sort of thing. Furthermore, they expected, ere many more days had ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Grand Canyon - The Mystery of Bright Angel Gulch • Frank Gee Patchin
... no further sifting; and without delay they proceeded to ascertain the weight of two hundred yards of rope. A balance was soon constructed and adjusted, as nicely as if they had meant to put gold in the scale. Twenty yards of the rope already in hand was set against stones—whose weight ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... that were inflamed with dust, and immediately fresh dust bit into them. On the coarse blankets on which I lay the dust was half an inch thick. Above me, through sifting dust, I saw an arched roof of lurching, swaying canvas, and myriads of dust motes descended heavily in the shafts of sunshine that entered through holes ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... was sifting through the chinks in the shutters when I opened my eyes again. I lay stunned and faint, staring up at the mouldy frescoes on the ceiling, struggling to gather together my wandering senses and knit them into something like consciousness. ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... far as it regards man, in this machinery for sifting and winnowing the merits of races, there is a system of marvellous means, which by its very simplicity masks and hides from us the wise profundity of its purpose. Often-times, in wandering amongst the inanimate world, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... witchcraft but lightly. Since Mrs. Lynn Linton's no careful treatment of English witchcraft proper has appeared. In 1907, however, Professor Kittredge published his Notes on Witchcraft, the sixty-seven pages of which with their footnotes contain a more scrupulous sifting of the evidence as to witchcraft in England than is to be found in any other treatment. Professor Kittredge is chiefly interested in English witchcraft as it relates itself to witchcraft in New England, but his work contains much that is fresh ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... ready to execute his commissions. Now and again his dark eyes wandered toward the table where the Jew sat, with the cards flashing through his fingers. McKeever hungered to be there on the firing line! How he wished he could feel that sifting of the polished cardboard under his finger tips. They were playing Black Jack. He noted the smooth skill with which Simonds buried a card. And yet the trick was not perfectly done. Had he, McKeever, ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... manifold discrepancies was easily developed into the tranquil fulness and light variety of epic poetry, so afterwards it readily responded to the demands which the tragic writers made upon it for earnestness, energy, and compression; and whatever in this sifting process of transformation fell out as inapplicable to tragedy, afforded materials for a sort of half sportive, though still ideal representation, in the subordinate species ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... European testimony, and that only up to the Renaissance. To do that, of course, I had to dig into the East, to learn several Oriental languages—Sanskrit among them. Hebrew I already knew. Then, when I had got my languages, I began to work steadily through the whole mass of existing records, sifting and comparing. It is thirty years since I started. Fifteen years ago I finished the section dealing with classical antiquity—with India, Persia, Egypt, and Judaea. To-day I have put the last strokes to a History of Testimony from the Christian era down to the sixth ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... series 2 is composed of 2-inch poles in contact and the joints are chinked on the upper side with small stones to prevent the earth from sifting through. This arrangement was seen in a small cluster on the canyon bottom ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... many weeks afterwards ere Tom Collins succeeded in sifting this interesting point to the bottom; but perhaps the reader may not object to have the result of his inquiries noted at this ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... wore coveralls, gloves, and face masks with respirators, but that didn't prevent the stuff from sifting through onto their bodies. Rip, who directed the work and kept track of the radiation with a gamma-beta ion chamber and an alpha proportional counter, knew they would have ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage
... to be conveyed by the elevator to the crushing and cleansing machine (12). After being cleansed, the cocoa is carried in trucks (13) to hoppers (14) by which it is fed into the mills (15) on the lower floor. The sugar mill and sifting apparatus (26) placed near the crushing and cleansing machines are also fed by a hopper from above. Cocoa and sugar are now supplied to the mixing machine (16), to be worked together before passing to the rolls (17) by which the final ...
