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More "Bracing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... quite as firm as it might be," said Dave. "It needs more bracing up on the sides. The carpenters aren't done, ...
— Dave Porter and His Rivals - or, The Chums and Foes of Oak Hall • Edward Stratemeyer
... He went to the creature's head, talked to it, stroked its nose, blew in its nostrils, and continued to talk till the ears no longer lay back at his touch. Presently the eyes ceased rolling and the legs were not bracing nervously. ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... most romantic, ride and walk I ever had." These early visits to Scotland inspired her with her love for the Highlands and the Highlanders. She found there quite a world of poetry. The majestic scenery, the fresh, bracing air, the picturesqueness of the kilted gillies, the piping and the dancing, and the long days among the heather, recalled scenes which Sir Walter Scott has glorified for all time, and which are especially identified with the fortunes of the unhappy ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... stimulus of the bracing early morning air. A new inspiration seemed to fire him, altogether dissimilar to the glow which he was wont to feel when plunging into a dangerous phase of a professional case. He slowly drew from his pocket the typed note-paper which had nestled in such ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... people, Hindoo and Lepcha, imprudently remaining for the night in the valley. Owing probably as much to the great exposure they had lately gone through, as to the sudden transition from a mean temperature of 50 degrees in a bracing wind, to a hot close jungly valley at 75 degrees, no less than seven were laid up ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... less sudden than unpleasant, and if, as they say, it will continue all winter with little variation, I shall have to seek a clearer climate. In the cold of these European winters, there is, as I observed last year in Germany, a dull, damp chill, quite different from the bracing, exhilarating frosts of America. It stagnates the vital principle and leaves the limbs dull and heavy, with a lifeless feeling which can scarcely be overcome by vigorous action. At least, ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... are looking very badly indeed for us, Christy," said the captain, bracing himself up as if for a renewed effort. "The Belle is almost up with the boat, and she will take Major Pierson and his party on board; and she is nearer to us than ...
— Taken by the Enemy • Oliver Optic
... himself. It had been clear to Bassett for ten minutes that Dick was talking against time, against the period of revelation. He would have it, but he was mentally bracing himself ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... still cold, but very bracing for exercise. Lambs were out in the fields, primroses grew in clumps under the hedgerows, hazel catkins flung showers of pollen to the winds, and in the coppice that bordered the road pale-mauve March violets and white anemone stars ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... the two young men had departed from Winthrop, and had made their way up the road that led along the steep hillside, the exhilaration of the bracing air and the superb view had made Will keenly alive to the beauties of the surrounding region. A soft halo covered the summits of the lofty hills, and the quiet of the valley was almost as impressive as the framework of the mountains. Mott too had been exceedingly pleasant in all that he had ...
— Winning His "W" - A Story of Freshman Year at College • Everett Titsworth Tomlinson
... increased as in the bearing of pain. The general impression seems to be that one should brace up to a pain; and very great strength of will is often shown in the effort made and the success achieved in bearing severe pain by means of this bracing process. But alas, the reaction after the pain is over—that alone would show the very sad misuse which had been made of a strong will. Not that there need be no reaction; but it follows naturally that the more strain brought to bear upon the nervous ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... would call harsh and crabbed. They must be eaten in the fields, when your system is all aglow with exercise, when the frosty weather nips your fingers, the wind rattles the bare boughs or rustles the few remaining leaves, and the jay is heard screaming around. What is sour in the house a bracing walk makes sweet. Some of these apples might be labelled, "To be eaten ...
— Wild Apples • Henry David Thoreau
... will be dreadful in Munich everybody said. So we left Luzerne, where it was warm, not daring to stay till the expected rival sun, Victoria of England, should make the heat overpowering. But the first week of August in Munich it was delicious weather,—clear, sparkling, bracing air, with no chill in it and no languor in it, just as you would say it ought to be on a high, gravelly plain, seventeen hundred feet above the sea. Then came a week of what the Muncheners call hot weather, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... him over the wall and gave a shove. He started slowly, bracing and resisting with hands and feet, but was soon speeding meteor-like down the icy incline. He disappeared, in the snow and debris at the base, but in a few minutes reappeared, with right arm swinging useless ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... him, always ready to hold him up or keep him back, if his six-year-old arms grew feeble during those exercises. All that benefited little Jack, whom sickness had made somewhat pale; but his color soon came back on board the "Pilgrim," thanks to this gymnastic, and to the bracing sea-breezes. ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... threw on the mighty power units that drove the ship, bracing them against the pull of ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... Although the work was heavy, Stephen's heart was light. Not only did he feel the zest of one who had grappled with life in the noble effort to do the best be could, but he had Nellie's approbation. He drank in the bracing air of the open as never before, and revelled in the rich perfume of the various trees as he moved along their great cathedral-like aisles, carpeted with the ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... time. There would be plenty of talking and smoking and plying of needles as the moonlight or river lights danced forth to guide the active river traffic and also the large inflowings and outflowings of restaurant guests. And all to the bracing music of a capital orchestra reeling off jubilant ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... white with frost. The deck passengers shivered around the engines and endeavored to extract heat from them. The cabin passengers, excepting myself, were wrapped in their fur coats as if it were midwinter. I walked about in my ordinary clothing, finding the air bracing but not uncomfortable. I could not understand how the Russians felt the cold when it did not affect me, and was a little proud of my insensibility to frost. Conceit generally comes of ignorance, and as I learned, wisdom I lost my ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... from bough to bough; when the light of heaven is so over all, that even the dun-colored earth, the decayed leaves and rotten branches, which the autumn blast has laid low, look beautiful, and seem to whisper resurgam; when a cold, bracing wind sends the warm blood bounding through our hearts—tinting our cheeks, and warming our extremities, until we bless it, as we do the strong hand which leads us in childhood; and we listen, with docile tenderness, ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... the side of the canoe to help her to the bank, but she took his hand only to steady herself while rising. Stepping over the bracing-strips between the gunwales, she caught a swaying branch, and swung herself lightly ashore. Back from the water the ground rose into a low hill, covered with oak and elm and ragged hickory trees. Here, ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... and then, after fasting for twelve hours, eat a dinner at Roehampton that would have done Sir Walter Scott's eyes good to see. Finally, he would walk back to Hereford Square, getting home late at night. And if the physique of the man was bracing, his conversation, unless he happened to be suffering from one of his occasional fits of depression, was still more so. Its freshness, raciness and eccentric whim no pen could describe. There is a kind of humour the delight of which is that while you smile at the pictures it draws, ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... imagine what sort of a place she was in. The light above her showed her a square, well-like tunnel, set up on end, and about two feet square, with the window ledge five feet higher than her head. At first she tried to climb up the wall by bracing herself on opposite sides of it, but her muscles were not quite equal to this. It was not until it slowly dawned on her that she could not possibly get out by her own efforts, that she began to call. Of course ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... proceeding to sea, that the benevolent intentions of her Majesty's Government in regard to me might be carried out. The "muddy heads" on shore had received a despatch from Madrid, in reply to my letter to them. Weather clear and bracing. Wind from the North. Thermometer at noon 59. deg. The steam-frigate disappeared somehow during the night. Protested, as under, against the presence of a ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... cause, Captain Joe watched his chance, sprang to the outermost rock, and, bracing his great snubbing posts of legs against its edge, reversed his body, caught the wavering sloop on his broad shoulders, close under her bowsprit chains, and pushed back ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... cannot bear your surroundings here. The mountains crush you, and weigh upon your heart. Nothing is open enough for you here. The heavens above you are not spacious enough. The air is not strong and bracing enough. ...
— The Lady From The Sea • Henrik Ibsen
... work out best in living, what are the ideals, doctrines, beliefs that make the noblest characters and the most useful citizens, the best sons, and daughters, and parents, and neighbours? What are the things that help me most in my life, the things that give me moral stimulus and bracing, the things that lead ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... connection with the evil thing that came to him at this time that he first makes mention of "the sea fogs," that beset a large part of the California coast. He speaks of them as poisonous; and poisonous they are to any one who is afflicted with pulmonary weakness, but bracing and glorious to others. They give the charm of climate to dwellers around the great bay. How he took this first very serious attack of the terrible malady is indicated in the letter to Edmund Gosse, ...
— The Sea Fogs • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Bentley to his friend. "That" happened to be Hinpoha, who was momentarily left alone with the fire. The cocoa kettle started to sag as the wood burned away and at the same time the mixture in the other kettle began to boil over. Bracing the cocoa kettle with one foot, she snatched the other kettle from the fire, and stood there on one foot holding the steaming pot. Professor Wheeler sprang to her assistance and propped up ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... said Father Payne; "but you can't turn the light of publicity on evil unless the light is there to turn. The reason why bullying continued was because people believed in it as inseparable from school life, and even, on the whole, bracing. What has got rid of it is a kinder and more tender spirit outside. I don't object to showing up bad things at all. By all means put them, if you can, in a clear light, and show their ugliness. Show your shame and disgust if you ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... been feeling rather personal. "That would be a change indeed—the very thing after South Africa," he added, looking with a keen professional eye at Major Dene's gaunt cheeks and too sharply outlined profile. "There are some pleasant places on the west coast—bracing, yet not too cold. In my boyhood I spent a summer in a village called St. Aidens. It was out of the way, certainly, but you could not go to ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... thankful we were to feel it, a rush of air, soft and yet bracing, cool, yet not chilly; the 'champagne atmosphere,' as some one called it, of the trade-wind: and all, even the very horses, plucked up heart; for that told us that we were at the summit of the pass, and that the worst of our day's work was over. In five minutes more we were aware, between ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... ever appeared in the locality. The house was situated on a rather high plain, though sheltered from the winds, and partly surrounded by its own moat. The air was fine and bracing. It would be likely to do good to those who had been exposed to the contagion of sickness, and had been taxing their strength in the good work ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green
... forgetful of her existence, a shadow would fall across mother's face, and she would murmur softly, "Poor little Darsie!" Darsie's own eyes filled at the pathos of the thought. She was filled with commiseration for her own hard plight... Father's letters were bracing. No pity here; only encouragement and exhortation. "Remember, my dear, a sacrifice grudgingly offered is no sacrifice at all. What is worth doing, is worth doing well. I hope to hear that you are not only an agreeable, but also a cheerful and cheering ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... it; but just the place I wanted for Miss Connie," he replied. "We are high above the sea, and the air is very bracing, and not, at this season, too cold. A month later I should not on any account have brought ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... swayed by the beautiful circumstances of Palestine travelling—by the clime, and the land, and the name of the land, with all its mighty import; by the glittering freshness of the sward, and the abounding masses of flowers that furnished my sumptuous pathway; by the bracing and fragrant air that seemed to poise me in my saddle, and to lift me along as a planet ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... still a prisoner in the closet, the door of which was an old-fashioned one and thick. But by bracing his feet against the back wall, Dick got a firm hold and soon his shoulder on the barrier caused it to bend and creak. Then the lock gave way and the door flew open ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)
... bracing herself a little on the table, and turned her face, looking, with that manner of one ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... ministerial work in the old cradle of liberty had somewhat told upon his health, and he felt that a few months or years in a warmer clime would result in the recovery of lost vigor. He had purchased a ticket for Wilmington, N. C. The air there was mild, bracing and dry and made health giving and mellow by the sweet odor of the yellow pine. And then, again, a field was open for the continuance of his work while he recuperated, a certain Baptist church in the old city had called him to its pastorate. Being a man of exceptional ability, affable ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... invigorating climate of the mountain camp was compensation for maternal deficiencies. Nature took the foundling to her broader breast. In that rare atmosphere of the Sierra foot-hills—that air pungent with balsamic odor, that ethereal cordial at once bracing and exhilarating—he may have found food and nourishment, or a subtle chemistry that transmuted asses' milk to lime and phosphorus. Stumpy inclined to the belief that it was the latter and good nursing, "Me and that ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... Peter Smithers,' Mrs. Fiske continued, bracing her shoulders. 'Surely, you remember poor Peter, Louisa? An old flame of your own! He was going to kill himself, but married a Devonshire woman, and they had disagreeables, and SHE died, and he was undressing, and saw her there in the bed, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... runs down to the uplands brown, From the heights of the snow-clad range, What anodyne drawn from the stifling town Can be reckon'd a fair exchange For the stalker's stride, on the mountain side, In the bracing northern weather, To the slopes where couch, in their antler'd pride, The deer on the ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... wholesome, invigorating effects and the specially refreshing properties of the Borage are supposed to be mainly due. For which reason, the plant, "when taken in sallets," as says an old herbalist, "doth exhilarate, and make the mind glad," almost in the same way as a bracing sojourn by the seaside during an autumn holiday. The flowers possess cordial virtues which are very revivifying, and have been much commended against melancholic depression of the nervous system. Burton, in his [61] Anatomy of ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... out the broken words, and showed her comprehension of the pauses. She was a perfect listener in all but one respect; she would not give the counsel Caroline wanted; and she would not have been Marian, she would not have had her own reality and bracing severity, if she had. She could not cheer Caroline up, bid her banish fear, and look forward to happiness; she could not even tell her there was no help for it: she only said, "I don't know," and sat considering whenever Caroline reiterated that it ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... thoroughly, saw the changing views, and had refreshments. Aagot beamed. The walk in the bracing air had flushed her cheeks, her lips, her ears, even her nose; her eyes were sparkling gaily. She suddenly remembered that she had almost pouted in disappointment when she saw other people; ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... and five mace of sugar candy and prepare congee with them in a silver kettle. When once you get into the way of taking this decoction, you'll find it far more efficacious than medicines; for it possesses the highest virtue for invigorating the vagina and bracing up the physique." ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... for a time busy in keeping his team upon the trail, but soon they settled down into a steady, shuffling trot, to which they held for mile after mile over the hard prairie road. The day was bright and clear, the air sweet and bracing. An hour's drive from the town, and the traveller seemed in a virgin world. A curious coyote sat on a hill, regarding intently the spectacle of a man travelling with wheels beneath him, instead of the legs of a horse. A band of antelope lined up on the crest ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... only one son survived the father. We find echoes of this affection now and again in the letters. 'We have summer heat here still,' writes Marcus, 'but since my little girls are pretty well, if I may say so, it is like the bracing climate of spring to us.'(1) When little Faustina came back from the valley of the shadow of death, her father at once writes to inform Fronto.(2) The sympathy he asks he also gives, and as old ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... kind, served up pretty much in the same way, with little to give relish to them, a big crying infant the while tugging at her breast, and the house-work to do, it is not strange that while the children, fresh from romping in the bracing prairie air, were favored with a ravenous appetite, she had little. Tom understood all this; for, constituted like her, he, too, felt the deprivations of the table, although in a less degree, and much did he worry about ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... rose from the river, obscuring all objects, when the bordermen rolled out of their snug bed of leaves. The air was cool and bracing, faintly fragrant with dying foliage and the damp, dewy luxuriance of the ripened season. Wetzel pulled from under the protecting ledge a bundle of bark and sticks he had put there to keep dry, and built a fire, while Jonathan fashioned a cup from a green fruit resembling ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... November 23d, in a clear, bracing atmosphere of twenty-five degrees below zero, we arrived at the mouth of the large river called the Penzhina, which empties into Penzhinsk Gulf, at the head of the Okhotsk Sea. A dense cloud of frozen mist, which hung over the middle of the gulf, showed the presence there of open water; ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... overnight—till I can tell them what's happened." He felt it a comfort to be trivial with Mrs. Pasmer, after bracing up to Alice's ideals. "I suppose they'll ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... weather be intensely cold. I dislike fires in bedrooms, especially for children; they are very enervating, and make a child liable to catch cold. Cold weather is very bracing, particularly at night "Generally speaking," says the Siecle, "during winter, apartments are too much heated. The temperature in them ought not to exceed 16 deg. Centigrade (59 deg. Fahrenheit); and even in periods of great cold scientific men declare that 12 deg. or ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... that the atmosphere of the New Hampshire highlands is exceptionally bracing and stimulating, and a fine aid to hard and continuous work. It is a just claim, I think. I came in May, and wrought 35 successive days without a break. It is possible that I could not have done it elsewhere. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... seen some of them swallow sand, ashes, and do their utmost to destroy their stomachs to get pale complexions. To make a fine Spanish body, what racks will they not endure of girding and bracing, till they have notches in their sides cut into the very ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... connection with each other correctly ascertained. These form his starting points; and then, taking each in its turn, he sets himself to discover the principles, or laws, which regulate its working in a healthy state;—what it is that promotes the circulation or stagnation of the blood, the bracing or relaxing of the nerves, the several processes in digestion, and the various functions of the skin and viscera. These are all first ascertained by observation and experience, and then, if necessary, ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... little city. Situated high above sea level, with a climate so bracing and life-giving that the phthisis bacillus can hardly live in it, it seemed to our soldiers, after their long march across the veldt, a veritable City of Refuge. Alas! how soon it was to be turned into a ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... held in New York in 1871, and so feeble was her condition that a screen was placed behind her to enable the audience to hear her voice. At the close of the Convention she went to the home of her childhood, in Hebron, Conn., hoping that the bracing air of the New England hills would give her new life and strength, until she could finish her work. But it was already finished. She had taxed herself to the uttermost, beyond nature's power to recuperate. In November she returned to Washington, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... between two gusts, Desmond could hear the shrieks and groans of the terrified man. But he had no time to sympathize; his whole energies were bent on preventing the grab from being pooped. He felt no alarm; indeed, the storm exhilarated him; danger is bracing to a courageous spirit, and his blood leaped to this contest with the elements. He thrilled with a sense of personal triumph as he realized that the grab was a magnificent sea boat. There was no fear ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... the voyage having been completed, we spent the last day at our disposal, in visiting Brooklyn. The weather was uncommonly fine, the sky being perfectly clear and unclouded; and though the sun shone out brilliantly, the heat was tempered by a cool, bracing, westwardly wind. Its influence was perceptible on the spirits of every body on board the ferry-boat that transported us ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... opened a door looking out over the black sea, bracing his arm against it. The wind tore in, beating his whitening beard over his shoulders, and with it came a deluge of rain that drenched him as he stood there. He forced the door shut and faced Alan, a great, gray ghost of a man in the yellow glow ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... little or no credit from their neighbours for their ambitious acts of self-denial. And one thing was specially worthy of remark,—so far from suffering in health, everyone returned home greatly improved in looks and vigour by this compulsory stay in the clear and bracing atmosphere of Comoro. As for the hypochondriacal gentleman, who had felt so keenly the refusal to be allowed to take his packing-case of medicines with him, he had returned in such a state of spirits that he at ...
