"Thinness" Quotes from Famous Books
... a momentary twinge, gone almost before he had realised it, a sudden clear conception of his great loneliness. The satisfaction he strove to extract from improving his estate for the benefit of his brother Gustav appeared to him at that moment to bear a singular resemblance, in its thinness, to Frau Dellwig's charitable soup. He got off his horse to speak to her, and rested his eyes, tired by looking at the hideous passions on the brawler's face, on hers. "To-day is the important day, is it not?" he asked, glancing from her ... — The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... blue overalls were dusted and cleaned, and put through this acid vat, and that acid tub, growing whiter and more pulpy with each process until it was fed into a great crushing roller that pressed the moisture out of it, flattened it to the proper thinness and spewed it out at last, miraculously, in the form of rolls of crisp, white paper. On the first day of the Easter vacation Fanny Brandeis walked down to the office of the Winnebago Paper Company's mill and applied ... — Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... the lofty disregard of doctrine which in so many quarters seems to be regarded as the hall-mark of enlightened thinking. We do well to beware of a so-called "breadth," which is but a pet euphemism for thinness. ... — Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... know that the shameful fact of Kalora's thinness was being whispered among the young men of Morovenia. When the daughters were out for their daily carriage-ride both wore flowing robes. In the case of Kalora, this augmented costume was intended to conceal the ... — The Slim Princess • George Ade
... inquiring mind, the dwarf decided to satisfy himself upon the matter. All around him lay slabs of rock, some of which were worn perfectly smooth and to the thinness of a tombstone, by centuries of polishing in the iron jaws of glaciers. Selecting one of these of convenient size, Otter approached the edge of the bridge, pushing the stone before him over the frozen snow. Here the ... — The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... had taken to prevent the galleon from passing us unobserved, we had not been inattentive to the means of engaging her to advantage, when we came up with her: For, considering the thinness of our hands, and the vaunting accounts given by the Spaniards of her size, her guns, and her strength, this was a consideration not to be neglected. As we supposed that none of our ships but the Centurion and the Gloucester ... — A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... the question of the affection of the object of his tender passion. It is only necessary for you to wear a philter upon the forehead and you can obtain the love of any woman," and giving Mesrour some directions, the Nubian brought to his master a minute bag of silk an inch square and of wafer thinness, which, both from its appearance and the rare odor of musk which it exhaled, resembled a ... — The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... well—songs, toasts and sentiments—punch, puns and witticisms, were handed about in abundance; in the mean time, the room began to wear an appearance of thinness, many of the boxes were completely deserted, and the Knights of the Bound Table were no longer surrounded by their Esquires—still the joys of the bowl were exhilarating, and the conversation agreeable, ... — Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... themselves with the effect of headlands and rocky promontories. She had a sallow complexion and a nose that was retrousse, with a prompt outward and upward thrust about the lower half of it, accompanied by a tendency to thinness as it approached its termination, quite out of agreement with the prominent cheek-bones. The whole face had a certain air of tough endurance, of determination, of resolute go-forwardness untempered by the recoil of sensitiveness. Miss Bowyer was clad ... — The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... and, though only made of the pack-saddles and cloths of his mules, had much the advantage of it, as Don Quixote's consisted simply of four rough boards on two not very even trestles, a mattress, that for thinness might have passed for a quilt, full of pellets which, were they not seen through the rents to be wool, would to the touch have seemed pebbles in hardness, two sheets made of buckler leather, and a coverlet the threads of which anyone that chose ... — Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... eyes he showed no emotion. John noticed that his features were cast in the antique mold. The pallor and thinness of his face accentuated his powerful features, and once more John was reminded of the portraits of the young Napoleon. Could there be such a thing as reincarnation? But he remembered that while a new mind like Napoleon's might be possible ... — The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... his assent to the diminishing thinness where a suspicion of the negative begins to wind upon ... — The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the seated personage. He held his head so bent upon his breast, that nothing was to be seen of his face thus thrown into shadow, except the tip of his nose, upon which fell a ray of light, and which must have been long. From the thinness of his wrinkled hand, one divined that he was an old man. It was Louis XI. At some distance behind them, two men dressed in garments of Flemish style were conversing, who were not sufficiently lost in the shadow to prevent ... — Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... wealth of love his clean young heart had in its power to give, now that he thought her unattainable and with all her own affection given to another man. And this same heart that loved her so ached and ached over Arethusa's paleness and thinness; but he accepted Miss Eliza's explanation as the literal one, that the winter in Lewisburg had been too much for her, and that all she needed was a tonic. Had Timothy talked a little to Miss Asenath, as in the ... — The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... is a continual richness in his harmonic texture. I can think of no other composer, save Wagner, whose chord-progressions are so full and opulent in colour. His tonal web is always densely woven—he avoids "thinness" as he avoids the banal phrase and the futile decoration. In addition to the plangency of his chord combinations, as such, his polyphonic skill is responsible for much of the solidity of his fabric. His pages, particularly in the more recent works, are studded with examples of felicitous and dexterous ... — Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... have attempted to prove that, owing to the planet's distance from the sun, and the thinness of its atmosphere, the temperature of Mars must be very low, probably below freezing-point even at the equator. Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace has gone further than this, and suggests that the temperature must ... — To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... was not set off by the severity of her toilet; there was no touch of spring or brightness anywhere, no look or note which should belong to one so young, unless it was the extreme thinness of her figure. ... — A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... very thin, and bake in a quick oven. The dough can be kept for days by putting it in the flour barrel under the flour, and bake a few at a time The more flour that can be worked in and the smoother they can be rolled, the better and more brittle they will be. Should be rolled out to wafer-like thinness. Bake quickly without burning. They should become perfectly cold ... — The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... side of iron; it was as good as a rope, for was not the Gordion knot tied with it? and could be whittled down as fine as a knitting needle without breaking, and still keeping its strength; it could be pounded into basket stuff, separating the layers to almost any degree of thinness. It handled every tool, from a pitchfork to an awl, and made the whole of a rake, the bows, teeth, head and staff. Besides, it had medicinal virtues; it was good for nose-bleed ever since it staunched the royal nose of King James, the ... — Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... on her dressing table in front of her. She sat with her glorious blue-black hair unbound, and falling over her shoulders, which gleamed pink through the filmy thinness of her robe. ... — The Golf Course Mystery • Chester K. Steele
... into a theoretical exposition of the universe. A sense of thinness and unreality accompanies much of their talk, because it is not, like Emerson's, in constant touch with active duty and ... — The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... saw, was of middle age and of very ordinary appearance; so ordinary, in fact, that he was difficult to describe—his only peculiarity being his extreme thinness. Pleasant—that is, good—vibrations issued from his atmosphere and met Dr. Silence as he advanced to greet him, yet vibrations alive with currents and discharges betraying the perturbed and disordered condition of his mind and brain. There was evidently something wholly out of the usual ... — Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... definite. He had gone too far, had been carried away. To be sure he had told the two men not to go near the telegraph operator, but that would no doubt but serve to arouse their suspicions of the thinness of his story. They would talk the matter over and start an investigation of their own. Then they would find out he had lied. He imagined the two men as already engaged in a whispered conversation regarding the probability of his tale. Like most shrewd men he ... — Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... newspaper building. It is a funny little affair; looks like a toy house. It is all given up to the mighty affairs of the Eastridge Banner. In front there is a piazza, and on this piazza sat Ned Temple. Changed? Well, yes, poor fellow! He is thin. I am so glad he is thin instead of fat; thinness is not nearly so disillusioning. His hair is iron-gray, but he is, after all, distinguished-looking, and his manners are entirely sophisticated. He shows at a glance, at a word, that he is a brilliant man, although he is stranded upon such a petty ... — The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... as to the thinness of French soup, for it looked like dirty water with a few pieces of bread and some scraps of vegetables floating in it. He was astonished at the piece of bread, nearly a yard long, placed on the table. ... — In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty
... once over her face, removing the tears and as the hand passed upward she smiled as sweetly as a young girl, with a pathetic and utterly charming mischievous expression. Then the palm passed downward, and her face was left again stiff and masklike, the lips twisted a little into a cruel thinness, her eyes hard as agates on my own. She was superb, and I silently ... — Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... of her own room, and with muffins and oysters for tea, Aunt Blin took out her upper teeth, that she might eat comfortably. Poor Aunt Blin! she showed her age and her thinness so. She had fallen away a good deal since she had been sick. But she was getting better. On Monday morning, she thought she would certainly be able to go out. All she had to do now was to be careful of her cough; and Bel had just bought her ... — The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... calcified scales, together with the membrane of the peduncle to which they are attached,—a case confined to Lithotrya,—I have scarcely any doubt is the reproduction of a succession of scales, sharply serrated for the purpose of enlarging the cavity in which the animal is lodged. The extreme thinness of the membrane of the peduncle has been noticed; this may be partly related to its protected condition, but partly, I think, to the necessity of its being formed in a very extensible condition; for the ... — A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... Place supposed his nebulous matter to be gas in a state of white-heat combustion, compared with which the heat of the hottest fire would be a cool bath. In no other way could he dissipate the world's substance into sufficient thinness for his vortices. But Spencer saw that this tremendous heat would be fatal to all forms of life, and especially to sensitive beings; and Tyndall shows us that this original matter must have had all the potencies of life and sensation, and a potency of sensation ... — Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... not thinness,' she said, 'but I had carried about with me the bright daring open face of my own boy. I shall learn to ... — The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... which they discover the cardinal points is curious. If an Indian happens to become confused with regard to this, he lays down his burden, and, taking his axe, cuts through the bark of a tree; from the thickness or thinness of which he can tell the north point at once, the bark being thicker ... — Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... when Jemmy appeared in it, had been for more than an hour assembled, but the thinness of the attendance not only proved the woful prevalence of sickness and distress in the parish, but sharpened the pedagogue's vinegar aspect into an expression of countenance singularly peevish and gloomy. When the lad entered, a murmur of pleasure and welcome ran through the scholars, and joy ... — The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... noted in her figure—in its solidity, its settledness—the signs of age the beauty doctors were still almost successful in keeping out of that masklike face which was their creation rather than nature's; he noted the rough-looking red of that hair whose thinness was not altogether concealed despite the elaborate care with which it was arranged to give the impression of careless abundance. He noted her hands; his eyes did not linger there, for the hands had the wrinkles and hollows and age marks which but for ... — The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... feet is shod for the first time, care must be taken to avoid excessive paring of the sole, for already the natural wear of the foot has been sufficient to keep the soft horn in a state of thinness. For the same reason hot fitting of the shoe must not be indulged in for too long a time. That common malpractice of the forge, 'opening up the heels,' must, in this case, be especially guarded against, or the excessive paring of the frog and partial ... — Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... wearing with ease gowns in the fashion of to-day. The men, somewhat grave