— The Food of the Gods - A Popular Account of Cocoa • Brandon Head
... vulgar superstition, and accept, absorb, and use the discoveries of Science instead, might, and possibly WILL, blossom into the true, universal, and pure Christian Fabric. Meanwhile, in the shaking to and fro of things,—the troublous sifting of the wheat from the chaff,—we must be content to follow by the Way of the Cross as best we can. Christianity has fallen into disrepute, probably because of the Self-Renunciation it demands,—for, in this age, the primal object of each individual is ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... A heavy snow was sifting through the swaying branches of the trees when Tom called Ree and the latter went on watch. This change in the weather gave the quick-witted sentinel an idea. With the first streak of dawn he called John to prepare breakfast, then hurried back to ...
— Far Past the Frontier • James A. Braden
... him was blotted out. The spur of ambition was blunted; he had no vitality with which to feel the prod of it. He was dead. His soul seemed dead. He was a beast, a work-beast. He saw no beauty in the sunshine sifting down through the green leaves, nor did the azure vault of the sky whisper as of old and hint of cosmic vastness and secrets trembling to disclosure. Life was intolerably dull and stupid, and its taste was bad in his mouth. A black screen was drawn ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... long explanation by telling them that Jones, the other midshipman, having been knocked down with a marlinespike by the second-mate, Captain Lennard had both him and Mr Capstan brought before him, when, sifting the matter to the bottom, Jones had made a clean breast of the way in which he and the ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat: Oh! be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet! ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... gentleman, of diplomatic habits (understood to be "Count Von Schulenburg-Klosterrode of Dresden"), has, since that event, unweariedly gone into the whole matter; and has brayed it everywhere, and pounded it small; sifting, with sublime patience, not only those Swedish Autographs, but the whole mass of lying books, pamphlets, hints and notices, old and recent; and bringing out (truly in an intricate and thrice-wearisome, but for ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... Horse of the West, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1945. A scholarly sifting of virtually all available material on mustangs. Readable. Only thorough bibliography on ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... a basis of either religion or ethics. The one who is moved by fear makes his chief concern the avoidance of detection on the one hand, or the escape of punishment on the other. Men of large calibre have an unusual sagacity in sifting the unessential from the essential as also the false from the true. Lincoln, when replying to the question as to why he did not unite himself with some church organisation, said: "When any church will ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... it from the bren: Examine the matter thoroughly; a metaphor taken from the sifting of meal, to divide the fine ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... decided that Mr. Raleigh was fully worth unlimited love, she added to her resolves a desire for content with whatever amount of friendly affection he chose to bestow upon her. And all this, while sifting the sugar over her raspberries. Nevertheless, she felt, in the midst of her heroic content, a strange jealousy at hearing the two thus discuss days in which she had no share, and she watched them furtively, with a sharp, hateful suspicion dawning in her mind. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... was sifting these evidences, and separating, as well as I might, the wheat from the chaff, I was in a measure training myself for what, without my then knowing it, was to become my career in life. This was not therefore altogether without a certain degree of labor, but so light and pleasant withal, so ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... one instance, familiar to me, in which it still retains its "good" signification. In "working" cochineal, spices, and other similar merchandise at the warehouse in which they are stored upon their arrival in this country, the operation of {360} sifting and separating the good from the bad is termed garbling: the word being here employed in the very same sense as in the examples quoted by E. S. T. T., illustrative of its original meaning, and which sense he erroneously stated it ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various
... perhaps, be an instructive lesson to young readers, if we now show them, by a short sifting of these confident dogmatists, how easy it is for a careless or a half-read man to circulate the most absolute falsehoods under the semblance of truth; falsehoods which impose upon himself as much as they do upon others. We believe ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... schools there should be a great sifting process under the direction of a national board of scientific men. The brain equipment of each child, the tendencies given it at birth, should be tested; then the nervous, hysterical and erratic minds ought to be [24] placed in a school by themselves, under the care of men and women who know ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... important question which of the two traditions—that reproduced by Berosus or the Biblical one—was to be considered as the oldest. Here again it was George Smith who had the good fortune to discover the original narrative (in 1872), while engaged in sifting and sorting the tablet-fragments at the British Museum. This is how it happened:[BC]—"Smith found one-half of a whitish-yellow clay tablet, which, to all appearance, had been divided on each face into three columns. In the third column of the obverse ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... bells from that old tower o'erhead, They sent their message sifting through the boughs Of cedars; when they ceased his lady said, "Pray you forgive me," and her lovely brows She lifted, standing in her moonlit place, And one short moment looked ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... the snow fell steadily and silently, sifting into each nook and corner and searching out