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More "Cracked" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "He is a cracked brain that will go and drown himself," said a frequenter of the place. He looked round about at the other players, who all ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... nights, I used to steal a bag which was used for carrying corn to the mill. I would crawl into this bag, and there sleep on the cold, damp, clay floor, with my head in and feet out. My feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... Reddy cracked his whip without producing any effect upon the patient steed, but, after much coaxing, Bob succeeded in starting him again, while Toby bounced up and down much like a kernel of corn on a griddle, such a decided ...
— Mr. Stubbs's Brother - A Sequel to 'Toby Tyler' • James Otis
... but, while she looked, the smile froze stiff as it were on his face, and changed to a nervous grin the sort of grin men wear when they are not quite easy in their saddles. The mare seemed to be sinking by the stern, and her nostrils cracked while she was trying to realise what was happening. The rain of the night before had rotted the drop-side of the Himalayan-Thibet Road, and it was giving way under her. 'What are you doing?' said the Man's Wife. The Tertium ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... police were upon them as he spoke. Revolvers cracked. Jack Harkness, blonde, curly haired, and of magnificent physique, let his firearm drop as he clapped his hand to a suddenly ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... stepped up to the old man and whispered something in his ear. The wrinkled face cracked into a hideous grin that showed his ...
— A Voyage with Captain Dynamite • Charles Edward Rich
... was Gama; cracked and small his voice, But bland the smile that like a wrinkling wind On glassy water drove his cheek in lines; A little dry old man, without a star, Not like a king: three days he feasted us, And on the fourth I spake of why we came, And my bethrothed. ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... rainy season was over, and just after he had finished the fence round his tent, one day when Robinson was at work in the cave, all of a sudden the earth began to fall from the roof, and the strong props he had put in cracked in a way which frightened him terribly. At the same time there was a curious moaning, rumbling noise, that he could not understand. He rushed out, and so afraid was he that the roof was falling in, and that he should be buried, that he got over the ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... curiosities that have already been discovered; a library containing the fine works of Mazois, of Raoul Rochette, of Gell, of Zahn, of Overbeck, of Breton, etc., on Pompeii, enables the student to consult them in Pompeii itself; workshops lately opened are continually busy in restoring cracked walls, marbles, and bronzes, and one may there surprise the artist Bramante, the most ingenious hand at repairing antiquities in the world, as likewise my friend, Padiglione, who, with admirable patience and minute fidelity, is ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... was afraid you were going to pinch them all. I'll tell you. It was easy. I piped the Magpie off to a chap named Kenleigh having the bonds up there in his rooms in an apartment house. I couldn't crack Kenleigh's safe myself, but it was nuts for the Magpie—see? He cracked the safe. I was with him, and I copped that near-diamond pin of his, and left it there so there wouldn't be any guessing as to who pulled off the job, and then we beat it back to his place to divide—and I beaned him. I wasn't looking into ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... His whip cracked suddenly, and the lash leapt serpentlike into the air, to descend and coil itself about La Boulaye's head and face. A cry broke from the young man, as much of pain as of surprise, and as the lash was drawn back, he clapped his hands to his seared face. But again he felt it, cutting ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... the sheath; he was over-matched, for the giant was possessed; but yet he reached out, caught his sword, and struck the giant his death-blow. Then the giant cast his hands about Cormac, and gripped his sides so hard that the ribs cracked, and he fell over, and the dead giant on top of him, so that he could not stir. Far and wide his folk were looking for him, but at last they found him and carried him aboard ship. Then ...
— The Life and Death of Cormac the Skald • Unknown
... breakfast consisted of ham and eggs and champagne. Yes, sir; don't think Aunt Mollie had overlooked the fashionable drink. Hadn't she been reading all her life about champagne being served at wedding breakfasts? So there it was in a new wash boiler, buried in cracked ice. And while the women was serving the ham and eggs and hot biscuits at the long table built out in the side yard, Uncle Henry exploded several bottles of this wine and passed it to one and all, and a toast ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... have cracked all at once, their easy-going, timid, incapable guardians having allowed things to take their course. Society, accordingly, disintegrated and a pell-mell, is turned into a turbulent, shouting crowd, each ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... agreed in one thing—they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... barrel of beer take two bushels of wheat just cracked in the mill, and some of the flour sifted out of it; when your water is scalding hot, put it into your mash-vat, there let it stand till you can see your face in it; then put your malt upon that, and do not stir it; let it stand two hours and an half; ...
— The Practical Distiller • Samuel McHarry
... sheet of paper. But she was burning up with fever; the quill cracked in her nervous fingers. "There," she said, throwing it down after a few seconds, "I don't know what's the matter with me to-day. I'll write it for ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... functions. The choir ceased from wrangling, the Sunday School plucked up courage and flourished like a green bay tree. She managed the deacons, she braced up the missionary societies, she captivated the parish, she cheered the depressed and depressing old ladies and cracked jokes with the invalids. ...
— The Romance of a Christmas Card • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... that's positively invaluable; a Zeiss lens, in perfect condition. I've got several good photographic outfits from time to time, but the lenses are always cracked by heat,—the things usually come down on fire. This one I got out of a plane I brought down up at Bar-le-Duc, and there's not a scratch on it; simply ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... 39th Regiment! What visions are conjured up when this name comes on the scene! Cracked and gaping plains, desolate, desert and abandoned of life, scorched beneath a lurid sun of burning fire, waterless, hopeless, relentless, and accursed: that is the picture he draws of the great interior. He had followed ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... found a perfect nest of small servants' rooms, with broken pieces of furniture, dirty cane-bottomed chairs, chests of drawers, cracked mirrors, and decrepit bedsteads. The rooms had low sloping ceilings already hung here and there with cobwebs, small windows, and badly plastered walls—a depressing and dismal region which they were glad ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... it,—"Live! live! he is here!" I still chatted with Leonora and made her laugh, and the child for the first time thoroughly liked me. We were finishing our dessert, when we heard John's knock. We allowed him to come in for a moment, and gave him some almonds, which, he leisurely cracked and ate. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... little girls and the two mothers got off the train at a little country station. Mr. White came to meet them. He and Billy, the hired man, piled all the trunks and bags in a wagon. Then Billy climbed up on the high seat and cracked his whip, saying, "Get-up! Get-up!" The horses pulled, the dust flew, and away the wagon went. Then Mr. White packed the mothers and the little girls into his automobile and away they also went ...
— Five Little Friends • Sherred Willcox Adams
... eyes were luminous with belief. Lizzie had smiled, and shaken her head slightly, looking at the battered rubbish in the bag—the little, tarnished mirrors, one of them cracked; the two small lenses, scratched and dim; the handful of rusty cogs and wheels. With what passion he had dreamed that he would see that which it hath not entered into the heart of man to conceive! He began ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... 'called' from parish to parish, one of the churchwardens of X complained to the churchwardens of Y that his late importation from the Y pulpit was not very satisfactory. 'And yet,' he said, 'you all cracked him up enormously.' 'Yes,' replied the churchwarden of Y, 'and you will have to crack him up too before you get ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... waited long in the darkness, and heard at last the slapping and shuffling of shoes along the pavement within, as the portress and another nun came to let him in. Then there were faint rays of light from their little lamp, quivering through the cracks of the old weather-beaten door upon the cracked marble steps on which Sor Tommaso was standing. A thin voice asked who was there, and Sor Tommaso answered that he was the doctor. Then he heard a little colloquy in suppressed tones between the two nuns. ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... the only time that I have ever seen my father weep. But as the stout timbers cracked and groaned under the strain it seemed to him as if the ship that he loved was calling piteously to him for help that he could not give, and it was too much for him. The gale that was yet raging overhead and the sea that was still terrible in the wide waters of the river ...
— Havelok The Dane - A Legend of Old Grimsby and Lincoln • Charles Whistler
... piano, too, was thrumming a waltz in the parlor, and two or three couples were throwing embracing, slowly-twirling shadows on the windows. Over in the bar-and billiard-rooms the click of the balls and the refreshing rattle of cracked ice told suggestively of the occupation of the inmates. Keeping on beyond these distracting sounds, he slowly climbed a long, gradual ascent to the "bench," or plateau above the wooded point on which were grouped the glistening white buildings of the pretty summer resort, ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... thought that Mercy had heard his unuttered prayer. The air and sea were intense darkness, till a light as intense for one moment annihilated it, and the succeeding darkness seemed shattered with the sharp reports of the thunder that cracked without reverberation. He who had shrunk from battle with his fellowmen, rushed to the mainmast, threw himself on his knees, and stretched forth his arms in speechless energy of supplication; but the storm passed ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... until six months after the wedding. You'll be back by that time, thirstier than ever. By the way, that reminds me: the gang's going to give you a blow-out at the club. Kind of an Auld lang syne business, 'champagny-vather an' cracked ice,' chimes at midnight, won't go home till morning, all good fellows and the rest of it. Edgington spoke to you about it, ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... or Clematis, it is customary to cut a slight gash on the underside of each limb to be laid down, just cutting inside of the bark; this will arrest the flow of sap, and new roots will form at this point. Where vines are layered, such as the Grape, a simple twisting of the vine until the bark is cracked, will answer in place of cutting, and we believe it is just as well. It should be understood, however, that in layering, the entire shoot is not to be covered; a good portion of the tip of the shoot should be in sight, and only the ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... only one person, that is, the sacristan's wife, a big, hard-faced woman with a faint mustache and a wart on her chin, who sat by the great column near the door dispensing holy water out of a cracked saucer and whining for pennies. Nothing escaped the hawklike eyes of Mother Bonneton, and now, with growing curiosity, she watched the scene between Coquenil and the candle seller. What interest could a great detective have in this girl, Alice, whom she and her husband had taken in as a ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... their heads, a perfect little shower of it fell all about them. The animals, too, struggling to their feet out of the little mounds that had formed around them, were covered with a thick coat of grayish dust. It was a sorry-looking party. With red-rimmed eyes, cracked, parched lips and swollen tongues, they looked as if they had been dragged through a ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... properly there? Would any of the most besotted followers of this pretender retain a rag of belief in His Messiahship if He was crucified? Could it be possible that, if there was a God at all, He should leave a man that really trusted in Him, not to say who was really His Son, to die thus? A cracked mirror gives a distorted image. The facts were seen, but their relation was twisted. If we will take the guidance of these gibes, and see what is the real explanation to the anomaly that they suggest, then we shall find that the taunts turn to Him for a testimony, and that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... the sea-wall among the boulders and howled so dismally. She leaped down after and caught me to her in the wildest distress, and even when I stopped howling could not seem to put me down. Indeed, she held me so tight that if any of my bones had been cracked by the tumble she must have finished by breaking them. The pathos of her efforts to romp with us as in happier days was lost upon me, I am happy to say. Nor did I, recalling to her what Braddish had said of robbers being inevitably caught, realize that I was ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... "Or cracked me rib," the captain growled. "But I didn't, so what's the use of worryin' about things that didn't happen. I'm here, with nuthin' worse than a sprained ankle. You an' Flo had better go to bed. I'm all right now. I want to stay right by this ...