always, accompany the music with snaps of their fingers in the air: shaven and sunburnt faces to which labor in the fields, in smuggling or at sea, has given a special thinness, almost ascetic; still, by the ampleness of their brown necks, by the width of their shoulders, one divines their great strength, the strength of that old, sober and ... — Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... wealth and respectability of the most esteem'd life appears too faint for the eye to observe at all, when little and large alike drop quietly aside at the thought of the prudence suitable for immortality. What is the wisdom that fills the thinness of a year, or seventy or eighty years—to the wisdom spaced out by ages, and coming back at a certain time with strong reinforcements and rich presents, and the clear faces of wedding-guests as far as you can look, in every direction, ... — Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... face faded into a deadlier pallor and her form wasted to a ghastlier thinness. And this was real, for she was demon-haunted—a victim of remorse, not a subject ... — Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... frames. The insertion, at the required intervals, of the plates into the perforations in these strips is made instantaneously, consequently the position of a shelf can be easily altered without an irritating expense of trouble, and waste of time. The thinness of the plates renders any mortising in the shelf unnecessary, and the small intervals between the perforations in the strips enables the whole space occupied by the shelves to be used most economically. These fittings, when used with a shelf sufficiently strong ... — The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... his arrival in England, and his brother's clothes, always too large, hung about him loose and ungraceful. His tie was grimy; his shirt frayed; his trousers turned up, but still falling over his heels; his hat, too large for him, came almost to his ears. In the increased pallor and thinness of his face, his dark eyes seemed to have come nearer together. He would have been a ludicrous object but for the intense earnestness of his expression. He came towards them with rapidly blinking eyes. He took no notice of Heneage, but he insisted upon ... — The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of silk or worsted or flax, for things are made of all these which are not drapery, but the ideas peculiar to drapery; the properties which, when inherent in a thing, make it drapery, are extension, non-elastic flexibility, unity and comparative thinness. Everything which has these properties, a waterfall, for instance, if united and extended, or a net of weeds over a wall, is drapery, as much as silk or woollen stuff is. So that these ideas separate drapery in our minds from everything else; they are ... — Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... that is the only word which applies to his appearance. His regular features, in their extreme thinness, were ethereal as the face of an angel, but he had not the painful look of emaciation which one so often sees in the faces of those long kept in confinement. He was very thin indeed, but there was a perfect grace in all his movements, an ease and self-possession in his gestures, ... — Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... his best, technically. Is there any other instance in our literature of a perfection of technique so unerring, so uniform, that it becomes actually fatiguing? It has often foolishly been said that the dazzling brilliance of Swinburne's form is apt to disguise a certain thinness or poverty of substance. It seems to me, on the contrary, that we are often in danger of overlooking the imaginative subtlety of phrases and epithets which are presented to us and withdrawn from us in a flash, on the turn of ... — Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Phipps promptly. Her cheeks had grown quite red with surprise, and she pulled in her upper lip, and bit at it hard as she looked down at her new pupil, and noted the flat nose, the wide mouth, and the elf-like thinness of the shabby figure. "Pixie! that's a very charming little name, but a fancy one, surely. What ... — Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... we have bought experience and paid for it. Never mind! experience is nearly always worth its price. And I have nearly lost my cough, and Robert is dosing me indefatigably with cod's liver oil to do away with my thinness.... ... — The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... irrepressible Sam, "unless it is that it is in my blood; for one of the last things I heard my mother say, ere I left home, was that, to judge by the thinness of the milk furnished by the farmer who supplied us, he much reminded her of Pharaoh's daughter, as he took a profit out of ... — Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... preserve a body in that condition for three weeks, and it's not cold now, but there is this:" and he showed his subordinate a small yellowish stain just at the opening of the collar, close to the Adam's apple, which, in spite of the comparative thinness of the ... — Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... define a form in outline and give it different qualities of expression by altering the quality and consistency of our outline, and we may obtain very different kinds of decorative effect by the use of lines of various degrees of thickness or thinness; but if we want to give it force and colour, and to distinguish it from its background more emphatically, we must add to ... — Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... time she saw him. He had just rounded an outcropping of rock about ten miles from the East Coast Mausoleum. They were facing each other, poised defensively, eyes alertly on each other, about twenty feet apart. She was blond and lean with the conditioning of outdoor life, almost to the point of thinness. And although not really beautiful, she was attractive and young, probably not yet twenty. Her features were even and smooth, her hair wild about her face. She wore a light blouse and faded brown shorts made from a coarse homespun material. Nelson had not expected ... — The Happy Man • Gerald Wilburn Page
... eternal image of the woman and the child; and in that instant everything within him was changed and renewed. His eyes were still absorbing her, finding again the familiar curves of her light body, noting the thinness of the lifted arm that upheld the little boy, the droop of the shoulder he weighed on, the brooding way in which her cheek leaned to his even while she looked away; then she drew back, the door closed, and the street-lamp ... — The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... the comet's surpassing thinness and lightness is not a mere speculative opinion. It rests upon incontrovertible proof. In 1770, Lexell's Comet passed within six times the moon's distance of the earth, and was considerably retarded in its motion by the terrestrial attraction. If its mass had ... — Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... not know," Anne faltered. "I could not tell you, sister. My eyes seem to stare so because of my thinness. I have seen ... — A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... as he told the story nor did his lip so much as quiver at the recollection of their sufferings. He made no effort to describe them, but the hollows in his cheeks and the dreadful thinness of his arms and little body told it all more ... — The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... a sofa, her face emaciated to a surprising thinness for the comparatively short interval since her attack. 'Come in, sir,' she said, as soon as she saw him, holding out her hand. 'Don't let ... — The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... the excellent woman, majestic now in spite of her red nose and her excessive thinness, did not care what Musa played. He had merely to play. She had decided for herself, from the conversation, that he was a very celebrated performer, and she had ascertained, by direct questioning, ... — The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... in a straight line. In some places for one reason or another, the thickness or thinness of the grass, the slope of the land, or the varying strength of the wind, the fire gained or lost ground. In some places great patches of land were cut off as islands by the joining of advanced columns ahead of them, and lay burning in triangles ... — Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... ("on top of the thinness," as he put it) she caught a heavy cold, he took the matter in dispute wholly out of ... — If You Touch Them They Vanish • Gouverneur Morris
... bought an old mediaeval painting of a Madonna. That Madonna had a stiffness, a deadly pallor, a thinness of face incompatible with strict beauty. But on the thin lips there was a smile for which no word is lovely enough; and in the eyes was a pure and far-seeing look, hardly to be imagined except by one who painted (like Fra Angelico) upon his knees. The ... — A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... staring at the same point. Day and night he grieves, shaking his head, sighing and smiling bitterly. He takes a part in conversation and usually makes no answer to questions; he eats and drinks mechanically when food is offered him. From his agonizing, throbbing cough, his thinness, and the flush on his cheeks, one may judge that he is in the first stage of consumption. Next to him is a little, alert, very lively old man, with a pointed beard and curly black hair like a negro's. By day he walks up and down the ward from window to window, or sits on his bed, cross-legged ... — The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... wilder hope that the softening was for him and not for an occasion. Emma had never seemed more desirable than to-day. A white strand or two in her yellow hair, the tiny wrinkles at the corners of her steady grey eyes, and the untimely thinness of her long white fingers made him eager to ward off the advancing years at her side, to keep unchanged, as it were, these precious evidences ... — The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... a Greek and kept an open-all-night chop-house, a mean hole in the wall two doors from the corner, where Cake's surpassing thinness made her invaluable at the sink. Also the scraps she carried home in her red, water-puckered hands helped out materially. Then her mother took a boarder and rested in her endeavours, feeling she ... — O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... flow, aside from actual local disease, is brought about by excessive muscular exercise during menstruation; by the use of all stimulants, whether alcoholic beverages or quinin; as well as by the thinness ... — The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... cooler. In the winter she wears lighter garments than he would dream of wearing, and yet stays warmer than he does, can stand more exposure without outward evidence of suffering than he can stand, and is less susceptible than he to colds and grips and pneumonias. Compare the thinness of her heaviest outdoor wrap with the thickness of his lightest ulster, or the heft of her so-called winter suit with the weight of the outer garments which he wears to business, and if you are yourself a man you will wonder why she doesn't freeze ... — 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... acquiring a mystifying, not to say sinister, aspect. First it had alarmed the girl in Mouquin's, and now this stranger in the curio-shop. I was confident that the latter had lied in regard to his explanations. The card had startled him, but his reasons were altogether of transparent thinness. A man never likes to confess that he is unlucky at cards; there is a certain pride in lying about the enormous stakes you have won and the wonderful draws you have made. I frowned. It was not possible for me to figure out what his interest in the card was. If he was a Westerner, his ... — Hearts and Masks • Harold MacGrath
... analysing the structure. By what process of logical accretion was this slight "personality," the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl, to find itself endowed with the high attributes of a Subject?—and indeed by what thinness, at the best, would such a subject not be vitiated? Millions of presumptuous girls, intelligent or not intelligent, daily affront their destiny, and what is it open to their destiny to be, at the most, that we should make an ado about it? The novel is of its very nature ... — The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... is evident from the rich store of technical expressions in the Greek language, for every gradation of the age, and character of masks. See the Onomasticon of Jul. Pollux. In the marble masks, however, we can neither see the thinness of the mass from which the real masks were executed, the more delicate colouring, nor the exquisite mechanism of the fittings. The abundance of excellent workmen possessed by Athens, in everything which had a reference to the plastic arts, will warrant the conjecture that they were in ... — Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... scarcely two inches apart, and about half as deep, and held perhaps half a million extremely small books. Each comprised many hundreds of pages, made of a perfectly opaque, bluish-white material of such incredible thinness that ordinary ... — The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... the men of marching feet—. Now and then he sang for them in that thin old voice whose thinness was so overlaid by the passion of his patriotism that those who listened ... — The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... seen on or about it, not even a cedar-bush, higher than a couple of feet at most. Against such blasts the solid wall was necessary, while the many intersecting partitions inside gave additional strength. It was a very solid structure as against winds, notwithstanding the comparative thinness of the walls,—0.63 m.—2 ft.—being their greatest width, ... — Historical Introduction to Studies Among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico; Report on the Ruins of the Pueblo of Pecos • Adolphus Bandelier
