"Thinning" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... forefront. It rolled up to and across a concrete highway, watched by perspiring motor cops who had performed miracles in clearing a path for it among the horde of sightseeing cars. It swept on into a spindling pine wood. Behind it lay a thinning sheet of vapor—thick white mist which seemed to rise and move more swiftly to overtake the main body. It lay across the highway in a sheet which was ten feet deep, then ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... gave a guttural "Good-night," and Landless strode on through the thinning woods. Shortly he emerged from the forest and saw before him tobacco fields and a house, and beyond the house the vast sheet of the Chesapeake slumbering beneath the moon. There was a beaten path leading to the house. Landless struck into it and followed it until it led him beneath ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... Virata's son, to Arjuna. When shooting them in battle against foes, these swift arrows blaze forth more brilliantly and become inexhaustible. And these long and thick shafts resembling the lunar crescent in shape, keen-edged and capable of thinning the enemy's ranks, belong to Bhima. And this quiver bearing five images of tigers, full of yellowish shafts whetted on stone and furnished with golden wings belong to Nakula. This is the quiver of the intelligent son of Madri, with which he ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... the swirling clouds were passing on; in the distance the thunder was fainter. The wind began to freshen from the track of the rain, the pigeons came out of the courthouse tower for a look around, light broke through the thinning clouds. ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... wiped it dry on her apron. She opened the oven and took out the browned cobbler. Sweet apple juice bubbled to the surface through the half moons and burst in delights of sugary aroma. The sun broke through the thinning edge of ...
— One Martian Afternoon • Tom Leahy
... but the finger descended, and instantly there was a terrific explosion. The very foundation seemed shaken, and a dense cloud of smoke rolled over the heads of the audience. As the Professor became visible through the thinning smoke, he looked around for his audience. Every man was under the benches, and groans came from all parts of the hall. "I hope," said the Professor, in anxious tones, "that no one has been hurt. I am afraid that I took up too ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... his own voice. The man ignored him. Brett moved along behind the crowd, looking for a vantage point or a thinning in the ranks. There seemed to be fewer people ahead. He came to the end of the crowd, moved on a few yards, stood at the curb. The yellow-jackets had passed now, and a group of round-thighed girls in satin blouses and black boots ...
— It Could Be Anything • John Keith Laumer
... to note the increasing number of bright, sensible, earnest young women coming from all parts of the country to aid the older workers and to close up their thinning ranks. The sight would be a revelation to that Massachusetts legislator who was lately reported as saying that the petitioners who had been asking for suffrage for so many years were fast dying off, and soon there would be none left. He would have seen how greatly he ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... we followed the road behind Hill 123, up a glorious valley, whose sides were thickly wooded with pines, gradually thinning under the destruction wrought by Austrian shell fire and the Italian military need for timber. The only other vegetation here was a little coarse grass. On the lee side of Hill 123, sheltered from ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... woods were cut down regularly every year, certain squares marked off. The first day's work was the marking of the big trees along the alleys which were to remain—a broad red ring around the trunks being very conspicuous. Then came the thinning of the trees, cutting off the top branches, and that was really a curious sight. The men climbed high into the tree, and then hung on to the trunk with iron clamps on their feet, with points which stuck into ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... twenty-seven years of age, was not yet all thin and worn. The sharp bony edges and corners of her head and face were still rounded out with flesh, but already the temper and the humor showed sharply in her clean blue eyes, and the thinning was begun about the lower jaw, that was so often strained with the upward ...
— Three Lives - Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena • Gertrude Stein
... mourning garments certainly made her look pale, but Margaret was not a sufficiently keen observer to note the additional depth of expression in Janetta's dark eyes, or the slightly pathetic look given to her features by the thinning of her cheeks and the droop of her finely curved mouth. Lady Caroline, however, noticed all these points, and was quite aware that these changes, slight though they were, gave force and refinement to the girl's face. Secretly, she was embittered against Janetta, and this new ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Ryder was surprisingly well preserved. With the exception of the slight stoop, already noted, and the rapidly thinning snow-white hair, his step was as light and elastic, and his brain as vigorous and alert, as in a man of forty. Of old English stock, his physical make-up presented all those strongly marked characteristics ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... brought them again under the women's eyes. He took her arm and drew her aside to the rail of the boat's stern. They stood there, watching the wake boiling and breaking and thinning, a white lace of froth on the glassy green. Sutton ...