— Working in the Shade - Lowly Sowing brings Glorious Reaping • Theodore P Wilson
... you doing out here, in an open boat, out of sight of land?" asked Captain Cumberland, while the watch on deck were bracing up ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... the morning of June twenty-eighth. The atmosphere was bracing and delightful, the azure of the sky above us shaded to the most delicate tints of blue at the horizon, and, here and there, bits of clouds, like bunches of cotton, flecked the sky. The sun broke grandly over the rugged hills, and the lake, like molten silver, ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... essentials, his cool detection of pretence and cant, however finely disguised, and his English with its frank love for the embodying noun and the active verb, make reading very like the clear, hard, bright, vigorous weather of the downs when the wind is up-Channel. It is bracing. But I discovered another notebook, of which I have heard so little that it shows what good things may be lost in war; for this book was published in 1914. It is the Impressions and Comments of Havelock Ellis. There have been ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... and sloping, and dotted with bright and clean white wooden houses and churches. We passed the pretty-looking town of Bristol on our right. The day was lovely, brilliant and cool, with a delightfully bracing wind caused by our own speed ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... and search his very soul to see of what quality he was. Far better a man should die than falter. He had not failed to notice the startled look in Cameron's eyes when Hobbs blurted out his news. Some way must be found for the bracing up of the nerve, the steadying of the courage of ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... than a week after their own arrival, the advent of the couple from Portland Place. "Oh, we shall give you time to breathe!" Fanny remarked, in reference to the general prospect, with a gaiety that announced itself as heedless of criticism, to each member of the party in turn; sustaining and bracing herself by her emphasis, pushed even to an amiable cynicism, of the confident view of these punctualities of the Assinghams. The ground she could best occupy, to her sense, was that of her being moved, ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... art-finish of those choice poets are mainly unseen and unmet in him,—perhaps because he cannot achieve them, more likely because he disdains them. But there is an electric living soul in his poetry, far more fermenting and bracing. His wings do not glitter in their movement from rich and varicolored plumage, nor are his notes those of the accustomed song-birds; but his flight is the flight ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... him with supplies. Findlay, Holden, Mooney, and Cooley returned to the settlements; but Stewart, Squire Boone, and Alexander Neely, who had accompanied Squire, threw in their lot with the intrepid Daniel, and fared forth once more to the stirring and bracing adventures of the Kentucky wilderness. In Daniel Boone's own words, he expected "from the furs and peltries they had an opportunity of taking ... to recruit his shattered circumstances; discharge the debts he had contracted ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... elegant turnout. During our drive he casually remarked that he had paid a thousand dollars for the rig, and as his pay was some two thousand dollars per annum I easily figured that his rig and diamond pin had cost him about a year's salary. It was a lovely morning, not cold, but bracing, just the day for a ride. We started for Fordham, but changed our minds and drove to the High Bridge, through Harlem lane, and well out into Westchester County. Returning, we stopped at O'Brien's Hotel for dinner. We ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... rustled quickly on the sand and Jason was alone. The leather walls flapped slackly in the wind and there was no other sound. Jason spat on his palms, controlled a slight shiver and slid into the pit. The wrench fitted neatly over the nut, he wrapped both hands around it and, bracing his leg against the pit wall, began ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... the beginning of a long conversation. John Graham had laid out for himself three hours of hard reading after his bracing tramp over the hills; but it was past noon when he went in to see Mrs Blair before he went away. He did not think the morning wasted; though in general, like all hard students, he was a miser respecting his time. When he was going away, ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... last—a day in November, when the sun seemed making a last effort to prevail against coming winter. The wind was fresh and bracing, and nature appeared bright and cheerful, ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... year I returned to the sea-side during the summer, and was always welcomed with unaffected cordiality by my old ally, Douglas. I was now a strapping youth of nineteen, tall and powerful of my age—thanks to the bracing sea-air and constant exercise. One day Douglas told me he was going over to Largs, and asked if ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... was not more than half an hour high, when we pushed off from the shore of the islet, and rowed over towards the mainland. The morning was fine and clear, and either the fresh, bracing sea-air, or the stir and excitement of setting out upon our expedition, had an exhilarating influence, for we gradually became quite cheerful, and even animated; and the faces of my companions began to brighten up with more of the old ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... live in the city and those who do not dislike raw, bracing winds from the ocean pronounce Los Angeles to be the only place worth living in in all Southern California. Each place has its supporters ignoring all other attractions, and absolutely opposite accounts of the weather have been seriously given me by visitors to each. For those ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... courage, intellectual honesty, scrupulous accuracy, chivalrous fairness, endless docility to facts, disinterested collaboration, unconquerable hopefulness and perseverance, manly renunciation of popularity and easy honours, love of bracing labour and strengthening solitude; these, and many other cognate qualities," says Baron von Huegel, "bear upon them the impress of God and His Christ." What Dr. Inge, who quotes these words, says of Plotinus declares his own character. He speaks of "the intense honesty of the man, who never shirks ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... he'd rather have me bury him at present." Sewell sat down, and, bracing his elbow on his desk, rested his head heavily ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... the sower conduces to the growth of the seed, is plain enough to us; yet perhaps the self-restraint which these and the like beliefs, vain and false as they are, have imposed on mankind, has not been without its utility in bracing and strengthening the breed. For strength of character in the race as in the individual consists mainly in the power of sacrificing the present to the future, of disregarding the immediate temptations of ephemeral pleasure for more distant and lasting sources of satisfaction. The ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... as the story was given to me and I repeat it to show how bracing the climate near Superior is. Remember, if you please, that I do not want the story to be repeated as coming from me, for I have nothing left now but my reputation for veracity, and that has had a very hard winter ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... the celestial banquets. Autumn is the season in which to indulge in a promenade through Quincy Market, after the leaf has been nipped by the frost and crimson-tinted, when the morning air is cool and bracing. Then the stalls and precincts of the chief Boston market are a goodly spectacle. Athenaeus himself, the classic historian of classic gluttons and classic bills of fare, could not but feel a glow ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... beneficially; because all bitters are poisons, and operate by stilling, and depressing, and lethargizing the irritability. But where weakness proceeds from the opposite cause of relaxation, there tonics are good; because they brace up and tighten the loosened string. Bracing is a correct metaphor. Bark goes near to be a combination of a bitter and a tonic; but no perfect medical combination of the two properties ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... episode. Mention has just been made of Mark Twain's walk with Twichell. Frequently their walks were extended tramps, and once in a daring moment one or the other of them proposed to walk to Boston. The time was November, and the bracing air made the proposition seem attractive. They were off one morning early, Twichell carrying a little bag, and Clemens a basket of luncheon. A few days before, Clemens had written Redpath that the Rev. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of the T or the base of the triangle, as the case may be, is used uppermost. This rod must be pierced in three places for the vertical masts employed in the bracing of the rod, trussing the main plane, and adjusting the elevator. These are spaced out in Fig. 130, which shows a side elevation of the model. Their sectional dimensions are 1/16 by 1/4 inch; their respective lengths are given in Fig. ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... off on a moose hunt, in autumn, with a practical Indian hunter. The air of the autumnal night is frosty and bracing. The moose are moving rapidly from place to place. Night is drawing on. The last fluttering of the aspens dying away, leaves that perfect repose in the air which is so necessary to the sport. The moon rises, ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... to begin by bracing herself to stand against him, now seemed to have braced herself to stand with him—perhaps a more commendable wifely attitude. I mean that the discipline incident to a life of success which was not without its rigors had ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... goat to drag me over the road! It was positively absurd. After enjoying the spectacle for a moment, and making a hurried sketch of it, wondering what manner of man had first contrived such a vehicle, I bounced in, and stretched my legs out on each side, bracing my feet against a pair of iron catches, made expressly for that purpose. Fortunately, I am a capital driver. If nature ever intended me for any one profession above all others, it must have been for a stage-driver. I have driven buggies, ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... reached the bridge, they saw strong columns of Greek infantry, dead black in the dim light, crossing the stream and slowly deploying on the other shore. It was a bracing sight to the dragoman, who then went into one of his absurd babbling moods, in which he would have talked the head off any man who was not born in a country laved by the childish Mediterranean. Coleman could not understand what he said to the soldiers as they passed, but it was evidently ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... the whole gets colder and more bracing, sometimes too much so, but by day it is occasionally uncomfortably warm. The Turks and ourselves keep shelling each ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... she said, bracing herself. "I've done as you told me—very faithful. I went this morning to get my orders from her. I don't say the voice that ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... see, I had rather entertained a sort of hope that when I had revealed to him the Bassett's mental attitude, Nature would have done the rest, bracing him up to such an extent that artificial stimulants would not be required. Because, naturally, a chap doesn't want to have to sprint about country houses lugging jugs of orange juice, unless it ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... road, now—a road that ran south across the spaces, unwinding itself like a tape flung from a reel. Suddenly Cheyenne pulled to a stop. Bartley raced up, bracing himself as the big cow-horse set ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... the men to whose help he had gone were really members of the crew. Christobal, dreading her despairing questions, was standing in the position he had occupied before Boyle dragged him into prominence. The chief officer was bracing a telescope against the ensign staff, and keeping the lifeboat in a full field. Gray, she noticed, was not looking towards Guanaco Hill, but swept all parts of the coastline constantly with his binoculars. The Spaniard's field-glasses were slung ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... Panama fevers were their portion; or, after a long pull and a strong pull around the Horn, they were comparatively fresh and eager for the fray when they touched dry land once more. There was much close company between decks to cheer the lonely hours; a very bracing air and a very broad, bright land to give them welcome when the voyage was ended—in brief, they ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... instead. Lieutenant D'Hubert, liberated without remark, returned to his regimental duties, and Lieutenant Feraud, his arm still in a sling, rode unquestioned with his squadron to complete his convalescence in the smoke of battlefields and the fresh air of night bivouacs. This bracing treatment suited his case so well that at the first rumour of an armistice being signed he could turn without misgivings to the prosecution ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... in the direction of the hills when, almost without warning, and with a great whistle and roar, a gale of wind swept down upon them. They stood still and looked at each other with startled faces, bracing with ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... Bracing strongly back, with the reins wound around his tough hands, and with a look in his face that should have given courage even to the Hart boys, Dab strained at his task as bravely as he had stood at the tiller of the ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, October 1878, No. 12 • Various
... of a bird called the knot, something like a snipe in shape, whose color is ashen gray in winter and bright Indian red in summer. They say he is very particular about the weather, and likes best fine bracing days with sunshine and a moderate breeze; so, in winter he flies south, but in summer he goes farther north than man has yet ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... of Landiani Station in the province of Naivasha. Here we started in earnest on our big game expedition, which I am glad to say proved to be a most delightful and interesting one in every way. The country was lovely, and the climate cool and bracing. We all got a fair amount of sport, our bag including rhino, hippo, waterbuck, reedbuck, hartebeeste, wildebeeste, ostrich, impala, oryx, roan antelope, etc.; but for the present I must confine myself to a short ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... and is perhaps the least noxious of all unnatural stimuli; which however, like all other great excitement, may be carried to excess, as complained of by the ancients. The unmeaning application of the words relaxation and bracing to warm and cold baths has much prevented the use of this grateful stimulus; and the misuse of the term warm-bath, when applied to baths colder than the body, as to those of Buxton and Matlock, and to artificial baths of less than ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... strength of character to subject themselves to. Lastly, I would have you consider especially the moral atmosphere in which they have habitually breathed: according to the nature of this the mental health varies as certainly as the physical strength varies in a bracing or relaxing air. A strong bodily constitution may resist longer, and finally be less affected by a deleterious atmosphere than a weak or diseased frame; and so it is with the mental constitution. Minds insensibly imbibe ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... forget; but perhaps it was that the morning had been a bright one, and that, beguiled by the clear winter sun, which threw its will-o'-the-wisp rays on my table like gold-edged invitation cards to be stirring, I had set out joyously in hopes of a good bracing walk on the hard, frost-dried roads, which, seen from my windows, gleamed smooth and glistening as white marble, or, again, in expectation of a gay stroll through the crisp, clean snow which draped the fields with its downy folds and reflected the morning ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... is of course acquainted with the vigorous and bracing pages of Sir John (2 vols., London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown). Sir John, who plays but a tooth-comb in the orchestra of this historical romance, blows in his own book the big bassoon. His character is there drawn at large; and ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... intently upon Sir Timothy's. She seemed to have been weighing every word he had spoken. There was none of that hungry pleasure in her face which shone from the other woman's and was reflected in the faces of many of the others. She seemed to be bracing herself for a shock. Sir Timothy looked over his shoulder towards the door which opened ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... for Aberdeen. I enjoyed this ride more than anything we had seen yet, the country was so wild and singular. In the afternoon we came in sight of the German Ocean. The free, bracing air from the sea, and the thought that it actually was the German Ocean, and that over the other side was Norway, within a day's sail of us, gave it a strange, romantic charm. It was towards the close of the afternoon that we found ourselves crossing the Dee, ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... hillsides are for the most part bare and green. Piora in fact is a fine breezy open upland valley of singular beauty, and with a sweet atmosphere of cow about it; it is rich in rhododendrons, and all manner of Alpine flowers, just a trifle bleak, but as bracing as the ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... mounting of steeds among the Crusader's tents; a hasty bracing-up of armor and settling of casques; shields were lifted high and spears were laid in rest, and, followed by a hundred knights, the boy Crusader dashed impetuously from his camp and charged into the thick gardens that held his captive cousin. His action was quicker than Isabelle's ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... slacking up the head stays, &c., &c. If we add to this all the tarring, greasing, oiling, varnishing, painting, scraping, and scrubbing which is required in the course of a long voyage, and also remember this is all to be done in addition to watching at night, steering, reefing, furling, bracing, making and setting sail, and pulling, hauling, and climbing in every direction, one will hardly ask, "What can a sailor ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... the water looked deliciously cool and tempting. There was a fascination about the great, black leaves floating there, which seemed to invite the lad to strip off the light flannels in which he had slept, to lower himself gently over the side, and lie in and on and amongst them, with the cool water bracing and invigorating him ready for the heat and toil of ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... discipline. The winter had been, to us who were accustomed to our rigorous climate here, very mild, but we had begun to feel as early as the end of March, a foretaste of that terrible enervation that the coming summer was to bring to our men habituated to our bracing air of Connecticut. We were somewhat hardened to the little outdoor inconveniences of Louisiana. We didn't mind the mosquitoes, although they were ten times as big—a hundred times as hungry and a thousand times as vicious as ...
— The Twenty-fifth Regiment Connecticut Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion • George P. Bissell
... materials around them had been washed away. We met with grass lately burnt, and some still burning, which indicated the presence of natives. It was generally very warm during the hours of travelling, between eight and twelve o'clock, but the bracing air of the nights and mornings strengthened us for the day's labour; the weather altogether was lovely, and it was a pleasure to travel along such a fine stream of water. Easterly and north-easterly breezes still prevailed, though I expected that the direction of the winds would ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... is as bracing, as tonic, as instinct with the spirit of vigorous youth, as the mountain air which has never before been breathed. Woodberry well says: "He created lasting pictures of human life, some of which have the eternal outline ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... regions, at different seasons of the year, and even different hours of the day. The odorous, fresh sea-breezes are distinct from the fitful breezes along river banks, which are humid and freighted with inland smells. The bracing, light, dry air of the mountains can never be mistaken for the pungent salt air of the ocean. The air of winter is dense, hard, compressed. In the spring it has new vitality. It is light, mobile, and laden with ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... waving her muff in farewell, Kathleen hastened off through the grounds in the direction of Pennsylvania Avenue. She found the cold invigorating air a bracing tonic after the steam-heated atmosphere of the Capitol, and was thoroughly enjoying her walk when she became conscious that a figure was keeping pace with her. Looking up, she recognized ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... and inquisitive than the rest, had ventured recklessly into the zone of danger. Among them were Ruth Clinton and Madame Olga Obosky, who, disregarding the command of Mr. Mott, were the only women to venture beyond the protecting corner of the deck building. They stood side by side, bracing themselves against the downward slope of the deck. Half-way forward were Trigger and the armed gunners, and beyond them the dense, irresolute mass of humanity. Percival, in rounding the corner to go to the assistance of Captain Trigger, observed with dismay the exposed position in which ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... sterling, something well below an average of two guineas each month. I suppose I might have starved in that first year if I had not had some twenty pounds in hand at the beginning of it. I had not twenty shillings in hand at the end of it, and yet I had already learned what hunger meant; not the bracing sensation of being sharp set and enjoying one's meal, but the dull, deadening, sickly sensation which comes of sustained work during weeks of bread and butter (or dripping) diet, and none too ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... you find a gayer quartette than started at an easy canter up the valley that fresh bracing morning? From the very first our faces were turned to the south-west, and before us rose the magnificent chain of the Southern Alps, with their bold snowy peaks standing out in a glorious dazzle against the cobalt sky. A stranger, or colonially speaking, a "new chum," would have thought ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... Honfleur, and Harfleur, and most people know Ste. Adresse and Etretat. The views and the drives are not equal to those about Ilfracombe and Lynton, and Etretat itself is only a rather inferior kind of Lynmouth. Those who want bracing won't select either Ste. Adresse or Etretat or Havre for a prolonged stay. Taking for granted the short-holiday-maker will visit all these places, let me give him a hint for one day's enjoyment, for which, I fancy, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 23, 1890. • Various
... tent form of shack, and Fig. 19 shows how the bark is placed like shingles overlapping each other so as to shed the rain. The doorway of the tent shack is made by leaning poles against forked sticks, their butts forming a semicircle in front, or rather the arc of a circle, and by bracing them against the forked stick fore and aft they add stability ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... from her attitude of affection, and, bracing her energies, saw that something practical must immediately be done. Much as she would have liked, in the emotion of the moment, to keep him entirely to herself, medical assistance was necessary while there remained a possibility of preserving him alive. ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... the brad-awl with cries of grief and sympathy, and then, turning upon me, they brandished their knives and howled at me like the gang of assassins that they were. So frantic were their gestures that I was convinced that my end had come, and was just bracing myself to meet it in a manner which should be worthy of my past reputation, when one of them gave an order and I was dragged roughly across the little glade to the brambles from which this new band ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... for the crowd. Did you ever see Officer Whalen practice firing at a mark? Well, I have. The man couldn't hit a barn door thirty feet off. Can't you come over, Frank? I've got something to propose to you. The afternoon is too fine and bracing to stay cooped up in the house. We'll soon have to hibernate, you know. Come along!" ...
— The Boys of Columbia High on the Gridiron • Graham B. Forbes
... situation, both in Saxony and the rest of Germany, tended inevitably towards a catastrophe. Day by day this drew nearer, and I flattered myself into regarding my own personal fate as interwoven with this universal unrest. Now that the powers of reaction were everywhere more and more openly bracing themselves for conflict, the final decisive struggle seemed indeed close at hand. My feelings of partisanship were not sufficiently passionate to make me desire to take any active share in these conflicts. I was merely conscious of an impulse to give myself up recklessly to the stream of events, ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... as it is—is not senseless, one may feel sure. Even now here in England one perceives an extraordinary pulling together and bracing up of the people, a development of solidarity and mutual helpfulness, a greater seriousness, and a disregarding of artificialities, which are all to the good. These things are gains, even though the way of their manifestation be through much of enmity and ignorance. ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... used as a hand rail was added on top of the frame, bracing frame and acting as a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 832, December 12, 1891 • Various
... gave the impression of bracing herself, as though against suspected attack. "Yes, and they were for my own reading, thank you. I suppose you thought they ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... dreams of fancy in which he so ardently delights. Not only is the Swiss determined by the peculiarities of his geographical position to lead a pastoral life, but the climate, and mountain scenery, and bracing atmosphere inspire him with the love of liberty. The reserved and meditative Hindoo, accustomed to the profuse luxuriance of nature, borrows the fantastic ideas of his mythology from plants, and flowers, and trees. The vastness and ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... children, carrying it from room to room, so she knew that one of them had awakened for a drink, or with the storm, and they had missed her. Then she could see them at the front door, Adam's sturdy feet planted widely apart, bracing him, as he held up the lamp which flickered in the wind. Then she could hear his voice shouting: "Mother!" Instantly Kate answered. Then she was sorry she had, for both of them began to scream wildly. There was a second of that, then ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... as water and as good as bread," says Mr. Howells. "Read 'Eben Holden'" is the advice of Margaret Sangster. "It is a forest-scented, fresh-aired, bracing and wholly American story of country and town life. * * * If in the far future our successors wish to know what were the real life and atmosphere in which the country folk that saved this nation grew, loved, wrought and had their being, they must go ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... what I am going to do," said Ann firmly, bracing herself for opposition, "and it's as good as done, so you needn't say a word about it. I'm going to have a Christmas dinner, and I'm going to invite every blessed soul in this house to come. They shall be warm and full for once in their lives, please God! And, Katey," she went on ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... had accomplished anything approaching to it in that time, he would have been incredulous. He had hardly realized that he had made a hole big enough for him to work in, kneeling on one knee, and bracing himself ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... in the tool shed. He'd had his eye on it for some time. He went quietly round to the tool shed. Soon he was contemplating with a satisfied smile a green and enraged cat and a green and enraged hen. Then, bracing himself for the effort, he delivered himself up to justice. When all was said and done no punishment could be really adequate to a ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... in the bracing atmosphere of a harvest morning, that I met by appointment Fairservice, with the horses, at the door of Mr. Jarvie's house, which was but little space distant from Mrs. Flyter's hotel. The first ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... rage and anger, to make a sufficient resistance? If the will were naturally as well developed as the passions, the stand would be soon made and soon successful; but as it is there must needs be a bracing by the suggestion of joy or fear. Let, then, the stimulus be of a mild and strong kind at once, and mingled with the thought of distant pleasure. To meet the suffering of rage and frenzy by the suffering of fear is assuredly to make of the little unquiet mind a battle-place of feelings too hurtfully ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... by perceiving any door of escape. Any vivid sensation was welcome in the irksome vacancy that pursued her in the absence of immediate excitement. Devoid of the interest of opposition, and of the bracing changes to the Holt, her intercourse with the Charterises had become a weariness and vexation of spirit. Idle foreign life deteriorated them, and her principle and delicacy suffered frequent offences; but like all living wilfully in temptation, she seemed under a spell, ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... spirits as in his appearance. Refreshed in mind and body, he slowly paced the deck, his chest expanding as he sniffed the fresh air, and his soul, encouraged by the dangers he had already passed through, bracing itself for ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... amusement, or occupation, or speculation would start up in its own shape when this Ithuriel spear touched it. How it would save from distractions! How strong it would make us, like a belt round the waist bracing the muscles tighter! 'This one thing I do' is always a ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... had gone to make the cakes ready as she said. And as he looked down he saw that the boy was bending over the bundle of fagots, blowing the spark that he had brought in upon the punk into a flame. The dry fagots began to crackle and blaze. "Now is my time," said Hans to himself. Bracing his elbows against each side of the chimney, he straightened his legs so that he might fall clear His motions loosened little shower of soot that fell rattling upon the fagots that were now beginning to blaze brightly, whereupon the boy ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle
... were now hurrying fast to their tragic climax. For some time the life of George III. had been flickering to its close. Any day might bring news that the end had come, and that the Princess was a Queen. And for some time Caroline had been bracing herself to face this crisis in her life and to pit herself against her enemies in a grim struggle for a crown, the title to which her years of folly (for such at the best they had been) had so gravely endangered. Over the remainder of her vagrant life, with its restless flittings, ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... it should be. Tout passe.—L'art robust seul a l'eternite, precisely as Gautier points out, with bracing common-sense; and it is excellent thus to comprehend that to-day, as always, only through exercise of the auctorial virtues of distinction and clarity, of beauty and symmetry, of tenderness and truth ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... the girls thought they must have missed "their own particular four" and were bracing themselves to stand the disappointment, ...