every dark spot, until when the day came it dawned upon a city mantled in spotless white, all the dirt and the squalor and the ugliness gone out of it, ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... hard at work near the base of the great dust-heap. A certain number of cart-loads having been raked and searched for all the different things just described, the whole of it now undergoes the process of sifting. The men throw up the stuff, and the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... Dion (l. lxix. p. 1249) affirms the whole to have been a fiction, on the authority of his father, who, being governor of the province where Trajan died, had very good opportunities of sifting this mysterious transaction. Yet Dodwell (Praelect. Camden. xvii.) has maintained that Hadrian was called to the certain hope of the empire, during ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... has been actually beneficial to the reputation of its subject, contrary to its obvious design. It has caused a thorough sifting of all accessible records of the poet's short and dreary life, and elicited many reminiscences from men of mark who were in one way or another personally associated with him. We know now, more certainly than we might have done but for Griswold's effort to prove the opposite, that Poe ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... more having passed, he mounted the stairs with a quick, resolute step, to know what was the reason. He came down faster, if possible, than he went up. "Mother, mother!" he cried, rushing toward Mrs. Bowen, who stood at the table sifting meal, his gray hair streaming wildly back, and his cheek blanched with amazement, "Jinny's run away!—run away, as sure as you're a livin' woman. Her piller hasn't been touched last night, and her ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... tempest, bitter and sharp from the north, and the trees were bending and breaking under its fury. Julia was thoroughly chilled, and her feet were benumbed with cold. She had been aware for some time that snow was sifting over her, and rattling on the dry leaves under her feet. She was dizzy, and almost overcome with sleep; and was conscious of strange visions and queer voices, that seemed to haunt her senses. Could she hold out ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... be but imperfectly written now. There are many shoals in the form of diplomatic indiscretions to steer clear of; there is much weighing and sifting of political motives for serious historians to do, but the time has not come for that. Much of the romance of his long career in China lies over and above such things, and of the romantic and personal side I here set down what I have gathered from one and ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... Talib. The man was innocent of the theft, but his protestations were not believed, and he was forthwith consigned to the Pen-jara or local gaol. The tedious formality of a trial was dispensed with, and nothing in the nature of the sifting of evidence was considered necessary. The stolen kris was the property of a Prince. That was enough; and Talib went to gaol forthwith, the Raja issuing an order—a sort of lettre de cachet—for his admittance. ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... hesitation in her manner, and the man was quick to make the most of it. She wanted to stay, wanted to skip a train and let this competent guide show her Chicago. But somewhere, deep in her consciousness, a bell of warning was beginning to ring. Some uneasy prescience of trouble was sifting into her light heart. She was not so sure of her fairy tale, a good deal less sure of ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... have been turned out of their course, how, and by what, he is at first quite at a loss to tell but he has guessed and reasoned, has found cause for suspecting the planet. He watches, observes, and compares; and after a long sifting of evidence, he brings it in guilty of the disturbance. If it be so, it must have a power to disturb, a power to attract; and if so, it is not a mere shell, much less a mere vapour. It has mass and it has weight, and he calculates and ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... is forced to bow to it if he wishes his book to avoid the dreariness of a summary, and he can plead in extenuation the increased literary output of the later age, and the incompleteness with which time so far has done its work in sifting the memorable from the forgettable, the ephemeral from what is going to last. The main body of imaginative prose literature—the novel—is treated of in the next chapter and here no attempt will be made to deal with any but the admittedly greatest names. Nothing ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... difference in its effect upon us is not due to our knowledge that it is spring or autumn and our consciousness of the associations appropriate to each season. The emotional quality of the scene is largely a matter of its color. Let the spring landscape be shrouded in gray mist sifting down out of gray skies, and we are sad. Let the autumn fields and woodland sparkle and dance in the crisp golden sunlight, and our blood dances with them and we want to shout from full lungs. In music the major key wakens a different emotion from the minor. ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... biography is properly a work of partnership, to which public credit is awarded too often in an inverse proportion to the labours expended. One group of historians, labouring in the obscurest depths, dig and prepare the ground, searching and sifting the documentary soil with infinite labour and over an area immensely wide. They are followed by those scholars and specialists in history who give their lives to the study of a single period, and who sow literature in the furrows of research prepared ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... papers were lying upon it, which he had been meaning to look over; some of them might conveniently be destroyed. But at last he shuffled them roughly together, and pushed them into a corner of the valise; they were business papers, and he was in no humor for sifting them. Then he drew forth his pocket-book and took out a paper of smaller size than those he had dismissed. He did not unfold it; he simply sat looking at the back of it. If he had momentarily entertained the idea ...
