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More "Imperceptible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... at this happy spot, we have had a ham, (sometimes a shoulder) of Bacon, to grace the head of the Table; a piece of roast Beef adorns the foot; a dish of beans, or greens, (almost imperceptible,) decorates the center. When the cook has a mind to cut a figure, (which, I presume will be the case to-morrow) we have two Beef-steak pyes, or dishes of crabs, in addition, one on each side of the center ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... I found that one of the windows of the cottage had formerly occupied a part of it, but the panes had been filled up with wood. In one of these was a small and almost imperceptible chink through which the eye could just penetrate. Through this crevice a small room was visible, whitewashed and clean but very bare of furniture. In one corner, near a small fire, sat an old man, leaning his head ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... conduct an interview with all the gravity and deliberation for which these affairs are celebrated. The slow approach, with frequent pauses to sit down and meditate, or "view the landscape o'er," the earnest and musical—if melancholy—exchange of salutations, the almost imperceptible drawing nearer, with the slightly waving tail the only sign of excitement, and at last the instantaneous dash, the slap or scratch (so rapid one can never tell which), the fiery expletive and retort, and the instant retreat, to sit down again. There ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... conscious only of the faint hum of a generator at the other end of the room, and the quivering hand of the meter. I turned the dial back an imperceptible degree, and the hand steadied down exactly upon the numerals "2700." Then I touched ...
— The Infra-Medians • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... Marmion looked up again suddenly with an almost imperceptible start, and, for the first time, took an interest in Miss ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... room seemed to him, as he entered, a little strained. Billie looked pale and agitated. Mr. Peters looked rather agitated too. Sam caught Billie's eye. It had an unspoken appeal in it. He gave an imperceptible nod, a reassuring nod, the nod of a man who understood all and was prepared to ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... had brooded the world, in preparation for flight. The shadows began to retreat from where they had shrouded the nearest trees. The air grew softer; from it a noiseless breeze just touched the great arms of the pines as though to waken them and gave to them an almost imperceptible motion. The stars and planets began to faint in the heavens. As the waves of light increased in the east, the snow on the high mountains to the west took on the hue of the opal, and when the last shadow fled away and the sun flashed gloriously above the eastern horizon, ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... the admiration of those who never knew their loss, but the perfection of the original was gone. Again and again I have heard him [Leech] sigh as he looked over the new number of Punch; and as I, seeing but excellence, would ask an explanation, he would point to some almost imperceptible obliquity which vexed his gentle soul." It is a curious fact that, in common with most draughtsmen, Leech never became reconciled to the fact that black printer's-ink cannot exactly render the tender grey tones of a hard lead pencil; but to the fact that he had not much to complain of Mr. ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... went on; and an imperceptible pause followed the words. "We rid down to Garyville to be wed, an' we went from the jestice's office to the office of this here Dickert. He had a cuss with him that was no better'n him; an' when it come to the time in the signin' that our names was put ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... and he again as he had done at dinner permitted himself to look into her eyes, and going on after an imperceptible pause he said softly, "simple, and pure, and sweet ...I always think of you, Lady Ethelrida, as the embodiment of sane things, balanced things—perfection." And his last word was ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... on whose ground we now stood at the foot of the hills, are Wa-Khutu, and their possessions consequently are U-Khutu, which is by far the best producing land hitherto alluded to since leaving the sea-coast line. Our ascent by the river, though quite imperceptible to the eye, has been 500 feet. From this level the range before us rises in some places to 5000 to 6000 feet, not as one grand mountain, but in two detached lines, lying at an angle of 45 degrees from N.E. to S.W., and separated one from the other by elevated valleys, tables, and ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... Sir Charles never rose from his bed again; but he sunk so gradually that it was almost imperceptible, and it was not until the summer of that year that he slept with his fathers, dying without pain, and in perfect ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the slopes beneath, he heard the clinking hoofs of the posse; the quiet was so perfect, the air so clear, that he even caught the chorus of straining saddle leather and then voices of men. All this time the effects of the whisky had been wearing away by imperceptible degrees and at that sound all his old self rushed back on Vic Gregg. Why, they were his friends, his partners, these voices in the night, and that clear laughter floated up from Harry Fisher who had been his bunkie at the Circle V Bar ranch three years ago. He felt ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... actually doing. Time, the greatest of all innovators, manages his innovations so dexterously, spreads them over such vast periods, and therefore brings them about so gradually, that often, while effecting the mightiest changes, we have no suspicion that he is effecting any at all. Thus how imperceptible are the steps by which a foreign word is admitted into the full rights of an English one; the process of its incoming often eluding our notice altogether. There are numerous Greek words, for example ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... she leaned over them, with her head thrust forward, terrifying in her immobility, with her eyes fixed intently upon the black dust scattered in patches over the plate. She sought what she had seen fortune-tellers find in the granulations and the almost imperceptible traces left by the coffee as it trickled away. She fatigued her eyes by gazing at the innumerable little spots, and deciphered shapes and letters and signs therein. She put aside some grains with her finger in order to see them more clearly and more sharply ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... wanly. She laid an impulsive hand on Patricia's arm and opened her pretty lips, but before the words came she evidently obeyed another differing impulse, for she underwent a subtle change, an imperceptible hardening that was so delicately veiled by her still gracious manner that Patricia had only a baffling sense of being gently shut out ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... evil, is, the temptation which always attends the use of stimulants. Their effect on the system is so agreeable, and the evils resulting are so imperceptible and distant, that there is a constant tendency to increase such excitement, both in frequency and power. And the more the system is thus reduced in strength, the more craving is the desire for that which imparts ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... the seacoast of Puteoli and the Caieta, they compare their own expeditions to the marches of Caesar and Alexander. Yet should a fly presume to settle on the silken folds of their gilded umbrellas, should a sunbeam penetrate through some unguarded and imperceptible chink, they deplore their intolerable hardships, and lament in affected language that they were not born in the land of the Cimmerians, the regions of eternal darkness. In these journeys into the country the whole body ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... with an imperceptible start. The colour again flooded his face; his gratitude, his joy were so great that, for a moment, they rendered him speechless, and his voice was broken when ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... the stars of the sphere successively appear in view, enumerated 6,000 stars. This number may be regarded as including all the stars in the heavens that are visible to the naked eye. With the aid of an opera glass thousands of stars can be seen that are imperceptible to ordinary vision. Argelander, with a small telescope of 2-1/2 inches aperture, was able to count 234,000 stars in the Northern Hemisphere. Large telescopes reveal multitudes of stars utterly beyond the power of enumeration, nor ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... peculiar case," whispered the young doctor in charge, as we paused at the door. "I want you to notice his face and his cough. His pulse seems very weak, almost imperceptible at times. The stethoscope reveals subcrepitant sounds all over his lungs. It's like bronchitis or pneumonia—but it ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... visible in it, playing at cards with a creature of a black and horrid countenance, wherein were plainly delineated the arts of his mind, cozenage and falsehood. They were marking their game with counters, on which we could see inscriptions, imperceptible to any but us. My lord had scored with pieces of ivory, on which were writ, Good Fame, Glory, Riches, Honour, and Posterity. The spectre over against him had on his counters the inscriptions of, Dishonour, ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... in 1697, the silent forests about the little village of Exeter felt an almost imperceptible stir of life, for through it there stealthily crept an Indian chief, followed by one and then another of his frightful band. Each dressed in tawny skins like the creatures of the wood and with adornment of feathers from the very birds, they seemed ...