— The Outdoor Girls at the Hostess House • Laura Lee Hope
... Missouri; "And we die fast too," echoed a major from another part of the room. As a matter of course, places possessing salubrious climates are crowded with pallid seekers after health, and as St. Paul enjoys a dry and bracing atmosphere from its great elevation above the sea level, as well as from the purity of the surrounding prairies, its hotels—and they are many—are crowded with the broken wrecks of half the Eastern states; some ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... at a small station for some carriages which were to take them across the prairie, and, the air being clear and bracing, they stood outside, where Miss Morgan, as usual, held an involuntary court. A cloud of dust arose, and behind it quickly came a great herd of cattle, driven with much shouting and galloping of horses by a half-dozen cowboys. The herd ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... rushed for the table. Rick reached out and grabbed an ankle. Bracing his legs, he gave a mighty heave. Striped shirt went over backward in front of Barby, who stamped with both bare feet on his stomach. The breath went out of him with ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... the institution might well seem to deserve a more tolerant and impartial investigation than it has yet received at the hands of our sociologists. A survival so picturesque could hardly be expected to outlive the bracing air of the nineteenth century. The north wind blew and by 1840 the cicisbeatura was ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... Crochard. "They wait in ambush! Well, let us see," and, stealing to the door, he opened it softly, softly, bracing his knee against it. ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... shone more brightly and the air was never more clear and bracing than when Sinclair helped his wife off the train at Pawnee Junction. The station-master's face fell as he saw the lady, but he saluted the engineer with as easy an air as he could assume, and watched for an opportunity to speak to ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... distance ahead. Suddenly a white object seemed to rise out of the road not more than a hundred yards in advance. Dolly, with the bit caught vigorously between her teeth, stretched her neck and head out and ran. Professor Valeyon, bracing himself with his feet against the dash-board, leaned back with his whole weight and sawed the reins right and left. When within a few yards of the white object—which seemed to have fluttered back to one side of the road—his right rein broke: he lost his balance ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... awoke a sun of great brilliancy was shining, and over him arched the high skies of the great west. The air was thin and cool, easy to breathe and uplifting, and in the bracing morning he did not feel the loneliness and immensity of the wilderness. Boyd had already built a little fire among the bushes, and was warming some strips of dried beef over ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... engine was changed for one working on the cog-wheel system, the grade being too heavy for the ordinary locomotive. The train winds and circles round hills cultivated, for the most part, to their summits. Upwards we climbed till we were in the clouds and the air became quite bracing and invigorating. Tiffin should be ordered through the guard before starting from Willem I., and it will be handed ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... really did start off heroically upon a bracing winter walk, determined to shake off, in solitude and exercise, the constant hunger for his presence, torturing possibilities would swarm into her mind, and weaken her almost while she thought them banished. She could catch him at his club; ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... you want—a regular change, something bracing. You don't look at all well, that's the fact. A winter in London tries any man—it does me, I know. I've been seedy myself these last few weeks. Edith wants me to take her over to Paris at the end of this month, and I think it ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... having been previously stitched on to the sides of the material, it should now be braced with twine by means of a packing needle, passing the string over the stretchers between each stitch taken in the webbing, and, finally, drawing up the bracing until the material is strained evenly and tightly in the frame. If the fabric is one which stretches easily, the bracings should not ...
— Handbook of Embroidery • L. Higgin
... and reverent, never prosecuting his investigations from a mere love of speculation, but as a sincere inquirer after truth. But his statements have had their natural result in producing a large and vigorous school of thinkers. Never bracing himself to write a philosophical or theological system, but merely stating his views in aphoristic form—as in the Aids to Reflection—he scattered his thoughts as a careless sower, and left them to germinate in the public mind. But many of his opinions have been perverted, and speculations have ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... more blows, both of them upon the body, and then at last they had the poor boy down, with his face upon the ground and his arms pinned to his sides, and Blunt, bracing himself for the stroke, with a grin of rage raised a heavy clog for one terrible blow ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... morning, cold, bracing and clear. The dry air stimulated one, and the winter sun shone cheerfully down upon the great white ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... banks and plunging through the vast gorges that it has hewn for itself in the course of centuries. The bases of the mountains are immersed in a deluge of cockneyism—fortunately a shallow deluge—whilst their summits rise high into the bracing air, where ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... "it was a good thing I said that to him. David is clever and good and dear and all that, but the trouble is he lacks ambition and push. He needs bracing up and to take things more seriously. Perhaps it will be just as well if I take the reins for ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... camp was compensation for material deficiencies. Nature took the foundling to her broader breast. In that rare atmosphere of the Sierra foothills,—that air pungent with balsamic odor, that ethereal cordial at once bracing and exhilarating,—he may have found food and nourishment, or a subtle chemistry that transmuted ass's milk to lime and phosphorus. Stumpy inclined to the belief that it was the latter and good nursing. "Me and that ass," ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... great service to weak people, and is perhaps the least noxious of all unnatural stimuli; which however, like all other great excitement, may be carried to excess, as complained of by the ancients. The unmeaning application of the words relaxation and bracing to warm and cold baths has much prevented the use of this grateful stimulus; and the misuse of the term warm-bath, when applied to baths colder than the body, as to those of Buxton and Matlock, and to artificial baths ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... embarrassing Mrs. Miller, seemed to relieve her. "I suffer from the liver," she said. "I think it's this climate; it's less bracing than Schenectady, especially in the winter season. I don't know whether you know we reside at Schenectady. I was saying to Daisy that I certainly hadn't found any one like Dr. Davis, and I didn't believe I should. Oh, at Schenectady he stands first; they think everything ...
— Daisy Miller • Henry James
... "switch" upon "switch," and "braid" surrounding "braid," a "frizz" here and a "frizz" there, with a few bows for capitals, and a few curls for streamers, and twenty-four hair-pins for fastenings and bracing-rods, the tower was finished, in less than half the time, as she assured him, owing to the advantageous position she enjoyed in her work, that it would take her to rear the same structure on her own head, and it was precisely like what ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... by sickness to stop several days on the road. He suffered intensely, the trail for many miles being covered to the depth of twelve feet with snow, although it was almost midsummer when he passed over it. He arrived at Rich Bar the latter part of June, and found the revivifying effect of its bracing atmosphere far surpassing his most sanguine hopes. He soon built himself an office, which was a perfect marvel to the miners, from its superior elegance. It is the only one on the Bar, and I intend to visit it in a day or two, when I will give you a description of its architectural ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... being given to the officers for winning that great battle. Wellington, however, had his eye on the football and cricket grounds when he spoke these words, and no doubt intended to convey the idea that these games went a long way in bracing up the nerve which served so well on the battle-field. Close adhesion to the practice of any game really and sincerely creates fresh possibilities of that perfection and discipline. And why should this not be so in football, particularly as it is a game regulated by sharply-defined ...
— Scottish Football Reminiscences and Sketches • David Drummond Bone
... monsieur's acquaintance. Her husband had told her that monsieur was staying farther up the coast and intended to come to town.. Monsieur was in business; she feared times were not what they were for business in Argyll, but the air was bracing—and much to the same effect, which sent the pseudo wine merchant gladly into the hands ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... right down to the camp stretched a long, sloping rock, whose smooth face, glistened in the light of the camp fire. As the men rose to prepare for the night, Tad began pulling himself cautiously back, bracing ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Montana • Frank Gee Patchin
... what his brother was doing. Bert set some posts in the ground, though it was hard to dig, for the earth was frozen. But the posts did not have to go in very deep. From the top of the posts to the ground Bert next slanted two long boards, bracing them on the under side with shorter posts. Then he made a little platform by nailing boards from the tops of the first two posts to two others which he placed a little back ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at Home • Laura Lee Hope
... grew even more beautiful than she was when she had first come to her mountain home. The bracing air agreed with her, her health was perfect, while her simple manner of living and her regular habits were calculated to develop to the utmost every charm, and keep her strong, and ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... his thirst seemed to grow upon him every minute. Then he grew desperate, and bracing himself, tried with all of his strength to burst the hollow tree asunder. ...
— Four Boy Hunters • Captain Ralph Bonehill
... way through the horse latitudes, embracing every flaw of wind, often accompanied by rain, to get a mile ahead here, half a dozen miles there; and, as these spurts come from every quarter, this involves a lot of bracing—changing the position of the yards; continuous work, very different from the placid restfulness of a "whole gale" of wind, with everything snug aloft and no chance of let-up during the watch. Between these occasional puffs ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... tail, which he twisted about his right arm in a flash, at the same time throwing up his feet and bracing them against a wheel of ...
— The Circus Boys on the Flying Rings • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... Jill, as she came out of the Pennsylvania Station into Seventh Avenue, with a whirl of powdered snow that touched her cheek like a kiss, the cold, bracing kiss one would expect from this vivid city. She stood at the station entrance, a tiny figure beside the huge pillars, looking round her with eager eyes. A wind was whipping down the avenue. The sky was a clear, brilliant tent of the brightest blue. Energy was ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... resolutions. It may be because their hearts are crass, but to stir them properly they must have men entering into glory with some pomp and circumstance. And that is why these stories of our sea-captains, printed, so to speak, in capitals, and full of bracing moral influence, are more valuable to England than any material benefit in all the books of political economy between Westminster and Birmingham. Greenville chewing wineglasses at table makes no very ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... great storm the weather of the island would become more bracing and exhilarating, and this morning the air seemed filled with the spirit of spring. Emmeline felt it, and as she watched the swimmer disporting in the water, she laughed, and held the child up to watch him. She was fey. The breeze, ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... strength, breadth, and charity. Miss Muloch and Gail Hamilton, while cherishing the sanctity of womanhood, are giving broader views, higher aims, truer delicacy, and greater self-reliance to their plastic sex. Their lessons and examples are bracing as the sea breeze, and soothing as air fresh from ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... moment when Bettina, already a little intoxicated with the bracing air and liberty, gave forth triumphantly these three exclamations, "No one! no one! no one!" a rider appeared, walking his horse in the direction of the carriage. It was Paul de Lavardens. He had been watching for more than an hour for the pleasure of seeing ...
— L'Abbe Constantin, Complete • Ludovic Halevy
... webbing having been previously stitched on to the sides of the material, it should now be braced with twine by means of a packing needle, passing the string over the stretchers between each stitch taken in the webbing, and, finally, drawing up the bracing until the material is strained evenly and tightly in the frame. If the fabric is one which stretches easily, the bracings should not ...
— Handbook of Embroidery • L. Higgin
... which now was caked over with ice, and had every appearance of being hard enough to bear the weight of a man with his skates on. John and Frederick were both running to the edge: and had not their father been with them would have immediately ventured on an amusement, hardy and bracing when followed with prudence, but which requires the caution of experience, not to ...
— Christmas, A Happy Time - A Tale, Calculated for the Amusement and Instruction of Young Persons • Miss Mant
... I am going to do," said Ann firmly, bracing herself for opposition, "and it's as good as done, so you needn't say a word about it. I'm going to have a Christmas dinner, and I'm going to invite every blessed soul in this house to come. They shall be warm and full for once in their lives, please God! And, Katey," she went on breathlessly, ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... looked to France for his career. The narrow horizon of his native island was no longer wide enough for him, but from its bracing mountain air and from the quick blood of his race he drew a magnetic force, which imparted to his decisions and actions a rapidity and energy that carried all before them, while at the same time a power of calm calculation, of industry, and of self-control enabled him to employ ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... no doubt that in these ways the Crusades were for our forefathers in Europe the most bracing and stimulating events that occurred in the whole millennium between the complicated disorders of the fifth century and the outburst of maritime discovery in the fifteenth. How far they justified themselves from the military point of view, it is not ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... when we ought to be at work is weakening and demoralizing. Rest and play after work is bracing and invigorating. The sooner we face and conquer a difficulty, the less of a difficulty it is. The longer we put it off the greater it seems, and the less becomes our strength with ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... relieved if you will manage this and take Mary to some fresh scenes, a place or country that she has not visited before. There is nothing like an entirely novel environment for distracting the mind, bracing ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... the Himalaya—height 7517 feet—39 miles from Rawalpindi, from which visitors are conveyed by tonga. The views from Murree are magnificent and the neighbourhood of the Hazara Galis is an attraction. But the climate is not really bracing. The summer headquarters of the Northern Army are at Murree, and before 1876 the Panjab Government spent the hot weather there. The Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner of Rawalpindi take their work there ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... me," I replied, "you have given the strongest reason why they should be carefully guarded against the slightest pressure. It is very remarkable that kittens and puppies should be so well put together that they need no artificial bracing, and the human family be left wholly to the mercy of a bandage. Suppose a child was born where you could not get a bandage, what then? Now I think this child will remain intact without a bandage, and, if I am willing to take the ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... varies in different regions, at different seasons of the year, and even different hours of the day. The odorous, fresh sea-breezes are distinct from the fitful breezes along river banks, which are humid and freighted with inland smells. The bracing, light, dry air of the mountains can never be mistaken for the pungent salt air of the ocean. The air of winter is dense, hard, compressed. In the spring it has new vitality. It is light, mobile, and laden with a thousand palpitating odours from earth, ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... come—she would hurry along Fifth Avenue, a Nordic Ganymede, her fur coat swinging fashionably with her steps, her cheeks redder by a stroke of the wind's brush, her breath a delightful mist upon the bracing air—and the doors of the Ritz would revolve, the crowd would divide, fifty masculine eyes would start, stare, as she gave back forgotten dreams to the husbands of many obese and ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... crave more than coffee and a roll in the morning," he continued, after the second omelette, the ham, the waffles, and more coffee had been consumed. "I fancy it's your bracing air." ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... at any moment, and a great deal of disagreeableness might be looked for when he turned up and had it out with Francis. Altogether the Sabine lady felt that she ought to be in a state of panic terror. But she had slept well,—it was an excellent cot—the air was heavenly bracing, Mrs. O'Mara was a joy to think of, with her brogue and her affectionate nature, and altogether Marjorie Ellison found herself wondering hungrily what there would be for breakfast, and dressing in a hurry so that she could ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... a bright day in the latter part of October that Jerome and Clotelle set out for the church, where the marriage ceremony was to be performed. The clear, bracing air added buoyancy to every movement, and the sun poured its brilliant rays through the deeply-stained windows, as the happy couple entered the sanctuary, followed by old Mr. Devenant, whose form, bowed down with age, attracted almost as much attention from the assembly as did ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... particular points to which attention must be given include the proper laying of the pipes, so that the spigot of one is forced home into the socket of the other, the provision and tightening up of all the bolts required to be fixed, the proper driving of the piles and fixing the bracing, the dredging of a clear space in the bed of the sea in front of the outlet pipe, and other matters dependent upon the special form of construction adopted. If a plug is inserted in the open end of the pipes as laid, the rising of the tide will press on the plugged end and ...
— The Sewerage of Sea Coast Towns • Henry C. Adams
... already wriggling his way down between the smooth rock walls, bracing himself with back and knees. Within a few seconds he had reached the bottom, some ten feet below. It was a sloping, uneven floor of earth, lighted dimly from above and from the south, where the ledge shelved ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... fall into the hands of his enemies, had given his word of honour that he would welcome us as friends and allies if we went to his assistance, we had heard of his defeat and tragic end. Thus we ourselves were now on our guard night and day. It was a question of either fleeing the country or bracing ourselves for a decisive struggle. Some counselled the former alternative; the others declared their resolve to follow the advice of their dying father and to find a grave under the ruins of the keep. Any suggestion of flight or compromise they denounced as contemptible cowardice. The ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... and Durham was left alone. Bracing his muscles, he strained at the cords which bound him, trying to writhe himself free. The chair creaked. In a moment the man with the yellow beard ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... squirm and run back to hide their heads in their mothers' skirts. It is an open secret that starchy, modern women often long to wilt back into droopy musk roses, that climb over gates and things, but they don't let each other. When I feel myself getting soluble, I write it out to Jane and I get a bracing cold wave of a letter in reply. The one this morning was on the subject of love, or, at least, that is what Jane would have said it was ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... a bright bracing day—quite calm, but with keen frost, which tended to increase the feelings of excitement already roused by the object we had in view. As we passed through the lake's fringe of willows, the tops of which just rose a foot or two above the drifted snow, ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... Everet, as they met at Ivy Cliff on the next day, "how charming you look! This pure, sweet, bracing air has beautified you like a cosmetic. Your cheeks are warm and your eyes are full of light. It gives me gladness of heart to see in your face something of the old look that faded from it ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... neighbours for their ambitious acts of self-denial. And one thing was specially worthy of remark,—so far from suffering in health, everyone returned home greatly improved in looks and vigour by this compulsory stay in the clear and bracing atmosphere of Comoro. As for the hypochondriacal gentleman, who had felt so keenly the refusal to be allowed to take his packing-case of medicines with him, he had returned in such a state of spirits that he at once ...
— Working in the Shade - Lowly Sowing brings Glorious Reaping • Theodore P Wilson
... surely we are growing very tired of dramatists who look upon life with a wry face instead of with a brave and bracing countenance. In due time, when (with the help of Mr. Barrie and other healthy-hearted playmates) we have become again like little children, we shall realise that plays like As You Like It are better than all the Magdas and ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... trials, but at last by Billy putting his hind legs against one wall of the well and bracing his forehead against the opposite wall, Stubby managed to jump on his back and climb to his head, from where he gave a big leap and landed outside ...
— Billy Whiskers' Adventures • Frances Trego Montgomery
... precarious pecuniary foundation, must have faded and shrivelled indeed, after another year or two of anything but hospitality as generous as that of New York. Well-nourished and undimmed, however, it concealed for them admirably the fact that it was the hospitality they were after, and not the bracing climate or the desire to see the fascinating Americans of London and Paris at home. New York found them agreeable specimens of high-spirited young English people, and played with them indefinitely. Miss Forde, when she sat imperturbably on a cushion in the middle of the floor after dinner and ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... morning of November 23d, in a clear, bracing atmosphere of twenty-five degrees below zero, we arrived at the mouth of the large river called the Penzhina, which empties into Penzhinsk Gulf, at the head of the Okhotsk Sea. A dense cloud of frozen mist, which ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... health appeared to be so infirm and shattered that her brother-in-law, Mr. Hoare, offered her the loan of his house at Cromer. She accepted the offer for a couple of months, and found a little benefit for the bracing air. She mentioned in her diary at this time that she had "an undue fear of an imbecile or childish state"—a not unlikely feeling to be cherished by an energetic woman accustomed all her life long to the work of helping others. At the end of October she returned home, thankfully rejoicing, ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... but most days you have the blue cloudless sky and dazzling sunshine, so often sought in vain on the Riviera. At mid-day your sunlit compartment is often too warm to be pleasant, when outside it is 10 deg. below zero. But the air is too dry and bracing for discomfort, although the pleasant breeze we are enjoying here will presently be torturing unhappy mortals in London in the shape of a boisterous and biting east wind. On the other hand, the monotony after a time becomes almost unbearable. All day long the eye rests vacantly ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... road, I bade farewell to my last remaining Poor Traveller, and pursued my way alone. And now the mists began to rise in the most beautiful manner, and the sun to shine; and as I went on through the bracing air, seeing the hoarfrost sparkle everywhere, I felt as if all Nature shared in the joy of ...
— The Seven Poor Travellers • Charles Dickens
... Fig. 19 shows how the bark is placed like shingles overlapping each other so as to shed the rain. The doorway of the tent shack is made by leaning poles against forked sticks, their butts forming a semicircle in front, or rather the arc of a circle, and by bracing them against the forked stick fore and aft they ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... and since the ballad first saw the light of day in Scribner's Magazine, Mr. Nutt and Lord Archibald Campbell have been in public controversy on the facts. Two clans, the Camerons and the Campbells, lay claim to this bracing story; and they do well: the man who preferred his plighted troth to the commands and menaces of the dead is an ancestor worth disputing. But the Campbells must rest content: they have the broad lands and the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... these old places! So much strength and youth went into them long ago that even yet they have strength and youth to give, and from them, as from the strong hills, pours out an inexhaustible potency of bracing influence. ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... to the side of the canoe to help her to the bank, but she took his hand only to steady herself while rising. Stepping over the bracing-strips between the gunwales, she caught a swaying branch, and swung herself lightly ashore. Back from the water the ground rose into a low hill, covered with oak and elm and ragged hickory trees. Here, for a space, there was little undergrowth, and save under ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... sportsman as he realizes that he has extinguished a spark of life shadowed Terry's thin, sensitive face. It was a face of singular appeal, dominated by a queer twist of upper lip that stamped his mouth with a permanent wistfulness. Even in the bracing cold of the winter morning his skin was white, but the clear pallor was belied by the swift energy with which he moved and the eager sparkle of his dark gray eyes. He picked up the fluffy bundle and stroked the ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... had thrown him down, and was trying to wrench the gun from him, while Jim and Joe were hovering around them afraid to strike at the tramp for fear of hitting Tom. But now Harry, having driven off his antagonist, flew to the help of Tom, and seizing the tramp by his hair, and bracing one knee against his back, dragged him backward to the ground, and held him there until Tom regained his feet, and holding the muzzle of the gun at the robber's head, called on him to surrender, which the ...
— Harper's Young People, August 10, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... when, during the brief intervals of breathing time he allowed himself, he would look below and above, he was forced to confess that at every step a belief, an illusion had been destroyed and trodden under foot, and he would wonder, while bracing himself for a new effort, how it would all end, and whether the mitre he lusted for would not after all, perhaps, be placed upon a head that doubted even the existence of a God. He was not a bad man, but merely one of that class who have embraced the priesthood merely as a means ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... in her step-mother's kindness, and she really loved her father; but their petting admiration soon grew oppressive, after the more bracing air of Compton; and their idolatry of her little brother fretted and tried her all the more, because they thought he must be a comfort to her, and any slight from her might be misconstrued. Mr. Venn's obsequiousness, instead of rightful ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... thrived. Perhaps the invigorating climate of the mountain camp was compensation for maternal deficiencies. Nature took the foundling to her broader breast. In that rare atmosphere of the Sierra foot-hills—that air pungent with balsamic odor, that ethereal cordial at once bracing and exhilarating—he may have found food and nourishment, or a subtle chemistry that transmuted asses' milk to lime and phosphorus. Stumpy inclined to the belief that it was the latter and good nursing, "Me and that ass," he would say, "has been father and mother to him! Don't you," ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... in truth, been no ice to break. The child was merely like a plant that had grown in the shade, and to her the strong, healthful youth was sunshine. His smile warmed and vivified her chilled nature, his hearty words and manner were bracing to her over-sensitive and timid soul, and his unaffected, unforced kindness was so constant that she gradually came to regard it as one of the best certainties of her life. She soon learned, however, that behind his sunny good-nature was a fiery and impatient ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... the big chair but one thing disturbed her serenity—and that one thing was within. She had everything that she wanted, and for the hour, at least, she was tired of it all. The mood was transient, she knew. It would pass because it was alien to the clear bracing air of her mind; but while it lasted she told herself that the present had palled on her because she had looked beneath the vivid surface of illusion to the bare structure of life. Men had ceased to interest her because ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... wonderfully quiet and beautiful spot where we had come down. The air had a delicate feel and a bracing temperature, while a soft breeze soughed through the leaves of ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... way forth. Very soon we were vibrating up a steep street on the first speed of the car, and the yellow reflections of distant furnaces began to shine over house roofs below us. It was exhilaratingly cold, a clear and frosty night, tonic, bracing after the enclosed warmth of the study. I was joyous, but silently. We had quitted the kingdom of the god Pan; we were in Lucina's realm, its consequence, where there is no laughter. We were on ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... and Emma had gone out as usual to milk the cows. It was a beautiful clear day, but there was a bracing air which cheered the spirits, and the sunshine was pleasantly warm in situations sheltered from the winds; one of the few fine days just before the rushing in of winter. They had milked their cows, ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... come up, and she could see fairly well; some light being furnished by it, though heavy clouds intervened. White-capped waves dashed against the boat. It was unusually rough for a lake of its size. She inhaled deeply the strong, bracing air, until, discovering that she was getting wet from the spray, the girl hurried below and crawled into her cot, shivering a little. Then she fell into a deep sleep, soothed by the rocking of ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls Afloat • Janet Aldridge
... was telling himself, as he passed an humble cottage where, through a dingy window, a lone lamp could be seen; and some children gathered about the kitchen stove, "I'm thinking this bracing weather that we boys have wanted to see so much, is pretty hard on poor folks. The world is unevenly divided, as mother often says; some have too much for their own good; and others far ...
— The Chums of Scranton High at Ice Hockey • Donald Ferguson
... together and bracing of which hemicycle or arch, worthie of admiration, of a rare and subtile deuise, and exquisite polyture, did thus obiect and present ...
— Hypnerotomachia - The Strife of Loue in a Dreame • Francesco Colonna
... to a practical mysticism that the practical man is here invited: to a training of his latent faculties, a bracing and brightening of his languid consciousness, an emancipation from the fetters of appearance, a turning of his attention to new levels of the world. Thus he may become aware of the universe which the spiritual ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... ancient silence and solitude soon separated me even in thought from the familiar scenes I had left. A virginal beauty rested upon the road, and sank deep into my own heart as I passed along; to be silent and open-minded was enough to bring one into fellowship with the hour and the scene. The clear, bracing air, the rustling of leaves slowly sifting down through the lower branches, the solemn quietude, filled the morning with a deep joy that touched the very sources of life, and made them sweet in every thought and emotion. It was like a new beginning in ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... rest they enjoyed—without having been disturbed by anything. One would have supposed that, after so much hardship, they would have got up somewhat wearied. Strange to say, it was not so, for they arose quite refreshed. This Lucien attributed to the bracing influence of the light dry atmosphere; and Lucien was right, for, although an arid soil surrounded them, its climate is one of the healthiest in the world. Many a consumptive person, who has crossed the prairies with flushed cheek, uttering his hectic cough, has returned to his ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... footsteps rustled quickly on the sand and Jason was alone. The leather walls flapped slackly in the wind and there was no other sound. Jason spat on his palms, controlled a slight shiver and slid into the pit. The wrench fitted neatly over the nut, he wrapped both hands around it and, bracing his leg against the pit wall, began ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... had tried to do justice to the inhabitants of the famous city of Peebles[5] in the style of the Book of Snobs. So I might go on for ever, through all my abortive novels, and down to my later plays,[6] of which I think more tenderly, for they were not only conceived at first under the bracing influence of old Dumas, but have met with, resurrections: one, strangely bettered by another hand, came on the stage itself and was played by bodily actors; the other, originally known as Semiramis: a Tragedy, I have observed on bookstalls under ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The captain whirled, bracing himself against the rail with both hands, as though prepared to meet an attempt to thrust him overboard. Then— and Harrigan thought his ears deceived him as he listened—McTee said with a ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... birds and people, by the way, tracing the rushing Sacramento to its fountains around icy Shasta. The first rains had fallen on the lowlands, and the first snows on the mountains, and everything was fresh and bracing, while an abundance of balmy sunshine filled all the noonday hours. It was the calm afterglow that usually succeeds the first storm of the winter. I met many of the birds that had reared their young and spent their summer in the Shasta woods and chaparral. ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... experiences some varieties of temperature. The seaboard is warm, but its considerable southward trend gives it a good Atlantic frontage, which prevents it from being relaxing. Weston is said to be ten degrees warmer than London. The breezes on the uplands are bracing but never searching. The Mendips have been considered a suitable site for a consumptive sanatorium. The central flats are damp. They lie so low that in places the coast has to be protected by sea walls, and the prevalence of large "rhines" or drains makes for humidity. ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... fixed it with glue and bracing, and fitting iron rings about it. The vibration of the motor and the straining have pulled the nail heads through the ...
— Dave Dashaway and his Hydroplane • Roy Rockwood
... similar to those exhibited when the animal has encephalitis, but the onset is more sudden, the duration is shorter, and there is less fever. There may be frenzy or coma, or alternations one with the other. The intelligence is diminished, staring eyes, bracing with the legs, pressing against the stall partition or manger, red mucous membranes. This condition ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... to force a door—that is, an ordinary door—and at the same time make very little noise. It is done—if the door opens inward—by seizing the knob firmly with both hands, having turned it, and then by bracing the body with one knee pressed firmly against the door directly under the knob. In this position, if it is assumed by a strong man, every effort may be centred upon one sudden impulse forward, which, while there is no visible or perceptible impact, ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... fine line of camel hair. Making one end fast to the teakwood sill he went down hand over hand, his strong hard palms gripping the soft line. At the end of it he still had a drop of ten or twelve feet, but bracing his shoulders to one wall and his feet to the other he let go. Hunsa was shaken by his drop of a dozen feet, but the soft sand of the river bed had broken the shock of his fall. He picked himself up, and crouching in the hiding shadow ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... see either of them again. Then one glorious day the trolling-lines were out astern, the elders were amidship playing "horse billiards," and "Tuck," the genial purser, was devoting himself to Paquita, when Drummond heard a scream of excitement and delight, and saw the younger sister bracing her tiny, slender feet and hanging on to a line with all her strength. In an instant he was at her side, and together, hand over hand, they finally succeeded in pulling aboard a beautiful dolphin, and landed him, leaping, flapping, ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... thick and long-lying, on the ground when he reached Boveyhayne, and the crunch-crunch of it under their feet, as Mary and he walked home, gave him a feeling of pleasure, and the cold, bracing air exhilarated him so that he laughed at things which would otherwise barely have made him smile. The antics of Rachel's daughter, as related to him by Mary, seemed extraordinarily entertaining, and when he drew Mary's arm in his and pressed it tightly, he felt that there was nothing in heaven ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... Lord Dreever enlightened her. That miserable creature was wearing the air of a timid child about to pull a large cracker. He seemed to be bracing ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... economical homes (somewhere else) for young gentlemen who cannot get on without expensive assistance at starting in Mother country, owing to excessive competition in laborious and over-crowded professions. A firm of enterprising Agents offer bracing and profitable occupation (coupled with the use gratis, of two broken spades, an old manure-cart, and an axe without a handle) in a peculiarly romantic and unhealthy district in the backwoods of West-Torrida. Photograph, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 19, 1890 • Various
... his nerves. He loved to pit himself, his courage, his coolness, his skill and his sagacity against what looked like overwhelming odds, and the formidable aspect of this enormous serpent, which might well have paralysed another man with terror, only had the effect of bracing him and filling him with the joy of combat. With his good sword gripped firmly in his hand he stood his ground, intently watching the movements of his formidable antagonist, with every muscle of his body tense and ready for action, and presently, when the python hurled ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... look!" cried Mickey, waving both hands and bracing on feet wide apart. "Do look! Your age or more, and about half ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... of rough but picturesque highlands, which embrace the central ranges of the Suliman system (the prehistoric home of the Pathan highlander), where vegetation is often alpine, and the climate clear and bracing and subject to no great extremes of temperature. The average breadth of this northern Pathan district is 150 m., but it narrows to less than 100 m. on the line of the Gomal, and expands to more than 200 m. on the line of the railway. Here all the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... never to disturb their clients by calling out the names of stations. When New Brunswick is reached many think that they have arrived at West Philadelphia, or (worse still) have been carried on to Wilmington. They rush desperately to the bracing chill of the platform to learn where they are. There is a mood of mystery about this Owl of ours. The trainmen take a quaint delight in keeping the actual whereabouts of the caravan ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... attached to the body proper by rigid flanges, reinforced by wires running from tip to tip of the planes, passing directly over the body, and not elevated on bracing chandelles. These wires were taut and made a part of the planes, much like reinforcing ribs. Beneath the planes three heavy wires ran from their forward tips to the bottom of ...
— On the Edge of the Arctic - An Aeroplane in Snowland • Harry Lincoln Sayler
... morning was bright and clear, and cool enough to be bracing. The colonel, alive with pleasant thoughts, rose early and after a cold bath, and a leisurely breakfast, walked over to the mill site, where the men were already at work. Having looked the work over and given certain directions, ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... rare time at Cambridge. What delight it was in those cold mornings to take a bracing walk into the country, and looking back over miles of level land, to behold the chapel of King's College, and the tower of St. Mary's church, which had been the land beacons of aspiring students for so many generations! I verily believe that the chapel of King's College is the finest ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... isolated and half-civilized. Also, he says that he visited the Galatians on account of an illness (iv. 13). It is incredible that he would have chosen the long unhealthy journey to North Galatia when he was ill. But it is extremely probable that he left the damp lowlands of Pamphylia for the bracing air of Pisidian Antioch. The malady was probably the malarial neuralgia and fever which are contracted in those lowlands. (3) The Epistle contains technical legal terms for adoption, covenant, and tutor, which seem to be used not in the ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... palace of Maxixca, and the rest of the army were quartered in that part of the city over which he exercised special authority. Here they remained for some weeks, during which the wounded recovered from their injuries, the sick regained their strength in the bracing mountain air, and the whole army shook off the effects of the terrible hardships they had undergone, ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... it should be. Comparatively few people in the State, outside of Berkshire, are even aware that such a town exists. But it would be a delightful place in which to spend a quiet summer. It is cool and healthy, the air is clear and bracing, and the scenery simply superb. The view from Mount Everett fully equals, if it does not surpass, that from Greylock. In whatever direction the spectator looks a most glorious display greets his eyes. Peak rises above peak on all sides, and the blue surfaces of lakes ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... and the three horses pressed on abreast, the powerful sweep of the gray Caliente and the chestnut Don Fernando, and the snappy, nervous leaps of the little bay that Jo was riding. With the bracing sea air and the exhilarating speed, the ...
— Frontier Boys on the Coast - or in the Pirate's Power • Capt. Wyn Roosevelt
... longer be said, as in the days of Augustus, that they were cut off from all the world. England was an integral part of the empire, where, if the proconsul or legionary commander had not the hot sun and blue sky of Italy, there were partial compensations in the bracing air which renewed his wasted strength, the new and peculiar luxuries in the shape of shellfish and wildfowl that enriched his table, and the facilities which his insular authority afforded him for strengthening ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... you go to the bracing climate of the North. But I am sorry you go so soon. Mother cannot stay in Washington after the third week in May. I am afraid we shall not meet again until ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... it, Sir John; but a craft that is foreordained to be a wrack, will be a wrack, in spite of reefing and bracing. Look ahead, you Dick Lion—ay, there you ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... hunters of the buffalo. Hendry was alive to the impressions of nature. The intense heat of August was followed in September by glorious weather, with the nights cool and the mosquitoes no longer troublesome. The climate was bracing. He complains only, from time to time, of swollen feet, and we need not wonder since his daily march occasionally went beyond twenty-five miles. Sometimes for days he saw no living creature. At other ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... summer he shrank from the thought of adventurous novelty, and ended by proposing a return to the same western seaside-town, to the familiar lodgings. The climate suited neither him nor his daughter, who both needed physical as well as moral bracing; but they only thought of this on finding themselves at home again, with another long year of monotony before them. And it was so good to feel welcome, respected; to receive the smiling reverences of tradesfolk; to talk ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... The sun was brilliant and the air cool and bracing. I felt better, and after a hard day's work and an evening stroll with my friends in the glorious afterglow, I went to bed cheerful and hopeful as to the climate and its effect on my health. This morning ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... on oat-straw and turnips. Not a handful of hay or of meal is given them. The calves are allowed to suck their dams at pleasure. He is convinced that with this simple system of feeding, together with the bracing air of Aberdeenshire, he has obtained a tribe of animals of hardy and robust constitutions, of early maturity, well calculated to improve the general stock ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... rode along, enjoying the splendid scenery and bracing air, but the gypsy's face was ...
— The Motor Girls Through New England - or, Held by the Gypsies • Margaret Penrose
... one for the crowd. Did you ever see Officer Whalen practice firing at a mark? Well, I have. The man couldn't hit a barn door thirty feet off. Can't you come over, Frank? I've got something to propose to you. The afternoon is too fine and bracing to stay cooped up in the house. We'll soon have to hibernate, you know. Come ...
— The Boys of Columbia High on the Gridiron • Graham B. Forbes
... trees, foliage, and flowers encircling the water basin that form the attraction of the place. Families make picnic excursions to this spot; and the gentlemen—it is said the ladies also—spend the sultry hours of midday bathing in the cold and bracing waters. The place is classic ground to the Naturalist from having been a favourite spot with the celebrated travellers Spix and Martius, during their stay at Barra in 1820. Von Martins was so much impressed by its magical beauty that he ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... kiss cheeks and make them rosy; I make people wrap up cosy; I bring chilblains, chaps, and nipping; I send people quickly tripping. See my breath all silver lacing; Feel my touch how cold and bracing; Come and race o'er ground so snowy; Come and trip 'mid breezes blowy. I'll make little eyes look brightly; I'll make little hearts beat lightly; And when cheeks grow red as cherry, Then will echo voices merry. For I'm Jack Frost who makes cheeks rosy; I make people wrap up cosy; ...
— Featherland - How the Birds lived at Greenlawn • George Manville Fenn
... she should probably, remain in England two or three weeks longer, and thus the house was again clear to the young men, who, forgetting to retrieve their characters, fairly outdid all they had done before. The weather was remarkably clear and bracing, and the greater part of each day was spent in the open air, either in fishing, riding, or hunting; Maggie teaching Henry Warner how to ride and leap, while he in turn taught her to shoot a bird upon the wing, until the pupil was equal to her master. In these outdoor excursions ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... poor alike were wrapped in homespun blanket paletots, whose vivid colours made a charming picture, as the wayfarers trudged over the deep white snow-fields on their buoyant snow-shoes, or coasted through the clear and bracing air on swift toboggans. In the evening they flocked to a chosen rendezvous, where a home-bred violinist tuned them through gay quadrilles; and anon the lonely violin would be drowned in the lusty voices of the dancers, who suited a folk-song ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... up from his stool, and, bracing his feet firmly, gave the spy one hand. The tall man shook upon ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... of bracing or stringing the bow was as follows: Grasping it with his right hand at its center, with the belly toward him, and the lower end on his right thigh, he held the upper end with his left hand while the loop of the string rested between ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... it, was bracing himself for a serious situation. He had a keen eye for a man, a feeling for style; in his judgment Urquhart was momentous, so much so that he could not afford to be irritated. Jealousy to him was a weakness, only pardonable when the cause was trivial. It had been trivial ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... secret bracing of my nerves I looked up and met his eyes fixed with that baffling expression upon mine, I own that I felt an inward alarm, as if something vaguely dangerous had reared itself in my path, which by its very charm instinctively bade me beware. ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... once betrayed their confidence. Almost immediately after reaching the Portuguese settlement on the coast, he was prostrated with a very severe illness. An English ship in the harbor was about to sail. In his great weakness, Livingstone longed for the bracing air of the Scottish highlands, and a sight of his beloved wife and children in the home land. But he prepared his reports, charts, and observations, put them aboard the ship, and, after watching it set sail, made ready to march back into the interior. ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... brace used as a hand rail was added on top of the frame, bracing frame and acting as a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 832, December 12, 1891 • Various
... looking. Far down below a few cabins appeared like little toy houses, while away beyond could be seen the blue cold waters of the North Pacific. The air was becoming keen. But it was bracing and stimulating. ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... from the date of her illness, the frail little child of the old days at Greenwater Broad had ripened, in the bracing Scotch air and the healthy mode of life, into a comely young woman. Her features were still, as in her early years, not regularly beautiful; but the change in her was not the less marked on that account. The wan face had filled out, and the pale complexion had found ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... after the two young men had departed from Winthrop, and had made their way up the road that led along the steep hillside, the exhilaration of the bracing air and the superb view had made Will keenly alive to the beauties of the surrounding region. A soft halo covered the summits of the lofty hills, and the quiet of the valley was almost as impressive as the framework of the mountains. Mott too had been exceedingly pleasant in all that he had said, ...
— Winning His "W" - A Story of Freshman Year at College • Everett Titsworth Tomlinson
... refreshing ourselves from clear little spring-wells, that sparkled over white pebbles at the foot of a gray rock tufted over with blaeberry and foxglove leaves. The poor thing chatted away like a child, inspired by the pure air, bracing, yet mild, and lost herself amongst recollections of her country home, talking of buttercups, hedge-sparrows' eggs, and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... a clear, lovely, October morning. The air was sharp and bracing, and the leaves which had taken their autumnal tints were falling from the trees. The road which wound by Westbourne Green, gave him a full view of the hill of Hampstead with its church, its crest of houses, and its villas peeping ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... dressed and went out for a stroll, drinking copious draughts of the bracing morning air. But the tormenting presence of the intercepted letter in his pocket drew him back to the house. He encountered his wife in ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... Republican; he had a great capacity for "handling the coloured vote" and his name was Pixley. Hurlbut mistrusted him; the young man had that instinct, which good leaders need, for feeling the weak places in his following; and he had the leader's way, too, of ever bracing up the weakness and fortifying it; so he stopped, four or five times a day, at Pixley's desk, urging the necessity of standing fast for the "Breaker," and expressing convictions as to the political future of a Democrat who should fail to vote for it; to which Pixley ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... South, can never mellow its hard, cold tint of greenish-blue. The distant hills, whether dark or light, are equally cold, and are seen too nakedly through the crystal air to admit of any illusion. Bracing as is this atmosphere, the gods could never breathe it. It would revenge on the ivory limbs of Apollo his treatment of Marsyas. No foam-born Aphrodite could rise warm from yonder wave; not even the cold, sleek Nereids could breast its keen edge. We could only imagine it disturbed, temporarily, by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... and snoring! Under the circumstances, therefore, the doctor, with much judgment, read very short prayers, and immediately afterwards took his departure for his snug little vicarage. The moon shone brightly, the air was clear and bracing, and he felt as blithe as a bird ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... young fellow had no special vocation, and he owned to Max afterwards that he feared that he had done the wrong thing. I am afraid Max thought so too, but he would not discourage him by saying so; on the contrary, he treated him in a bracing manner, telling him that he had put his hand to the plough, and that there must be no looking backward, and bidding him pluck up heart and do his duty as well as he could; and then he smoothed his way by asking him to be his curate and live with him, so saving him from the ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... lasted for several minutes, she could not imagine what sort of a place she was in. The light above her showed her a square, well-like tunnel, set up on end, and about two feet square, with the window ledge five feet higher than her head. At first she tried to climb up the wall by bracing herself on opposite sides of it, but her muscles were not quite equal to this. It was not until it slowly dawned on her that she could not possibly get out by her own efforts, that she began to call. Of course her voice was carried by the furnace ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... morning, and we have seldom since been so young in feeling as never we are sure in years, as when we walked forth into its bracing air. And Aunt Rachel—she enjoyed it; the broad icy fields, the difficult ascent of the steep slippery hills and the "duckies" down them, and the crackling of the icicles as we thrust our way through the bristling under-brush of those diamond-cressed woods. We loved even to eat the icicles ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... rods, with horizontal tie-bars to resist the thrust. The suspension-bolts are enclosed within spandril pillars of cast iron, which give great stiffness to the superstructure. This system of longitudinal and vertical bracing has been much admired, for it not only accomplishes the primary object of securing rigidity in the roadway, but at the same time, by its graceful arrangement, heightens the beauty of the structure. The arches consist of four main ribs, disposed in pairs ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... passed this scene of watery commotion and got out into the deeper water, the sea smoothed down a great deal; but sea-sickness began to claim its victims, at first a few, then more and more, till the greater part were quite badly affected. I had a touch of it myself, but managed to keep my feet by bracing out pretty wide, and hugging everything I could get hold of that seemed to offer a steady support, and I did not lie down until after I had thrown my ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... sea-bread from morning to night under the pressure of a real sea appetite, is not a greater luxury than the choicest viands on shore. To me it certainly was; and surely I had reason to be deeply thankful to the Lord, who, by means of that delicious voyage, and its bracing exhilarating effects, prepared me for a trying winter in the singular climate for which I ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... into the tree-grown sheltered wing of the garden. By interlacing paths, from the tremulous gray willows under the somber, clashing eucalyptus spears, under dark wings of cypress they were moving. She was bracing in every nerve against the unnerving ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... T or the base of the triangle, as the case may be, is used uppermost. This rod must be pierced in three places for the vertical masts employed in the bracing of the rod, trussing the main plane, and adjusting the elevator. These are spaced out in Fig. 130, which shows a side elevation of the model. Their sectional dimensions are 1/16 by 1/4 inch; their respective lengths ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... never hold a ferule nor snap children's ears being incomparable fluting-irons. Next the sash was scornfully untied, and tightened to suggest something resembling a waist. The chastened bows that had been squat, dowdy, spiritless, were given tweaks, flirts, bracing little pokes and dabs, till, acknowledging a master hand, they stood up, piquant, pert, ...
— The Flag-raising • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... to the walk, but she couldn't help finding it pleasant. The open air was very sweet and bracing; the exercise was inspiriting, and the threatened talk went well with both. There was nothing whatever formidable about it; the words and thoughts seemed to play, like the sunlight, on anything that came ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... from the poop, and Wilbur, his arm around the boy, followed. Kitchell was already out of hearing, and Wilbur was bracing himself upon the rolling deck, steadying the young fellow at his side, when the latter heaved a deep breath. His throat and breast swelled. Wilbur stared sharply, ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... sturdy earth thumpers seemed to be overworked in the bracing air of the dam top, and they certainly looked picturesque with their white and blue towels round their heads. Indeed, with all the singing and movement, not to speak of the refreshment stalls, the scene was not unlike a fair. When ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... "this country life is great. Early to bed and early to rise makes a man's stomach digest mince pies—how's that? Notice the air out here? How pure and fresh and bracing! You ought to go out and run ...
— Back to the Woods • Hugh McHugh
... sunshine. She opened the long French window to the balcony and stepped out. It was snappily cold, so she went back long enough to catch up a wrap. The apple blossom kimono was the first thing she saw, so she slipped into it, and went out on the balcony. The bracing air was delightful, and she walked up and down, drawing long deep breaths of ozone. There was a low railing round the little balcony and Patty sat down on it. The ground was only about eight feet below her, for the house was built on a side hill, ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... fixture. She was a large steam-launch to be hoisted on the deck of a steamer no larger than the Guardian-Mother; but the task was satisfactorily accomplished by lunch-time. The afternoon was used in bracing the craft in her position, and putting everything ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic
... than that for which the particular author—be his name Chaucer or Chesterton, Shakespeare or Shaw—designed it; as neither can Oxford nor Cambridge nor any University study English Literature, to understand it, unless by bracing itself to consider a living art. Origins, roots, all the gropings towards light—let these be granted as accessories; let those who search in them be granted all honour, all respect. It is only when they preach or teach these preliminaries, these accessories, to be more ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... up hill. Which makes stiffer climbing? Usually the one you are doing seems the harder. Sometimes the road is a dead level between hills. And dead level walking—the monotonous dead-a-way, with no bracing air, no inspiring outlook—is often much harder than down hill or up. And so it too is climbing. Following means climbing. He climbed. He made the high climb all alone. No other ever had the courage ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... for the rearing of sheep; but the island is totally destitute of mineral wealth. It is highly favoured in climate. The intense heat of a North American summer is here tempered by a cool sea-breeze; fogs are almost unknown, and the air is dry and bracing. Instances of longevity are very common; fever and consumption are seldom met with, and the cholera has never visited its shores. Wages are high, and employment abundant; land is cheap and tolerably productive; but though a competence may always ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... cultivator soon learns to make many deft applications of ingrafting. Sometimes a piece of bark may be used as a patch. In the bracing of crotches in young trees, the two trunks may be joined by uniting a small branch from either one, twisting them together to form a bridge like a bolt; they can be made to grow together, forming a solid union. Bolting the parts with iron rods, or holding them together ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... for more than an hour, when I heard steps, steps soft and slow, I knew not where, I was unable to locate them, but bracing myself up, I called out anew, whereupon I perceived a glimmer of light in ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... be many visitors who go there to search in its bracing air for the health they have lost during many years of toil and anxiety, and to whom the words of an unknown poet would ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... thought of confiding in Lord Selsey was at once soothing and bracing. He was a widower with no children, and Cecil was by way of being his heir. Since the death of his wife he lived in a kind of cultured retirement in a large old house standing a little by itself ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... bough to bough; when the light of heaven is so over all, that even the dun-colored earth, the decayed leaves and rotten branches, which the autumn blast has laid low, look beautiful, and seem to whisper resurgam; when a cold, bracing wind sends the warm blood bounding through our hearts—tinting our cheeks, and warming our extremities, until we bless it, as we do the strong hand which leads us in childhood; and we listen, with docile tenderness, to its teachings, ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... numerous rivers and streams flow down, and thoroughly irrigate the greater part of this lovely island: indeed, it may well be looked on as the Paradise of the East; for though, in the low country, the climate is relaxing and enervating to European constitutions, in the higher regions the air is bracing and exhilarating ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... ashore in the boat that was to carry Alan away. Beyond them, the lights of the Huntress showed where she was getting up sail. Martin made the landing with some difficulty, climbed the ladder to the wharf, and stood bracing himself against the ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... brightly and the air was never more clear and bracing than when Sinclair helped his wife off the train at Pawnee Junction. The station-master's face fell as he saw the lady, but he saluted the engineer with as easy an air as he could assume, and watched for an opportunity to ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... firing doubts at me obliquely across the table. "You can't run a country through its spoilt children," he said. "What you call aristocrats are really spoilt children. They've had too much of everything, except bracing experience." ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... same material, and the fur cap was drawn tightly about his head and ears. The slender-barreled rifle lay across his shoulder, and the blanket and deer meat made a light package on his back. Only his face was uncovered, and that was rosy with the sharp but bracing cold. But the resolute blue eyes seemed to have grown more resolute in the last six months, and the firm jaw was ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... love and hate, in the clear briny depths above and beneath! If the angels ever look out of their sphere of intense spiritual realities to indulge in a laugh, methinks such a lonely tripod-sitter, cased over with his invulnerable, non-conducting cloak and hood,—shrinking, dodging, or bracing himself up on the defensive, as the crowd fans him with its rush or jostles up against him,—like the man who fancied himself a teapot, and was forever warning people not to come too near him,—might furnish a subject for a planetary joke not unworthy of translation into ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... interest as a figure appeared farther up the road, and recognizing the fine poise and vigorous stride, she stopped and waited. Lisle was a bracing person to talk to, and she wanted to see him. He soon came up with her and she greeted him cordially. Unlike Gladwyne, he was a real man, resolute and resourceful, with a generous vein in him, and she did not resent the fact that he looked ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... down suddenly to hide the tears that stung my eyelids. But I winked them away in an instant, and was bracing myself to make him laugh by mimicking the man who had introduced us: Nebuchadnezzar of ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... of the lower order acquire from novel-reading a cultivation which they previously lacked, the higher seem proportionately to sink. They lose that aspiring pride which arises from the sense of walking in intellect on the necks of a subject crowd; they no longer feel the bracing influence of living solely among the highest forms of art; they become conformed insensibly, to the general opinion which the new literature of the people creates. A similar change is going on in every department of man's activity. The history of thought in its artistic form is parallel ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... interesting. Brigades marching at route step, bivouac fires, around which groups were eating their breakfast, orderly sergeants insisting in very naughty yet impressive language on the use of sand paper on muskets already bright, musicians rehearsing some new march, little boys bracing up drums half as high as themselves, important adjutants riding to and fro to hurry up the formation of their respective regiments, elegantly attired aides-de-camp galloping like mad and endeavoring to avoid mud puddles, batteries thundering along, ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... the stimulus of the bracing early morning air. A new inspiration seemed to fire him, altogether dissimilar to the glow which he was wont to feel when plunging into a dangerous phase of a professional case. He slowly drew from his pocket the typed note-paper which had nestled in such enviable intimacy ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... extremity of which a thin purple line indicated a range of hills. Here Tolly Trevor, unable to restrain his joy at the prospect of adventure before him, uttered a war-whoop, brought his switch down smartly on the pony's flank, and shot away over the plain like a wild creature. The air was bracing, the prospect was fair, the sunshine was bright. No wonder that the obedient pony, forgetting for the moment the fatigues of the past, and strong in the enjoyment of the previous night's rest and supper, ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... have given ourselves away in any situation with a pound of tea. Therefore, perhaps, it was well for us that, a peremptory summons to town reaching me after seven days of comradeship with William, I must make shift to collect my faculties with my effects, and return to the more bracing climate of Fleet Street. ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... Fenneben himself, with his tall figure and striking presence outlined against the gray stone columns of the veranda. All this because it was mid-October, a heaven-made autumn day in Kansas, with its gracious warmth and bracing breath; with the Indian summer haze in shimmering amethyst and gold overhanging the land; and the Walnut Valley, gorgeous in the glow of the October frost-fires, winding down between broad seas of rainbow-radiant prairies. And all this gladness ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... seen something about the strong, wholesome, well-groomed Englishman that pleased her, perhaps she was simply glad to be alive upon that glorious morning, with the bracing breeze blowing fresh from the lake, and the sun sending his welcome rays down upon the mountainside. At all events, her lips parted in the merest shadow of a smile as she walked along the gravelled path with the veriest air of ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... it was perhaps peculiar to the writer more immediately to feel for the safety of the whole. Each log or upright beam of the beacon was to be fixed to the rock by two strong and massive bats or stanchions of iron. These bats, for the fixture of the principal and diagonal beams and bracing chains, required fifty-four holes, each measuring two inches in diameter and eighteen inches in depth. There had already been so considerable a progress made in boring and excavating the holes that the writer's hopes of getting the beacon erected this year began ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... enjoyed—without having been disturbed by anything. One would have supposed that, after so much hardship, they would have got up somewhat wearied. Strange to say, it was not so, for they arose quite refreshed. This Lucien attributed to the bracing influence of the light dry atmosphere; and Lucien was right, for, although an arid soil surrounded them, its climate is one of the healthiest in the world. Many a consumptive person, who has crossed the prairies with flushed cheek, uttering his ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... snowboat, made off, hauling it with a rope over white banks and hollows toward the big timber. The dog, Bony, came along with them, wallowing to his ears and barking merrily. Since morning the sun had begun to warm the air, and a light breeze had risen. The boy sat bracing on a rope fastened before and looped around him. As they went along he was oversown with sparkling crystals. They made his cheeks tingle, and almost took his breath as he went plunging into steep hollows. Often he tipped over and sank in the white deep. Then Trove hauled him out, ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... name of Mr. Heathcliff's dwelling. 'Wuthering' being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times, indeed: one may guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... He reached out his spear as far as he could. It touched a soft object. The object, whatever it was, surged violently beneath the touch. His flesh crept, and the shaggy hair uplifted on his neck. "Back!" he hissed, thrusting A-ya off to arm's length and bracing his spear point before him to receive the expected attack. A pair of faintly phosphorescent eyes, small, but so wide apart as to show that their owner's head must have been enormous, flashed round upon them. There ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... laughed—a young spontaneous laugh—the first since she had come home. She kept Betty gossiping for half an hour, and as the stream of the village life poured about her, in Betty's racy speech, it was as though some primitive virtue entered into her and cheered her—some bracing voice from the Earth-spirit—whose purpose ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... domination, and particularly (it is pleasant to remember) from the girls. After the slipshod training and the incomplete accomplishments of a girls' school, there was something at first annoying, at last exciting and bracing, in this high ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... man in, and Mrs. Cody got breakfast for us. He refused the drink I set out for him. I felt that I needed a good deal of bracing in this writ of replevin business, so I drank his as well ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
... but it is only a small sample of a vast crop of a similar nature which you have in Western Ontario, for as I am informed by my honourable friend on my right, Mr. Mackenzie, the peaches are often given to the pigs. (Great laughter.) The pleasant and bracing seasons of Canada can be enjoyed in a country without its equal, for nowhere has the settler a more varied range of choice in the scenery, the locality, the soil which will finally determine him where to found a home. His fortune may be compared to that of a man entering one ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... faded and shrivelled indeed, after another year or two of anything but hospitality as generous as that of New York. Well-nourished and undimmed, however, it concealed for them admirably the fact that it was the hospitality they were after, and not the bracing climate or the desire to see the fascinating Americans of London and Paris at home. New York found them agreeable specimens of high-spirited young English people, and played with them indefinitely. Miss Forde, when she sat imperturbably ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... left the diner and swayed back into the Pullman she experienced a surging rush of energy and wondered if she was feeling the bracing air of which Harry had spoken. This was the North, the ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... for the table. Rick reached out and grabbed an ankle. Bracing his legs, he gave a mighty heave. Striped shirt went over backward in front of Barby, who stamped with both bare feet on his stomach. The breath went out of ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... islands to south and east, and with the hotly golden rice flats of the Val Maggia to the north. And because it was a remote and insignificant place, far away out of the crowding tragedies of that year of disaster, away from burning cities and starving multitudes, bracing and tranquillising and hidden, it was here that there gathered the conference of rulers that was to arrest, if possible, before it was too late, the debacle of civilisation. Here, brought together by the indefatigable energy of that impassioned humanitarian, Leblanc, the French ambassador at Washington, ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... cienega the dogs stopped before a thicket, bristled their backs and growled impatient remonstrance to the superintendent's efforts to shove them into the brush with his foot. In response to urgent encouragement, the collies, bracing back, barked furiously at the thicket, while the herders edged away to climbable trees, and the superintendent waited with tense nerves for the rush of a ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... question Maggie had been bracing herself for: "How about Dick Sherwood? Did he finally come ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... around and she couldn't go through. My natural gallantry got the better of my resentment, and I went out to help her over, notwithstanding what she had said when I was under the counter. Planting one foot firmly in the center of the puddle and bracing the other against the curb-stone, I ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... fellows! Hold 'em!" encouraged the men of the upper seats, bracing themselves against the broad ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... requisition; and, luckily, hares and Khorassan partridges were tolerably abundant. At times, even our guides confessed themselves at fault, so difficult was it to make our way through such a country. However, one thing was greatly in our favour—we had a splendid, bracing climate the whole way, the nights and mornings being "rayther" too cold, the thermometer ranging at that time between 20 and 30 degrees. The poor Sepoys and camp-followers, however, suffered severely. We experienced scarcely the slightest annoyance from the inhabitants ...