— The American • Henry James
... in the evenings, between eight and nine o'clock, Anton is always sifting in front of the door, resting his head against the wall. This is his recreation, his one blessed hour of out-door air and rest. He stands with his cap in his hand while I pass, and his face shines as if all ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... had more wagons come, and neighbors had waited for neighbors, tardy at the great rendezvous. The encampment, scattered up and down the river front, had become more and more congested. Men began to know one another, families became acquainted, the gradual sifting and shifting in social values began. Knots and groups began to talk of some sort of accepted government ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... very well, but it doesn't mend matters much, so you needn't laugh, Celia," began Thorny, recovering himself, and stubbornly bent on sifting the case to the bottom, now he ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... heart of the afternoon. The sun, a ball of fire, slipped back of the tree-tops. Thick shadows stole across the stretch of dusty road. Off in the distance there was the sound of cowbell. Slowly these came nearer and nearer—as the golden light slanted, sifting deeper and deeper into ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... laid in that vicinity; but each merely speaks, in easy omniscience, of the "distant chain of blue mountains," or of the "far-off snow-peaks outlined against the horizon," and the fiction proves hardly worth sifting for so little fact. Plainly the Pyrenees lack the voluminous literature of the Alps. Plainly we shall have, in part, to grope our way. The grooves of Anglo-Saxon travel are many and deep, lined increasingly with English ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... knew Sophia to have much more generosity than her master, so her fidelity promised her a greater reward than she could gain by treachery. She then cross-examined all the articles which had raised her fears on the other side, and found, on fairly sifting the matter, that there was very little in them. And now both scales being reduced to a pretty even balance, her love to her mistress being thrown into the scale of her integrity, made that rather preponderate, ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... what you will," said my Master putting on his hat. "At present however I am mystified by your lighting on me in the dustbin of Paris. You must have done much sifting." ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... be taken into account, both in officials and immigrants, and human nature is imperfect; much of it at Ellis Island is exceedingly difficult to deal patiently with. Hence, from the very nature of things and men, the situation is one to develop pathos, humor, comedy, and tragedy, as the great "human sifting machine" works away at separating the wheat from the chaff. The tragedy comes in the case of the excluded, since the blow falls sometimes between parents and children, husband and wife, lover and sweetheart, and the decree of exclusion is ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... and importance of a revolution. The reflective activity of the Sophists in ancient Greece—a movement of the deepest ethical significance—was in the main of this nature. It consisted in a radical sifting and criticism of current moral standards, and was due almost entirely to the first class of influences, being affected only in the slightest degree by scientific ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... pecuniary rather than an industrial kind. Admission to the class is gained by exercise of the pecuniary aptitudes—aptitudes for acquisition rather than for serviceability. There is, therefore, a continued selective sifting of the human material that makes up the leisure class, and this selection proceeds on the ground of fitness for pecuniary pursuits. But the scheme of life of the class is in large part a heritage from the past, and embodies much of ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... led to this result. His attack was the prelude to the sifting of the Pope's prerogative during thirty-five years: its sifting by a rival at Constantinople, by the eastern bishops, by the eastern emperor, who had now also become the sole Roman emperor; and the sifting was ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... approbation of the Coroner, to whom he had explained his idea, Mr. Gryce began the sifting process by which he hoped to discover the one witness ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... South so long that so sudden an introduction to some of its customs came with something of a shock. He had remembered the pleasant things, and these but vaguely, since his thoughts and his interests had been elsewhere; and in the sifting process of a healthy memory he had forgotten the disagreeable things altogether. He had found the pleasant things still in existence, faded but still fragrant. Fresh from a land of labour unions, and of struggle for wealth and power, of strivings first for equality ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... clear. After this the account became so confused and contradictory that the actual truth was never known. After a good deal of sifting, the following facts were accepted as the best version