— The Romantic • May Sinclair
... my order, of fitting size and dimensions, to receive Jack's hatchet and saw. Jack and I have set up a sort of Sir Walter and Tom Purdie companionship of clearing and cutting paths through the woods nearest to the house; thinning the overhanging branches, clearing the small evergreen thickets which here and there close over and across the grassy track. To me this occupation was especially delightful until quite lately, since the weather began to be rather warmer and the snakes to slide about. Jack has contrived to inoculate ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... should be a civilized and Christianized part of the world, the philanthropist is sometimes put in doubt whether to repress, or indulge, the sentiment which tempts him to complacency in the operation of an epidemic which is thinning their numbers. ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... resorption. A large plaque may flatten in the center until an annular disk is left to show its former location. Coincident symptoms are disturbance in the functions of the sweat and sebaceous secretion, thinning and loss of hair in the regions involved, especially the eyebrows, and disorders of sensibility. Later results, are a nasal catarrh, atrophy of the sexual organs in both sexes, with impairment or loss of procreative power, hopeless blindness. However the course ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... which transcended Forsyteism. For it is written that a Forsyte shall not love beauty more than reason; nor his own way more than his own health. And something beat within him in these days that with each throb fretted at the thinning shell. His sagacity knew this, but it knew too that he could not stop that beating, nor would if he could. And yet, if you had told him he was living on his capital, he would have stared you down. No, no; a man did not ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... now here, now there, and the ranks of the enemy were already thinning, while the numbers ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... battle Nathaniel's voice rose in thundering shouts to the men in the sea, and close beside him he heard Neil shrieking out a name between his blows. Like demons they fought straight ahead, slashing with their knives. The Mormon line was thinning. The mainlanders had turned and were fighting their way back, gaining foot by foot what they had lost. Suddenly there came a terrific cheer from the plain and the hope that had flamed in Nathaniel's breast died out as he heard it. He knew what it meant—that the Mormons ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... now see that the trees were thinning out. Still further ahead they knew that there must lie either plantation ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Philippines - or, Following the Flag against the Moros • H. Irving Hancock
... the glen at the back of the house (the Cape Flora of Martin Conrad), so I took him into that, not without an increasing sense of embarrassment. It was a clear October day, the glen was dry, and the air under the shadow of the thinning trees was full of the soft ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... been more or less commonly in use. This is called scumbling, and may be considered under the head of solid painting, as it is always done with body, and never with transparent, color. The process consists of rubbing a mixture of body color, without thinning, over a surface previously painted and dried. Generally this scumble is of a lighter color than the under-painting, and is rubbed on with a stubby brush slightly charged with the paint. As much surface as is desired ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... further step, and then spoke his name again. There was a slight movement. He was awake, and merely very unhappy and perhaps exhausted. With the slightest feeling of self-consciousness she advanced to Gaga's side, and laid a hand upon his shoulder. She could see the thinning hair upon the top of his head, and the long slim ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... what," said Tom to himself, "it's much pleasanter sitting here in the shade, than broiling over celery trenches, and thinning wall fruit, with a baking sun at one's back, and a hot wall before one's eyes. But I'm a miserable slave. I must either work or see my family starve; a very hard lot it is ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... then two o'clock. The merry-makers were thinning out; she was quite alone at her end of the place. By this time a close observer might have noticed that she was trembling violently; there was an air of abject fear ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... On the sealing grounds, when hove to, a watch of only a single man is kept through the night, each man holding the deck for an hour. It was a dark night, though not a black one. The gale was breaking up, and the clouds were thinning. There should have been a moon, and, though invisible, in some way a dim, suffused radiance came from it. I paced back and forth across the deck amidships. My mind was filled with the event of the day and with the horrible ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... starboard side of the deck, noticing as I did so that there was a faint lightening in the fog away to windward, showing that the dawn was approaching; and as I turned on the forecastle to go aft again, I observed that the fog was thinning away famously on the weather quarter. As I walked aft I kept my eyes intently fixed on this thin patch, which appeared to be a small but widening break in the curtain of vapour that enveloped us, for it was evidently drifting along with the wind. I had reached as far aft as the main rigging, ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... that I first noticed—not light, but a thinning out of the darkness. It was, of course, merely the adjustment of my eyes to the new conditions. I could make out no forms surrounding me, but, looking down, I could clearly distinguish the outline of my hands as they lay on the ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... dull maize yellow tinge over the larger part of the pileus, but even then the center is often brown in color, shading into the yellow color toward the margin; the light yellow forms in age, often thinning out to a cream color. The flesh of the pileus is rather thin, even in the center, and becomes very thin toward the margin, as shown in Fig. 67. The scales on the pileus are more or less flattened, rather thin, clearly separated from the pileus, and easily removed. They are more ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... person, but would act invariably upon the old recognized rule of etiquette observed at other courts in such matters—i.e., he would present anybody who had been presented at the court of St. James, and none who had not been so presented. The result was soon apparent in a singular thinning of the magnificent suites of rooms of the Pitti on ball-nights. The general appearance of the rooms might be something more like what the receiving-rooms of princes are wont to look like, but all that was gained in quality was attained by a very marked sacrifice of quantity. In a week ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... drink and sandwiches he could eat, and manners he could tolerate. And remembering the ghastly sawdust-eating waiting-rooms of the North English railways, he wrote that rich chapter in Mugby Junction. Matthew Arnold could have told him that this was but a part of the general thinning down of European civilisation in these islands at the edge of it; that for two or three thousand years the Latin society has learnt how to drink wine, and how not to drink too much of it. Dickens did not in the least understand the Latin society: but he did understand the ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... Romans, they were indeed getting ready to cross the ford when the mist should have risen; and on the bank it was thinning already and melting away; for a little air of wind was beginning to breathe from the north-east and the sunrise, which was just at hand; and the bank, moreover, was stonier and higher than the meadow's face, which fell away from it as a shallow dish from its rim: ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris
... beautification of their churchyard, decide to do what is necessary with no needless alterations. This plan of preservation, as already intimated, is probably the most desirable. But we know instances, especially in and around London, where good work has been done by judiciously thinning out the crop of tombstones, clearing away the least presentable features of the place, and making the ground prim with flower-beds and borders. To do this much, and to introduce a few seats, will leave the graveyard ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... into the business of the courts you are enabled to diminish the number of judges, which is a very great advantage. When judges are very numerous, death is perpetually thinning the ranks of the judicial functionaries, and laying places vacant for newcomers. The ambition of the magistrates is therefore continually excited, and they are naturally made dependent upon the will of the majority, or the individual who fills up the vacant appointments; the ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... her to the telephone, every fraction of the day had its appointed pleasure. Julia must swiftly eliminate from her life much of the rich feminine tradition of housewifery; it was not for her to darn her husband's hose, to set exquisite patches in thinning table linen, to gather flowers for jars and vases. Julia never saw Jim's clothing except when he was wearing it, the table linen was Ellie's affair, and Lizzie had the entire lower floor bright and fragrant with ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... making two furrows again, this time for beet seeds. These may also be sown thickly. The plants may be thinned out afterward. The small plants that are pulled out will make excellent greens. When the thinning is completed the remaining plants should stand from four to six inches apart, according to variety; some beets ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... the table outside the cafe. A cold wind was blowing. The sky was blue-black and the ashen white arc lamps cast a mortuary light over everything. In the Colonnade of the Palais Royal the shadows were harsh and inky. In the square the people were gradually thinning. The lights in the Magazin du Louvre had gone out. From the cafe behind him, a faint smell of fresh-cooked food began to saturate the cold air ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... a dry-eyed one, women in spite of themselves with lips whitening, men grim with pride and an innermost bleeding, sagged suddenly, thinning and trickling back into the great, impersonal maw of the city. Apart from the rush of the exodus, a youth remained at the rail, gazing out and quivering for the smell of war. Finally, ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... just about the delay that he had expected, and Robert's hand sprang to the trigger at the very moment the man pulled his own. The bullet hummed by his cheek. His finger contracted and then it loosened. A sudden acuteness of vision, or a chance thinning of the fog at that point, enabled him to see the man's face, and he recognized the French partisan, Charles Langlade, known also to the Indians as the Owl, who, with his wife, the Dove, had once held him in a ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... but did not really agree with her in the least. Fontenoy's air of overwork was more decided than ever; his eyes had almost sunk out of sight; the complexion of his broad strong face had reddened and coarsened from lack of exercise and sleep; his brown hair was thinning and grizzling fast. Nevertheless a man saw much to admire in the ungainly head and long-limbed frame, and did not think any the better of a woman's intelligence ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... us spoke after that, until he said with a sigh, "Well, well, my dear! Bleak House is thinning fast." ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... group of warriors passed within a dozen feet of us, driving to their camp some strayed beeves from the high rolling bottom-lands to the east. When the last of them had passed I observed with great alarm a thinning out of the ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... beyond the bare divide there rose against the southern sky a bold, oblong height or butte, studded with bowlders and stunted pine, and watchers at the fort became aware as the sun climbed higher that the smoke cloud, thinning gradually but perceptibly, was slowly drifting thither. The fire, too, grew faint and scattering. The war-whoops rang and re-echoed among the rocks, but all sound of cheering had long since died away. ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... changed considerably in appearance since that last holiday that he spent in his mother's house at Finden. At present he would have been taken for five-and-thirty, though only in his twenty-ninth year; his hair was noticeably thinning; his moustache had grown heavier; a wrinkle or two showed beneath his eyes; his voice was softer, yet firmer. It goes without saying that his evening uniform lacked no point of perfection, and somehow it suggested a more elaborate ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... scale are, as already stated, not uncommon in some parts of the United States. They have another object besides the sport—that of thinning off the squirrels for the protection of the planter's corn-field. So destructive are these little animals to the corn and other grains, that in some States there has been at times a bounty granted, for killing them. In early times ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... do you behave as if it were?" "I won't, uncle. Honor bright! You watch me." And next day, in front of Port Gibson, through all the patter, smoke, and crash, through all the charging, cheering and volleying, while the ever-thinning, shortening gray lines were being crowded back from rise to rise—back, back through field, grove, hedge, worm-fence and farmyard, clear back to Grindstone Ford, Bayou Pierre, and with the cavalry, Harper's, cut off and ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... the first room, and, after a quarter of an hour, found himself in the door-way of the second. He had arrived late, and the rooms were already thinning. ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... of domes, flanked by a pair of slender minarets, daintily proclaimed the Mosque Yeni-Djami against the fading amber. On Galata Bridge itself, the day-long tide of medleyed life was thinning. Where there had been an eddying current of turbans and tarbooshes, bespeaking all the tribes and styles which foregather at the meeting place of two Continents and two seas, there were now only ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... cut was full twelve feet long, being a very strong but light and tough young tree, which merely required thinning at the butt to ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... on something. It may have been a tree-stump embedded there, or a rock—he never knew. At least, it was firm, and to it he hung despairingly. Would that rush never cease? His lungs were bursting; he must let go! Oh! the foam was thinning; his head was above it now; now it had departed, leaving him like a stranded fish upon the shingle. For half a minute or more he lay there gasping, then looked behind him to see another comber approaching through the gloom. He ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... The original thickening and thinning of the lines of the classic Roman capitals was partly due to the imitation in stone inscriptions of the letter forms as they were written on parchment with the pen. The early Latin scribes held their stiff-nibbed reed pens almost directly ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown
... largely a matter of chance that but a few of the tens of thousands of eggs ever really have a chance to become young oysters. You can help that in two ways, one by preparing the ground so that everything is made easy for the young oysters to have a chance, the other by thinning them out or transplanting the young oysters or 'spat' as they are called, improving and enlarging ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... and fields of tobacco stretching away on all sides. The rare traveler, pursuing his devious way on horseback or in a boat, would catch sight of these noble estates opening up from the road or the river, and then the forest would close in around him for several miles, until through the thinning trees he would see again the white cabins and the cleared fields ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... classes to the service of Education, waxed daily more numerous and more insolent on the strength of their immunity from the old burden which had formerly exercised the twofold wholesome effect of at once taming their brutal nature and thinning their excessive numbers. ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... drove me away, because they fancied I manufactured love-powders. O dear, as if there was any need of 'em nowadays. Then once upon a time I was a tailor; the outcry was, I thieved too much: a pastrycook; all accused me of thinning the cat and dog population. I wanted to put on a monk's cowl; but no convent would let me in. Then came my doctoring days, and I was to be burnt; for they muttered about, what think you? witchcraft. I became a scholar, wrote essays, systems of philosophy, poems: those who could ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... give the crop trees space, give them plenty of room to grow. In the woods they start to grow in a dense undergrowth. The young trees soon reach a height where they begin to dominate their neighbors. There you pick the straight, thrifty-growing trees for crop trees and favor them in your thinning and pruning operations. Tree density influences diameter growth of the trees. In thick stands, trees are usually small and spindly. So plant a large number to give the crop trees good form, then thin the plantation ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... are found throughout South America, and are excessively abundant and destructive to birds' nests in some districts. In most cases, in the big, strong-domed nest or deep burrow, all the eggs are hatched and all the young reared, the thinning, out process commencing only after the brood has been led forth into a world beset with perils. With other families, on the contrary, the greatest amount of destruction falls on the eggs or fledglings. I have frequently kept a dozen or twenty pairs ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... were commanded; but fearful of detection, they adopted strange disguises, not unlike those worn by the caitiffs who were put to death, a few weeks ago, by the king in the great park. Night after night they thus went forth, thinning the herds of deer, and committing other outrages and depredations. Nor were their dark proceedings altogether unnoticed. Belated travellers crossing the forest beheld them, and related what they had seen; others watched for them, but they ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... again and again blotted out whole lengths of the defenses and killed the defenders by scores. Time after time along those parts of the front selected for assault were parapets destroyed, and time after time did the thinning band of survivors build them up again and await the next onset as ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... that one chief cause of the desertion which was thinning his army was the natural unwillingness of the men to leave their families in a state of destitution. Cork and its neighbourhood were filled with the kindred of those who were going abroad. Great numbers of women, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... apron. Denzil was wearing a heavy overcoat with a fur collar. He was never seen without it in public during the winter. In private he removed it and sat in his shirt sleeves. Crowl was a thinker, or thought he was—which seems to involve original thinking anyway. His hair was thinning rapidly at the top, as if his brain was struggling to get as near as possible to the realities of things. He prided himself on having no fads. Few men are without some foible or hobby; Crowl felt almost lonely at times in his superiority. He was a Vegetarian, a Secularist, a Blue ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... the ground to pick up passengers, then veering away. The gap in the starship's side was closing, and still Bart had not seen the tall, slim, flame-haired figure of his father. The port on the other side of the ship, he knew, was for loading passengers. Bart moved carefully through the thinning crowd, almost to the foot of the stairs. One of the Lhari checking papers stopped and fixed him with an inscrutable gray stare, but finally turned ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... their second loads there was another hurly-burly, but the decks were thinning out, and pushing to the nearest ladder Charley and the Fremonter managed to climb down, lowering their baggage, into the boat there. The boat was loaded full almost instantly, and away it pulled, ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... of color has never been fully agreed upon. Some writers maintain that the character of its hues depends on the number of undulations of a ray. Goethe's theory is substantially, that colors are produced by the thinning or thickening and obstructing of light. Brewster contends that there are but three primary colors,—red, yellow, and blue. Wollaston finds four,—red, yellowish green, blue, and violet. But this, as well as the consideration of the solar spectrum ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... Indian mind to the exclusion of lesser warriors, I have never yet decided. But the fact remains that the Indians of our generation are not as familiar with Bonaparte's name as were their fathers and grandfathers, so either the predominance of English-speaking settlers or the thinning of their ancient war-loving blood by modern civilization and peaceful times, must one or the other account for the younger Indian's ignorance of the Emperor of ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... people were thinning off by degrees as Charlotte and Eleanor walked about in quest of Bertie. Their search might have been long had they not happened to hear his voice. He was comfortably ensconced in the ha-ha, with his back to the sloping side, smoking a cigar, and eagerly engaged in conversation with some youngster ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... stump of a felled tree, with the lichen-covered trunk itself near it, and a patch of grassy turf. The eye cannot penetrate far through the riotously growing underbrush, but as one looks upwards, to the left, a thinning of foliage, allowing a glimpse of the sky, gives evidence of the near proximity of some small body ...
— The Noble Lord - A Comedy in One Act • Percival Wilde
... boards open, and a pencil line drawn round them, a mark being made to show where the back comes. The skin is then pared, making it thin where the edge of the boards will come. Great care must be taken that the thinning does not commence too abruptly, or a ridge will be apparent when the ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell
... honorable, not according to the number, but the character of its residents. The drunkards and the paupers and the thieves and the idiots rather diminish than increase its respectability. It seems to me that the world would be greatly benefited by thinning out. Most of the places that I have seen would be much improved by being decimated, not to say quinqueted or bisected. If people are stubborn and rebellious, stiff-necked and uncircumcised, in heart and ears, the fewer of them the better. A small population, trained to honor and virtue, to liberality ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... their patroness lived, did pretty well. She got a tragedy of his accepted at her theater. She made him send her a copy, and with her scissors cut out about half; sometimes thinning, sometimes cutting bodily away. But, lo! the inherent vanity of Mr. Triplet came out strong. Submissively, but obstinately, he fought for the discarded beauties. Unluckily, he did this one day that his patroness was in one of her bitter humors. So she instantly gave him ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... and town was thinning fast. Parliament still lingered, but only for technical purposes; the political struggle of the session having terminated at the end of July. One social event was yet to be consummated—the marriages of Lothair's cousins. They were to be married on the same day, at ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... respects, for all that. If all loungers, of slender revenues, like mine, could command a constant succession of invitations, from men of estates in the country, how amazingly it would tend to the thinning of Bond Street! [Throws himself into a Chair near the Writing Table.] Let me see—what has Sir Simon been reading?—"Burn's Justice"—true; the old man's reckoned the ablest magistrate in the county. he hasn't cut open the leaves, I see. "Chesterfield's ...
— John Bull - The Englishman's Fireside: A Comedy, in Five Acts • George Colman
... middle of July, green apples are so large as to remind us of coddling, and of the autumn. The sward is commonly strewed with little ones which fall still-born, as it were,—Nature thus thinning them for us. The Roman writer Palladius said,—"If apples are inclined to fall before their time, a stone placed in a split root will retain them." Some such notion, still surviving, may account for some of the stones which we see placed to be overgrown in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... was not properly fitted. It was short-waisted, and gave her figure a short, chunky appearance. This chunky aspect, with her sharp face and strained back hair, made her seem fairly hideous to herself. But she remained firm. Her firmness, in reality, was one cause of the tightening and thinning of her lips. She hesitated when about to go down-stairs. She had not heard Evelyn go down. She wondered whether she had better wait until she went, or go into her room. She finally decided upon the latter course. Evelyn was standing in front of her dresser brushing her hair. When Maria entered she ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... began to lessen a little and allowed him to look around. Wherever he turned a sea of faces met him—faces strangely set and strained. Even under the joviality of those closest to him he saw the tightened sinews of their jaws. Those further away were blurred by the smoke that rose in a never-thinning cloud, blurred until there was nothing but indistinct blotches of white in ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... already in the suburban chain that ringed the great city. This place—he did not know its name, certainly—was quite a town in itself. And he was so close to London that there was no real open country. One town or borough ran right into the next. The houses would grow fewer, thinning out, but before the gap became real, the outskirts of the next ...