— Some Three Hundred Years Ago • Edith Gilman Brewster
... the book-learning crept in of its own accord, by imperceptible degrees. Children naturally want to be like their parents, and to do what they do: the boys following their father, and the girls their mother; and as I was always writing or reading, mine naturally ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... it take?" inquired Cornelius, stooping to flick an imperceptible spot of dust from ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... for another chocolate cream, gave an imperceptible start. She, too, was staying at the Normandie. She presumed that her admirer was a recent arrival, for she had seen nothing of him ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... he says, "was no conversation of leaps and bounds, in which idleness traverses a whole gallery of ideas that have no connection with one another, and weariness draws you away from one object to skim a dozen others. They were talks in which all was bound together, often by imperceptible threads, but all the more naturally, as not a word of what was to be said had been led up to or prepared beforehand." Grimm cannot find words to describe her verve, her stream of brilliant sallies, her dashing traits, her eagle's coup ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... however, for a final visit, and the day after to see them away, without any apparent breach in the confidence and friendship with which they regarded each other. There might be, perhaps, a faint almost imperceptible difference in Chatty, a little dignity like that which her mother had discovered in her, something that was not altogether the simple girl, younger than her years, whom Mrs. Warrender had brought to ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... settled down over the party. Little by little the magic of the night began to gain a hold on them. There were sudden creaks of the furniture, imperceptible rustlings in the curtains. Suddenly Tuppence ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... with their arms and standards no disgrace would be inflicted upon the national arms, and as a tribute, however much reduced, would still be paid, they could still regard the Rebu as under their domination. The reduction of the tribute, indeed, would be an almost imperceptible item in the revenue ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... secret, unknown, covert, impenetrable, obscure, undiscovered, unseen, dark, imperceptible, occult, unimagined, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... by a half-worn and almost imperceptible path leading through the long rough grass, and, turning round a half- demolished shrine, which exhibited the remains of Apis, the bovine deity, he came immediately in front of the philosopher, Agelastes, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... speaking in public or to receiving delegations. The sentences were stately, the voice rather loud and declamatory. His closing words were: "Yes, gentlemen, the way to see London is from the top of a 'bus—from the top of a 'bus, gentlemen." Then there was an almost imperceptible wave of the hand, and we knew that the interview was ended. In a moment we were outside and the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... forlorn hope, advanced perhaps one hundred yards before the main body....The snow was deeper than in the fields, because of the nature of the ground; and the path made (by the advance guard) was almost imperceptible because of the falling snow. Covering the locks of our guns with the lappets of our coats, holding down our heads (for it was impossible to bear up our faces against the imperious storm of wind and snow), ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... dealer makes up in boastful clamor for the absence of quantity and assortment in his wares; and it often happens that an almost imperceptible boy, with a card of shirt-buttons and a paper of hair-pins, is much worse than the Anvil Chorus with real anvils. Fishermen, with baskets of fish upon their heads; peddlers, with trays of housewife wares; louts ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... broken, the grasp of despair is loosened a little about his heart. Yet hardly does he notice whether the sun shines or no, or care whether he lives or dies. Slowly his senses steady themselves from the effects of a shock that nearly destroyed him, and merciful time, with imperceptible touch, softens day by day the outlines of that picture, at the memory of which he will never cease ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... we found the sun struggling for the mastery with the clouds on the tops of the adjacent hills. The army was now in full motion; the regular infantry defiled in something like order down the narrow path, which had been imperceptible to us on the preceding evening. The Bashi Bazouks, on the other hand, might be seen streaming down the hill-side, jumping, rolling, and tumbling in strange confusion. Having inspected the fort we joined in with these, and rode down a descent, which would ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... considerate for her husband, and extremely kind to all her visitors, though with a tinge of difference in her behaviour according to their position. She received Nekhludoff as if he were one of them, and her fine, almost imperceptible flattery made him once again aware of his virtues and gave him a feeling of satisfaction. She made him feel that she knew of that honest though rather singular step of his which had brought him to Siberia, ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... riders and had become what their teacher called "pals" with their horses, they were daily given larger liberty. In company with him, and sometimes without him, they rode long distances over the roads, the narrow trails, and the almost imperceptible paths which led over the mountains ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... afternoon. His bodily strength had been rapidly declining during the last few days, and it was only at intervals that he retained any degree of apparent consciousness. The last transition took place quietly and with almost imperceptible gradation. ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... up, met Lena's eyes. Their expression of candour seemed to hide some struggling intention. Her head, he fancied, had made an imperceptible affirmative movement. Why? What reason could she have? Was it the prompting of some obscure instinct? Or was it simply a delusion of his own senses? But in this strange complication invading the quietude of his life, in his state ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... By some imperceptible means, Madame Dravikine saw to it that her nephew came in contact with those people who could be useful to him; and she was satisfied, if slightly surprised, to see the ease with which he talked. Ivan himself wondered ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... looking overhead as we swiftly ploughed our smooth way at a great height through the now imperceptible atmosphere of the planet, I saw the two moons of Mars meeting in the sky exactly ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... he started about four o'clock. The evening was most melancholy. For, though no rain any longer fell, there was a continual pattering of drops from the trees and a ghostly creaking of branches in a light and almost imperceptible wind. The day, too, was falling, the grey overhang of cloud was changing to black, except for one wide space in the west, where a pale spectral light shone without radiance; and the last of that was fading when he pulled up at a parting ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... offered his aid to the nurses. If he was clumsy in his attempt to jiggle a chair into position, an explanation may be instantly provided. Miss Fairweather, after a brief stare of indecision, favoured him with an almost imperceptible smile. He happened to be in the act of pushing a high- chair under the wriggling person of Imogene. That smile caused the momentary paralysis of his whole being, with the result that the nurse came near to depositing Imogene on the floor. Every one—except Imogene—squealed. Mr. Flanders ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... annoyance passed over the face of the elder lady as she arranged the snowy ruffles of her cap, while the deepened color and sparkling eyes of the younger, with the almost imperceptible sarcasm of her smile, seemed to indicate mingled pleasure, defiance and contempt. The visitor who entered was resplendent in the gay scarlet and glittering lace of the British uniform, and his redundancy of ruffles, powder ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... seems to mean undifferentiated connective tissue; "exhalants" are imperceptible tubes arising from the capillaries and secreting fat, serum, marrow, etc.; the "absorbents and glands" are the lymphatics and ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... bees, or to summon the chickens to be fed—I never know. It is only my mental picture of a "lively din." As to the second line, all attempts to see the thing described only bring before me clouds and shadows, confusedly rushing about in an impossible way; a chaos utterly unlike the serenity and imperceptible growth of morning, and ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... imperceptible motion, Mrs. Gammit slid her right hand, armed with the pepper-pot, over the edge of the window-sill. The porcupines, enraptured with the flavour of the herring-tub, never looked up. Mrs. Gammit was just about to turn the pepper-pot over, when she ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... deeper grey than the sky. It is a remarkably handsome mountain, sufficiently lofty to be imposing, rising out of an elevated country, the slope of which, upward to the base of the mountain, though imperceptible, is really considerable; and it is surrounded by lesser hills of just sufficient elevation to set it off. The atmosphere, too, of these regions is peculiarly favourable for views: it is very dry at this season; but still the hills are clearly defined, without the harsh ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... smoke from the fires would in time become annoying. But Indians used for fuel only dry wood and bark, the smoke from which would be a negligible factor. The varying pressure of the atmosphere outside creates a current of air in or out which is usually imperceptible but which penetrates to the ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... consider the pace a very fast one, but being a cheerful fellow by nature, he simply expressed his dissatisfaction by an imperceptible shrug. ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... older since she and I had parted; she had seen trouble; her child had been born, and although she was not exactly estranged from Clem, for neither he nor she would have admitted any coolness, she had learned that she was nothing specially to him. I have often noticed what an imperceptible touch, what a slight shifting in the balance of opposing forces, will alter the character. I have observed a woman, for example, essentially the same at twenty and thirty—who is there who is not ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... neither smoke, nor soot, nor dust. Instead of entering a room through a register, as I had always seen heated air supplied, it came through numerous small apertures in the walls of a room quite close to the floor, thus rendering its supply imperceptible, and making a ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... belonged not to the past so much as to the present, that her power was unexhausted and would go forward to the shaping of the coming years. Which knowledge drew confirmation from what immediately followed. For, as by almost imperceptible degrees the brightness faded in the west, the figures, so mysteriously peopling the room, faded out also, until only the woman in homely garments was left. By her side stood the charcoal drawing ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... plain even to the non-mathematical mind, when he said that "ten decimal places are sufficient to give the circumference of the earth to the fraction of an inch, and thirty decimal places would give the circumference of the whole visible universe to a quantity imperceptible with the ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... years, and he found that they averaged from twelve to fourteen hundred francs per year. He then compared the situation of mill-hands paid in proportion to the prices obtained by their employers with that of laborers who receive fixed wages, and found that the difference is almost imperceptible. This result might easily have been foreseen. Economic phenomena obey laws as abstract and immutable as those of numbers: it is only privilege, fraud, and absolutism which disturb ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... the table roused him. It was Miss Keating laying down a match-box. He saw her hand poised yet in the delicacy of its imperceptible approach. ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... fairer-minded of Hodder's opponents, though appalled, were forced to admit in their hearts that the methods by which Mr. Parr had made his fortune and gained his ascendency would not bear scrutiny . . . . Some of them were disturbed, indeed, by the discovery that there had come about in them, by imperceptible degrees, in the last few years a new and critical attitude towards the ways of modern finance: moat of them had an uncomfortable feeling that Hodder was somehow right,—a feeling which they sought to stifle when they reflected upon the consequences of facing it. For this would mean a disagreeable ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... reflecting telescope, the least breath upon the mirror of which will cause all the starry sublimities that it should shadow forth to fade and become dim. The slightest moisture in the atmosphere, though it be quite imperceptible where we stand, will be dense enough to shut out the fair, shining, snowy summits that girdle the horizon and to leave nothing visible but the lowliness and commonplaceness of the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... abstraction, the ordered calm which characterized Seagreave's cabin, made fragrant by burning pine logs and fresh with the cold winds from the mountain tops, had altered by imperceptible and subtle gradations until the atmosphere was now strangely electrical, throbbing with vital life, glowing with warmth and color. In outer semblance nothing was changed, no more than was the appearance of the world outside, and yet beneath ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... substantives and adjectives would be so violent an alteration, that I believe neither the power of Power nor the power of Genius would be able, to effect it. In most cases I am convinced that very strong innovations are more likely to make impression than small and almost imperceptible differences, as in religion, medicine, politics, etc.; but I do not think that language can be treated in the same manner, especially in a refined age. When a nation first emerges from barbarism, two or three masterly writers may operate wonders; and the fewer the number of writers, as the ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... with regard to the other branches of the executive government, which relate rather to original measures than to administering the law, it may be observed that the power exercised in conducting them is distinguished by almost imperceptible shades from the legislative, and that all such as admit of open discussion and of the delay attendant on public deliberations are properly the province of the representative assembly. If this observation ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... by very small and short successive steps, offers several advantages: (1) it is imperceptible to the eye; (2) it does not affect the main current; (3) any sudden instantaneous variation of the main current does not allow a too near approach of the carbon points. Let, now, an accident occur; for instance, a carbon is broken. At once the automatic cut-off ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... the connection of things visible and things invisible, finite and infinite, objects of sense and objects of faith, is utterly imperceptible to human thought, we might reply by quoting the words of that Sacred Book whose supreme authority our author is seeking, by this argument, to establish. "The invisible things of God, even his eternal power and god-head, from the creation, are clearly seen, being understood by ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... ever fish with the fly from a birch-bark canoe on absolutely still water? You do not seem to move. But far below you, gliding, silent, ghostlike, the bottom slips beneath. Like a weather-vane in an imperceptible current of air, your bow turns to right or left in apparent obedience to the mere will of your companion. And the flies drop softly like down. Then the silence becomes sacred. You whisper— although there is no reason for your whispering; you move ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... draining, but was then marshy as well as bushy:—flat to the eye, yet must be imperceptibly convexed a little, for the line of watershed is hereabouts: walk from Hohenfriedberg to Striegau, the water on your left hand flows, though mainly in ditches or imperceptible oozings, to the north and west,—there to fall into an eastern fork of the Roaring Neisse [one of our three new Neisses, which is a very quiet stream here; runs close by the Mountain base, fed by many torrents, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... bark revealed to us two scorpions with enormous bellies, and heads so small as to be almost imperceptible; all they did was to stiffen out their tails, which are composed of six divisions, the last terminating in an extremely ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... of the jungle composed rather than disturbed the ape-man but an unusual sound, however imperceptible to the awakened ear of civilized man, seldom failed to impinge upon the consciousness of Tarzan, however deep his slumber, and so it was that when the moon was high a sudden rush of feet across the grassy carpet in the vicinity of his tree brought him to alert ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... notes trembled, paused, and fell to the minor. Felicity, feet bare, toes touched with scarlet, wafted into the room. Her dancing was incredibly light; she looked like some exotic poppy swaying to an imperceptible breeze. The dance was languorously sad, palely gay, a thing half asleep, veiled. It seemed always about to break into fierce life, yet did not. The scent of mandragora hung over it—it was as if the dancer, drugged, ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... English born and English educated; but so also was she South African, for quite half her life had been passed in Johannesburg, and it was there that her actual home existed. And so, by slow imperceptible degrees, out of nowhere and without explanation, crept into her mind the sudden realisation of Africa's claim upon her. She remembered that it was there her father had amassed his wealth. There had been won for her all the smooth, ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... rather reluctantly, I thought, and the subject dropped. Another time I should have tried to extort a more gracious permission, for my heart was set on the ball; but for some time I had noticed a slight change in Raby's manner to me, an imperceptible reserve that made me a little less at my ease with him; it was not that he failed in kindness, for he had never been so good to me, but there was certainly a slight barrier between us. He ceased ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... planes, ripple like shadows, and the wind playfully designs huge arabesques on their surfaces. The sea lies far away, so far, in fact, that its roar cannot be heard, though we could distinguish a sort of vague, aerial, imperceptible murmur, like the voice of the solitude, which perhaps was only the effect produced by the ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... a word taken from Roman law, in which it was one of the examples of accessio, that is, acquisition of property without any act being done by the acquirer. It signifies the gradual accretion of land or formation of an island by imperceptible degrees. If the accretion or formation be by a torrent or flood, the property in the severed portion or new island continues with the original owner until the trees, if any, swept away with it take root in the ground. Alluvion never attached at all in the case of agri limitati, that ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... earth, rather than on the state of the evaporations, the relative humidity, and the dew point. And I have noticed that the best scenting days have been those when the thermometer has given readings from 38 up to 46 Fahrenheit in the shade. A high and steady glass, an almost imperceptible east or north-east wind, with the ground soaked with moisture and no frost during the previous night, is the only combination of conditions under which scent on the grass is a moral certainty. On the other hand, a low and unsteady glass, a warm, gusty south or west ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... cartilage forming the septum of the nose; fissure and division of the feet and hands; enlargement of the lips, and a disposition to glandular swelling; dyspnoea and difficulty of breathing; the voice hoarse and barking; the aspect of the face frightful, and of a dark colour; the pulse small, almost imperceptible." Sometimes the limbs drop off, piecemeal or in ...
— The Leper in England: with some account of English lazar-houses • Robert Charles Hope
... nature," continued Mrs. Wilson with an almost imperceptible smile. "I have no doubt his sympathies were warmly enlisted in behalf of this family and possessing much, he gave liberally. I have no doubt he would have undergone personal privation to have relieved their distress, and endured both pain and labor, with such ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... trimmed with brown ribbon, and, on the inside, a bunch of deep pink flowers, which gave a slight coloring to her otherwise pale and sallow but intellectual face. Her whole dress bespoke refinement and taste. She was tall and slender, with an almost imperceptible stoop in the shoulders, indicative of a studious habit; but you forgot this seeming defect in her easy and graceful movements. Her brown hair was combed plainly over a rather low and narrow forehead; her face was long and thin, and her small, clear gray eyes were shaded ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... eyes, has unconsciously guided and influenced their architectural tastes. All the roofs of the houses are straight—straight as the mountain; a gable is almost unknown, and even the few steeples are dwarfed to an imperceptible departure from the prevailing straight line. The very trees which shade the Parade-ground and border the road in places have their tops blown absolutely straight and flat, as though giant shears had trimmed them; but I must ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... Voltaire. He neither laughs out like the French wit, nor, like the Irish wit, throws a double portion of severity into his countenance while laughing inwardly; but preserves a look peculiarly his own, a look of demure serenity, disturbed only by an arch sparkle of the eye, an almost imperceptible elevation of the brow, an almost imperceptible curl of the lip. His tone is never that either of a Jack Pudding or of a Cynic. It is that of a gentleman, in whom the quickest sense of the ridiculous is constantly tempered by ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... jointly conceived definite and lasting impressions of the man who was to become, during the next few weeks, an object of the deepest concern to both of them. The intruder was slightly built, of little more than medium height, of dark complexion, with an almost imperceptible moustache of military pattern, black hair dishevelled with the wind, and eyes of almost peculiar brightness. He carried himself with an assurance which was somewhat remarkable considering the condition ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... The union was not only an unutterable grief to him: it amazed him, notwithstanding that he had passed the preceding week in a suspicion that such might be the issue of Troy's meeting her away from home. Her quiet return with Liddy had to some extent dispersed the dread. Just as that imperceptible motion which appears like stillness is infinitely divided in its properties from stillness itself, so had his hope undistinguishable from despair differed ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... time. I thought to myself—on so seeing him—(added the sculptor) that it is thus that I will chisel your bust in marble." Dannecker then requested me to draw my hand gently over the forehead—and to observe by what careful, and almost imperceptible gradations, this boldness of front had been accomplished; I listened to every word that he said about the extraordinary character then, as it were, before me, with an earnestness and pleasure which I can hardly describe; and walked round and round the bust with a gratification ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... to 31/2 fathoms; and the ship being found to drift to leeward with the tide, a stream anchor was dropped. There seemed to be two tides here in the day, setting nearly east and west, but the rise and fall were so imperceptible by the lead, that it could not be known which ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... these; scarcely to be dignified by that name, more in the nature of aggravated discomforts they were. But they irked, and, like any accumulation of small things, piled up a disheartening total. By imperceptible degrees the glamour of the trail, the lure of gypsying, began to lessen. She found herself longing for the Pine River cabin, for surcease from this never-ending journey. But she would not have owned this to Roaring Bill; not ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... and sparse yellow sage led to the first almost imperceptible rise of the valley floor on that side. The distant cedars beckoned to Slone. He was not patient, because he was on the trail of Wildfire; but, nevertheless, the ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... bracelets, jewels; with a long black wig, powdered, and curled in front; with ribbons wherever he could put them; steeped in perfumes, and in fine a model of cleanliness. He was accused of putting on an imperceptible touch of rouge. He had a long nose, good eyes and mouth, a full but very long face. All his portraits resembled him. I was piqued to see that his features recalled those of Louis XIII., to whom; except in matters of courage, he was ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... of society is now imperceptible and permanent, now periodical and violent; it depends upon the course which property takes. In a country where the property is pretty evenly distributed, and where little business is done,—the rights and claims of each being balanced by those of others,—the power of invasion is destroyed. ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... nature; the residuum of a field of force which is possibly more or less analogous to the electromagnetic field. This residuum either is or is not dischargeable to an object of planetary mass; and I'm virtually certain that it is. The discharge may be anything from an imperceptible flow up to one of such violence as to volatilize the craft carrying it. From the facts: One, that in the absence of that field the subspace radio will function normally; and Two, that no subspace-radio messages have ever been ...
— Subspace Survivors • E. E. Smith
... of this passage, which consists in the appropriation made by Nemesis of the line originally directed to Cynthia, had been wholly imperceptible to succeeding ages, had chance, which has destroyed so many greater volumes, deprived us likewise ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... from one ship to the other was almost imperceptible. The structure of both corridors was the same, but Mel knew when the junction was crossed. He sensed the entry into a strange world that was far different from the common one ...
— The Memory of Mars • Raymond F. Jones
... play of conflicting desires about the girl's face and body. He could see the uncertainty and indecision in the girl's nearly imperceptible movement. But ...