of what must have taken place. According to the landlord's tale, most of the guests had left, Dick and another sailor being either the sole remaining men in the room, ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... his case and that of John Pearson, and I ask that this court adjourn until to-morrow, in order to give me time to examine the evidence in the case of the other parties under arrest. I am proud to think that my efforts have been the means of sifting the matter to the bottom, of freeing Mr. Hartsook from suspicion, and ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... was in the back of the house, a small, crowded study, with a green-shaded desk lamp. Shandor dumped the contents of the briefcase onto the desk, and settled down, his heart pounding in his throat. He started at the top of the pile, sifting, ripping out huge sheafs of papers, receipts, notes, journals, clippings. He hardly noticed when the girl slipped out of the room, and he was deep in study when she returned half an hour later with steaming black coffee. With a grunt of thanks he drank it, never shifting his ...
— Bear Trap • Alan Edward Nourse
... on the sunflower craning after thee, And burnishest my brother of the vane, And softly sifting through the linden-trees Strewest the ground with dappled gold, So fine there's no ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... Constitutional theory of defective verbs going on, all other excitement is conceivable. A universal shaking and sifting of French Existence this is: in the course of which, for one thing, what a multitude of low-lying figures are sifted to the top, and set busily ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... naked sticks of limbs. Black, then turning white. Not with heat—but cold. Ice was forming from the moisture in the humid air. And then the sudden condensation brought snow—a thick white fall of it sifting down into the palm-laden garden; falling gently, then swirling in a ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... would require deeper sifting than could be given in such an article as the present. The first of the letters (1669) is curious, as presenting the {311} appearance of forms belonging to the great calculus which, in this paragraph, we ought to call that of fluxions. We find, of the date February 18, 1669-70, what ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... now wore the overseas uniforms that they had worn in their ride over the Old Apache Trail. In addition, a red bandana handkerchief was twisted about the neck of each Overland Rider, in true western style, to keep the alkali dust from sifting down ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders on the Great American Desert • Jessie Graham Flower
... been bad, he knew the day would be a hundred times worse. Already a gray light was sifting into the hollow of the sky. The vague misty outlines of the mountains were growing sharper. Soon from a crotch of them would rise a red hot cannon ball to pour its heat into ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... But for all I could do, the evil got in among us, and we had no less than three contested bastard bairns upon our hands at one time, which was a thing never heard of in a parish of the shire of Ayr since the Reformation. Two of the bairns, after no small sifting and searching, we got fathered at last; but the third, that was by Meg Glaiks, and given to one Rab Rickerton, was utterly refused, though the fact was not denied; but he was a termagant fellow, and ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... be read like old leaves on the elm tree of Time. Sifting soft winds with sentence ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... marriage, it had been arranged Christmas should be celebrated at Allan's and New Year's at the master's. We had been looking for what people in Scotland dread, a Green Yule, for the ground was bare. When we rose the morning before Christmas we were pleased to see it white, and a gentle sifting of snow falling. Allan came for us early in the afternoon and we filled his big sleigh with children and parcels. We had just got into the house when the clouds lowered and it became suddenly dark. You have seen in summer a gentle rain prevail, until, ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... sifting sand that marks the passing year In many-colored tints its course has run Through days with shadows dark, or bright with sun, But hope has triumphed over doubt and fear, New radiance flows from stars that grace our flag. ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... day I set him to work to beating some corn out, and sifting it in the manner I used to do, as I observed before; and he soon understood how to do it as well as I, especially after he had seen what the meaning of it was, and that it was to make bread of; ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... fellowship, fain Of the live-oak, the marsh, and the main. The little green leaves would not let me alone in my sleep; Up-breathed from the marshes, a message of range and of sweep, Interwoven with waftures of wild sea-liberties, drifting, Came through the lapped leaves sifting, sifting, Came to the gates of sleep. Then my thoughts, in the dark of the dungeon-keep Of the Castle of Captives hid in the City of Sleep, Upstarted, by twos and by threes assembling: The gates of sleep fell a-trembling Like as the lips of a lady that forth falter yes, Shaken with happiness: ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... you can, all such as are inequitable, or contrary to usage, or contradictory to others. Statius told me that they were usually put before you ready written, read by himself, and that, if they were inequitable, he informed you of the fact: but that before he entered your service there had been no sifting of letters; that the result was that there were volumes containing a selection of letters, which were usually adversely criticised.