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More "Foil" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "I'd foil those profiteers, that's what I'd do," he said. "Fifteen cents for a cone! I can get three cones ...
— Roy Blakeley's Camp on Wheels • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... the Society as out of date? You do not think, as is sometimes said, that the establishment of the Grosvenor took away the raison d'etre and original intention of the Society—that of being a foil to ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... pretends that he was always in possession of it, and made nothing of it,—that he imbibed it with mother's milk,—and that I, the wretched Tommy, am most abjectly behindhand in not having done the same. I ask, why is Tommy to be always the foil of Mr. Barlow to this extent? What Mr. Barlow had not the slightest notion of himself, a week ago, it surely cannot be any very heavy backsliding in me not to have at my fingers' ends to- day! And yet Mr. Barlow systematically carries it over me with a high hand, and will tauntingly ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... is the next study, No. 4! How well Chopin knew the value of contrast in tonality and sentiment! A veritable classic is this piece, which, despite its dark key color, C sharp minor as a foil to the preceding one in E, bubbles with life and spurts flame. It reminds one of the story of the Polish peasants, who are happiest when they sing in the minor mode. Kullak calls this "a bravura study for velocity and lightness in both hands. Accentuation ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... writing. He, Addisonian and Goldsmithian to the back-bone, and steeped to the very lips in what is called classical literature, of which I have a horror and a loathing, as the deadest of all dead languages; he, foil of subdued pleasantry, quiet humor, and genial blandness, upon all subjects. I, altogether—but never mind. He is a generous fellow, and led the way to all our triumphs in that 'field of the cloth of gold' which men ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... nature in the highest form. It is of no use to ape it or to contend with it. Somewhat is possible of resistance, and of persistence, and of creation, to this power, which will foil ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... SPECTATOR and Hecatissa have been admitted with so much Applause. I don't want to be put in mind how very Defective I am in every thing that is Ugly: I am too sensible of my own Unworthiness in this Particular, and therefore I only propose my self as a Foil to the Club. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... turned the rim down some way to even increase the shade; but Janet fitted that which was frank, open, and aboveboard. And so she used the black for contrast rather than obscurity—besides which there was another sort of contrast, for a soldier hat on Janet was a striking foil for her utter femininity. And its romantic pretense (so different from the dark gypsy-like romantic) was such an arrant little piece of make-believe that it had the effect of playful candor, acknowledging how impossible a man she would ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... a sentiment with regard to me which amounted to this—that a man wanted, after all, to be something more than a cipher in his own house, where, if anywhere, it is not pleasant to serve as a mere foil to some one else. This sentiment was merely excusable, he thought, in a man who, though he might reasonably suppose himself of some account among his fellows, had been brought into close contact with another ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... was the engaging personality of Miss MAY BLAYNEY. Always a fascinating figure to watch, she showed an extraordinary sensitiveness of voice and expression. As for that honest and admirable actor, Mr. MCKINNEL, who made the perfect foil to her charms that every good husband should wish to be, he seems never to tire of playing these stern, dour, semi-brutal parts. That more genial characters are open to him his success in Great Catherine showed. Miss MARY BROUGH, as a charwoman, supplied a rare need ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... Hellenism and Hebraism alike this is, I say, the aim. When the two are confronted, as they very often are confronted, it is nearly always with what I may call a rhetorical purpose; the speaker's whole design is to exalt and enthrone one of the two, and he uses the other only as a foil and to enable him the better to give effect to his purpose. Obviously, with us, it is usually Hellenism which is thus reduced to minister to the triumph of Hebraism. There is a sermon on Greece and the Greek spirit by a man never to be mentioned ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... North and South, and desired to shelve practically Lincoln while he himself stood at the front to manage the turmoil, he made no more mistakes than statesmen in general. He had been powerful for good before the war, and during its course, with what virile stiffness of the upper lip did he face and foil the frowning foreign world! He had the insight and candour to do full justice at last to Lincoln, whom at first he depreciated. Then the purchase of Alaska! Writing as I do on the western coast I am perhaps affected by the glamour of that ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... exclaimed Gerardin, turning round in his saddle, and shaking his clenched fist at the English lieutenant. "You have foiled me again and again. I know you, and who you are; you stand between me and my birthright; you shall not foil me again. I have before sought your life; the next time we meet we will not separate till one or ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... Still, it is a small blot on a big opera. The music for such incidents cannot be of the highest beauty; here we have one of the cases of a tour de force. But even its inferiority is made to serve a purpose; it serves as a foil for that which accompanies the entry of Eva and her conversation with Sachs. Beckmesser has gone away joyfully with the manuscript, fully believing he has got possession of a song by Sachs—who has told him he can do what he likes with it—and revealing the ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... As a foil, against which Luigi's silent devotion showed to the best advantage, Romanzo Caukins' dogged persistence in telling her on an average of once in two months that he loved her and was waiting for a satisfactory ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... of Philadelphia, proved that within four hours typhoid germs were completely destroyed by the introduction into the polluted water of copper foil. ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume V (of VI) • Various
... dignified step. Movement precise. An effect of a good deal of nose glasses. Black, heavy rims. A wide, black tape. Head perpendicular, drawn back against the neck. Grave, scholarly face, chiselled with much refinement of technique; foil to the studious complexion, a dark, silken moustache. Holding our thumb-nail sketch up to the light, we ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... as now, no less wilt be my life, And I shall know it better than before, Praying and trusting, hoping, claiming more. From effort vain, sick foil, and bootless strife, I shall, with childness fresh, look up to thee; Thou, seeing thy child with age encumbered sore, Wilt round him ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... delicate and plaintive surprise. Above all it was her smallness which entranced him; her feet and hands, her tiny waist, the finesse of her dress and movements. All the women he had ever seen, Lucy and Dora among them, served at this moment only to make a foil in his mind for ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in her cotton frock was a spectacle at which youth laughed and age blushed. But after all it did not matter to Lesbia. She would have liked a less rowdy chaperon; but as a foil to her own fresh young beauty ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... against the enemy's reckless frontal attacks. The landlord suddenly unmasked a very strong battery which created some consternation. He himself appeared in force, but, thanks to the vigilance of my outposts, I was enabled to make a strategic retirement by the back-garden gate, leaving Mabel to foil the enemy by a ruse-de-guerre. (Dear Mabel is wonderfully clever at these things.) I succeeded in regaining my position under cover ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 16, 1914 • Various
... stablish, strengthen, settle you," he causes the whole matter to be indelibly impressed on their minds by the very mechanical comparison of Perfection, Establishment, Strengthening, and Settling to four sparkling jewels set in the jet-black foil of past suffering. This is just that kind of illustration which his audience craves. It matters not whether he meets this audience through a vague or a transparent medium, provided the vagueness or ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... river beside his cabin. He sung as before a song or invocation, in which he mentioned the wants of the wretched Indians, and the cunning endeavours of the Evil Spirit to keep them in his service, and ended by begging his master to shew his own superiority, and enable his priest to foil the tricks of his adversary. The tribe assembled, just as they had done on the previous days. But they were more anxious now than they had been before, because the more there is in the cabin of a man, the greater is his thirst to increase ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... 'I've been thinking—it will be better for all parties, if you make your offer to my proprietor before you dismount.' I was too vexed to speak: this animal's infernal intelligence had foreseen my manoeuvre—he meant to foil it, if ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... she was most reassuring in her speech, and taking the cold remains of a similar cut from the ice chest, she gave him an object lesson. She demonstrated to him how he should begin the attack, how he might foil the bone that existed only to baffle, how slice after slice might fall beneath his sure and ...
— The Jester of St. Timothy's • Arthur Stanwood Pier
... foil of the butcher-bird's stolidity we may set the inquisitive, garrulous temperament of the white-eyed vireo and the yellow-breasted chat. The vireo is hardly larger than the goldfinch, but let him be in one of his conversational moods, and he will fill a smilax thicket ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... do. But Fate decreed that he should be childless, that all religious independents might call him father. There is only one thing better than for a strong man to marry an absolutely dull woman. She teaches him by antithesis: he learns by contrast, and her stupidity is ever a foil for his brilliancy. He soon grows to a point where he does not mentally defer to her in the slightest degree, but goes his solitary way, making good that maxim of Kipling, "He travels the fastest who travels alone." He ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... imprisoned in the hand of the man who had just declared war against her, her surprise gave place to a mingled feeling of impatience and anger. She drew her foot back with a sudden movement, but unfortunately the foot went one way and the slipper another. A fencing-master, who sees his foil carried ten steps away from him by a back stroke, could not feel more astonishment than that felt by Madame de Bergenheim. Her first movement was to place her foot, so singularly undressed, upon the ground; an instinctive ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... still remained, how many criminal designs, how many treasonable plots, which only Marat's perspicacity and vigilance could unravel and foil! Now he was dead, who was there to denounce Custine loitering in idleness in the Camp of Caesar and refusing to relieve Valenciennes, Biron tarrying inactive in the Lower Vendee letting Saumur be taken and Nantes blockaded, ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... to be derived from the same root as Paup-puk-ke-nay, a grasshopper, the inflection iss making it personal. The Indian idea is that of harum scarum. He is regarded as a foil to Manabozho, with whom he is frequently brought in ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... snow was gone from the hills; the stream that gathered its three forks at this point roared over its rocks; the stunted willows were in full leaf; the thick, soft moss of every dark shade of green and yellow and red made a foil for innumerable brilliant flowers. The fat, gray conies chirped at us from the rocks; the ground-squirrels, greatly multiplied since the wholesale destruction of foxes, kept the dogs unavailingly chasing hither and thither whenever they were ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... after all, the imaginative part which outweighs the given. Nor do we desire the given to infringe upon the ideal field. Thus do we understand that for most drawings a background vague and formless is the desideratum. "Such a tone is the foil for psychological moments, as they are handled by Goya, for instance, with barbarically magnificent nakedness. On a background which is scarcely indicated, with few strokes, which barely suggest space, he impales like a butterfly the human type, mostly in a moment ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... interferences with his government, by reminding his hearers that they thought it was necessary to have Major-Generals; adding that so they 'might have gone on,' if they had not insisted on his calling the Parliament of 1656, against his will, which had given them 'a foil.'[62] ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... Hamlet and Laertes were known to excel at this sword play; and Hamlet taking up the foils chose one, not at all suspecting the treachery of Laertes, or being careful to examine Laertes' weapon, who, instead of a foil or blunted sword, which the laws of fencing require, made use of one with a point, and poisoned. At first Laertes did but play with Hamlet, and suffered him to gain some advantages, which the dissembling king magnified ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... ah, that Golf should vanish with the green! What noble matches Winter might have seen; And in Old Age what glorious Hazards foil'd, What Zest of painful ...
— The Golfer's Rubaiyat • H. W. Boynton
... So he sat minute after minute. The Cathedral was full of echoes—murmurous rebounds of the noises of the streets, drawn out and mellowed into long, soft, rolling tones, against which, as against a foil, there stood out detached, now and then, the sudden footsteps of someone leaving or entering a confessional, the short scream of a slipping chair—once the sudden noise of a confessional-door being opened and the click of the handle which ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... and from thy birth my friend, Dorset, to thee this fable let me send: With Damon's lightness weigh thy solid worth; The foil is known to set the diamond forth: Let the feign'd tale this real moral give, How many ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... that has been worn out by hard service. Past seventy now, his youth had been trained to a different civilization, and there was a touching gentleness in his face, as if he expressed still the mental attitude of a class which had existed merely as a support or a foil to the order above it. Without spirit to resent, he, with his fellows, had endured the greatest evils of slavery. With the curse of free labour on the land, there had been no incentive for toil, no hire for the labourer. Like an incubus the system ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... nitrate of silver, soluble in nitric acid and ammonia. When the precipitate is dried and heated on platinum-foil, it disperses as white vapour with slight detonation. Sulphate of lime in excess gives a white precipitate, soluble in nitric or hydrochloric acid, but insoluble in oxalic, tartaric, ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... owner, hey? If you do you'll get an honourable mention in our troop-book. I was carried away in it by two thieves who didn't know I was in the car, because I was disguised, sort of, under the buffalo robe. Do you want to help me foil them?" ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... wrestles with amazing dexterity, and is an excellent cricketer. He runs like a buck, leaps like a wild goat, and plays at skittles like a wizard. Then he has a fine voice for singing, he touches the guitar so as to make it speak, and handles a foil as well as any fencer in Spain.—Cervantes, Don Quixote, II. ii. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... sale, and distribution of tobacco in this country and abroad, and that this had been done by combinations made with a purpose and effect to stifle competition, control prices, and establish a monopoly, not only in the manufacture of tobacco, but also of tin-foil and licorice used in its manufacture and of its products of cigars, cigarettes, and snuffs. The tobacco suit presented a far more complicated and difficult case than the Standard Oil suit for a decree which would effectuate the will of the court and end the violation of the statute. There was ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Maclaren's he first met Alfred Bates Richards, who became a life friend. Richards, an undergraduate of Exeter, was a man of splendid physique. A giant in height and strength, he defeated all antagonists at boxing, but Burton mastered him with the foil and the broad-sword. Richards, who, like Burton, became a voluminous author [47] wrote long after, "I am sure, though Burton was brilliant, rather wild, and very popular, none of us ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... made of two pieces of tin-foil, four by ten, and three pieces of waxed paper a little larger than the foil. A piece of wire is twisted into the end of each piece of foil, and then one sheet of foil is laid on a sheet of paper. This is then covered by another sheet of paper upon which is laid the ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... alyk. But of it we have sundrie diphthonges: oa, as to roar, a boar, a boat, a coat; oi, as coin, join, foil, soil; oo, as food, good, blood; ou, as house, mouse, &c. Thus, we commonlie wryt mountan, fountan, quhilk it wer more etymological to wryt montan, ...
— Of the Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue - A Treates, noe shorter than necessarie, for the Schooles • Alexander Hume
... sometimes vaguely referred to the verb foil, to baffle, with which it has no connection. The Fr. feuille, leaf, is also invoked, and compared with Fr. fleuret, a foil, the idea being that the name was given to the "button" at the point. Now the earliest foils and fleurets were not buttoned; first, because they were pointless, and secondly, because the point was not used in early fencing. It was not until gunpowder began to bring about the disuse of ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... that he always had on his table. It had a top like a fencing foil; in fact, that's what it was in miniature, except that it was edged. It was that top, flattened close down, that stopped any flow of blood, so that everyone thought at first it was the blow on the temple that killed him. There's this about it, though: I'm told ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... party assault with the fourth cut. Bravo! performed with perfect precision." And so he went on. Each time, however, that Jones's division had to assault, he saw that Blackall endeavoured to take some undue advantage of Ernest, who with equal regularity contrived quietly to foil him. Ernest kept his eye on his opponent's, but said nothing, and in no other way showed that he was aware of his evil intentions. Blackall at length began to lose his temper at his own failures: he ground his teeth and turned savage glances towards Bracebridge, who met them ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... is used by the agents of government, and they have money at command without stint. If I were possessed of the same means, I could not only foil the prosecutors, but render them ridiculous and infamous. The democratic papers teem with abuse against me and my counsel, and even against the chief justice. Nothing is left undone or unsaid which can tend ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... Indian hunters immediately classed the white, the deep and the pale grizzly red, the grizzly dark-brown—in short, all those with the extremities of the hair of a white or frosty color without regard to the color of the ground or foil—under the name of hoh-host. The Indians assured them that these were all of the same species as the white bear, that they associated together, had longer nails than the others, and never climbed trees. On the other hand, the black ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... event.—There was plenty of fuel in the corner. I made up the fire, and then, leaning back, with my eyes fixed on it, let my thoughts roam at will. Where was my old nurse now? What was she seeing or encountering? Would she meet our adversary? Would she be strong enough to foil him? Was she dead for the time, although some bond rendered her return from the regions of the dead inevitable?—But she might never come back, and then I should have no tidings of the kind which I knew she had gone to see, and which I longed ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... thalium, | | and many other | | substances. | | | | Organic matter, as | Gives a brown color to the acid. | a piece of straw | | in a carboy of acid | | | Hydrochloric acid | Arsenic | Marsh's test. | | | Some yellow samples | Reinsh's test; a small piece of | contain no iron, | copper foil becomes coated | but an organic salt,| on boiling in dilute acid. | and give an alkaline| | ash on ignition of | | the residue after | | evaporation | | | Calcium chloride | Calcium hydrate | The clear ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... success is often secured by putting on as bold a front, and making as great and startling display, as possible. But as fragrant, modest flowers usually bloom in the garden with gaudy, scentless ones, so those inclined to be bizarre made an excellent foil for the refined and elegant, and thus had their uses. There is little in the world that is not of value, looking at it from ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... transept, but seems like a system of huge semi-cylinders erected on their bases, and united with reentrant angles, their convex surfaces toward us, so that the ground-plan might be called a species of quatre-foil. In each of the convex faces is an admirably proportioned door-way, a Gothic arch with deep-carved and elaborately fretted mouldings, so wonderfully perfect in its imitation that you almost feel like knocking for admittance, secure of an ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... resolves to disregard the ordinance, and pay the funeral rites to her brother Polynices. The conflict between the law of the State and the divine law which Antigone obeys is the moral key-note of the play. Ismene is Antigone's weaker sister and serves as a foil to her. Antigone is betrothed to Haemon, a ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... violets, so doth the primrose fall At once the spring's pride and its funeral, Such early sweets get off in their still prime, And stay not here to wear the foil of time; While coarser flowers, which none would miss, if past, To scorching summers and cold ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... impassive; he lifted his foil carelessly and swung it; the hiss that followed might have been construed as a challenge. John ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... church. To him as to innumerable other honest, middle-aged and comfortable men, Darwinism came as a dreadful invitation to go out into the wilderness. Over my head and just out of range of my ears he was debating that issue with Siddons as a foil and my cousin as a horrified antagonist. Slowly he was developing his conception of compromise. And meanwhile he wasn't going out into the wilderness at all, but punctually to and fro, along the edge of the lawn by ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... suggests that its object may have been quite as much to raise disgust at the elders' crime as to raise admiration at Susanna's purity; in fact that the whiteness of her character was designed as a foil to make more prominent the blackness of her oppressors. On this account Jer. xxix. 23 might perhaps be taken as a verse which gave his cue to the writer. But these are points on which opinions will inevitably vary according ...
— The Three Additions to Daniel, A Study • William Heaford Daubney
... answered these artless inquiries as best he could; they came as a refreshing foil to the sweet but melancholy memories of the past. They were interesting, too, from this very pretty but very ignorant little girl in this backward little Southern town. She was a flash of sunlight through a soft gray cloud; a vigorous shoot from an old moss-covered stump—she was life, young life, ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... jokes have been left without a label on them; he needs to acquire the art of seeming to pluck, as he goes along in the progress of his speech, as by the wayside, some flower of rhetoric. He seems to have passed it and to have plucked it casually,—but it is a boutonniere with tin foil round it. [Laughter.] You can see, upon close inspection, the mark of the planer on his well-turned sentences. Now, the competition with gentlemen who are so cultivated is severe upon one who must speak absolutely upon the impulse of the occasion. ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... agent turned over in his mind various schemes to foil McKee, who now stood behind him with the muzzle of his revolver pressing into the middle of his back. Each was rejected ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... 1867 C. E. Varley proposed the use of a copper sheath surrounding a magnet core to diminish self-induction. It has since been used by Brush and others. Sometimes metallic foil is laid between ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... the cistern was daily filled, and from the summit of defence her flood went pouring into the moat around its feet, until it mantled to the brim, turning the weeds into a cold shadowy pavement of green for a foil to its pellucid depth. She understood all the secrets of the aqueous catapult, at which its contriver had little more than hinted on that memorable night when he disclosed so much, and believed she could arrange it for action without assistance. At the same time her new ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... certain where the attack was not made on hearts of stone, the simple modesty of her wardrobe seemed rather to indicate the thoughtful and contemplative mind, rich in its own resources, and requiring no foil to render conspicuous its real value, her auburn locks parted in the front, discovered a fine well arched forehead, from under which darted glances from her beautiful dark eyes, that when purposely directed for observation, spoke volumes to the heart. Unadorned by the feathers which waved in majestic ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... most educated, of our friends; and so at last the Norcoms, during their brief but concentrated, most vivid and momentous, reign, a matter, as I recall it, of a couple of breathless winters. We were provided by their presence with as happy a foil as we could have wished to the plainness and dryness of the Wards; their homely grace was all their own and was also embodied in three brothers, Eugene, Reginald, Albert, whose ages would have corresponded, I surmise, with those ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... Unwearied yet by all thy useful toil! Whom num'rous slanderers assault in vain; Whom no base calumny can put to foil. But still the laurel on thy learned brow Flourishes fair, and ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... most nearly akin to the drama, with which we should be disposed to identify it if the characters of the prologue and epilogue were introduced as dramatis personae in action. But their doing and enduring are presupposed as accomplished facts, and employed merely as a foil to the dialogues, which alone are the work of the author. Perhaps the least erroneous way succinctly to describe what in fact is a unicum would be to call it ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... that on Saturday night the Board would vote for the eviction of the teacher, was so great that she felt almost indifferent to her own fate, as she and the doctor started on their six-mile ride to East Donegal. But when he presently confided to her his scheme to foil her father and Absalom, she became almost ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... didn't think we could be much help to them; anyway they didn't hire Pee-wee to foil the bandit the way men do in stories. I'd like to see that kid capturing a bandit. Judging by the way he treats ice cream cones there wouldn't be much left of the bandit. I'm not crazy about bandits, anyway, but some fellows are. ...
— Roy Blakeley's Bee-line Hike • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... sweet-briar and evening primroses floated in on the warm, moist air, and mingled with the steam of the tea-kettle and the fume in the chafing-dish; and the patter, patter of rain drops, and the dash of wet leaves against each other, were a foil to the tea-kettle's song. Wych Hazel looked on, musingly, till Rollo came back and took her round the room looking at books. Then offering her his arm, he somewhat suddenly brought her face to face with some one just ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... with surprise. "We are fencing—and I hate it. Once at West Point I was fencing with a man, my friend; the button broke off my foil and I hurt him seriously. He fell dead beside me in ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... no longer trust its pledge; but thus Recall'd it; rapt its Ganymede from us. Was there no milder way but the small-pox, The very filthiness of Pandora's box? So many spots, like naeves on Venus' soil, One jewel set off with so many a foil; Blisters with pride swell'd, which through's flesh did sprout Like rose-buds, stuck i' th' lily-skin about. Each little pimple had a tear in it, To wail the fault its rising did commit: 60 Which, rebel-like, with its own lord at strife, Thus made an ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... delicious Mrs. Bennet—her archness, her querulousness, and above all her talkativeness. Was it Sally May or Mrs. Bennet? Molly Seaton, as Mr. Bennet, proved an excellent foil—reserved, quiet, full of ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... are all right, but my legs are weak; and then, I have not had a foil in my hand since that devil of a duel; and you, I am sure, have been fencing every day, in order to carry your little conspiracy against ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... with numbers and get the war over. I am not disturbed about Russia. If we can get the Dardanelles open, we can easily send her ammunition and equipment for her spare men, and so end the war more quickly; but, failing that, I think Russia will easily foil Germany, and spring at her again and again until she is worn out. I had a letter of congratulation from your sister Mabel. Very ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie
... human limitations, however, has its foil in the ideal of deity, which is nothing but the ideal of man freed from those limitations which a humble and wise man accepts for himself, but which a spiritual man never ceases to feel as limitations. Man, for instance, is mortal, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... then slipped the driver's license into a pocket worked into the back of the metallic paper foil of the citation blank. He handed the pad into the window to the driver together with a ...
— Code Three • Rick Raphael
... killed without remorse, and that I still survived was itself a mere accident. Yet the very fact that I lived yielded me fresh confidence, a fatalistic belief that my life had thus been spared for a specific purpose. It might yet be my privilege to foil these villains, and rescue Mrs. Henley. It was my belief she was also on board this vessel. I had no reason to assume this, except the wording of Broussard's report which I had overheard. But she was a prisoner, and this vessel would be the most likely place for her to be confined. I sat up, my ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... the pouting lips were fretful, the whole appearance unhealthy, and the dark bullet-shaped head seemed too large for the thin bony little figure. Worn, fagged, and aged as Flora looked, she had still so much beauty, and far more of refinement and elegance, as to be a painful foil and contrast to the child that clung to her, waywardly refusing all response to her ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... every disagreeable impression which you might have received from the contrast, supposing them real, between the two brothers. You did not believe in Joseph with the same faith with which you believed in Charles. The latter was a pleasant reality, the former a no less pleasant poetical foil to it. The comedy, I have said, is incongruous; a mixture of Congreve with sentimental incompatibilities: the gaiety upon the whole is buoyant; but it required the consummate art of Palmer ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... open fire, with his feet thrust into the coals, and an open volume of Thackeray upon his knees. He said that Thackeray was the greatest living novelist. I sometimes suspected that the volume of Thackeray was kept as a foil, that he might not be talked to. He shrank from ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... they relish them at all, in another language than in their own. The respectable domestic virtues of Elphin and his wife Angharad, the blameless loves of Taliesin and the Princess Melanghel, hardly serve even as a foil to the satiric treatment of the other characters. The careless incompetence of the poetical King Gwythno, the coarser vices of other Welsh princes, the marital toleration or blindness of Arthur, the cynical frankness of the robber King Melvas, above all, ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... is supreme and man cannot resist His omnipotence, nor thwart His decrees, nor foil His plans, nor render His omniscience fallible. Luther: "For all men find this opinion written in their hearts, and, when hearing this matter discussed, they, though against their will, acknowledge and assent to it, first, that ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... brother Corineius was, Since when we passed the Cicillian gulf, And so transfretting the Illirian sea, Arrived on the coasts of Aquitaine, Where with an army of his barbarous Gauls Goffarius and his brother Gathelus Encountering with our host, sustained the foil. And for your sakes my Turnus there I lost, Turnus that slew six hundred men at arms All in an hour, with his sharp battle-axe. From thence upon the strons of Albion To Corus haven happily we came, And quelled the giants, come of Albion's race, With Gogmagog ...
— 2. Mucedorus • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... of that day. I received a second message from Sheridan on the 5th, in which he urged more emphatically the importance of my presence. This was brought to me by a scout in gray uniform. It was written on tissue paper, and wrapped up in tin-foil such as chewing tobacco is folded in. This was a precaution taken so that if the scout should be captured he could take this tin-foil out of his pocket and putting it into his mouth, chew it. It would cause no surprise at all to see a Confederate soldier chewing ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... as shining as if he had been polished with a shoe-brush) entered the kitchen of the hotel, and asked for the largest knife they had. The head-cook gave him a sort of carving-knife, some eighteen inches long, sharp as a razor, and pliant as a foil. The negro looked at it, shook his head as if in doubt whether it would do, but nevertheless took it up stairs with him. Presently he brought it down again, and asked for a larger one. The cook opened all his drawers, and at last found a sort of cutlass, which he hardly ever used on account ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... then packed for the market in small bundles of 50 or 100 in each, enclosed in lead foil, or tight metallic cases. ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... taught me to save peach-stones, tin-foil, newspapers and all kinds of junk. In fact, I can now ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... stopped at nothing. From this forward he began to retort upon his clerical companions, who found that the sheepish youth whom they had often made ridiculous, possessed skill, when properly excited, to foil them at their own weapons. He observed many things in their convivial meetings. The holy man, whom his flock looked upon as a being of the highest sanctity, when lit up into fun and frolic, Denis learned to estimate at his just value. He thought, besides, that a person resolved to ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... 'tis a vain dissembling—a part of the work of the day, And the words that your voice makes music, but the dull, dead lines of the play. Little you care for the woman you woo, save as a foil designed. To prove your skill as ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... the bell at the door of Mrs. Wilson's home she did not know that her approach had been watched. She meant to be very careful during her interview, for she realized that she and Ruth were endeavoring to foil two ...
— The Automobile Girls At Washington • Laura Dent Crane
... appears in the quotation from Edrisi below as Hindiah, and found its way into Spanish in the shapes of Alhinde, Alfinde, Alinde, first with the meaning of steel, then assuming, that of steel mirror, and finally that of metallic foil of a glass mirror. (See Dozy and Engelmann, 2d ed. pp. 144-145.) Hint or Al-hint is used in Berber also for steel. (See J. R. A. S. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... shall have to bring some pressure to bear upon Greece," said the younger man. "We cannot permit that. Bulgaria must get in the game sooner and thus foil such a plan." ...
— The Boy Allies in the Balkan Campaign - The Struggle to Save a Nation • Clair W. Hayes
... the nacre of any mussel or oyster-shell you might cut, at your pleasure, any quantity of small flat circular discs of the prettiest colour and lustre. To some extent, such tinsel or foil of shell is used pleasantly for decoration. But the mussel or oyster becoming itself an unwilling modeller, agglutinates its juice into three dimensions, and the fact of the surface being now geometrically gradated, together with ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... breathing fast, her bosom rising and falling with quick respirations, and her cheeks flushed with color, made a delicious foil to the pearly tone of her face, concealed on her neck and forehead by the escaping tresses of ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... dress of dead silk that imitates crape, but is much softer. So quiet, so like a wraith, and yet with a fascinating loveliness in her eyes, in her tender, blossom-like face, in her fresh young voice. She makes no blunders, she is not awkward, she is not loud. Cecil is her foil,—Cecil, in lace over infantile blue, with a knot of streamers on one shoulder in narrow blue satin ribbon and a blue sash. Floyd is host, of course, so Cecil would be left exclusively with her pretty mamma, if it was not her own choice. Madame watches them. How ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... violent temper; so much so that I remember going once into the attics of my grandfather's house at Penrith, upon some indignity having been put upon me, with an intention of destroying myself with one of the foils, which I knew was kept there. I took the foil in hand, but my heart failed. Upon another occasion, while I was at my grandfather's house at Penrith, along with my eldest brother, Richard, we were whipping tops together in the large drawing-room, on which the carpet was only laid down upon ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... stately Palace built of squared brick, Which cunningly was without mortar laid, Whose walls were high, but nothing strong, nor thick, And golden foil all over them displayed, That purest sky with brightness they dismayed. High lifted up were many lofty towers And goodly galleries far overlaid, Full of fair windows, and delightful bowers, And on the top a dial told the ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... Meredith Simpson!" Selingman recited, waving his cigar. "Well, well, we certainly have made a stir with our little meetings here. An inspired English Cabinet Minister, travel-stained and dusty, arrives with his valet and a black dispatch-box, to foil our schemes. Send him along, my friend. We are not at all afraid of Mr. Simpson. Perhaps we may even ask him to join ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... may be foil'd like Tarquin, if you follow Not the dry light of Rome's straight-going policy, But the fool-fire of love or lust, which well May make you lose yourself, may even drown you In ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... is like drawing the lead from the pistol or putting a foil on the rapier: it defeats his purpose, it renders his weapon ineffective. So far from setting his congregation on fire he sets them asleep; instead of sending them away with clenched convictions they leave the church tittering, ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... from him!" he cried out in an agony too great for words. To realize that she was in the mercy of such a man was a sorrow so great that all else on earth paled before it. Then a mighty resolve came to him—to foil the villainous plot, weak though he was; he must make his escape and fly to ...
— Mischievous Maid Faynie • Laura Jean Libbey
... heav'n, Only that, whence it kindles, none is lost, And it is soon extinct; thus from the horn, That on the dexter of the cross extends, Down to its foot, one luminary ran From mid the cluster shone there; yet no gem Dropp'd from its foil; and through the beamy list Like flame ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... that gold never looks so well as on the foil of their dark skins. Dick found in his trunk a string of gold beads, such as are manufactured in some of our cities, which he had brought from the gold region of Chili,—so he said,—for the express purpose of giving ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... trench when there was unpleasant work to be done, while boys half his age kicked him in a vain attempt to waken him to a sense of duty; but instances of this kind were rare. There were not enough of them to serve as a foil to the shining deeds which were of daily and ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... is dark and massive—a splendid foil for his wife's slenderness and fairness. They are much in love with each other. He always sits beside her if he can, and she looks up at him and smiles, and last night I saw him take her hand where it hung among the folds of her gown, and he held it ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... in her favour a memory for places and nothing more. A deviation amounting to two or three of our strides is enough to make her lose her way and to keep her from returning to her people, whereas miles across unknown country will not foil the Mason-bee. I expressed my surprise, just now, that man was deprived of a wonderful sense wherewith certain animals are endowed. The enormous distance between the two things compared might furnish matter for discussion. In the present ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... to those who made inquiry that for good and sufficient reasons Mrs. Wybrant was not going anywhere at present. But she sent a great stiff set piece of flowers, an elaborate, inadequate thing with a wire back to it and a tin-foil footing, which sat alongside the black box during the service and afterwards was propped upright in the rank grass at the head of the grave. It was doubly conspicuous by reason of being the only example of what greenhouse men call floral offerings that graced the occasion. And she had written her ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... shown at i, is a soft rennet cheese made from cow's milk. It is made at Neufchatel-en-Bray, France, and not at Neufchatel, Switzerland. This variety of cheese is wrapped in tin-foil and sold in small packages. It is used chiefly for salads, sandwiches, etc. As it does not keep well after the package is opened, the entire contents should ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 2 - Volume 2: Milk, Butter and Cheese; Eggs; Vegetables • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... which cover the W. bank of the Avon, near Clifton. They form a fine foil to the open downs opposite. To enter them cross the Suspension Bridge into Somerset, take first turning to R., cross the intervening combe, which runs up from the river, by the first available footpath, and then wander ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... herd of imitators, among whom were sons and nephews of his own; but as, like most imitators, they could do little more than mimic his defects without reaching his excellencies, they served only as a foil to set off the lustre of his great successor Sophocles, who, while yet his scholar, aspired to be his competitor, and gained the preeminence at the age ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... one may see, far away and "sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill," some neighboring village with its graceful spire of purest white gleaming and flaming in the hot sunshine, like marble set in a foil of malachite. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... Mr. OWEN NARES was doing in this galley; and I cannot tell you. I can only say that he was very brave about it all. In a sense it was a serious performance, the only one of its kind in the play; yet not serious enough to serve as a foil for the general frivolity, for he was constantly bringing his own high sentiments into ridicule, and so burlesquing the OWEN NARES that we love ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 8th, 1920 • Various
... our picture you will see the shape of the insect. Cut this out of a piece of cork about three inches long, and make the legs of thin wire (after the manner of the spider we described in a previous number); then get some strips of thin tin-foil, and gum them on the back of the cucuius; then paint over the whole with transparent green color (oil paints if possible). Now gouge out two holes about the size of the head of a common match, and then cut off the heads of two common ...
— Harper's Young People, September 14, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... the time in which they were talking by silently taking a foil from the nearest chest). Back! Do not come any nearer. You ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... Vogelstein no better foil could be imagined than Brush. If they recalled the tusked monsters that charged in the van of Asiatic armies, his analogue was the desert horse. Small, spare, sensitive, shy, his every posture suggested race, training, spirit, and docility. His flair for classical art had become proverbial. ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... impulse and act, a kind of crankiness, of whose essential feebleness we are all the more sensible as contrasted with a nature so steady on its keel, and drawing so much water, as that of Horatio,—the foil at once, in different ways, to both him and Hamlet. It was natural, also, that the daughter of self-conceited old Polonius should have her softness stiffened with a fibre of obstinacy; for there are two kinds of weakness, that which breaks, and that which bends. Ophelia's is of the former ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... swing up as the wind fets[619] breath. When Caesar saw his army prone to war, And Fates so bent, lest sloth and long delay Might cross him, he withdrew his troops from France, And in all quarters musters men for Rome. They by Lemannus' nook forsook their tents; They whom[620] the Lingones foil'd with painted spears, Under the rocks by crooked Vogesus; And many came from shallow Isara, 400 Who, running long, falls in a greater flood, And, ere he sees the sea, loseth his name; The yellow Ruthens left their garrisons; Mild Atax glad it bears not Roman boats,[621] And frontier ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... down he thought again of that night when he had last seen Beatrice. How splendid she had looked in her boat on the water; how unreserved, and yet how reticent she was; how beautiful, and yet how unconscious of her beauty. What a foil she made to that dreadful little ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... the nigger that worked for Fern," explained Mr. Weil. "He got hold of some of these notes and checks, in Fern's office, and is coming to look us up to-day, for the purpose of having his employer arrested. A nice game, eh? But we will foil him, won't we? We'll show him a trick worth several of his! He's probably gone to the Hoffman House and he'll hang round till he finds me. I'll send word that I am to be home this afternoon at five. You will be there with me. We'll tackle him together. When ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... laurels with the killing tears Of slow, dull care, so that their roots to Hell Might pierce, and their wide branches blot the spheres Of Heaven, with dewy leaves and flowers; this well 30 May be, for Heaven and Earth conspire to foil ...
— The Witch of Atlas • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... drawings and took them to a machinist whom he knew, afterwards one of his assistants, who laughed at the idea but made the model. Previously he bet a friend a barrel of apples that he could do it. When the model was finished he arranged a piece of tin foil and talked into it, and when it gave back a distinct sound the machinist was frightened, and Edison won his barrel of apples, "which," he says, "I was very ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... the Poet to make the Usurper build his Scheme upon the generous unsuspicious Temper of the Person he intends to murder, and thus to raise the Prince's Character by the Confession of his Enemy, to make the Villain ten Times more odious from his own Mouth. The Contrivance of the Foil unbated (i.e. without a Button) is methinks too gross a Deceit to go down even with a Man of the most ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... everything else into a corner of the room. I flung my fine cloak over the monk, and the fellow looked as if he had stolen it. I must have looked like a man who has been to a dance and has spent the rest of the night in a disorderly house, though the only foil to my reasonable elegance of attire was the bandages round ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Drills Fire, Ambulance, Life-saving Drills Single Stick and Foil, Boxing Swimming Water Polo Water Sports Jumping and Running Shot Put Discus Throwing Baseball, Indoor and Outdoor Basket-ball Football Volleyball ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... He pushed a great mound of talc-fine dust before him to cover up the cargo. It was necessary. With freight costing what it did, fuel and air and food came frozen solid, in containers barely thicker than foil. While they stayed at space-shadow temperature, the foil would hold anything. And a cover of insulating moondust with vacuum between the grains kept even air frozen ...
— Scrimshaw • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... were measurably corroborated by the attitude toward Sally adopted by Mrs. Standish in her capacity as close friend, foil, and confidant of Mrs. Artemas. In the course of those three days the girl had not been insensible to intimations of a strong, if as yet restrained, animus in the mind of the older woman. In alarm and regret she did her futile best to discourage ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... Merwyn, Arthur. I have my own personal score to settle with him. He has made a good foil for you and my other friends, and I have learned to appreciate you the more. YOU have won my entire esteem and respect, and have taught me how quickly a noble, self-sacrificing purpose can develop manhood. O Arthur, Heaven grant that we may all meet again! How proud I ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... was concerned, we reached the reached the headquarters at Torrecilla, and were well received by the Spanish commander—in—chief, a tall, good—looking, soldierlike man, whose personal qualities had an excellent foil in the captain—general of the province, an old friend of mine, as already mentioned, and who certainly looked full as like a dancing—master, or, at the best, perruquier en general to the staff, ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... bidarka almost any night and escape, but I believe he is afraid to leave the bay lest he may be found by some of these villagers whom he has offended. I don't think Skookie would go anywhere with him. As it is, one is a foil to the other here with us, but each is afraid of the other ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough
... your permission, make the victory more definite," replied the poet, testing his foil and saluting ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... trailing dress of dead silk that imitates crape, but is much softer. So quiet, so like a wraith, and yet with a fascinating loveliness in her eyes, in her tender, blossom-like face, in her fresh young voice. She makes no blunders, she is not awkward, she is not loud. Cecil is her foil,—Cecil, in lace over infantile blue, with a knot of streamers on one shoulder in narrow blue satin ribbon and a blue sash. Floyd is host, of course, so Cecil would be left exclusively with her pretty mamma, if it was not her own choice. Madame watches them. How ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... means," returned the young officer, "this unconscionable man has just left about half a tumbler foil, and I do not intend he shall have more. Waunangee," he pursued, after filling and presenting him with the glass, "that is the lady of the house," pointing to Mrs. Elmsley, "you ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... themselves together under a curse to snatch Paul even from the midst of the Roman swords; and the Roman captain was only able to foil their plot by sending him under a heavy escort down to Caesarea. This was a Roman city on the Mediterranean coast; it was the residence of the Roman governor of Palestine and the headquarters of the Roman ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... only slightly soluble. At ordinary temperatures it unites directly with many other elements; thus with hydrogen, combination takes place in direct sunlight with explosive violence; arsenic, antimony, thin copper foil and phosphorus take fire in an atmosphere of chlorine, forming the corresponding chlorides. Many compounds containing hydrogen are readily decomposed by the gas; for example, a piece of paper dipped in turpentine inflames in an atmosphere of chlorine, producing ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... shrilled the boy, and, setting down his burden, charged out again, returning instantly with another cry of 'Beef, no vedge.' He was out and in again with a cry of 'Pork and vedge,' and out and in again with a cry of 'Pork, no vedge.' Then a shock-headed youth appeared with a basket foil of tin measures and a big can of black beer. He was met with an instant storm of chaff, and allusions of a Rabelaisian sort were made to one Mary for whom he would seem to have had a kindness. He departing, the men set themselves to the serious business of dinner, ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... entangled amongst books and papers. A man cannot tell possibly what he is now good for, save to move up and down and fill room, or to serve as animatum instrumentum, for others to work withal in base employments, or to be foil for better wits, or to serve (as they say monsters do) to set out the variety of nature, and ornament of the universe. He is mere nothing of himself, neither eats, nor drinks, nor goes, nor spits, but by imitation, for ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... and walking toward Munson, glass in hand, his baggy trousers and tunic making him look twice his regular size. "You know as much about fencing, Munson, as you do about the lost tribes of Israel. Booth handles his foil as a policeman does a rattan cane in the pit of the Bowery. Forrest is the only man in this country who can handle ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... 'By way of foil, I suppose,' said Elizabeth; 'still, saving your presence, Helen, I think that if Lucy had all the sense you ascribe to her, she might keep things ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... point was, that hitherto she had generally been able so to dress Hesper as to make of her more or less a foil to herself. My reader may remember that there was between Hesper and Sepia, if not a resemblance, yet a relation of appearance, like, vaguely, that between the twilight and the night; seen in certain positions and circumstances, the one would recall ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... the east to Von Kluck's army? Personally, I have not a doubt that Paris is the objective, or that the Germans are still striving to carry out their programme in its entirety, which is the extension of their empire over Europe and Asia Minor. The immediate object of the Allies is to foil this design, and only after we have accomplished that can we think of assuming the offensive and crushing Prussian militarism. We have not compassed that end; the battlefields are still in the Allies' countries, ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... meditations on the common welfare, on the aggrandizement of the Gods and the promotion of order and beauty in the universe—of setting all to rights with a handful of clay; of creating living things, and moulding them after our own likeness. I saw what was lacking to our godhead: some counterpart, some foil wherein to set off its blessedness. And that counterpart must be mortal; but in all else exquisitely contrived, perfect in intelligence, keen to appreciate our superiority. Thereupon, I moulded ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... thro' life, and from thy birth my friend, Dorset, to thee this fable let me send: With Damon's lightness weigh thy solid worth; The foil is known to set the diamond forth: Let the feign'd tale this real moral give, How many Damons, how ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... without remorse, and that I still survived was itself a mere accident. Yet the very fact that I lived yielded me fresh confidence, a fatalistic belief that my life had thus been spared for a specific purpose. It might yet be my privilege to foil these villains, and rescue Mrs. Henley. It was my belief she was also on board this vessel. I had no reason to assume this, except the wording of Broussard's report which I had overheard. But she was a prisoner, and this vessel would be the most likely place ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... professed. He was yet a wise man and a brave courtier, but rough and participating more of active than sedentary motions, as being in his instillation destined for arms. There is a query of some denotations, how he came to receive the foil, and that in the catastrophe? for he was strengthened with honourable alliances and the prime friendship in Court of my Lords of Leicester and Burleigh, both his contemporaries and familiars; but that there might be (as the adage hath it) falsity in ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... imitation shown off by the foil of some incongruous setting. The setting in this case Stevenson found about him in the omnibuses, the clubs, and the railways ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... a word that can have many meanings, and I am sure that in using it, I did n't place the same construction that you did in hearing it. But let that pass. I apologize. What I should have said was that, if you will pardon me, she used you, as young women will do, as a foil against her fiance in a time of petty quarreling between them. Is ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... someone happy, and her endeavour carries with it a train of incident, solving a mystery which had thrown a shadow over several lives. A charming foil to her grave elder sister is to be found in Miss Babs, a small coquette of five, whose humorous ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... imagine, never gave Boccaccio a thought, only the way they were placed being important. The elaborate preparation for the story-telling; the grouping of them as a whole, in contrast with the greater story he put as their contrast and foil; the solemn gloom, the deep chiaroscuro of this framing, painted like a miniature; the artful way in which he prepares for his lieta brigata the way out of the charnel-house: these are the real 'Decameron.' The ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... for its retention. In the form of rolls or tape it was forced into the previously cleaned and prepared cavity, condensed with instruments under heavy hand pressure, smoothed with files, and finally burnished. Tin foil was also used to a limited extent and by the same method. Improvements in the refining of gold for dental use brought the product to a fair degree of purity, and, about 1855, led to the invention by Dr Robert Arthur ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... was a Carnation against a Leaf of Geranium with Tin Foil below, which is no longer being done in ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... way. She had come to Briar Hills, flattering Jerry, of course, that they could be alone, intriguing meanwhile with Channing Lloyd, a wild fellow, according to Jack Ballard, who at thirty could have unprofitably shared his omniscience with the devil. A fine foil for Jerry! ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... correction for the faults they may commit, nor suffer them to be inured to hardships and hazards, as they ought to be. They will not endure to see them return all dust and sweat from their exercise, to drink cold drink when they are hot, nor see them mount an unruly horse, nor take a foil in hand against a rude fencer, or so much as to discharge a carbine. And yet there is no remedy; whoever will breed a boy to be good for anything when he comes to be a man, must by no means spare him when young, and must very often transgress the ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... arm'd—with gilded Lances and Shields of Black, with golden Suns painted. The Musick plays a fighting Tune. They fight at Barriers, to the Tune.—Harlequin is often foil'd, but advances still; at last Scaramouch throws him, and is Conqueror; all give Judgment ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... like it in the world. The historical setting of this lustrous stone is intensely interesting. Out of what mine did the priceless diamond come? By whose skill was it so admirably cut and polished? By whose hand was it set in its own historic foil? Such questions are worthy of ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... "He will foil me there as in all else," replied Joseph, disconsolately. "Has he not already guessed my plans in Germany, and has he not torn my banner from my hand to flaunt it above his own head, as the defender of German liberties! And Maria ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... ammunition forward to the trenches. The enemy during the day would get the range of the road over which this train had to pass. Of course, each night the time of ammunition moving was changed in an attempt to foil the German fire. But this was of no avail, for when the train of trucks moved along the road to the trenches a bright flash of light would go up somewhere within our lines, telling the enemy that it was time to fire upon ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... to command. Her dark eyes were still brilliant and glittered humorously and shrewdly from beneath their bushy brows. The lean, veined neck, bedecked with diamonds, was still poised proudly on the bent shoulders. Her wrecked beauty was a perfect foil for the fresh loveliness of the young girl who, with a splendidly attired cavalier, followed ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... the same weight was similarly immersed; lastly the crown itself was immersed, and of course—for the story must not lack its dramatic sequel—was found bulkier than its weight of pure gold. Thus the genius that could balk warriors and armies could also foil the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Sprawler, who is very nice to look at, whose back is very beautiful, and who sprawls most gracefully over the railings, and pays her those delightful, absurd compliments about her and her horse "being such a capital pair," while, as a foil to so much grace and splendour, a poor little snub-nosed, ill-dressed, ill-conditioned dwarf of a snob looks on, sucking the top of his cheap cane in abject admiration and hopeless envy! Then she pats and kisses the nice soft nose of Cornet Flinders's hunter, which ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... that the ladies were talking about the doctrine called Adoption when first they saw Donal; whence this doctrine was the first to occur to the champion of orthodoxy as a weapon wherewith to foil the enemy. ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... modern warfare, as illustrating the immense power that quick-firing rifles confer upon the defence. Given a nucleus of well-trained troops, with skilled engineers, any position of ordinary strength can quickly be turned into a stronghold that will foil the efforts of a far greater number of assailants. Experience at Plevna showed that four or five times as many men were needed to attack redoubts and trenches as in the days of muzzle-loading muskets. It also proved ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... Ye who with undaunted hearts, immortal mitred Few! For Truth's dear sake, the Tyrant foil'd to whom ye still were true—[37] Rejoice! Who knows what scatter'd thoughts of yours were buried seeds, Slow-springing for th' oppress'd and poor, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... out to seek him, but was almost slain, Perhaps is dead now; everywhere The knights come foil'd from the great quest, in vain; In vain they ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris
... lingered for twenty-four seconds. Willis had moved the squad ship from that position, but the sergeant had left a substitute. The small object he'd dropped from the ejector tube now swelled and writhed and struggled. In pure emptiness, a shape of metal foil inflated itself. It was surprisingly large—almost the size of the squad ship. But in emptiness the fraction of a cubic inch of normal-pressure gas would inflate a foil bag against no resistance at all. This flimsy shape even jerked into motion. Released ...
— A Matter of Importance • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... you are to read: I conceive you as a man quite beyond and below the reticences of civility: with what measure you mete, with that shall it be measured you again; with you, at last, I rejoice to feel the button off the foil and to plunge home. And if in aught that I shall say I should offend others, your colleagues, whom I respect and remember with affection, I can but offer them my regret; I am not free, I am inspired by the consideration of interests far more large; and such pain as can be inflicted by ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... girl at any time, but she certainly looked very pretty indeed as she turned toward the visitor—her bright hair tumbled, her face flushed with exercise, her eyes sparkling merrily. She held a fencing-mask in one hand, and a foil, lightly upraised, ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... Jan's knife swept in an upward flash and plunged to the hilt through the flesh of his enemy's forearm. With a cry of pain O'Grady dropped his club, and the two crashed to the stone floor of the trail. This was the attack that Jan had feared and tried to foil, and with a lightning-like squirming movement he swung himself half free, and on his back, with O'Grady's huge hands linking at his throat, he drew back his knife arm for ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... do the paintings and sculpture take proper place in the tone scheme, but every bit of planting, every strip of lawn and every bed of flowers or shrubs, has its duty to perform as color accent or foil. Even the gravel of the walks was especially chosen to shade in with ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney
... no milder way but the small-pox; The very filthiness of Pandora's box? So many spots, like naeves, our Venus soil? One jewel set off with so many a foil? Blisters with pride swelled, which through 's flesh did sprout, Like rose-buds, stuck i'the lily-skin about. Each little pimple had a tear in it, To wail the fault its rising did commit, Which, rebel-like, with its own lord at strife, Thus made an insurrection 'gainst ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... Charley was back with the painters from the two canvas canoes knotted together. His first toss confirmed the captain's fears, the rope foil ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... presumptuous donkey in the world, the one who knew least and who thought he knew most; the others were very modest and able craftsmen. In the presence of us all this Gaio began to talk, and said: "Miliano's foil should be preserved, and to do that, Benvenuto, you shall doff your cap; [1] for just as giving diamonds a tint is the most delicate and difficult thing in the jeweller's art, so is Miliano the greatest jeweller that ever lived, and this is the most difficult diamond ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... Soc. Chem. Ind., xxiv., April 1905) process is as follows:—The cap composition is removed by squeezing the cap with pliers, while held over a porcelain basin of about 200 c.c. capacity, and removing the loosened foil and broken composition by means of a pointed wooden chip. Composition adhering to the shell or foil is loosened by alcohol, and washed into the dish by means of alcohol in a small wash bottle. The shell and foil are put to ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... intrigues; or amorous old dowagers, eloquent on Rousseau; or powdered courtiers, uttering epigrams against kings and religions,—straws that foretold the whirlwind. Paul Courier was right! Frenchmen are Frenchmen still; they are full of fine phrases, and their thoughts smell of the theatre; they mistake foil for diamonds, the Grotesque for the Natural, the Exaggerated for the Sublime: but still I say, Paul Courier was right,—there is more honesty now in a single salon in Paris than there was in all France in the days of Voltaire. Vast interests and solemn causes are no longer ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fifty thousand. Several of the daimios were converted to the new faith, and Nobunaga, who hated and strove to exterminate the Buddhists, received the Christians with the greatest favor, gave them desirable sites for their churches, and sought to set them up as a foil to the ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... this escort, Ritchie and Lyon reached Murzuk without molestation, but there the former died on the 2nd November, worn out by the fatigue and privations of the journey across the desert. Lyon, who was ill for some time from the same causes, recovered soon enough to foil the designs of the sultan, who counting on his death, had already begun to take possession of his property, and also of Ritchie's. The captain could not penetrate beyond the southern boundaries of Fezzan, but he had time to collect ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... have some clue to the search, if the glance of his eye, which these varlets have reported, do show truly where the treasure is hidden. I will foil the old fox yet with his ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... at all, — while my avarice regards The whole pool as my own — 'Come, give me five cards.' 'Well done!' cry the ladies; 'Ah, Doctor, that's good! 25 The pool's very rich — ah! the Doctor is loo'd!' Thus foil'd in my courage, on all sides perplex'd, I ask for advice from the lady that's next: 'Pray, Ma'am, be so good as to give your advice; Don't you think the best way is to venture for 't twice?' 30 'I advise,' cries the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... lot, who cast it in, Illustrious Ajax, in his open palm The herald placed it, standing at his side. 220 He, conscious, with heroic joy the lot Cast at his foot, and thus exclaim'd aloud. My friends! the lot is mine,[8] and my own heart Rejoices also; for I nothing doubt That noble Hector shall be foil'd by me. 225 But while I put mine armor on, pray all In silence to the King Saturnian Jove, Lest, while ye pray, the Trojans overhear. Or pray aloud, for whom have we to dread? No man shall my firm standing by his strength ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... al alyk. But of it we have sundrie diphthonges: oa, as to roar, a boar, a boat, a coat; oi, as coin, join, foil, soil; oo, as food, good, blood; ou, as house, mouse, &c. Thus, we commonlie wryt mountan, fountan, quhilk it wer more etymological to wryt montan, fontan, according ...
— Of the Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue - A Treates, noe shorter than necessarie, for the Schooles • Alexander Hume
... of that wild time grew up for Vic Gregg, and the thought of free men who laughed at the law, strong men, fierce men. What would one of these have done if the girl he intended to marry had treated him like a foil? ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... his command. That they insisted on keeping him there shows beyond everything that he had already impressed himself so strongly on Virginia that the authorities, although they smarted under his attacks, did not dare to meddle with him. Dinwiddie and the rest could foil him in obtaining a commission in the king's army, but they could not shake his hold upon ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... you, punish mee not with your harde thoughts, wherein I confesse me much guiltie to denie so faire and excellent Ladies anie thing. But let your faire eies, and gentle wishes go with mee to my triall; wherein if I bee foil'd, there is but one sham'd that was neuer gracious: if kil'd, but one dead that is willing to be so: I shall do my friends no wrong, for I haue none to lament me: the world no iniurie, for in it I haue nothing: onely ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... originality? There is nothing in what I am treating as this phase of our author's thought to separate it from the old-fashioned rationalism. There must be a reason for every fact; and so much reason, so fact. The reason is always the whole foil and background and negation of the fact, the whole remainder of reality. "A man may feel good only by feeling better. . . . Pleasure is ever in the company and contrast of pain; for instance, in thirsting and drinking, the pleasure of the one is the exact measure of the pain ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... well-worn path of unrestrained invective against the Borgias, giving to the usual empty assertions the place which should be assigned to evidence and argument. Like his predecessors along that path, he causes Giuliano della Rovere to shine heroically by contrast—a foil to throw into greater relief the blackness of Alexander. But he carries assertion rather further than do others when he says of Cardinal della Rovere that "He ascended the steps of St. Peter's Chair without simony ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... to "calling in question the talents" of persons who had been unsuccessful in getting his play represented. Remonstrance merely irritated Tobias. His new novel was but a fainter echo of his old novels, a panorama of scoundrelism, with the melodramatic fortunes of the virtuous Monimia for a foil. If read to-day, it is read as a sketch of manners, or want of manners. The scene in which the bumpkin squire rooks the accomplished Fathom at hazard, in Paris, is prettily conceived, and Smollett's indignation at the British system of pews in church is edifying. But ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... I would give as a foil—of course, only to yourself, privately. He had great abilities; and though I widely differed with him in his views of history—which I, being of the science school, thought should be different from ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... front, one-quarter profile, so as to show the whites of the eyes and the down of the upper lip. "Splendid!" said the Widow, —and to tell the truth, she was not far out of the way, and with Helen Darley as a foil anybody would know she must be foudroyant and pyramidal,—if these French adjectives may be naturalized for this ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... billiard-bridge. The girl in the orange sweater had a handful of scribbled notes, and was telling them where to push the pills. There were other objects on the map, too—pistol-cartridges, and cigarettes, and foil-wrapped food-concentrate wafers. Paula, ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... III., and received its first charter from Edward IV. Their bye-laws order that if any member be found rebel or contrariwise to the wardens he shall pay one pound of wax for certain altar-lights. No tin-foil might be used, but only oil colours. They derive their name Painter-stainers from the custom of calling a picture a "stained cloth." The principal artists in England were members of the guild, and in their hall are numerous examples of the work of its members. The Pattenmakers' ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... thing, and rich in blossoms and fruits of all kinds. Let the wonderful plant, which I will not name, have its place. It will serve at least as a foil to the bright-gleaming pomegranate and the yellow oranges. Or should there be, perhaps, instead of this motley abundance, only one perfect flower, which combines all the beauties of the rest and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... at him affectionately, reflecting that Trent's black cynicism made a striking foil to the serene and constant ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... (1828-1861) fell an early sacrifice in the war. His descriptions of prairie life, his fresh and vigorous individualization of character and power of narrative indicate a vein of original genius which was foil of promise. William Dean Howells and Henry James are foremost as writers of the analytic and realistic school. Their studies of character are life-like and finished, their satire keen and good-natured. The romances of Julian Hawthorne ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Greysolon Du Lhut, leader of coureurs de bois, was too important to be thus set aside. He was now as usual in the wilderness of the north, the roving chief of a half savage crew, trading, exploring, fighting, and laboring with persistent hardihood to foil the rival English traders of Hudson's Bay. Inducements to gain his adhesion were probably held out to him by La Barre and his allies: be this as it may, it is certain that he acted in harmony with the faction of the new governor. With La Foret it was widely ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... was a miniature tractor with a gigantic scoop in front. He pushed a great mound of talc-fine dust before him to cover up the cargo. It was necessary. With freight costing what it did, fuel and air and food came frozen solid, in containers barely thicker than foil. While they stayed at space-shadow temperature, the foil would hold anything. And a cover of insulating moondust with vacuum between the grains kept even air frozen solid, ...
— Scrimshaw • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... and it was at Maclaren's he first met Alfred Bates Richards, who became a life friend. Richards, an undergraduate of Exeter, was a man of splendid physique. A giant in height and strength, he defeated all antagonists at boxing, but Burton mastered him with the foil and the broad-sword. Richards, who, like Burton, became a voluminous author [47] wrote long after, "I am sure, though Burton was brilliant, rather wild, and very popular, none of us foresaw his ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... beginning of such attempts is naturally connected with the use of gilding; whether those gold grounds of the panel pictures of the fourteenth century represented to the painters only a certain expenditure of gold foil, or whether (as I have suggested, but I fear fantastically) their streakings and veinings of coppery or silvery splendour, their stencillings of rays and dots and fretwork, their magnificent inequality and variety of brown or yellow or greenish effulgence, were vaguely connected in the minds ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... temperate proceedings of the British Parliament were set off to the greatest advantage by a foil. The wretched government of Lewis the Fifteenth had murdered, directly or indirectly, almost every Frenchman who had served his country with distinction in the East. Labourdonnais was flung into the Bastile, and, after years of suffering, left it only to die. Dupleix, stripped of his immense ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... They shall not have me. I have plans that will foil them yet. But think not too well of me, Rosamund. I am not the hero you would make me out. I am a mad fellow, and have played the fool once too often; but for all that they shall ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... split his currents; that for many a league The shorn and parcell'd Oxus strains along Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles— 885 Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had In his high mountain-cradle in Pamere, A foil'd circuitous wanderer—till at last The long'd-for dash of waves is heard, and wide His luminous home deg. of waters opens, bright deg.890 And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars deg. deg.891 Emerge, and shine upon ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... again re-told, Must you crowd on the weary brain, Till the fingers are cold that entwin'd of old Round foil and trigger and rein, Till stay'd for aye are the roving feet, Till the restless hands are quiet, Till the stubborn heart has forgotten to beat, Till the hot ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... May Foster and Natala King. May's bronze-brown hair and brilliant coloring were a perfect foil for the creamy-white narcissus blossoms on her hat and the creamy-white of her gown. While Natala's light-brown hair and hazel eyes needed just the lilac tints to show how pretty ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... famoused for fight,[161-1] After a thousand victories, once foil'd, Is from the books of honour razed quite, And all the rest ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... shifted place in heav'n, Only that, whence it kindles, none is lost, And it is soon extinct; thus from the horn, That on the dexter of the cross extends, Down to its foot, one luminary ran From mid the cluster shone there; yet no gem Dropp'd from its foil; and through the beamy list Like flame in alabaster, glow'd ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... face, quite thin, and twinkly blue eyes and a lot of dark hair that blew around like Jerry's. He looked from one to the other of us and nodded his head to himself. I suppose we did look very queer,—quite dirty, and Jerry with the tin-foil-buckled belt still around him and no shirt; and my bloomers dangling down like a Turkish person's because of the elastics having burst when ...
— Us and the Bottleman • Edith Ballinger Price
... Lucy did not want Mr. Talboys to visit them. This decided Mrs. Bazalgette to let his dresses and him come. He would only be a foil to Mr. Hardie, and perhaps bring him on faster. Her decision once made on the above grounds, she conveyed it in characteristic colors. "No, my love; where I give my affection, there I give my confidence. I have your word not to encourage this gentleman's addresses, so why hurt your uncle's feelings ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... track of destruction. The little ones knew her as a loving, gentle, all-powerful guardian. For them her breast was soft and warm and infinitely tender. She fed and warmed them, she was their wise and watchful keeper. She was always at hand with food when they hungered, with wisdom to foil the cunning of their foes, and with a heart of courage tried to crown her well-laid plans for them with ...
— Johnny Bear - And Other Stories From Lives of the Hunted • E. T. Seton
... all things, human intelligence. Intellectual smartness and abstract rational deductions entice you. But, to return to the SPECIAL CASE we were talking about just now. I must tell you that we have to deal with reality, with nature. This is a very important thing, and how admirably does she often foil the highest skill! Listen to an old man; I am speaking quite seriously. Rodion"—(on saying which Porphyrius Petrovitch, who was hardly thirty-five years of age, seemed all of a sudden to have aged, a sudden ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... not worth looking at. That is the quality of all you will see at court; gold foil, ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... rubies, the stones set in foil, and six in number," continued the methodical chatelain, whose eye now lighted ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... sacred presence in the sylvan shade, By their malignant footsteps ne'er profaned. Descend, propitious, to my favour'd eye! 580 Such in thy mien, thy warm, exalted air, As when the Persian tyrant, foil'd and stung With shame and desperation, gnash'd his teeth To see thee rend the pageants of his throne; And at the lightning of thy lifted spear Crouch'd like a slave. Bring all thy martial spoils, Thy palms, thy ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... evening of his days. Thebes was his home town and he was as well known in the all-night restaurants as Oscar Hammerstein is on Forty-second Street. He was a great poker player, and wore an amalgamated copper mask when engaged in a stiff game; it was a helpful foil when trying to work his passage on a pair of trays. This, mind you, was in the stone age of poker, when a man couldn't hide his feelings when he held a full hand. To-day the player sits disconsolate and looks woebegone when glancing ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... la Baudraye, whose legs were so thin that, for mere decency, he wore false calves, whose thighs were like the arms of an average man, whose body was not unlike that of a cockchafer, would have been an advantageous foil to the Bailli de Ferrette. As he walked, the little vine-owner's leg-pads often twisted round on to his shins, so little did he make a secret of them, and he would thank any one who warned him of this little mishap. He wore knee-breeches, black silk stockings, and a white waistcoat till ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... red Rocky woods; New England. Round-leaved cornus White, berries Rich soil, copses; Middle blue States. Roxbury wax-work, climbing Red berries Thickets; N. E., Middle States. Seneca snakeroot White Rocky soil; N. E., West, South. Sheep-laurel Crimson Hill-sides, pastures. Common. Shrubby cinque-foil Yellow Wet grounds; N. E. Common. Silver-weed Yellow Brackish marshes and meadows; New England, West. Small cranberry Rose-color Peat bogs; N. E., Middle States. Spotted wintergreen Pink and white Open woods; Middle States. Staghorn ...
— Harper's Young People, June 8, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... my final instructions to Amar Mitter, a high school friend who planned to accompany me to the Himalayas. We had chosen the following day for our flight. Precautions were necessary, as Ananta exercised a vigilant eye. He was determined to foil the plans of escape which he suspected were uppermost in my mind. The amulet, like a spiritual yeast, was silently at work within me. Amidst the Himalayan snows, I hoped to find the master whose face often ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... her dear friend is a young lady of great simplicity and irreproachable principles, whom she admits just enough, but not too far, into her confidence, and who finds it worth while to enact the part, now of a blind, and now of a foil. ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... I like the rapier. It's a gentleman's weapon. You heard of my bout with the Chevalier d'Eon? I had him at my sword-point for forty minutes at Angelo's. He was one of the best blades in Europe, but I was a little too supple in the wrist for him. 'I thank God there was a button on your Highness's foil,' said he, when we had finished our breather. By the way, you're a bit of a duellist yourself, Tregellis. How often ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... places, therefore, had to be taken by the banderilleros. These gay-looking people are men on foot with arrows two feet long, each with a hooked point. On the other end these arrows are decorated with little flags, brass foil, tinsel, and even bird cages whence gaily decked birds are permitted to escape. With these arrows the banderilleros walk right up to the bull, and, when he is ready to charge, jump to one side and thrust their weapons deep into his neck, halfway between his ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... known and used by the Grand Masters alone, the common members being wholly ignorant of their existence; and thus it is, that these grandees can so completely foil their followers, without the least risk of the latter being the wiser. The qualities are made for the special purpose of designating each individual, and at the same time be entirely safe from the least suspicion. When a Grand Master has had the honour of ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... importance. Practice of this kind should form a part of every naturalist's daily routine. After a certain time, it need not be consciously done. The movements of thought and action will, indeed, become as automatic as those which the trained fencer makes with his foil. ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... sides. Each window is divided into two openings by a single central shaft, having a carved cap and broad square abacus, on which rest the two plain pointed arches of the inner openings. The shield above is pierced with a bold quatre-foil. The two western piers of the crossing are still standing, and within the arch there has been erected in modern times a large traceried window. The spaces below the window and across the side aisles have been built up with fragments of the demolished structure, and a window ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... foils with buttons on the points, and fight according to the strict rules of fencing. The game is won by touching the adversary over the heart with the sheathed point of the foil. ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 36, July 15, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... vain dissembling—a part of the work of the day, And the words that your voice makes music, but the dull, dead lines of the play. Little you care for the woman you woo, save as a foil designed. To prove your skill as a lover—yet—"I ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... our first attempt; some little neglect or accident may foil our present efforts, but the present enterprise will result in gathering stores of experience which will make the next effort certain. Not that I do not expect success now, but accidental failure now will not be ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... the King had succeeded in carrying off a thousand dozen bottles of this wine out of the royal cellars when he fled from his subjects in Megalia. The bottles in which Vino Regalis was sold had yards of gold foil wrapped round their necks. They were in their way quite as splendid and obtrusive as Madame Corinne was in hers. I always think that Gorman must have had the lady before his eyes when he arranged ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... Kenloe puts it in the mouths of leaders of polite society. As coolly as if it had been a question of parlor decoration, they appear to have argued that the black background of the general misery was a desirable foil to set off the pomp of the rich. But, after all, this objection was not more brutal than it was stupid. If here and there might be found some perverted being who relished his luxuries the more keenly for the sight of others' want, ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... hands and calling. She could distinctly hear a cry! It chilled her senses, and brought a frantic, unreasoning fear. Somehow she felt he was connected with the one from whom she fled. Some emissary of his sent out to foil her in her attempt ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... strength and art were tried, The stately tree all force defied; Well might the elm resist and foil their might, For though his branches were decay'd to sight, As many as his leaves the roots spread round, And in the firm ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... zircon, hyacinth, carbuncle, amethyst, pearl, coral, bijou, doublet, carnelian, briolette, cabochon, chatoyant, rhinestone, amphibole, aquamarine, tourmaline, rhodolite, spinel, bufonite. Antonyms: paste, strass, gewgaw, gimcrack, tinsel, pinchbeck, gaud, bauble, foil stone. Associated words: lapidary, lapidist, lapidarian, cameo, intaglio, facet, naif, anaglyph, briquet, collet, platinum, bizet, caret, anaglyphic, diaglyptic, anaglyphies, glyptography, table, bezel, girdle, pavilion, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... except that she was much younger, being barely eighteen years of age; but there were not wanting indications that her charms would one day even surpass those of the lovely Mrs Henderson Mrs Gaunt was a petite blonde, very pretty and engaging, and an excellent foil to Mrs Henderson, the two ladies being of exactly opposite types of beauty. Of the children no more need be said than that they were light-hearted, joyous, and just well-behaved enough to show that their parents did not intend to spoil them if it ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... such is the most evident aspect of the story, as our thought brushes freely and rapidly around it. In this drama the war and the peace are episodic, not of the centre; the historic scene is used as a foil and a background. It appears from time to time, for the sake of its value in throwing the nearer movement of life into strong relief; it very powerfully and strikingly shows what the young people are. The drama of the rise of a generation is ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... the love-affairs of three young people, with an old-fashioned romance in the background. A tiny dog plays an important role in serving as a foil for the heroine's talking ingeniousness. There is poetry, as well as tenderness and charm, in this tale of a ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... no less wilt be my life, And I shall know it better than before, Praying and trusting, hoping, claiming more. From effort vain, sick foil, and bootless strife, I shall, with childness fresh, look up to thee; Thou, seeing thy child with age encumbered sore, Wilt round him ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... "but if my Lord Mohun were a commoner, I would say, 'twas a pity he was not hanged. He was familiar with dice and women at a time other boys are at school, being birched; he was as wicked as the oldest rake, years ere he had done growing; and handled a sword and a foil, and a bloody one too, before ever he used a razor. He held poor Will Mountford in talk that night, when bloody Dick Hill ran him through. He will come to a bad end, will that young lord; and no end is bad enough ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... silly title) was the engaging personality of Miss MAY BLAYNEY. Always a fascinating figure to watch, she showed an extraordinary sensitiveness of voice and expression. As for that honest and admirable actor, Mr. MCKINNEL, who made the perfect foil to her charms that every good husband should wish to be, he seems never to tire of playing these stern, dour, semi-brutal parts. That more genial characters are open to him his success in Great Catherine showed. Miss MARY BROUGH, as a charwoman, supplied a rare need with her richly-flavoured ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... bearing unmistakable marks of the polished pupil of the world in the grace that flowed through every motion, the art which taught each feature to play its part with the ease of second nature and made dress the foil to loveliness. The face was delicate and dark as a fine bronze, a low forehead set in shadowy waves of hair, eyes full of slumberous fire, and a passionate yet haughty mouth that seemed shaped alike ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... The harmony of their tongues hath into bondage Brought my too diligent ear: for several virtues Have I liked several women; never any With so full soul, but some defect in her Did quarrel with the noblest grace she owed, 45 And put it to the foil: but you, O you, So perfect and so peerless, are created Of ...
— The Tempest - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... from fiction and the drama that the Iron King would never appreciate her until he stood in danger of losing her. She welcomed the Poet as a foil and misquoted his poetry twice before tea was over; then she invited him to accompany her to a picture palace, but the Poet, once inside the citadel, was reluctant to leave it until his position ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... insufferable contempt on a poor and intrusive relation, by what name do you call yourself? Write it down. And when she would fain put variance between you and those who do not think well of you, what steps do you take to foil her? Where and how do you get strength at that supreme moment to think of others as you would have them think of you? "Oh," said Standfast, "what a mercy it is that I did resist her! for to what might ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... {programming fluid} without impeding typing. 4. 'elephant condom': the plastic shipping bags used inside cardboard boxes to protect hardware in transit. 5. /n. obs./ A dummy directory '/usr/tmp/sh', created to foil the Great Worm by exploiting a portability bug in one of its parts. So named in the title of a comp.risks article by Gene Spafford during the Worm crisis, and again in the text of "The Internet Worm Program: ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... word, being resolved to cheat her as he had done before. He went to find out little Day, and saw him with a little foil in his hand, with which he was fencing with a great monkey, the child being then only three years of age. He took him up in his arms and carried him to his wife, that she might conceal him in her chamber along with his sister, ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... well, ye mighty men, ye warriors stern and bold, And let your cords be very strong, your fetters manifold! For neither they nor He they trust shall foil my kingly ire, Or save them from the wrathful flame ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... an old man, too insignificant for notice, and I have passed the day in my chamber lamenting the kindest of lords, the best of masters. Last evening I heard the soldiers boasting that today they would capture the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, and I determined to foil them. They have been feasting and drinking all night, and it is but now that the troopers have fallen into a drunken slumber and I was able to possess myself of the ...
— The Lion of the North • G.A. Henty
... for like. This would foil the devil: this would make him say, I must not deal with this man thus; for then I put a sword into his hand to cut off ...
— The Jerusalem Sinner Saved • John Bunyan
... completely. Strings of pop-corn festooned the branches, and flakes of cotton-wool snow were cunningly disposed here and there. Bright apples peeped from amid the green, and from every tip hung a splendid star of tinsel or tin foil. No "boughten stuff" these; all through the year Miss Fidely patiently begged from her neighbors: from the women the tinsel on their button-cards, from the men the "silver" that wrapped their tobacco. Carefully pressed under the big Bible, ...
— The Wooing of Calvin Parks • Laura E. Richards
... medallion-form predominates. The Anglo-Saxon brooches [v.04 p.0643] were exquisite works of art, ingeniously and tastefully constructed. They are often of gold, with a central boss, exquisitely decorated, the flat part of the brooch being a mosaic of turquoises, garnets on gold foil, mother of pearl, &c. arranged in geometric patterns, and the gold work enriched with filigree or ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... couldn't have asked a better foil; yet I'm sure she never consciously used his dullness to relieve her brilliancy. She may have felt that the case spoke for itself. But I believe her reserve was rather due to a lively sense of justice, and to the rare habit (you said ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... for he had felt on his breast the point of his adversary's sword, but so lightly that he might have taken it for the button of a foil. His anger redoubled at the conviction that he owed his life to the captain, and his attacks became more numerous and ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... these few days they had become united in the bonds of a love which was to stand all tests. Clara was sitting on a low chair, Gladys kneeling by her side, with her arm on her knee. So sitting, they presented a contrast, each a fine foil to the other. The stately, dark beauty of Clara set off the fairer loveliness of the younger girl; neither suffered by the contrast. These days of peace and restful, luxurious living had robbed Gladys of her wearied listlessness, had given to her delicate ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... talents" of persons who had been unsuccessful in getting his play represented. Remonstrance merely irritated Tobias. His new novel was but a fainter echo of his old novels, a panorama of scoundrelism, with the melodramatic fortunes of the virtuous Monimia for a foil. If read to-day, it is read as a sketch of manners, or want of manners. The scene in which the bumpkin squire rooks the accomplished Fathom at hazard, in Paris, is prettily conceived, and Smollett's indignation at the British system of pews in church ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... shepherd) that Mr. Barmby would be watchful to act as a block between them; and therefore she had stipulated for his presence on the journey. She remembered Victor's rapid look of readiness to consent:—he reckoned how naturally Mr. Barmby would serve as a foil to any younger man. Mr. Barmby had tried all along to perform his part: he had always been thwarted; notably once at Gisors, where by some cunning management he and mademoiselle found themselves in the cell of the prisoner's Nail-wrought ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... interest. Of course he does not know or care what it is that these men are talking about. It is only for the sake of an artistic effect, to pass away the night, and to deepen for his hero the gloom which was to serve as the foil and sullen ground of his great victory, that his interlocutors are permitted to ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... stated in the study of oxygen, water may be separated into its component parts by means of the electric current. The form of apparatus ordinarily used for effecting this analysis is shown in Fig. 18. A platinum wire, to the end of which is attached a small piece of platinum foil (about 15 mm. by 25 mm.), is fused through each of the tubes B and D, as shown in the figure. The stopcocks at the ends of these tubes are opened and water, to which has been added about one tenth of its volume of sulphuric ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... draping the less ornamental walls. Mirrors were apparently plentiful. No mention is made of such articles in glass, probably because the ancients had not yet learned to make that material sufficiently pure and true or to provide it with the proper foil or background. For the most part they were made of highly polished copper, bronze, or silver. The smaller ones were held in the hand, the handle and back parts being richly and often tastefully ornamented. There is an epigram extant which tells of a vindictive Roman dame ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... Captain Sprawler, who is very nice to look at, whose back is very beautiful, and who sprawls most gracefully over the railings, and pays her those delightful, absurd compliments about her and her horse "being such a capital pair," while, as a foil to so much grace and splendour, a poor little snub-nosed, ill-dressed, ill-conditioned dwarf of a snob looks on, sucking the top of his cheap cane in abject admiration and hopeless envy! Then she pats and kisses the nice soft nose of Cornet Flinders's ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... qualities are known and used by the Grand Masters alone, the common members being wholly ignorant of their existence; and thus it is, that these grandees can so completely foil their followers, without the least risk of the latter being the wiser. The qualities are made for the special purpose of designating each individual, and at the same time be entirely safe from the least suspicion. When a Grand Master has had the honour of promotion conferred, he is supplied ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... should surely have felt, would have been a false note in the whole rosy glow; but what note so false as that of the dingy little presence that she might actually, by a refinement of her perhaps always too visible study of effect, have provided as a positive contrast or foil? whose name and intervention, moreover, she appeared to be no more moved to mention and account for than she might have been to "present"—whether as stretched at her feet or erect upon disciplined haunches—some shaggy old ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... either warrior armed with coils of hide His hands, and round his limbs bound ponderous bands, And, breathing bloodshed, stept into the ring. First there was much manoeuvring, who should catch The sunlight on his rear: but thou didst foil, O Polydeuces, valour by address; And full on Amycus' face the hot noon smote. He in hot wrath strode forward, threatening war; Straightway the Tyndarid smote him, as he closed, Full on the chin: more furious waxed he still, And, earthward bent, dealt blindly random blows. ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... advanced slowly, in consequence of the destruction dealt amongst them by the shafts of their concealed adversaries, who had converted every house into a fortress, whence they could with difficulty be dislodged. In order, therefore, to foil this deadly warfare, they had recourse to a still more terrible expedient: they applied the blazing torch to the inflammable habitations of their enemies; a rising gale seconded their intentions, and the greedy flames spreading widely round, the town was soon enveloped in one promiscuous ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... Rolland:—"Fair comrade Olivier, Son of the good Count Renier, he who held The marches to the distant shores of Gennes; To break a lance, to pierce a shield, the brave To counsel, traitors to dismay and foil, No land e'er saw a better ...
— La Chanson de Roland • Lon Gautier
... Against the foil of the butcher-bird's stolidity we may set the inquisitive, garrulous temperament of the white-eyed vireo and the yellow-breasted chat. The vireo is hardly larger than the goldfinch, but let him be in one of his conversational ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... was a man of Milan called Gaio. He was the most presumptuous donkey in the world, the one who knew least and who thought he knew most; the others were very modest and able craftsmen. In the presence of us all this Gaio began to talk, and said: "Miliano's foil should be preserved, and to do that, Benvenuto, you shall doff your cap; [1] for just as giving diamonds a tint is the most delicate and difficult thing in the jeweller's art, so is Miliano the greatest jeweller that ever lived, and ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... secretary knew from fiction and the drama that the Iron King would never appreciate her until he stood in danger of losing her. She welcomed the Poet as a foil and misquoted his poetry twice before tea was over; then she invited him to accompany her to a picture palace, but the Poet, once inside the citadel, was reluctant to leave it until his position was ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... correct and composed deportment of the Capital she had come from! He must be the rustic indeed to her, handling lollipops yet like a child, and tumbling books in a child's confusion. As if to give more acuteness to his picture of himself he saw a foil in Young Islay so trim and manly in the uniform old custom demanded for the Sunday parade, a shrewd upward tilt of the chin and lowering of the brow, his hand now and then at his cheeks, not so much to feel its pleasing roughness, as to show the fine ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... encounter That fierce harbinger of gloom— Fain to dare the spells of magic, Fain to foil the wrath of doom. Hark! the solitary raven Croaks a note of death and pain, And a human call defiant Answers from the ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... fishing and went down to the nearest town again to buy eccentric items of equipment. Copper foil. Strobe-light packs, two of them. He could use foil instead of large-area heat-dissipating units, because the current would flow so briefly. He would get a terrific current, of course. Two strobe-light packs in series would give him four million ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... Burns and Coolidge were the life of the company, the latter seeming a different man from the one who had come to consult his old chum as to the trouble in his life. Mrs. Coolidge, quiet and very attractive in her reserved, fair beauty, made an interesting foil to Ellen Burns, and the two, beside the rather fussy aunt and cousins, seemed to ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... parts are lost in the ground, others boldly relieved, and how all these are mutually altered and interchanged according to the reason and scheme of the work. He admires not the harmony of colouring alone, but he examines by what artifice one colour is a foil to its neighbour. He looks close into the tints, of what colours they are composed, till he has formed clear and distinct ideas, and has learnt to see in what harmony and good colouring consists. What is learnt in this manner from the works of others becomes really our ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... enabled him to arrange his other characters around the main figure, and to subordinate them all to his central emphasis—all these qualities are undeniable. Moreover he was himself the most perfect foil and contrast to Johnson that could be imagined, while he possessed in a unique degree the power of both stimulating and provoking his hero to animation and to wrath. Boswell may not have known what an artist he was, but he is probably ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... [scouts], and the sense of the letters: u og a fe, which was a date, and meant April 15th, 1832. Under each capital letter were inscribed names followed by very characteristic notes. Thus: Q. Bannerel. 8 guns, 83 cartridges. A safe man.—C. Boubiere. 1 pistol, 40 cartridges.—D. Rollet. 1 foil, 1 pistol, 1 pound of powder.—E. Tessier. 1 sword, 1 cartridge-box. Exact.—Terreur. 8 ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... FOIL. A blunt, elastic, sword-like implement used in fencing.—To foil means to disconcert or defeat ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... Laertes were known to excel at this sword-play; and Hamlet taking up the foils chose one, not at all suspecting the treachery of Laertes, or being careful to examine Laertes' weapon, who, instead of a foil or blunted sword, which the laws of fencing require, made use of one with a point, and poisoned. At first Laertes did but play with Hamlet, and suffered him to gain some advantages, which the dissembling king magnified and extolled beyond ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... day in question we stood before each other, foil in hand, both of us nerved by an intense, though as yet unspoken, enmity. This had been observed by most of the spectators, who approached and formed a circle around us; all of them highly interested in the result—which, ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... heart-beat in the whole grind. As to Willis—he failed egregiously, when he attempted to 'gild refined gold and paint the lily,' as he did in his so-called 'Sacred Poems.' He can spin a yarn pretty well, and coin a new word for a make-shift, amusingly, but save me from the foil-glitter of his poetry." [2] ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... the primrose fall At once the spring's pride and its funeral, Such early sweets get off in their still prime, And stay not here to wear the foil of time; While coarser flowers, which none would miss, if past, To scorching summers and ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... looking at our picture you will see the shape of the insect. Cut this out of a piece of cork about three inches long, and make the legs of thin wire (after the manner of the spider we described in a previous number); then get some strips of thin tin-foil, and gum them on the back of the cucuius; then paint over the whole with transparent green color (oil paints if possible). Now gouge out two holes about the size of the head of a common match, and then cut off the heads of two common matches, and insert them into ...
— Harper's Young People, September 14, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... ornament, vegetation may; vegetation in any form, however fragmentary, however abstracted. A single leaf laid upon the angle of a stone, or the mere form or frame-work of the leaf drawn upon it, or the mere shadow and ghost of the leaf,—the hollow "foil" cut out of it,—possesses a charm which nothing else can replace; a charm not exciting, nor demanding laborious thought or sympathy, but perfectly simple, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... all this was a veil of dark gauze at the horizon-line, its foil a golden, virgin moon, dangling a single ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... victor in a hundred fights should in his hundred-and-first, [Footnote: "The painful warrior, famoused for fight, After a thousand victories once foil'd, Is from the book of honor razed quite, And all the rest forgot for which he toil'd." Shakespeare's Sonnets.] as in his first, risk the loss of that particular battle, is inseparable from the condition ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... as if you took the diamond from its setting, and left me nothing but the foil," says he. "Oh, I would order it another way: give me the gem, and let who will take what remains. Unless these little hands are mine to hold for ever, I will ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... suck the life out of the wretched handloom weavers in Tipton and Freshitt. That is how his family look so fair and sleek," said Mrs. Cadwallader. "Those dark, purple-faced people are an excellent foil. Dear me, they are like a set of jugs! Do look at Humphrey: one might fancy him an ugly archangel towering above them ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... using it, I did n't place the same construction that you did in hearing it. But let that pass. I apologize. What I should have said was that, if you will pardon me, she used you, as young women will do, as a foil against her fiance in a time of petty quarreling between them. ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... you'll get an honourable mention in our troop-book. I was carried away in it by two thieves who didn't know I was in the car, because I was disguised, sort of, under the buffalo robe. Do you want to help me foil them?" ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... bonesetter, whose name she had caught and remembered. To her, Beauvouloir was a being to whom she owed an untold debt of gratitude; and she desired of all things to question him on certain points relating to her son. If an attempt were made to poison him, how should she foil it? In what way ought she to manage his frail constitution? Was it well to nurse him long? If she died, would Beauvouloir undertake the care of the ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... she left him, in the position of a self-indulgent idler, preferring comfort to duty, a foil to his more conscientious rival. When the dust of the departure had cleared away, he sat on, not in the cool house, but on the hot verandah, nursing his griefs in solitude. He seemed the only person left behind, or else he seemed forgotten, as a guest of no account. "What a Christmas Day!" ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... to himself as he strode across the turf, "to make myself a mere foil and stop-gap for that conceited brute! Not I." Far from practising the abstinence of the other two, he had eaten as much as he could stuff and drunk all the beer he could get, and this, combined with resentment at Robarts' words, caused him to go in for slogging ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... than Robinson Crusoe, Columbus, Kit Carson and Davy Crockett had in their combined lives! He was a heart-breaker one second and a head-breaker the next. He had insisted to Alex that one villain wasn't enough for him to foil, so they had about a dozen and he trimmed 'em all. They was also several heroines for him to save and clasp on his manly bosom, which same he did in evenin' clothes only. It was nothin' for him to save a maiden in distress from a sinkin' ship and the next second ...
— Alex the Great • H. C. Witwer
... by this time some creditable recruits. But the fact is, that the whole system is a sham. Our young friends care about as much for Saint George as they do for Saint Thomas Aquinas; they would think twice before they permitted themselves to be poked at with an unbuttoned foil; and as for the deeds of their ancestors, a good many of them would have considerable difficulty in establishing their descent even from a creditable slop-seller—"the founder of our family"—in the reign of George the Third. It is therefore a mystery to us why they should persevere in their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... Edison took away from the telephone all except the mouth-piece and the diaphragm, fastened a point of metal, which we will call a "style," to the center of the diaphragm, and then contrived a simple arrangement for making a sheet of tin-foil pass in front of the style. When the diaphragm is still, the style simply scratches a straight line along the foil. When a sound is made, however, and the diaphragm set to vibrating, the mark of the style is not a simple scratch, but an impression ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... Rappaccini, thus to snatch the lad out of my own hands, as I may say, and make use of him for his infernal experiments. This daughter of his! It shall be looked to. Perchance, most learned Rappaccini, I may foil you where you little dream ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was, that hitherto she had generally been able so to dress Hesper as to make of her more or less a foil to herself. My reader may remember that there was between Hesper and Sepia, if not a resemblance, yet a relation of appearance, like, vaguely, that between the twilight and the night; seen in certain positions and circumstances, ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... the tumult sank a little, and men cried on Volsung the King And his sons, the hedge of battle, to try the fateful thing. So Volsung laughed, and answered: "I will set me to the toil, Lest these my guests of the Goth-folk should deem I fear the foil. Yet nought am I ill-sworded, and the oldest friend is best; And this, my hand's first fellow, will I bear to the grave-mound's rest, Nor wield meanwhile another: Yea this shall I have in hand When mid the host of Odin in the Day ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... have white cotton covers on them now that they are being used, so the general effect at dinner-time is of a huge laundry in a gale, with beautiful laundresses in low dresses sitting at table under a world of wildly flapping linen; with the lamps lit, and our black coats for a foil, the colours are really extremely pretty, though the discomfort is great. Men and women are all getting a little brown with the sea air, and the ladies have a little of the blush of spring now, instead of the pallor of winter with ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... me; yea, he calls me first; the first proffer of the gospel is to be made to the Jerusalem sinner; I am he, wherefore stand back, Satan; make a lane, my right is first to come to Jesus Christ.' This now would be like for like. This would foil the devil; this would make him say, I must not deal with this man thus; for then I put a sword into his hand to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... on and listened to the cacophonous sounds of the names: the Encephalartos horridus, a gigantic iron rust-colored artichoke, like those put on portals of chateaux to foil wall climbers; the Cocos Micania, a sort of notched and slender palm surrounded by tall leaves resembling paddles and oars; the Zamia Lehmanni, an immense pineapple, a wondrous Chester leaf, planted in sweet-heather soil, its top bristling with barbed javelins and jagged ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... with your permission, make the victory more definite," replied the poet, testing his foil and saluting the ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... to foil van Heerden, and after—to dissolve the marriage?" asked the lawyer, shaking his head. "I don't like that solution, Beale—I tell you frankly, I don't like it. You're a good man and I have every faith in you, but if I consented, even though I were confident that you would play fair, which ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... is. Something that has occurred to you primarily as an effect from your experience or observation? Or something you have carpentered out of the old stuff of your reading, with a wooden hero and heroine reciprocally dying for each other, and a wooden villain trying to foil them?" ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... the particles pack together, the less the circulation of air through the mass, and the smaller the amount of aroma which is carried away. He also found that glass makes the best container for coffee, with the tin can, and the foil-lined bag with an inner lining of glassine, ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... succeed in our first attempt; some little neglect or accident may foil our present efforts, but the present enterprise will result in gathering stores of experience which will make the next effort certain. Not that I do not expect success now, but accidental failure now will not be the evidence ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... is shown at i, is a soft rennet cheese made from cow's milk. It is made at Neufchatel-en-Bray, France, and not at Neufchatel, Switzerland. This variety of cheese is wrapped in tin-foil and sold in small packages. It is used chiefly for salads, sandwiches, etc. As it does not keep well after the package is opened, the entire contents should be used ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 2 - Volume 2: Milk, Butter and Cheese; Eggs; Vegetables • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... one instance of his generosity in this respect; for it was much talked of at the time. One of your countrymen, who had never handled a fencing-foil nor fired a pistol, took offence at something M. de Mauleon had said in disparagement of the Duke of Wellington, and called him out. Victor de Mauleon accepted the challenge, discharged his pistol, not in the air—that might have been an affront—but so as to be wide of the mark, walked ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... brother, speaking for the first time in an accent of reproach, and seeming, by the sound of his voice, to have covered his face with his hands, 'I have been, since then, a useful foil to you. You have trodden on me freely in your climbing up. Don't spurn me with ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... you will note a white layer, like tin foil, which gives the fish its silvery color. Do not disturb this if possible. Remove all surplus flesh, cut away the gills and interior of head and if at all greasy (what fish is not) treat to a bath ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... Ham radios all over North America picked up his speech, which was made by spreading the beam from an eighty-foot diameter parabolic reflector and aiming it at Earth from a hundred thousand miles out. It was a collapsible reflector, made of thin foil, like the ones used ...
— By Proxy • Gordon Randall Garrett
... would be no casus belli; the younger son would bow to the law of primogeniture and that would end the matter. Schiller, however, felt the need of a bolder contrast to his hero. The 'sublime criminal' required a colossal foil; and as equality with the sword was out of the question, the most obvious recourse was to pit natural depravity against natural greatness; scheming ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... evils necessarily attendant on the mode of payment by results. A certain number of teachers made it their chief effort to secure the largest possible number of grants. Huxley regarded these as poachers of the worst kind, and did all he could to foil them. He did all he could to promote systematic practical instruction in the classes, and to aid teachers who desired to learn their business more thoroughly. He insisted again and again upon the ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... be foil'd like Tarquin, if you follow Not the dry light of Rome's straight-going policy, But the fool-fire of love or lust, which well May make you lose yourself, may even drown you In the good regard ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... success, Fabius had a triumph decreed him at Rome, much more splendid than his first; they looked upon him now as a champion who had learned to cope with his antagonist, and could now easily foil his arts and prove his best skill ineffectual. And, indeed the army of Hannibal was at this time partly worn out with continual action, and partly weakened and become dissolute with over abundance and luxury. Marcus Livius, who was governor of Tarentum when it was betrayed to ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... Kirkbank in her cotton frock was a spectacle at which youth laughed and age blushed. But after all it did not matter to Lesbia. She would have liked a less rowdy chaperon; but as a foil to her own fresh young beauty Lady ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... presence every passing hour; What but thy grace can foil the tempter's power? Who like thyself my guide and stay can be? Thro' cloud and ...
— The Otterbein Hymnal - For Use in Public and Social Worship • Edmund S. Lorenz
... of one travail born, Doomed to one death, in one brief life we moil; The pangs that maim us and the powers that spoil Are common sorrows heired from worlds outworn. Alike in weakness, time too long hath torn Our mother, Patience, and our father, Toil. Brothers in hatred of the fates that foil, Say not in vain we murmur and ...
— Iolaeus - The man that was a ghost • James A. Mackereth
... his formal speech he began on his statement of the action of the naval affairs committee in buying control of the Altacoola land to foil attempts to rob the Government. As he had predicted, the Senate did "sit up." The Senate did agree that a new kind of politics ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise
... of order and beauty in the universe—of setting all to rights with a handful of clay; of creating living things, and moulding them after our own likeness. I saw what was lacking to our godhead: some counterpart, some foil wherein to set off its blessedness. And that counterpart must be mortal; but in all else exquisitely contrived, perfect in intelligence, keen to appreciate our superiority. Thereupon, ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... "Question, question!" The question was then put, and carried, by 43 votes against 19, and the house adjourned till four o'clock. Before going to their dinners the 19 held an indignation meeting, at which it was decided that they would foil these outrageous proceedings by staying away. It took 47 to make a quorum, and without these malcontents the assembly numbered but 45. When the house was called to order after dinner, it was found there were but ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... and I must choose your dress for you; of course father will pay for it, but I promise you it shall be pretty, and suitable to your complexion. I mean to have eight bridesmaids. Jocelyn will be one, of course, and I shall get that tall, fair Grace Underley to act as a foil to her bigness. I shall not ask poor Lesbia to be one; it would be too trying for her, and I know you will not care about it; but you must come for a week, and see all my pretty things, and help poor mamma, for ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... model, and took it to Mr. Kruesi, at that time engaged on piece-work for me. I told him it was a talking-machine. He grinned, thinking it a joke; but he set to work and soon had the model ready. I arranged some tin-foil on it and spoke into the machine. Kruesi looked on, still grinning. But when I arranged the machine for transmission and we both heard a distinct sound from it, he nearly fell down in his fright. I must admit that I was a little scared ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... belittle the man of genius, but set off his greatness as with a foil. They illustrate the thought of Goethe: "It is all the same whether one is great or small, he has to pay ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... target, but he pretends that he was always in possession of it, and made nothing of it,—that he imbibed it with mother's milk,—and that I, the wretched Tommy, am most abjectly behindhand in not having done the same. I ask, why is Tommy to be always the foil of Mr. Barlow to this extent? What Mr. Barlow had not the slightest notion of himself, a week ago, it surely cannot be any very heavy backsliding in me not to have at my fingers' ends to- day! And yet Mr. Barlow systematically carries it over me with a high hand, and will tauntingly ask me, ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... by two answering bands, one of which rang out, 'Saul hath slain his thousands,' while the other overtopped them by pealing out still more loudly and exultantly, 'And David his ten thousands.' To be brought into comparison with this unknown stripling was bitter enough, but to be used as a foil to set off his superiority was too much to be borne. There are few men, holding high places in any walk of life, who could have stood such a comparison without wincing. Suppose a great soldier in our day, coming home from a successful campaign, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... happened to notice Colonel Colquhoun, who had stepped back to judge the effect of some drapery he was putting up. Mr. Price was a little behind him, and two of the younger men, the three making an excellent foil to Colonel Colquhoun. Evadne was struck by the contrast. The outside aspect of the man still pleased her. There was no doubt that he was a fine specimen of his species, a splendid animal to look at; what a pity he should have had a regrettable past, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... Selingman recited, waving his cigar. "Well, well, we certainly have made a stir with our little meetings here. An inspired English Cabinet Minister, travel-stained and dusty, arrives with his valet and a black dispatch-box, to foil our schemes. Send him along, my friend. We are not at all afraid of Mr. Simpson. Perhaps we may even ask him to join ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... And the American imagination, always receptive of the romantic, might readily and forgivably have pictured villas, maids in durance vile, and sword-thrusts under the moonlight. But the waiter, who had served his time in one or another of the foreign armies, knew that no foil or rapier could have made such a scar; more probably the saber. For the Italian officer on horseback is the maddest of all men, and in the spirit of play courts hazards that another man might sensibly ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... hath into bondage Brought my too diligent ear: for several virtues Have I liked several women; never any With so full soul, but some defect in her Did quarrel with the noblest grace she owed, 45 And put it to the foil: but you, O you, So perfect and so peerless, are created ...
— The Tempest - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... yore never once did I ween it, When I wielded the cleaver of targets, That sickness was fated to foil me— A fighter so hardy as I. But I shrink not, for others must share it, Stout shafts of the spear though they deem them, —O hard at my heart is the death-pang,— Thus hopeless the bravest ...
— The Life and Death of Cormac the Skald • Unknown
... Since when we passed the Cicillian gulf, And so transfretting the Illirian sea, Arrived on the coasts of Aquitaine, Where with an army of his barbarous Gauls Goffarius and his brother Gathelus Encountering with our host, sustained the foil. And for your sakes my Turnus there I lost, Turnus that slew six hundred men at arms All in an hour, with his sharp battle-axe. From thence upon the strons of Albion To Corus haven happily we came, And quelled the giants, come of Albion's race, With Gogmagog son to Samotheus, The ...
— 2. Mucedorus • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... or woman. I have heard him say it was unpardonable. If it hadn't been that we were what we are, Eloise, I should never have dreamed of doing as I have done. Now if only some good fairy would open your eyes to see which side your bread is buttered on! You could do marvels with such a foil for contrast." ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... and nothing more. A deviation amounting to two or three of our strides is enough to make her lose her way and to keep her from returning to her people, whereas miles across unknown country will not foil the Mason-bee. I expressed my surprise, just now, that man was deprived of a wonderful sense wherewith certain animals are endowed. The enormous distance between the two things compared might furnish matter for discussion. In the present case, ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... humble waters of finance wherein we paddle we find that a book of fifty cheques lasts us about four months, allowing for two or three duds when we start to make out a foil payable to bearer (self) and decide to renounce that worthy ambition and make it out to the gas ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... being determined to trick her as he had done previously. He went in search of little Day, whom he found with a tiny foil in his hand, making brave passes—though he was but three years old—at a big monkey. He carried him off to his wife, who stowed him away in hiding with little Dawn. To the ogress the steward served up, in place ...
— Old-Time Stories • Charles Perrault
... color harmony. Not only do the paintings and sculpture take proper place in the tone scheme, but every bit of planting, every strip of lawn and every bed of flowers or shrubs, has its duty to perform as color accent or foil. Even the gravel of the walks was especially chosen to shade in with ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney
... in cavities which had sound walls for its retention. In the form of rolls or tape it was forced into the previously cleaned and prepared cavity, condensed with instruments under heavy hand pressure, smoothed with files, and finally burnished. Tin foil was also used to a limited extent and by the same method. Improvements in the refining of gold for dental use brought the product to a fair degree of purity, and, about 1855, led to the invention by Dr Robert Arthur of Baltimore of a method by which it could be ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... still brilliant and glittered humorously and shrewdly from beneath their bushy brows. The lean, veined neck, bedecked with diamonds, was still poised proudly on the bent shoulders. Her wrecked beauty was a perfect foil for the fresh loveliness of the young girl who, with a splendidly attired cavalier, followed ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... trembled. He was glad his teammates could not know how he felt. Nervously he walked out to the mound, and caught the new ball which the umpire divested of its foil cover and tossed to him. Russell girded himself in protector and mask, and the batter stepped back to ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick
... reached, he stopped at nothing. From this forward he began to retort upon his clerical companions, who found that the sheepish youth whom they had often made ridiculous, possessed skill, when properly excited, to foil them at their own weapons. He observed many things in their convivial meetings. The holy man, whom his flock looked upon as a being of the highest sanctity, when lit up into fun and frolic, Denis learned to estimate at his just value. He thought, besides, that a person resolved to go ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... after which each person cuts herself or himself a slice. If there are two sets of favors hidden in the cake, there is a mark in the icing to distinguish the bridesmaids' side from that of the ushers. Articles, each wrapped in silver foil, have been pushed through the bottom of the cake at intervals; the bridesmaids find a ten-cent piece for riches, a little gold ring for "first to be married," a thimble or little parrot or cat for "old maid," ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... was informed of this new plot, he set himself cautiously but steadily and resolutely to foil it. His first object was to ascertain the reality of the death of the young prince, and to confirm the opinion which had always prevailed with regard to that event. Richard had engaged five persons to murder his nephews—viz., Sir James Tirrel, whom he made ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... be war to the knife between her and me. If she succeed, it must be with you. I will do anything to foil her except lie." ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... which was packed by the Regent, and by the actual conclusion of a marriage-treaty. But if Francis could spare neither horse nor man for action in Scotland his influence in the northern kingdom was strong enough to foil Henry's plans. The Churchmen were as bitterly opposed to such a marriage as the partizans of France; and their head, Cardinal Beaton, who had held aloof from the Regent's Parliament, suddenly seized ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... Soissons for defence is perfect. I may not describe it, but think of whatever would stop and destroy an attacking party or foil the hostile shell. It is there. Men have had nothing else to do and nothing else to think of for two years. I crossed the bridge the English made in the pursuit after the Marne, and went into the first line trenches ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... Husbandry they did Wonders also; as to Wheat and Barley; as to Liming, Marling, and Sanding of Land; as to planting of Hops, draining of Bogs; as to raising Liquorish, Saffron and Madder; and as to sowing of Turneps, Clover, St. Foil, Trefoil, and all Kinds of Grass Seeds. They improv'd by a well judged Emulation and proper Rewards, Numbers of our Husbandry Utensils: They set the Nation at Work, in Planting amazing Quantities of Timber Trees, Willows and Osiers ...
— A Dialogue Between Dean Swift and Tho. Prior, Esq. • Anonymous
... expressed in the Hebrew: 'Let me devour, I pray thee, of that red, that red there.' It is no sin to be hungry, but to let appetite speak so clamorously indicates feeble self-control. Jacob's coolness is an unpleasant foil to Esau's impatience, and his cautious bargaining, before he will sell what a brother would have given, shows a mean soul, without generous love to his own flesh and blood. Esau lets one ravenous desire hide everything else from him. He wants the pottage which smokes there, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... fencing match, and all the Court were present. Hamlet had the blunt foil always used in fencing, but Laertes had prepared for himself a sword, sharp, and tipped with poison. And the wicked King had made ready a bowl of poisoned wine, which he meant to give poor Hamlet when ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... folly made The foil to all his pen portrayed; Still, where his dreamy splendors shone, The ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... purposes she was to carry out, of the officers' quiet contempt of scientific pursuits, which not even the captain's influence was able to subdue, of the illusory promises of help and advancement held out by the Admiralty to young investigators, makes a striking foil to the spirit in which the Government of thirty years later undertook a greater scientific expedition. Perhaps some vivid recollections of this voyage did something to better the conditions under which the later ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... best made, if wanted for small birds, from the broken steel of a wool comber's "devil," about nine inches long, fixed in a bradawl handle of about four inches, or, if for large birds or mammals, the iron may be made from a broken fencing foil, to any size between twelve and thirty inches, with suitable handle. In either case the smallest end is driven into the handle, and the top is filed across with a smooth nick, to push in, but not to retain the tow. ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... what we call hell, or something speechlessly worse, if nothing less will do. He has a claim to be compelled to repent; to be hedged in on every side; to have one after another of the strong, sharp-toothed sheep-dogs of the great shepherd sent after him, to thwart him in any desire, foil him in any plan, frustrate him of any hope, until he come to see at length that nothing will ease his pain, nothing make life a thing worth having, but the presence of the living God within him; that nothing is good but ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... is, miracle. The roundabout common ways of things are just as much his as the straight, miraculous ones—I incline to think more his, in the sense that they are plainly the ways he prefers. In all things that are, he is—present even in the evil we bring into the world, to foil it and bring good out of it. We are always disbelieving in him because things do not go as we intend and desire them to go. We forget that God has larger ends, even for us, than we can see, so his plans do not fit ours. If God were not only to hear our prayers, as he does ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... international law, unique and alone; there is nothing like it in the world. The historical setting of this lustrous stone is intensely interesting. Out of what mine did the priceless diamond come? By whose skill was it so admirably cut and polished? By whose hand was it set in its own historic foil? Such questions are worthy ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... movement that the kneeling figure made behind him. So he sat minute after minute. The Cathedral was full of echoes—murmurous rebounds of the noises of the streets, drawn out and mellowed into long, soft, rolling tones, against which, as against a foil, there stood out detached, now and then, the sudden footsteps of someone leaving or entering a confessional, the short scream of a slipping chair—once the sudden noise of a confessional-door being opened and the click of the handle which turned out the electric light. ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... for all. It cannot be that a deliberate suicide of soul is the ideal holding the deepest desire of four hundred millions of people. Nirwana is not negation, but a pure positive without alternation or foil. ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... level part of the forest, which has a rich black soil. Great sarmentous plants climb here up to the tops of the trees: wild Grapes, the climbing, poisonous Sumach, (Rhus toxicodendron,) and the vine-like Cinque-foil, which transforms withered, naked trunks into green columns, Bignonias, with their brilliant scarlet trumpet-flowers, are the most remarkable. The Thuja occidentalis, which may be met with in European gardens, stands ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... by the eagerness of his blows, but by the delicacy of his tact. The poisoned wound he inflicted was so fine, as scarcely to be felt till it rankled and festered in its "mortal consequences." His callousness was an excellent foil for the antagonists he had mostly to deal with. He took knaves and fools on his shield well. He stole away its cloak from grave imposture. If he reduced other things below their true value, making them seem worthless and hollow, he did ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... radiation from uranium, thorium and radium was complex. (Rutherford, "Radio-activity" (2nd edition), Cambridge, 1905.) Three types of rays were soon distinguished. The first, named by Rutherford alpha-rays, are absorbed by thin metal foil or a few centimetres of air. When examined by measurements of the deflections caused by magnetic and electric fields, the alpha-rays are found to behave as would positively electrified particles of the magnitude of helium atoms possessing ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... Indeed this appears to have been quite a fine ladies' argument. Kenloe puts it in the mouths of leaders of polite society. As coolly as if it had been a question of parlor decoration, they appear to have argued that the black background of the general misery was a desirable foil to set off the pomp of the rich. But, after all, this objection was not more brutal than it was stupid. If here and there might be found some perverted being who relished his luxuries the more keenly ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... shaped leg in Europe," he was by common consent the "greatest gentleman" any Court could show. Picture him as he made his first appearance at a Court ball. "His coat," we are told, "was of pink silk, with white cuffs; his waistcoat of white silk, embroidered with various-coloured foil and adorned with a profusion of French paste. And his hat was ornamented with two rows of steel beads, five thousand in number, with a button and a loop of the same metal, and cocked in a new military style." See young "Florizel" as he makes his smiling and gracious progress through the ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... antiquity of love he cannot agree; love is not of the olden time, but present and youthful ever. The speech may be compared with that speech of Socrates in the Phaedrus in which he describes himself as talking dithyrambs. It is at once a preparation for Socrates and a foil to him. The rhetoric of Agathon elevates the soul to 'sunlit heights,' but at the same time contrasts with the natural and necessary eloquence of Socrates. Agathon contributes the distinction between love and the works of love, and also hints incidentally that ...
— Symposium • Plato
... excited jealousies; among others that of her husband's sister, Madame de Listomere, who until now had patronized her, thinking that she protected a foil to her own merits. A countess, beautiful, witty and virtuous!—what a prey for the tongues of the world! Felix had broken with too many women, and too many women had broken with him, to leave them indifferent to his marriage. When these women beheld in Madame de Vandenesse a small woman with red ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... who with undaunted hearts, immortal mitred Few! For Truth's dear sake, the Tyrant foil'd to whom ye still were true—[37] Rejoice! Who knows what scatter'd thoughts of yours were buried seeds, Slow-springing for th' oppress'd and poor, and ripen'd now ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... Glittering with many a radiant gem, Some mean metallic foil is placed Judicious, by the hand of taste; You seek, amidst the sons of fame, To set an undistinguish'd name? If so—that name is freely lent, A ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... distinguished himself, even to my half-giddy eye, by the ease with which he bore down and dispersed those who fought against our freedom. My father alone offered an opposition which threatened to prove fatal to him; for Wallace, it was said, could foil any two martial champions that ever drew sword. Brushing from him the armed men, as a lady would drive away with her fan a swarm of troublesome flies, he secured me in one arm, used his other for our mutual protection, and I found myself in the act of being ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... to represent that new literature which began to rise after the violent removal of the old. They do not belong to the history of Anglo-Saxon literature except indirectly as a foil and a contrast. They show how ready were new forms to take the place of the old. But while the English language was thus following the natural and spontaneous course of its development, there still survived ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... fast, her bosom rising and falling with quick respirations, and her cheeks flushed with color, made a delicious foil to the pearly tone of her face, concealed on her neck and forehead by the escaping tresses of ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... and crowns of those play-actor emperors," said Sancho, "were never yet pure gold, but only brass foil or tin." ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... for the cart and the flail, and by mischance entangled amongst books and papers. A man cannot tell possibly what he is now good for, save to move up and down and fill room, or to serve as animatum instrumentum, for others to work withal in base employments, or to be foil for better wits, or to serve (as they say monsters do) to set out the variety of nature, and ornament of the universe. He is mere nothing of himself, neither eats, nor drinks, nor goes, nor spits, but by imitation, for all which he hath set forms and fashions, which he ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... must be sped! But Love, that holds the mastery of dread, Braces his spirit, and with constant toil He wins his way, and now, with arms outspread, Impatient plunges from the last long coil; So may all gentle Love ungentle Malice foil! ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... reads like a book with a purpose from which the purpose has been by some oversight omitted. When a young person fails to "find herself" (as the phrase used to go) there should surely be provided some foil to her instability, either implicit in the behaviour of other characters or expressed in the meditations of the author. Even if the author only means to tell us that human life is all like this, she ought ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 4, 1914 • Various
... his early transmitters was a rough model of the human ear, carved in oak, and provided with a drum which actuated a bent and pivoted lever of platinum, making it open and close a springy contact of platinum foil in the metallic circuit of the current. He devised some ten or twelve different forms, each an improvement on its predecessors, which transmitted music fairly well, and even a word or two of speech with more or less perfection. But the apparatus ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... heart can see without instruction; he seemed to mistrust me. If I had not had the inward support of my great love he would have made me awkward and stupid by affecting to believe that I knew nothing of life. He presented me in society under the expectation that my dulness would be a foil to his qualities. Had I not remembered the sorrows of my childhood I might have taken his protecting vanity for brotherly affection; but inward solitude produces the same effects as outward solitude; silence within our souls enables us to hear the faintest sound; the habit of taking refuge within ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... sensational romance above mentioned will not be written, at least not on this occasion. We are in stalactite caverns; I expect a subterranean lake,—of still champagne of course,—and a boat; strange silver foil and gold foil fish ought to be swimming about, and the name of the subterranean lake should be Loch Foil, Loch Gold or Silver Foil, according to the material. No, nothing of the sort. It is all quite dry; uncommonly dry; atmosphere dry; ground dry; and, gradually, throats ...
— Punch, Volume 101, September 19, 1891 • Francis Burnand
... overrul'd I oversway'd, Leading him prisoner in a red-rose chain: Strong-temper'd steel his stronger strength obey'd, Yet was he servile to my coy disdain. 112 O! be not proud, nor brag not of thy might, For mastering her that foil'd the god ...
— Venus and Adonis • William Shakespeare
... axes, and wedges, and a beetle in the canoe, and Gershom was as expert with these implements as a master of fencing is with his foil, to say nothing of the skill of le Bourdon, the tree was soon laid open, and its ample stores of sweets exposed. In the course of the afternoon the honey was deposited in kegs, the kegs were transferred to the canoe, and the whole deposited in ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... apparent to him when he sees her surrounded by others, so does her beauty strike him when reflected in other eyes, and pass unheeded when seen only by his own. Katrine was alone, there was no other woman's face to either rival or be a foil to hers, and after the first six weeks her beauty ceased to sting and surprise Stephen's senses. She, as it were, became the standard, since there was no other. And there is no absoluteness about beauty, nor our admiration for it. ...
— A Girl of the Klondike • Victoria Cross
... GORDON ROY. The book has all the requisites of a good novel, including the perhaps rarest one of literary style. Cousin Adair is well worth knowing, and her character is skilfully portrayed. As a foil against this high-minded, pure-souled unselfish girl, there are sketched in two or three of the sort of people, men and women, more frequently met with in this wicked world. But Cousin Adair is good enough to leaven the lump. GORDON ROY is evidently ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 26, 1891 • Various
... insoluble sulphates, silica and any silver that may have been precipitated as silver chloride, and receive the filtrate in a small beaker, washing the precipitate and filter paper with warm water until the filtrate and washings amount to 75 cc. Bend a strip of aluminium foil (5 cm. x 12 cm.) into triangular form and place it on edge in the beaker. Cover the beaker and boil the solution (being careful to avoid loss of liquid by spattering) for ten minutes, but do ...
— An Introductory Course of Quantitative Chemical Analysis - With Explanatory Notes • Henry P. Talbot
... He did not seem to expect to see more than he found, when he entered—a great bare room with its floor strewn with sawdust and its walls adorned here and there by a gaunt trophy of arms. In the middle of the floor, engaged apparently in weighing one foil against another, was a stout, dark-complexioned man, whose light and nimble step, as he advanced to meet his visitor, gave the lie ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... with a youth named Assheton—formed, with the poet Gray, and Horace himself, what the young wit termed the 'Quadruple Alliance.' Then there was the 'triumvirate,' George Montagu, Charles Montagu, and Horace: next came George Selwyn and Hanbury Williams; lastly, a retired, studious youth, a sort of foil to all these gay, brilliant young wits—a certain William Cole, a lover of old books, and of quaint prints. And in all these boyish friendships, some of which were carried from Eton to Cambridge, may be traced the foundation of the Horace Walpole, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... index finger, may have found and been not unwilling to find his face chiefly expressive of a kind of empty alertness; but when it was turned to her its quite pleasantly modelled features glowed and it was transfigured. So far as she was concerned, with Sir Isaac as foil, he was real enough and good enough for her. And by the virtue of that unlovely contrast even ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... countrymen rightly matched against the Welsh," replied Dennis Morolt, "that their solid and unyielding temper may be a fit foil to the fiery and headlong dispositions of our dangerous neighbours, just as restless waves are best opposed by steadfast rocks.—Hark, sir, I hear Wilkin Flammock's step ascending the turret-stair, as deliberately as ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... Every nerve in Vergil must have thrilled at the consummate beauty of this woman of his own creation, her self-abandonment, her love, her suffering, her despair. If he deliberately uses her simply as a foil to the character of AEneas it is with a perception of this charm infinitely deeper and tenderer than ours. But he does use her as a foil. Impulse, passion, the mighty energies of unbridled will are wrought up into a figure ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... confession to me in a moment of agitation. He was, he said, overpowered by a sentiment with regard to me which amounted to this—that a man wanted, after all, to be something more than a cipher in his own house, where, if anywhere, it is not pleasant to serve as a mere foil to some one else. This sentiment was merely excusable, he thought, in a man who, though he might reasonably suppose himself of some account among his fellows, had been brought into close contact with another to whom he felt himself in the strangest ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... more ordinary; not that her attractions would ever cause any trouble to Percy, but because it seemed as if a son of hers ought to have a wife to throw him up more. Percy, however, had no idea that Bertha was anything but a good foil to him, intellectually—and, as I have said, he regarded her (or believed he regarded her) a good deal ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... Holmes was a perfect foil for his laboring friend. He lounged away his days draped across the settee on Charity's gallery or sitting down on the bayou levee—after she had chased him away—pitching pebbles into the water. He told all of them that it ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... (a silly title) was the engaging personality of Miss MAY BLAYNEY. Always a fascinating figure to watch, she showed an extraordinary sensitiveness of voice and expression. As for that honest and admirable actor, Mr. MCKINNEL, who made the perfect foil to her charms that every good husband should wish to be, he seems never to tire of playing these stern, dour, semi-brutal parts. That more genial characters are open to him his success in Great Catherine showed. Miss MARY BROUGH, as a charwoman, supplied ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... which I shall ever play in life," she had said with a smile to Hester, was much delighted with the arrangement of everything. Mrs. Willis was in grey silk, with her favourite Honiton lace. She was a very striking and beautiful woman, and in her grand simplicity, made a perfect foil to the fantastic appearance of the younger members ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... be carved, she was most reassuring in her speech, and taking the cold remains of a similar cut from the ice chest, she gave him an object lesson. She demonstrated to him how he should begin the attack, how he might foil the bone that existed only to baffle, how slice after slice might fall beneath ...
— The Jester of St. Timothy's • Arthur Stanwood Pier
... lip-messages that are out of the reach of words, and Mrs. Rossitur's half-spoken last charge, to take care of herself; and with these seals upon her mission Fleda set forth and joined the doctor; thankful for one foil to curiosity in the shape of a veil and only wishing that there were any invented screen that she could place ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... and down he thought again of that night when he had last seen Beatrice. How splendid she had looked in her boat on the water; how unreserved, and yet how reticent she was; how beautiful, and yet how unconscious of her beauty. What a foil she made to that dreadful ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... thou shalt see Angel faces wreathed with light, Mystic forms long vanished hence. Ah, too fine, too rare, they be For the grosser mortal sight, And they foil our ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... nine!" said Hugh. "I began to learn two years ago, and I have outgrown my first foil, and the Colonel has given me a ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... (After giving a foil to Monsieur Jourdain) Come, sir, the salute. Your body straight. A little inclined upon the left thigh. Your legs not so wide apart. Your feet both in a line. Your wrist opposite your hip. The point of ...
— The Middle Class Gentleman - (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) • Moliere
... knew all about George and Roddy. The novelty was Lemoyne, and she must learn about him. She readily seized the points that composed his personal aspect, which she found good: his general darkness and richness made him a fine foil for Cope. She quickly credited him with a pretty complete battery of artistic aptitudes and apprehensions. She felt certain that he would appreciate her ballroom and picture-gallery, and would figure well within it. The company was young, the night was wild, and cheer was the word. She presently ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... measures, and her phenomenal leanness made her only comfortable in the national dress. She travelled from place to place in Spain with another woman whom she had taught to dance, and whose beauty she used cleverly as a foil to her own uncomeliness; and so wasted herself in these low resorts, earning hardly sufficient to keep body and soul together. I wish I could ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... eyes revealed that he would have said more, but the room was meantime filling with players from the stage, some exchanging compliments, some strutting before the glass, and he would not so degrade his dignity before them. Dick, foil in hand even in the manager's room, was testing the steel's strength to ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... and what a small part of a man "his best" is! His second and third best are often much better. If he is the first violin he must fiddle for life; he must not remember that he is a fine fourth bagpipe, a fair fifteenth billiard-cue, a foil, a fountain pen, a hand at whist, a gun, ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... That revelation will be accomplished in terms of the critic's own experience of the beauty of the work, an experience imaged forth in such phrases that the pleasure the work communicates is conveyed to his readers in its true quality and foil intensity. It is not enough to dogmatize as Ruskin dogmatizes, to bully the reader into a terrified acceptance. It is not enough to determine absolute values as Matthew Arnold seeks to do, to fix certain canons of intellectual judgment, and by the ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... and Natala King. May's bronze-brown hair and brilliant coloring were a perfect foil for the creamy-white narcissus blossoms on her hat and the creamy-white of her gown. While Natala's light-brown hair and hazel eyes needed just the lilac tints to ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... serves as a connecting link between the other features, which have before seemed more or less unrelated. The grand staircase, built of Siena marble, the finest example of the intelligent use of colored marble in this country, has until now lacked its foil, which the dull blue walls now give. The added pleasure which is apparent in viewing the stairway emphasizes the importance of the guiding intelligence which has made all this possible. There is in our experience only ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration - Vol 1, No. 9 1895 • Various
... kneeling figure made behind him. So he sat minute after minute. The Cathedral was full of echoes—murmurous rebounds of the noises of the streets, drawn out and mellowed into long, soft, rolling tones, against which, as against a foil, there stood out detached, now and then, the sudden footsteps of someone leaving or entering a confessional, the short scream of a slipping chair—once the sudden noise of a confessional-door being opened and the click of the handle which turned out the electric light. And it ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... word appears to be derived from the same root as Paup-puk-ke-nay, a grasshopper, the inflection iss making it personal. The Indian idea is that of harum scarum. He is regarded as a foil to Manabozho, with whom he is frequently brought in ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... Bates Richards, who became a life friend. Richards, an undergraduate of Exeter, was a man of splendid physique. A giant in height and strength, he defeated all antagonists at boxing, but Burton mastered him with the foil and the broad-sword. Richards, who, like Burton, became a voluminous author [47] wrote long after, "I am sure, though Burton was brilliant, rather wild, and very popular, none of us foresaw his ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... was endeavouring to get it off, to effect which she made use of the small bone of the leg of the kangaroo, round the point of which Bennillong had rolled some punk, so that it looked not unlike the button of a foil. She held it every now and then to the fire, then applied and pressed it to the navel until it cooled. This was persevered in, till the mother thought the cord sufficiently deadened, and then with a shell ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... sleeves, the most becoming dress that a gentleman ever appears in; and during a pause she happened to notice Colonel Colquhoun, who had stepped back to judge the effect of some drapery he was putting up. Mr. Price was a little behind him, and two of the younger men, the three making an excellent foil to Colonel Colquhoun. Evadne was struck by the contrast. The outside aspect of the man still pleased her. There was no doubt that he was a fine specimen of his species, a splendid animal to look at; what a pity ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... the unwitting murderer and the incestuous wretch whose exile the oracle demands before dispelling the plague,—here the divine genius of Sophokles introduces a chorus of general merriment, somewhat as Shakespeare uses the maundering fool as a foil to heighten King Lear's fate. No praise can be too high for Paine's music here. Its choric structure is masterly, its spirit is running fire. Note, as an instance, the effect at the words "To save our land thou didst rise as a tower!" where the music itself is suddenly ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... you care; now I'm coming with my expeditionary forces, and you and I'll foil them yet. One of our office men was taken sick, that was the trouble. And I've been so busy doing his work and my own, and getting this crew of wild Indians ready to invade Temple Camp, that I haven't ...
— Tom Slade at Black Lake • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... assembled selections laughed very heartily; and one gentleman in a yellow waistcoat, with a coach-trimming border, whispered a neighbour in green-foil smalls, that Tuckle was ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... his brain was working like mad in the new-found desire to perform miracles for the sake of this lovely, unattainable creature. Was there no way to foil these triumphant conspirators? He was forgetting the Prince, the horrors of the 26th; he was thinking only of saving this girl from the fate that Marlanx had in store for her. Vos Engo may have had the promise, but what could it profit him ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... no—speak him fair! Call it to temporize; and not to lie; Harold, I do not counsel thee to lie. The man that hath to foil a murderous aim ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... intercourse with Marcus Aurelius, Marius was not satisfied, nor was it the bleak sense that all is vanity which troubled him, but rather a feeling of mediocrity—of a too easy acceptance of the world—in the imperial philosophy. For in the companionship of Cornelius there was a foil to the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius, and his friend was more truly an aristocrat than his Emperor. Cornelius did not accept the world in its entirety, either sadly or otherwise. In him there was "some ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... are made to fit accurately, either by filing or on a lathe. The surfaces are moistened with the soldering fluid, a smooth piece of tin foil laid on, and the pieces pressed together and tightly wired. The article is then heated over the fire or by means of a lamp until the tin foil melts. In this way two pieces of brass can be soldered together so nicely that the joint can ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various
... sign of failing heart or wind, when all at once these flags went stiffly up, as under sudden renewal of strength. The Warhorse put forth all his power, not to reach the hedge to the north, but over the open prairie eastward. The Greyhound followed, and within fifty yards the Jack dodged to foil his fierce pursuer; but on the next tack he was on his eastern course again, and so tacking and dodging, he kept the line direct for the next farm-house, where was a very high board fence with a hen-hole, and where also there dwelt his other hated enemy, the big black Dog. An outer hedge delayed ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... all right, but my legs are weak; and then, I have not had a foil in my hand since that devil of a duel; and you, I am sure, have been fencing every day, in order to carry your little conspiracy against ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... character of importance not mentioned here is Aristippus, 'a pleasant gentleman' and a successful courtier, whose friendship with Carisophus, an alliance hollow, suspicious, and most unloving on one side at least, forms an admirable foil for the true friendship of Damon ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... to save peach-stones, tin-foil, newspapers and all kinds of junk. In fact, I can ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... Screech-Owl, Hoppy, and the other wretches whose misdeeds blacken these pages, form the foil; while Fleur-de-Marie, Clemence d'Harville, Miss Dimpleton, and Mrs. George are the gems which will be seen to shed their luster and charm over the no less interesting pages of the Second Division of this work, entitled, ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... you!" exclaimed Gerardin, turning round in his saddle, and shaking his clenched fist at the English lieutenant. "You have foiled me again and again. I know you, and who you are; you stand between me and my birthright; you shall not foil me again. I have before sought your life; the next time we meet we will not separate till one or ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... time. Tears of longing and vexation dimmed her eyes as she thought of the golden, halcyon days of youth that would never return. At any rate, Felipe and Chiquita must not meet until after she had warned the latter. Blanch must be used as a foil as ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... caustic jests. Yet in truth his success on these occasions belonged quite as much to the king as to the wit. We read that Commodus descended, sword in hand, into the arena against a wretched gladiator, armed only with a foil of lead, and after shedding the blood of the helpless victim, struck medals to commemorate the inglorious victory. The triumphs of Frederic in the war of repartee were of much the same kind. How to deal with him was the most puzzling of questions. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... his face chiefly expressive of a kind of empty alertness; but when it was turned to her its quite pleasantly modelled features glowed and it was transfigured. So far as she was concerned, with Sir Isaac as foil, he was real enough and good enough for her. And by the virtue of that unlovely contrast even ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... ship of full five hundred tons, more than double the size, in fact, of the Rose, though not so lofty in proportion; and many a bold heart beat loud, and no shame to them, as she began firing away merrily, determined, as all well knew, to wipe out in English blood the disgrace of her late foil. ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... all? What then? You do not fear the men: Perchance you only wish to hide your heart, And so, you fickle flirt, You don a khaki skirt To foil the deadly aim ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... without instruction; he seemed to mistrust me. If I had not had the inward support of my great love he would have made me awkward and stupid by affecting to believe that I knew nothing of life. He presented me in society under the expectation that my dulness would be a foil to his qualities. Had I not remembered the sorrows of my childhood I might have taken his protecting vanity for brotherly affection; but inward solitude produces the same effects as outward solitude; silence within our souls ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... give him—something to reduce that fever." Mostyn knew that the remark was a mere tentative foil against the verdict stamped upon the bearded face. The doctor slowly wiped the tiny tube and restored it ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... through, But telling what I may to ease my mind. And I declare that when I speak thereof Love sheds such perfect sweetness over me That if my courage failed not, certainly To him my listeners must be all resign'd. Wherefore I will not speak in such large kind That mine own speech should foil me, which were base; But only will discourse of her high grace In these poor words, the best that I can find, With you alone dear dames and damozels: 'Twere ill to speak thereof with any else. . . . . . . . . My lady is desired ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock
... joy his heart strings swell, And blest he deems his lot; For the foil'd tyger as he fell, A ...
— Ballads - Founded On Anecdotes Relating To Animals • William Hayley
... promise much mischief, and are ascribed, without any difference of opinion, to Hamilton. You must, my dear Sir, take up your pen against this champion. You know the ingenuity of his talents; and there is not a person but yourself who can foil him. For Heaven's sake, then, take up your pen, and do not desert the public cause altogether. Thursday evening. The Senate have, to-day, voted the publication of the communications from our Envoys. The House of Representatives decided against ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... in beauty, thou dost seem A vision in a poet's dream! Thou look'st as though thou claim'st not birth With sea and sky and other earth, That smile around thee but to show Thy beauty in a brighter glow,— That are unto thee as the foil Artistic hands have featly set Around Golconda's radiant spoil, To grace some lofty coronet,— A foil which serves to make the gem ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... thirty thousand napoleons from the Bank of France. It has become known that we have never had occasion to unpack the money, and that it is still lying in our cellar. The crate upon which I sit contains two thousand napoleons packed between layers of lead foil. Our reserve of bullion is much larger at present than is usually kept in a single branch office, and the directors have had misgivings ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... picked up his speech, which was made by spreading the beam from an eighty-foot diameter parabolic reflector and aiming it at Earth from a hundred thousand miles out. It was a collapsible reflector, made of thin foil, like the ones used on space ...
— By Proxy • Gordon Randall Garrett
... De Wardes flew upon Raoul with such impetuosity, that at the first clashing of the steel blades Buckingham clearly saw that Raoul was only trifling with his adversary. Buckingham stepped aside, and watched the combat. Raoul was as calm as if he were handling a foil, instead of a sword; having retreated a step, he parried three or four fierce thrusts which De Wardes made at him, caught the sword of the latter within his own, and sent it flying twenty paces ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... might win should be given to the poor. He prayed for skill in his dancing lessons, because he wanted to have more time for more serious studies. He was more devout in his daily life than ever, prayed to Christ with the foil in his hand, studied the Bible in Hebrew and Greek, spent whole nights in prayer, fasted the livelong day on Sundays, and was, in a word, so Methodistic in his habits that he could truly describe himself as a "rigid Pietist." He interfered in many a duel, ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... Tommy, his target, but he pretends that he was always in possession of it, and made nothing of it,—that he imbibed it with mother's milk,—and that I, the wretched Tommy, am most abjectly behindhand in not having done the same. I ask, why is Tommy to be always the foil of Mr. Barlow to this extent? What Mr. Barlow had not the slightest notion of himself, a week ago, it surely cannot be any very heavy backsliding in me not to have at my fingers' ends to- day! And yet Mr. Barlow systematically carries it over me with a high hand, and will ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... wanted a foil, it was there; the gold glittered upon a cloudy background. My treasure was not exactly in my hand to enjoy. There might be many days before Thorold and I saw each other's faces again. Dangers lay threatening him, ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... that, M. de Valensolle must not be arrested. It was better to follow him on his pretended journey to Geneva, which was probably but a blind to foil investigation. It was therefore agreed that Roland, whose disguise, however good, was liable to be penetrated, should remain at the lodge, and Michel and Jacques should head off the game. In all probabilities, M. de Valensolle ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... be; so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such a one. Now, as in geometry, the oblique must be known as well as the right, and in arithmetic, the odd as well as the even; so in the actions of our life, who seeth not the filthiness of evil, wanteth a great foil to perceive the beauty of virtue. This doth the comedy handle so, in our private and domestical matters, as, with hearing it, we get, as it were, an experience of what is to be looked for, of a niggardly Demea, of a crafty Davus, of a flattering ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... that thy springs revive The drooping patient, scarce alive; Where, as he gathers strength to toil, Not e'en thy heights his spirit foil, But nerve him on to bless, t'inhale, And triumph in the morning gale; Or noon's transcendent glories give The vigorous touch that bids him live. Perhaps e'en now he stops to breathe, Surveying the expanse beneath? Now climbs ...
— The Banks of Wye • Robert Bloomfield
... of poverty. This is the last golden lock to the millions of Lagunitas, The poor puppet he has set up to play the contestant is under his control. He had wished to see Natalie homeward bound before this denouement. It must be. He muses. Kill her! Ah, no; too dangerous. He must FOIL her. ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... productions, Fanfaro was continually assisting the performers; he handed Girdel the weights and took them from him; he accompanied Robeckal's sword exercise with hollow beats on a tambourine; he played the violin while Caillette danced on the rope, and acted as Bobichel's foil in his comic acts. Fanfaro himself was not to appear before the second part; for the conclusion of the first part a climax was to be given in which Girdel would perform a piece in which he had everywhere ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... where the ship had come out of overdrive and lingered for twenty-four seconds. Willis had moved the squad ship from that position, but the sergeant had left a substitute. The small object he'd dropped from the ejector tube now swelled and writhed and struggled. In pure emptiness, a shape of metal foil inflated itself. It was surprisingly large—almost the size of the squad ship. But in emptiness the fraction of a cubic inch of normal-pressure gas would inflate a foil bag against no resistance at all. ...
— A Matter of Importance • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... the jacinth oppos'd, seeming its foil; while the gold Holds all the jewels together, in ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... to its hole. It was a harvest mouse, rejoicing in the enormous weight of 4.7 grains and a length of 57 mm., but with as much love of life and fear of death as an elephant. Heaven knows what had smitten it! Perhaps it was one of the very few who just escape the owl, or who foil that scientific death, the weasel, at the last moment—but no matter. The result was ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... chambers should be noted the fine ivory carving from chamber 23, showing a bound captive; the large stock of painted model vases in limestone in a box in chamber 20; the set of perfect vases found in chamber 21; a fine piece of ribbed ivory; a piece of thick gold-foil covering of a hotep table, patterned as a mat, found in the long chamber west of the tomb; the deep mass of brown vegetable matter in the north-east chamber; the large stock of grain between chambers 8 and 11; and the bed of currants ten inches thick, though ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... music of the spheres, He laid him down upon a roseate bank To dream of holiness!—He hath not stirred.— 'Twas well I did not speak to Bellingham, For we have not been noted. Good, so far. All eyes are busy with their own affairs; I'll wake him now and foil discovery. ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... laugh'd outright. Yet, by my life and hopes, I would not part With this sweet recollection from my heart; I would not now forget that tender scene To wear a crown, or make my girl a queen. Why need be told how pass'd the months along, How sped the summer's walk, the winter's song, How the foil'd suitor all his hopes gave up, How Providence with rapture fill'd their cup? No dark regrets, no tragic scenes to prove, The gardener was too old to die for love. A thousand incidents I cast aside To tell but one—I gave away the bride— Gave the dear youth what kings ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... receive these four jewellers, among whom was a man of Milan called Gaio. He was the most presumptuous donkey in the world, the one who knew least and who thought he knew most; the others were very modest and able craftsmen. In the presence of us all this Gaio began to talk, and said: "Miliano's foil should be preserved, and to do that, Benvenuto, you shall doff your cap; [1] for just as giving diamonds a tint is the most delicate and difficult thing in the jeweller's art, so is Miliano the greatest jeweller ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... of dhows, lookout-man!" he cried, fully awake at last, not only in his own person, but as regarded the responsibility attaching to him should he unhappily let our prey escape and so foil his captain's carefully arranged plan. "Are ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... which enabled him to arrange his other characters around the main figure, and to subordinate them all to his central emphasis—all these qualities are undeniable. Moreover he was himself the most perfect foil and contrast to Johnson that could be imagined, while he possessed in a unique degree the power of both stimulating and provoking his hero to animation and to wrath. Boswell may not have known what an ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... no better foil could be imagined than Brush. If they recalled the tusked monsters that charged in the van of Asiatic armies, his analogue was the desert horse. Small, spare, sensitive, shy, his every posture suggested race, training, spirit, and docility. His flair for classical art ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... have been quite a fine ladies' argument. Kenloe puts it in the mouths of leaders of polite society. As coolly as if it had been a question of parlor decoration, they appear to have argued that the black background of the general misery was a desirable foil to set off the pomp of the rich. But, after all, this objection was not more brutal than it was stupid. If here and there might be found some perverted being who relished his luxuries the more keenly for the sight of others' want, yet the general ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... were not kept to this way of declaiming when Sophocles and Euripides influenc'd the age. Nor yet had any blind alley-professor foil'd their inclinations, when Pindar and the Nine Lyricks durst not attempt Homer's Numbers: And that I may not bring my authority from poets, 'tis certain, neither Plato nor Demosthenes ever made it their practice: A stile one would value, and as I may call it, a chast oration, is not splatchy ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... taken into his service, and became a principal figure in all the grand gladiatorial encounters, at wages of forty shillings a week and his meat. As for Mr. Figg himself, who was as good at backsword as at broadsword, at quarter-staff as at foil, and at fisticuffs as any one of them,—to say nothing of his Cornish wrestling,—I saw him once, and shall never forget him. There was a Majesty blazed in his countenance and shone in all his actions beyond all I ever beheld. His right leg bold and firm; ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... rang the bell at the door of Mrs. Wilson's home she did not know that her approach had been watched. She meant to be very careful during her interview, for she realized that she and Ruth were endeavoring to foil two brilliant and ...
— The Automobile Girls At Washington • Laura Dent Crane
... flowed silently in the darkness. She was not willing to plant a seed of distrust in the bosom of her brother, yet she remembered bitterly and indignantly what Angelique had said of her intentions towards the Intendant. Was she using Le Gardeur as a foil to set off her attractions in ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... and are subject abnormally to the will: the late lamented Mr. Charley Peace, who murdered and "burgled" once too often, could darken his complexion and even change it by arresting jugular circulation. The much-read Mr. F. Marion Crawford (Saracinesca, chapt. xii.) makes his hero pass a foil through his adversary's throat, "without touching the jugular artery (which does not exist)or the spine." But what about larynx and pharynx? It is to be regretted that realistic writers do not cultivate ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... Gold.—Is prepared by dissolving gold in aqua regia, a composition of one part of nitric to two parts of muriatic acid. Gold foil is the best for our purposes; coin, however, answers, in most cases, for the daguerreotype operator, as the alloy, being so slight is not noticed in the gilding process. When the latter is used, it will facilitate the operation ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey
... art were tried, The stately tree all force defied. Well might the elm resist and foil their might, For though his branches were decay'd to sight, As many as his leaves the roots spread round, And in the firm ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... a hot wire in his tooth! But Bill, being already intensely crucified, and assured of Firelock's skill, took his head out of the mush-plaster, opened his jaws, and Firelock, admonishing him to "keep cool," crowded the hot, sizzling wire on to the tin foil jammed into the hollow by Wangbanger, and gave it a twist clear through the melted tin to the exposed nerve. Bill jumped, bit off the wire, burnt his tongue, and knocked Firelock nearly through the partition of his shop; and so frightened ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... face, as reflected in the mirror, looking haggard and pale. He had never seen his wife in black, which was an excellent foil to her fair beauty, and the sight of her rendered him tongue-tied. He had nothing to say even when she dismissed him with a "Thanks, ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... gigantic scoop in front. He pushed a great mound of talc-fine dust before him to cover up the cargo. It was necessary. With freight costing what it did, fuel and air and food came frozen solid, in containers barely thicker than foil. While they stayed at space-shadow temperature, the foil would hold anything. And a cover of insulating moondust with vacuum between the grains kept even air frozen solid, ...
— Scrimshaw • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... guessed. The names of these hardy adventurers must by no means go unrecorded: shepherd's purse, wild pepper-grass, pansy, common chickweed (Stellaria media), mouse-ear chickweed (Cerastium viscosum), knawel, common mallow, witch-hazel, cinque-foil (Potentilla Norvegica,—not argentea, as I should certainly have expected), many-flowered aster, cone-flower, yarrow, two kinds of groundsel, fall dandelion, and jointweed. Six of these—mallow, cinque-foil, aster, cone-flower, fall dandelion, and jointweed—were noticed only at Nahant; and ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... study my skiagraph, you will see how I got my first clue. There was something over that spot which caused the refractory sore. What was it? Radium—carefully placed in the mask with guards of lead foil in such a way as to protect the eyes, but direct the emission full at the gland which was to be ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... admirably, wrestles with amazing dexterity, and is an excellent cricketer. He runs like a buck, leaps like a wild goat, and plays at skittles like a wizard. Then he has a fine voice for singing, he touches the guitar so as to make it speak, and handles a foil as well as any fencer in Spain.—Cervantes, Don Quixote, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... like that which had lent so powerful an impulse to the popular mind, was one far easier to set going than to deprecate or extinguish. The very circumstances which had occurred to foil the excited mob in their pursuit of Sir Francis Varney, were of a nature to increase the popular superstition concerning him, and to make him and his acts appear in still more ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... of his generosity in this respect; for it was much talked of at the time. One of your countrymen, who had never handled a fencing-foil nor fired a pistol, took offence at something M. de Mauleon had said in disparagement of the Duke of Wellington, and called him out. Victor de Mauleon accepted the challenge, discharged his pistol, not in the air—that might have been an affront—but so ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... by the attitude toward Sally adopted by Mrs. Standish in her capacity as close friend, foil, and confidant of Mrs. Artemas. In the course of those three days the girl had not been insensible to intimations of a strong, if as yet restrained, animus in the mind of the older woman. In alarm and regret she did her futile best to discourage this gentleman without being overtly ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... every Thursday evening, in Oxford one roof sheltered both of them. Furthermore, there was even some measure of intimacy between them. It was the Duke's whim to condescend further in the direction of Noaks than in any other. He saw in Noaks his own foil and antithesis, and made a point of walking up the High with him at least once in every term. Noaks, for his part, regarded the Duke with feelings mingled of idolatry and disapproval. The Duke's First in Mods oppressed him (who, by dint of dogged industry, had scraped a Second) ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... warmer regions took firm hold of the doctrine of a foil, a something thrust between itself and the sapping influences of weather, sun and soil. The Negro was pressed into service as that foil. He was to stand in the open and bear the brunt of nature's hammering, ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... nor suffer them to be inured to hardships and hazards, as they ought to be. They will not endure to see them return all dust and sweat from their exercise, to drink cold drink when they are hot, nor see them mount an unruly horse, nor take a foil in hand against a rude fencer, or so much as to discharge a carbine. And yet there is no remedy; whoever will breed a boy to be good for anything when he comes to be a man, must by no means spare him when young, and must very often transgress ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... the thick adobe wall of the old casa, and apparently left the present century behind her. A peaceful atmosphere of the past surrounded her not only in the low vaulted halls terminating in grilles or barred windows; not only in the square chambers whose dark rich but scanty furniture was only a foil to the central elegance of the lace-bordered bed and pillows; but in a certain mysterious odor of dried and desiccated religious respectability that penetrated everywhere, and made the grateful twilight redolent of the ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... worked for Fern," explained Mr. Weil. "He got hold of some of these notes and checks, in Fern's office, and is coming to look us up to-day, for the purpose of having his employer arrested. A nice game, eh? But we will foil him, won't we? We'll show him a trick worth several of his! He's probably gone to the Hoffman House and he'll hang round till he finds me. I'll send word that I am to be home this afternoon at five. You will be there with me. We'll tackle ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... walked through the corridors with Mr. Lyons, who, portly and imposing, acted as escort to her and Mrs. Earle, and invited them to luncheon at a hotel restaurant. Excitement had given her more color than usual, to which her mourning acted as a foil, and she looked her best. Lyons was proud of being in the company of such a presentable and spirited appearing woman, and made a point of stopping two or three members of the legislature and introducing them ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... the next study, No. 4! How well Chopin knew the value of contrast in tonality and sentiment! A veritable classic is this piece, which, despite its dark key color, C sharp minor as a foil to the preceding one in E, bubbles with life and spurts flame. It reminds one of the story of the Polish peasants, who are happiest when they sing in the minor mode. Kullak calls this "a bravura study ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... in very suddenly to explain about the Christmas tree. There were lots of little pencils on the table. And blocks of paper. And nice cold, shining sheets of tin-foil. There was violet-colored tin-foil, and red-colored tin-foil—and green and blue and ...
— Fairy Prince and Other Stories • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... of the British Parliament were set off to the greatest advantage by a foil. The wretched government of Lewis the Fifteenth had murdered, directly or indirectly, almost every Frenchman who had served his country with distinction in the East. Labourdonnais was flung into the Bastile, and, after years of suffering, left it only to ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... other scenes? Other, but haply beautiful as these, Which now I gaze on; but which, wanting thee, Want half their charms, for, to thy poet's thought, More deeply glow'd the heaven, when thy fine eye, Surveying its grand arch, all kindling glow'd; The white cloud to thy white brow was a foil; And, by the soft tints of thy cheek outvied, The dew-bent wild-rose ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 322, July 12, 1828 • Various
... dearest lives of its noble houses are lost; they might have been saved if the sacristan had not stumbled as he walked. Othello mislays his handkerchief, and there remains nothing for him but death. Hamlet gets hold of the wrong foil, and the rest is silence. Edmund's runner is a moment too late at the prison, and the feather will not move at Cordelia's lips. Salisbury a moment too late at the tower, and Arthur lies on the stones dead. Goneril ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... licence, of which we are often tempted to wish that its author had not availed himself; yet the most unmetrical and apparently careless passages flow with a grace, a lightness, a colloquial ease and frolic, which perhaps only heighten the effect of the serious parts, and serve as a foil to set off the unrivalled finish and melody of these latter. In these come out all Mr. Tennyson's instinctive choice of tone, his mastery of language, which always fits the right word to the right thing, and that word always the simplest one, and the perfect ear for melody which makes it ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... others, are of the earth earthy. As a result of their appearance on the scene, there are some powerful contrasting passages in the book. Archangias, the coarse and brutal Christian Brother who serves as a foil to Abbe Mouret; La Teuse, the priest's garrulous old housekeeper; Desiree, his 'innocent' sister, a grown woman with the mind of a child and an almost crazy affection for every kind of bird and beast, are all admirably portrayed. Old Bambousse, though one sees but ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... were the life of the company, the latter seeming a different man from the one who had come to consult his old chum as to the trouble in his life. Mrs. Coolidge, quiet and very attractive in her reserved, fair beauty, made an interesting foil to Ellen Burns, and the two, beside the rather fussy aunt and cousins, ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... elsewhere, to equal that piece of workmanship, or else acknowledge themselves his underlings and vassals. For many days had Mimer himself toiled, alone and vainly, trying to forge a sword whose edge the boasted armor of Amilias could not foil; and now, in despair, he came to ask the help of his ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... the best literature. He understood that he couldn't get numbers into my head. You couldn't tamp them in! History I also disliked as a dry thing without juice, and dates melted out of my memory as speedily as tin-foil on a red-hot stove. But I always was ready to declaim and took natively to anything dramatic or theatrical. Captain Harris encouraged me in recitation and reading and had ever the sweet spirit of a companion rather than ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... of bed he had climbed and downstairs he had come; and here he was, to all appearances, just in time to foil the very plot on which he had been brooding. Mr. Peters might be in bed, but there in the hall below him stood the accomplice, not ten paces from the museum's door. He arrived on the spot at racing speed ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... her legerete. What makes me think the tradition that Celimene was Mademoiselle[1] Moliere true, is that Moliere was certainly in love with Celimene. She is made as engaging as possible, and her worst faults do not rise above foibles. Her satire is good-natured. Arsinoe is her foil, introduced to show ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... always an imitation shown off by the foil of some incongruous setting. The setting in this case Stevenson found about him in the omnibuses, the clubs, and the railways of ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... snapped it at them, it flashed in the pan. Neighboring garrisons were summoned, but all battling with goblins was fruitless. One night a dark and hostile throng emerged from the wood and moved toward the blockhouse, where twenty musketeers were keeping guard. "If you be ghosts or devils I will foil you," cried the captain, and tearing a silver button from his doublet he rammed it into his gun and fired on the advancing host. Even as the smoke of his musket was blown on the wind, so did the beleaguering army vanish, the silver bullet proving that they were not of human kind. The night was ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... clear to him—that with such traitors no terms of honour were either binding or possible, and that, short of lying, he might use any means to foil them. And he could not doubt that the old princess had sent him expressly to ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... are his countrymen rightly matched against the Welsh," replied Dennis Morolt, "that their solid and unyielding temper may be a fit foil to the fiery and headlong dispositions of our dangerous neighbours, just as restless waves are best opposed by steadfast rocks.—Hark, sir, I hear Wilkin Flammock's step ascending the turret-stair, as deliberately as ever monk mounted ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... grot; Whither, by care of Libyan Jove, (High Servant of paternal Love) Young Bacchus was conveyed—to lie Safe from his step-dame Rhea's eye; Where bud, and bloom, and fruitage, glowed, Close-crowding round the infant god; All colours,—and the liveliest streak A foil to ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... furious, for he had felt on his breast the point of his adversary's sword, but so lightly that he might have taken it for the button of a foil. His anger redoubled at the conviction that he owed his life to the captain, and his attacks became more numerous and more ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... favor of Ferdinando, there would be no casus belli; the younger son would bow to the law of primogeniture and that would end the matter. Schiller, however, felt the need of a bolder contrast to his hero. The 'sublime criminal' required a colossal foil; and as equality with the sword was out of the question, the most obvious recourse was to pit natural depravity against natural greatness; ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... experiments, that a water-ice is the only form of nourishment his stomach will retain, he is driven to the conviction that there is something wrong, and that he had better see the doctor. The result of the young athlete's visit to the doctor was that he mournfully laid down the dumb-bells and the foil, eschewed gymnastics, and ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... are these chances, if the origin And end of each be heedfully compar'd. And as one thought bursts from another forth, So afterward from that another sprang, Which added doubly to my former fear. For thus I reason'd: "These through us have been So foil'd, with loss and mock'ry so complete, As needs must sting them sore. If anger then Be to their evil will conjoin'd, more fell They shall pursue us, than the savage hound Snatches the leveret, panting 'twixt his jaws." Already I perceiv'd my ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... wedges, and a beetle in the canoe, and Gershom was as expert with these implements as a master of fencing is with his foil, to say nothing of the skill of le Bourdon, the tree was soon laid open, and its ample stores of sweets exposed. In the course of the afternoon the honey was deposited in kegs, the kegs were transferred to the canoe, and the whole deposited in the chiente. The ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... stupid, homes are dreary, homes are insufferable. If one can be pardoned for the Irishism of such a saying, homes are their own worst "banes." If homes were what they should be, nothing under heaven could be invented which could be bane to them, which would do more than serve as useful foil to set off their better cheer, their pleasanter ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... have been personally associated with it through the various exhibitions held along with those of modern painting at the gallery of the Photo-Secession, or more intimately understood as "291". Photography was an interesting foil to the kind of veracity that painting is supposed to express, or rather to say, was then supposed to express; for painting like all other ideas has changed vastly in the last ten years, and even very much since the ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... a sigh of relief. A companion like Miss Martin makes a most excellent foil to solitude, and after she had departed, Lady Gore lay for a while in a state of pleasant quiescence. Why, she wondered, even supposing she herself did think too well of her husband, should Miss Martin object? Why do onlookers appear to resent the spectacle of a too united family? There is, no ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... must degenerate and Disease of all kinds ride rampant through the land, rather than upset the firmly rooted fallacies of the past or foil the ghoul-like greed of a certain set ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... So doth the ghostly foe our souls abuse, And all beyond his force he gains by ruse; He hates the purpose fast he cannot foil,— Then he retreats—retreats but to recoil! In endless barricade obstruction piles, To-day 'tis tears impede, to-morrow—smiles! And this poor dream—his coinage of the night Gives place to other lures, all falsely bright: ...
— Polyuecte • Pierre Corneille
... black as ink, and as shining as if he had been polished with a shoe-brush) entered the kitchen of the hotel, and asked for the largest knife they had. The head-cook gave him a sort of carving-knife, some eighteen inches long, sharp as a razor, and pliant as a foil. The negro looked at it, shook his head as if in doubt whether it would do, but nevertheless took it up stairs with him. Presently he brought it down again, and asked for a larger one. The cook opened ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... the most instructive in modern warfare, as illustrating the immense power that quick-firing rifles confer upon the defence. Given a nucleus of well-trained troops, with skilled engineers, any position of ordinary strength can quickly be turned into a stronghold that will foil the efforts of a far greater number of assailants. Experience at Plevna showed that four or five times as many men were needed to attack redoubts and trenches as in the days of muzzle-loading muskets. It also proved that infantry ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... revelations eagerly. Her admiration for his lordship was intense, and she trusted him utterly. The only doubt that occurred to her was whether, with the best intentions in the world, he would be able unassisted to foil a pair of schemers so distant from each other geographically as the man who called himself Jimmy Crocker and the man who had called himself Skinner. That was a point on which they had not touched, the fact that one impostor was above stairs, the other below. It seemed to Mrs. Pett ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... break out of their regular routine, while one tribe followed in the steps of another so closely that it was generally possible to prognosticate where the attack would be made, and make arrangements to foil it. ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... think the symmetry improves them. Whenever the materials of ornament are noble, they must be various; and repetition of parts is either the sign of utterly bad, hopeless, and base work; or of the intended degradation of the parts in which such repetition is allowed, in order to foil ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... hot? Your bolts distress not me, But injure the fair mistress of these bowers, Whose sordid guardian would her husband be, For lucre, not for love. Rather than quarrel, let us use our powers, And gift with magic aid some active sprite, To foil the guardian and ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... all to eat not of that bread," the whole company, when they saw the champagne bottles, with their necks covered with gold foil appear, burst out singing, as if ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... calls on Bacchus, and propounds the prize, The groom his fellow-groom at buts defies, And bends his bow, and levels with his eyes: Or, stript for wrestling, smears his limbs with oil, And watches with a trip his foe to foil. Such was the life the frugal Sabines led; So Remus and his brother king were bred, From whom th' austere Etrurian virtue rose; And this rude life our homely fathers chose; Old Rome from such a race derived her birth, The seat of empire, and ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... discontent. Mr. Todd, spurred by his responsibility, gradually came around to something like his old arbitrary self. Yank Tate, the carpenter, maintained through it all a patient faith in the captain, and, in so far as his influence could be felt, acted as a foil to the irascible, fault-finding Tom Plate, the forecastle lawyer, the man who had been at the lead-line at Barbados. But the rest of them were dazed and nerveless, too shaken in brain and body to consider seriously Tom's proposition to toss ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... Carolina. Cornwallis, after having been reinforced by General Leslie, had planned to invade North Carolina, conquer that State, march through Virginia and join Clinton in a fierce onslaught against Washington's army in the North. To foil the plans of the British officers Greene was concentrating the patriot troops in the South in the Catawba Valley, and Gregory was left with only a handful of men to hold the ...
— In Ancient Albemarle • Catherine Albertson
... if you took the diamond from its setting, and left me nothing but the foil," says he. "Oh, I would order it another way: give me the gem, and let who will take what remains. Unless these little hands are mine to hold for ever, I will take nothing ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... most utterly-uppermost," he murmured. "It's positively uncanny. No uninitiated adult of the utmost intelligence ever held an Italian-pattern foil correctly yet—nor until he had been pretty carefully shown. Who the devil put him up to the design in the first place, and the method of holding, in the second? Explain yourself, you two-anna[6] marvel," he demanded of ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... twenty-five, a face peaceful, placid, and beautiful with the austere and almost unearthly beauty of the youthful dead. The lips were slightly parted, the eyes half closed and drowsy, shaded with sweeping lashes; and a wealth of dark hair in massive plaits served as a foil to the ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... plain-spoken days of childhood, Miles and Julius had detected Camilla Vivian in some flagrant cheating at a game, and had roundly expressed their opinion. In the subsequent period of Raymond's courtship, Miles had succumbed to the fascination, but Julius had given one such foil, that she had never again attempted to ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... admiration in which Aeschylus was held, gave birth to a herd of imitators, among whom were sons and nephews of his own; but as, like most imitators, they could do little more than mimic his defects without reaching his excellencies, they served only as a foil to set off the lustre of his great successor Sophocles, who, while yet his scholar, aspired to be his competitor, and gained the preeminence at the ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... piece of thin sheet iron 1 in. by 5 in. as per sketch. To the other end of the strip of iron is soldered a piece of brass 1/64 in. by 1/4, in. by 2 in., on each end of which has been soldered a patch of platinum foil 1/4 in. square. ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... it now,' Sarrasin said carelessly. 'We should be pretty simpletons if we couldn't foil the plot now that we have the threads in ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... exposing the head and feet of the body, from which the bandages had decayed and fallen off. In the powerful glare of the electric light which we carried, the bare skull, with a golden vulture upon it, could be seen protruding from the remains of the linen bandages and from the sheets of flexible gold-foil in which, as we afterwards found, the whole body was wrapped. The inscription on the coffin, the letters of which were made of rare stones, gave the titles of Akhnaton, "the beautiful child of the Sun"; but turning to the shrine we ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... necessary to a critic, it being very certain that he was, like this essayer a very indifferent poet; he loved to be well dressed; and I remember a little young gentleman whom Mr. Walsh used to take into his company as a double foil to his person and capacity. Inquire between Sunning Hill and Oakingham, for a young, short, equal, gentleman, the very bow of the God of Love, and tell me whether he be a proper author to make personal reflections? He may extol the ancients, but he has ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... completion of the first few chapters, in favour of more complex characterisation. Bob Calverley, the young squatter, really holds a third or fourth place in relation to the main motive of the story, and is used rather as a foil than as an exemplar of anything typically Australian. He does not bear any active part in the drama of passion and intrigue; he is not even permitted to be a ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man's smudge and shares ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... Mrs. Bennet—her archness, her querulousness, and above all her talkativeness. Was it Sally May or Mrs. Bennet? Molly Seaton, as Mr. Bennet, proved an excellent foil—reserved, quiet, full of a delightful ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... softer. So quiet, so like a wraith, and yet with a fascinating loveliness in her eyes, in her tender, blossom-like face, in her fresh young voice. She makes no blunders, she is not awkward, she is not loud. Cecil is her foil,—Cecil, in lace over infantile blue, with a knot of streamers on one shoulder in narrow blue satin ribbon and a blue sash. Floyd is host, of course, so Cecil would be left exclusively with her pretty mamma, if it ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... captivity, without refuge or redemption." "The mystical and blessed union of marriage can be no way more unhallowed and profaned, than by the forcible uniting of such disunions and separations." "And it is a less breach of wedlock to part with wise and quiet consent betimes, than still to foil and profane that mystery of joy and union with a polluting sadness and ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... agree; love is not of the olden time, but present and youthful ever. The speech may be compared with that speech of Socrates in the Phaedrus in which he describes himself as talking dithyrambs. It is at once a preparation for Socrates and a foil to him. The rhetoric of Agathon elevates the soul to 'sunlit heights,' but at the same time contrasts with the natural and necessary eloquence of Socrates. Agathon contributes the distinction between love and ...
— Symposium • Plato
... soft and may disappear during vermicomposting. If you could grind bones before sending them to the worm bin, they would make valuable additions to your compost. Avoid putting non-biodegradable items like plastic, bottle caps, rubber bands, aluminum foil, and glass ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... his studies; individuality of form or color he was wholly indifferent to. The looseness of execution in his latest works has not even the apology of having been attempted on scientific principles; he did not work upon a particular point of a picture as a focus and leave the rest obscure, as a foil to enhance it, on a principle of unity; on the contrary, all is equally obscure and wild alike. These last productions are a calamity to his reputation; yet we may, perhaps, safely assert that since ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... of the train could be faintly seen as it glided along its steel track bringing its load of human or mechanical food to the hungry battle-line. Swiftly but with great care the two brothers made ready the deadly missiles with which they hoped to foil the plans of their ...
— Fighting in France • Ross Kay
... Movement precise. An effect of a good deal of nose glasses. Black, heavy rims. A wide, black tape. Head perpendicular, drawn back against the neck. Grave, scholarly face, chiselled with much refinement of technique; foil to the studious complexion, a dark, silken moustache. Holding our thumb-nail sketch up to the light, we ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... The Indian hunters immediately classed the white, the deep and the pale grizzly red, the grizzly dark-brown—in short, all those with the extremities of the hair of a white or frosty color without regard to the color of the ground or foil—under the name of hoh-host. The Indians assured them that these were all of the same species as the white bear, that they associated together, had longer nails than the others, and never climbed trees. On the other hand, ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... what Mr. OWEN NARES was doing in this galley; and I cannot tell you. I can only say that he was very brave about it all. In a sense it was a serious performance, the only one of its kind in the play; yet not serious enough to serve as a foil for the general frivolity, for he was constantly bringing his own high sentiments into ridicule, and so burlesquing the OWEN NARES that we love ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 8th, 1920 • Various
... time to time he handled with ostentatious sanctimony. The other was as complete a contrast to his companion as could be desired by the humorous painter. He was a plump, spry little fellow, brightly dressed and bubbling over with merry, roguish spirits, which formed the most fantastic foil to the lugubriousness of his fellow-worker. Any good citizen of Paris, arising belated, if any such there may have been, and hurrying to the walls to know how things went for the king's cause, would have recognized readily enough in these two strange opposites two of the most dreaded of the ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... the surrounding sandridges sheltered them from view, they crouched over a small basket they had brought with them and performed certain ceremonies. First the pouch was wrapped in many sheets of tin foil, which Richard had been long in collecting from various tobacco-loving friends. When that was done it flashed in the sun like a nugget of wrinkled silver. This was stuffed into a baking-powder can from which the label had been carefully ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... even. The small-pox had left one only mark on her chin, which was so large, it might have been mistaken for a dimple, had not her left cheek produced one so near a neighbour to it, that the former served only for a foil to the latter. Her complexion was fair, a little injured by the sun, but overspread with such a bloom that the finest ladies would have exchanged all their white for it: add to these a countenance in which, ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... turn with the occasions, but also run with the occasions, and not strain their credit or strength to over-hard or extreme points; but choose in their actions that which is most passable: for this will preserve men from foil, not occupy them too much about one matter, win opinion of moderation, please the most, and make a show of a perpetual felicity in all they undertake: which ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... (both of which I suppose were Sir Oliver's best of long standing) he may cut a tolerable figure dangling to church with Miss Bell!—The woman, as she observes, should excel the man in features: and where can she match so well for a foil? ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... Dutton-Ames. He is dark and massive—a splendid foil for his wife's slenderness and fairness. They are much in love with each other. He always sits beside her if he can, and she looks up at him and smiles, and last night I saw him take her hand where it hung among the folds of ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... tale we went to the same circus and saw the same clown. His ears were painted bright red—the red ear is the inevitable badge of the French clown—and he had as a foil for his funning a comic countryman known on the program as Auguste, which is the customary name of all comic countrymen in France; and, though I knew only at second hand of his sketch-making abilities, I am willing to concede that he was the drollest ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... in using it, I did n't place the same construction that you did in hearing it. But let that pass. I apologize. What I should have said was that, if you will pardon me, she used you, as young women will do, as a foil against her fiance in a time of petty quarreling between ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... upon I told him what I wished to do, and after a little persuasion he agreed to carry a letter to her on his next marketing trip. My message was prepared by writing it on tissue paper, which was then compressed into a small pellet, and protected by wrapping it in tin-foil so that it could be safely carried in the man's mouth. The probability, of his being searched when he came to the Confederate picketline was not remote, and in such event he was to swallow the pellet. The letter appealed to Miss Wright's loyalty and patriotism, and requested ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... has ever the best of it at all points. The man plays with a button to his foil, while the woman uses a weapon that can really wound. Burgo knew that he must go,—felt that he must skulk away as best he might, and perhaps hear a low titter of half-suppressed laughter as he went. Even that might ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... take the city of New York, they might command the whole line from the mouth of the Hudson to the St. Lawrence, and so cut off New England from the other colonies and overcome a divided enemy. To foil this policy Washington planned to hold New York and to capture Canada. With Canada in line the union of the colonies would be indeed continental, and, if the British were driven from Boston, they would have no secure foothold in ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... if wanted for small birds, from the broken steel of a wool comber's "devil," about nine inches long, fixed in a bradawl handle of about four inches, or, if for large birds or mammals, the iron may be made from a broken fencing foil, to any size between twelve and thirty inches, with suitable handle. In either case the smallest end is driven into the handle, and the top is filed across with a smooth nick, to push in, but not to retain the ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... a word, being resolved to cheat her again as he had done before. He went to find little Day, and saw him with a foil in his hand, with which he was fencing with a great monkey: the child was then only three years of age. He took him up in his arms and carried him to his wife, that she might conceal him in her ...
— The Tales of Mother Goose - As First Collected by Charles Perrault in 1696 • Charles Perrault
... but hardly spoke a word. He did not need to speak. His intelligent eyes, his smile, his refined manners, the tranquillity that was in and inundated by his personality, could not but attract Jacqueline. Christophe, by contrast, stood as a foil to Olivier's shining qualities. She did not show anything, for she was fearful of the feeling stirring in her: she confined herself to talking to Christophe, but it was always about Olivier. Christophe was only too ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... order; and to judge from the gaping crowds which they attracted, we are not the only credulous nation in the world. Among the games was a machine resembling an English round-a-bout, with wooden horses for the players, each of whom was furnished with a foil, with which he strove to seize the greatest number of rings from the centre; this was, indeed, a chivalrous exhibition. Stilt-walkers, mountebank families, and jugglers, "chequered in bulk and brains," lent their aid to amuse the crowd; and, occasionally, two ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 330, September 6, 1828 • Various
... stood still, his hand on the door-knob, eager, hesitating. Here was the man; were the papers here? If they were, should we secure them? A single false step, a single wrong word, might foil us. ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... stick as though it were a club, swinging it like a baseball bat. That would be as silly as using an overhand stab with a dagger. He used it the way a fencer would use a foil, and the hard, blunt end of it sank into the first thug's solar plexus with all the drive of the Duke's right arm and shoulder behind it. The thug gave a hoarse scream as all the air was driven from his lungs, and he dropped to ...
— Nor Iron Bars a Cage.... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... just this charming degree of manly frankness from monsieur. A button is a button, too, and a devilish serious thing when, say, off a foil." ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... its squares and streets, painting its signboards, draping its balconies and windows to the fourth and fifth stories with hangings of crimson damask. Street after street displayed this uniform vista of crimson, foil for the procession, with its riot of gorgeous dresses, gold lace, banners, ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... makes an excellent foil," said Frau von Treumann. "Miss Estcourt looks quite ethereal ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... in heav'n, Only that, whence it kindles, none is lost, And it is soon extinct; thus from the horn, That on the dexter of the cross extends, Down to its foot, one luminary ran From mid the cluster shone there; yet no gem Dropp'd from its foil; and through the beamy list Like flame in alabaster, glow'd ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... contradiction or antinomy. Moving water, it has been shown, is suggestive of life. But over against it we find a suggestion of death. Indeed there has been a widely diffused belief in a river of death—a striking foil to the inspiring mysticism of the river of life. The old-world mythology taught, in varying forms, but with underlying unity of concept, that there is a river, or gulf, which must be crossed by the departing soul on its ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... in again, through Joe's guard, darting his blade as though it were a foil. A cut opening magically on Joe's chest from the left nipple to navel, and ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... artifice of sending all the merry company for a drive, and now Carrie came in alone. It was the first time that Hurstwood had had a chance to see her facing the audience quite alone, for nowhere else had she been without a foil of some sort. He suddenly felt, as she entered, that her old strength—the power that had grasped him at the end of the first act—had come back. She seemed to be gaining feeling, now that the play was drawing to a close and the opportunity ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... indefatigable industry is used by the agents of government, and they have money at command without stint. If I were possessed of the same means, I could not only foil the prosecutors, but render them ridiculous and infamous. The democratic papers teem with abuse against me and my counsel, and even against the chief justice. Nothing is left undone or unsaid which can tend to prejudice the public mind, and produce a conviction without evidence. The machinations ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... dress that a gentleman ever appears in; and during a pause she happened to notice Colonel Colquhoun, who had stepped back to judge the effect of some drapery he was putting up. Mr. Price was a little behind him, and two of the younger men, the three making an excellent foil to Colonel Colquhoun. Evadne was struck by the contrast. The outside aspect of the man still pleased her. There was no doubt that he was a fine specimen of his species, a splendid animal to look at; what a pity he should have had a regrettable past, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... some way to even increase the shade; but Janet fitted that which was frank, open, and aboveboard. And so she used the black for contrast rather than obscurity—besides which there was another sort of contrast, for a soldier hat on Janet was a striking foil for her utter femininity. And its romantic pretense (so different from the dark gypsy-like romantic) was such an arrant little piece of make-believe that it had the effect of playful candor, acknowledging how impossible a man she would make; and while it was, strikingly, ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... appears to be derived from the same root as Paup-puk-ke-nay, a grasshopper, the inflection iss making it personal. The Indian idea is that of harum scarum. He is regarded as a foil to Manabozho, with whom he is frequently brought in contact in ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... much Applause. I don't want to be put in mind how very Defective I am in every thing that is Ugly: I am too sensible of my own Unworthiness in this Particular, and therefore I only propose my self as a Foil to the Club. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... creature; looking at her lover with complacent looks of possession and smiles of welcome. Dolly never knew what sort of a figure the third was; she could not see herself, and she never thought about it. Yet she was a foil to the other two, and they were a foil to her, as she sat there at the corner of the hearth on a low cushion, in her black dress, and with no ornament about her other than the cameo ring. A creature very different from the beauty at the other ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... To foil these attempts at concealment is the business of the observers who gather information for Army Headquarters and G. H.Q. For observers on corps work the detective problems are somewhat different. This department deals with hidden saps and battery positions, and draws and photographs conclusions ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... to the knife between her and me. If she succeed, it must be with you. I will do anything to foil her except lie." ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... Strings of pop-corn festooned the branches, and flakes of cotton-wool snow were cunningly disposed here and there. Bright apples peeped from amid the green, and from every tip hung a splendid star of tinsel or tin foil. No "boughten stuff" these; all through the year Miss Fidely patiently begged from her neighbors: from the women the tinsel on their button-cards, from the men the "silver" that wrapped their tobacco. Carefully pressed under the big Bible, they waited till Christmas, to ...
— The Wooing of Calvin Parks • Laura E. Richards
... her foil turned aside. She began to lose patience. Her boot patted the sod. "Monsieur, since the countess is not high enough, since gold and honors have ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... towering soul of MONTAGU, Her sex's glory, and her country's too; Who gave the spotted plague one deadly blow, And bade its mitigated poison flow With half its terrors; yet, with loathing still, We hous'd a visitant with pow'r to kill. Then when the healthful blood, though often tried, Foil'd the keen lancet by the Severn side, Resisting, uncontaminated still, The purple pest and unremitting skill; When the plain truth tradition seem'd to know, By simply pointing to the harmless Cow, Though wise distrust to reason might appeal; What, when hope triumph'd, what ...
— Wild Flowers - Or, Pastoral and Local Poetry • Robert Bloomfield
... by high mountains, and again crowned by the snowy peaks of those more distant, lay before us, its whole surface dotted with a multitude of white forts surrounded by a belt of the most vivid green, the barrenness of the uncultivated spots acting as a foil to the rich vegetation which springs under the foot of the Affgh[a]n husbandman wherever he can introduce the fertilizing stream. We rode leisurely on through this wilderness of gardens, till on approaching the ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... still, and I should be Fit for this cell, which wrongs me—but for thee. The very love which locked me to my chain Hath lightened half its weight; and for the rest, Though heavy, lent me vigour to sustain, And look to thee with undivided breast, And foil the ingenuity ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... Our foes should fling us down their mortal gage, And with a hostile step profane our sod! We shall not shrink, my brothers, but go forth To meet them, marshalled by the Lord of Hosts, And overshadowed by the mighty ghosts Of Moultrie and of Eutaw—who shall foil Auxiliars such as these? Nor these alone, But every stock and stone Shall help us; but the very soil, And all the generous wealth it gives to toil, And all for which we love our noble land, Shall ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... the advanced organization of a civilized state in the mode of impression, by which they were carefully protected from the process of counterfeiting usual in that age—the plating of inferior metal with thin silver-foil. ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Sir Francis Drake came near involving him in serious trouble, but ultimately ended by procuring him the commission he had so long desired. Tired of a life of inactivity, anxious to foil the Spanish in the New World, and sick to death of the busy idleness of the court, Sidney at length determined to go with Drake to a new world and a new career. Accordingly, he made ready, and actually went ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... dead boy. You see I was over to the dairy fair at the exposition building Saturday night, and when they were breaking up, me and my chum helped to carry boxes of cheese and firkins of butter, and a cheese-man gave each of us a piece of limberger cheese, wrapped up in tin foil. Sunday morning I opened my piece, and it made me tired. O, it was the offulest smell I ever heard of, except the smell when they found a tramp who hung himself in the woods on the Whitefish Bay road, and had been dead three weeks. It was just like a old back number ...
— Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa - 1883 • George W. Peck
... Antigone resolves to disregard the ordinance, and pay the funeral rites to her brother Polynices. The conflict between the law of the State and the divine law which Antigone obeys is the moral key-note of the play. Ismene is Antigone's weaker sister and serves as a foil to her. Antigone is betrothed to ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... considered that Scotland was never before, under any of his ancestors, so united and so animated in its own defence; yet had often been able to foil or elude the force of England, combined heartily in one cause, and inured by long practice to the use of arms. How much greater difficulty should he find, at present, to subdue by violence a people inflamed ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... foil is sometimes vaguely referred to the verb foil, to baffle, with which it has no connection. The Fr. feuille, leaf, is also invoked, and compared with Fr. fleuret, a foil, the idea being that the name was given to the "button" at the point. Now the earliest foils and fleurets were not buttoned; first, because they were pointless, and secondly, because the point was not used in early fencing. It was not until gunpowder began to bring about the disuse ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... that they thought it was necessary to have Major-Generals; adding that so they 'might have gone on,' if they had not insisted on his calling the Parliament of 1656, against his will, which had given them 'a foil.'[62] ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... Against such foil the mistress stood— A pearl upon a cross of gold— White with consistent womanhood, And fixed with unrelaxing hold Upon ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... no-lies, I had good Aqua vitae, Rosa so-lies: With sweet Ambrosia, (the gods' own drink) Most excellent gear for mortals, as I think, Besides, I had both vinegar and oil, That could a daring saucy stomach foil. This foresaid Tuesday night 'twixt eight and nine, Well rigged and ballasted, both with beer and wine, I stumbling forward, thus my jaunt begun, And went that night as far as Islington. There did I find (I dare ...
— The Pennyles Pilgrimage - Or The Money-lesse Perambulation of John Taylor • John Taylor
... a foil Used by Tecumseh to augment his greatness; And, by good husbandry of incantation, And gloomy charms by night, this Prophet works So shrewdly on their braves that every man, Inflamed by auguries of ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair
... the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man's ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... There are sentences, and perhaps passages, in this volume, that some people will not like; but they are about things that I do not like. A propagandist should use his pen as a weapon rather than a fencing foil. At any rate, my style is my own; it is copied from no model, or set of models; although I confess to a predilection for the old forthright literature of England, before "fine writing" was invented, or "parliamentary" eloquence came into vogue, or writers were anxious ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... feathers make fine birds. I saw many who were vastly richer dressed than your friends, but I will venture to say that I saw none neater or more elegant: which praise I ascribe to the taste of Mrs. Temple and my mantuamaker; for, after having declared that I would not have any foil or tinsel about me, they fixed upon the dress ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... of overdrive and lingered for twenty-four seconds. Willis had moved the squad ship from that position, but the sergeant had left a substitute. The small object he'd dropped from the ejector tube now swelled and writhed and struggled. In pure emptiness, a shape of metal foil inflated itself. It was surprisingly large—almost the size of the squad ship. But in emptiness the fraction of a cubic inch of normal-pressure gas would inflate a foil bag against no resistance at all. This flimsy shape even jerked into motion. Released gas ...
— A Matter of Importance • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Bakkus sang his ballads and an occasional humorous song of the moment to Andrew's accompaniment on mandolin or one-stringed violin, and Andrew conjured and juggled comically, using Bakkus as his dull-witted foil. A complete little performance, the patter and business artistically thought out and perfectly rehearsed. They wore the conventional Pierrot costume with whited faces and ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... this mystery to the bottom," thought he. "I shall foil the conspirators, if so they be, with their own weapons; art with art; chicane with chicane; ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Hissing and seething at the opposition she offered, the larger waves burst over her bows, and swept the deck from stem to stern; but her ample scuppers discharged it quickly, and up she rose again, dripping from the flood, to face and fight and foil ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... longing and vexation dimmed her eyes as she thought of the golden, halcyon days of youth that would never return. At any rate, Felipe and Chiquita must not meet until after she had warned the latter. Blanch must be used as a foil as long as possible. ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... sender or funnel-shaped tube, with its open mouth-piece standing toward the operator; the diaphragm and stylus connected therewith, which receives the sound spoken into the tube; and thirdly, the revolving cylinder, with its sheet-coating of tin-foil laid over the surface of a spiral groove to receive the indentations of the point of the stylus. The mode of operation is very simple. The cylinder is revolved; and the point of the stylus, when there is no sound agitation in the funnel or mouth-piece, makes a smooth, continuous depression ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... the fire up; and then the snare of its leaping flames and glowing coal bed drew her from her work; she sat looking and thinking, in a fulness of happiness to which all the roar of the storm only served for a foil. She heard the drip, drip of the rain; the fast-running stream from the overcharged eaves trough; then the thunder of the wind sweeping over the house in a great gust; and the whistle of the elm branches as they swung through the air like tremendous lithe switches, beating and ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... stopped in the doorway bowing gracefully, his hat held before him and his hand on his stick as though it were resting on a foil. He had the face and carriage of a gallant of the days of Congreve, and he wore his modern frock-coat with as much distinction as if it were of silk and lace. He was evidently amused. "I couldn't help overhearing the last line," he ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... will gather round, and they'll launch me in the ground, And pile the stones the timber wolf to foil; And the moaning pine will wave overhead a nameless grave, Where the black snake in the sunshine loves to coil. And they'll leave me there alone, and perhaps with softened tone Speak of me sometimes in the camp-fire's glow, As a played-out, broken chum, who has gone to ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... questionable blood-guiltiness. With Miriam, it is a guilt which has for excuse that it was the only resort against an unnatural depravity in Father Antonio. But as if to emphasize the indelibleness of blood-stains, however justly inflicted, we have as a foil to Miriam the white sensitiveness of Hilda's conscience, which makes her—though perfectly free from even the indirect responsibility of Miriam—believe herself actually infected. In both cases, it is the shadow of crime which weighs upon the soul; but Miriam, in exactly the position of ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... night, to open the cheese. It was one of the cream cheeses, so popular in Canada, no bigger than my closed hand. We gingerly unwrapped the tin foil and broke it open. To our great joy, in the hollow heart of it there was tucked away the tiny compass Simmons had written for from Vehnmoor just before our second escape. With it were ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... cigar. "Well, well, we certainly have made a stir with our little meetings here. An inspired English Cabinet Minister, travel-stained and dusty, arrives with his valet and a black dispatch-box, to foil our schemes. Send him along, my friend. We are not at all afraid of Mr. Simpson. Perhaps we may even ask him to join us ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... antecedents, but he had read his character aright. He was instantly on the alert. Crane evidently was on a thief's errand, and was likely to steal not only Miles's money but Tom's. Our hero was alive to the emergency, and resolved to foil him. He had his revolver with him; for in the unsettled state of society, with no one to enforce the laws, and indeed no laws to enforce, it was the custom for all men ...
— The Young Miner - or Tom Nelson in California • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... very suddenly to explain about the Christmas tree. There were lots of little pencils on the table. And blocks of paper. And nice cold, shining sheets of tin-foil. There was violet-colored tin-foil, and red-colored tin-foil—and green and ...
— Fairy Prince and Other Stories • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... both all arm'd—with gilded Lances and Shields of Black, with golden Suns painted. The Musick plays a fighting Tune. They fight at Barriers, to the Tune.—Harlequin is often foil'd, but advances still; at last Scaramouch throws him, and is Conqueror; all give ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... no King, French Jews unjustly to the Crown to bring; No Edward, Richard, to lose rule and life, Nor no Lancastrians to renew old strife; No Duke of York nor Earl of March to soyle Their hands in kindred's blood whom they did foil. No crafty Tyrant now usurps the Seat, Who Nephews slew that so he might be great; No need of Tudor Roses to unite, None knows which is the Red or which the White; Spain's braving Fleet a second time is sunk, France knows how oft my fury she hath drunk; ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... all other smiths, both in the Rhine country and elsewhere, to equal that piece of workmanship, or else acknowledge themselves his underlings and vassals. For many days had Mimer himself toiled, alone and vainly, trying to forge a sword whose edge the boasted armor of Amilias could not foil; and now, in despair, he came to ask the help of his pupils ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... hope of a future for the idea. Kruesi, when he had nearly finished it, asked what it was for. I told him I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted 'Mary had a little lamb,' etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. I was never so taken aback in my life. Everybody was astonished. I was always afraid of things that worked the first time. Long ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... brilliant—imitation of the cucuius. By looking at our picture you will see the shape of the insect. Cut this out of a piece of cork about three inches long, and make the legs of thin wire (after the manner of the spider we described in a previous number); then get some strips of thin tin-foil, and gum them on the back of the cucuius; then paint over the whole with transparent green color (oil paints if possible). Now gouge out two holes about the size of the head of a common match, and then cut off the heads of two common matches, ...
— Harper's Young People, September 14, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... really to be considered a forgery, this, instead of being a matter of surprise, ought to be just the thing to be expected; because a clever fabricator, foreseeing that he would be suspected, and eager to foil detection, would know that the curious inquirer into a research of the present description would thus become baffled at every turn from inability, if not to discover it himself, at least, to explain to the satisfaction and conviction of others, the incompatibility of the workings of ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... found the copper gongs used in the dances, and here too grew the wonderful tree which bore the agate beads so prized by the women. This spirit gave the Tinguian rice and sugar-cane, taught them how to plant and reap, how to foil the designs of ill-disposed spirits, the words of the diams and the details of many ceremonies. Further to bind himself to the people, it is said, he married "in the first times" a woman from Manabo. He is summoned in nearly every ceremony, and ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... Mr. Feis, Shakspere detested such a creed and such conduct as Hamlet's, and made him die by poison in order to show his abhorrence of them—this, when we know Hamlet to have died by the poisoned foil in the earlier play. On that view, Cordelia died by hanging in order to show Shakspere's conviction that she was a malefactor; and Desdemona by stifling as a fitting punishment for adultery. The idea is ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... plans for misleading them came to him. But none seemed practicable. Frank was intensely dogged in his determination to accomplish anything he had set out to do. The idea of giving up now, even to mislead his pursuers and so save Captain Greene from capture, was repugnant to him. He wanted to foil the men behind him—unless, as was possible, he only imagined that they were behind him—and still do what he had set out to do, which was in this instance to refill that empty petrol ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Trail • George Durston
... is to make someone happy, and her endeavour carries with it a train of incident, solving a mystery which had thrown a shadow over several lives. A charming foil to her grave elder sister is to be found in Miss Babs, a small coquette of five, whose humorous child-talk ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... place! All the snow was gone from the hills; the stream that gathered its three forks at this point roared over its rocks; the stunted willows were in full leaf; the thick, soft moss of every dark shade of green and yellow and red made a foil for innumerable brilliant flowers. The fat, gray conies chirped at us from the rocks; the ground-squirrels, greatly multiplied since the wholesale destruction of foxes, kept the dogs unavailingly chasing hither and thither whenever they were loose. We never ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... had to "consider his position" in the church. To him as to innumerable other honest, middle-aged and comfortable men, Darwinism came as a dreadful invitation to go out into the wilderness. Over my head and just out of range of my ears he was debating that issue with Siddons as a foil and my cousin as a horrified antagonist. Slowly he was developing his conception of compromise. And meanwhile he wasn't going out into the wilderness at all, but punctually to and fro, along the edge of the lawn by the bed of hollyhocks and through the little green door ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... says I. "You see, right after dinner Brink was missin' and everybody was wonderin' what had become of him, when all of a sudden he bobs up through a tin-foil lake in the middle of the table and proceeds to do this crab impersonation in costume. They say it ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... tin is for protective platings on household utensils and in wrappings of tin-foil. Tin forms an important part of many alloys such as babbitt, Britannia metal, bronze, gun metal ...
— Oxy-Acetylene Welding and Cutting • Harold P. Manly
... explanation is to be found in the incentive given to his energies by the conditions of his life, and of his father's affairs, at this formative period. To the habitually poor, poverty is a familiar; to the patrician who has had reverses, it may be a foil to his spirit: he still has his pride of family and caste. To the burgher class, in which Shakespeare moved in Stratford, the loss of money was the loss of caste. To provide for the future of his children and to restore the declining fortunes and prestige of his family became ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... legerete. What makes me think the tradition that Celimene was Mademoiselle[1] Moliere true, is that Moliere was certainly in love with Celimene. She is made as engaging as possible, and her worst faults do not rise above foibles. Her satire is good-natured. Arsinoe is her foil, introduced to show ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... look," he declared, "only Marjolaine did smile sometimes. You have rather the air of wondering if you'd left out enough tea for the servants' breakfast. Don't mind my teasing; I love you to look like that, and besides, it makes a splendid foil to my Harlequin—my selfishness coming to the fore again, you see. But you really are to go home the moment you're bored; the excellent Kelnicort gets heaps of dances throughout the winter, so don't ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... mercury on a tin foil, smoothly laid on a flat table, and rub it gently with a hare's foot. It soon unites itself to the tin, which then becomes very splendid, or is what they call quickened. A plate of glass is then cautiously, passed upon the tin leaf, in such a manner as to sweep ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... quantities cannot be distinguished from butyric (c) Evaporate to dryness; mix acid by tests within the with equal quantity of scope of the bacteriological arsenious oxide and heat laboratory. on platinum foil. ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... from Nature's toilet, their wild untutored elegance was singular and bewitching. Indeed, Katherine, or "Kattern," as she was more generally called, was the cynosure of this clime—a jewel, that needed not the foil of its homely setting; the envy and admiration of the whole neighbourhood—well known at church, and at Ormskirk market, where she attended weekly—at the latter place to dispose of her produce. Here she was the torment of many a rustic, unable to conquer, or even to understand, the power ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... him what I wished to do, and after a little persuasion he agreed to carry a letter to her on his next marketing trip. My message was prepared by writing it on tissue paper, which was then compressed into a small pellet, and protected by wrapping it in tin-foil so that it could be safely carried in the man's mouth. The probability, of his being searched when he came to the Confederate picketline was not remote, and in such event he was to swallow the pellet. The ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 4 • P. H. Sheridan
... which foil every attempt at relief, I have been aiming, for some time past, to make such a change in the constitution of the patient, as might give a chance of success to ...
— An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses - With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases • William Withering
... of the substance is wanting, as potassium nitrate was shown not to give an explosive substance with tin. A thin layer of a mixture of sulphur and potassium nitrate was placed between sheets of tin and copper foil, and allowed to stand, being kept constantly moist. After a time the copper was found to have become coated with sulphide, while the tin was largely converted into the explosive basic nitrate. The conditions are obviously the same as those found in the powder machinery, where bronze ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... Kittredge, talking incessantly to the bewildered freshman "home" whom she guarded, batted balls with ferocious lunges of her big fist back to the centre field, where a dainty little freshman with soft, appealing brown eyes, half hidden under a mist of yellow hair, occasionally managed to foil T. Reed's pursuit and sent them pounding back into the outstretched arms of a tall, ungainly home who tossed or dropped them—it was hard to tell which—into the freshman basket. It was a shame to let her play, the sophomores grumbled. She was a giantess, not ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... against her, her surprise gave place to a mingled feeling of impatience and anger. She drew her foot back with a sudden movement, but unfortunately the foot went one way and the slipper another. A fencing-master, who sees his foil carried ten steps away from him by a back stroke, could not feel more astonishment than that felt by Madame de Bergenheim. Her first movement was to place her foot, so singularly undressed, upon the ground; an instinctive horror of the damp, muddy walk made her draw it quickly back. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... man at her side in the uniform of an American captain with his black curls and dark face, made a splendid foil for Ruth's beauty. Behind him walked his twin sister—as like Tom Cameron as another pea in a pod—and Ann Hicks, both in rose-color, completing a color scheme worthy of the taste of whoever had originated it. For the sheer beauty of the picture, ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson
... exploring the subtleties of the human heart. The pen of Dickens portrayed all classes of society except, perhaps, that which Thackeray made his peculiar field. The historians, too, furnish singular contrasts: the vehement pugnacity of Freeman is a foil to the serene studiousness of Acton; the erratic career of Froude to the concentration of Stubbs. The influence exercised on their contemporaries by recluses such as Newman or Darwin may be compared with the more worldly activities of Huxley and Samuel ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... if they cannot run clear. Sparkling and pellucid rills, wherein we can all see our own-selves and trace our own dreams, irradiated with light like the flickering of gems, and set off with rich foil, are those to attract the popular eye. Genuine humor, pathos, elevation and delicacy of fancy seek no disguise, but aim at the utmost simplicity of expression. Inversions, like affectation in every shape, are foreign ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... take heed; they stop in full career. Yon crowding flock, that at a distance gaze, Have haply foil'd the turf. See that old hound! How busily he works, but dares not trust His doubtful sense; draws yet a wider ring. Hark! Now again the chorus fills. As bells, Sally'd awhile, at once their paean renew, And high in air the tuneful thunder rolls, See how they toss, with animated ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... you may be right; do as foil would be done by is the golden rule after all. But, here comes Mr. John Effingham; so ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... rapid combustion, the body, if not already black, ought to be blackened. When metals are to be burned, it is necessary to blacken or otherwise tarnish them, so as to diminish their reflective power. Blackened zinc foil, when brought into the focus of invisible rays, is instantly caused to blaze, and burns with its peculiar purple light. Magnesium wire flattened, or tarnished magnesium ribbon, also bursts into flame. Pieces of charcoal suspended in a receiver full of oxygen are also set on ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... for some time, during which she was endeavouring to get it off, to effect which she made use of the small bone of the leg of the kangaroo, round the point of which Bennillong had rolled some punk, so that it looked not unlike the button of a foil. She held it every now and then to the fire, then applied and pressed it to the navel until it cooled. This was persevered in, till the mother thought the cord sufficiently deadened, and then with a shell ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... verse for a young friend's Album (six will be enough). M. Burney will tell you who she is I want 'em for. A girl of gold. Six lines—make 'em eight—signed Barry C——. They need not be very good, as I chiefly want 'em as a foil to mine. But I shall be seriously obliged by any refuse scrap. We are in the last ages of the world, when St. Paul prophesied that women should be "headstrong, lovers of their own wills, having Albums." I fled hither to escape the Albumean persecution, and had not been ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... ask what Mr. OWEN NARES was doing in this galley; and I cannot tell you. I can only say that he was very brave about it all. In a sense it was a serious performance, the only one of its kind in the play; yet not serious enough to serve as a foil for the general frivolity, for he was constantly bringing his own high sentiments into ridicule, and so burlesquing the OWEN NARES that we love ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 8th, 1920 • Various
... of the staircase, cosily and femininely draped, where, by the light of the shaded lamp, he saw a woman of full round figure reclining upon a couch in such a position as not to disturb a pile of magnificent hair on the crown of her head. A deep purple dressing-gown formed an admirable foil to the peculiarly rich brown of her hair-plaits; her left arm, which was naked nearly up to the shoulder, was thrown upward, and between the fingers of her right hand she held a cigarette, while she idly breathed from her plump lips a thin ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... they do fencers or wrestlers, who if they come in robustiously and put for it with a deal of violence are received for the braver fellows; when many times their own rudeness is a cause of their disgrace, and a slight touch of their adversary gives all that boisterous force the foil. But in these things the unskilful are naturally deceived, and judging wholly by the bulk, think rude things greater than polished, and scattered more numerous than composed; nor think this only to be true in the sordid multitude, ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... men, who at the time when these prints were first published, were noted for teaching the arts of defence by different weapons, and who are here drawn from the life; one of whom is a Frenchman, teacher of the small-sword, making a thrust with his foil; the other an Englishman, master of the quarter-staff; the vivacity of the first, and the cold contempt visible in the face of the second, beautifully describe the natural disposition of the two nations. ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... would soon have wearied her. A warm, bright nature, loving to please others, but to be pleased in return, cruelly hurt by surging against this rock-bound coast, piqued and almost angered, sent into moods of daring, seductive warmth and gayety, quite capable of making a foil of Dr. Maverick, who was strangely puzzled by her contradictory moods. But for one thing, he must have tried to cage the dazzling, elusive spirit: he, too, had a strong sense of honor toward his friend; and he could ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... behind me; and poor Dad saying, '"'Pon my honour, Arthur, I can't account for it!" Oh, how my cheeks tingled when I reached my room! But Cissie had laid out my very best evening dress, the white satin one, vandyked at the bottom with spots of morone foil, and the pearl knots, you know, catching up the drapery from the left shoulder. I had poor mother's lace ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... the part, was excellent in his quiet moods, and when he was obliged to rant was no worse than other ranters. The superb solidity of Mr. SASS as the Russian officer served as an admirable foil to the mercurial methods of Quixano. Miss PHYLLIS RELPH as the heroine mitigated the effect of her obvious sincerity by a bad trick of showing her nice teeth. Mr. PERCEVAL CLARK, as a young American millionaire, was pleasantly British. Humorous relief of a cosmopolitan order was provided by the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various
... were to begin at nine o'clock. They were to come in this order: Standing broad jump, running broad jump, high jump, foil match, revolver contest and ...
— The Boy Allies at Jutland • Robert L. Drake
... the guerdon ye sought with your bloodshed and toil, Was it slaves, or dominion, or rapine, or spoil? No! your lofty emprise was to fetter and foil The uprooter of Greece's domain, When he tore the last remnant of food from her soil, Till her famished ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... and eleven frigates, under Vice-Admiral Villaret. In this action three French ships were taken; the rest fled for protection to their own port and their own land batteries. In the West Indies the English cruizers and squadrons were not so successful; all their vigilance was not sufficient to foil the daring projects of Victor Hugues. The French, indeed, recovered the whole of Guadaloupe, attacked with success the fort of Tiburon, in St. Domingo; and made themselves masters of St. Lucia; Grenada, Dominico, and St. Vincent's were with difficulty preserved. But in these victories ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... sending all the merry company for a drive, and now Carrie came in alone. It was the first time that Hurstwood had had a chance to see her facing the audience quite alone, for nowhere else had she been without a foil of some sort. He suddenly felt, as she entered, that her old strength—the power that had grasped him at the end of the first act—had come back. She seemed to be gaining feeling, now that the play was ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... The Nights serves admirably as a foil to the absolute realism of the picture in general. We enjoy being carried away from trivial and commonplace characters, scenes and incidents; from the matter of fact surroundings of a work-a-day world, a life of eating and drinking, sleeping and waking, fighting ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... make the victory more definite," replied the poet, testing his foil and saluting the ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... is her son, Fathom, the hero of the book. Because he is placarded, "Shrewd villain of monstrous inhumanity," we are fain to accept him for what his creator intended; but seldom in word or deed is he a convincingly real villain. His friend and foil, the noble young Count de Melvil, is no more alive than he; and equally wooden are Joshua, the high-minded, saint-like Jew, and that tedious, foolish Don Diego. Neither is the heroine alive, the peerless Monimia, but then, in her case, want of vitality ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... seek him, but was almost slain, Perhaps is dead now; everywhere The knights come foil'd from the great quest, in vain; In vain they ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris
... Sammy Brown was shone upon by the far-flung rays of the renaissance. Sammy, with his ultra clothes, his horseshoe pin, his plump face, his trite slang, his uncomprehending admiration of Ravenel—the broker's clerk made an excellent foil to the new, bright unseen visitor to the ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... jester had acquainted him with the discovery just made of the secret hoard, and he was therefore compelled to have recourse to this desperate move. But I was apprized of his intentions by Will Sommers, and have come in time to foil him." ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the box, and the umpire broke open a pasteboard box, brought out a ball that was wrapped in tin foil, removed the covering, and tossed the snowy sphere to the freshman pitcher Yale had so ...
— Frank Merriwell at Yale • Burt L. Standish
... destiny of Nature's calling, Foil'd and frustrate! Just then the evil tide was crawling To drown ...
— The Village Wife's Lament • Maurice Hewlett
... of passion in Mr. ASQUITH'S measured criticism of the Allied Council and of the PRIME MINISTER'S speech on the subject in Paris. His foil was carefully buttoned, and though it administered a shrewd thrust now and again it was not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 28, 1917 • Various
... fine ivory carving from chamber 23, showing a bound captive; the large stock of painted model vases in limestone in a box in chamber 20; the set of perfect vases found in chamber 21; a fine piece of ribbed ivory; a piece of thick gold-foil covering of a hotep table, patterned as a mat, found in the long chamber west of the tomb; the deep mass of brown vegetable matter in the north-east chamber; the large stock of grain between chambers 8 and 11; and the bed ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... is made of two pieces of tin-foil, four by ten, and three pieces of waxed paper a little larger than the foil. A piece of wire is twisted into the end of each piece of foil, and then one sheet of foil is laid on a sheet of paper. This is then covered ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... bar admirably, wrestles with amazing dexterity, and is an excellent cricketer. He runs like a buck, leaps like a wild goat, and plays at skittles like a wizard. Then he has a fine voice for singing, he touches the guitar so as to make it speak, and handles a foil as well as any fencer in Spain.—Cervantes, Don Quixote, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... and she smiled and said, kindly this time: "Look ye, Squire, I am hot and weary, and ill-content; but presently it will be better with me; for my knees have been telling my shoulders that the cold water of this little lake will be sweet and pleasant this summer noonday, and that I shall forget my foil when I have taken my pleasure therein. Wherefore, go thou with thine hounds without the thicket and there abide my coming. And I bid thee look not aback as thou goest, for therein were peril to thee: I shall not keep ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris
... not Antony's passion for Cleopatra which ruins him. He has not the cohesion which obtains success. He is loose-bonded. Caesar is his complete foil and contrast. Caesar exists dramatically to explain Antony. Antony's challenge to single combat and the speeches he makes to his servants are characteristic. The marriage to Octavia, more than his Egyptian ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... daughter could scarcely have a worse one—was that my own dear father, knowing Lord Castlewood's bad behavior, and his own sad plight in consequence, and through that knowledge caring little to avenge his death, for wife and children's sake preferred to foil inquiry rather than confront the truth and challenge it. He might not have meant to go so far, at first beginning with it; but, starting once, might be driven on by grievous loss, and bitter sense of recreant friends, and the bleak despair of a homeless world before him. ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... the reason, that, while they are the least essential, and on the whole the least interesting, of domesticated animals, they have had a certain place in civilization. They afford, moreover, a capital foil by which to set off the virtues of the dog. Nowhere else, indeed, among the creatures which are intimately associated with men, do we find two related forms which afford, along with a certain likeness, ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... the level part of the forest, which has a rich black soil. Great sarmentous plants climb here up to the tops of the trees: wild Grapes, the climbing, poisonous Sumach, (Rhus toxicodendron,) and the vine-like Cinque-foil, which transforms withered, naked trunks into green columns, Bignonias, with their brilliant scarlet trumpet-flowers, are the most remarkable. The Thuja occidentalis, which may be met with in European ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... from an unwelcome suitor? She knew full well that her friend would resent the slightest semblance of love-making on the part of any man on board. Already her astonishment at Elsie's unlooked-for vivacity was yielding to the humor of meeting such a rival. The Count might serve as a foil, but the real quarry now was the captain. That very night there would be a moon. And the sea was calm as a sheltered lake. Isobel's lips parted in a delighted smile as she tried to imagine Courtenay deserting her to discuss those celebrities whom Elsie had made the most of. And how she ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... if you choose. That's your way: giggle over everything. But when I play background, I want it to be with something worth while in the foreground. I don't hanker after making myself a foil to show off such fellers as our officers ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... own stamp. I foresaw the position I should occupy in his establishment. I had once been sent to the plantation for punishment, and fear of the son had induced the father to recall me very soon. My mind was made up; I was resolved that I would foil my master and save my children, or I would perish in the attempt. I kept my plans to myself; I knew that friends would try to dissuade me from them, and I would not wound their ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... whereabouts of little Joe, the "kid" of the patrol, by means of smoke telegraphy and track his abductors to their disgrace; how they assist the passengers of a stranded steamer and foil a plot to harm and perhaps kill an aged sea-captain, one must read the book to learn. A swift-moving narrative of convincing interest and ...
— The Boy Scouts on Belgian Battlefields • Lieut. Howard Payson
... bottles from the dispensary across the road, each using a billiard-bridge. The girl in the orange sweater had a handful of scribbled notes, and was telling them where to push the pills. There were other objects on the map, too—pistol-cartridges, and cigarettes, and foil-wrapped food-concentrate wafers. Paula, seeing ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... built of squared brick, Which cunningly was without mortar laid, Whose walls were high, but nothing strong, nor thick, And golden foil all over them displayed, That purest sky with brightness they dismayed. High lifted up were many lofty towers And goodly galleries far overlaid, Full of fair windows, and delightful bowers, And on the top a dial told the ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... of nourishment his stomach will retain, he is driven to the conviction that there is something wrong, and that he had better see the doctor. The result of the young athlete's visit to the doctor was that he mournfully laid down the dumb-bells and the foil, eschewed gymnastics, and took ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... whimsicalities, impossible suggestions offered with perfect gravity. He was always perfectly natural; he never attempted to live up to his part; in talk, at least, he never forced the note. His attitude toward himself was slightly tinged with humor, and he knew how to foil easily and pleasantly too great a pressure ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... not succeed in our first attempt; some little neglect or accident may foil our present efforts, but the present enterprise will result in gathering stores of experience which will make the next effort certain. Not that I do not expect success now, but accidental failure now will not be ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... different productions, Fanfaro was continually assisting the performers; he handed Girdel the weights and took them from him; he accompanied Robeckal's sword exercise with hollow beats on a tambourine; he played the violin while Caillette danced on the rope, and acted as Bobichel's foil in his comic acts. Fanfaro himself was not to appear before the second part; for the conclusion of the first part a climax was to be given in which Girdel would perform a piece in which he had everywhere appeared with thunders of applause; the ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... the powder works; but the explanation of the formation of the substance is wanting, as potassium nitrate was shown not to give an explosive substance with tin. A thin layer of a mixture of sulphur and potassium nitrate was placed between sheets of tin and copper foil, and allowed to stand, being kept constantly moist. After a time the copper was found to have become coated with sulphide, while the tin was largely converted into the explosive basic nitrate. The conditions are obviously the same as those found in the powder ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... marry," she continued after a pause which none interrupted, "I am resolved my husband shall not be a rival, but a foil to me. I will suffer no competitor near the throne; I shall exact an undivided homage: his devotions shall not be shared between me and the shape he sees in his mirror. Mr. Rochester, now sing, and ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... song or invocation, in which he mentioned the wants of the wretched Indians, and the cunning endeavours of the Evil Spirit to keep them in his service, and ended by begging his master to shew his own superiority, and enable his priest to foil the tricks of his adversary. The tribe assembled, just as they had done on the previous days. But they were more anxious now than they had been before, because the more there is in the cabin of a man, the greater is his thirst to increase his store, and the ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... where their feet may go; Rich be the meadows where their hands may toil, The fountains many where the good wines flow; Full be their harvest bins with corn and oil, And quick their hearts all wise delights to know; To sorrow may their humour be a foil, Tardy their footsteps to the gate Farewell. Deep be your cups. Our hearts the gods make light: Drink, that their joy may ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... or his good qualities. She liked him in a sort of way; nay, it might even be said that she was fond of him. But what she liked better than him was to gratify her vanity, by showing her power over the finest young fellow in the village, and to use him as a foil to aggravate George Hawker. My aunt Betsy (spinster), used to say, that if she were a man, sooner than stand that hussy's airs (meaning Mary's), in the way young Stockbridge did, she'd cut, and run to America, ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... greatest care to reduce to a minimum the evils necessarily attendant on the mode of payment by results. A certain number of teachers made it their chief effort to secure the largest possible number of grants. Huxley regarded these as poachers of the worst kind, and did all he could to foil them. He did all he could to promote systematic practical instruction in the classes, and to aid teachers who desired to learn their business more thoroughly. He insisted again and again upon the ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... for. The delicacy surprised him. But he was too much the master, too confident of his own powers, to trifle. He delivered one of his favorite thrusts; it was a stroke of his own invention; three times out of five, in years past, it had carried home the button of his foil to his opponent's jacket. It was executed with the directness and rapidity ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... malua ula. The malua-ula was a variety of tapa that was stained with hili kukui (the root-bark of the kukui tree). The ripe kukui nut was chewed into a paste and mingled with this stain. Mama ula refers to this chewing. The malua ula is mentioned as a foil to the pa-u, ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... pictured them as a kind of beneficent aristocracy seven feet high, with minds and manners to match their physique, and set above the rest of the world for its good; for I found it necessary (so that my dream should have a point) to provide them with a foil in the shape of millions of such people as we meet every day. I was egotistic and self-seeking enough, it is true, to enroll myself among the former, and had chosen for my particular use and wear just such a frame as that of the Theseus, with, of course, the ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... unrestrained invective against the Borgias, giving to the usual empty assertions the place which should be assigned to evidence and argument. Like his predecessors along that path, he causes Giuliano della Rovere to shine heroically by contrast—a foil to throw into greater relief the blackness of Alexander. But he carries assertion rather further than do others when he says of Cardinal della Rovere that "He ascended the steps of St. Peter's Chair without simony and amid general applause, and with him ceased, ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... moment, against the blue sky behind it; then the fleeting cloud which shadowed it passed on, and the face of the column brightened into such luminousness that the sky behind sank to the complexion of a dark foil. ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... showed us the other religions mainly to place Christianity and its renewing and redeeming power in a brighter light. The former served, as it were, for a foil to the picture of our Saviour's religion and character, which he desired to imprint upon the soul. Whether he succeeded in bringing us into complete "unity" with the personality of Christ, to which he stood in such close relations, is doubtful, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... know what I think?" Beth inquired. "I think you should be punished for using Mrs. Wordling or anyone else as a foil. ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... and listened to the cacophonous sounds of the names: the Encephalartos horridus, a gigantic iron rust-colored artichoke, like those put on portals of chateaux to foil wall climbers; the Cocos Micania, a sort of notched and slender palm surrounded by tall leaves resembling paddles and oars; the Zamia Lehmanni, an immense pineapple, a wondrous Chester leaf, planted in sweet-heather soil, its top ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... hate you!" exclaimed Gerardin, turning round in his saddle, and shaking his clenched fist at the English lieutenant. "You have foiled me again and again. I know you, and who you are; you stand between me and my birthright; you shall not foil me again. I have before sought your life; the next time we meet we will not separate till one ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... more than fifty of the shape XIII, 22, and many of XIII, 20. Nearly all were, however, broken, for, as in all these tombs, the arch had fallen in. This tomb contained also a string of beads, barrel beads of lapis lazuli, carnelian and gold foil, and small discs ...
— El Kab • J.E. Quibell
... in, that would have been another matter. Those two fenced often; I saw them many times. True, Joan was easily his master, but it made a good show for all that, for La Hire was a grand swordsman. What a swift creature Joan was! You would see her standing erect with her ankle-bones together and her foil arched over her head, the hilt in one hand and the button in the other—the old general opposite, bent forward, left hand reposing on his back, his foil advanced, slightly wiggling and squirming, his watching eye boring ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Mary-Girl (a silly title) was the engaging personality of Miss MAY BLAYNEY. Always a fascinating figure to watch, she showed an extraordinary sensitiveness of voice and expression. As for that honest and admirable actor, Mr. MCKINNEL, who made the perfect foil to her charms that every good husband should wish to be, he seems never to tire of playing these stern, dour, semi-brutal parts. That more genial characters are open to him his success in Great Catherine showed. Miss MARY BROUGH, as a charwoman, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... could ascribe my inability to rise, till, hearing me complaining of my leg, he examined it, and found that my foot was gangrened. An accident of my early days was the cause of this new trouble. At Soreze I had my right foot wounded by the unbuttoned foil of a schoolfellow with whom I was fencing. It seemed that the muscles of the part had become sensitive, and had suffered much from cold while I was lying unconscious on the field of Eylau; thence had resulted a swelling which explained ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... finally made drawings and took them to a machinist whom he knew, afterwards one of his assistants, who laughed at the idea but made the model. Previously he bet a friend a barrel of apples that he could do it. When the model was finished he arranged a piece of tin foil and talked into it, and when it gave back a distinct sound the machinist was frightened, and Edison won his barrel of apples, "which," he says, "I was very glad ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... fanatics all arrayed For revolution! To foil their villainous crusade Unsheathe again ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... joy is the next study, No. 4! How well Chopin knew the value of contrast in tonality and sentiment! A veritable classic is this piece, which, despite its dark key color, C sharp minor as a foil to the preceding one in E, bubbles with life and spurts flame. It reminds one of the story of the Polish peasants, who are happiest when they sing in the minor mode. Kullak calls this "a bravura study for velocity and lightness in both ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... little harvest of curious fruit—sweet-cake rings and stars and two gingerbread men hanging by pack-thread from the white and green branches, the Noah's Ark lodged in one crotch, the very amateur snow-shoes in another, and the lost toys wrapped up, transfigured in tobacco-foil, dangling merrily before Kaviak's ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... Pour some mercury on a tin foil, smoothly laid on a flat table, and rub it gently with a hare's foot. It soon unites itself to the tin, which then becomes very splendid, or is what they call quickened. A plate of glass is then cautiously, passed upon the tin ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... the word Flos; for the flower is only a group of {42} singularly happy leaves. From these two roots come foglio, feuille, feuillage, and fleur;—blume, blossom, and bloom; our foliage, and the borrowed foil, and the connected technical groups of words in architecture ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... trust its pledge; but thus Recall'd it; rapt its Ganymede from us. Was there no milder way but the small-pox, The very filthiness of Pandora's box? So many spots, like naeves on Venus' soil, One jewel set off with so many a foil; Blisters with pride swell'd, which through's flesh did sprout Like rose-buds, stuck i' th' lily-skin about. Each little pimple had a tear in it, To wail the fault its rising did commit: 60 Which, rebel-like, with its own lord at strife, Thus made an insurrection ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... of muscle and bone. Jan's knife swept in an upward flash and plunged to the hilt through the flesh of his enemy's forearm. With a cry of pain O'Grady dropped his club, and the two crashed to the stone floor of the trail. This was the attack that Jan had feared and tried to foil, and with a lightning-like squirming movement he swung himself half free, and on his back, with O'Grady's huge hands linking at his throat, he drew back his knife arm for ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... extraordinary that such mysterious characters as Fantomas can exist nowadays. Is it really possible that a single man can commit such a number of crimes, and that any human being can escape discovery, as they say Fantomas can, and be able to foil the cleverest devices of the police? ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... with goblins was fruitless. One night a dark and hostile throng emerged from the wood and moved toward the blockhouse, where twenty musketeers were keeping guard. "If you be ghosts or devils I will foil you," cried the captain, and tearing a silver button from his doublet he rammed it into his gun and fired on the advancing host. Even as the smoke of his musket was blown on the wind, so did the beleaguering army vanish, the silver bullet proving that they were ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... their noses in the cool water, and sent the bright drops in showers about us, I looked down upon her, the dark green of her riding-habit making a rich foil to the soft glow of her cheek, and the drooping plume of her hat falling over her snowy neck and mingling with the dark ringlets, and one little hand from which she had drawn the glove playing with Fatima's tawny mane—and I ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... hand, Charles considered that Scotland was never before, under any of his ancestors, so united and so animated in its own defence; yet had often been able to foil or elude the force of England, combined heartily in one cause, and inured by long practice to the use of arms. How much greater difficulty should he find, at present, to subdue by violence a people inflamed with religious prejudices; while he could only oppose to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... Corineius was, Since when we passed the Cicillian gulf, And so transfretting the Illirian sea, Arrived on the coasts of Aquitaine, Where with an army of his barbarous Gauls Goffarius and his brother Gathelus Encountering with our host, sustained the foil. And for your sakes my Turnus there I lost, Turnus that slew six hundred men at arms All in an hour, with his sharp battle-axe. From thence upon the strons of Albion To Corus haven happily we came, And quelled the giants, come of Albion's race, With Gogmagog son ...
— 2. Mucedorus • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... American imagination, always receptive of the romantic, might readily and forgivably have pictured villas, maids in durance vile, and sword-thrusts under the moonlight. But the waiter, who had served his time in one or another of the foreign armies, knew that no foil or rapier could have made such a scar; more probably the saber. For the Italian officer on horseback is the maddest of all men, and in the spirit of play courts hazards that another man might sensibly ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... workmanship, or else acknowledge themselves his underlings and vassals. For many days had Mimer himself toiled, alone and vainly, trying to forge a sword whose edge the boasted armor of Amilias could not foil; and now, in despair, he came to ask the help of his pupils ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin
... On the contrary, it will bring you followers. None but Lotzen and his circle will resent it, and they, already, are your enemies. The Governorship will make them no more so. Instead, it will keep them careful; for it will give you immense power to detect and foil ...
— The Colonel of the Red Huzzars • John Reed Scott
... the long black velvet robe covered with tin-foil ornaments, with which the necromancer was wont to frighten the ignorant and superstitious peasants who came to consult him ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... wrested from him. His jester had acquainted him with the discovery just made of the secret hoard, and he was therefore compelled to have recourse to this desperate move. But I was apprized of his intentions by Will Sommers, and have come in time to foil him." ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... hand, he laid down the condition that any money he might win should be given to the poor. He prayed for skill in his dancing lessons, because he wanted to have more time for more serious studies. He was more devout in his daily life than ever, prayed to Christ with the foil in his hand, studied the Bible in Hebrew and Greek, spent whole nights in prayer, fasted the livelong day on Sundays, and was, in a word, so Methodistic in his habits that he could truly describe himself as a "rigid Pietist." He interfered in many a duel, and rebuked ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... acid. Black precipitate of metallic Propionic acid in small silver formic acid. quantities cannot be distinguished from butyric (c) Evaporate to dryness; mix acid by tests within the with equal quantity of scope of the bacteriological arsenious oxide and heat laboratory. on platinum foil. ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... 178 foil. The accounts of Ctesias and other ancient writers seem to throw no light on the town-planning and streets of Babylon, however useful they ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... ordinary reader, in the action, character or fate of the victims; and as for "Hamlet," so far is he from any idea of blood revenge, that he doubts and disobeys the message from the other world, doubts indeed the existence of any other world, and dies at last not a bloody death, but by a foil "unbated and envenomed." ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... puzzled. As I broke the seal, pulled out the cork and unwrapped the cigar from its gold foil he took a stick and rapped loudly on the floor. After a brief interval footsteps were heard on the stairs and Mike Monahan, white aproned and scarlet faced, appeared ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... in the camp, and train'd in every toil Which taught his sire the haughtiest foes to foil; Destin'd he seem'd by fate to raise his name, And rule the empire with ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... forego the same advantage; but when this compact is broken by any special lady, the treason is thought to be very treacherous. It is as though a fencer should remove the button from the end of his foil. But Mrs Greenow was so good-natured in tendering the services of Jeannette to all the young ladies, and was so willing to share with others those good things of the toilet which her care had provided, that her cap was forgiven her by the ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... it kindles, none is lost, And it is soon extinct; thus from the horn, That on the dexter of the cross extends, Down to its foot, one luminary ran From mid the cluster shone there; yet no gem Dropp'd from its foil; and through the beamy list Like flame in alabaster, glow'd ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... to the essential nature of their so palpable well-being, [74] or the rival standards thereof, of origins and issues. And yet, with all their gaiety, as its last triumphant note in truth, they were ready to trifle with death, welcoming, by way of a foil to the easy character of their days, a certain luxurious sense of danger—the night-alarm, the arquebuse peeping from some quiet farm-building across their way, the rumoured presence in their neighbourhood of this or that great military leader—delightful premonitions of the adventurous ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... hot-air register to the window sash, the window sash to the weight—specially covered with tin foil—and brought forth the table on which was the now completed Sleep Prolonger. Only the face of the clock appeared, the rest was buried under an arrangement of cardboard boxes and perfectly useless spools, that turned with the rope ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... was he clear, and on this he became more settled with every hour: whatever he did he must do with the idea of a fundamental awakening in Maggie. Merely to foil her in this one scheme would be to solve the lesser part of his problem; Maggie would be left unchanged, or if changed at all the change would be toward a greater hardness, and his major problem would be ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... chapels, fountains running wine, great cellars full of wine free as water to all comers, silk tents, gold lace and foil, gilt lions, and such things without end; and, in the midst of all, the rich Cardinal out-shone and out-glittered all the noblemen and gentlemen assembled. After a treaty made between the two Kings with as much solemnity as if they had intended to keep it, the lists—nine ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... shall see express'd Love's better omens, in the green hues dress'd Of this selected foliage.—Nymph, 't is thine The warning story on its leaves to find, Proud Daphne's fate, imprison'd in its rind, And with its umbrage veil'd, great Phoebus' power Scorning, and bent, with feet of wind, to foil His swift pursuit, till on Thessalian shore Shot into boughs, and rooted to the soil.— Thus warn'd, fair Maid, Apollo's ire to shun, Soon may his Spray's ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... his contemporaries is a venial offense in the time of the troubadours and minnesingers. Charisi was particularly happy in his use of the "mosaic" style, and his short poems and epigrams are most charming. Deep melancholy is a foil to his humor, but as often his writings are disfigured by levity. The following may serve as samples of his versatile muse. The first is addressed ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... but serves as a connecting link between the other features, which have before seemed more or less unrelated. The grand staircase, built of Siena marble, the finest example of the intelligent use of colored marble in this country, has until now lacked its foil, which the dull blue walls now give. The added pleasure which is apparent in viewing the stairway emphasizes the importance of the guiding intelligence which has made all this possible. There is in our experience only one other building in the country ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration - Vol 1, No. 9 1895 • Various
... snug, and continue to sigh on, Till made by my losses as bold as a lion, I venture at all, — while my avarice regards The whole pool as my own — 'Come, give me five cards.' 'Well done!' cry the ladies; 'Ah, Doctor, that's good! 25 The pool's very rich — ah! the Doctor is loo'd!' Thus foil'd in my courage, on all sides perplex'd, I ask for advice from the lady that's next: 'Pray, Ma'am, be so good as to give your advice; Don't you think the best way is to venture for 't twice?' 30 'I advise,' ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... less easy to ascertain exactly, in what part of the mouth they were modulated; but recollecting that those parts of the mouth must be more ready to use for the purpose of forming the vowels, which were in the habit of being exerted in forming the other letters; I rolled up some tin foil into cylinders about the size of my finger; and speaking the vowels separately through them, found by the impressions made on them, in what part of the mouth each of the vowels was formed with somewhat greater accuracy, but not so ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... pockets of my coat and climbed down. I kept those persimmons and am tasting them to-night. Lupton's Pond may fill to a puddle, the meadows may shrivel, the creek dry up and disappear, and old Time may even try his wiles on me. But I shall foil him to the end; for I am carrying still in my pocket some of yesterday's persimmons,—persimmons that ripened in the rime of a winter when I was ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... Princess unnoticed, slipped the ring from her finger, and escaped unobserved. He hastened to the seaside, and, finding a vessel ready to sail, embarked, and arrived at Biserta, in Africa. Here he found Agramant impatient for the talisman which was to foil the enchantments of Atlantes and to put Rogero into his hands. The dwarf, kneeling before the king, presented him with the ring, and Agramant, delighted at the success of his mission, crowned him in ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... my young friend. I cannot say I regret yielding to the impulse that moved me. I feel that I have helped to foil the ...
— Struggling Upward - or Luke Larkin's Luck • Horatio Alger
... half-giddy eye, by the ease with which he bore down and dispersed those who fought against our freedom. My father alone offered an opposition which threatened to prove fatal to him; for Wallace, it was said, could foil any two martial champions that ever drew sword. Brushing from him the armed men, as a lady would drive away with her fan a swarm of troublesome flies, he secured me in one arm, used his other for our mutual protection, and I found myself in ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... This word appears to be derived from the same root as Paup-puk-ke-nay, a grasshopper, the inflection iss making it personal. The Indian idea is that of harum scarum. He is regarded as a foil to Manabozho, with whom he is frequently brought in contact in ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... one might pass on them, I imagine, never gave Boccaccio a thought, only the way they were placed being important. The elaborate preparation for the story-telling; the grouping of them as a whole, in contrast with the greater story he put as their contrast and foil; the solemn gloom, the deep chiaroscuro of this framing, painted like a miniature; the artful way in which he prepares for his lieta brigata the way out of the charnel-house: these are the real 'Decameron.' ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... spake, and him Beelzebub Thus answered: "Leader of those armies bright, Which but th' Omnipotent none could have foil'd...." MILTON, Paradise ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... Government has done a thing To make its guardian-angel droop her wing In sickened indignation: That is, has striven to strengthen its redoubts, Perfidious 'Ins,' to foil the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... currents; that for many a league The shorn and parcell'd Oxus strains along Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles— Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had, In his high mountain-cradle in Pamere, A foil'd circuitous wanderer—till at last The long'd for dash of waves is heard, and wide His luminous home of waters opens, bright And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars Emerge, and shine upon the ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... to a critic, it being very certain that he was, like this essayer a very indifferent poet; he loved to be well dressed; and I remember a little young gentleman whom Mr. Walsh used to take into his company as a double foil to his person and capacity. Inquire between Sunning Hill and Oakingham, for a young, short, equal, gentleman, the very bow of the God of Love, and tell me whether he be a proper author to make personal reflections? He may extol the ancients, but he has reason to thank the gods ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... furious lust of a mortal enemy, to save her husband's life, and who, in so doing, did that for him she would not have done for herself! This is not the place wherein we are to multiply these examples; they are too high and rich to be set off with so poor a foil as I can give them here; let us reserve them for a nobler place; but for examples of ordinary lustre, do we not every day see women amongst us who surrender themselves for their husbands sole benefit, and by their express order and ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... a peahen's cry, above all a bird's song, is a great interruption to hypnotism—silent or by voices. A nightingale will foil the worst attack. ...
— Inferences from Haunted Houses and Haunted Men • John Harris
... a moment later his smile died away, and he drew his lips inward with anxiety. He felt a new power in the foil slithering up and down his own. Suddenly a thousand needles stung his wrist: his foil lay rolling about the deck. The vicomte bowed jestingly, stepped forward and picked up the foil, presenting it to its owner. Again they resumed guard. Quick as light ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... and Miriam under a similar pressure of questionable blood-guiltiness. With Miriam, it is a guilt which has for excuse that it was the only resort against an unnatural depravity in Father Antonio. But as if to emphasize the indelibleness of blood-stains, however justly inflicted, we have as a foil to Miriam the white sensitiveness of Hilda's conscience, which makes her—though perfectly free from even the indirect responsibility of Miriam—believe herself actually infected. In both cases, it is the shadow of crime ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... superstitious customs, and ceremonies, and the like; so that there was no parting of them; or those who had long been grappling and conflicting with their strong corruptions and old temptations, and in those conflicts had received many a foil, and got many a fall to the wounding of their consciences, and cutting deep gashes upon their souls; now they stand up with a kind of omnipotence among them, no temptation is able to stand before them; ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... of gems, the orient list, The diamond, topaz, amethyst, The emerald mild, the ruby gay; Talk of my gem, Anne Hathaway! She hath a way, with her bright eye, Their various lustre to defy, The jewel she and the foil they, So sweet to look Anne hath a way. She hath a way, Anne Hathaway, To make grief ...
— Shakespeare and Precious Stones • George Frederick Kunz
... ladies of Brookfield further opportunity for studying one of the levels from which they had risen. Arabella did almost all the fencing with Laura Tinley, contemptuously as a youth of station returned from college will turn and foil an ill-conditioned villager, whom formerly he ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... commerce—and that your efforts to suppress it, have affected nothing more than a three-fold increase of its horrors. There is a God who rules this world—all-powerful—far-seeing: He does not permit his creatures to foil his designs. It is he who, for his all-wise, though to us often inscrutable purposes, throws "impossibilities" in the way of our fondest hopes and most strenuous exertions. Can ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... was the half-bottle of Three Star brandy sold by the grocer. This bottle had its neck broken clean off with a stone. The stone employed for the purpose was picked up, as was the neck of the bottle, with its cork, covered with a tin-foil seal. The seal showed marks of attempts that had been made to uncork the ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... face were only bits of emphasis that made her prettiness the more distinct; and the dress, not rumpled by her mother's careful hours of work, was a white cloud of loveliness. Finally there were two triumphant bouquets of violets, each with the stems wrapped in tin-foil shrouded by a bow of purple chiffon; and one bouquet she wore at her waist and the other she carried in ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... with the hunter and Tayoga. He was still glad of the lucky chance that had taken away the Governor General. There was also a certain keen delight in speculating what their enemies would do next. Conscious of right and strength he believed they could foil all attempts upon them, and while the question was still fresh in his mind Father Philibert Drouillard came in. Wrapped closely in his black robe he looked taller, leaner, and more ascetic than ever, and his gaze was even stronger ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... Dumaresq. He turned, and laid the foil back upon the mantelpiece behind him; then calmly crossed the intervening space, and stood before her. "I am grateful to you for granting me an interview, mademoiselle," he said. "I am aware that you have done so ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... she had said with a smile to Hester, was much delighted with the arrangement of everything. Mrs. Willis was in grey silk, with her favourite Honiton lace. She was a very striking and beautiful woman, and in her grand simplicity, made a perfect foil to the fantastic appearance of the younger members of ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... and Vautrin's schemes unexpectedly work out for good. As in the story of Pere Goriot again, Vautrin, after furthering matrimonial deals and other quasi-benevolent projects, ends in the clutches of the law. Of Raoul little need be said. He is the foil for his dread protector and he is saved from dishonor by a narrow margin. The scene is laid at Paris, just after the second accession of the House of Bourbon, in 1816. Titles and families are in some confusion on account of the change of dynasties. It is therefore an opportune time ...
— Introduction to the Dramas of Balzac • Epiphanius Wilson and J. Walker McSpadden
... Thebes was his home town and he was as well known in the all-night restaurants as Oscar Hammerstein is on Forty-second Street. He was a great poker player, and wore an amalgamated copper mask when engaged in a stiff game; it was a helpful foil when trying to work his passage on a pair of trays. This, mind you, was in the stone age of poker, when a man couldn't hide his feelings when he held a full hand. To-day the player sits disconsolate and looks woebegone when glancing at ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... Out of the nacre of any mussel or oyster shell you might cut, at your pleasure, any quantity of small flat circular disks of the prettiest color and luster. To some extent, such tinsel or foil of shell is used pleasantly for decoration. But the mussel or oyster becoming itself an unwilling modeler, agglutinates its juice into three dimensions, and the fact of the surface being now geometrically gradated, together with the ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... Hideous (which is also evil) should never be used except as a foil. There is no immorality in exhibiting the prevailing vices of the epoch, but this is the physician's duty. The evil lies in presenting these evils under such forms as may lead many to enjoy or tolerate them, giving them the additional power of a charming ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... side, and Jane began to mount the stairs. He did not look at her, but it seemed to Jane that his eyes were on the hem of her gown as it trailed past him. She paused beside Miss Lister. She knew exactly how effectual a foil she made to the American girl's white loveliness. She turned and faced him. She wished him to look up and see them standing there together. She wanted the artist eyes to take in the cruel contrast. She wanted the artist soul of him to realise ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... The King's ministers were treacherously negotiating with false Burgundy, some say with the Regent Bedford himself. They cared not to save France. They cared only to keep out of harm's way—to avoid all peril and danger, and to thwart the Maid, whose patriotism and lofty courage was such a foil to ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green
... the dun, Foil, son of Nectan, was the first to awake. It was his custom to wander forth by himself early in the morning, devising snares and stratagems by which he might take and destroy men at his leisure. He was ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... window panes and keeps up a solemn buzzing, anxious to be off in the sun and ripen a fresh emission of germs. How does she lay her eggs, the origin of the loathsome maggot that battens poisonously on our provisions, whether of game or butcher's meat? What are her stratagems and how can we foil them? This is what ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... his coat a bottle of champagne, and set it on the table, where the lamp's ray fell full on its gold foil. Her eyes opened wide; for he had always visited this house in his oldest clothes and passed for ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... not deep, but only dark, must run dry if they cannot run clear. Sparkling and pellucid rills, wherein we can all see our own-selves and trace our own dreams, irradiated with light like the flickering of gems, and set off with rich foil, are those to attract the popular eye. Genuine humor, pathos, elevation and delicacy of fancy seek no disguise, but aim at the utmost simplicity of expression. Inversions, like affectation in every shape, are foreign to them. True songsters, like the birds, warble to be heard, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... untried Were spread; the raw crew set at spar and coil. Now round the prow Charybdean waters boil And ever higher surges war's red tide. The mate who should the captain's care divide Has strengthless proved. Where shall, the foe to foil, A man be found able to bear the toil And stand, to steer the ship, by ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... gave place to a mingled feeling of impatience and anger. She drew her foot back with a sudden movement, but unfortunately the foot went one way and the slipper another. A fencing-master, who sees his foil carried ten steps away from him by a back stroke, could not feel more astonishment than that felt by Madame de Bergenheim. Her first movement was to place her foot, so singularly undressed, upon the ground; an instinctive horror ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... of Ralegh's birth the family had lost its pristine splendour. But there has been a tendency to exaggeration of the extent of the decadence, by way of foil to the merit which retrieved the ruin. John Hooker, a contemporary Devonshire antiquary, uncle to the author of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, described the family as 'consopited,' and as having 'become ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... there is so much fighting, the students make it a point to keep themselves in constant practice with the foil. One often sees them, at the tables in the Castle grounds, using their whips or canes to illustrate some new sword trick which they have heard about; and between the duels, on the day whose history I have been writing, the swords were not always idle; every now and then we heard a succession ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Calydon; (What great offense had either people done?) But I, the consort of the Thunderer, Have wag'd a long and unsuccessful war, With various arts and arms in vain have toil'd, And by a mortal man at length am foil'd. If native pow'r prevail not, shall I doubt To seek for needful succor from without? If Jove and Heav'n my just desires deny, Hell shall the pow'r of Heav'n and Jove supply. Grant that the Fates ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... the N.E. and W. sides. Each window is divided into two openings by a single central shaft, having a carved cap and broad square abacus, on which rest the two plain pointed arches of the inner openings. The shield above is pierced with a bold quatre-foil. The two western piers of the crossing are still standing, and within the arch there has been erected in modern times a large traceried window. The spaces below the window and across the side aisles have been built up with fragments of the demolished ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... man of the best Dutch blood imported at the revolution: for the rest, one of those commodious persons in society who are nothing particular themselves, but are understood to be acquainted with the best in every department; close-clipped, pale-eyed, nonchalant, as good a foil as could well be found to the intense coloring and ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... in which you see her. This short struggle is indicated by the posture of the body; for, squatting down and being struck in the back, it is naturally on her back that she ought to have fallen. The murderer used a sharp narrow weapon, which was, unless I am deceived, the end of a foil, sharpened, and with the button broken off. By wiping the weapon upon his victim's skirt, the assassin leaves us this indication. He was not, however, hurt in the struggle. The victim must have clung with a death-grip to his hands; but, as he had not taken off his lavender ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... Lords, our wars are brought to end, Our foes to the foil, and we in safety rest: It us behooves to use such clemency In peace as valour in the war It is as great honor to be bountiful At home as to be conquerors in the field. Therefore, my Lords, the more to my content, ...
— 2. Mucedorus • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... cars were fairly natural. This was a masterly stroke in caricature, since it furnished the necessary foil to all that followed. They were not, to my eye, of any known species, but, with the exception of being evidently used to hard lines, they looked enough like trams to pass as such. Inside sat, in all seriousness, a wonderful cageful ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... feels after a jag. You've got to sin to feel really good. Consequently, Sin must be good to be the means of good, to be the raw material of good, to be virtue in the making, mustn't it? The dance-halls are a good foil to the gospel-halls. If we were all virtuous, there would be no virtue in virtue, and if we were all bad no one would be bad. And because there's so much bad in this old burg of ours, it makes the good ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... to seek him, but was almost slain, Perhaps is dead now; everywhere The knights come foil'd from the great quest, in vain; In vain they struggle for ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris
... it has the texture of horn, but the tone is warm. The pupil is surrounded by an orange circle; it is of bronze set in gold, but vivid gold and animated bronze. This pupil has depth; it is not underlaid, as in certain eyes, by a species of foil, which sends back the light and makes such eyes resemble those of cats or tigers; it has not that terrible inflexibility which makes a sensitive person shudder; but this depth has in it something of the infinite, just as the external radiance of the eyes suggests the absolute. The glance of an observer ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... of it is, that she manages to make me appear so unamiable and unattractive in my husband's eyes," she sighed to herself. "But I'll foil her efforts," she added, between her shut teeth, springing up, and beginning her toilet as she spoke: "he likes to have me bright and cheery, and well and becomingly dressed, and so I ...
— Elsie's Kith and Kin • Martha Finley
... indices, the above proportions are sufficiently accurate for all. The object in view is the securing of total reflection of as much light as possible from the flat polished back of the stone. Cabochon stones are sometimes set over foil or on polished gold to ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... Teresa, as she was to-night, her blue eyes still clouded with Ellen Montgomery's sorrows, her curls tumbled about her hot cheeks, would have made a pretty foil in a picture of old ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... use a great deal of diligence before I can spring anything to my mind, whereas in town, whilst I am following one character, it is ten to one but I am crossed in my way by another, and put up such a variety of odd creatures in both sexes, that they foil the scent of one another, and puzzle the chace. My greatest difficulty in the country is to find sport, and in town to chuse it. In the mean time, as I have given a whole month's rest to the cities of London and Westminster, ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... not kept to this way of declaiming when Sophocles and Euripides influenc'd the age. Nor yet had any blind alley-professor foil'd their inclinations, when Pindar and the Nine Lyricks durst not attempt Homer's Numbers: And that I may not bring my authority from poets, 'tis certain, neither Plato nor Demosthenes ever made it ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... impertinent slave provides the foil. When the lovers succeed in meeting, they are interlocked in embrace from 172 to 192, probably invested with no small amount of suggestive "business." This would doubtless hardly be tolerated by the "censor" today. Another ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... gather round, and they'll launch me in the ground, And pile the stones the timber wolf to foil; And the moaning pine will wave overhead a nameless grave, Where the black snake in the sunshine loves to coil. And they'll leave me there alone, and perhaps with softened tone Speak of me sometimes in the camp-fire's glow, ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... up and down he thought again of that night when he had last seen Beatrice. How splendid she had looked in her boat on the water; how unreserved, and yet how reticent she was; how beautiful, and yet how unconscious of her beauty. What a foil she made to that ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... hand on his sword and replied, "Your dogs would devour me, my good fellow, and I foil them. They would employ their teeth upon me as I would mine if I had before me a morsel of that appetizing boar, for I am lost in the forest since yesterday morning and ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... and after a little persuasion he agreed to carry a letter to her on his next marketing trip. My message was prepared by writing it on tissue paper, which was then compressed into a small pellet, and protected by wrapping it in tin-foil so that it could be safely carried in the man's mouth. The probability, of his being searched when he came to the Confederate picketline was not remote, and in such event he was to swallow the pellet. The letter appealed to Miss Wright's ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 4 • P. H. Sheridan
... Herbeck was an excellent foil. He was as silent and secretive as sand. He moved, as it were, in circles, thus always eluding dangerous corners. He was tall, angular, with a thin, immobile countenance, well guarded by his gray eyes and straight lips. He was a born financier, ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... All the snow was gone from the hills; the stream that gathered its three forks at this point roared over its rocks; the stunted willows were in full leaf; the thick, soft moss of every dark shade of green and yellow and red made a foil for innumerable brilliant flowers. The fat, gray conies chirped at us from the rocks; the ground-squirrels, greatly multiplied since the wholesale destruction of foxes, kept the dogs unavailingly chasing hither and thither whenever they were loose. We never grew tired of walking up and down ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... miserable anticipations of those miseries, in appropriating the exemplar miseries of others to ourselves, and usurping upon their miseries as our own, to our prejudice? Is the glory of heaven no perfecter in itself, but that it needs a foil of depression and ingloriousness in this world, to set it off? Is the joy of heaven no perfecter in itself, but that it needs the sourness of this life to give it a taste? Is that joy and that glory but a comparative ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
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