— Jess of the Rebel Trail • H. A. Cody
... only because others were to die, and because his death afforded an opportunity to Addison for some very fine writing. We have the example of Cervantes making Don Quixote die[1107].—I never could see why Sir Roger is represented as a little cracked. It appears to me that the story of the widow was intended to have something superinduced upon it: but the superstructure did ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... boot-hose for the laird, which were annually presented at Christmas with great form. The aged sibyls blessed the bridal bed of the laird when he married, and the cradle of the heir when born. The men repaired her ladyship's cracked china, and assisted the laird in his sporting parties, wormed his dogs, and cut the ears of his terrier puppies. The children gathered nuts in the woods, and cranberries in the moss, and mushrooms on the ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... conducted by himself. She afterwards fell into extreme poverty, and at the age of about seventy (!!!!), was induced to come forward to sing again at the oratorios. "I had the curiosity to go, and heard her sing He was despised and rejected of men in The Messiah. Of course her voice was cracked and trembling, but it was easy to see her school was good; and it was a pleasure to observe the kindness with which she was received and listened to; and to mark the animation and delight with which she seemed to hear again the music in which she had ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... baskets, saw the sedan-chair and saw the lady in it. Under black hair, which made to tower high on her head, he saw a very fair, very delicate, very smart face, a brightly red mouth, like a freshly cracked fig, eyebrows which were well tended and painted in a high arch, smart and watchful dark eyes, a clear, tall neck rising from a green and golden garment, resting fair hands, long and thin, with wide golden ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... pipe with its cane stem and knocked it on the heel of his boot, then he put it into his mouth and blew through it till the liquid nicotine cracked audibly. "I've been huntin'," he said, dryly. "In my day an' time I've been on all sorts o' hunts, from bear an' deer down to yaller-hammers, but I waited till I wus in my sixty-fifth year—goin' on sixty-six—'fore I started out huntin' ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... pint of cracked oatmeal in a quart of milk till tender; add a pound of grated bread, pennyroyal, leeks, a little onion cut small, mace, pepper, and salt, to your judgment. Melt some of the leaf of the fat, and cut some of the fat small, according to the quantity made at once; and ...
— The Lady's Own Cookery Book, and New Dinner-Table Directory; • Charlotte Campbell Bury
... particularly desirous of supplying myself with as much of it as I could procure, because most of the preventatives we had brought out were either used, or spoiled by keeping. By the time we had prepared a hogshead of it, the ship's copper was discovered to be very thin, and cracked in many places. This obliged me to desist, and to give orders that it should be used as sparingly for the future as possible. It might, perhaps, be an useful precaution for those who may hereafter be engaged in ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... to understand he had belonged to her five years, I inquired if he knew Lieutenant Bowling? "Know Lieutenant Bowling!" said he, "Odds my life! and that I do; and a good seaman he is as ever stepped upon forecastle, and a brave fellow as ever cracked biscuit—none of your Guinea pigs, nor your fresh water, wish-washy, fair-weather fowls. Many a taugt gale of wind have honest Tom Bowling and I weathered together. Here's his health, with all my heart: wherever he is, a-loft, or a-low, ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... speaking with contempt or depreciation of the tadpole tails. Without their aid most of us bourgeois socialist frogs would never have been able to get out of our old conservative shells. It was the utopianism of our tails, in most cases, that first cracked the shell. ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... nightfall, I came to the chateau of Murol. The old fortress, an enormous tower standing on a peak in the midst of a large valley, where three valleys intersect, rears its brown, uneven, cracked surface into the sky; it is round, from its large circular base to the ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... brought back, having driven many miles with the stream. In the mean time, I sent another party to fetch the guanicoes which our people had shot the night before; but they found nothing left except the bones, the tygers having eaten the flesh, and even cracked the bones of the limbs to come at the marrow. Several of our people had been fifteen miles up the country in search of fresh water, but could not find the least rill: We had sunk several wells to a considerable depth where the ground appeared moist, but ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... and went on: 'Now it so happened that the house opposite to the one taken by the mechanician was peculiar. It was a tall narrow building, wholly unornamented, the walls covered with a layer of white plaster cracked and soiled by time. I seem to see that house now! Six stone steps led up to the door, with a rusty iron railing on each side, and under these steps were others which went down to a cellar—in ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... house the boys were hurrying into their "war togs"— which is, being interpreted, their best clothes. There was a nervous scramble over the cracked piece of a bar mirror—which had a history— and cries of "Get out!" "Let me there a minute, can't yuh?" and "Get up off ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... care,' answered the Shifty Lad. 'I never spent Hallowe'en yet without cracking a nut'; and he cracked one. ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... 'fractious,' and ready to turn on his companion for every remark he made. Roger understood the case by instinct, as it were, and bore it all with his usual sweetness of temper. They entered the house by the front door; it lay straight on their line of march. On the old cracked yellow-marble slab, there lay a card with Lord Hollingford's name on it, which Robinson, evidently on the watch for their return, hastened out of his pantry ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Captain Reed. "Your apprentice, Kraybo. He broke down during a Misfit attack on the way here; he was never cut out to be a Master Guesser, and even though he tried to kill you to get the job, he couldn't handle it. He cracked completely as soon as he tried to co-ordinate alone. We've actually missed ...
— But, I Don't Think • Gordon Randall Garrett
... assemble, all silent, at the place appointed. Laid on its bier, covered with sable pall, and borne in solemn state, the corpse (i.e. the book) is carried with slow procession, with the moaning music of flutes and fifes, the screaming of fiddles, and the thumping and mumbling of a cracked drum, to the open grave or the funeral pyre. A gleaming line of blazing torches and twinkling lanterns wave along the quiet streets and through the opened fields, and the snow creaks hoarsely under ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... said she had had that jug ever since she was married and nobody had ever broken it before. When we got up I stepped on her dress and all the gathers tore out of the skirt. The next morning when I got up I hit the pitcher against the basin and cracked them both and I upset a cup of tea on the tablecloth at breakfast. When I was helping Aunt Mary with the dinner dishes I dropped a china plate and it smashed. That evening I fell downstairs and sprained my ankle and had to stay in bed for a week. I heard Aunt ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... compared to Mozart, and Beethoven unbeautiful. Some day, and there are portents on the musical horizon, some day, I repeat, the reign of beauty in art will reassert its sway. Too long has Ugly been king, too long have we listened with half-cracked ear-drums to the noises of half-cracked men. Already the new generation is returning to Mozart—that is, to music for music's ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... sharp, hatchet-face, a small sunken eye, and long, loose hair, brushed back and falling over the collar of a seedy black coat. He looked like nothing in the world I have ever seen, and his pale, sallow face, and cracked, wheezy voice, were in comic keeping with his discourse. His text was: 'Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward.' And addressing the motley gathering of poor whites and small-planters before him as the 'chosen ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... imperfections with pitiless insistence, and the torn edges of the green paper shades that half concealed the rooms within were plainly to be seen, as well as the dismantled knocker which hung by one nail to the old cracked door. The vision of Knapp with his ear laid against this door added to the forlorn and sinister aspect of the scene, and gave to the constable, who remembered the brothers in their palmy days when they were the life and pride of the town, a by ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... his head, with rather a grim smile. "Told you once I worked in a pottery. Supposing the clay of a piece wasn't mixed right, it wasn't the dish's fault if it cracked in the firing. Just the same, it got ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... top of four stout posts previously firmly planted in the earth. Around these holes were then hung blankets, and all the cooking utensils of the deceased, pots, kettles, and pans, each with a hole punched through it, and all her crockery-ware, every piece of which was first cracked or broken, to render it useless; and then, when all was done, they left her to remain for one year, when the bones would be buried in a box in the earth directly under the canoe; but that, with all its appendages, would never be molested, ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... to scream until the sky cracked with the noise, and she had no knowledge of her journey home. She found herself sitting at the dinner-table with Helen, and heard her ask, "Don't you ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... Gus Schmidt, gaily, and cracked the long whip he carried. The Canadians understood and cracked their own whips, and away went the whole party, over the fields of ice and snow, ...
— The Rover Boys in Alaska - or Lost in the Fields of Ice • Arthur M. Winfield
... arms folded and our backs bent double, and were borne jogging along by two native porters, our heads every now and then bumping up against the roof, till we couldn't help laughing and shouting out to each other to ascertain if our skulls were cracked. I suppose the natives have a mode of glueing themselves down ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... basha appeared, both driver and guard got up in a fine dark-green uniform, a spruceness it much tickled our vanity to mark. With a feeling akin to princely pride we stepped in, the driver cracked his whip, and, amid the bows of the inn household, we went off up the street. Barring the loss of an umbrella, which had happened somewhere between the time we boarded the basha on the yestereen and the hour of departure that morning, and an exhaustive but vain hunt for the ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... shudder ran through her frame—the ice of artificial years cracked, and the clear stream of her woman's nature welled up to the light, as pure as when she first lay on her mother's bosom: she lifted up her eyes, and with one long look of ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... noblemen's houses, with their wives and daughters, who all aped the manners of their betters in the most ridiculous way; nobody knew me and I was known to nobody, and I cut a sorry figure amongst them all, for in a company of this sort the wittiest man is the greatest fool. Everybody cracked his joke to the bride, she answered everybody, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... asked her if she would be kind enough to let me take it, as if I thought she were there for a purpose. "I'll bring you a chair," said I; and she said, "Certain, dear." And I helped her up, and I'm sure she had the good look she had coveted while I took the bowl to the window. It was badly cracked, and had been mended with putty; but the rich, dull colour of it was exquisite. One often comes across a beautiful old stray bit of china in such a place as this, and I imagined it filled with apple-blossoms or wild roses. Mrs. Wallis wished to give it to me, she said ...
— An Arrow in a Sunbeam - and Other Tales • Various
... my tree bears fruit, I shall sell it and buy three varas of cloth to wear in place of this cracked shell." ...
— Philippine Folk Tales • Mabel Cook Cole
... only two or three times. The little ones were already wild; they had forgotten all about our first meeting, and when I showed myself, or cracked a twig too near them, they would promptly bolt into the brush. One always ran straight away, his white flag flying to show that he remembered his lesson; the other went off zigzag, stopping at every angle of his run to look back and question me with ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... her, and he sat always amazed at the divine melody of her pure soprano voice. And he could not help but contrast it with the weak pipings and shrill quaverings of factory girls, ill-nourished and untrained, and with the raucous shriekings from gin-cracked throats of the women of the seaport towns. She enjoyed singing and playing to him. In truth, it was the first time she had ever had a human soul to play with, and the plastic clay of him was a delight to mould; ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... woman would only stamp her foot. There was that morning when your fire would not burn, and a little black child bawled with the cold and angered you; if its body is ever dug up where it was laid, the skull cracked with the billet of wood will tell the tale. You once suspected me of truantry from your charms—Quedo, quedo! exacting dame—and the pale offspring of poor Hagar you threw upon the blazing backlog, and grimly watched it burn. The pursued children whose cries you could ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... of others, and his religious disbelief, are illustrated by an incident related of him, that, having in a moment of weakness made a promise to some friends that he would offer a sacrifice to Diana, he repaired the next day to her temple, and, taking a louse from his head, cracked it upon her altar. ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... at last. He stopped until the cracked bell of the chapel had done striking the Angelus, and then put on his overcoat, and went out. The air was cold and pungent. The crowded city seemed wakening to some keen enjoyment; even his own weak, deliberate step rang ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... looking at one's self early in the morning in a cracked mirror. I had no idea I had grown so old. As for Lancelot, he must have a beard. A beard? The word struck me, and without knowing why I glanced across the room at my bearded friend on the sofa. Oddly enough he was looking at me, with a half-defiant, half-sullen expression; ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... buried her nose every time, so that I feared I should next be cold in the water, seeing England from the top of a wave. Every time she rose the jib let out a hundredweight of sea-water; the sprit buckled and cracked, and I looked at the splice in the forestay to see if it yet held. I looked a thousand times, and a thousand times the honest splice that I had poked together in a pleasant shelter under Bungay Woods ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... could see not an enemy shell reached it, though when our troops were in the town of Gaza there were many crumps and woolly bears to disturb the new occupation. But all went swimmingly. It was true we had only captured the well-cracked shell of a town, but the taking of it was full of promise of greater things, and those of us who looked on the mutilated remnants of one of the world's oldest cities felt we were indeed witnesses of the beginning of the downfall of the Turkish ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... buried cities which have no history; and that on these real marvels he built up his own romances of the Great Stone City, where the captain encountered an awful race of giants with no legs, who carved stones into ornaments with clasp-knives, as the Swiss cut out pretty things in wood, and cracked the cocoa-nuts with their fingers. I am sure he invented flowers as he went along when he was telling me about the forests. He used to look round the garden (which would have satisfied any one who had not seen or heard of what the ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... later we had a little reunion in the Purdy-Pell lib'ry. Robin was holdin' some cracked ice to a lump on his forehead, and Uncle Noah was sittin' uncomf'table on the edge ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... contribution of amateurs, and in the other an Italian bravura, which she sung or rather screamed out with a thousand indescribable shruggings, contortions, and grimaces, and in a voice to which a cracked tea-kettle, or a "brazen candlestick turned," had seemed the music of the spheres. A little farther on we found two elderly gentlemen playing at see-saw; one an immense corpulent man of fifteen stone at least, ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... drink to success!" cried Krag, seizing a bottle and breaking its head off between his fingers. There were no glasses, but he poured the amber-coloured wine into some cracked cups. ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... own tea with me. (Takes a little paper bag of tea out of one of the slippers and crosses to MISS CAREY.) If I had struck him with the vase, I could understand his calling me "Vixen" (Beginning to weep again.)—but I only flung it at him, 'cause I cracked it by accident in the morning, and I didn't want him to find it out. He was always calling me "butter-fingers." (Sits at ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... the total length of this fragment that fell was two hundred and fifty-one yards. About fifty acres of land suffered from this violent convulsion; two houses were entirely destroyed; one end of a new barn was left in ruins, the walls being cracked through the very stones that composed them; a hanging coppice was changed to a naked rock; and some grass grounds and an arable field so broken and rifted by the chasms as to be rendered for a time neither fit for the plough nor safe for ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... by hungry waves. In some places they overhung their base so as to look like leaning towers that might topple over at any minute. In other parts they were scooped into niches or caverns. Here and there they were cracked in deep fissures, some of them of such width that one might enter them, if he cared to run the risk of meeting the regular tenants, who might treat him ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... themselves in a large gloomy house, which likewise belonged to the cacique of Moyahua. The previous occupants had already left strong evidences in the patio, which had been converted into a manure pile. The walls, once whitewashed, were now faded and cracked, revealing the bare unbaked adobe; the floor had been torn up by the hoofs of animals; the orchard was littered with rotted branches and dead leaves. From the entrance one stumbled over broken bits of chairs and other furniture covered ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... roar between bitter laughter and pain, Urgan smote Sir Tristram with such fury that he cracked his shield in half, and then before Sir Tristram could recover himself he smote him again so that he would have killed him had not the blow by great good chance turned aside. But, turning aside as it did, it gave Sir Tristram ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... make it cheerful too; So you may view the country, which to some may be quite new. Come, take your seats, this Family Coach it can no longer wait, Or else at night,' the coachman said, 'we shall be very late.' The whip he cracked, the wheels went round, so very, very fast, The people at each other some anxious glances cast. The coachman said his horses were the steadiest in town; 'I'm sure I don't agree with him,' cried frightened Mrs. Brown. 'Take care, my dear, or I am sure you will ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... could not have spelled if she had known. She was differently and superiorly educated. In the university that life is, she had acquired encyclopedias of recondite learning. She knew that ice is not all that it is cracked up to be: that a finger in the pie is better than two in the fire, and that angels have been observed elsewhere than at Mons—learning which, as you may ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... renewed. The best lac was chosen and applied to the wire i, so as to be in good contact with it everywhere, and in perfect continuity throughout its own mass. It was not smaller than is given by scale in the drawing, for when less it frequently cracked within a few hours after it was cold. I think that very slow cooling or annealing improved its quality in this respect. The collar g was made as thin as could be, that the lac might be as wide there as possible. In order that ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... gifts would pick their way among the sketchers, and search the shops for cracked china and bits of brass. Few if any of them left without purchasing one of the famous Tilling money-boxes, made in the shape of a pottery pig, who bore on his back that remarkable legend of his ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... showed none of the old-time animation on the subject. What a different man, I mused to myself, from that enthusiastic engineering student that I used to come upon dreaming over his blue-prints. He was considered "half-cracked" in those days when he would enthuse over his undersea railroad, but his animated face was lit with inspiration. Now the light ...
— The Undersea Tube • L. Taylor Hansen
... engaged by a venerable chapel, which stands yet entire, except that the roof is gone. It is about sixty feet in length, and thirty in breadth. On one side of the altar is a bas relief of the blessed Virgin, and by it lies a little bell; which, though cracked, and without a clapper, has remained there for ages, guarded only by the venerableness of the place. The ground round the chapel is covered with gravestones of Chiefs and ladies; and still continues to ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... every window, and opening every door, was, as Bluebeard judiciously pointed out to his wives, fatal to their practical usefulness in society. One could not stop to chase doubts as though they were rabbits. One had no time to paint and putty the surface of Law, even though it were cracked and rotten. For the young men whose lives were cast in the generation between 1867 and 1900, Law should be Evolution from lower to higher, aggregation of the atom in the mass, concentration of multiplicity in unity, compulsion of anarchy in order; and he would ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... country. Good wine is wealth, drugged wine is not; good meat is wealth, putrid meat is not; good pictures are wealth, bad pictures are not. A thing is worth precisely what it can do for you; not what you choose to pay for it. You may pay a thousand pounds for a cracked pipkin, if you please; but you do not by that transaction make the cracked pipkin worth one that will hold water, nor that, nor any pipkin whatsoever, worth more than it was before you paid such sum for it. You may, perhaps, induce many potters ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... all the same, and I won't tell your father you're paying court to his queen," replied Serejka, passing his tongue over his dry and cracked lips. ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... little man had in some measure recovered from his alarm, his small, squeaky, cracked voice was heard saying, "Couldn't you have held me more gently? See my little coat; you have rent and damaged it in a fine manner, you clumsy, officious things!" Then he picked up a sack of jewels, and slipped out of sight behind ...