— Campaign of the Indus • T.W.E. Holdsworth
... the bushes and the sward, breaking into a thousand diamonds as it caught the rays of the stars. On went the horses briskly, their breath steaming against the fresh air, and their hoofs sounding cheerily on the hard ground. The rapid motion of the carriage, the bracing coolness of the night, and the excitement occasioned by anxiety and the forethought of danger, all conspired to stir the languid blood of Lord Mauleverer into a vigorous and exhilarated sensation, natural in youth to his character, but utterly contrary to the nature he had imbibed ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to play a little at Monte Carlo and cruise a little in the Mediterranean—to kill time through the detestable winter, which made itself felt wherever he was; and she went to London to see about Francie's gown, and up north to bracing Scotland, and down to Wellwood for Christmas, and back to the racket of London in the spring; and neither of them had spent a lonelier time in all their lives. Quite a fresh and peculiar sense of homelessness and uncomforted old age ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... more bracing here than at Cannes, but on the whole the climate is more equable, there being no such sudden fall in the temperature after sunset; it is, however, I fear, less suited for invalids of a consumptive nature than other parts of the Riviera. It ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... my bear-hunting adventures. One day, when I had nothing else to do, I saddled up an extra pony express horse, and arming myself with a good rifle and pair of revolvers, struck out for the foot hills of Laramie Peak for a bear-hunt. Riding carelessly along, and breathing the cool and bracing autumn air which came down from the mountains, I felt as only a man can feel who is roaming over the prairies of the far West, well armed, and mounted on a fleet and gallant steed. The perfect freedom which he enjoys is in itself a refreshing stimulant ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... tonic and bracing to watch one's friend burst into bloom!... I needed the stimulus, too. ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... her go, honey, when you get hold of her," said Jimmy to Gabriella in a sympathetic aside "What she needs is bracing up—I was saying so to Pussy only this morning. 'If you could just brace up Cousin Fanny, she'd be as well as you or I,' was what I said to her Now I don't believe there's a better place on earth to brace a body up than old New York. I remember I took my poor old father ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... D'Hubert, liberated without remark, returned to his regimental duties, and Lieutenant Feraud, his arm still in a sling, rode unquestioned with his squadron to complete his convalescence in the smoke of battlefields and the fresh air of night bivouacs. This bracing treatment suited his case so well that at the first rumour of an armistice being signed he could turn without misgivings to the prosecution of ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... Clare, bracing herself against the chiffonier which she had moved away from the door, "just a little shaky from the drugs—but all right. Don't bother about me, now. I can take care of myself. I'll feel better in a minute. Upstairs— that is where I think that ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... to that door, you! Back up!" Sandy's voice was almost conversational but it was profoundly convincing. The bully obeyed him, standing at the door in the place of the assayer, who stepped aside, feeling a little sick at the stomach, Sam bracing him in friendly fashion ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... and striking into a canter the two men made for the open country. The excitement and motion combined with the bracing air drove the fumes of the liquor from Cook's head, and before many miles had been passed he was comparatively free from the terrible malady which threatened ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... told it, and she knew, too, what harm would come to her bairn if that kind of gossip got abroad in the village. She was no longer the gentle, loving nurse with the soft caressing hand, but a woman of purpose. The sudden terror aroused in her heart had the effect of tightening her grip and bracing her shoulders as if the better to withstand some ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... way utterly to fear, and not so terrified but that she could note all Hemstead did; and for some reason she believed he would be equal to the emergency. His confidence, moreover, communicated itself to her. She saw that he did not jerk or saw on the reins at first, but, bracing his large powerful frame, drew steadily back, and that the horses yielded somewhat ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... of verdure and blossoms,—the whole lit up by the mellow light of the setting sun, whose rays scintillated in every fantastic form amongst this gorgeous tropical vegetation, whilst the snow-wreathed evergreens, surrounding the conservatory waved their palms to the orb of day in our clear, bracing Canadian atmosphere—summer and winter combined in one landscape; the tropics and their luxuriant magnolias, divided by an inch of glass from the realms of old king frost and his hardy familiars, the pine and the maple. Charming was the ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... town," answered Fortune. "Why, there aint a person in Madersley who don't know Delaney Manor; and strangers, when they come there, drive out to see Delaney Manor as they would any other big place, and folks at this time of year travel from far to stay at Madersley, because the place is bracing and the coast good for bathing. So you see, Mr. Dolman, there'll be lots of people who will read my descriptions, and when they read 'em they'll begin to talk about the children, and there's no ...
— A Little Mother to the Others • L. T. Meade
... Tom had elected to take with him seemed to resent being separated from his companions. Bracing his feet well apart, the ...
— Tom Swift in Captivity • Victor Appleton
... of it, for he was chilled, in spite of the toilsome climb. The dark boughs wailed above him, tossing athwart his path a haze of sliding snow, but he caught a faint and reassuring clink of drills, and straightened himself as he clambered down between the trees. The sound had a bracing effect on him, and he felt a curious little thrill as the clamour of the river came up to him in long pulsations. The sound of the waters was growing louder when Gordon, with a big axe in his hand, materialized out of the shadows, and strode forward impulsively ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... that score, he would get no satisfaction, she thought. She owed it to Frank. Her pretty face strengthened and hardened on the instant. Her small, white teeth set themselves in two even rows; and her father saw quite plainly that she was consciously bracing herself for an attack of some kind. He feared by this that she was guilty, and he was all the more distressed, ashamed, outraged, made wholly unhappy. He fumbled in the left-hand pocket of his coat and drew forth from among the various papers the fatal communication so cheap in its physical ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... was running free when we first sighted her, but just as she was passing astern of us, she began to come slowly about. I could see a great number of men swaying in unison against the helm that controlled the gigantic rudder. Others were bracing the ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... tired after his long spell of arduous work in Paris, and was glad to rest his brains, so they spent most of the time boating on the lake, or strolling in the woods, getting new-made-over in the fresh, bracing country air. The car they had hired was to meet them at Lancaster. They went thus far south by train, then motored to Liverpool. Loveday, ready with suit-case packed, was eagerly expecting them. From the window of her aunt's drawing-room she watched the big six-seater car arrive at ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... followed him, always ready to hold him up or keep him back, if his six-year-old arms grew feeble during those exercises. All that benefited little Jack, whom sickness had made somewhat pale; but his color soon came back on board the "Pilgrim," thanks to this gymnastic, and to the bracing sea-breezes. ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... sailors knotted the ends of their sashes around the mast. Tonet tied the little boy securely to a ring astern; but seeing that his brother, for a show of bravado, had sat down beside the tiller free, he crouched at the railing, bracing himself against a chock on the deck. A funereal silence settled on the Mayflower. The sea was now in such commotion that the kelp on the bottom showed its streamers in the troughs of the waves. The crests of foam were turning a dirty yellow from the mud stirred ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... across the rolling plains and gently sloping hill sides, covered with waving cane, and interspersed with provision grounds, contributed with the fresh bracing air of the morning to make the drive pleasant ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... of fairy tales, and as she was invited to spend the next summer in the lovely New Hampshire village of Walpole, she thankfully accepted the invitation, and decided to write the new book there in the bracing air of the hill town. In Walpole, she met delightful people, who were all attracted to the versatile, amusing young woman, and she was in great demand when there was any entertainment on foot. One evening she gave a burlesque lecture on "Woman, and Her Position, by Oronthy Bluggage," which created ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... in the early winter, but the day came out bright and clear. Greatly the boys enjoyed the bright sunshine and the bracing air as they took their way through the woods, crossing the river at last, and following a much used trail which took them toward the Delawares' village. This was a new route to them, but it was the course the ...
— Far Past the Frontier • James A. Braden
... once but busied himself with his ponderous fur coat, which he buttoned, as if bracing himself for the start. Beneath her lashes she looked sideways at the deliberate hands and the lean strong face, burnt to a red-brown by sun and snow, half hidden in the fur collar of his ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... friend of the brad-awl with cries of grief and sympathy, and then, turning upon me, they brandished their knives and howled at me like the gang of assassins that they were. So frantic were their gestures that I was convinced that my end had come, and was just bracing myself to meet it in a manner which should be worthy of my past reputation, when one of them gave an order and I was dragged roughly across the little glade to the brambles from which ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... answer?" asked the Ranchero, bracing himself for a strong pull. "You had better ponder the matter well before you decide. What do you suppose your uncle will think, when he comes home and finds you hanging to this hook? He had rather lose the money a thousand times over ...
— Frank Among The Rancheros • Harry Castlemon
... does lie over the mountains. There are difficulties. The Christian course is like a Roman road which never turned aside, but went straight up and on. So much the better. A keener air blows, bracing and health-giving, up there. Mosquitoes and malaria keep ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... clear of the speeding komatik, pitching over and over, and finally sliding to a stop, dazed and bewildered, but in time to see the komatik, bottom up, at the very brink of the chasm. Toby was sprawling just above it. The dogs, with traces taut, stood above him bracing themselves to hold the sledge ...
— Left on the Labrador - A Tale of Adventure Down North • Dillon Wallace
... state of health appeared to be so infirm and shattered that her brother-in-law, Mr. Hoare, offered her the loan of his house at Cromer. She accepted the offer for a couple of months, and found a little benefit for the bracing air. She mentioned in her diary at this time that she had "an undue fear of an imbecile or childish state"—a not unlikely feeling to be cherished by an energetic woman accustomed all her life long to ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... power cable branched off downward, at a sharp angle, overhead. Ray was able to turn about and get his feet in front of him; Yetsko had to crawl on until he had passed it, and then back into it after Ray had entered. Bracing one foot on either side, Ray inched his way down the forty-degree slope, hoping that the two hundred pound weight of Doug Yetsko ...
— Null-ABC • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... of great brilliancy was shining, and over him arched the high skies of the great west. The air was thin and cool, easy to breathe and uplifting, and in the bracing morning he did not feel the loneliness and immensity of the wilderness. Boyd had already built a little fire among the bushes, and was warming some strips of dried beef over ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... simple forms, after so much exciting thought of Art and Man. The day passed in the St. Bernardin, with its lofty peaks and changing lights upon the distant snows,—its holy, exquisite valleys and waterfalls, its stories of eagles and chamois, was the greatest refreshment I ever experienced: it was bracing as a cold bath after the heat of a crowd amid which one has listened to ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... oat-straw and turnips. Not a handful of hay or of meal is given them. The calves are allowed to suck their dams at pleasure. He is convinced that with this simple system of feeding, together with the bracing air of Aberdeenshire, he has obtained a tribe of animals of hardy and robust constitutions, of early maturity, well calculated to improve the general ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... hushing of it up may, in a perfectly candid and honest mind, grow into a deliberate religious policy, or parti pris. Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the phenomenon. It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer's inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight; its sting so often departs and turns into a relish when, after vainly seeking to shun it, we agree to face about and ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... sneaking down the companionway. For an instant I was in a panic of terror and chagrined that I had lingered long enough to give the enemy time to return. But I determined that I might as well fight there as anywhere else, and, bracing myself against the bunks, I drew my knife and raised the belaying-pin, prepared to begin the attack as soon as my visitor ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... the carriage, bracing his courage for the emergency. He could take a cushion, jump out and attack the man with that. It was not a deadly weapon, and would require considerable force back of it to do damage. The whip might ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... something bracing and sustaining about it; and the days in which Hugh learnt the truth about himself had nothing of gloom or sadness about them. The discovery indeed surprised him with a certain lightness and freshness of spirit. He smiled ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... you see, I had rather entertained a sort of hope that when I had revealed to him the Bassett's mental attitude, Nature would have done the rest, bracing him up to such an extent that artificial stimulants would not be required. Because, naturally, a chap doesn't want to have to sprint about country houses lugging jugs of orange juice, unless ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... not in loveliness of character and demeanour, nor even much in the always gentle and tender expression of countenance; but the animal spirits and frame, that should have had all the strong cherishing and bracing that affection and wisdom together could have applied, had been left to wear themselves out under trials his father had shrunk from, and other trials his father had made. And Mrs. Rossitur it was hard for Fleda to remember the face she ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... cheered Peter to meet someone who talked of the possibility of his fighting again. Soon the two were deep in technicalities, the appalling technicalities of the airman. It was no good listening to their talk, for you could make nothing of it, but it was bracing up Peter like wine. Archie gave him a minute description of Lensch's latest doings and his new methods. He, too, had heard the rumour that Peter had mentioned to me at St Anton, of a new Boche plane, with mighty engines and stumpy ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... breadth. Ranges of wooded hills bound this valley on both sides. After the first twenty miles you come to Mount Morambala, which rises with steep sides to 4000 feet in height. It is wooded to the top, and very beautiful. A small village peeps out about half-way up the mountain. It has a pure, bracing atmosphere, and is perched above mosquito range. The people on the summit have a very different climate and vegetation from those on the plains, and they live amidst luxuriant vegetation. There are many species of ferns, some so large ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... books as to a playground to forget our cares and to blow off the cobwebs of business, let us make sure that we find what we seek. It is there, sure enough. The playgrounds of literature are indeed wide, and alive with bracing excitement, nor is there any limit to the variety of the games. But let us be sure, when we set Out to be amused, that we really are amused, that our humorists do really make us laugh, and that our story-tellers have stories to tell and know how to tell them. ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... always something going on outdoors worth seeing," says Charles Dudley Warner, and of no part of the world is this more true than of these apparently desolate plains at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. Rich is the reward of the daily stroller, not only in the inspiration of its pure, bracing air, the songs of its meadow-larks, and the glory of its grand mountain view, but in ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... little more inclined now to bet on calmness than on passion, he decided to take a seat in the parlor, and keep it, at least, till he could dispose of his present doubt. Easily might he have measured three miles over the Waltham hills, in the bracing morning-air, with his own locomotive apparatus, while he had been looking in vain for artificial conveyance. But if that plan had occurred to him at all at first, it would have been dismissed with contempt as unbusinesslike. He ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... to whom she thus wrote, saw how the poor over- taxed system needed bracing, and accordingly sent her a shower- bath—a thing for which she had long been wishing. The receipt of it was acknowledged ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... gleamed every now and then in the sun. Two more were seen the next day, and at 6.22 A.M. on December 9, noon position 65 deg. 8' S., 177 deg. 41' W., the pack was sighted ahead by Rennick. All that day we passed bergs and streams of ice. The air became dry and bracing, the sea was calm, and the sun shining on the islands of ice was more than beautiful. And then Bump! We had just charged the first big floe, and we were in ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... the air—covert smiles—the whole detestable atmosphere of intrigue with which they would have surrounded her, had vanished as by a spell before the magic word fiancee. She was breathing air like that upon the mountain-tops. It was sweet and clean and bracing. ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... boundless grassy plains; there is all the grandeur of monotony and yet continual change. Sometimes the distances are broken by blue buttes, or rugged bluffs. Over all there is a sparkling atmosphere and never-failing breeze; the air is bracing even when most hot, the sky is cloudless, and no rain falls. A solitude which no words can paint, the boundless prairie swell conveys an idea of vastness which is the overpowering feature of the Plains.... The impression is not merely one of size. There is perfect ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... Bath), you will hear it said that everybody is well in London, but in London you will find that the hygienic critics or authorities distinguish. All England, indeed, is divided into parts that are relaxing, and parts that are bracing, and it is not so strange then that London should be likewise subdivided. Mayfair, you will hear, is very bracing, but Belgravia, and more particularly Pimlico, on which it borders, is terribly relaxing. Beyond Pimlico, ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... Arthur, "we must all pass through the discipline of life. The time will soon come when you will assume woman's duties, and it is well that you go forth awhile to gather strength and wisdom, to meet and fulfil them. You need something more bracing and invigorating than the atmosphere of love that ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... had been made, for tall glasses stood in the centre of the tables filled with ripe grasses and pretty autumn leaves, but, strange to relate, we were more interested in the contents of our soup plates and what was to follow. The cold and bracing air during our short walks on deck had given us all famous appetites, and we ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... split apart down the back, and a slender form, adorned with two pairs of crumpled, wet wings, struggled three-quarters of its length from the shell. For a short time it clung motionless, gathering strength. Then, bracing its legs firmly on the edges of the shell, it lifted its tail quite clear, and crawled up the weed a perfect dragon-fly, forgetful of that grim husk it was leaving behind. A few minutes later, the good sun having dried its wings, it went darting and hurtling over ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... felt as strong as usual, and it is a great treat to get away from the schoolroom and out into the open air, which is bracing and delightful. I believe I have enjoyed this outing more than any I have taken since I came North; and you must allow me to tell you how earnestly I thank you for your considerate remembrance ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... director of the theatre orchestra once asked father Brahms not to play so loud; whereupon he replied with dignity, "Herr Kapellmeister, this is my double-bass, I want you to understand, and I shall play it as loud as I please." The music of Brahms in its bracing vigor has been appropriately compared to a mixture of sea air and the timbre ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... the skipper, bracing up and smiling sweet as he could for the ache in his back. 'I'll 'elp you out. You trust your Uncle George. Not on account of what you're going to give me, you understand,' says he. 'It would be a pity if ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... beacon was now finished, with its supports and bracing-chains, and whatever else was considered necessary for its stability, in so far as the season would permit; and although much was still wanting to complete this fabric, yet it was in such a state that it could be left without ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... previous day. Thus for several days we travelled on, resting during the night at rude tambos, the inhabitants of which, directly Don Jose spoke to them, willingly undertook to give us accommodation. The weather was fine, the air pure, bracing, and exhilarating; and in spite of the fatigue we underwent, none of us suffered. Ellen and Maria bore the journey wonderfully. Although we were making our way towards the east, frequently we found ourselves riding round a mountain with our backs to the rising ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... the new goal posts and ball, which Mr Freshfield, a junior master, was heard to explain was a present from the head-master to the school, had also a mollifying effect. And the bracing freshness of the air and the self-respect engendered by the sensation of their flannels (for most of the players had contrived to provide themselves with armour of this healthy material) completed their reconciliation to their lot, and drove all feelings of resentment against their tyrant, ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... And when (bracing myself at last) I asked point-blank if anything had been sent to him as from me, and he answered "No," I might have been relieved, but I wasn't. Though I did not know then that my darling had burnt my letter, I began ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... honesty, scrupulous accuracy, chivalrous fairness, endless docility to facts, disinterested collaboration, unconquerable hopefulness and perseverance, manly renunciation of popularity and easy honours, love of bracing labour and strengthening solitude; these, and many other cognate qualities," says Baron von Huegel, "bear upon them the impress of God and His Christ." What Dr. Inge, who quotes these words, says of Plotinus declares his own character. He speaks of "the intense honesty of the man, who never ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... the pilot was sweating and swearing. The haze began to clear as they neared the ground, but the ports were too high for Duke to see anything but the underside of the thick clouds. He stood up and headed for the lift, bracing himself as the ...
— Victory • Lester del Rey
... fascination about the great, black leaves floating there, which seemed to invite the lad to strip off the light flannels in which he had slept, to lower himself gently over the side, and lie in and on and amongst them, with the cool water bracing and invigorating him ready for the heat and toil ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... new proposal, I mean Honolulu. You would get the Atlantic and the Rocky Mountains, would you not? for bracing. And so much less sea! And then you could actually see Vailima, which I would like you to, for it's beautiful and my home and tomb that is to be; though it's a wrench not to be planted in Scotland—that I can never deny—if I could only be buried in the hills, under the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... different thing on the gun-deck of a frigate, from what the gentle and sequestered Wordsworth found it at placid Rydal Mount in Westmoreland. In a frigate, you cannot sit down and meander off your sonnets, when the full heart prompts; but only, when more important duties permit: such as bracing round the yards, or reefing top-sails fore and aft. Nevertheless, every fragment of time at his command was religiously devoted by Lemsford to the Nine. At the most unseasonable hours, you would behold him, seated apart, ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... his sowing had done, for by day the bright sunshine shone down on standing wheat and lengthening rows of sheaves. It was in the bracing cold of sunrise the work began, and the first pale stars were out before the tired men and jaded horses dragged themselves home again. Not infrequently it happened that the men wore out the teams and machines, but ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... and light in her eyes which puzzled him. Her expression seemed to speak less of passive grief, than of some active determination—some strong desire. She had all the appearance of a woman who was bracing herself up for some ordeal, nerving herself with all the stimulus of a firm will to triumph over her natural feelings, and follow out a difficult purpose. Mr. Thurwell scarcely recognized his own daughter. She was no longer ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... whose fates were linked irrevocably by love. I stooped suddenly, under the sway of an impulse, I could not resist, and kissed her upturned face, turning almost dizzy in the act. Then I broke from her clasp, and bracing myself for the task to which we stood committed ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... be no doubt that in these ways the Crusades were for our forefathers in Europe the most bracing and stimulating events that occurred in the whole millennium between the complicated disorders of the fifth century and the outburst of maritime discovery in the fifteenth. How far they justified themselves from the military point of view, it is not so easy to say. On the one ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... stubborn were all her replies and assertions; she did not contradict herself once. Waymark marvelled at her appearance and manner. The venom of malice had acted upon her as a tonic, strengthening her intellect, and bracing her nerves. Once she looked directly into Ida's face ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... like an algebraic symbol but still joyful; and the reader will find there a caput mortuum of piety, with little indeed of its loveliness, but with most of its essentials; and these two qualities make him a wholesome, as his intellectual vigour makes him a bracing, writer. I should be much of a hound if I lost ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... next few days, regardless of the heat, George toiled early and late in his father's office, incited by the hope of soon taking the old man away on a visit to the more bracing climate of the North. In the evenings he refreshed himself by a long swim in the harbor, and by sailing his boat over ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... obstacle to know whether to relax or stiffen, or rise or fall to meet it. Just before she strikes the ground on the down plunge, see the wonderful hind hoofs sweep themselves forward, surveying the ground by touch, and bracing themselves, in a fraction of time so small that the eye cannot follow, for the shock of what lies beneath them, whether rock or rotten wood or yielding moss. The fore feet have followed the quick eyes above, and shoot ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... did often in this way Master my fancy while I wandered on With that revered companion. And sometimes—465 When to a convent in a meadow green, By a brook-side, we came, a roofless pile, And not by reverential touch of Time Dismantled, but by violence abrupt— In spite of those heart-bracing colloquies, 470 In spite of real fervour, and of that Less genuine and wrought up within myself— I could not but bewail a wrong so harsh, And for the Matin-bell to sound no more Grieved, and the twilight taper, and the cross 475 High on ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... wrought-iron vertical rods, with horizontal tie-bars to resist the thrust. The suspension-bolts are enclosed within spandril pillars of cast iron, which give great stiffness to the superstructure. This system of longitudinal and vertical bracing has been much admired, for it not only accomplishes the primary object of securing rigidity in the roadway, but at the same time, by its graceful arrangement, heightens the beauty of the structure. The arches consist of four main ribs, disposed ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... crest of the eastern side of the Rio Chico Canon, in an ideal place with bracing air. A fine, sloping meadow afforded quite an arcadian view with the animals peacefully grazing and resting; but looking westward, the eye revelled in the grand panorama of the sierra. The two sides of the Rio Chico Valley rise here evenly from the bottom of the gorge so as to suggest the letter ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... the drawing-room babbled, while Agnes stared into the fire, bracing herself to encounter Lambert, who would surely arrive within the next two or three days, and while Miss Greeby savagely rebuked herself for having so foolishly intimated her departure. Then the men straggled in from their wine, and bridge became the order ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... example, what an inspiration, what a grand symphony of concentrated harmony! Germany was the source of Protestantism and therefore of modern morals—honest, uncompromising morals. German discipline would have a bracing, solidifying effect on a typically casual, slack American youth like Gard, whose latent capabilities were never likely to be fully called upon in the comparatively hit-and-miss organization of ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... they were cut off from all the world. England was an integral part of the empire, where, if the proconsul or legionary commander had not the hot sun and blue sky of Italy, there were partial compensations in the bracing air which renewed his wasted strength, the new and peculiar luxuries in the shape of shellfish and wildfowl that enriched his table, and the facilities which his insular authority afforded him for strengthening his political position, and plotting ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... little way up the beach. The respirator about my mouth, charged with some chemical substance I did not know the use of, permitted me to breathe at first with some ease. And what was more extraordinary was this, that while in the woods the fog had seemed to suffocate me, here it was exhilarating; bracing a man's steps so that he seemed to walk on air; exalting him so that his mind was on fire and his head full of the wildest notions. No coward that ever lived would have known a moment's fear under the stimulation of that clear blue vapour. I bear witness, ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... an unlucky moment, for continual racketing in the country had quite unhinged me; I required bracing, and had quite lost my colour. My paternal relation, however, (Houlditch), undertook my repair, and I was very soon exhibited painted green, and ticketed, 'For ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 397, Saturday, November 7, 1829. • Various
... any dressing-bell that she had better get up. So up she jumped, and set about the business of dressing with great alacrity. Where was the distress of last night? Gone with the darkness. She had slept well; the bracing atmosphere had restored strength and spirits; and the bright morning light made it impossible to be dull or downhearted, in spite of the new cause she thought she had found. She went on quick with the business of the toilet. ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... said he. He sat up, and, bracing himself against the roll of the vessel, he opened the bag and carefully examined its contents. In an inner pocket he found an old letter of Doctor Glyphic's to Thor; another from Thor to his son, dated three years back; and finally a diary kept by Balder Helwyse, which gave Manetho all the ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... old rocks which the steam heaved up and burst before it could get out. And what are the black lines across, marked E E E? They are the streams of lava which have burrowed out, some covered up again in cinders, some lying bare in the open air, some still inside the cone, bracing it together, holding it up. Something like this is the ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... inspiration. Vandy and I separated instinctively without a word. You want to be with the Taj alone, for it leads you captive and invites to secret communion. I wandered around many hours, gazing at every turn, deliciously, not joyously happy; there was no disposition to croon over a melody, nor any bracing quality in my thoughts—not a trace of the heroic—but I was filled with happiness which seemed to fall upon me gently as the snow-flakes fall, as the zephyr comes when laden with sweet odors. I sat ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... excited, determined to hold fast to that which she had, twisted the free end of the rope about her arm and grasped the tautened strand with both hands, at the same time bracing her feet and pulling ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders Among the Kentucky Mountaineers • Jessie Graham Flower
... was to wait and hope. No human force could prevail over the storm. Bracing themselves against whatever offered, and clinging by their hands to projections, the adventurers in the cabin expected every moment to be their last. Washington, who had gone out to the engine room, came ...
— Through the Air to the North Pole - or The Wonderful Cruise of the Electric Monarch • Roy Rockwood
... have just returned from a walk to the top of a hill, on the opposite side of the flat on which the town is situated from that which we mounted yesterday. The day is charming, clear, with a fanning, bracing air. We had a finer view almost than yesterday. The same character of scenery all round the island. Spacious flats on the sea-board under irrigation; about one-half of the fields covered (now) with water, and the other ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... with frost. The deck passengers shivered around the engines and endeavored to extract heat from them. The cabin passengers, excepting myself, were wrapped in their fur coats as if it were midwinter. I walked about in my ordinary clothing, finding the air bracing but not uncomfortable. I could not understand how the Russians felt the cold when it did not affect me, and was a little proud of my insensibility to frost. Conceit generally comes of ignorance, and as I learned, wisdom I lost my ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... marching at route step, bivouac fires, around which groups were eating their breakfast, orderly sergeants insisting in very naughty yet impressive language on the use of sand paper on muskets already bright, musicians rehearsing some new march, little boys bracing up drums half as high as themselves, important adjutants riding to and fro to hurry up the formation of their respective regiments, elegantly attired aides-de-camp galloping like mad and endeavoring to avoid mud puddles, batteries thundering along, as if eager to unlimber and fire at some ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... her son George, after the laughter had subsided, "that, however much you might like the aspect, the situation would be a little too bracing for you." ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... strong was little David, for the sun gave him rosy cheeks, and the bracing wind made him long to run races with his own shadow, ...
— A Child's Story Garden • Compiled by Elizabeth Heber
... years, and trying to enjoy it to the utmost. She has no household cares. Mr. Bowie manages everything, and does so, in order to keep up the honour of the family, on a somewhat magnificent scale. The children, in that bracing air, are better than she has ever seen them. She has Valencia all to herself; and Elsley, in spite of the dark fancies over which he has been brooding, is better behaved, on the ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... ships; and a sort of dull and indefinite longing took possession of me and I felt as if I would like to be out of doors myself in search of pleasurable and exciting adventure. I hungered to be in the bracing wintry night air, or in one of those foreign lands where the sun beats down with tropical warmth; I yearned to be out and singing like them, as loud as possible, just for the joy of ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... confidence. It was a blow on a wound. She glanced at her sister entreatingly. And what she fancied she read in the other's eyes instantly altered the desire to turn—made her send the mules forward at a better pace. Marylyn was sitting stiffly upright, bracing herself with her hands. Her head was up, her look was eager and fixed. There was a smile ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... cloudless, bracing autumn morning. I rose gayly, with the pleasant conviction on my mind that our experiment had thus far been successful ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... been close, damp weather," said Henrietta, surprised at the accurate remembrance, which she could not confute. "She misses the cold bracing wind." ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... light was the white glare of ice. The only guide across that heaving traverse, the unerring instinct of that tall figure at the bow, now plunging forward, now bracing back, now shouting out a "Steady!" that the wind carried to our ears, thrusting his pole to right, to left in lightning strokes, till the canoe suddenly darted up the roaring current of ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... heart was of the old-fashioned kind, and his fancy was not fickle; besides, being now, in a measure, launched upon the subject, of love, so awful to approach, he was unwilling thus soon to leave a theme so sweet, yet so formidable. Therefore, crossing his legs, and bracing up against the chair-back; he determined, now or never, to give her an inkling of his feelings, an intention so very palpable, that Nattie was glad indeed to hear from ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... day in November, when the sun seemed making a last effort to prevail against coming winter. The wind was fresh and bracing, and nature appeared bright and cheerful, on ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... men live better, to work out a moral reformation,—why, there is no need for a Gospel at all. If the change were a simple change of habit and action on the part of men, we could do without a Christ. If the change simply involved a bracing ourselves up to behave better for the future, we could manage somehow or other about as well as or better than we have managed in the past. But if redemption be the giving of life from God; and if redemption ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... all so discreet. One of the Kents of Gracedieu tried to trip me by thrusting his cane between my legs. But! was ready for him, and, pulling up quick and bracing my knees, I snapped the thing short, so that he was left ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... rear the structure. So, with "switch" upon "switch," and "braid" surrounding "braid," a "frizz" here and a "frizz" there, with a few bows for capitals, and a few curls for streamers, and twenty-four hair-pins for fastenings and bracing-rods, the tower was finished, in less than half the time, as she assured him, owing to the advantageous position she enjoyed in her work, that it would take her to rear the same structure on her own head, and it was precisely like what other ladies ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... force of the hurricane was not so fiercely felt, and where the angry argument of the sea was deadened by distance. There was a lovely perfume everywhere,—the dash of rain on the herbs and field flowers had brought out their scent, and the freshness of the stormy atmosphere was bracing and exhilarating. He put Charlie down on the grass, and was amused to see how obediently the tiny creature trotted after him, close at his heels, in the manner of a well-trained, well-taught lady's favourite. There was no ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... and his friends having walked their blood into active circulation, proceeded cheerfully on. The paths were hard; the grass was crisp and frosty; the air had a fine, dry, bracing coldness; and the rapid approach of the gray twilight (slate-coloured is a better term in frosty weather) made them look forward with pleasant anticipation to the comforts which awaited them at their hospitable entertainer's. It was the sort of afternoon that might induce a ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... surrounded by a sort of halo. The sky seemed of a more vivid blue, the grass of a brighter emerald than in the States where women do not enjoy equal rights. The leaves of the many cottonwood trees twinkled pleasantly in the clear sunlight, the air was fresh and bracing and the snow mountains looked down upon the city like a visible realization of ideals." The presence of the visitors soon became known and an impromptu reception was held in the large waiting room of the station, which was beautified by potted ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... towards the door, and took the step unsteadily. He stopped for a second, bracing his shoulders; then he walked firmly across the room. While his hand was on the handle, he heard Mr. ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... it was that the men got the means of recruiting their strength in this manner, as the latter part of the march was a terrible teaser. We marched off from this place about twelve. Although we had found the morning pleasant enough, with a fine bracing breeze, yet in the afternoon, about half an hour after starting, the wind went down, and the sun shone out terribly; the sand in some parts was half knee deep, and although there was no breeze to blow it in our faces, ...
— Campaign of the Indus • T.W.E. Holdsworth
... to have recovered her spirits under the influence of her friends, and in the fresh, bracing air of the Winter woods. Letters from home came for all the girls and boys, but ...
— The Outdoor Girls in a Winter Camp - Glorious Days on Skates and Ice Boats • Laura Lee Hope
... elated. He refused to question the likelihood of such tales. He was hungry for just such cheering stories of success. And when he got them, he devoured them with avidity, without ever looking at them. The effect on him was bracing. It was glorious, he told himself, to have taken part in such happenings. The only cloud on his horizon was the fact that the chance to do distinguished acts had never come to him. The Regimental Colours never required saving under ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... reminiscence. "A girl among the anarchists!" he exclaimed to his present biographer; "if they had said 'A man among the anarchists' it would have been more of an adventure." He is ready to tell other tales of this eccentric environment, most of which does not convey an impression of a very bracing atmosphere. That revolutionary society must have contained many high public ideals, but also a fair number of low private desires. And when people blame Bernard Shaw for his pitiless and prosaic coldness, his cutting refusal ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... his wild songs, and Llewelyn and Howel sat by the glowing fire of logs that blazed in the long winter evenings upon his hearth, listening to his fierce words, and hardening their hearts and bracing their wills against any kind of submission to a foreign yoke. A burning hatred against the English king also consumed them. Had they not, at the cost of most bitter humiliation, gone to him as vassals, ...
— The Lord of Dynevor • Evelyn Everett-Green
... owing to the proximity of much of the shire to the sea. The mean annual temperature at Braemar is 43.6 deg. F., and at Aberdeen 45.8 deg. . The mean yearly rainfall varies from about 30 to 37 in. The summer climate of the upper Dee and Don valleys is the driest and most bracing in the British Isles, and grain is cultivated up to 1600 ft. above the sea, or 400 to 500 ft. higher than elsewhere in North Britain. Poor, gravelly, clayey and peaty solis prevail, but tile-draining, bones and guano, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the cultivator soon learns to make many deft applications of ingrafting. Sometimes a piece of bark may be used as a patch. In the bracing of crotches in young trees, the two trunks may be joined by uniting a small branch from either one, twisting them together to form a bridge like a bolt; they can be made to grow together, forming a solid union. Bolting the parts with iron rods, or holding ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... suddenly come to a stop, bracing himself for the shock, and when Gladiator came to the end of the rope he turned completely over, and landed on his back with a ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor
... and they had rolled up a huge boulder against the small entrance, bracing it so that it would be impossible for her to get out from the inside. Then they ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... help it, Sir John; but a craft that is foreordained to be a wrack, will be a wrack, in spite of reefing and bracing. Look ahead, you Dick Lion—ay, there you ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... to Norway. I was well enough off. I rather enjoyed myself. Perhaps I required a little bracing up for the task that lies before me." He ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... tone of the book is bracing, and its spirit excellent; the work cannot fail to delight as well ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... have been deserved. The young nobleman, who was then in his thirty-fourth year, had the qualities of a leader of men. The army felt him, from general to drummer-boy. He was its soul; and while breathing into it his own energy and ardor, and bracing it by stringent discipline, he broke through the traditions of the service and gave it new shapes to suit the time and place. During the past year he had studied the art of forest warfare, and joined Rogers and his rangers in their scouting-parties, sharing ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... has hitherto been the by-word for perfidious treachery. The heartening surprises of gallant little Belgium and Serbia; the renascence of Russia; the wonderful upleap to the needs of the times by Great, and still more by Greater Britain; and, not least, the bracing of the loins of our closest Allies just across ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... telling the judge that he felt highly complimented, but it was a mistake to ring in that snow stuff on Alaska. She'd suffered from it too long. He was going on to paint Alaska as something like Alabama—cooler nights, of course, but bracing. Alonzo still had Beryl Mae by the scarf, telling her how flowerlike ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... His chief experience in the weight of human-kind had been in wrestling matches at the armory, and only the largest and most muscular men in the regiment cared to try a bout with him. Of course Peter knew as a fact that women were lighter than men, but after bracing himself, much as he would have done to try the cross-buttock with two hundred pounds of bone and brawn, he marvelled much at the ease with which he transferred the rider. "She can't weigh over eighty pounds," he thought. Which was foolish, for ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... with earnest sympathy, at each step helped out the broken words, and showed her comprehension of the pauses. She was a perfect listener in all but one respect; she would not give the counsel Caroline wanted; and she would not have been Marian, she would not have had her own reality and bracing severity, if she had. She could not cheer Caroline up, bid her banish fear, and look forward to happiness; she could not even tell her there was no help for it: she only said, "I don't know," and sat considering ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... allowed themselves to be hauled stiff-legged through the deep snow in their effort to keep the sleds from over-running the dogs. It was exciting work. The men throwing their utmost weight upon the lines sought every obstruction, swerving against trees, bracing against roots, grasping at branches, and floundering through bushes. Often they fell, and occasionally, when they failed to regain their footing, were mercilessly dragged downhill; the heavy sleds, gathering momentum, overtook ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... picture, while Barraclough embraced the opportunity to slip the crook of his stick through the handle of the bag and tug hard. But the bag was heavier than he had imagined. It scarcely moved and only by bracing his foot on the seat opposite was he able to upset its balance. Just a fraction of a second too soon the man turned. Conceivably he saw murder in Barraclough's eyes or else he was unusually quick at grasping a ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... the bridge, they saw strong columns of Greek infantry, dead black in the dim light, crossing the stream and slowly deploying on the other shore. It was a bracing sight to the dragoman, who then went into one of his absurd babbling moods, in which he would have talked the head off any man who was not born in a country laved by the childish Mediterranean. Coleman could not understand what he said to the soldiers as they passed, but it was evidently ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... which he had boasted to his waiting comrades. True, it had been only a boast; never yet had he dared to lay violent hands upon her; but with the thoughts of the delicious, cool bock or Culmbacher bracing his nerves, he was near to upsetting his own theories of the treatment due by a gentleman to a lady. But, with his loafer's love for the more artistic and less strenuous way, he chose diplomacy first, the high card in the game—the assumed ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... entranced with Chicago. She thrived under its more bracing air. She loved the bustle, the stir. We were now in the midst of the presidential campaign, and Mammy and Jenny saw political enthusiasm in a new phase. Marching men passed through the street. There were shouts, torches, many speeches ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... see them slowly close again. The sight of the encircling peaks and ridges, rising in solemn grandeur out of the darkness into the light of the stars, comforted her. The night wind, drawing down the canyon, was sweet and bracing with the odor of the hills. The roar of the tumbling Clear Creek, filling the night with its deep-toned music, soothed and calmed her troubled mind. Presently, she would be with her friends, and, somehow, ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... had turned rosy at the close and then white with the lesser light of night, so did the summer now fade away in a blaze of colour, giving one last display of what life could do before leaving the land to the shroud of the winter's snow. Cool bracing winds, of which there had already been foretaste, now swept the land. The sun seemed brighter because the air was clearer. The college boys had returned, and were heard daily shouting at their games. A few days made all this outward difference. No other difference ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... meerschaum-pipe I ever saw. Lucky? Yes, he was—and especially so, and more than all else—on account of the joyousness of his soul. There was a contagious and a godlike hilarity in his broad, open brow, his frank, laughing eyes, and his mobile lips. He seemed to carry about with him a bracing moral atmosphere. The sight of him had the same effect on the dull man of ordinary life that the Himalayan air has on an Indian invalid; and yet Jack was head-over-heels in debt. Not a tradesman would trust him. Shoals of little bills were sent him every day. Duns without number ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... to Hector reassuringly and backed him several paces. He was quick to grasp her desire and eager to fall in with it. She felt him bracing himself under her, and she laughed in sheer delight as she set him at ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... be used as rests for the feet. Here the men, five on a side, march like a chain-gang, backward and forward; placing one end of the pole in the bed of the stream, resting the other in the hollow of the shoulder near the arm-pit, and bracing themselves by their feet against these bars, they pry ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... she was inspirited by perceiving any door of escape. Any vivid sensation was welcome in the irksome vacancy that pursued her in the absence of immediate excitement. Devoid of the interest of opposition, and of the bracing changes to the Holt, her intercourse with the Charterises had become a weariness and vexation of spirit. Idle foreign life deteriorated them, and her principle and delicacy suffered frequent offences; but like all living wilfully in temptation, she seemed under a spell, ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... which had been awakened since his marriage. In speaking of his family, his wife, and his children, he is always full of thanks to God; his heart swells with emotion, and he breathes amid his heated labours and struggles a fresh and bracing air. Just as, during the Diet of Augsburg, he had pointed out encouragingly to the Elector the happy Paradise which God had allowed to bloom for him in his little boys and girls, so he himself was permitted to experience and enjoy this Paradise at home. In his domestic no less than in his ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... suspicious, had been a murderer. The cold, unkindly memory slid along his senses like a snake. On the edge of the sloping road-bank, studded with little yellow flowers, just where the trees stopped, Pete set down his load and waited, instinctively bracing his body, drawing it back beneath the shelter of ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... I felt that this mere hovering on the outskirts of debate must not last too long, and that nothing was more hazardous to final reputation than to be too slow in attempting to lay its first stone. Yet I felt some difficulty in every great question; and, after bracing my nerves for the onset, I always found my courage fail at the sight of the actual encounter. I felt as a young knight might have felt in some of the tilting-matches of old—master of his charger in the open field, and delighting in the pressure of his armour and the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... in, and Mrs. Cody got breakfast for us. He refused the drink I set out for him. I felt that I needed a good deal of bracing in this writ of replevin business, so I drank his as ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
... of his long arm. And as she looked, a lusty bass—heavy, full of fight—took the hook, and she saw the man stand motionless, intent, alert, at the instant he first felt the fish. Then she caught the skillful turn of his wrist as he struck—quick and sure; watched, with breathless interest as—bracing himself—the fisherman's powerful figure became instinct with life. With the boiling water grasping his legs, clinging to him like a tireless wrestler seeking the first unguarded moment; and with the plunging, tugging, rushing giant at the other end of the silken line—fighting ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... against the insipidity which is too often an accompaniment of conjugal intercourse the institution might well seem to deserve a more tolerant and impartial investigation than it has yet received at the hands of our sociologists. A survival so picturesque could hardly be expected to outlive the bracing air of the nineteenth century. The north wind blew and by 1840 the cicisbeatura was ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... answered the question you put to me," he said, "but I'm going to make a fight of it. Dan Boundary is too old in the bones and hates exercise too much to survive the keen air and the bracing employment of Dartmoor—if we ever got there," he ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... both of them upon the body, and then at last they had the poor boy down, with his face upon the ground and his arms pinned to his sides, and Blunt, bracing himself for the stroke, with a grin of rage raised a heavy clog for one terrible blow that should finish ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... was as if, unconsciously, he was bracing himself for a blow. He had grown a little white; but his voice was quite ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... was in sight from the loopings of the eastern approach. Lidgerwood, scanning the grades as the service-car swung from tangent to curve and curve to tangent up the steep inclines, was beginning to think of breakfast. The morning air was crisp and bracing, and he had been getting the full benefit of it for an hour or more, sitting under the umbrella roof at the observation end ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... was fine; the air bracing. The utmost strength of poor little Diana, and she applied it well, made no impression whatever on the pony's tough mouth. Influences of every kind were favourable. On the illogical principle, probably, ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... could learn to make his statements as firm and unswerving as the horizon-line,—his continuity of thought as marked, yet as unbroken, as yonder soft gradations by which the eye is lured upward from lake to wood, from wood to hill, from hill to heavens,—what more bracing tonic could literary culture demand? As it is, Art misses the parts, yet does not grasp ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... stronger cynic. But she had eluded him, eluded him at the very moment of her freshness and happiness and triumph. What defeat to his proud spirit was working now in him? What longing? What fierce determination to secure even now his ends? The change that I fancied in him was perhaps no more than his bracing of his strength and courage to face new conditions. Death had robbed him of his possession—so much the worse ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... it, going down hill, and got caught in the skid. It had been under an artillery corps and field-guns at a gallop, when the Queen revoo'd the troops in Hyde Park. And look at it now! Horse-kicks and wheel-crushing really had a bracing tendency; gave the constitution tone, and seldom left ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... in Massachusetts offer to summer visitors as many attractions as does Princeton. The air is clear and bracing, the landscape charming, and the pleasant, shady woodroads afford opportunities for drives through most picturesque scenery. Near at hand is the lake, and above it towers Wachusett. It has been proposed to run a railroad up to and around the mountain, but ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... our first exploratory ramble in Eigg an hour before noon. The day was bracing and breezy, and a clear sun looked cheerily down on island, and strait, and blue open sea. We rowed southwards in our little boat, through the channel of Eilean Chaisteil, along the trap-rocks of the ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... her eyes for a minute, then she opened them and looked steadily at her father, her childish lips became slightly compressed, it was as if a world of strength suddenly entered her little frame, as though, dying as she was, she was bracing ...
— Daddy's Girl • L. T. Meade
... trust it will not spread, though 'twoulde be unadvised to goe needlesslie into the infected Quarter. Uncle Dick would fayn take us Girls down to Oxon, but Father sayd he could not spare us while Mother was at Stoke; and that there was noe prevalent Distemper, this bracing Weather, in our Parish. Then felle a musing; and Uncle Dick, who loves a Jeste, outs with a large brown Apple from's Pocket, and holds it aneath Father's Nose. Sayth Father, rousing, "How far Phansy goes! thy Voice, Dick, carried me back ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... but the hillsides are for the most part bare and green. Piora in fact is a fine breezy open upland valley of singular beauty, and with a sweet atmosphere of cow about it; it is rich in rhododendrons, and all manner of Alpine flowers, just a trifle bleak, but as bracing as the Engadine itself. ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... more favorable than the other for beginning a new life, nor did there seem to be, as he went along, any need of it. He had an appearance of being busy every day; he rose late and went late to bed. It was the old life. Stocks down, there was a necessity of bracing up with whomever he met at any of the three or four clubs in which he lounged in the afternoon; and stocks up, there was reason for celebrating that fact in the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... where they stood. The plaza was enclosed by the natives gathered in whispering groups, and depressed by fear and wonder. On one side were crowded all the Messenwah warriors, unarmed, and as silent and disturbed as the Opekians. In the middle of the plaza some twenty sailors were busy rearing and bracing a tall flag-staff that they had shaped from a royal palm, and they did this as unconcernedly and as contemptuously, and with as much indifference to the strange groups on either side of them, as though they were working ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... glue and bracing, and fitting iron rings about it. The vibration of the motor and the straining have pulled the nail heads through the holes in ...
— Dave Dashaway and his Hydroplane • Roy Rockwood
... your surroundings here. The mountains crush you, and weigh upon your heart. Nothing is open enough for you here. The heavens above you are not spacious enough. The air is not strong and bracing enough. ...
— The Lady From The Sea • Henrik Ibsen
... burn runs down to the uplands brown, From the heights of the snow-clad range, What anodyne drawn from the stifling town Can be reckon'd a fair exchange For the stalker's stride, on the mountain side, In the bracing northern weather, To the slopes where couch, in their antler'd pride, The deer ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... either side seemed to Dorothy Thornton to close in and stifle her, and the bracing, effervescent air of the high places had become dead and lifeless in her nostrils, as ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... laugh—the first since she had come home. She kept Betty gossiping for half an hour, and as the stream of the village life poured about her, in Betty's racy speech, it was as though some primitive virtue entered into her and cheered her—some bracing voice from the Earth-spirit—whose purpose is ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of her health. While she had been so unhappy, she had neglected to take that care of herself which her condition necessitated, and she was suffering the consequences. Once her mind was at rest, she made what amends she could by exercise in the bracing winter air, in defiance of dirt and intense cold, and by social relaxation, at least such as could be had while the guillotine was executing daily tasks to the tune of Ca ira, and women were madly turning ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... his plan had worked to perfection, but when he grasped the rope, bracing himself behind a crotch of two mighty branches, he found that dragging the mighty, struggling, clawing, biting, screaming mass of iron-muscled fury up to the tree and hanging her ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and east, and with the hotly golden rice flats of the Val Maggia to the north. And because it was a remote and insignificant place, far away out of the crowding tragedies of that year of disaster, away from burning cities and starving multitudes, bracing and tranquillising and hidden, it was here that there gathered the conference of rulers that was to arrest, if possible, before it was too late, the debacle of civilisation. Here, brought together by the indefatigable energy of that impassioned humanitarian, Leblanc, the French ambassador ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... Mrs. Murray succeeded in inducing Christine to take walks with her along those quiet unfashionable streets, in the bracing air of the late autumn afternoons. She would return from these expeditions so refreshed, with such a charming color in the fair, sweet face to which peace and love and protecting companionship had given an expression of new beauty, that Mrs. ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... with the burden of their treasure, saying they had not come to Arizona for their health. Now in these present days there comes a throng of people in quest of health solely, and many are they who find its blessing in the sunny and bracing air of this climate, in hot springs and the balmy breath of the fir and juniper of our mountains. I found employment in a mercantile establishment of this little mining town and grew up with the country, as the saying is. I formed new acquaintances and made new friends. Among others, I met ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... agitation went through the house. I knew what they were all talking about, thinking about. Subtle waves of thought seemed to catch up each new comer so that she felt, without being told, that something extraordinary was happening. Women now approached not unprepared; but for all their bracing against the shock, not one could be quite nonchalant at the first sight of ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... point of view Autumn is suggestive of pleasant reflections. The wearying, wasting heat of Summer, and the deadly blasts with which her breath has for some years been freighted, are past, and the bracing north winds begin to bring balm and healing on their wings. The hurly-burly of travel, and most sorts of publicity (except newspapers), are fast playing out, and we can once more hope to see our friends and relations in the happy ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... busy in keeping his team upon the trail, but soon they settled down into a steady, shuffling trot, to which they held for mile after mile over the hard prairie road. The day was bright and clear, the air sweet and bracing. An hour's drive from the town, and the traveller seemed in a virgin world. A curious coyote sat on a hill, regarding intently the spectacle of a man travelling with wheels beneath him, instead of the legs of a horse. A band of antelope lined up ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... morning and the bracing air of Colorado made me feel as wild as the young animals that were fast wheeling me over the dangerous trail and possibly into a camp of hostile Indians. I gave no thought to danger for I was too busy keeping the fiery little beasts ...
— Dangers of the Trail in 1865 - A Narrative of Actual Events • Charles E Young
... and the bracing effect of the cold water of the Rappahannock was wearing off, and I began to feel the fatigue of an exciting day and a seventy-five-mile ride—on top of nine other days with little to eat and not much rest. My wet clothes chilled me, and the last few miles I have never been able to ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... H. H. Murray, in both which appears John Norton, the trapper, a character that promises to become as much of a favorite as is the hero of the Leather Stocking novels. These stories have a bracing outdoor freshness and a delightfully crisp realism: are vigorous in tone, and strong and picturesque in the relation. Taken altogether, they may be pronounced in the most artistic of Mr. Murray's excursions into the realms ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... weather is this for the caravan. The people do not like to move, and show a decided tendency to hibernation. Some camels are also lost—escaped from the numbed fingers of their drivers. I, too, feel it cold; and yet there is so much of home in this weather—this keen, bracing air—that I cannot complain. ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... nests, of superior quality, and five mace of sugar candy and prepare congee with them in a silver kettle. When once you get into the way of taking this decoction, you'll find it far more efficacious than medicines; for it possesses the highest virtue for invigorating the vagina and bracing up the physique." ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... and stumbling through the roots of the heather. Roddy gazed at them with his fixed and mournful eyes. He couldn't share your excitement. He drew back his shoulders, bracing himself to bear it; his lips tightened in a hard, bleak grin. He grinned at the absurdity of your supposing that he could be interested in ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... when Bettina, already a little intoxicated with the bracing air and liberty, gave forth triumphantly these three exclamations, "No one! no one! no one!" a rider appeared, walking his horse in the direction of the carriage. It was Paul de Lavardens. He had been watching for more ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the story was given to me and I repeat it to show how bracing the climate near Superior is. Remember, if you please, that I do not want the story to be repeated as coming from me, for I have nothing left now but my reputation for veracity, and that has had a ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... agricultural purposes, as also for the rearing of sheep; but the island is totally destitute of mineral wealth. It is highly favoured in climate. The intense heat of a North American summer is here tempered by a cool sea-breeze; fogs are almost unknown, and the air is dry and bracing. Instances of longevity are very common; fever and consumption are seldom met with, and the cholera has never visited its shores. Wages are high, and employment abundant; land is cheap and tolerably productive; ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... elated at this. The construction he put on it was that she had relented and was coming back to fling her arms round his neck. He was just bracing himself for the clash, when he caught her eye, and it was as cold and unfriendly ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... me at last," hollered Dave, bolting into the kitchen, slamming the door behind him and bracing ...
— The Seiners • James B. (James Brendan) Connolly
... of the jury was completed Mr. Loram rose to introduce the case; whereupon his lordship leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, as if bracing himself for a ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... temperature low, the springs shoot thick volumes of steam high in air. To the incomer by the north or west entrance who has yet to see a geyser, the first view of the Lower Geyser Basin brings a shock of astonishment no matter what his expectation. Let us hope it is a cool, bracing, breezy morning when the broad yellow plain emits hundreds of columns of heavy steam to unite in a wind-tossed cloud overlying and setting off the uncanny spectacle. Several geysers spout vehemently and one or more roaring vents bellow like angry bulls in a nightmare. This is appropriately ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... to whom the world was a bank had not been so inexorably shut away from the bracing, tonic shock of knowing men utterly diverse, to whom the world was just as certainly only a grocery store, or a cobbler's bench, he might have come to believe in a world that is none of these things and ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... waving both hands and bracing on feet wide apart. "Do look! Your age or more, and about half your beefsteak ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... frightened, and I could feel him tremble, which made me all the more afraid. The situation was not pleasant, and without stopping to think, I said, "Rollo, we must run him down—now do your best!" and taking a firm hold of the bridle, and bracing myself in the saddle, I struck the horse hard with my whip and gave an awful scream. I never use a whip on him, so the sting on his side and yell in his ears frightened him more than the wolf had, and he started on again with a rush. But the wolf stood still—so did my heart—for the beast ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... Jacob Cochrane's lively songs, cheerful, hopeful, militant, and bracing, fell with a pleasing sound upon the ear of the believer of that epoch.) The love of God had, indeed, entered Philip's soul, but in some mysterious way had been ossified after it got there. He had intensely black hair, dark skin, and a liver that disposed him constitutionally to an ardent ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... shipping coming up with wind and tide. Sea-gulls wheeled around us overhead, sea-weed clung everywhere to the banks which the advancing tide had not yet covered, everything was of the sea sea-ey, and the fine bracing air which blew over the water made me feel more hungry than I had done for many a day; I did not see how children could live in a better physical atmosphere than this, and applauded the selection which Ernest had made on behalf ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... rejoined, bracing herself, but turning a drawn and haggard face, that had just grown ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... know thou wouldst rejoice To inhale this bracing air; Thou wouldst break thy sweetest sleep To ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... a hard frost, that day. The air was bracing, crisp, and clear. The wintry sun, though powerless for warmth, looked brightly down upon the ice it was too weak to melt, and set a radiant glory there. At other times, Trotty might have learned a poor man's lesson from the wintry sun; but, he was ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... remarked, "have you a little something bracing round this place? I'd like a small nip of whisky ...
— Frank Merriwell's Son - A Chip Off the Old Block • Burt L. Standish
... for so peaceful was the country to which he was accustomed that he carried no weapon. He took his present danger little to heart. There was a strange buoyancy—born, no doubt, of the bracing wind—in his spirit. If they were going to kill him—well, he would die hard; and a man can but die once. A laugh arose from the men; it sounded to him as strange a sound, for the time and place, as the almost human cry of the horse a few minutes before. Then O'Shea came towards him with menacing ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... of amazement into the lads' countenances. The soft, sweet, bracing air of morning floated from the glorious shore, all cliff and indentation looking of a pearly grey, almost the same tint as the surf that curled over upon the rocks distant ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... rains and rains, and the streets stream with the flood, and the dull air reeks with a sort of inner steam, hot, close, and sticky as a brother: a brother whose wants are many and whose resources are few. The morning after the storm, there will be a keen thrill in the air, keen but wholesome and bracing as a good resolution and not necessarily more lasting. The asphalt has been washed as clean as a renovated conscience, and the city presses forward again to the future in which alone it has its being, with the gay confidence of ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... character to subject themselves to. Lastly, I would have you consider especially the moral atmosphere in which they have habitually breathed: according to the nature of this the mental health varies as certainly as the physical strength varies in a bracing or relaxing air. A strong bodily constitution may resist longer, and finally be less affected by a deleterious atmosphere than a weak or diseased frame; and so it is with the mental constitution. Minds insensibly ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... the breath exhaled in chagrin audible to all but the teacher. Out of class I was noticed, cheered, and commended, and exhorted to hold on in the course of truth and uprightness—encouragement corresponding to the rubbing down and bracing bestowed by his guardians upon the pugilist. And still the geography questions went around, and Mary Morgan was head and ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... of course acquainted with the vigorous and bracing pages of Sir John (2 vols.: London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown). Sir John, who plays but a tooth-comb in the orchestra of this historical romance, blows in his own book the big bassoon. His character is there drawn at large; and the sympathy of Landor has countersigned ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... position very agreeable, the fine bracing air from the sea acting like a charm upon the invalids, and driving away those wandering minstrels, the mosquitoes. Besides, there was the daily trip on shore in the "fast boat," available to those whose duties ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... fir trees and the ground was like a brown velvet carpet, yielding gently under their feet. The air was laden with a pungent odor, accentuated by the recent storm, and the damp, resiny fragrance was like a bracing tonic to the fugitives, bidding them welcome to ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... "And we die fast too," echoed a major from another part of the room. As a matter of course, places possessing salubrious climates are crowded with pallid seekers after health, and as St. Paul enjoys a dry and bracing atmosphere from its great elevation above the sea level, as well as from the purity of the surrounding prairies, its hotels—and they are many—are crowded with the broken wrecks of half the Eastern states; some find what ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... take care of myself, mon petit Asticot," she laughed, bracing her strong arms. "And suppose I wanted to go off with him? They are amusing sometimes, people like that. There is one. ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... the right was Lucy, tense and pale. My coach was a stranger; his was good Clay. My coach tried in vain to get me to take the position he preferred; it hurt and strained me, and he gave up. As I slowly got the position I was used to, working my elbows into the sand, bracing my toes, keeping my body close to the ground, my left hand twisted in the sling and supporting the barrel, my right at the trigger and stock, and my cheek at the butt, to my left a rifle heavily spoke, and in spite of cotton my ear rang. Then Lucy shot. ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
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