— Facing the German Foe • Colonel James Fiske
... well understood, for the Complete Farmer, s.v. Turnips (ed. 3), says that about 1750 Norfolk farmers boasted that turnips had doubled the value of their holdings, and Norfolk men were famous for understanding hoeing and thinning, which were little practised elsewhere. Further, Young, Southern Tour, p. 273, says: 'the extensive use of turnips is known but little of except in Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex. I found no farmers but in these counties that understood anything of fatting cattle with them; ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... Their fire covered the advance of the troops, and silenced more than one of the enemy's guns. "The American ships," writes a British historian, "with their heavy discharges of round and grape, too well succeeded in thinning the ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... building up Irish character and developing Irish industry and commerce. 'Agitation,' as Thomas Davis said, 'is one means of redress, but it leads to much disorganisation, great unhappiness, wounds upon the soul of a country which sometimes are worse than the thinning of a people by war.'[14] If Irish politicians had at all realised this truth, it is difficult to believe that the popular movement of the last quarter of a century would not have been conducted in a manner far less injurious ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... him was thinning of its crowd as the theater-bound diners went out in twos and threes. The last of these disappeared finally, and save for Mr. Grimm there were not more than a dozen persons left in the place. Thus for a few minutes, and then the swinging doors leading from ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle
... occurrence, and the grave has already claimed two of the six,—Risk, the robust English gentlemen, and Hughie, the cheery, ingenious adventurer. It is not easy to draw a fair picture of one's self, even with the aid of a mirror, and when one can readily note the ravages of time in thinning locks and increasing wrinkles, it is hard to speak of the robust health of youth without exaggeration. At that time, however, he was about twenty-three, having dark hair and eyes, a medium stature, and splendid health. Like Hughie, in a humbler sphere, he was a dabbler in many things,—lawyer, novelist, ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... unlovely opinions. One thing, indeed, is not to be learned in Scotland, and that is the way to be happy. Yet that is the whole of culture, and perhaps two-thirds of morality. Can it be that the Puritan school, by divorcing a man from nature, by thinning out his instincts, and setting a stamp of its disapproval on whole fields of human activity and interest, leads at last directly to ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... are crowded And the level roads are jammed; The pleasant little rivers With the drifting folks are crammed. But off yonder where it's rocky, Where you get a better view, You will find the ranks are thinning ...
— Just Folks • Edgar A. Guest
... failure of supply; and when either condition is to be suspected it becomes our duty to learn the reasons for this striking symptom. Loss of flesh has also a collateral value of great import, because it is almost an invariable rule that rapid thinning is accompanied soon or late with more or less anaemia, and it is uncommon to see a person steadily gaining fat after any pathological reduction of weight without a corresponding gain in amount and quality of blood. We too rarely reflect that the blood thins with the ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... it leads the way that they do not stray? What unimagined arm keeps their bodies from harm? What presence concealed lifts their little feet that yield Over dry ground and wet till their straining eyes are met With a thinning of ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... by one, she put the striving blind things down; then rose and went her way into the gardens about the house. Slowly through the kitchen gardens she passed. Glyde, thinning walled peach-trees, saw her, felt her go. She shed her benediction upon him—"Good morning, Struan,"— and went on. He watched her for a while, then turned fiercely to his affair. Through dense shrubberies, over drenched lawns her way was; it led her to the lily-pond, which lay hidden within ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... end of the avenue, the Duke was conscious of a thinning in the procession on either side of him, and anon he was aware that not one undergraduate was therein. And he knew at once—did not need to look back to know—why this was. ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... the largest part was fully a foot in diameter, and the top extended far enough over the opposite edge to prevent any weakness from the thinning out of the branches. ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)
... Tilney was no longer to be seen where he had hitherto sat, but his father remained, and perhaps he might be now coming round to their box. She was right; in a few minutes he appeared, and, making his way through the then thinning rows, spoke with like calm politeness to Mrs. Allen and her friend. Not with such calmness was he answered by the latter: "Oh! Mr. Tilney, I have been quite wild to speak to you, and make my apologies. You ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... beginning of Los Angeles traffic. Later she was on the open road again. The mists were thinning and lifting. The perfume was not so heavy. The sheeted whiteness of the orange groves was broken with the paler white of plum merging imperceptibly into the delicate pink of apricot and the stronger pink of peach, and there were deep green orchards ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... Autumn leaves are falling, and the days are closing in, And the breeze is growing chilly, and my hair is getting thin! I've a comfortable income—and my age is thirty-three; But my Thatch is thinning quickly—yes, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various
... between us except that the seat by his side had come to be mine; it made none now. He turned his old bright fatherly look upon me, laid his hand on my hand in his old way, and said again, "She will succeed, my dear. Nevertheless, Bleak House is thinning fast, O ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... to lessen, its downfall thinning into a soft patter among the leaves. The young man took off his hat and let the damp air play over his hair. It was thick hair, black and straight, already longer than city fashions dictated, and a first stubble of black beard was hiding the lines of a ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... and pruning" in plantations planters—like doctors—differ. An amusing story was sent to Mr. Loudon by the Duke of Bedford, in reference to his grandfather, who was an advocate for vigorous thinning ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... that I am gaining in weight. It was my hope to come back thin and gaunt and interesting-looking. Instead of which, you will likely be mad as a hornet to find me so sleek, while you at home have done all the thinning down. Truth to tell, if you compare our relative peace and war status, you are much more at war than ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... gradually thinning off; and King David's labour, as grand carver, is daily abridged. We this day had a haunch of Virginia venison, with fat an inch and half deep, the flavour equal to anything I ever ate: it is the first fat venison I have seen in the country. Canvass-back ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... have made that find on Jumala. That lucky, lucky find! Hume's plasta-flesh fingers curved, their nails drew across the red surface of the table. And where was Wass? He was about to rise and go when the golden oval on the wall smoked, its substance thinning to a mist as a man stepped ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... afternoon of that hard-fought battle of Manassas (Bull Run), July 21, 1861, the Federals were thinning out the lines in gray. Now they were directing their efforts against the wings of Jackson and Beauregard. Jackson's solemn visage was growing more solemn; Beauregard was anxiously scanning the landscape beyond, in the hope of discovering the ...