[290] On this subject I am not going to give you any advice at this time of day, for it is too late; and you cannot but be aware ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... bodies is here selective, not creative. There is no colour generated by any natural body whatever. Natural bodies have showered upon them, in the white light of the sun, the sum total of all possible colours; and their action is limited to the sifting of that total—the appropriating or absorbing of some of its constituents, and the rejecting of others. It will fix this subject in your minds if I say, that it is the portion of light which they reject, ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... made a tart once," observed Dot seriously, "and instead of sifting powdered sugar on it she got hold of her sand-shaker, and when she gave Margaret Pease and me each a piece it gritted our teeth so we couldn't eat it. So then," concluded Dot, "she found ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... There were always the sky, the clouds, the clear sunshine, the crisp-etched shadows; and in the afternoon there was always the wondrous opalescent haze of August, filling every distance. There was always his garden—there were the great trees, with the light sifting through high spaces of feathery green; there were the flowers, the birds, the bees, the butterflies, with their colour, and their fragrance, and their music; there was his tinkling fountain, in its nimbus of prismatic ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... opening, gallon bottles with long necks, pots or pitchers for their bear oil, which will hold forty pints; lastly, large and small plates in the French fashion: I had some made out of curiosity upon the model of my delf-ware, which were a very pretty red. For sifting the flour of their maiz, and for other uses, the natives make sieves of various finenesses of the splits of cane. To supply themselves with fish they make nets of the bark of the limetree; but the large fish they shoot ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... fight at all," he said to Mr. Goffe, the attorney for the Countess. Mr. Mainsail rubbed his hands. Mr. Goffe shook his head. Mr. Goffe was sure that they would fight. Mr. Mainsail, who had worked like a horse in getting up and arranging all the evidence on behalf of the Countess, and in sifting, as best he might, the Italian documents, was delighted. All this Sir William feared, and he felt that it was quite possible that the Earl's overture might be rejected because the Earl would not be thought to be worth having. "We must count upon his coronet," said Sir William to Mr. Flick. ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... sailors slept in a bit of a forecastle forward; we three apprentices slung our hammocks in a bulkheaded part of the run or steerage, a gloomy hole, the obscurity of which was defined rather than illuminated by the dim twilight sifting down aslant from the hatch. Here we stowed our chests, and here we took our meals, and here we slept and smoked and yarned in our watch below. I very well remember my two fellow apprentices. One was named Corbin, and the other Halsted. They were both of ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... agricultural implements, including a perfect plough.* The main interest of all, however, lies, both here and at Behnesa, in the papyri. They consist of Greek and Latin documents of all ages from the early Ptolemaic to the Christian. In fact, Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt have been unearthing and sifting the contents of the waste-paper baskets of the ancient Ptolemaic and Roman Egyptians, which had been thrown out on to dust-heaps near the towns. Nothing perishes in,, the dry climate and soil of Egypt, so the contents of the ancient dust-heaps have been preserved intact until our ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... set out soon after to call on people whose opinion was necessary, returning for a cup of tea soon after sixteen o'clock. Then he settled down, after the rest of his office and a visit to the Blessed Sacrament, to compose his letter, which though short, needed a great deal of care and sifting. After dinner he made a few notes for next day, received visitors again, and went to bed soon after twenty-two o'clock. Twice a week it was his business to assist at Vespers in the afternoon, and he usually sang high mass ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... the Princess. Thus the two elder brothers set off with the rest; but as for Boots, they said outright he shouldn't go with them, for if they were seen with such a dirty fellow, all begrimed with smut from cleaning their shoes, and sifting cinders in the dust-hole, they said folk ...