... interminable variations of St. Peter at the gate. Max Beerbohm once codified all the English comic papers and found that the following list comprised all the subjects discussed: Mothers-in-law; Hen-pecked husbands; Twins; Old maids; Jews; Frenchmen and Germans; Italians and Niggers; Fatness; Thinness; Long hair (in men); Baldness; Sea sickness; Stuttering; Bloomers; Bad cheese; Red noses. A like examination of American newspapers would perhaps result in a slightly different list. We have, of course, our purely local jokes. Boston will always be a joke to Chicago, ... — Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... excellent carbine, was at once named Abu Sittah (the Father of Six) and the Shaytan or Devil: the pocket pistol became the Malunah or Accursed, and the distance to which it carried ball made every man wonder. The Arabs had antiquated matchlocks, mostly worn away to paper thinness at the mouth: as usual they fired with the right elbow raised to the level of the ear, and the left hand grasping the barrel, where with us the breech would be. Hassan Turki had one of those fine old Shishkhanah ... — First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... the drowsy hum of mid- summer —with that charm of Italian vegetation that comes to us as its confession of having scenically served, to weariness at last, for some pastoral these many centuries a classic. In a certain cheapness and thinness of substance—as compared with the English stoutness, never left athirst—it reminds me of our own, and it is relatively dry enough and pale enough to explain the contempt of many unimaginative Britons. But it has an idle abundance and wantonness, a romantic shabbiness ... — Italian Hours • Henry James
... use of argument to persuade the men to embark in cases of this kind would have been out of place, as it is not only discomfort, or even the risk of the loss of a limb, but life itself that becomes the question. The boats, notwithstanding the thinness of our ranks, left the vessel at half-past five. The rough weather of yesterday having proved but a summer's gale, the wind came to-day in gentle breezes; yet, the atmosphere being cloudy, it had not a very favourable appearance. The boats reached the rock at six a.m., and the eight ... — The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... here's what happened in my case: I had a new man in the wheel-house, here, and he almost rammed me into Cuttyhunk, gave me a touch and go with the Pollock Rip Lightship, and had me headed toward Nauset when the fog lifted. And he was steering my courses to the thinness of a hair, at that! Say, I took a sudden tumble and frisked that chap and dragged a toad-stabber knife out of his pocket—one of those regular foot-long knives. It had been yawing off that compass all the way from a point to a point and a half. When ... — Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... fate, inasmuch as it has sunk some way in, and begun to sprout. The field, like many a one in hilly country, had places where the hard pan of underlying rock had only a thin skin of earth over it. Its very thinness helped quick germination, for the rock was near enough to the surface to get heated by the sun. So, with undesirable rapidity, growth began, and shoots appeared above ground before there was root enough made below to nourish them. There was only one possible end for such premature growth—namely, ... — Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... before he stirred, an hour in which Ellen's eyes had silently noted that which had escaped them hitherto, a curious change in his colour as he lay with closed eyes, a thinness of the flesh over the cheek bones, dark shadows beneath the eyes. Whether he slept she could not be sure. But when he sat up again these signs of wear and tear seemed to vanish at the magic of his smile, which ... — Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... to the dictates of prudence, and pay some attention to the prejudices of mankind. The sternness of age and the austerity of censoriousness are now silent. Now pleasure wears a freer garb; and the manners of enjoyment are more frank and unrestrained. The thinness of indiscretion and the airy forms of inadvertence are lost and annihilated amid ... — Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... our money, complains if it does not approximate what is bankable, but in paying us his money pours out a combination in which black sand is a predominating ingredient. Many merchants even keep a saucer of black sand in readiness to dilute their bankable gold to the utmost thinness it ... — The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... young woman, who was called Maritornes, assisted the daughter, and the two made up a bed for Don Quixote in a garret which had served for many years as a straw-loft. The bed on which they placed him was made of four roughly planed boards on two unequal trestles; a mattress which, in thinness, might have been a quilt, so full of pellets that if they had not through the holes shown themselves to be wool, they would to the touch seem to be pebbles. There was a pair of sheets made of target leather; and as for the ... — The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... readily detected with the fingers by the bulging ridge of the bone outside and along the lower edge of the molar teeth. A thickening of the lower jawbone may likewise be identified by feeling on both sides of each branch at the same time and comparing it with the thinness of this bone in a normal horse. As a result mastication becomes difficult or impossible and the teeth become loose and painful. The imperfect chewing which follows causes balls of feed to form which drop out of the mouth into the manger. Similar enlargements of the bones of the upper jaw may be ... — Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... me," said Houadir, "to see my generous benefactress deceived; but the thinness of inhabitants, occasioned by the tyranny of Almurah, is the cause that your provisions are more plentiful; but yet I insist upon bearing my part in the burden of the day, and Urad shall share ... — Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... the lips to such thinness that the depressions between the teeth were clearly revealed. From the first dose to the last breath this was a case of dying, and the most persistent fight for life against immense odds I have ever become ... — The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... of life, no way favorable to population. I apprehend that these first settled countries, so far from being overstocked with inhabitants, were rather thinly peopled, and that the same causes which occasioned that thinness occasioned also those frequent migrations which make so large a part of the first history of almost all nations. For in these ages men subsisted chiefly by pasturage or hunting. These are occupations which spread the people without multiplying them in proportion; they teach them ... — The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... it and saw with gladness her shivering cease. As I buttoned it at her throat I marvelled at the thinness of her, and at the delicacy of her face. In the opal light of the luminous sky her great grey ... — The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... who unavoidably saw the apparition (for apparition it certainly seemed) not one will ever forget it or remember it without a shudder. The figure was that of a very tall man, evidently of immense natural strength, with a face shrunk to skeleton thinness and terrible staring eyes rendered more fearful by the heavy red beard and long matted hair. It was dressed in what appeared to be white trousers, but barefoot; and its upper clothing seemed to be a shirt beneath ... — Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... The wonder would rather be that she did not set his teeth on edge if it were not that he was nearly as bad as she was. It is not a matter of facetiousness—I dare say he never tired of that; and perhaps the thinness of the jokes—little misreadings of hymns, things about the Mammon of Righteousness, and so on—in a kind of way added to the fun of them. It is their subject matter which offends. They commonly turn upon the health of the respective parents and the chances ... — In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... that held the photographs. A commanding figure! She was in black, carrying her only ornament, an embossed silver girdle and chatelaine, the gift of her husband in their first year of marriage. As she paused, motionless, in the clear sunshine, her great height and her great thinness and flatness brought out with emphasis the masculine carriage of the shoulders and the strong markings of the face. In this moment of solitude, however, the mistress of Coryston Place and of the great domain on which she ... — The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... are here in jars numbered to correspond with the trees from which they were gathered and may be compared for variation in size, shape, thinness of ... — Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Fourth Annual Meeting - Washington D.C. November 18 and 19, 1913 • Various