— My Book of Favorite Fairy Tales • Edric Vredenburg
... window. He was too low down and I too much buried in foliage to see clearly. Was it the rattle? I took a hasty step downwards at the thought. Or was it the blunderbuss? In my sudden move I slipped on the dew-damped branch, and cracked a rotten one with my elbow, which made an appalling crash in the early stillness, and sent a walnut—pop! on to Jem's hat, who had already ducked to avoid the fire of the blunderbuss, and now fell on his face under the fullest conviction that he had ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... you to continue to live—perhaps in the mines. But certainly, Peter the foolish, you must not yield to that present impulse. Of course, you are armed. But do not move! Two feet behind you stands an excellent shot with a pistol aimed at your backbone. Men with cracked spines do ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... two-thirds of the way they did very well, but at last coming to a steep pitch, suddenly the whole span stopped, and refused to budge an inch farther. Frantically the driver lashed and lashed, and cracked his whip, the reports resounding like a sharp fire of musketry amid the hills. It was of no avail, and had not two of the men rushed up with two huge masses of rock, which they placed behind the wheels, the waggon would have gone backwards, ...
— Hendricks the Hunter - The Border Farm, a Tale of Zululand • W.H.G. Kingston
... dead. I looked at his stiff body again and shuddered. The whistle of a train sounded from the valley below, and then an errand-boy passed along the road at the back of the house (for the second or third time that day) singing in a cracked voice the fragment of a popular melody, of which I am sorry to say I know ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... fled. Out in the street, he looked up at the sky. "Is there a new moon?" he asked himself, gravely. "Am I cracked? Why did I pitch into that chap? If I'm not careful, I shall get myself into trouble to-day. I wonder if Jack Seymour will lend me enough to take me to South Africa? They say that war is brewing there. That is what I want—gore, bomb-shells, ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... know me,' he said to himself, as out of a sort of half melancholy mischief he glanced at his face in the little bit of cracked looking-glass which was all he had to adorn himself by. He was feeling utterly worn out and depressed—so many of his friends and companions were dead or dying—knocked down at that time quite as much by disease as by Russian bullets—in many cases the more terrible death of the two. And things ...
— Grandmother Dear - A Book for Boys and Girls • Mrs. Molesworth
... I reminded myself. Followed the voice, a voice from the stable, the cracked, whining tenor of a very aged vassal of the Arrowhead, one Jimmie Time. Jimmie, I gathered, was currying a horse as he sang, for each bar of the ballad was measured by the double thud of a currycomb against the side of a stall. Whistle, ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... was, I could not help gasping, "Are you enjoying your sea trip?" and she replied sepulchraily, "It isn't what it's cracked up to be." We could say no more. That time we groaned ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... merely the reflection of films, but the one hundred thousandth of an inch thick, yet they give forth oral sounds as creatures of flesh and blood. In fact every sound is produced harmoniously with the action on the screen. An iron ball is dropped and you hear its thud upon the floor, a plate is cracked and you can hear the cracking just the same as if the material plate were broken in your presence. An immaterial piano appears upon the screen and a fleshless performer discourses airs as real as those heard on Broadway. ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... Aberdeen, Mississippi. They wouldn't sell her mother because she brought fine children. I think she said they had a regular stock man. She and Aunt Polly was sold several times and together till freedom. When they got off the boat they had to walk a right smart ways and grandma's feet cracked open and bled. 'Black Mammy' wrapped her feet up in rags and greased them with hot tallow or mutton suet and told her not to cry no more, be a good girl and mind master ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Arkansas Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... And you shall see how lively and cheerful I will be." He forced a smile that hovered on tears. "We shall be two rackety young students, every night raising a thousand devils. Gaudeamus igitur." He began to hum in his cracked hoarse voice the Burschen-lied of his early days at ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... a sobbing cry, a cry in spite of himself, and then, as the flying machine swept over them, fell forward into the pit of that darkness, seated on the cross wood and holding the ropes with the clutch of death. Something cracked, something rapped smartly against a wall. He heard the pulley of the cradle hum on its rope. He heard the aeronauts shout. He felt a pair of knees digging into his back.... He was sweeping headlong through the air, falling through the air. All his ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... the imperial mantle, and this indicated that the newly born infant was destined to sovereignty. Great was the rejoicing. The purple marvel was shown even to me who could but just walk. I, like a naughty boy, flung it down; the shell cracked, and the contents poured out on the pavement. My mother saw it, and her exclamation, 'Wicked child, you have murdered your brother!' was often repeated to me in after-years. It never struck me as ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... morning as she first took up the elaborate silken thing, to which pale girls in hot Parisian workrooms had given so much labour of hand and head, and then caught sight of her own face and shoulders in the cracked glass upon the wall, she was seized with certain ghastly perceptions that held her there motionless in the semi-darkness, shivering amid the delicate lace and muslin which enwrapped her. Finished!—for her—all the small feminine joys. ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... up to the means of finding out the real turtle from the mock," said my master. "It's difficult to tell by the ring. Silver, if it's at all cracked—as lots of money is—don't ring no better than pewter; besides, people can't try every blessed bit o' tin they get in that way; some folks is offended if they do, and some ain't got no counter. As for the color, I defy any body to tell the difference. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... though he still laughed and cracked his jokes, was beginning to get sort of discouraged. But Si Perkins used to go round and cheer him up by telling him that it was bound to come his way in the end, and that when it did come it ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... imagination," he began, "a young, virgin intelligence, steeped for nearly five years in the talk of Allegre's studio, where every hard truth had been cracked and every belief had been worried into shreds. They were like a lot of intellectual dogs, you know ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... are cracked and water runs upon them in thin threads without sound, black and glistening as blood. We stole the candle from the larder of the Home of the Street Sweepers. We shall be sentenced to ten years in the Palace ...
— Anthem • Ayn Rand
... the poor. My darling mother, like a frightened dove, sheltered herself in the bosom of the princess, who pushed her away, laughing. The poor distraught girl, trembling, weeping, knelt down in the midst of that infamous room. It was St. Anne's Day; all at once the house shook, the walls cracked, cries of distress rang out in the streets. My mother was saved. It was the earthquake that destroyed half Naples. You know all about it, my lord, since your old palace is ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Half of the cracked stone came up a few inches, far enough to allow them to get their fingers underneath it. So it ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... while of the Beamish family's banter. This had set in, the evening before, as soon as he and Polly returned to the house—pacing the deck of the little steamer, he writhed anew at the remembrance. Jokes at their expense had been cracked all through supper: his want of appetite, for instance, was the subject of a dozen crude insinuations; and this, though everyone present knew that he had eaten a hearty meal not two hours previously; had been kept up till he grew stony and savage, and Polly, trying hard not to mind but ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... with the laconism compulsory on him from his knowledge of the Swedish tongue, "Aland?" This was the name of the halting-place. "Intet tu," (not yet,) replied the postillion, as he took his arm from the sheepskin which surrounded his shoulders. At the same time he cracked his whip, as if to show how impatient he was to reach his halting-place. The animals, thus excited, set forth at a long gallop across that portion of the Gulf where the frequent passage of the fishermen had to a degree leveled the snow, and ascended with much difficulty a hill covered by ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... hastily planted with rare shrubs and sycamores. Fragments of furniture and of the roughest of the utensils contained in the different chambers are still unearthed from among the heaps of rubbish, and the cellars especially are full of potsherds and cracked jars, on which we can still see written an indication of the reign and the year when the wine they once contained was made. Altars of massive masonry rose in the midst of the courts, on which the king or one of his ministers ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... and his partner were not dancing. It was warm and they were among the lucky ones who had succeeded in getting something besides a cheque from the waiters. Two tall glasses of ginger ale with a long curl of lemon peel sepentining through the cracked ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... ball-player. I leaned over and let that block go with all my strength. It wasn't the ordinary shell-block, but a solid carving of lignum-vitae; and it fetched that lion a smash on the head that must have cracked his skull, for he sank down, then got up and wabbled, rather than walked, forward along the alley to ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... what devotion we nursed the one with the broken head, in those early days when new heads were not to be bought at the nearest shop. And even if they could have been purchased for us, would we, the primitive children of those dear, dark ages, have ever thought of wrenching off the cracked blonde head of Ethelinda and buying a new, strange, nameless brunette head, gluing it calmly on Ethelinda's body, as a small acquaintance of mine did last week, apparently without a single pang? Never! A doll had a personality in those times, and has yet, ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... quiet young chap, from Sydney, except when he got drunk—which was seldom—and then he was a customer, from all round. He was cracked on the subject of spielers. He held that the population of the world was divided into two classes—one was spielers and the other was the mugs. He reckoned that he wasn't a mug. At first I thought he was a spieler, and afterwards I thought that he was a mug. He used ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... putting a new dissected puzzle together. Before he knew how it came about his bashfulness had vanished and he was a part of that circle. When the puzzle was completed Mary brought out a chafing-dish and a bowl of nuts, which she commanded him to "pick out" while Jack cracked them. She was going to try a new kind of candy. Later, when he disclosed the fact that he could play a little on the guitar, Norman brought out his mother's, bidding him "tune ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... this morning, Berselius was mildly cheerful. He washed and had his wound dressed, and then sat down to a miserable breakfast of cold tinned meat and cassava cakes, with water fetched from the pool in a cracked calabash. ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... reply,—"by and by you see." He liked rum and biscuit, and was only to be animated by the conversation turning upon seals, or poussies, as the natives call them. Then indeed Frederick's face was wreathed in smiles, or rather its oleaginous coat of dirt cracked in divers directions, his tiny eyes twinkled, and he descanted, in his broken jargon, upon the delight of poussey with far more unction than an alderman would upon turtle. After threading the islets we struck to north-east by compass, from the northernmost rock of the group, which our guide assured ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... his desk, hiding himself from the Speaker by the soles of his boots .... After a few experiences of this sort, the Speaker threatens, in a laugh, to call the 'gemman' to order. This is considered a capital joke, and a guffaw follows. The laugh goes round and then the peanuts are cracked and munched faster than ever; one hand being employed in fortifying the inner man with this nutriment of universal use, while the other enforces the views of the orator. This laughing propensity of the sable crowd is a great cause ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... their room from a man who styled it a furnished apartment, in virtue of a rickety table, a broken chair, a worn-out sheet or two, a dilapidated counterpane, four ragged blankets, and the infirm saucepan before mentioned, besides a few articles of cracked or broken crockery. For this accommodation the landlord charged ninepence per day, which sum had to be paid every night before the family was allowed to retire to rest! In the event of failure to pay they would have been turned out into the street at once, and the door padlocked. Thus the necessity ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... the darkness a shriek split the night like a sudden flash of flame—a great ringing scream that cracked and swelled and stopped. With one wild effort the man hurled himself out the door and plunged through the darkness. Panting and cursing, he flashed his huge revolver—"bang! bang! bang!" it cracked into the night. The sweat poured from his forehead; the ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... flat, dry sponge over knee thus held, and bandage this in place. Keep sponge and bandage wet with ice water. If no sponge is available, half fill rubber hot-water bottle with cracked ice, and lay this over knee joint. ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... screams of "Perro, perro, gringo perro!" A crackling noise, a coming shadow, and forward I fell on my face, ever on the alert, ever ready. An unearthly yell and a great body flew over, fierce claws grazing me. Two balls of fire shone in the bush, but my rifle cracked and a great lion fell in its tracks. I expected my companions to meet me soon, coming my way. Instead, I found them, after my all-night's walk, snugly camped where I had left them. Don Juan explained that with God's favor they had found the water soon after I had left them. He said that ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... capable of playing in any time except dancing time, and the character of the baile, funeral and sacred music is the same. The only distinction is the addition of a continuous tremolo to the latter two, which produces the same unpleasant effect on the nerves as a comic song chanted by the shaky, cracked, piping and quavering voice of senility. As the fiddles invariably play their parts in funerals as well as on festive processions, it requires some familiarity with the customs of the country to distinguish one from the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... the elastic stomach-tube, some fluid should be introduced into the stomach before attempting to empty it, or a portion of the mucous membrane may be sucked into the aperture. The tube should be examined to see that it is not broken or cracked, as accidents have happened from neglecting this precaution. The bowels and kidneys must also be stimulated to activity, to help in the elimination ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... oars and pulled for the opposite shore. He had not taken more than a couple of strokes when a dozen rifles cracked simultaneously from the bushes, and as many bullets struck the boat and glanced over ...
— The Ranger - or The Fugitives of the Border • Edward S. Ellis
... were going to listen to me, seriously!" he said, bitterly. "If you won't believe me; what about the chap the Second Mate saw? What about Tom? What about Williams? For goodness sake! don't try to put me off like you did last time. I nearly went cracked with wanting to tell someone who would listen to me, and wouldn't laugh. I could stand anything, but this being alone. There's a good chap, don't pretend you don't understand. Tell me what it all means. What is this horrible man that I've twice seen? You know you know something, ...
— The Ghost Pirates • William Hope Hodgson
... back to his little line, and two men came slowly, one with a pick, one with a shovel. They started in the direction of the Rostina sharp-shooters. Bullets cracked near their ears. "Dig here," said Lean gruffly. The men, thus caused to lower their glances to the turf, became hurried and frightened merely because they could not look to see whence the bullets ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... her into the house, trying to lessen his weight as if he were walking on thin ice; and the old house cracked its knuckles, but his foot-fall made not a sound. She placed a chair for him and sat down with her hands in her lap, and how expressive they were, small and thin, but shapely. She was pale and neat in a black ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... does not surge through cracked brains alone, or only in the world of adventurers, charlatans and pretenders generally; it has spread abroad in all the domains of life, spiritual and material. Politics, literature, even science, and—most odious of all—philanthropy and religion are infected. Trumpets announce a good deed done, ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... trainer was not so easy a matter. He lay in the very centre of the ring, beyond the reach of any weapons; and not a man would venture within the great cage. The attendants shouted at the lioness, brandished irons, cracked whips. She heard them unmoved. Once she shifted her position slightly and a moan ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... of the room are for the most part hidden by books. The shelves are simple affairs of stained maple, covered heavily with successive coats of varnish, cracked, as is that of the desk, by age and heat. The contents are varied. Of religious works there are the Septuagint, in two fat little blue volumes, like Roman candles; Conant's Genesis; Hodge on Romans; Hackett on Acts, which the minister's small children used to spell out as "Jacket ...
— Saint Patrick - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... thou bearest, and thy knees Among the silent caves of Palestine Wear the sharp flints away with midnight prayer; Or thou shalt keep the fasts of Barbary, Shalt wait amid the crowds that throng the well From sultry noon till the skies fade again, To draw up water and to bring it home In the cracked gourd of some vile testy knave, Who spurns thee back with bastinadoed foot For ignorance or delay ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... than he swung himself up from branch to branch. Quickly he reached the overhanging bough. At its juncture with the trunk he paused for a second to catch his breath, then swung himself out on it cautiously, hand over hand. The bough creaked and cracked ominously, but did not break. Near the end of the limb he stopped, and throwing a leg over to free his hands, he knotted one end of the rope to the branch and flung the other end to ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... nuts and the jokes were cracked; the cafe, the chasse-cafe, the enigmas, the conundrums, the anecdotes, the songs, the tableaux-vivants followed each other. My amiable hostess seemed to think I must have had enough of it, and, with her graceful acquiescence, I stole out after ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... the fat Kentish soil, and the fitful September breeze was heavy with the goodly perfume of the hops. Athelstan felt the exhilaration instinctively, for he lifted up his voice and sang; it was the cracked voice of the boy of fifteen, and Sally ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... scrub-rag in rigor mortis. Una was annoyed with herself for ever observing so unlovely an object, but in the moment of relaxation when she went to wash her hands she was unduly sensitive to that eternal rag, and to the griminess of the wash-room—the cracked and yellow-stained wash-bowl, the cold water that stung in winter, the roller-towel which she spun round and round in the effort to find a dry, clean, square space, till, in a spasm of revulsion, she would bolt out of the wash-room with her face ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... married and nobody had ever broken it before. When we got up I stepped on her dress and all the gathers tore out of the skirt. The next morning when I got up I hit the pitcher against the basin and cracked them both and I upset a cup of tea on the tablecloth at breakfast. When I was helping Aunt Mary with the dinner dishes I dropped a china plate and it smashed. That evening I fell downstairs and sprained my ankle and had to stay in bed for a week. I heard ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... calling the packing-room a prison. The ceaseless rattle of speckled gray wrapping-paper, the stamp of feet on the gray cement floor, the greasy gray hair of the packer next to him, the yellow-stained, cracked, gray wash-bowl that served for thirty men, such was his ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... store-house, some stayed for a long time behind the barn, screaming like foxes, others answered from afar like cats; one stood behind the smoke-house, barking like a cross old dog whose upper notes were cracked; and at last all joined in a general chase. The girls came sauntering along in large groups, having a few boys, mostly small ones, with them, who had gathered about them on the road in order to appear like young men. When such a bevy of girls arrived at ...
— A Happy Boy • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... sit in The biggest, but it was too hard and high; The middle one she scarcely seemed to fit in, But in the smallest chair sat easily; And rocked herself, her ease and comfort taking, Singing the pretty songs she knew so well; When, oh! the little chair cracked loud, and, breaking, Gave way all suddenly, and ...
— Mother Hubbard Picture Book - Mother Hubbard, The Three Bears, & The Absurd A, B, C. • Walter Crane
... were on deck looked over the bulwarks, and cracked coarse jokes among themselves, as the passengers ascended the gangway. Reuben found that only one-third of the number were allowed on deck at once. Two soldiers paced up and down the deck, on guard ...
— A Final Reckoning - A Tale of Bush Life in Australia • G. A. Henty
... of filthy water in a cracked basin he proceeded to wash his face and hands, though Sylvia said she would rather go dirty ...
— Daisy Ashford: Her Book • Daisy Ashford
... if childish custom once led to a vendetta. A man once cracked such an enormous quantity of eggs, that in the evening he was challenged to show his marvellous egg, which he persistently refused to do. This led to words and words to revolvers, and the man was shot. Then the egg was found to be a clever ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... schemes, provided always that they included a reasonable number of visits to places where refreshment could be obtained. From first to last, the expedition was a disappointment. They visited various smoke-hung dancing halls, decorated for the most part with oleographs and cracked mirrors, in which sickly-Looking young men of unwholesome aspect were dancing with their feminine counterparts. The attitude of their ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... into action his manner indicated that he knew how to handle balky oxen. First he cracked Mr. Kyle smartly over the bridge of the nose. "Wo haw up!" was a command which Kyle tried to obey in a flame of ire, but a swifter and more violent blow across the nose sent him back on his heels, his ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... whoop um an sen' um tuh de fiel'. Dey couldn' visit no slaves an no slaves was 'lowed tuh visit em. So mah cousin Sallie watched him hide de key so she moved dem a li'l further back so dat he had tuh lean ovah tuh reach dem. Dat mawnin soon when he come tuh let em out she cracked him in de haid wid de poker an made little Joe help put his haid in de fiuh place. Dat day in de fiel' Little Joe made er song; "If yo don' bleave Aunt Sallie kilt Marse Jim de blood is on huh under dress". He jes hollered hit. "Aunt Sallie kilt Marse Jim." ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... to let, and having all the squalid appearance of a deserted place, which rendered it difficult to judge what it would look like when neatly kept up, the broken panes replaced in the windows, and the rough-cast (now cracked and discoloured) made white and whole. The other end forms a cottage, with the low ceilings and stone floors of a hundred years ago; the windows do not open freely and widely; and the passage upstairs, leading to the bedrooms, is narrow and tortuous: ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... and cracked his whip with such vehemence, that here and there an inquiring and angry face might be seen at the neighboring windows, peering out upon the untimely intruders, who were making dawn hideous by their clattering arrival. The footman sprang from his board, and thundered ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... signs of rally, had retreated in what to say the least was a highly strategic way. Well, let her go for the moment! She could scarcely escape me. I would see the thing through, I told myself with growing stubbornness; but I didn't feel that the doing of a civic duty was what it is cracked up ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... fairly stung to madness and foaming at the mouth with fury; "curse you, fiend that you are!" And as he hurled forth words of rage and defiance he tugged and strained with such superhuman strength upon his bonds that the stout rope fairly cracked whilst it cut into the flesh of his wrists down to the bone. But the lashing was too strong to yield to even his frenzied efforts, apart from the fact that, with his arms lashed behind him, he had no opportunity to ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... stone beneath, and a bar of pale red clay above. Both deposits belonged to formations equally unknown, at the time, to the geologist. The deep-red stone formed part of an upper member of the Lower Old Red Sandstone; the pale red clay, which was much roughened by rounded pebbles, and much cracked and fissured by the recent frosts, was a bed of the boulder clay. Save for the wholesome restraint that confined me for day after day to this spot, I should perhaps have paid little attention to either. Mineralogy, ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... two flickering candles, the like of which he had never seen before, Camors proceeded to inspect the quaint portraits of his ancestors, who seemed to stare at him in great surprise from their cracked canvases. They were a dilapidated set of old nobles, one having lost a nose, another an arm, others again sections of their faces. One of them—a chevalier of St. Louis—had received a bayonet thrust through ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... little chickens will hatch out of the eggs," said grandma. "Some of the shells are already cracked, and the ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue on Grandpa's Farm • Laura Lee Hope
... and came out with a cracked blue cup. "Here," said she—"here's the salt-cup, and this is the one I got it ...
— Young Lucretia and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... leopard was alert again. Timokles climbed cautiously. He was nearing the roof. There was a cracking sound, such as he had heard, before. The leopard moved vehemently. Suddenly the branch cracked so that it swung Timokles against the wall. The leopard's movement ...
— Out of the Triangle • Mary E. Bamford
... a forest fire, and may mean the whole reserves at the station. The thing to do is to crack every fighting head that you see, before there are so many fighting heads that you cannot crack any of them. There is but scant account kept of cracked heads in back of the yards, for men who have to crack the heads of animals all day seem to get into the habit, and to practice on their friends, and even on their families, between times. This makes it a cause for congratulation ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... of grammar became a frequent theme of remark during the remainder of the term among the boys. None of them liked it very well, so that poor grammar was slandered, and many a joke was cracked over it. ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... give it room. He looked with all his eyes, and a magnificent stag stepped into the moonlight, antlers erect, waiting and listening for a moment before he bowed his head to drink. Paul almost leaped up in the boat as a rifle cracked beside him, and he saw the stag spring into the air and fall dead, with his feet in ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... lugubrious dirge mingles with the drum and horn. A man has forced his way close by the stage,—a man with a confounded cracked hurdy-gurdy. Whine! whine! creaks the hurdy-gurdy. "Stop that! stop that mu-zeek!" cries a delicate apprentice, clapping his hands to his ears. "Pity a poor blind—" answers the man with ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Richard Burton, when consul-general at Damascus in 1870, cleared an Arab screen out of the vestibule, and in consequence the exquisite doorway leading into the cella can now be well seen. On either side of it staircases constructed within columns lead to the roof. The cracked door-lintel, which shows an eagle on the soffit, was propped up first by Burton, and lately, more securely, by the Germans. The cella, now ruinous, had inner wall-reliefs and engaged columns, which supported ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... eighties he built the big beautiful house on South Figueroa Street, moved the last of his negro servitors and the last of his cellar and his young family into it and died. Since that day Kings had come and gone in it, big, bonny creatures, liked and sighed over, and the house was shabby now, cracked and peeling for the want of paint, the walks grass-grown, the lawn frowzy, lank and stringy curtains at the dim windows. There were only three bottles of the historic cellar left now, precious, cob-webbed; there was only one of the blacks, an ancient, ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... looked the more hopeful I grew and the end of it was I hasted to bring such tools as I needed and forthwith set to work. All the morning, and despite the sun, I laboured upon this wrecked boat, stripping off her cracked and splintered timbers and mightily pleased to find her framework so much less damaged than I had dared hope, insomuch that I presently fell a-whistling; but coming on three ribs badly sprung I became immediately dejected. Howbeit I had all the wood I could wish as planks, bulkheads ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... enough in a sense; but I have asked you whether he is coming back again, and you won't answer me. I just give you three seconds;" and he held out his arm with a pistol in it. "One!" As the word "Two" left his lips, a pistol cracked and Mullens fell back with a ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... clothed than on plantations. The house servants are fed on what the families leave. But they are kept short, and I think are oftener whipped for stealing something to eat than any other crime. On plantations their food is principally hommony, as the southerners call it. It is simply cracked corn boiled. This probably constitutes seven-eights of their living. The house-servants in cities are generally decently clothed, and some favorite ones are richly dressed, but those on the plantations, especially in their dress, if it can be called dress, exhibit the most haggard ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... see as did other men, were doing these things; straightway, the old street corner, the selling of matches and shoelaces, the street strolling singing in a cracked voice while twanging some tuneless instrument, vanished. Other men had risen above this crowning infirmity; why could not I. Boulogne and this meeting with Captain Towse had saved me. Gloom vanished, for the moment at any rate, and my whole being was animated by a great ...
— Through St. Dunstan's to Light • James H. Rawlinson
... ice at last," he exclaimed. "At least he has cracked it and it won't take much more to finish the job. Won't there be a big splash though when the Maises and Greys all tumble in. Those circus children of Myra Maise are the best things that ever strayed into ...
— Pearl and Periwinkle • Anna Graetz
... with the soles of their boots turned up for the inspection of the ladies in the galleries. Their language and gestures as they expectorated hither and thither were often as coarse as their positions, while they ranted about the "laws and Constitution," and cracked their slave-whips over the heads of the dough-faces ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... way," was the answer; "father says she is a little cracked about such matters. He pities her, though, and helps her a good deal, and so does 'most every one else here who can. She needs it." Then after a pause she added, "How did you enjoy the meeting, ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... the splash of blood on her shoe. Blood! Yes; that was as much a fact as anything else. How was it to be dealt with? Why, by the glorious creed of Humanity—that splendid God who died and rose again ten thousand times a day, who had died daily like the old cracked fanatic Saul of Tarsus, ever since the world began, and who rose again, not once like the Carpenter's Son, but with every child that came into the world. That was the answer; and ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... only time that I have ever seen my father weep. But as the stout timbers cracked and groaned under the strain it seemed to him as if the ship that he loved was calling piteously to him for help that he could not give, and it was too much for him. The gale that was yet raging overhead and the sea that was ...
— Havelok The Dane - A Legend of Old Grimsby and Lincoln • Charles Whistler
... losses by breakage, was not asked. Every bit, even to baking-powder prizes of green and greasy glass, antedated the Revolution, and the wise and mighty of Smalltown knew no better. A bit of egg shell sticking to a cracked teacup was stolen as a relic of Washington's last breakfast ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... glasses at the same time, and otherwise disposing of everything within reach of his hand, so as to suit his own notions of order, and then leaning back on his chair until the two ends of the uprights dug into the plaster behind him, while the legs on which the fabric was poised cracked with his weight; "honor the saints! we should be much more like to dishonor them! What does any one want to honor a saint for? A saint is but a human—a man like you and me, after all the fuss you make ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... on again, while Pat cracked his whip and the party went on. Mrs. Kilrea was looking rather horrified, thought Sophy McGurn. Her turn was coming at last. There would be a scene that would repay her for her ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... Dives' feast, So looked the poor forlorn old beast; His coat was rough, his tail was bare, The gray was sprinkled in his hair; Sportsmen and jockeys knew him not, And yet they say he once could trot Among the fleetest of the town, Till something cracked and broke him down,— The steed's, the statesman's, common lot! "And are we then so soon forgot?" Ah me! I doubt if one of you Has ever heard the name "Old Blue," Whose fame through all this region rung In those old days ...
— The One Hoss Shay - With its Companion Poems How the Old Horse Won the Bet & - The Broomstick Train • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Strindberg held up to Nature was a cracked one. It was cracked in a double sense—it was crazy. It gave back broken images of a world which it made look like the chaos of a lunatic dream. Miss Lind-af-Hageby, in her popular biography of Strindberg, is too ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... The fire cracked so loudly I became aware there was ominous silence among the loungers of the camp. They were listening as well as watching. Up to this time I had not thought they were paying the slightest attention to us. Laplante was not ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... all intimate with Field will forget the enjoyment he took in trolling forth, in a quaint, quavering, cracked, but tuneful recitative, ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... large as that of yon boy in his punt. All that is purchasable in the capitals of the world is not to be weighed in comparison with the simple enjoyment that may be crowded into one hour of sunshine. What can place or power do here? "Who could be before me, though the palace of Caesar cracked and split with emperors, while I, sitting in silence on a cliff of Rhodes, watched the sun as he swung his golden censer athwart ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... While rifles cracked and spat fire and sprayed lead over him and about him he rode the last fifty yards. He reached the boulders, set his horse up, threw himself from the saddle, and with his back to the rock, his face ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... the day before yesterday," says he, "my dear, and that's not what I'm thinking of now; but any thing to oblige you, and to have peace and quietness, my dear"—and presently I had the glimpse of him at the cracked glass over the chimney-piece, standing up shaving himself to please my lady. But she took no notice, but went on reading her book, and Mrs. Jane doing her hair behind. "What is it you're reading there, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... Indianapolis to New York was the same for corn as for its direct products, such as ground corn, cracked corn, corn meal, hominy and corn feed. Such a tariff made it possible for Western mills to compete with similar mills that had been established in the East, since a discrimination of 5 per cent. was sufficient to absorb three or four times ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... nut is to be cracked. The majority report proposes to give up three-fourths of our territory to the North absolutely, retaining the little balance for the South. The amendment proposes to pick the kernel out of the balance, and to leave the husks to us. To that we shall agree ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... keep almost any length of time in lime-water properly prepared. One pint of coarse salt, and one pint of unslacked lime, to a pailful of water. If there be too much lime, it will eat the shells from the eggs; and if there be a single egg cracked, it will spoil the whole. They should be covered with lime-water, and kept in a cold place. The yolk becomes slightly red; but I have seen eggs, thus kept, perfectly sweet and fresh at the end of three ...
— The American Frugal Housewife • Lydia M. Child
... Mr Tappertit, not exactly in a voice of thunder, for his tones, to say the truth were rather cracked and shrill—but very impressively, notwithstanding—'where ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... charming wife, and, a little retired, a white-headed butler. Greetings over with host and lady, this delightful creature, with ebon face beaming hospitality, advanced, holding a salver, on which rested a huge silver goblet filled with Virginia's nectar, mint julep. Quantities of cracked ice rattled refreshingly in the goblet; sprigs of fragrant mint peered above its broad rim; a mass of white sugar, too sweetly indolent to melt, rested on the mint; and, like rose buds on a snow bank, luscious strawberries ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... under the eaves was stifling. An unmade bed stood in a corner. From nails in the rafters hung Bill's holiday wardrobe. A tin cup and a cracked pitcher of spring water ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Lady of Shalott," said Rudolph Musgrave, "the mirror is cracked from side to side, isn't it? I am sorry. For life is not so easily disposed of. And there is only life to look at now, and life is a bewilderingly complex business, you will find, because the laws of it are so childishly simple—and implacable. ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... sundry other exhibits which appear to have created superstitious fear in the crowd about the court. It is amusing to note that while those exhibits were being examined one of the scaffolds erected for seating gave way or cracked ominously, giving the crowd a thorough scare. It was thought that the devil himself, raised by the power of those uncanny objects, had got into the Guildhall. Consternation reigned for quite a ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... whupped 'em till dey nigh killed 'em. Lots of 'em run away and hid in de woods. De marsters would put de dogs after you jes' like a coon. Dey'd run you and tree you"—imitating the sound of baying dogs—"oh, glory, hallelujah—dat's de way dey done 'em! I'se seed bare feets all cracked up wid de cold. We don't have no cold weather now. Why, I'se seed big pine trees bust wide open—done froze, and de niggers would be out in dat kind o' weather. But dey'd ruther do dat dan stay and git beat to death. Many a night ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... without expressing any opinion, passed on to the subject of the cracked window, but he could not persuade any of Hallett's room to own to the accident. He threatened, he even entreated,—in vain. The clock ticked on; it was a quarter past nine, and everyone was very tired ...
— Jack of Both Sides - The Story of a School War • Florence Coombe
... skin like cracked parchment across his high cheekbones, and a pair of Carradine eyes looking down at Dan. If Death should walk in human flesh, Dan thought, it would ...
— Martyr • Alan Edward Nourse
... me in amazement. 'Drunk!' ejaculated the officer I had addressed. 'Cracked, I should say,' suggested another. 'Now,' spoke up Mr. Minturn, 'I do not understand what I have just heard,' he said. 'What is a Water-devil? I am astounded.' 'You never said a word of this to me!' exclaimed Miss Minturn. ...
— The Rudder Grangers Abroad and Other Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... this second tree was hardly more than a sapling, yet it required upward of half an hour of the most arduous and persistent labour, and several large water blisters appeared on the palms of my hands before it tottered, bent, cracked and finally fell quivering on the earth. In descending it perversely took the wrong direction, narrowly escaping striking me in its fall; indeed, one of its lower limbs severely ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... have healthy books, a stout horse-rake or a kitchen range which is not cracked. Let not the poet shed tears only for the public weal. He should be as vigorous as a sugar-maple, with sap enough to maintain his own verdure, beside what runs into the troughs, and not like a vine, which ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... and with the first rays of light the rifles cracked in the frosty air. The sharpshooters, though they had passed a sleepless night, were in their places behind rocks and stumps and trees. Neither army was ready to recommence the struggle. General Grant was out of provisions. The transports, with supplies and reinforcements, ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... for a place in the coach; the long whip cracked. The horses sprang forward; and away the stage rattled round curves where a hind wheel would try to go over the edge—only the driver didn't let it; down embankments where any normal wagon would have upset, but ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... pleasure-garden and watched the parade, saw the servants, the maids, the baskets, saw the sedan-chair and saw the lady in it. Under black hair, which made to tower high on her head, he saw a very fair, very delicate, very smart face, a brightly red mouth, like a freshly cracked fig, eyebrows which were well tended and painted in a high arch, smart and watchful dark eyes, a clear, tall neck rising from a green and golden garment, resting fair hands, long and thin, with wide ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... had a terrible time. Jacques finally cracked him over the head with the butt of his revolver; ...
— Fighting in France • Ross Kay
... the cold, solitary life of a selfish scientist, and he would die in cold solitude. Was he indeed going to die thus? Would he never taste the happiness enjoyed by even the common porters, by the carters who cracked their whips, passing by under his windows? But he must hasten, if he would; soon, no doubt, it would be too late. All his unemployed youth, all his pent-up desires, surged tumultuously through his veins. He swore that ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... obeyed—a broken bell being the result. Its fragments having been taken to Duncrub, were, many years after, re-cast into a bell, now used in connection with the private chapel there. The inscription on the cracked bell, for a copy of which the writer is indebted to the present Lord Rollo, was of a very interesting and suggestive nature. Round the top were the words—"Soli Deo Gloria. Joannes Oaderogge me fecit. Roterodami, 1681"; and on the body of the ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... window-places at their beautiful church, and you pause at the big round, rugged doorway that admits you to what is now the drawing-room. The massive step by which you ascend to the threshold is a trifle crooked, as it should be: the lintels are cracked and worn by the myriad-fingered years. This strikes your casual glance. You look up and down the miniature cloister before you pass in: it seems wonderfully old and queer. Then you turn into the drawing-room, where you find modern ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... set out, and were received by the jovial crew with great acclamation. They had plenty of good cheer, and never was a more joyous wedding seen. All was mirth and frolic; the beggars told stories, played tricks, cracked jokes, sung and danced, in a manner which afforded high amusement to the fiddler and his man, who were well rewarded when they departed, which was not till late in the evening. The next day the Dean and Sheridan walked out in their usual dress, ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... above his ordinary level. He lost all thought of self. Let Aphrodite take him if she would, but Matilda must be saved. "Go away!" he repeated; and his voice was cracked and harsh, under the strain of doing such violence to his feelings. "Can't you see you're—you're not wanted? Oh, do go ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... in hue; with large whiskers of the same colour slightly tinged with grey at the roots. By the imperfect light of the room it was not perceptible that the clothes were somewhat threadbare, and that the boots, cracked at the side, admitted glimpses of no very white hosiery within. Mr. Beaufort, reluctantly rising from his repose and gladly sinking back to it, motioned to a chair, and put on a doleful and doubtful semi-smile of welcome. The servant placed the wine and glasses before ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... for the head of the old nurse could only be compared to a cracked soup-pot. It was with the greatest difficulty that George and Francoeur got anything good out of it. Finally, however, by means of much repetition they did extract a tale which ...
— Honey-Bee - 1911 • Anatole France
... by such mental depression that I could not answer the communication of even a lost soul. I had to seek surcease in my old remedy of hasheesh and chloroform, which was a change from suffering to stupidity. But I shall not swell the cosmic chorus of woe by raising my cracked voice against impending fate. I am more and more alone, more and more conscious of a growing something that is keeping me apart from all whom I can ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... number of persons, very picturesque in appearance, had now collected in front of the mansion. The huntsmen blew their horns and cracked their whips, the dogs barked and yelped and gave tongue in a variety of ways, the horses pranced and kicked, the peasants shouted, and the whole party set off towards the spot appointed for the meet. A ride of three or four ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... obeyed, and cracked the egg-shell with the blade of a knife. He uttered a cry of surprise. The shell contained nothing but a small piece of blue paper. At the request of Arsene he unfolded it. It was a telegram, or rather a portion of a telegram from which the post-marks ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... bore not a vestige of moss, but time had cracked it diagonally and the chiselled letters were weathered away. He studied it with painful care, poring intently over each faint impression. He who cared for the grave had apparently been troubled only to keep the stone free ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... queerness of this impression when there came a faint, momentary glow from the hall—mysterious, phosphorescent, unreal; and then it vanished. Both young men were huddled upon the sofa, which was placed facing the open door. A huge Spanish screen was drawn before them; but the black leather was cracked in places; and through these they had a clear view ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... of his own college, Brazenose. The origin of the poem was simply this:—A young friend of his, B——d P——t, went to call upon him at Brazenose, and, without being aware of the heinous crime he was committing, cracked a four-horse whip in the quadrangle. This moved the ire of a certain doctor, a fellow and tutor, and at that time also dean of the college, commonly called Dr Toe from a defect in one of his feet. The doctor had unfortunately made himself ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... mind of the dealer in brittle wares. Whether he broke any of the valuable articles in his warehouse in consequence has not been ascertained, but it appears for a time to have broken a friendship between the parties concerned: such breaches, however, are perhaps easier healed than broken or cracked crockery. ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... tradition which looks like the story of Solomon and the harlots, there is not a name like Tom Earthquake or Sam Shake-the-ground in the whole country. They have a tradition which may refer to the building of the Tower of Babel, but it ends in the bold builders getting their crowns cracked by the fall of the scaffolding; and that they came out of a cave called "Loey" (Noe?) in company with the beasts, and all point to it in one direction, viz., the N.N.E. Loey, too, is an exception in the language, as they use masculine instead ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... carefully they assemble, all silent, at the place appointed. Laid on its bier, covered with sable pall, and borne in solemn state, the corpse (i.e. the book) is carried with slow procession, with the moaning music of flutes and fifes, the screaming of fiddles, and the thumping and mumbling of a cracked drum, to the open grave or the funeral pyre. A gleaming line of blazing torches and twinkling lanterns wave along the quiet streets and through the opened fields, and the snow creaks hoarsely under the tread of a hundred men. They reach the scene, and a circle forms around ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... opened upon a pasture, dotted here and there with juniper bushes, and thence divided into three lines, along which ran the deep track of wagons, cutting the pasturage into small hillocks. After long hesitation, the man cracked his whip and took the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... she purr. They must have smelt her, though. Anyway, she seemed to be a little island in the mist—the faint, faint, ethereal dew-mist—where nobody walked. You could hear them—a rustle here, a squeak there, a thud somewhere else, a displaced leaf, a cracked twig—this only once—a drumming, a patter, a sniff, a snuffle, a sigh; but they all passed by on the other side, so to say, and gave the silver tabby room to think. Apparently cats are not considered good company in the wild; lonely creatures, they ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... a tin basin, water, a bit of rag for a towel, and a small, cracked mirror, in which my reflection was scarcely recognizable. He was a man of few words, contenting himself with uttering merely a dry comment on Kennedy, who had dropped back into a convenient chair, and buried his ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... happily, we understood little or nothing. On the other, a gang of men and boys, who, as the night fell, worked, many of them, altogether naked, their glossy bronze figures gleaming in the red lamplight, and both men and women singing over their work in wild choruses, which, when the screaming cracked voices of the women were silent, and the really rich tenors of the men had it to themselves, were not unpleasant. A lad, seeming the poet of the gang, stood on the sponson, and in the momentary intervals of work improvised some ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... gaunt limbs to every autumn wind. Only the spruce and pine stood forth in their year-round habiliments of green. The days shortened steadily. The nights grew long, and bitter with frost. Snow fell, blanketing softly the dead leaves. Old Winter cracked his whip masterfully ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... pale, anxious, and troubled, as his eyes rested sorrowfully on the fevered face upon the pillow, and he saw that the luxuriant hair had been closely clipped, to facilitate applications to relieve the brain. The parched lips were browned and cracked, and the vacant stare in the eyes told him that consciousness was ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... surrounded. Then Hannibal, if Livy may be credited, (for Polybius says nothing of this matter,) caused a great quantity of vinegar to be poured on the rock,(745) which piercing into the veins of it, that were now cracked by the intense heat of the fire, calcined and softened it. In this manner, taking a large compass about, in order that the descent might be easier, they cut away along the rock, which opened a free passage to the forces, the baggage, and even to the elephants. Four ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... seized with anxiety to know what was at the window. He was too low down and I too much buried in foliage to see clearly. Was it the rattle? I took a hasty step downwards at the thought. Or was it the blunderbuss? In my sudden move I slipped on the dew-damped branch, and cracked a rotten one with my elbow, which made an appalling crash in the early stillness, and sent a walnut—pop! on to Jem's hat, who had already ducked to avoid the fire of the blunderbuss, and now fell on his face under the fullest conviction ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... littered with books, some of them open as if he had been consulting them; but before him lay an open deed, and at his elbow were several others lying on an open deed-box. He was thin and as faded-looking and as worn with age as the house and the room, lined with dusty volumes and yellow, surface-cracked maps and pictures. He wore a long dressing-gown which was huddled round him as if he were cold, though a fire of logs almost as large as the one in the hall was burning ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... I count that boy in the next room. Eh? He has fragments of the old knightly spirit, if his brain be cracked. No others." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... case in fact An angel's face a little cracked, (Could poets or could painters fix How angels look at thirty-six) This drew us in at first to find In such a form an angel's mind; And every virtue now supplies The fainting rays of Stella's eyes See at her levee crowding swains Whom Stella greatly entertains With breeding humour, wit, and sense ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... bayonet and revolvers cracked. Men struggled with their bare hands. Friend and foe went down together, struggling to the last. On the right and on the left, though Hal could not see these actions, similar scenes were being enacted. The ...
— The Boy Allies At Verdun • Clair W. Hayes
... hair to make it lie down and "act dacint," but the image that looked back at her from the cracked glass was not encouraging, even after making allowance for the crack, but she comforted herself by saying, "Sure it's Danny she wants to see, and she won't be lookin' ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... to her breast]—somethin's cracked inside o' here. But then! Everybody's gotta get out o' the world sometime. I've lived quite ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... Cork brogue—"ah! would ye have him come in a state of nature?" at the instant a loud whistle rang through the house, and the pavillion scene slowly drew up, discovering me, Harry Lorrequer, seated on a small stool before a cracked looking-glass, my only habiliments, as I am an honest man, being a pair of long white silk stockings, and a very richly embroidered shirt with point lace collar. The shouts of laughter are yet in my ears, the loud roar of ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... knee from his elbow." He managed by his thumping to scare the last remnant of wits out of Jimmy. We could hear the object of our exasperated solicitude darting to and fro under the planks. He had cracked his voice at last, and could only squeak miserably. His back or else his head rubbed the planks, now here, now there, in a puzzling manner. He squeaked as he dodged the invisible blows. It was more heartrending even than his yells. Suddenly Archie produced ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... Red noses; Pools, splashes, Spouts, spirts; Swollen sashes. Gutters, squirts; Limp curls, Splashed hose; Pretty girls, Damp shows; Piled grates, Cold shivers; Aching pates, Sluggish livers; Morn cruel, Eve a biter; Hot gruel, Sweet nitre; Voice a creaky Cracked cadenza, Face "peaky," INFLUENZA!!! Gloom growing, Glum, glummer Noses (and nothing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, 13 June 1891 • Various
... slowly on. The few spectators teased the ant-eater in one corner, or the first violin in another. One or two young farmers' boys were a little uproarious with egg-pop, and danced awkward breakdowns at the end of the tent. Then a cracked bell sounded and the curtain rose, showing hardly more of the stage than was plainly ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... entered. They all smiled, too, and most of them said, "Good-afternoon, Mrs. Dawson," in a very friendly way, which only made Jessie feel even more uncomfortable, for she realized suddenly that her boots were cracked, and her hat very shabby, and that she had no gloves at all; and she wished very much that they could get right away up to the far end of the shop, where it seemed quite empty ...
— The Story of Jessie • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... one man among you who isn't a coward and a sneak, and— and a howling kid!" retorted Wally. "Gee up!" Whereat the whips cracked and ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... this throat, pinching, and kicking, and cuffing the tones about so! Four strings have snapped already, and one hammer is lamed for life. My ears ring again,—my head hums,—my nerves tremble! Have all the harsh notes from the cracked trumpet of a strolling-player been imprisoned in this little throat! (But this excites me,—I must drink ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... hands slowly and carefully, examining them again and again, for he thought it barely possible that the skin might have been cracked somewhere by the cutting March wind, and might have bled a little, but he could not find the least sign of ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... the upper deck, fetched a lifebuoy, and rammed it over the injured man's shoulders. "God forgive me for taking it," said the latter gratefully, "but my fibula's cracked to blazes, an' I love my wife ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... been tremendously hot. Cricket was out of the question, and boating equally uninviting. The playground had been left deserted to bake and scorch under the fierce sun, and the swings and poles in the gymnasium had blistered and cracked in solitude. The only place where life was endurable was down by the river, and even there it was far too hot to do anything but sit and dabble our feet under the shelter of the trees, ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... was nothing to detect Pomona Road along - None faked a cly, nor cracked a crib, Nor prigged a wipe, nor told a fib,— Minds cultivated and select ...
— Ban and Arriere Ban • Andrew Lang
... pours out a portion for each player and at a given signal all drink steadily for several minutes. The "It's" wife then says, "Now—how about a few rubbers of bridge?" She is immediately elected "team captain" for the rest of the evening. It is the duty of the "team captain" to provide cracked ice and water, to get ready the two spare bedrooms, to hold Wallie Spencer's hand, to keep Eddie Armstrong from putting his lighted cigaret ends on the piano, and to break up the party as soon as possible. The game generally ends when (1) the liquor is all gone, (2) the "It" (or three ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... the redoubtable Mr. Crow took his stand beside the old hand-pumping "fire-engine" and gave orders right and left in a valiant but thoroughly cracked voice. ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... easily cracked, and hulled out in halves have been developed. Walnuts will grow almost any where. Originally it was a common forest tree and would continue to be if it had the opportunity. There is little danger of the walnut becoming extinct. It is too valuable. I suggest ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... her son. "Adams wants me to speak a piece on that great day. I told him I couldn't—m' lip's cracked!" and Marty giggled. "But Sally Prentiss is going to recite 'A Psalm of Life,' and Peke Ringgold is going to tell us all about 'Bozzar—Bozzar—is'—as though we hadn't been made acquainted with him ever since Hector was a pup. And Hector's a ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... of their sins and in token of obedience and recollection of their Lincoln mother. This, combined with a notice of detention of prebend for all non-resident and non-represented canons, must have brought the faithful up in goodly numbers to their ecclesiastical centre. If they were once there, the cracked and shored-up building and the bishop's zeal and personal influence might be entrusted to loose their purse strings, especially as he led the way, both by donation and personal work, for he carried the hod and did not disdain to bring mortar and stones up the ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
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