— East O' the Sun and West O' the Moon • Gudrun Thorne-Thomsen
... creation, though not in the flagging of intellectual activity in general. In the schools and academies of Pumbeditha, Nahardea, and Sura, scientific work was carried on with the same zest as before, only this work had for its primary object the sifting and exposition of the material heaped up by the preceding generations. This was the province of the Sabureans and the Geonim, whose relation to the Talmud was the same as that of the Scribes (the Soferim) of the Second Temple to the Bible (see above, ch. vi). In the later period, ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... we see arising a host of ungoverned clubs, wherein no control is exercised over the manners of the members and adequate supervision impossible. We cannot refuse to listen to the opinion of certain royal commissioners who, after much sifting of evidence, came to the conclusion that as far as the suppression of public-houses had gone, their diminution had not lessened the convictions ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... failing in all special departments of letters will be ungrudgingly communicated. It is not enough to attain failure, we should deserve it. The writer, by way of insuring complete confidence, would modestly mention that he has had ample opportunities of study in this branch of knowledge. While sifting for five or six years the volunteered contributions to a popular periodical, he has received and considered some hundredweights of manuscript. In all these myriad contributions he has not found thirty pieces which ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... towards them like a huge, translucent top. Gaining momentum as it spun along and picking up more dust as it advanced, it came whirling onward, rising high and higher until it swept down on them, a huge, khaki-colored, balloon-like mass. It caught them in its whirl, ground its stinging, sifting particles into their clothing, their skin and even into their shut eyes. Then it passed them by, and went spinning away in its course. Carew swore softly, as he wiped the ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... forgery by which the Landgrave Philip of Hesse had been entrapped into his long imprisonment. His course in and towards the Netherlands has been sufficiently examined. Not a single charge has been made lightly, but only after careful sifting of evidence. Moreover they are all sustained mainly from the criminal's own lips. Yet when the secrecy of the Spanish cabinet and the Macchiavellian scheme of policy by which the age was characterized are considered, it is not strange that there ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... a breaker, usually more than one hundred feet above the surface of the ground. There it is dumped upon a screen of iron bars, which lets the fine salt fall through. The large lumps are sold without crushing or sifting, and are ...
— Diggers in the Earth • Eva March Tappan
... upon sifting this matter to the bottom, had written to require the Scottish regent to inform her of the share which he had taken in the intrigue, and whatever else he knew respecting it. Murray had become fully aware how much more important it was to his interests to preserve the favor and ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... mortar; the one holding the winnowing pan keeps throwing the grain into the air with a movement which causes the heavier grain to fall to the back of the pan, while the chaff and dust is thrown forward on to the mat. Her companion separates the rice dust from the chaff by sifting it through a sieve. A considerable quantity of the dust or finely broken rice is formed by the pounding in the mortar, and this is the principal food given to the pigs. The winnowed grain is usually returned to the mortar to be put through the whole process a second time. ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... depositions, and we when we came to examine them, fully recognized this possibility. The lawyers, as already observed, took pains to test each witness and either rejected, or appended a note of distrust to, the testimony of those who failed to impress them favorably. We have carried the sifting still further by also omitting from the depositions those in which we found something that seemed too exceptional to be accepted on the faith of one witness only, or too little supported by other evidence ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various |