... never, and could never be, closed, flanked by lamp-standards carrying no lamp. Rust was the only active agent to be seen there at this time of the day and year. The palings along the front were rusted away at their base to the thinness of wires, and the successive coats of paint, with which they were overlaid in bygone days, had been completely undermined by the same insidious canker, which lifted off the paint in flakes, leaving the raw surface of the iron on palings, standards, ... — Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... assuring us that as no woman could be found to nurse the child it must die a much worse death than that to which he had put it. As a similar circumstance occurred a short time after, we have every reason to suppose the custom always prevails among them; and this may in some degree account for the thinness of population which has been observed among the natives of ... — An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... of course ashamed of it, but she told me it was very nice to be different from other people, and dressed me in crisp yellow linen or pale blue, which made me look still darker, on the principle that Sarah Bernhardt followed in exaggerating her thinness when it was the fashion to have a rounded form. My mother told me to consider my dark skin a beauty, for she believed that if children had a good opinion of themselves they ... — The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... the others, the whole may be considered as laminated or striped. The laminae, to sum up their characteristics, are either quite straight, or slightly tortuous, or convoluted; they are all parallel to each other, and to the intercalating strata of obsidian; they are generally of extreme thinness; they consist either of an apparently homogeneous, compact rock, striped with different shades of grey and brown colours, or of crystalline feldspathic layers in a more or less perfect state of purity, and of different ... — Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... has been highly satisfactory. No Bill, I believe, of such importance,—certainly no important Bill in my time, has been received with such general approbation. The very cause of the negligence of the reporters, and of the thinness of the House, is that we have framed our measure so carefully as to give little occasion for debate. Littleton, Denison, and many other members, assure me that they never remember to have seen a Bill better drawn or ... — Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... thee?' Quoth Shemseddin, 'These forty years have I been married to my wife, yet hath she borne me neither son nor daughter; and I am told that the cause of my failure to get her with child is the thinness of my seed; so I have been seeking wherewithal to thicken it, but found it not.' 'I have a thickener,' said Sheikh Mohammed; 'but what wilt thou say to him who makes thy wife conceive by thee, after forty years' barrenness? 'An thou do this,' answered ... — The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... "What is the measure of the thinness of Hope? What on earth is exceedingly difficult of acquisition? Tell me this, O holy one, for thou art well conversant with ... — The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... years that followed, Bryant produced a few other noteworthy poems, yet it is significant of the thinness of his inspiration that, though he began writing in early youth and lived to the age of eighty-four, his total product was scant in the extreme when compared with that of any of the acknowledged masters. His earnings from this source were never great, and, removing to New York, he ... — American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... that no part of our Union is more exposed to invasion by the numerous avenues leading to it, or more defenseless by the thinness of the neighboring population, or offers a greater temptation to invasion, either as a permanent acquisition or as a prize to the cupidity of grasping invaders from the immense amount of produce deposited there, than the city of New Orleans. It is ... — A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 2: James Monroe • James D. Richardson
... nitrified, which with small seedings would prove very refractory. The speedy nitrification which occurs in soil (far more speedy than in experiments in solutions under any conditions yet tried) is probably owing to the great mass of nitrifying organisms which soil contains, and to the thinness of the liquid layer which covers ... — Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... of the question on account of coarseness, the deepest waves of the record being less than one-thousandth of an inch in depth, and many of them probably ten to one hundred times as shallow. Edison finally decided to apply a preliminary metallic coating of infinitesimal thinness, and accomplished this object by a remarkable process known as the vacuous deposit. With this he applied to the original record a film of gold probably no thicker than one three-hundred-thousandth of an inch, or several hundred times less ... — Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... less bear the external atmospheric pressure when the internal air was removed. Lana himself noticed this objection, but he thought that the spherical form of the copper shell would, notwithstanding its extreme thinness, enable it, after the exhaustion was effected, to sustain the enormous pressure, which, acting equally on every point of the surface, would tend to consolidate rather than to break the metal. His proposal to exhaust the air from the globes by attaching to each a tube 36 ft. long, fitted ... — Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... on the sandspit to the cemetery. Dressed in his fresh miner's rig, (that was an accidental pun) taken so lately from our big packing boxes, Pa marched with all the dignity a man of his height and thinness can assume, with a gold pan under one arm, and a shiny pick and shovel upon his shoulder. ... — The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... Spaniards wear for the sake of cleanliness under their black ones. They are girt with a bit of native linen, so long that after having been knotted it hangs from the waist to the knees; and it serves to make their garb more decent than it would be because of the meagerness and thinness of the breeches. Or if they do not have that, then they use two brazas' length of the same cloth or silk, which at its full width they wind about the body, joined in front with one end crossed below the other. In that manner they ... — The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... them that made them feel as though they were a stranger's hands which never had belonged to him. As he looked at them with a sort of vague curiosity they seemed to swell and grow, these two strange, fettered hands, until they measured yards across, while the steel bands shrunk to the thinness of piano wire, cutting deeper and deeper into the flesh. Then the hands in turn began to shrink down and the cuffs to grow up into great, thick things as cumbersome as the couplings of a freight car. A voice that Mr. Trimm dimly recognized ... — The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... the walls of the drawing-room were pale Virgins, with long hands, reigning peacefully among angels, patriarchs, and saints in beautiful gilded frames. On a pedestal stood a Magdalena, clothed only with her hair, frightful with thinness and old age, some beggar of the road to Pistoia, burned by the suns and the snows, whom some unknown precursor of Donatello had moulded. And everywhere were Miss Bell's chosen arms-bells and cymbals. The ... — Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... 'em," Rick disagreed. "How about 'Editor and reporter assume new dimensions. Rolled to paper thinness in ... — The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... the two tired boys to Bemmon, contrasting their thinness and weariness with the way Bemmon's paunch still bulged outward and his jowls still sagged with their ... — Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... shaved heads, the same as the soldiers. Around the table shone two rows of cranial spheres, reddish or dark. Their ears stood out grotesquely, and their jaw bones were in strong relief owing to their thinness. Some had preserved the upright moustache in the style of the Emperor; the most of them were shaved or had a stubby ... — The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... a light, and the interior of the room was visible, he was surprised by the extreme thinness of the child, who seemed to be little more than skin and bone. When the little peasant had been put to bed, Benassis tapped the lad's chest, and listened to the ominous sounds made in this way by his fingers; then, after some deliberation, he drew ... — The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... assuaged by the extraordinary comfort and novelty of his environment. In the great Airedale mansion he experienced for the first time that ultimate triumph of civilization—a cup of tea served in bed before breakfast, with slices of bread-and-butter of tenuous and amazing fragile thinness. He was pleased, too, with the deference paid him as a representative of the cloth, even though it compelled him to a solemnity he did not inwardly feel. But most of all, undoubtedly, he was captivated by the loveliness and warmth ... — Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... indeed, a very picturesque and striking figure. Not so tall probably as he seems at first sight from his extreme thinness, but the pose and air could not be otherwise described than as distinguished. Head of fine type, carried well on the shoulders and in walking with the impression of being a little thrown back; long brown ... — Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... other Indians, men, women and boys, lying on the rock floor in a dreadful state of thinness ... — The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... air cells are of extreme thinness, consisting of delicate elastic and connective tissue, and lined inside by a single layer of thin epithelial cells. In the connective tissue run capillary vessels belonging to the pulmonary artery and veins. Now these delicate vessels running in the connective tissue are surrounded on all sides ... — A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... the steep, went driving a procession of yellow vapoury clouds from the sea-quarter towards the mountain Scawfell. Their colours I have called yellow, but it was exquisitely varied, and the shapes of the rocks on the summit of the ridge varied with the density or thinness of the vapours. The effect was most enchanting; for right above was steadfastly fixed a beautiful rainbow. We were a party of seven, Mrs. Wordsworth, my daughter, and Miss Fenwick included, and it would be difficult to say who was most delighted. The Abbey of Furness, ... — The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... character, Ivanhoe himself, played by Mr. BEN DAVIES, who would be quite an ideal Ivanhoe if he were not such a very real Ivanhoe—only, of course, we must not forget that he "doubles" the part. There is no thinness about "Ben Mio," whether considered as a man, or as a good all-round tenor. I did not envy Ivanhoe's marvellous power of sleep while Miss MACINTYRE was singing her best, her sweetest, and her loudest. For my part I prefer to believe that the crafty Saxon was "only purtendin'," ... — Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... added cares in the thinness of her face and certain drawn lines about the mouth, but it had not lost ... — A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... gay; the old chimney-stacks, towering into the pale blue sky, threw sharp shadows on the rich red and orange surface of the tiles. Below, the court was half in shadow, and utterly quiet and deserted. To the left there was a gleam of green, atoning for its spring thinness and scantiness by a vivid energy of colour; while straight across the court, beyond the rich patchwork of the roofs and the picturesque outlines of the chimneys, a delicate piece of white stone-work rose into air—the spire of one of Wren's churches, as ... — Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... It was well that, having made the round of the garden, they came suddenly upon Mr. Hale, whose whereabouts had been quite forgotten by them. He had not yet finished the pear, which he had delicately peeled in one long strip of silver-paper thinness, and which he was enjoying in a deliberate manner. It was like the story of the eastern king, who dipped his head into a basin of water, at the magician's command, and ere he instantly took it out went through the experience of a lifetime. I Margaret felt ... — North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... feebleness has become so feeble as even to invent a theory, making thinness of voice, weakness of stamina, and general emasculation literary virtues; when intellect can find adequate interest only in the chess-puzzles of a Browning, and the sense of humor can find adequate sustenance only in the table-leaping antics of a Mark Twain, and the conscience can be goaded into ... — Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... "And yet you are changed,—I do not know how; it isn't all thinness, or paleness. What is ... — Opportunities • Susan Warner
... are interesting as music, and the workmanship is skilful. If one can get over the thinness of the part-writing, especially in the slow movements, there is much to enjoy in them. The style of movement—Tempo di Menuetto—in No. 2 recalls Emanuel Bach's "Wuertemberg" ... — The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... witnesses and directors of the public counsels. Very few of the senators, whom chance had thrown in the way, were forced to attend the consuls; fear prevented the rest from coming not only to the house, but even to the forum. Nor could any thing be done by reason of the thinness of the senate. Then indeed the people began to think their demand was eluded, and the redress of their grievances delayed; that such of the senators as had absented themselves did so not through chance or fear, but on purpose to obstruct the business. That ... — The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... had stopped at the sound of the morning cannon, we found great difficulty in gathering together even a cold breakfast of ekmek, yaourt, and raisins. Ekmek is a cooked bran-flour paste, which has the thinness, consistency, and almost the taste of blotting-paper. This is the Turkish peasant's staff of life. He carries it with him everywhere; so did we. As it was made in huge circular sheets, we would often punch a hole in the middle, and ... — Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... succeeded in splitting a mineral substance called mica into films of such extreme thinness as to give brilliant colours. One plate, for example, gave a yellow colour, another a blue colour, and the two together a deep purple, but as plates which produced this colour were always less than the twelve-thousandth part of an inch thick it was quite impracticable, ... — The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... atrophy, but I am inclined to think that this idea was only partially correct. The stomach walls of the autumn yearling trout, which is artificially reared on soft food, do not show any marked abnormality in the way of thinness; but as the trout's age increases, so does the thickness of the stomach wall decrease in proportion to its size. This leads me to believe that the development of the stomach wall, at any rate, and probably ... — Amateur Fish Culture • Charles Edward Walker
... it is proved that the small extent of the new wall between A and n will settle but little, in proportion to the extent of the same wall between c and d. The proportion will in fact be that of the thinness of the mortar in relation to the number of courses or to the quantity of mortar laid between the stones above the different levels ... — The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... observation was repeated on another pod, which had partially buried itself in sawdust, and which was lifted up a quarter of an inch above the surface; it described three very small circles in 24 h. Considering the great length and thinness of the peduncles and the lightness of the pods, we may conclude that they would not be able to excavate saucer-like depressions in sand or sawdust, or bury themselves in moss, etc., unless they were aided by their ... — The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... was the thin little children. Elisabeth hadn't come to us yet," Roger went on, referring to a Belgian baby that had been sent to the Club to take care of, "and I wasn't so accustomed to thinness as I've grown to be since, and it made me—well, it just made ... — Ethel Morton at Rose House • Mabell S. C. Smith
... wax is, I do not see that there is any difficulty in the bees, whilst at work on the two sides of a strip of wax, perceiving when they have gnawed the wax away to the proper thinness, and then stopping their work. In ordinary combs it has appeared to me that the bees do not always succeed in working at exactly the same rate from the opposite sides; for I have noticed half-completed rhombs ... — On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... a good deal rouged to-night, but with natural shadows under the eyes and below the arch of the brows which were toned to correspond with the evidently dyed hair. Her dress, a Paris creation of pale satin and glistening embroidery, was draped to hide her thinness, and her neck and throat were almost covered with strings of pearls and clusters of clear-set diamonds. Judging from the way in which the Leichardt'stonians stared at her as she came down the stairs, it seemed probable that none of them ... — Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... QUALITY, 'timbre,' the characteristic of a sound determined by the number of partial tones (overtones), as richness, sweetness, thinness, stridency; hence sometimes applied to the musical quality of a verse or phrase, 6 and ... — The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... poet thought it an impertinence to add any harmonies of his own. If it were only extant as a whole, it would be one of the most notable of poems. Where else is there anything like it, for sincerity and for thinness? ... — Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... carrying four insides, whose extreme thinness enabled them to travel thus economically without experiencing the slightest inconvenience. These four personages were, two very profound critics, Mr Gall and Mr Treacle, who followed the trade of reviewers, but occasionally indulged themselves in the composition of bad poetry; and two ... — Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... exility of bones, thinness of skulls, smallness of teeth, ribs, and thigh-bones, not improbable that many thereof were persons of minor age, or women. Confirmable also from things contained in them. In most were found substances resembling ... — Notes and Queries, Number 52, October 26, 1850 • Various
... had grown thinner than ever, or rather that her thinness, which had formerly had a healthy reed-like strength, now suggested fatigue and languor. And her face was spent, extinguished—the very eyes were lifeless. All her vitality seemed to have withdrawn itself into the arch ... — The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... vergeth towards the southern parts, by reason of the thinness and fineness that is in the south; the northern parts are more compacted, they being congealed by a rigorous cold, but those parts of the world that are opposite are enfired. Democritus, because, the southern parts of the air being the weaker, the earth ... — Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... How many times he had watched them or their duplicates striding and mincing and bounding by, each moving like an animated note of interrogation! They were long, and medium, and short. There were women of a thinness beyond comparison, sheathed in skirts as featly as a rapier in a scabbard. There were women of a monumental, a mighty fatness, who billowed and rolled in multitudinous, stormy garments. There were slow eyes that ... — Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... kitchen door timidly opened, and Miranda, who had been astir for nearly an hour and had the table already laid for breakfast, stepped into view, and, with a smile on her face that actually broadened its thinness dangerously near to the proportions of a genial and happy reciprocation of the jovial greeting, dropped ... — How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... of such a nature as to induce over-abundance of fat, the child will be born too fat. This does not mean a healthy child by any means, and it may mean considerable extra pain for the mother. A mother inclined to thinness need not fear that this diet will reduce her. The taking of cream, eggs, bacon and other fat foods often has the opposite effect from that desired. A thin person adopting the above light diet will generally ... — Papers on Health • John Kirk |