— The Happy Man • Gerald Wilburn Page
... jokes were passed around by the incorrigible Charles Douglas, but to all Guy Trevelyan was invulnerable. He betrayed no sign of the inward tempest raging within, save by the almost imperceptible expression which had attracted the scrutinizing eye of the ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... these greater works, swarms the innumerable legion of satirical fabliaux and laughable tales. They, too, cross the sea, slight, imperceptible, wandering, thus continuing those migrations so difficult to trace, the laws of which learned men of all nations have vainly sought to discover. They follow all roads; nothing stops them. Pass the mountains and you will find them; cross the sea ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... and ewer;" and, turning to my brother, said, "O my guest come forward and wash thy hands." My brother rose to do so but he saw neither ewer nor basin; yet his host kept washing his hands with invisible soap in imperceptible water and cried, "Bring the table!" But my brother again saw nothing. Then said the host, "Honour me by eating of this meat and be not ashamed." And he kept moving his hand to and fro as if he ate and saying to my brother, "I wonder to see thee eating thus sparely: ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... blossom, and bearing their fertilizing pollen, after it has broken and deflowered their branches, to far-distant trees that hitherto have bloomed in barrenness, the storm of Charles's army carried far and wide through Europe thought-dust, imperceptible, but potent to enrich the nations. The French alone, says Michelet, understood Italy. How terrible would have been a conquest by Turks with their barbarism, of Spaniards with their Inquisition, of Germans with their brutality! But France, impressible, sympathetic, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... fully displays our fallen nature, than that of reprobation. All mankind agree in opinion, that there ever has been an elect, or good class of society; and a reprobate, or worthless and bad class; varying in turpitude or in goodness to a great extent and in almost imperceptible degrees. All must unite in ascribing to God that divine foreknowledge that renders ten thousand years but as one day, or hour, or moment in his sight. All ascribe to his omnipotence the power to ordain or decree what shall come to pass—and where is the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... taught to crush their finer feelings. A simple form of religion was inculcated, while the boys' natural love for humour was encouraged and developed. In a word, the children were allowed to grow up naturally, and the influence brought to bear upon them by this wise mother was as quiet and as imperceptible as Nature intended it to be. Dean Stanley, Ruskin, Jowett, Tyndall, and Browning were among those who were wont to come and ply Mrs. Baden-Powell with questions as to how she managed to keep in such excellent control half-a-dozen boys filled to the brim with animal spirits. ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... with verdure, and the seat of the sorrows and joys of myriads of human beings, who erected cities, and built pyramids, and monuments, which Time has long since swept away, and wrapt in his eternal mantle of oblivion. That a constant, but almost imperceptible change is hourly taking place in the earth's surface, appears to be established; and independent of the extraordinary bouleversements, which have at intervals convulsed our globe, this gradual revolution has ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... body gathered together, prepared to bound away into the deep forest in the twinkling of an eye, he stands a splendid specimen of the cervine tribe. We will not kill him; we look and admire! A doe suddenly gives that imperceptible signal to which I have formerly alluded, and the next moment the whole herd has dashed through the bamboo alleys, vanishing from sight—a dappled hide now and again gleaming in the sunlight as its owner scampers away to ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... Its function was double, by raising or by lowering the arm,—"modo per arteri elevationem, modo per ejusdem submissionem" says the worthy Vairits; "for," he continues, "when the artery is thrown out and is open, the spirits are emitted with wonderful celerity, and in some imperceptible manner are carried to the thing to fascinate it. And because the artery has its origin in the heart, the spirits issuing thence retain its infected and vitiated nature, and according to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... crush a little at the "dandy roll," and although the marks are not removed by the calender stack which was employed in those tests it was found that one "nip" on the supercalenders renders them practically imperceptible and it is believed that the proper size and weight of calender stack would entirely remove these marks. All of the papers produced up to this point are somewhat lacking in the bulk desired in a book paper; therefore, in the two following ...
— Hemp Hurds as Paper-Making Material - United States Department of Agriculture, Bulletin No. 404 • Lyster H. Dewey and Jason L. Merrill
... behind could be traced through the attenuated fabric. The next thing about the craft that attracted attention was the fact that some of the running and standing rigging had parted and was hanging loose, swaying gently to the almost imperceptible heave of the ship on the glass-smooth sea. And finally, when they had arrived within a mile of her, they saw that her paint was so bleached and blistered by the sun that it was difficult to say what its original colour had been, while much of ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... expected all the delight that ever the prospect of a watering-place held out to its most impatient visitants. My health was by this time a good deal confirmed by the country air, and the influence of that imperceptible and unfatiguing exercise to which the good sense of my grandfather had subjected me; for when the day was fine, I was usually carried out and laid down beside the old shepherd, among the crags or rocks round ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... secure it from the rising of the tides. Over this the long, salt grass is artfully arched, to conceal it from the view above; but this very circumstance enables the experienced egg-hunter to distinguish the spot at the distance of thirty or forty yards, though, imperceptible to a common eye. The eggs are of a pale clay color, sprinkled with small spots of dark red, and measure somewhat more than an inch and a half in length by an inch in breadth, being rather obtuse at the small end. These eggs are delicious eating, far surpassing ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... both on the face and soffits with the chevron or zig-zag moulding. There are many intermediate gradations between the extreme plain and massive work of early date, and the enrichments, mouldings, and elongated proportions to be found late in the style; and in detail we may perceive an almost imperceptible merging into that ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... hills with all their fields could be seen sleeping under great shadows, or basking in the light. A deluge of rays fell upon them, defining every angle of Watley Rocks and floating over the grasslands of Standon, all shape becoming lost in a huge embrasure filled with the almost imperceptible outlines of the ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... Courage is one of the noblest virtues of this nether sphere; and though scarcely more requisite in the field of battle, to guard the fighting hero from disgrace, than in the private commerce of the world, to ward off that littleness of soul which leads, by steps imperceptible, to all the base train of the inferior passions, and by which the too timid mind is betrayed into a servility derogatory to the dignity of human nature! yet is it a virtue of no necessity in a situation such as mine; a situation ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... leaves, Five crores exact; and shouldst thou pluck yon boughs Together with their shoots, on those twain boughs Swing twice a thousand nuts and ninety-five!" Vahuka checked the chariot wonderingly, And answered: "Imperceptible to me Is what thou boastest, slayer of thy foes! But I to proof will put it, hewing down The tree, and, having counted, I shall know. Before thine eyes the branches twain I'll lop: How prove thee, Maharaja, otherwise, ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... But if our view be arrested there, let our imagination pass beyond; it will sooner exhaust the power of conception than nature that of supplying material for conception. The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature. No idea approaches it. We may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; we only produce atoms in comparison with the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, the centre of which is everywhere, the circumference ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... railroad, for a space kept to the brow of the hill where stretched a well defined road, which by almost imperceptible degrees led deeper and always higher into the woods. Presently, leaving this road and turning into a bridle path where an unpracticed eye would have discovered no sign of travel, she rode on until reaching a small clearing among the pines, ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... occupations on the third: they attended to the young, worked within the open royal cells, and also watched on those that were shut. They made a waved work on them, not by applying wax cordons, but by removing wax from the surface. Towards the top this waved work is almost imperceptible; it becomes deeper above, and the workers excavate it still more from thence to the base of the pyramid. The cell, when once shut, also becomes thinner; and is so much so, immediately preceding the queen's metamorphosis ...