— How the Flag Became Old Glory • Emma Look Scott
... was less dense now, thinning out, as they neared the clearing in which the radio station was located. Dashing ahead, they cleared the last of the trees and started across the clearing. As they drew nearer the station, heading for the doorway, where the outward-swinging door stood open, Jack saw the four ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... Rocks. Argillaceous. Calcareous. Gypsum. Forms of Stratification. Original Horizontality. Thinning ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... jug over to him and rolled a cigarette. He rolled it carefully, the delicate rice paper crisping in his hand without a tremor; but all the while a red tide mounting up from beneath the collar of his shirt, deepening in the hollows of the cheeks and thinning against the cheekbones above, creeping, spreading, till all his face ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... the reception of the injury he was taken ill and died. A postmortem examination showed that the right ventricle had been penetrated in a slanting direction; the cause of death was apoplexy, produced by the weakening and thinning of the heart's walls, the effect of the wound. Tillaux reports the case of a man of sixty-five, the victim of general paralysis, who passed into his chest a blade 16 cm. long and 2 mm. broad. The wound of puncture was 5 cm. below the nipple and 2 cm. to the outside. The ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... them, at their shadowy window low, With quiet smile; for two things made her glad: One that she saw the glory of the sun; For while the earth lay all athirst for light, She drank the fountain-waves. The other joy; Sprung from herself: she fought the darkness well, Thinning the great cone-shadow of the earth, Paling its ebon hue with radiant showers Upon its sloping side. The woman said, With hopeful look: "To-morrow will be bright With sunshine for our holiday—to-morrow— Think! we shall see the green fields in the sun." So with ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... as if we had been mad dogs. I was often the object of his fury, and shall bear the marks of it on my body till I die. Such was my suffering and degradation, that at the end of five years, I hardly dared to say I was free. When thinning cotton, we went mostly on our knees. One day, while thus engaged, my uncle found my row behind; and, by way of admonition, gave me a few blows with his hickory, the marks of which I carried for weeks. Often I followed the example of the fugitive ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... back in a chair and looked about him. For the first time we saw him without a hat. A wide head, full over the temples, and with thinning hair on the brow, it was in no wise unusual. The head of a professional man, shall I say? His hands lay palm downward on the arms of the chair, the knuckles white, the broad flat nails ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... Then, by further thinning out Thomas's line, which was well entrenched, I drew another division of Palmer's corps (Baird's) around to the right, to further strengthen that flank. I was impatient to hear from the cavalry raid, then four ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... animals frequented was in the present case a very circumscribed one—fresh individuals could come neither down from the Kenia nor over the waterfall at the end of the great plateau—we soon succeeded in so thinning their numbers that only a few examples were left, the destruction of which we handed over to our Andorobbo huntsmen, whom we furnished with weapons for this Purpose, and to whom we offered a large premium for every crocodile slain in the Eden lake or in the Dana above the ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... suddenly seemed a stranger to me. So cold. So vibrationless. Broken lights. These slanting, wrecked corridors. With the ventilating fans stilled, the air was turning fetid. Chilling. And thinning, with escaping pressure, rarifying so that I could feel the grasp of it in my lungs and the pin-pricks ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... these facts, we can no longer wonder at the submission of the French peasantry to a thinning of their families by military conscription; at the eager thirst for office which afflicts the whole nation; or at the morbid desire to overturn society, and strike out a better organisation. As matters grow worse, this passion for wholesale change ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various
... morning when I had about got over the bashfulness about the hollyhocks, and had decided to deny them absolutely and stick to it, for a time at least, I happened to pick up Grandmother Nelson's book. It was full time—maybe past time—for thinning out my sugar-beets and resetting my cosmos. I fled out to the wilderness in greater speed than I had left it, and fairly threw myself prostrate at the feet of my neglected garden. Peter helped me, a sun-blistered, brier-scratched, ragged ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... making ready for night: the yellow warmth overhead thinning into tintless space; the low hills drawing farther off in the melancholy light; the sky sinking nearer; clouds, unsteady all day, softened at last into a thoughtful purple, and couching themselves slowly in the hollows of the horizon; the sweep of cornfields ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... the cotton follows the wheat without plowing, but the soil was deep, naturally open, and a layer of nearly two inches of loose earth had been placed over the seed at the time of planting. Besides, the ground would be deeply worked with the two or four tined hoe, at the time of thinning. ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... possible woodchuck's hole, or to strike a few hopeful blows at a hollow tree with the light axe which Isaac had carried to blaze new marks on some of the line-trees on the farther edge of their possessions. Sometimes they stopped to admire the size of an old hemlock, or to talk about thinning out the young pines. At last they were not very far from the entrance to the great tract of woodland. The yellow sunshine came slanting in much brighter against the tall trunks, spotting them with golden light high among ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett
... if the fragments have been kept in perfect apposition, osseous union may take place, but in the great majority of cases the union is fibrous. The shortening of the quadriceps and the gradual stretching and thinning of the connecting fibrous band may allow of further separation of the fragments (Fig. 88), which to a variable extent interferes with the stability and functions of the limb. The proximal fragment sometimes becomes attached to the front of the femur, and moves with it, ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... D'Aunay and his men again attempted to scale the walls, but were forced to retire with a considerable force. Then D'Aunay offered fair terms if the fort was immediately given up. Madame La Tour, anxious to spare the lives of her brave garrison, which was rapidly thinning, agreed to the proposal, and surrendered the fort; and then D'Aunay is said to have broken {104} his solemn pledge, and hanged all the defenders except one, whose life was spared on the condition of ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... had finished sowing my first planting of mignonette and growled at the prospective labour entailed by thinning out the fall-sown Shirley poppies (I have quite resolved to plant everything in the vegetable-garden seed beds and then transplant to the flowering beds as the easier task), Lavinia Cortright came up, note-book in hand, inviting herself comfortably to spend the