— New observations on the natural history of bees • Francis Huber
... or it may be capturing tiny insects housed away there. Much more like a large sphynx moth hovering and humming over the flowers in the dusky twilight, than like a bird, appears this delicate, fairy-like beauty. How the bright green of the body gleams and glistens in the sunlight. Each imperceptible stroke of those tiny wings conforms to the mechanical laws of flight in all their subtle complications with an ease and gracefulness that seems spiritual. Who can fail to note that fine adjustment of the organs ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [December, 1897], Vol 2. No 6. • Various
... have been affected by them. The two works named are, however, of the highest importance; in them, if we are not mistaken, are to be found the first signs of the disappearance, as it were, of the sonata of three movements, and, perhaps, of the sonata itself, into the "imperceptible." After Op. 90 Beethoven wrote sonatas in four movements, but that does not affect the argument, neither does the fact, that after Beethoven are to be found several remarkable sonatas with the same number. The process ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... forgiveness of the wrong inflicted by her words. But when those words were irrevocably spoken, his look assumed sternness, the sense of power, and immitigable resolve; and this with so natural and imperceptible a change, that it seemed as if the iron man had stood there from the first, and the meek man not at all. The effect was as when the light, vapory clouds, with their soft coloring, suddenly vanish from the stony brow of a precipitous mountain, and leave there the frown which you at once feel to be ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... necessitates an expenditure of energy represented by at least 1,058 horse power, but the action is spread over an enormous area of leaf surface, rendered necessary by the small proportion of carbonic acid contained in the air, by measure only 1/2000 part, and hence the action is silent and imperceptible. It is now conceded on all hands that what is termed heat is the energy of molecular motion, and that this motion is convertible into various kinds and obeys the general laws relating to motion. Two substances brought within the range of chemical affinity unite with more or less ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various
... maximum, and perhaps fallen to a point slightly lower, at which hight it may be expected to remain, other conditions also remaining constant. The gland steam must now be gradually turned off until the amount of steam vapor issuing from the glands is almost imperceptible. This should not lower the vacuum in the slightest degree. By gradual degrees the gland steam can be still farther cut down, until no steam vapor at all can be discerned issuing from the gland boxes. This reduction should be continued until a point is reached at which ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... enlightenment, even if they cannot get liberty; they must at least be technical. An old apprentice learnt a trade, even if his master came like any Turk and banged him most severely. The old housewife knew which side her bread was buttered, even if it were so thin as to be almost imperceptible. The old sailor knew the ropes; even if he knew the rope's end. Consequently, when any of these revolted, they were concerned with things they knew, pains, practical impossibilities, or ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... quite imperceptible. During the whole time of our stay, Reaumur's thermometer stood between 15 and ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... need that the General Government should maintain all its authority and as soon as practicable resume the exercise of all its functions. On this principle I have acted, and have gradually and quietly, and by almost imperceptible steps, sought to restore the rightful energy of the General Government and of the States. To that end provisional governors have been appointed for the States, conventions called, governors elected, legislatures assembled, and Senators and Representatives ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Johnson • Andrew Johnson
... circulation, respiration, digestion, speech, or thought. It is pretended, that the soul is then separated from the body; but to say, that this soul, with which we are unacquainted, is the principle of life, is to say nothing, unless that an unknown power is the hidden principle of imperceptible movements. Nothing is more natural and simple, than to believe, that the dead man no longer lives: nothing is more extravagant, than to believe, that the dead man is still alive. We laugh at the simplicity of some nations, whose custom is to bury provision with the dead, under ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... near perfection as this mortal coil will allow. We hold that mind and matter, in that mysterious union which connects the spiritual with the physical being, commence in the medium state, undergoing, not, as some men have pretended, transmigrations of the soul only, but such gradual and imperceptible changes of both soul and body, as have peopled the world with so many wonderful beings—wonderful, mentally and physically; and all of which (meaning all of the improvable class) are no more than animals of the same great genus, ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Thus, by alternately opening and shutting the two sets of lateral wings, M. Petin proposes to make his ship sail forward on a series of inclined planes, upwards and downwards. He takes care to assure us, however, that the requisite degree of inclination will be so slight as to be imperceptible to his passengers; and instances, in corroboration of this opinion, the beds of rivers, where a very slight degree of inclination suffices to ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... by the fact that unwittingly a part of his work had been just above one of the great beams that supported the ceiling, and he was forced to enlarge the hole by one-fourth. But at last all was done. Through a hole so thin as to be quite imperceptible from below he saw the room underneath. There was only a thin film of wood to be broken through on the night of his escape. For various reasons, he had fixed on the night of August 27. But hear ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... far in a short time by the calendar, every metamorphosis was slow and painful and imperceptible. She wept her eyes dry; then moped until her gloom grew intolerable. The first diversion she sought was really an effort of her grief to renew itself by a little repose. Her first amusement was for her grief's sake. But before long her diversions ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... ours. I recall his sudden bewilderment, but I never have understood exactly how it happened. I remember Brutus' eyes on my father's hand, as it moved so gently over his coat. It must have been some gesture, smooth and imperceptible. For suddenly, my father's languor left him, suddenly his lips curled back in a smile devoid of humor, and he leapt at the lantern. He leapt, and at the same instant, as perfectly timed as though the whole matter had been ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... less explicit, of names rather than notes. He was astonished that morning at his own fortune and facility; he succeeded in covering a page of ruled paper wholly to his satisfaction, and the sentences, when he read them out, appeared to suggest a weird elusive chanting, exquisite but almost imperceptible, like the echo of the plainsong reverberated from the ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... reforming, possibly, might take up many years." Without question it might; and it ought. It is one of the excellences of a method in which time is amongst the assistants, that its operation is slow, and in some cases almost imperceptible. If circumspection and caution are a part of wisdom, when we work only upon inanimate matter, surely they become a part of duty too, when the subject of our demolition and construction is not brick and timber, but sentient beings, by the sudden alteration of whose state, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... like that of Mahomet can only be extended by violence and terror; for the natural stubbornness of men does not readily give way to novel impressions; but the mild spirit of the gospel is alone to be infused through the means of gentleness, persuasion, and imperceptible perseverance. These are the proper instruments of conversion, and peculiarly belong to the fair sex, whose eloquence, on such occasions, gives charms to devotion and ornaments to truth. The earliest stages of Christianity ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... sat intently watching the canoe. It seemed an age to him before he saw a hand emerge from the bushes and take hold of the head-rope. The motion given to the canoe was so slight as to be almost imperceptible; it seemed as if it was only drifting gently before the slight breeze which was creeping over the surface of the lake. Half its length had disappeared from the open space, when an Indian appeared by the edge ...
— True to the Old Flag - A Tale of the American War of Independence • G. A. Henty
... riding, Hal made out specks ahead that he took to be automobiles. He increased the speed of the car slightly to make sure of this fact. The car driven by Hal was gaining, but so slightly as to be almost imperceptible. ...
— The Boy Allies with Haig in Flanders • Clair W. Hayes
... An almost imperceptible nerve was dancing against Mrs. Samstag's right temple. Alma could sense, rather than see, the ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... again, sitting on the edge of her stall, with his colors and brushes tossed out on the board, he talked to her, and, with the soft imperceptible skill of long practice in those arts, he drew out the details of her ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... that I have in a sense called my own to me; that the great mass of children could not be ignited except by an orderly and imperceptible process, either from within or without. In fact, it has been said repeatedly that I deal with extraordinary soil. I wish to place the situation here even more intimately, in order to cover these and other objections, for I believe they are to ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... but ever and again it went away to be filled. What happened on these holiday jaunts Euphemia has never ascertained. But a chance blow or worse cause ran a crease athwart the forehead of the thing, and below an almost imperceptible bulging hinted at a future corpulency. And there was complaint of the quantity of polishing it needed, and an increasing difficulty in keeping it bright. And except when it was full to the brim, the lining was unsightly; and this became more so. One day Ithuriel must have visited Euphemia's ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... to cover the new applications. He may be led to a process of 'rationalising' or 'spiritualising' which is dangerous to intellectual honesty. The vagueness of the general conceptions with which he is concerned facilitates the adaptation; and his words slide into new meanings by imperceptible gradations. His error is in taking a legitimate tentative process for a conclusive test; and inferring that opinions are confirmed because a non-natural interpretation can be forced upon them. This, however, is only the vicious application ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... piece of bark revealed to us two scorpions with enormous bellies, and heads so small as to be almost imperceptible; all they did was to stiffen out their tails, which are composed of six divisions, the last terminating ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... world, the one a materialistic belief, and the other some degree or phase of a spiritual conception. Every degree of density is to be found in the material view, and every grade of refinement exists in the spiritual vision: by imperceptible gradations they may shade from one into the other, but the two extremes are material and spiritual. The latter view will tend to result in unselfishness, in altruism and a keen desire to leave one's own little corner of the world ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... ventilating houses is by some method that will empty rooms of the vitiated air and bring in a supply of pure air by small and imperceptible currents. ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the highest mountains of the globe. Still, however, the instance we have cited of the rivers of Russia shows, that the land whence great rivers take their rise, is not necessarily mountainous; in this case the ascent is almost imperceptible, and the summit offers the aspect of a level and marshy plain. Such also occurs in the famous boundary between the United States and Canada, where the highlands that figured in two successive treaties have disappeared, and in their supposed place has been ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... mind. Rousseau and Goethe were studied, French and German sentiments were exchanged, till criminal passion was exalted into the purest of all earthly emotions. It were tedious to dwell upon the minute, the almost imperceptible occurrences that tended to heighten the illusion of passion, and throw an air of false dignity around the degrading spells of vice; but so it was, that in something less than a year from the time of her marriage, ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... these suns are luminary only? Do you believe that this old Phoebus, who incessantly forces into space, wherein we are swimming, his inordinate surge of heat and light, has no other function but to light the earth and some other paltry and imperceptible planets? What a candle! A million times greater than ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... of the instincts and the passions, a vague intimation of sympathy between man and the world around him,—in one word, the sense of mystery. The narrower and the broader meanings pass into one another by imperceptible shades. They are affected by the well-known historic conditions for romantic feeling in the different European countries. The common factor, of course, is the man with the romantic world set in his heart. It is Gautier with his love of color, Victor Hugo enraptured with the sound of words, Heine ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... a quick, almost imperceptible nod, as she recalled how she had lain in her clothes, and listened to the busy coming and going of footsteps, for the greater part of ...
— Cutlass and Cudgel • George Manville Fenn
... to constitute the sum total of a well built character. Therefore, the whole truth about the morals of the present generation will be known only to the next. The processes used in the moral development of the race have been gradual and almost imperceptible in progress, but they have been in progress, nevertheless, and promise great results. The man who sowed his seeds yesterday does not expect to reap a harvest to-morrow. Cultivation is to follow planting. The warm spring rains, the hot rays of a summer sun are to come and moisten and warm the soil ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... heart, that natural seat of evil propensities, that little troublesome empire of the passions, is led to what is right by slow motions and imperceptible degrees. It must be admonished by reproof, and allured by kindness. Its liveliest advances are frequently impeded by the obstinacy of prejudice, and its brightest promises often obscured by the tempests of passion. It is slow in its acquisition of virtue, ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... imagination began to paint her hovering like a sea-bird upon white wings high above the mainmast's taper point, and gazing through the darkness into the soul of her she loved. Then, by those faint and imperceptible degrees with which thoughts fade one into another, from Jeannie her thought got round to Eustace Meeson. She wondered if he had ever called at the lodgings at Birmingham after she left? Somehow, she had an idea that he was not altogether indifferent to her; there had been a ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... that electricity exists immovable or in circulation everywhere, latent or imperceptible, around us, and within ourselves, and that it enters as a cause into the majority of the chemical, physical, and mechanical phenomena that are constantly taking place before our eyes. A body cannot change state, nature, temperature, form, or place, even, without electricity being brought ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... had been going cautiously all the while. I had had confidential agents trickling through the country some time, whose office was to undermine knighthood by imperceptible degrees, and to gnaw a little at this and that and the other superstition, and so prepare the way gradually for a better order of things. I was turning on my light one-candle-power at a time, and meant to continue ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... adventure. These mushrooms, like other vegetables, have the power of suddenly bursting without being touched, Nature having provided them with this means of spreading their seed over a wide extent of ground. The red dust which so disagreeably filled our eyes is composed of imperceptible spores, each atom containing a germ. The shock produced when we fell caused the explosion of some of the largest of these, and they set all the others agoing, though who would have believed that two brave hunters could be ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... to me, as clear as daylight. I only marvelled how his Honour could waste his time and mine by putting what he thought were searching questions to the accused relating to his past. Francis Smethurst, who had quite shaken off his somnolence, spoke with a curious nasal twang, and with an almost imperceptible soupcon of foreign accent, He calmly denied Kershaw's version of his past; declared that he had never been called Barker, and had certainly never been mixed up in any murder ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... said, stepping back a pace, and an almost imperceptible jar coming into her voice. Then she came close again. "The fault you will have to find with me is this, Jasper," she said, looking fully at him with her sweet eyes; "I shall love you, if anything, too well. No one can ever come between us, unless it ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... Before the novel could reach its modern stage, of a more or less sincere attempt to express human life and character, it had to pass through several centuries of almost imperceptible development. Among the early precursors of the novel we must place a collection of tales known as the Greek Romances, dating from the second to the sixth centuries. These are imaginative and delightful ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... The education of an individual is a slow process. The education of a family, of a community, or of a state is slower still. The education of a nation or of a race is so slow that its progress is difficult of measurement. Indeed, the movement of the race as a whole is so imperceptible that it leaves room for debate as to whether humanity is ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... Their eyes did not flash, but shone with a cold still light. They were of a pale-golden or straw color, horrible to look into, with their stony calmness, their pitiless indifference, hardly enlivened by the almost imperceptible vertical slit of the pupil, through which Death seemed to be looking out like the archer behind the long narrow loop-hole in a blank turret-wall. On the whole, the caged reptiles, horrid as they were, hardly matched his recollections of what he had seen or dreamed ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... is there, of which man is capable, that is not founded on the exterior; the relation that exists between visible and invisible, the perceptible and the imperceptible?—Lavater. ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... At last an imperceptible opening is made. Streams rush down from the mountain to join the river; even raindrops lend their individually insignificant aid. All the forces of nature are subtly arrayed against the obstruction in the ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... of destruction are here named. There is a slow decay going on in the opponents and their opposition, as a garment waxing old, and there is a being fretted away by the imperceptible working of external causes, as by ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... it as an enormous rope under the constant pressure of soldiers on either side, who now and then, with an "all together" of a tug-of-war at a given point, straightened or made a bend, with the result imperceptible except as you measured it by a tree or a house. Battles as severe as the most important in South Africa, battles severe enough to have decided famous campaigns in Europe in former days, when one king rode forth against ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... up and begin again. The sky is superb; the weather is hot, calm and propitious for those in search of the Lizard crushed beside the footpath. Perhaps the effluvia of the gamy tit-bit have reached them, coming from afar, imperceptible to any other sense than that of the Sexton-beetles. So my Necrophori are fain to go ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... cried, "Ho boy! bring basin and ewer;" and, turning to my brother, said, "O my guest come forward and wash thy hands." My brother rose to do so but he saw neither ewer nor basin; yet his host kept washing his hands with invisible soap in imperceptible water and cried, "Bring the table!" But my brother again saw nothing. Then said the host, "Honour me by eating of this meat and be not ashamed." And he kept moving his hand to and fro as if he ate and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... the musketeer, continuing his imperceptible tone of irony, "I had no idea such a ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the road for seven miles extends over somewhat undulated ground, generally good; but here and there stony, with a gradual but almost imperceptible ascent, until the top of the pass is reached; from this, the view of Tazeen valley, and the summit ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... render less striking the contrast in manners and civilization which I observed at the beginning of the century, at Caracas, Bogota, Quito, Lima, Mexico and the Havannah. The influences of the Basque, Catalanian, Galician and Andalusian origin become every day more imperceptible. ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... part of the edifice it might be perpetrated. From hall to hall, and from room to room, he tracked with noiseless step and glaring eye the movements of the Christian mob—now hiding himself behind a pillar, now passing into concealed cavities in the walls, now looking down from imperceptible fissures in the roof; but, whatever his situation, invariably watching from it, with the same industry of attention and the same silence of emotion, the minutest acts of spoliation committed by the most humble follower of the Christian ranks. It was ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... has hung for many years in her grandson's dining-room, and is well known to all his friends. It represents a stately woman with an unmistakably fair skin; and if the face or hair betrays any indication of possible dark blood, it is imperceptible to the general observer, and must be of too slight and fugitive a nature to enter into the discussion. A long curl touches one shoulder. One hand rests upon a copy of Thomson's 'Seasons', which was held to be the proper study and recreation of cultivated women in those ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... Only at night and in the forests while the dew lasted was there any freshness. But on the road, the highroad along which the troops marched, there was no such freshness even at night or when the road passed through the forest; the dew was imperceptible on the sandy dust churned up more than six inches deep. As soon as day dawned the march began. The artillery and baggage wagons moved noiselessly through the deep dust that rose to the very hubs of the wheels, and the infantry sank ankle-deep ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... in the alliance. 'The stream of supplies and reinforcements, which in terms of modern war is called "communications,", was kept free from even the threat of molestation, not by visible measures, but by the undisputed efficacy of a real, though imperceptible sea-power. At the close of the Russian war we encountered, and unhappily for us in influential positions, men who, undismayed by the consequences of mimicking in free England the cast-iron methods of the Great Frederick, ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... comprehended in the first region descends towards the north with so imperceptible a slope that it may almost be said to form a level plain. Within the bounds of this immense tract of country there are neither high mountains nor deep valleys. Streams meander through it irregularly: great rivers ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... flood-tide had obliged the pickmen to strike work, a sea would come rolling over the rocks, dash out the fire, and endanger his indispensable implement, the bellows. If the sea was smooth, while the smith often stood at work knee-deep in water, the tide rose by imperceptible degrees, first cooling the exterior of the fireplace, or hearth, and then quietly blackening and extinguishing the fire from below. The writer has frequently been amused at the perplexing anxiety of the blacksmith when ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... friend. "Here," he says, "was no conversation of leaps and bounds, in which idleness traverses a whole gallery of ideas that have no connection with one another, and weariness draws you away from one object to skim a dozen others. They were talks in which all was bound together, often by imperceptible threads, but all the more naturally, as not a word of what was to be said had been led up to or prepared beforehand." Grimm cannot find words to describe her verve, her stream of brilliant sallies, her dashing traits, her eagle's coup d'oeil. No wonder ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... into the Gulf, through Timbalier Bay, and may properly be termed one of the mouths of the Mississippi. Its current movement does not in high water exceed three miles an hour, and when the Mississippi is at low water, it is almost imperceptible. Large steamers, brigs, and schooners come into it when the river is at flood, and carry out three or four hundred tons of freight ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... alone worthy to represent some of the aspects of the Highest. And may it not be that from His standpoint those great differences that we see between ourselves and those which we call the lower forms of life may be almost imperceptible, since He transcends them all? A little child sees an immense difference between himself of perhaps two and a half feet high and a baby only a foot and a half high, and thinks himself a man compared with that tiny form rolling on the ground and unable to walk. ...
— Avataras • Annie Besant
... was delicacy on the duchess's part—not policy. He was on the point of saying something himself, to make the chance which he had determined to give her still better, when the servant announced another visitor. The duchess, on hearing the name—it was that of an Italian prince—gave a little imperceptible pout, and said to Newman, rapidly: "I beg you to remain; I desire this visit to be short." Newman said to himself, at this, that Madame d'Outreville intended, after all, that they should ...
— The American • Henry James
... in a jargon which to a layman would have been unintelligible, illustrating them by certain almost imperceptible shiftings of the fingers or changes in the position of his hand, so slight as to thwart discovery. Through it all the girl stood by and followed his every word and motion with eager attention. She needed no explanation of the terms they ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... still plastic, still capable of being won to God, as it were, by a coup de main—might not—would not—all have been well? But no!—he must needs believe that God had given her to him for ever, that there was room for all the gradual softening, the imperceptible approaches by which he had hoped to win her. It had seemed to him the process could not be too gentle, too indulgent. And meanwhile the will and mind that might have been captured at a rush had time to harden—the forces of ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the great river, sailing when the wind permitted, paddling when it did not, passing, at tolerably frequent intervals, points where lesser streams discharged themselves into the main body of water, while by imperceptible degrees the waterway narrowed, and the forest—dense, green, flower-decked, alive and gay with bird and insect life—pressed its foliaged walls in upon them ever closer and closer, except where an occasional break caused by fire or windfall afforded them a momentary glimpse of giant mountain ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... elegant villas on the seacoast of Puteoli and the Caieta, they compare their own expeditions to the marches of Caesar and Alexander. Yet should a fly presume to settle on the silken folds of their gilded umbrellas, should a sunbeam penetrate through some unguarded and imperceptible chink, they deplore their intolerable hardships, and lament in affected language that they were not born in the land of the Cimmerians, the regions of eternal darkness. In these journeys into the country the whole body of the household marches with their master. In the same order as the ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... it was slowly opening. Gradually, gradually the lid was swinging back, and the black slit which marked the opening was becoming wider and wider. So gently and carefully was it done that the movement was almost imperceptible. Then, as we breathlessly watched it, a white thin hand appeared at the opening, pushing back the painted lid, then another hand, and finally a face—a face which was familiar to us both, that of Professor Andreas. Stealthily he ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... burning brightly, and the other, a yellow one, too, was already beginning to blink. And though there was no wind, that lantern quivered from its own blinking, and everything seemed to quiver slightly. Yura was about to get up to go into the arbour and there begin life anew, with an imperceptible transition from the old, when suddenly he heard voices in the arbour. His mother and the wrong Yura Mikhailovich, the officer, were talking. The right Yura grew petrified in his place; his heart stood still; ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... to the non-mathematical mind, when he said that "ten decimal places are sufficient to give the circumference of the earth to the fraction of an inch, and thirty decimal places would give the circumference of the whole visible universe to a quantity imperceptible with the most ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... shook his head. In the distance he saw the Honourable Maurice come quickly toward them. With a firm but imperceptible gesture ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... fascination of the lifeless face and wide-staring eyes. They drew him towards them; he stooped down and felt for the pulse, which was imperceptible; laid his hand upon the heart, but could not feel it beat; he raised an arm, and it fell back ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... was up; there were no clouds now, but there was not a very strong light, because the moon was on the wane. It was one of those nights during which an imperceptible vapour arises, and renders the moon somewhat obscure, or, at least, it robs the earth of her rays; and then there were shadows cast by the moon, yet they grew fainter, and those cast upon the floor of the apartment were ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... connected with mankind long who has learned to estimate the nature of eternity? or glorious who is aware of the insignificance of the size of the earth, even in its whole extent, and especially in the portion which men inhabit? And when we consider that almost imperceptible point which we ourselves occupy unknown to the majority of nations, can we still hope that our name and reputation can be widely circulated? And then our estates and edifices, our cattle, and the enormous treasures of our gold and silver, can they be esteemed or denominated ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... honour;—could you believe in the decline of life he would have fallen off? No, he cannot have fallen: such a mind as his never was exalted.—It is the virtues of his wife that has hitherto made his vices imperceptible;—that has kept them in their dark cell, afraid to venture out;—afraid to appear amidst her shining perfections.—Vile, abandon'd Smith!—But for the sake of his injur'd, unhappy wife, I will not discover his baseness to any but yourself and Lady Powis.—Perhaps ...
— Barford Abbey • Susannah Minific Gunning
... face. After a moment Alan dropped the paper, rose to his feet, and went to the window. There was no longer a light in the cabin where Mary Standish had been accepted as a guest. Stampede, too, had risen from his seat. He saw the sudden and almost imperceptible ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... Hebrew language is aware that we have in the conjugation of our verbs a mode known as the 'intensive voice,' which, by means of an almost imperceptible modification of vowel-points, intensifies the meaning of the primitive root. A similar significance seems to attach to the Jews themselves in connection with the people among whom they dwell. They are the 'intensive form' of any nationality whose language and customs they ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... eyes fell upon Fernand Wagner, she started slightly; but this movement was imperceptible alike to him whose presence caused ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... Athlone,—at least so my uncle's letter mentioned. Perhaps he might have returned; if not, to Athlone I should set off at once. So resolving, I stole noiselessly up-stairs, and reached the door of the count's chamber; I opened it gently and entered; and though my step was almost imperceptible to myself, it was quite sufficient to alarm the watchful occupant of the room, who, springing up in his ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... the hand of Adherbal flew at him. An imperceptible bending of the body, a red streak on Glaucon's naked side, and it dug into the deck. Yet whilst it quivered, was out again and hurled through the Carthaginian's breast and shoulders. He fell in a ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... box for another chocolate cream, gave an imperceptible start. She, too, was staying at the Normandie. She presumed that her admirer was a recent arrival, for she had seen nothing ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... white siren yonder, whose delicate body seemed to palpitate with every slow ripple of the surrounding waters. He hesitated,—with that often saving hesitation a noble spirit may feel ere willfully yielding to what it instinctively knows to be wrong,—and for the briefest possible space an imperceptible line was drawn between his own self-consciousness and the fascinating personality of his lately found friend—a line that parted them asunder as though by a ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... restively, and say, "Uh-uh," at intervals, and at the first chance they would sort of fade out of the room, with a meaning glance at their wives. Eva had two children now. Girls. They treated Uncle Jo with good-natured tolerance. Stell had no children. Uncle Jo degenerated, by almost imperceptible degrees, from the position of honoured guest, who is served with white meat, to that of one who is content with a leg and one of those obscure and bony sections which, after much turning with a bewildered and investigating knife and fork, leave ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... but she would not meet her cousin's true eyes, nor would she grant me one minute apart from the rest in which I could utter my fears or demand the breaking of that spell whose effects were so visible, even if its workings were secret and imperceptible. But at last the stomacher was finished, and as it dropped from her hands I threw myself at her feet, and from this position, looking ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... had the unspeakable joy of seeing her wag her tail with an almost imperceptible movement at his approach. He sat down then, without fear, by her side, and they began to play together; he took her paws and muzzle, pulled her ears, rolled her over on her back, stroked her warm, delicate flanks. She let him do what ever he liked, and when he began ...
— A Passion in the Desert • Honore de Balzac
... before I knew or was capable of guessing what the world, or glories, or business of it were, the natural affections of my soul gave me a secret bent of aversion from them, as some plants are said to turn away from others, by an antipathy imperceptible to themselves and inscrutable to man's understanding. Even when I was a very young boy at school, instead of running about on holidays and playing with my fellows, I was wont to steal from them and walk into the fields, either alone with a book, or with ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... Nevill said these words. The fat man did not show any sign of embarrassment, however, unless his expectant gaze became somewhat fixed, in an effort to prevent a blink. If this were so, the change was practically imperceptible. "She had left here before six o'clock last evening, ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... a positive, about ten pounds of positive, I should judge from the size of that volume, while Charlotte certainly argued from a negative viewpoint," said father, and his eyes twinkled as he gave me an almost imperceptible wink. By his answer he also avoided answering the question of faith put ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... agreeable rejoinders she had made to his offerings, the faint suggestion of an accent that should have struck him at the time but did not for the obvious reason that he was then not at all interested in her. Her English was so perfect that he had failed to detect the almost imperceptible foreign flavour that now took definite form in his reflections. He tried to place this accent. Was it French, or Italian, or Spanish? Certainly it was not German. The lightness of the Latin was evident, he decided, but it was ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... admitting of theory, first, that those mountains had been much higher; secondly, that they had been degraded in their present place; thirdly, that this continent has subsisted in its present place for a very long space of time, during the slow progress of those imperceptible operations; and, lastly, that much of the solid parts of this earth has been thus travelled by the waters to the sea, after serving the purpose of soil upon the surface of ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... venturing to open the door wider, he worked through the narrow aperture, inch by inch, stopping every few seconds for fear that the rustle of his shirt against the jamb might be overheard. At length, by almost imperceptible movements, he succeeded in gaining the head of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... obtain information as to the progress of the Berlin industrial works, and the faithful patriot had, in obedience to the call of his king, come to Leipsic. He had seen the misery and suffering on this poor, down-trodden town, and, as he traversed the antechamber, he said to himself, with an imperceptible smile, "I brought the Russian general to clemency, and the king will not ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... have even before we are conscious of a single image; as if, circumscribing his scenes by a magic circle, he had imposed his own mood on all who entered it. The spell then opens ere it seems to have begun, acting upon us with a vague sense of limitless expanse, yet so continuous, so gentle, so imperceptible in its remotest gradations, as scarcely to be felt, till, combining with unity, we find the feeling embodied in the complete image of intellectual repose,—fulness and rest. The mind thus disposed, the charmed eye glides into the scene: a soft, undulating light leads it on, from bank ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... measurements sank into insignificance beside it. Its color was of softest gray just touched with the flush that deepens the inmost chamber of a shell, or blushes in the unfolded petals of a wind flower. With majestic yet almost imperceptible motion this cloud mounted the blue background of the sky. The spectre of a faded moon hung motionless above it an instant only, and then was swiftly drawn within its soft eclipse. Changing from moment to moment, the great mass took on all semblances of vivid ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... a thin mist spread over portions of the "Moor." It did not lie everywhere, it spared the sand, it lay above the water, but in so delicate a film as to be all but imperceptible. It served to diffuse the moonlight, to make a halo of silver about the face of the orb, when looked up to by one within the haze, ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... answer for a moment, and when he did, it was in a low, almost imperceptible tone, as he stood by the table at which Barbara sat, ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... had not deceived itself. It was as I had thought. I had planned to rid myself of her by hating this phantom until my hate had darkened it. Then there would be nothing but an imperceptible shadow of her remaining, one with which my senses could ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... last 5,000 years. The latter prediction is lawful, because, while we know the causes on which its rising depends, we know, also, that there has existed hitherto no perceptible cause to counteract them; and that it is opposed to experience that a cause imperceptible for so long should start into immensity in a day. If the uniformity is empirical only, that is, if we do not know the causes, and if we infer that they remain uncounteracted from their effects ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... dwelling, I found that one of the windows of the cottage had formerly occupied a part of it, but the panes had been filled up with wood. In one of these was a small and almost imperceptible chink through which the eye could just penetrate. Through this crevice a small room was visible, whitewashed and clean but very bare of furniture. In one corner, near a small fire, sat an old man, leaning ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... and uncouth nature of the man was susceptible to the impulses of a refined revenge, or of an exalted ambition. But when, on closer inspection, the duchesse perceived the small, piercingly black eyes, the longitudinal wrinkles of his high and massive forehead, the imperceptible twitching of the lips, on which were apparent traces of rough good-humor, Madame de Chevreuse altered her opinion of him, and felt she could say to herself: "I have ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the door and opened it. Quarrier, passing the corridor, turned an expressionless visage toward him, and passed on with a nod almost imperceptible. ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... returned to the towns and cities. Yet from this temporary association were produced two results; European fraud became sharpened by coming into contact with Asiatic craft, whilst European tongues, by imperceptible degrees, became recruited with various words (some of them wonderfully expressive), many of which have long been stumbling-stocks to the philologist, who, whilst stigmatising them as words of mere ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... (man included), begins the course of its existence as an egg; and each egg has no greater value of form than that of a single cell. This egg-cell is differentiated, after fecundation, in gradual and imperceptible transitions, farther and farther, higher and higher, until the individual has reached its perfect organization. No organ, no function of the body, no power or function of the soul or of the mind, appears suddenly, but all in gradual development. Since ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... had beheld a man weep in the prison. With difficulty I comforted him, and although from that day forth, he began to serve me more zealously than ever, if that were possible, and to watch over me, yet I perceived, from almost imperceptible signs, that his heart could never pardon me for my reproach; and yet the others laughed at us, persecuted him at every convenient opportunity, sometimes cursed him violently—but he lived in concord and friendship with them and never took offense. Yes, it is sometimes ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... of an almost imperceptible wink in the direction of Violet, the third of the party. Sir Thomas's diplomacies were thoroughly appreciated by his offspring. "It's time some of you were cleared out from under my feet!" he told them. Nevertheless ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... sad infection is syphilis, instead of gonorrhea, there are still other miseries in store for it. If it is not so fortunate to be stillborn, it may have infection that ranges from almost imperceptible degrees to the most loathsome extent that it is possible for animal tissue to harbor. Its brain may be so invaded by the syphilitic parasites that it can never attain any degree of mentality; its spinal column maybe so involved that paralytic conditions ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... a slight, almost imperceptible start, and opened his long, dark eyes with questioning surprise at Bardo's blind face, as if his words—a mere phrase of common parlance at a time when men were often being ransomed from slavery or imprisonment—had some ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... is so little that you cannot see it, but by the motion of it; for at every pulse, as it opens you may see it, and immediately again it shuts, in such sort as it is not to be discerned. From this red speck, after a while, there will stream out a number of little (almost imperceptible) red veins. At the end of some of which, in time, there will be gathered together a knot of matter, which by little and little will take the form of a head and you will, ere long, begin to discern eyes and a beak in it. All this while the first ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 36. Saturday, July 6, 1850 • Various
... vice and corruption. There are a sort of middle tints and shades between the two extremes; there is something uncertain on the confines of the two empires which they first pass through, and which renders the change easy and imperceptible. There are even a sort of splendid impositions so well contrived, that, at the very time the path of rectitude is quitted forever, men seem to be advancing into some higher and nobler road of public conduct. Not that such impositions are strong enough in themselves; ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... in advancement. Each new position brings them to a new situation and into a new relation to the business. Girls receive salary advancement for increasingly responsible work, but any change in work is likely to be so gradual as to be almost imperceptible if they remain in the same place of employment. If they change to another place, those who are stenographers have a slight readjustment to make in getting accustomed to new terms and to the peculiarities of the new persons who dictate ...
— Wage Earning and Education • R. R. Lutz
... air has been phenomenally still. One can go outside, as we do frequently, to feed the birds and squirrels without hats and not feel a hair stirred. Even when the snow was on the ground we never felt the cold, owing to the absence of wind, and the thaw has been imperceptible. Snow is still on the hills. I have several times thrown open my bedroom window about dawn for an hour to familiarise myself with the outside noises. There is nothing human within a quarter of a mile. (N.B.—The others, who are much more likely to be accurate as to distance than I, say ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... peaks, paling from rose to saffron, far above, beyond. There was no sound but a tinkling stream and the continual jingle of our sledge-bells. We drove at a foot's pace, our horse finding his own path. When we left the forest, the light had all gone except for some almost imperceptible touches of primrose on the eastern horns. It was a moonless night, but the sky was alive with stars, and now and then one fell. The last house in the valley was soon passed, and we entered those bleak gorges where the wind, fine, noiseless, penetrating like an edge of steel, poured ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... few minutes later, I rejoined those below, I found them all, with eyes directed toward the cornice, searching for the hole through which I had just been looking. It was next to imperceptible, so naturally had it been made to fit in with the shadows of the scroll work; and even after I had discovered it and pointed it out to them, I found difficulty in making them believe that they really looked upon an opening. But when once convinced ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... have been tempted to tell her too,' Cytherea went on, 'had I not found out that there exists a very odd, almost imperceptible, and yet real connection of some kind between her and Mr. Manston, which is more than that of a mutual interest in ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... don't know, Gracious, only it seems to me you are like a pure white lily bell, and I want to creep into your heart and live in its fragrance, but—" She stopped abruptly. It seemed as though the almost imperceptible veil of reserve was falling lower ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... obviously plausible reason for assigning it to the creator of so realistic a witch and so singular a succubus. But such a dramatic poem as this would be a conspicuous jewel in the crown of any but a supremely great dramatist and poet. And the musical or metrical harmony of the verse, imperceptible as it may be or rather must always be to the long-eared dunces who can only think to hear through their clumsy fingers, is so like Fletcher's as to suggest that if any part of Shakespeare's "King Henry VIII." is attributable to a lesser hand than his it may far more plausibly be assigned ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of Greenland moves. It flows with imperceptible slowness under its own weight, like, a mass of some viscous or plastic substance, such as pitch or molasses candy, in all directions outward toward the sea. Near the edge it has so thinned that mountain peaks are laid bare, these islands in the sea of ice being known as NUNATAKS. Down the valleys ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... before. This was the mere allegation of envy, chafed at the achievements of another, which, from their apparent facility, might have been its own. It is indeed strange that the simple mechanism thus explained should have been unobserved or misunderstood so long; and nothing can account for it but the imperceptible lightness as well as the strength of the chains which authority ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... is like a reflecting telescope, the least breath upon the mirror of which will cause all the starry sublimities that it should shadow forth to fade and become dim. The slightest moisture in the atmosphere, though it be quite imperceptible where we stand, will be dense enough to shut out the fair, shining, snowy summits that girdle the horizon and to leave nothing visible but the lowliness and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... mechanical basis of the world, the processes which science knows as 'laws of motion' and the like, but which really, as I then perceived, might more aptly be described as the more inveterate of Nature's habits. Upon this foundation, which varied, indeed, but by almost imperceptible gradations, was built up an infinitely complex structure of intermediate parts, increasing from below upwards in freedom, ease and beauty of form, till high above all floated on the ear snatches of melody, ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... his heart, and tho' never insensible of beauty, had never been enslaved by it, was now by charms he least suspected, and at an age when he believed himself proof against all the attacks of love, subdued without knowing that he was so.—The tender passion stole into his soul by imperceptible degrees, and under the shape of friendship and paternal affection, met with no opposition from his reason, till it became too violent to be restrained; then showed itself in the whole power of restless wishes, fears, hopes, ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... general's plantation, M. Michaux passed over Mulder Hill, a steep and lofty mountain, that forms a kind of amphitheatre. From its summit the neighbouring country presents the aspect of an immense valley, covered with forests of imperceptible extent. As far as the eye can reach, nothing but a gloomy verdant space is seen, formed by the tops of the close-connected trees, and, through which, not even the vestige of a plantation can be discerned. The profound silence that reigns in these woods, uninhabited by savage beasts, ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... objects seemed much nearer from the distinctness with which their outlines were revealed. The road was a magnificent one,—broad, well paved, well graded,—and though for some miles it was steadily ascending, yet the ascent was made by such an easy slope, that it was really imperceptible; and they bowled along as easily and as merrily as if on level ground. Moreover, the scenery around was of the most attractive character. They were among the mountains; and though there were no snow-clad summits, and no lofty peaks lost amid the clouds, still the ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... hoofs of the posse; the quiet was so perfect, the air so clear, that he even caught the chorus of straining saddle leather and then voices of men. All this time the effects of the whisky had been wearing away by imperceptible degrees and at that sound all his old self rushed back on Vic Gregg. Why, they were his friends, his partners, these voices in the night, and that clear laughter floated up from Harry Fisher who had been his bunkie at the Circle V Bar ranch three years ago. He ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... a slow, almost imperceptible shake of the head. He was gazing reflectively at a couple of English sparrows perched on one of the telephone wires some ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... necklace." Then he looked up at her, and their eyes met, hers with desperate expectation and his holding her gaze in an unmoved questioning. "Did she give it to you?" he asked, and she shook her head with a negation almost imperceptible. "No," said Jeffrey to himself. "She didn't have it. ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... on the box and waited, meditating upon the probable occupations of gentlemen who habitually slept till ten o'clock in the morning and sometimes till twelve. From time to time he brushed an almost imperceptible particle of dust from his very smart blue cloth knees, and settled the in-turned collar of the perfectly new blue guernsey about his neck. It was new, and it scratched him disagreeably, but it was ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... Mr. Ferris with evident reluctance and not until he had plainly received intimation from Miss Sanford that it was more than time. Knowing Mrs. Truscott well, she could see what was imperceptible to their visitors, that the strain was becoming almost unbearable. The moment they were gone ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
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