day, and thoroughly inspect the hardy ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... thinning. "I would," she said, "if I honestly wouldn't rather walk. I'm wet through now, and it'll be pleasanter to—walk a little of it off than to squeeze into that car. Thanks, really very, very much, though. Don't you miss it." She thrust out ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... it, and I felt it, that wordless thinning down of radiance, that mysterious holding back of warmth, until it seemed to strike a chill into the bones. It was the darker wing of Destiny hovering over man's head, deepening at the same time that it shadows the receding sky-line, so that even the memory of it, a thousand miles ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... a warlike ditty in French, with a chorus of "Marchons! Marchons!" and at every word grapeshot fell to the ground, for the Colonel, in spite of the suggestions of war, was peacefully engaged, being seated on the top of a pair of steps thinning out the grapes which hung from ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... and deadly fire as seems almost as impossible to advance against as against the lightnings of heaven. They halted, wavered, and gave signs of confusion; but they were soon restored to order and again came on. Again one of those close and terrible volleys was poured into them, thinning the ranks and encumbering every step with dead; and again they halted and wavered. This time they deployed in line of battle and commenced a fierce fire on the opposing divisions; accompanied by yells peculiar to themselves—such as no other civilized troops in the world have ever ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... mariners with strips of blanket. By this time the light on the stranded ship was burning low. The skipper and his companions examined the four boats, dragged one of them down to the edge of the tide and launched it. The fog was thinning swiftly, and a gray pallor was spreading in the east and south. They manned the boat and pulled out for the ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... mortality amongst the latter is so great, that the establishments could not continue, if their spiritual conductors did not constantly procure fresh recruits from amongst the free Indians, to fill the thinning ranks ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... turned off at right angles to their path and presently were edging their way through the wood again. As Bradby had surmised, the ground rose steadily, though it was very rough. Big boulders lay about the ground amongst the trees, which were thinning off. Soon they emerged on to what was open country, and speedily found themselves right under a ledge of rock which rose sheerly above their heads to a height of twenty ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... longer heavy against us. It was thinning rapidly and I could hear the scuffle as men made off down the side streets. My first notion was that these were the Turkish police. But I changed my mind when the leader came out into a patch of light. He carried no torch, but a long stave with which he belaboured ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... sun set and darkness closed in, Bill noticed, to his gratification, that the weed seemed to be thinning out and that the water-lanes grew more ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... again to the vestibule and hall, where the crowd is by this time perceptibly thinning. Chaperons are sailing off to the cloak-room, each followed by her brood; and the hoarse voices of the servants and policemen outside—"Call Mrs. Thingummy's carriage," "Mrs. Whatshername's carriage ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... party together, and had all the guns fired off in quick succession. This speedily parted the oncoming herd, and so they in two divisions thundered by on the right and left, with their merciless pursuers on their flanks and in the rear, rapidly thinning their numbers. ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... will be one that triumphs within the conditions, not outside them. The machines and the division of labor have made sad havoc with binding as a craft. The men in America, at least, who are masters of every process and of all the skill and cunning of the early binders are few, and their thinning ranks are not being filled. Will bookbinding, in spite of a high economic demand, share the fate that has overtaken engraving, or shall we have a renascence of this fascinating handicraft and delightful art, to take its name from ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... in face of almost certain failure. They had 250 yards of absolutely unfamiliar ground to cover. The rifle and machine-gun fire was intense, and terribly accurate. The Huns, having no shells directed at them, stood up in their trenches aiming deliberately at each man in the broken and thinning lines. Short rushes were made from shell-hole to shell-hole, each rush proving very costly in casualties. Few, if any, of the men got within 100 yards of the enemy. Captain Attride had been wounded in the body, and ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... house by herself. She had pushed open the French windows of the study to breathe the air of the garden and see the tall sycamore growing deep into the thick blue night. Half the room, reflected on the long pane, was thrown out into the garden. She saw it thinning away, going off from the garden into another space, existing there with an unearthly reality of its own. She had sat down at last, too tired to go upstairs, and had found herself crying, incredibly ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... the ice assumed this liquid or softened state, it would be squeezed out toward the region where, because of the thinning of the glacier, it would enter a field where pressure melting did not occur. It would then resume the solid state, and thence journey to the margin of the ice in the ordinary manner. We thus can imagine how such a glacier as ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... wore on. Two rifles to one were now playing against his devoted company, which had had neither food nor drink since early morning. As he scanned his thinning line he saw a look of bloodlessness and hopelessness gathering on the set faces of which he had grown so fond during this ordeal. Some of the men were crouching ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... in the eyes as well as to the heart of this brother coming home, there would have been something wanting to her of genuine womanhood. Yet she had gone daily about her Lord's business, thinking of that first; not stopping to watch the graying or thinning of hairs, or the gathering of life-lines about eyes and mouth, or studying how to replace or smooth or disguise anything. She let her life write itself; she only made all fair, according to the sense of true grace that was in her; fair as she could with that which remained. ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... old gods, say their old prayers, and perform their old rites. That home they found at last among the tolerant Hindoos, on the western coast of India and in the peninsula of Guzerat. There they throve and there they live still, while the ranks of their co-religionists in Persia are daily thinning ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... dark," he said, as they came up; "the Walk is thinning; ought we not to be going? ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... with her two oldest sons frolicking about her like excited puppies, came up to Carolan Hall one exquisite morning a month later. Brush fires were burning in the thinning woods, and the blue, fragrant smoke drifted in thin veils ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... man still young; under forty indeed, though marked prematurely by hard work and hard fighting. His black hair had receded on the temples, and was obviously thinning on the crown of the head; he wore spectacles, and his shoulders had taken the stoop of office work. But the eyes behind the spectacles lost nothing that they desired to see; and the general impression was one ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... had passed, and a slight breeze blowing from the sea began at length to disperse the fog, which, thinning a little, revealed the outline of the cliffs on the landward side. The sun had long ago set, but still showed such a bright glow on the western horizon, that it was light enough to see that the sandbank was almost clear, and the water flowing from ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... the left the woman shapes the clay, and smoothes it off with a dampened cloth. From time to time, she rolls out a coil of clay between the palms of her hands, lays it along the top of the vessel, and works and pinches it in. Further shaping and thinning is done with a wooden paddle and the dampened hand, and then the jar is allowed to dry slightly. Before the drying has progressed far enough to render the sides rigid, a smooth stone is placed inside, and ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... thinning," she considered, and one green one, spread like the palm of a hand, circled ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... contributed largely. He was a fine, upstanding man, who looked less than his forty-nine years in spite of an ominous thinning of the hair which he tended and brushed so carefully. He had a firm chin, a mouth that smiled often and pleasantly beneath the closely-clipped moustache, and very bright blue eyes which met yours in a clear, frank, honest ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... to be seen around the black rock from which the Tremolino, with her plucky heart crushed at one blow, had slipped off into deep water to her eternal rest. The vastness of the open sea was smothered in driving mists, and in the centre of the thinning squall, phantom-like, under a frightful press of canvas, the unconscious guardacosta dashed on, still chasing to the northward. Our men were already descending the reverse slope to look for that punt which we knew from experience was not always to be found ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... once. "You hear another shower?" he said, doubtfully. A sort of thinning of the darkness seemed to have taken place, and Decoud could see now the outline of his companion's figure, and even the sail came out of the night like a square block of ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... After self-thinning has gone on for a hundred years or so, the ranks have been so thinned that there are openings sufficiently large to allow other species a chance to come in. By this time, too, there is sufficient humus on the floor to allow the seeds of many other species to germinate. ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... beneath it shone the rosy-sailed ships floating stately through their triumphal arch up the channel to their home. Other clouds floated stately too in the upper sea over our heads, with dense forms, thinning into vaporous edges. Some were of a dull angry red; some of as exquisite a primrose hue as ever the flower itself bore on its bosom; and betwixt their edges beamed out the sweetest, purest, most melting, most transparent ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... warm October afternoon as he went out through the gatehouse, still and bright, with the mellow smell of dying leaves in the air; the fields stretched away beyond the road into the blue distance as he went along, and were backed by the thinning woods, still ruddy with the last flames of autumn. Overhead the blue sky, washed with recent rains, arched itself in a great transparent vault, and a stream of birds crossed it from east ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... Darkness is thinning; shadows are retreating; Morning and light are coming in their beauty; Suppliant seek we, with an earnest outcry. ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... wholly an accident, my lord. We fired at a hawk that had been thinning the pet birds of my master's daughter. One of the arrows struck a tree, and glancing off entered the house in which the cat was kept and unfortunately caused its death. We regretted the accident bitterly, knowing how sacred was ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... leaf-buds, and often fuzzy. Heading-back the tree of course tends to concentrate the fruit-buds and to keep them nearer the center of the tree-top; but heading-back must be combined with intelligent saving and thinning of the interior shoots. Heading-back of pears and peaches and plums is usually ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... things to tell, feelings to describe that are new to me and which I cannot tell to another. The excuse sounds childish; but listen: I speak it softly: I love, and he who loves is ever as a child. I smile at myself for making the admission. I, a man whose hair is thinning and silvering, who has written of love all his life, and laughed at it. Oh, it's humorous, deliciously humorous. To think that I have become, in reality, the fool I pictured ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... nodded listlessly and glanced at the white yacht, now becoming visible through the thinning mist. Somewhere above in the viewless void an aura grew and spread into a blinding glory; and all around, once more, the fog turned into floating golden vapour shot ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... as I believe, into a pouch by, firstly, the delicate tunic (c) lining the sack of the female; secondly, a double layer (d) of corium; and, thirdly, by a special, rather thick membranous layer (b), which thinning out round the cavity coats only part of the under surface of the scutum. This latter membrane I have not seen in any other Cirripede, and I believe it is nothing but the tissue, here not calcified, which, ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... silence hung heavily as ever over the city. The cold was not unpleasant to either of them, muffled as they were in heavy clothing, for it imparted briskness and vigour to their strong young bodies, and they went on at a swift pace through the densest part of the city, into the thinning suburbs and then toward the fields and open spaces which lay on the nearer side of the earthworks. Not a human being did they see not a dog barked at them as they passed, scarcely a light showed in a window; all around them the city lay in ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... did rob him, and I often thought how cunningly, for he took no more than about half his gold, well knowing, I'm now sure, neither he nor my lord, your father, kept any count; and there was a bundle of notes in his pocket-book, which Mr. Archer was thinning swiftly, when all of a sudden, like a ghost rising, up sits Mr. Beauclerc, an unlucky rising it was for him, and taking him by the collar—he was a powerful strong man—"You've robbed me, Archer," says he. I was behind Mr. Archer, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... gulch which might have been sought in vain for ten years by a stranger, they passed into the rim of a bowl-shaped valley. Timber covered it from edge to edge, but over to the left a keen eye could see a thinning of the foliage. Toward this they went, following the sidehill and gradually dipping down through heavy underbrush. Before him the officer of rangers saw daylight, and presently a corral, ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine |
