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More "Sparse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... we have come from the south. This stream, assisted by the Peace, is fast filling up with detritus the western portion of Lake Athabasca. There is a marked contrast between the upper and lower coasts of the lake. The north shore consists of Laurentian gneiss with a sparse wood growth; the south bank for the most part is low, the formation being a cretaceous sandstone. Ice holds fast this beautiful sheet for six months every year. As we puff along the surface of its incomparable blue it is hard to realise that, although ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... the preceding chapter occurred one autumn, many years ago. In the spring succeeding this autumn, a company of settlers, with their loaded teams, and unwieldy baggage, were making their slow way through the labyrinths of an Ohio forest to a sparse settlement buried many miles ...
— The Riflemen of the Miami • Edward S. Ellis
... we wanted. Upon the top of Pap's head the sparse grey hairs bristled ominously. His teeth clicked; his eyes snapped. He was furiously angry—as I had expected him ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... her?" interrogated Marrineal. "Do you really think—" His uplifted brows, sparse on his broad and candid forehead, consummated ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... in an otherwise {flat} entity which is not actually present. For example, some Unix filesystems can store large files with holes so that unused regions of the file are never actually stored on disk. (In techspeak, these are referred to as 'sparse' files.) As another example, the region of memory in IBM PCs reserved for memory-mapped I/O devices which may not actually be present is called 'the I/O hole', since memory-management systems must skip over this area when ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... of colour. A drapery of crimson and gold endued the maples; the wild bines and briars were covered with orange and scarlet berries; the black-plumed pine trees rose solemnly behind. A flat country, for the most part; and, as the travellers slowly receded westward, settlements became sparse and small; the grand forests closed more densely round them; solitary clearings broke ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... when it was literally a strand, that is, a low-lying road by the side of the Thames, stretching from Temple-bar to Charing Cross. On the south side of the thoroughfare were the mansions of bishops and nobles dotted at sparse intervals; on the north was open country. To-day there are even fewer survivals of the past than might have been seen thirty years ago. The wholesale clearance of Holywell Street and the buildings to the north has completely ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... who might be expected to reserve a whole compartment for himself. He was small and thin, and weedy, with little blinking, pink-rimmed eyes of the kind which ought to have had white lashes instead of the sparse, jet black ones that rimmed them. His forehead, though narrow, suggested shrewdness, as did the expression of those light coloured eyes of his, which were set close to the sharp, slightly up-turned nose. His hair was so black that it made his skin seem singularly ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... thousand miles from Earth there had still been enough hydrogen traces in the ether to give purchase to the explosions of their water-motor. At six hundred miles from the moon they had run into a sparse gaseous belt that had enabled them to change direction and slow their speed. They had hoped to find hydrogen at a thousand or twelve hundred ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... fosilo. Spade (at cards) piko. Spain Hispanujo. Spangle briletajxo. Spanish-fly kantarido. Spare (extra) ekstra. Spare indulgi. Sparing, to be sxpari. Sparing (saving) sxparema. Spark fajrero. Sparkle brili. Sparrow pasero. Sparrow-hawk akcipitro. Sparse maldensa. Spasm spasmo. Spatter sxprucigi (sur). Spawn fisxsemo. Speak paroli. Speak through the nose nazparoli. Speaker parolanto. Spear lanco. Special speciala. Specialise specialigi. Specialist specialisto. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... individuals, it may be a helpful movement, since individuals unsuited to rural life may find themselves adapted to some type of urban life. When unneeded and unhelpful individuals are removed from the country, the rural population may be more efficient and more prosperous, even though relatively more sparse. ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... tall savages were advancing through the somewhat sparse scrub. Yielding to a first impulse of self-preservation, Laurence, quick as thought, stepped behind the stem of the ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... was at the head of a flight of steps leading up from the office. It had only a single window, but it commanded a partial view of several roads leading into the village, and a sparse row of houses on the opposite side of the street. In front of the stable stood a blacksmith shop, and next to it, on the right, the only store in the village. The store building had two rooms, the front being used for dry-goods, groceries, and country produce, the one in ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... the spring dusk. She chose the road towards Barnham Wood because it was lonely there and the hedges were thin; you could feel the breath of the sea as it blew across the sparse fields. The hush of an English Sunday evening enfolded the road, the wood, the fields. The sun was very low and the saffron light penetrated the dark lines of the hedges and hung like a curtain of misty gold ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... still unknown and not even guessed at, it is evident that many mistakes must have been made, and that many an instance, which until now has been considered reliable proof of a so-called single variation, is in fact only a case of vicinism. In reading the sparse literature on sports, numerous cases will be found, which cannot stand this test. In many instances crossing must be looked to as an explanation, [215] and in other cases the evidence relied upon does not suffice to exclude this ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... and State or local fishing access points are sparse, so that for the most part the Basin's main flowing streams remain a closed book for people who lack the time, youth, equipment, or inclination to come at them by canoeing or some other more or less arduous ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... is derived from a native word meaning "red" and was given to the mountain people because in their attacks upon the lowlanders they wore, as a distinguishing mark, red trousers or a dash of red colour elsewhere about their sparse clothing. They raided coast towns and did immense damage before they were finally brought under control. It should be remembered that these conditions were allowed to arise by a Filipino provincial governor, and by Filipino municipal ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... as we have said, of very rude construction—such a one as could only spring up in so remote a region, and among so sparse a population. With the exception of the roof, the frame-work of which had been covered with raw buffalo hides, it was built wholly of rough logs, notched at the ends in a sort of dove-tail fashion, and when not lying closely, filled in with chunks of wood, over which a rude plaster of mud had ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... ungainly, the sleeves of his tunic far above the bony wrist, as though his tailor in cutting the garment had repudiated as fantastic the evidence of his measurements. Yet, when one might have expected to find hands of a talon-like knottiness, to correspond with the sparse rugosity of his person, one found to one's astonishment the most delicately shaped hands in the world, with long, sensitive, nervous fingers, like those of the thousands of artists who have lived and died without being able to express themselves in any artistic ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... a log he rested his chin in his hands. Below him twinkled the sparse lights of the Flat; shouts and singing rose from the circus.—And so John would have been willing to go surety for him! Let no one say the unexpected did not happen. All said and done, they were little more than strangers to each other, and John had no notion what his money-making capacities ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... old-fashioned, sloping-topped, shallow desk covered with green baize, on high legs, so that like a soldier too he could stand as he wrote (Crozier had made that high stand for the desk himself). That was what the room conveyed to her—the spirit of the soldier, bare, clean, strong, sparse: a workshop and a chamber of sleep in one, like the tent of an officer on the march. After the feeling had come to her, to heighten the sensation she espied a little card hung under the small mirror on the wall. There ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... winter we have not had for a long time," said Briest. Then Effi arose from her seat and stroked back the sparse hairs from his forehead. But beautiful as everything seemed from the point of view of Effi's health, it was all illusion, for in reality the disease was gaining ground and quietly consuming her vitality. Effi again wore, as on the day of her betrothal to Innstetten, ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... there in the foothills, and the rushing noise of the small mountain river that hurled itself down upon Millings, ran through it at frenzied speed, and made for the canon on the other side of the valley. Below him Millings twinkled with a few sparse lights, and he could, even from here, distinguish the clatter of Babe's voice. But when he came to the top, Millings dropped away from the reach of his senses. Here was dazzling space, the amazing presence of the mountains, the pressure of the starry sky. Far off already ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... box of a garage had been one of the "all modern conveniences" so fervidly painted in the real estate agent's advertisement, the Crowes had no car. It was the last house on Undercliff Road that had any pretense to sparse grass and a stubbly hedge—beyond it were sand-dunes, delusively ornamented by the signs of streets that as yet only existed in the brain of the owner of the "development," and, a quarter of a mile away, the long blue ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... reply, pushing Gootes aside with one plump hand while with the other he tidied the sparse black hairs of his mustache, which was trimmed down to an eyebrow shading his lip. After inspecting and rejecting several identical bucketseats he found one less to his distaste than the others and stowed his equipment, which was ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... grower's suggestions and becomes fleshy and swells into an ellipse similar to the turnip, of which it possesses all the merits of corpulence, flavour and delicacy; only the strange product serves as a base for a few sparse leaves, the last protests of a real stem that refuses to lose its attributes entirely. ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... was sparse, and the movement of so large a number of men along a certain route completely exhausted all the resources of the inhabitants; and although willing to pay for all that his men required, the Earl of Evesham had frequently to lie down on the turf ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... glad to find a refuge from a fate more cruel than death; a fate from which I was rescued by the intervention of my dear dead friend, Thomas Anderson. I was born on a lonely plantation on the Mississippi River, where the white population was very sparse. We had no neighbors who ever visited us; no young white girls with whom I ever played in my childhood; but, never having enjoyed such companionship, I was unconscious of any sense of privation. Our parents spared no pains to make the lives of their children (we were three) ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... culminated in the expulsion of the Acadians, although there followed a period of peace, but despite the efforts of the Government in making roads, and instituting public works, the settlements were sparse, and the Indian was still in the land. There was only one minister in the county, the Rev. John Eagleson, who had been sent out in 1769 by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, while in the province there were a few Anglican, Congregational, Presbyterian ...
— William Black - The Apostle of Methodism in the Maritime Provinces of Canada • John Maclean
... a clear melody in the dream. Thoughts began to go astray and to mingle with other thoughts; the beech alley was transformed to a path between ilex-trees, and here and there a vine climbed from bough to bough, and sent up waving tendrils and drooped with purple grapes, and the sparse grey-green leaves of a wild olive-tree stood out against the dark shadows of the ilex. Clarke, in the deep folds of dream, was conscious that the path from his father's house had led him into an undiscovered country, and he was wondering at the strangeness of it all, when suddenly, ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... this man who had prodded me, with a long, pale face and pale eyes, a long reddish beard, and hair rather darker, both hair and beard being sparse. He was a fidgety person, always twitching with his hands, and he walked with something of a strut, as though the earth belonged to him. He snapped-to the case of his binoculars as though he had sheathed ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... its sparse wave of hair from the forehead, was repeated in grotesque exaggeration on the wall at her back. The iron will in her lent a certain metallic hardness to her features, and her shadow resembled in outline the head on some ancient coin that had lain ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... Legislative, about sunset or after; give the most pathetic detail of the frightful pass they were in:—Prussians billowing round by the myriad, volcanically spouting fire for fifteen hours: we, scattered sparse on the ramparts, hardly a cannoneer to two guns; our dastard Commandant Lavergne no where shewing face; the priming would not catch; there was no powder in the bombs,—what could we do? "Mourir! Die!" answer prompt voices; (Hist. Parl. xvii. 148.) and ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... left the sand and sagebrush, cacti and sparse bunch-grass was bounded by the horizon; behind him, in front of him, it was the same; only on the right was the monotony broken by foothills and beyond, a range of purple snow-covered peaks. From the ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... and perhaps the hills ahead, but for the most part enfolding even the road and ourselves in its maudlin affection. We pull steadily on through the morning, over a good road and up through a still dreary region of moist, sparse turf and shaly slopes of slate and rock and profitless debris. The occupants of the landau, as they look down toward us at times from the turn next above, wave dry and encouraging greetings, through the open windows; and we wave back damper but equally encouraging greetings in ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... who carried the economy of his race even to the extent of flesh, of which he was sparse, greeted the reproof by casting down his eyes into the empty can ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... The next event in her calendar, and Johnny's, was the blooming of the fruit trees. She had seen hillside orchards in the west country break into a foam of flower—a sight perhaps as beautiful as any England has to show. But, to her mind, it did not compare with the sparse white bloom which lay like a first hoar frost on her crooked trees and showed cold and delicate against the pale blue sky. After that, nearly every day, there was something fresh and interesting for Mr. Gillat and Julia, so that the March wind was forgotten, ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... lectures, 'The Harmonious Blacksmith.' My dear one had a great favour for this honest Darwin always; many a road to shops, and the like, he drove her in his cab, in those early days when even the charge of omnibuses was a consideration, and his sparse utterances, sardonic often, were a great amusement to her. 'A perfect gentleman,' she at once discerned him to be, and of sound worth and kindliness, in the most unaffected form." He died in 1881, aged ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... not going to the bowwows. I'm all right. I'm a decent citizen. I awake in the rosy dawn with a song on my lips; I softly whistle rag time as I button my collar; I warble a few delicious vagrant notes as I part my sparse hair; I'm not murderous before breakfast; I go down town, singing, to my daily toil; I fish for fat contracts in Georgia marble; I return uptown immersed in a holy calm and the evening paper. I offer myself a cocktail; I bow and ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... respects what people call "a character," and seemed to fancy himself to have in some degree proprietary rights over the three celebrated Tuscan monasteries, Vallombrosa, Camaldoli, and La Vernia. He was well known to the friars at each of these establishments, and indeed to all the sparse population of that country-side. He was a very good and competent guide and courier, possessed with a very amusingly exaggerated notion of his own importance, and rather bad to turn aside from his own preconceived and predetermined methods of doing everything that had ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... Thevenin was old—so old that he seemed to be falling to pieces as he tottered forward. His skin was yellow and shrivelled, his mouth sunken, his hair sparse and grey; and from this weird face peered strange ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... who had walked to Castell On, which was three miles away up the valley of the On, he having been of late a frequent attendant at Mr. Price's church. The vicar was much beloved by all his parishioners, beloved and respected by high and low, but still his congregation was sparse and uncertain, so that every new member was quickly noticed and welcomed by him—more especially any stray sheep from the dissenting fold possessed for him all the interest of the sheep in the parable, for whose sake the ninety and nine were left in the wilderness. Will had gone off with ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... half-mile the way was easy, and by moving slowly he suffered less pain than he had expected. Around him the frost-smitten aspens were shivering in the wind, their sparse leaves dangling like coins of red-and-yellow gold, and all the billowing land below, to the west, was iridescent with green and flame-color and crimson. A voiceless regret, a dim, wide-reaching, wistful sadness came over him, but did not shake his resolution. ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... whole of the known world was covered with their settlements, in constant communication with one another through itinerant merchants, who effected an exchange of learning as well as of wares; while the other nations grew more and more isolated, and shut themselves off from even the sparse opportunities of mental ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... air. The little girl looked round to see where they came from, but everything looked just the same. Hundreds of ants, of all kinds and sizes, were hurrying to their nests; a few lizards were scuttling about amongst the dry twigs and sparse grasses; there were some grasshoppers, and in the trees birds fluttered to and fro. Then Dot knew that she was hearing, and understanding, everything that was being said by all the insects and creatures ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... reduction, this revolution, in freights, will that not hurt the railroads? Ask the railroads whether they make their profit on the long or the short haul. Ask them whether high rates and sparse population or dense population and low rates pay the better dividends! Compare New York Central traffic receipts and Southern Pacific on the average per mile! Now ships that are to use Panama plan pouring twenty million ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... all the rest of his unconscious and smashed body was hidden beneath the rugs. The automobile vanished, and so did my peace of mind. It seemed to me tragic that that burly infant under the rugs should have been martyrized at a poor little morning match in front of a few sparse hundreds of spectators and tens of thousands of unresponsive empty benches. He had not had even the glory and meed of a great multitude's applause. When I last inquired about him, at the end of the day, he was still unconscious, and that was all that ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... who, looking with contempt on vulgar fisticuffs and gouging, settled their difficulties satisfactorily according to the established rules of the DUELLO with sword, pistol, or rifle. Hostile meetings on the levee, below the city, where the population was sparse, and no impertinent interruptions could be apprehended, were frequent. Indeed, the intelligence, some pleasant morning, that a duel had just been fought, and one of the parties lamed in the sword arm, or scientifically ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... and there was Lupin. But again how changed! The clothes of the Duke of Charmerace littered the floor; the kit-bag was open; and he was wearing the very clothes of Chief-Inspector Guerchard, his seedy top-hat, his cloak. He wore also Guerchard's sparse, lank, black hair, his little, bristling, black moustache. His figure, hidden by the cloak, seemed to have shrunk to the ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... were turned out at once to graze off the unappetizing-looking thorns, sparse and dusty, that peppered the field of view like scabs on a yellow skin. There was no fear of their wandering too far, for if the camel ever was wild, as many maintain that he never was, that was so long ago that the whole species has forgotten it, and he wouldn't ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... sharply. He found that they had left the heath, and were riding down a smooth grassy place into a deep valley. The decline was dotted with young oak-trees, sparse at the top but thickening in clusters and ranks lower down. Between the stems, but at some distance, he could see a herd of deer feeding on the rank grass by a brook at the bottom. Beyond the brook again the wood grew still thicker with holly trees ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... the Dobrava. The southern slopes of Tzer are less abrupt than those on the north and descend gradually into the Leschnitza Valley, out of which rise the lesser heights of the Iverak Mountains. Both these ranges are largely covered by prune orchards, intersected with some sparse timber. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... thrummed, thrummed, thrummed above them; the rails were glaring hard lines; the goldenrod smelled dusty. Across the track was a pasture of dwarf clover and sparse lawn cut by earthy cow-paths; beyond its placid narrow green, the rough immensity of new stubble, jagged with wheat-stacks like ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... mice that attain adulthood acquire at least three distinct types of pelage in sequence in the course of their development. The first of these, the juvenal pelage, is short, relatively sparse, and characteristically grayish brown. The molt (post-juvenal molt) from juvenal pelage to subadult pelage seemingly occurs at an early age, perhaps frequently before the young leave the nest, as individuals ...
— Geographic Variation in the Harvest Mouse, Reithrodontomys megalotis, On the Central Great Plains And in Adjacent Regions • J. Knox Jones
... and comfortable mediocrity. She had made her flight—like the queen bee she had soared once into the farthest, bluest reaches of her heaven, and henceforth she was quite content to relapse into the utter commonplaces of the hive. Her yellow hair grew sparse and flat and streaked with gray, her pink-rose face became over plump and mottled across the nose, and her mind turned soon as flat and unelastic as her body; but she was perfectly satisfied with ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... great surprise, after journeying a half-mile or so, the character of the country underwent a great change. The ground became more level, and they found themselves traveling among stunted trees and sparse vegetation. The moon did not rise until quite late, so that until then they could barely see each other's bodies as they moved along. This made them uncertain as to whether they were following the right course; but they were greatly pleased to find ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... beautiful, fertile to the tops, covered with the richest sward of bluegrass and white clover, the inclosed fields waving with the natural growth of timothy. The inhabitants are few and population sparse. This is a magnificent grazing country, and all it needs is labour to clear the mountain-sides of its great growth of timber. There surely is no lack of moisture at this time. It has rained, I believe, some portion of every day since I left Staunton. Now it is pouring, and the wind, having ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... copious, though still very sparse notices of them I have run across, are those given by Thomas Gage, an English Catholic educated in Spain, who, in the twenties and thirties of the seventeenth century, lived as a priest in the then city of Guatemala, nowadays called Antigua, and in some Indian villages not ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... of the Napo were both numerous and powerful. That was while they were under the superintendence of those active apostles, the Jesuit fathers; but most of their settlements have long ago disappeared; and now only a few sparse stations exist along the ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... heather belong to other Surrey hills; but Chobham Common has its own features of sandy hillocks topped by clumps of pines, which set an austere gauntness on the place unlike the rolling flanks and ridges by Frensham and Hindhead. In May the heather is dark and dry; there are sparse patches of gorse scattered about the slopes, and looking across at a group of pines edging the horizon you sometimes get a setting of black, yellow, and blue, which belongs peculiarly to this corner ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... having considerably more than one hundred inches of rain annually are very apt to be forest-covered, and therefore to be deficient in food-producing plants. Such localities have usually a sparse population, in spite of the profusion of vegetation. In some parts of India, lands that have been left idle for a few seasons produce such a dense jungle of wild vegetation that to reclaim them for cultivation ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... wooded ridge. They were standing in the marshy bottom of a natural hollow amidst a sparse scattering of pine and attenuated spruce. Beyond the ridge lay the waters of the cove. And to the left the broad waters of the river mouth flowed by. It was a desolate, damp spot, but its significance to the two men ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... farmers, dwellers in tiny villages scattered over the area once so populous. The mud huts which constituted the dwelling-places of by far the greater portion of the inhabitants have disappeared, and their materials overlie the rocky plain and form the support of a scanty and sparse vegetation. But the old water-channels remain, and by their aid the hollows and low ground have been converted into rich gardens and fields, bearing full crops of waving rice and sugar-cane. Vijayanagar has disappeared as a city, and a congeries of small hamlets with an industrious and ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... so sparse that there is not one person for every 20,000 acres; and most of these people live on the coast. Consequently, the vast interior could not be used for food supplies in any case. Besides, ever since the white man occupied the coast, the immediate ...
— Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... the journey to Fort Bent had been one of toil and hardships, of burning suns, and the fatigue of endless dreary miles. The wagon-trains were often far in advance and food at times grew scanty, while the scarcity of fuel made it difficult to warm their sparse supplies. During part of the journey they were drenched by heavy rains. To these succeeded days of scorchingly hot weather, bringing thirst in its train and desert mirages which cheated their suffering souls. When at length the Arkansas River was reached, men and animals alike rushed madly ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... of the occupancy of two-sous chairs within the charmed circle of Guignol and of Gringalet. I suppose I should have blushed to confess it, but Polichinelle and his puppets, in the afternoons, under an umbrage sparse till evening fell, had still their spell to cast—as part and parcel, that is, of the general intensity of animation and variety of feature. The "amusement," the aesthetic and human appeal, of Paris had ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... all. They trusted to the parson and the clerk, who did their best with unfamiliar names. Even now old people in rural districts may find half a dozen orthographic variants of their own names among the sparse documentary records of their lives. Dugdale the antiquary is said to have found more than 130 variants of Mainwaring among the parchments of that family. Bardsley quotes, ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... feet, the President had never answered so quickly before. He faced the screen on the wall to his right and saluted, amazed once again at how old the man looked. Sparse white hair criss-crossed haphazardly over the President's head, his face was lined with deep trenches that not even the most charitable could call wrinkles, and the faded eyes that stared from deep caverns no longer ...
— Alien Offer • Al Sevcik
... baobabs, with trunks fifteen or twenty feet thick and offshoots covering a quarter of an acre. Then the trees thinned out to the sparse and shriveled all-but-dead things that struggle for existence on the border-lines between man's land and desolation. At last we drew down the smoked panes over the window to escape the glare and ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... animals abounded in the section, as they were found in hundreds of other portions of the vast area known under the general name of the Louisiana Territory. You must bear in mind that there were thousands of square miles that had not been trodden by a white man, and so sparse were the Indian villages that large portions of the country remained to be ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... have passed, for beyond them were the radiant mists of the pit of the city, and through this precipitous gateway filtered the enveloping luminosity. On each side of us uprose gradually converging and perpendicular scarps along whose base huddled a sparse foliage. ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... Worte turned her sparse face toward the down-town tide and against a light wind that tasted of rain and napped her skirts ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... the matter was that Mme Lerat was beginning to feel anxious at the painful way her niece doled out the sparse, occasional francs destined to pay for little Louis's board and lodging. Doubtless she was willing to make sacrifices and to keep the child by her whatever might happen while waiting for more prosperous times, but the thought that Fontan was preventing ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... a young woman with thin, sparse, gold-glinting hair, with face pallid and rounded, with broad forehead and gray eyes of remarkable clarity. She was slim, dressed in a little brown coat and a short brown skirt. She came forward, trembling, as if overcome by the audience. ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... and down, till he was brought up short by a great mossy block of stone just as another volley was fired, apparently from the mule-track high above him; and half-unconsciously, in the confusion and excitement of the moment, he lay perfectly still, cowering amongst the sparse growth in the hope that he might not be seen from the shelf-like mule-track above, though expectant all the while that the next shot fired ...
— !Tention - A Story of Boy-Life during the Peninsular War • George Manville Fenn
... tropics. So much of his food is necessarily converted into heat that he cannot afford to lead so active a life; but he also, like him of the tropics, partakes with his surroundings in color. The one, living amid snowclad scenery, where the sparse vegetation is gray and grayish-green, and the birds and animals almost as white as the snow over which they wander, is pale, etiolated. The other, under a vertical sun, surrounded by a lush and lusty growth, whose flowers for variety and intensity ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... character to cause apprehension—especially to one journeying alone. On all sides extended a vast plain of sterile soil—the brown earth but thinly covered with a growth of cactus and wild aloes, under the shadow of which appeared a sparse herbage, wild, and of yellowish hue. The aspect was monotonous and dreary beyond expression; while here and there vast clouds of dust rose in whirlwinds, and moved like spectres over the plain. The straggling huts encountered at long intervals on the way were all empty—apparently ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... old dog as other children had been rough. She loved to cuddle down close beside him, her arms around his shaggy neck; and croon queer little high-voiced songs to him; her thin cheek against his head. She used to save out fragments from her own sparse lunch to give to him. She was inordinately proud to walk at his side during Lad's rare rambles around the Place. Child and dog made a pretty picture of ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... and a glass door, with a sham air of a villa. He asks for a bath, and while it is being prepared he smokes his cigar at the window, with the noise of the water behind him, looks at the flower-bed of sparse lilac, and the high walls ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... main lines increased in the last few years to a little more than 2,000,000, but only about two-thirds of these have subscribers; much of the infrastructure is outdated and inefficient domestic: good service in north but sparse in south; domestic satellite system with 12 earth stations (20 additional domestic earth stations are planned) international: 5 submarine cables; microwave radio relay to Italy, France, Spain, Morocco, and Tunisia; coaxial cable to Morocco and Tunisia; participant in Medarabtel; ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... crooked and twisty. As it grows and branches under the cultivation and guidance of the orchardist, it maintains a lusty, hearty aspect, its yellowish, reddish or brownish twigs—again according to variety—spreading out to the sun and the air freely. A decade passes, and the sparse showing of bloom that has decorated it each spring gradually gives place to a great glory of flowers. The tree is about to bear, and it assumes the character of maturity; for while it grows on soberly for many years, there is now a spreading, a sort of relaxation, very different from the vigorous ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... life of the undergraduate body. His desire for an immediate theological campaign was merely that passion for doing things and for self-expression which were always conspicuous traits. His intense ambition as a boy is still remembered in this sleepy little village. He read every book in the sparse college library; he talked to his college mates and his professors on every imaginable subject; he led his associates in the miniature parliament—the Franklin Debating Society—to which he belonged; he wrote prose and verse at ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... the mangy Cats of Amochol trim my hatchet-sheath. When the young men ask me what this sparse and sickly fur may be, I shall strip it off and cast it at their feet, saying it is but ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... of ghastly white fungus. Overhead, from the wooden roof, which formed the floor of the shop, hung innumerable spider's webs thick with dust. The floor was of large flags cracked in many places, and between the chinks in moist corners sprouted sparse, colorless grass. In the centre was a deal table, scored with queer marks and splotched with ink. Over this flared two gas-jets, which whistled shrilly. Against the wall, which was below the street, were three green painted safes fast ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... rock where ancient waters' rise and dip, Recoil and plunge, eddy, and oscillant tide, Had worn and worn, while races lived and died, Involved channels. Where the sea-weed's drip Followed the ebb, now crumbling lichens sip Sparse dews of heaven that down with sunset slide. I sat long-gazing southward. A dry flow Of withering wind sucked up my drooping strength, Itself weak from the desert's burning length. Behind me piled, away and up did go Great sweeps ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... lands, so many grinning corpses on battle-fields, that no physiognomies repel them; and Gouraud began to cast his eyes on the old maid's fortune. This imperial colonel, a short, fat man, wore enormous rings in ears that were bushy with tufts of hair. His sparse and grizzled whiskers were called in 1799 "fins." His jolly red face was rather discolored, like those of all who had lived to tell of the Beresina. The lower half of his big, pointed stomach marked the straight line which characterizes a cavalry officer. Gouraud had commanded the ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... landmarks have been swept away by the fateful hand of time and fire, the town impresses you as a very old town, especially as you saunter along the streets down by the river. The worm-eaten wharves, some of them covered by a sparse, unhealthy beard of grass, and the weather-stained, unoccupied warehouses are sufficient to satisfy a moderate appetite for antiquity. These deserted piers and these long rows of empty barracks, with ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the most important of the Outposts is Sumatra, an island four-fifths the size of France, as potentially rich in mineral and agricultural wealth as Java, but with a sparse and intractable population, certain of the tribes, notably the Achinese, who inhabit the northern districts, still defying Dutch rule in spite of the long and costly series of wars which have resulted from Holland's ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... overlooked the starlit bay, nearly ringed with a sparse fence of palms, and on its roof, a little scarlet figure on the white rugs, Incarnacion sat waiting till Scott should come. Below her, the reeking city was hushed to a murmur, through which there sounded from the Praca a far throb of drums ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... shortly after the McKee prolonged breakfast was over, a small man of perhaps fifty, with iron-gray hair and a sparse goatee, made his way along the Street. He moved with the air of one having a definite destination but a by ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... other side was a very old man, gray as a ghost, who showed no sign of knowing that he had a new neighbour. Everything about him was gray: his thin, concave face, his expressionless eyes, his sparse hair and straggling moustache, his clothes, and his hands, knotted on the back like the roots of trees. His grayness and the bleak remoteness of his air made him seem unreal as a spirit come back to haunt the scene of long-ago triumphs or defeats. Mary could almost ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... chaque feuille qui tombe est une lgie toute faite." Through an avenue of scraggy poplars we approach a dilapidated chteau, whose owner is playing dominoes at the caf of the nearest provincial town, or exhausting the sparse revenues of the estate at the theatres, roulette-tables, or balls of Paris. People leave these for a rural vicinage only to economize, to hide chagrin, or to die. So recognized is this indifference to Nature and inaptitude for rural life in France, that, when we desire ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of Keighley never quite melts into country on the road to Haworth, although the houses become more sparse as the traveller journeys upwards to the grey round hills that seem to bound his journey in a westerly direction. First come some villas; just sufficiently retired from the road to show that they can scarcely belong to any one liable to be summoned in a ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... minute!" panted Madaline. "You have almost murdered us as it is," she proclaimed in her excitement, which always banished her ordinarily sparse ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis
... time you receive this we shall already perhaps have had our 'bapteme de feu'. We have been engaged in the hardest kind of hard work — two weeks of beautiful autumn weather on the whole, frosty nights and sunny days and beautiful coloring on the sparse foliage that breaks here and there the wide rolling expanses of open country. Every day, from the distance to the north, has come the booming of the cannon around Reims and the lines along the Meuse. . . . But imagine how thrilling ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... the more decided the result. If performed before puberty the secondary sexual characteristics fail to develop. The voice does not change in the male; the development of hair is more sparse; the general physical development is less masculine; and mentally the individual is less aggressive. Most pertinent of all as bearing upon the question under review, sexual desire and capacity do not develop, either at all, or at any rate, not to the same degree as in ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... appropriations and private subscriptions, statues and other monuments have at different times been erected; and many others doubtless will be erected in them hereafter. Some of them are in secluded situations, where for many mites the population is sparse, and the few people that live near them cherish tenderer recollections of the "Lost Cause" than of that which finally won. But such of them as are contiguous to cities are places of interest to more or less of the ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... Krakatau, though the vast rent in the cloven pyramid must materially diminish the power of any future eruption, and Nature's busy hand already covers the torn side of the precipitous cone with a green veil of sparse vegetation. A curious marine growth of weed and moss rooted itself on Krakatau three years after the phenomenal eruption, from seeds floating on the tide or carried by the wind. The thin soil formed by these decaying plants, and enriched by the chemical ingredients of disintegrating ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... company of Germans, employed in an optical shop; there also arrived a party of clerks from the fish and gastronomical store of Kereshkovsky, and two young people very well known in the Yamas—both bald, with sparse, soft, delicate hairs around the bald spots: Nicky the Book-keeper and Mishka the Singer—so were they both called in the houses. They also were met very cordially, just like Karl Karlovich of the optical shop and Volodka of the fish store—with raptures, cries ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... yuh're ferchunit t' have all seeh new-fangled idees in the house! It clean locoes me t' think Ah'm livin' wid sech fine contraptions." And Sary pressed her large freckled, hands over her sparse red hair to signify how "locoed" her ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... Then she sat down in her rocking-chair by the window and looked out. Her eyry was high above all the other buildings, and she could look across some low roofs opposite and see the further end of Tompkins Square, with its sparse spring green showing faintly through the dusk. The eternal roar of the city floated up to her and vaguely troubled her. She was a country girl; and although she had lived for ten years in New York, she had never grown used to that ceaseless murmur. To-night she felt the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... Bergeret exclaimed: "Zoe! we have forgotten 'Yellow hair and sparse beard.' Let us ...
— Putois - 1907 • Anatole France
... pictured the heavy, gloomy, lethargic life within. The slatternly servants pottering about the bases of the sooty buildings sickened and saddened him. A solitary Earl's Court omnibus that lumbered past with its sinister, sparse cargo seemed to be a spectacle absolutely tragic—he did not know why. The few wayfarers were obviously prim and smug. No joy, no elegance, anywhere! Only, at intervals, a feeling that mysterious and repulsive wealth was hiding itself like an ogre in the eternal twilight ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... Maryburgh, in Fife, and the most celebrated of four brothers, John, Robert, James and William Adam, was born at Kirkcaldy in 1728. For few famous men have we so little biographical material, and contemporary references to him are sparse. He certainly studied at the university of Edinburgh, and probably received his first instruction in architecture from his father, who gave proofs of his own skill and taste in the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary (now demolished). His mother was the aunt of Dr W. Robertson, the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... branches, crashing through a covert with closed eyes and warding arm, they fled, now and then pausing for a quick change of hands on the box or the sweep of a sleeve across a dripping brow. Nearly a half hour from the time they had started they emerged into brighter light, the trees growing sparse, the earth moist, a soft coolness rising—the creek's ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... of one instance of a white man falling a victim to a veld fire. I forget this individual's name, although I knew him well. He, seeing the flames approaching, reached what he thought was a place of safety, for the grass was very sparse, and he reckoned on being able to beat out the fire as it approached him. But he had not taken into account the contingency of the wind freshening and flinging forward sheets of flame from the places where the grass was longer. This actually happened. He got badly, but ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... room, with doors of all sizes opening in every direction, while I could perceive a narrow entry, or passageway, extending toward the after part of the vessel. The roof, formed of the upper deck, was low, upheld by immense timbers, and the apartment, nearly square, was dimly flooded by the sparse light sifting down through the single hatch-opening above, so that, in spite of its large dimensions, it had a cramped and stuffy appearance. The vast butt of the mainmast arose directly in front of me, and, upon a ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... Joel's presence on these occasions added in any marked degree to the general hilarity, but Celia's satisfaction was unmistakable. She always sat beside him with an air of proprietorship, digging her sharp little elbow into the sparse cushioning of his lean thighs or when weary, dropping her frowsy head against his shoulder with an engaging certainty that it was there for that very purpose. Like many another who has defied capture till after middle life, Joel atoned ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... torrent below to the great Eiger rock-mountain, and through its heart to the glacier beyond, more than 10,000 feet above sea-level. On the way back I left the train at the foot of the Eiger glacier, and walked down with my companion amongst the rocks of the moraine and over the sparse turf of these highest regions of life. Everywhere was a profusion of gentians, the larger and darker, as well as the smaller, bluest of all blue flowers. The large, plump, yellow globe-flowers (Trollius), the sulphur-yellow ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... checked. It is my purpose to protect the rights of the Indian inhabitants of that Territory to the full extent of the executive power; but it would be unwise to ignore the fact that a territory so large and so fertile, with a population so sparse and with so great a wealth of unused resources, will be found more exposed to the repetition of such attempts as happened this year when the surrounding States are more densely settled and the westward movement of our population looks still more eagerly for fresh lands to occupy. Under ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... their singular conduct this morning. Was there much of a row?" This came from a thin-visaged young man with eye-glasses and a sparse, whitish moustache. ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... next to nothing is in reality derived from these few sparse villages; and from the tent Arabs less than nothing, for the Turks have to bribe these to abstain from plundering the regular soldiers belonging ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... little balconies play an old refrain and the university cheering afterward; saw the old professor he had cared for most of all, with the thin white hair straggling over his silken hood, following the band in the sparse ranks of his class. And he saw his own Commencement Day—and the station at the junction where he stood the morning after, looking across the valley at the old towers for the last time; saw the broken groups of his class, standing upon the platform on the other side of the tracks, ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... and believing that their love and influence would be powerful enough to win the men to sobriety and virtue. Alas! how mistaken they have been! What they have endured! Of such was this woman! There she stood, the embodiment of woe. A tall, refined woman, her clothing poor and sparse, her ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... very sparse notices of them I have run across, are those given by Thomas Gage, an English Catholic educated in Spain, who, in the twenties and thirties of the seventeenth century, lived as a priest in the then city of Guatemala, nowadays called Antigua, and in some Indian villages ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... in "The Slashes," a desolate region inhabited by squatters. As they jolt over corduroy roads between pools of stagnant waters, the travelers look out wearily upon a sparse growth of gallberry and scrub-pine. Now and then they pass the solitary hut of a charcoal-burner, surrounded by its little patch of meagre corn; a pack of cur dogs rush out and bark fiercely, within the safe limits of the wattle fence surrounding the premises; white-headed children gaze ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... Cloud came up the steps, and they went in to a rather dreary evening service with a sparse congregation and a bored-looking choir, who passed notes and giggled during the sermon. Allison and Leslie sat and wondered what kind of a shock it would be to them all if the Great Companion should suddenly become visible in the room. If all ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... dressing-gown of green silk, trimmed with black fur, which showed here and there a few worn-out, defective spots. A small green velvet cap, the shape of which reminded the beholder of the cap of the learned Melancthon, covered his expansive, intellectual forehead, which was shaded by sparse light-brown hair. ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... are beautiful, fertile to the tops, covered with the richest sward of bluegrass and white clover, the inclosed fields waving with the natural growth of timothy. The inhabitants are few and population sparse. This is a magnificent grazing country, and all it needs is labour to clear the mountain-sides of its great growth of timber. There surely is no lack of moisture at this time. It has rained, I believe, some portion of every day since I left ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... ever-increasing antiquarian treasures. If a quartette were assembled,—and many times the musical party was enlarged to a quintette or a septette,—an adjournment was necessary to a room less crowded, but equally sparse of conventional furniture. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... up, gaunt, straight, twisting his sparse imperial, and blinking a bit doubtfully at the messenger. But Linton was not so much at a loss for reasons. He was an earnest young man ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... great reduction, this revolution, in freights, will that not hurt the railroads? Ask the railroads whether they make their profit on the long or the short haul. Ask them whether high rates and sparse population or dense population and low rates pay the better dividends! Compare New York Central traffic receipts and Southern Pacific on the average per mile! Now ships that are to use Panama plan pouring twenty million people into the Pacific Coast ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... the will of God, and he laid his hand lightly on her head in silent blessing, his eyes uplifted gratefully to Heaven. Too late Hannah felt the misconception and was remorseful. For the festival occasion Reb Shemuel elected to worship at the Great Synagogue; Hannah, seated among the sparse occupants of the Ladies' Gallery and mechanically fingering a Machzor, looked down for the last time on the crowded auditorium where the men sat in high hats and holiday garments. Tall wax-candles twinkled everywhere, in great gilt chandeliers depending from ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the area once so populous. The mud huts which constituted the dwelling-places of by far the greater portion of the inhabitants have disappeared, and their materials overlie the rocky plain and form the support of a scanty and sparse vegetation. But the old water-channels remain, and by their aid the hollows and low ground have been converted into rich gardens and fields, bearing full crops of waving rice and sugar-cane. Vijayanagar has disappeared as ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... been in his service. With the harshness common in those days, and which in his case was well deserved, the door of the cell was walled up, only one small opening being left through which he could receive the scanty allowance of food brought him, and a little barred window through which some sparse ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... peculiar to lovers, Matthew Maltboy immediately recognized in Mr. Chiffield a rival—and a dangerous one. Having seen much of society, Maltboy was well aware that Mr. Chiffield's mature age, his grim appearance, his sparse whiskers, and even the bald spot on the top of his head, were eminent advantages with which youth and bloom, and a full head of hair could not cope—unless with the aid of that fascination which Matthew flattered himself that he possessed, and which, he thought, he had ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... the flat pulled them together again, and they plodded on by Bardie's Farm, where the scent became sparse, and on to Steg where, for the first time since leaving Templeton, they came upon traces ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... heard of Bertie in the interval as a successful debutante as a reader of Shakespeare, and had received her sparse and sparkling letters confirming report, truly "angel visits, few and ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... her thumps for attention to be called to 'the strangeness of it,' that a poor, small, sparse village, hardly above a hamlet, on the most unproductive of Kentish heights, part of old forest land, should at this period become 'the cynosure of a city beautifully named by the poet Great Augusta, and truly indeed ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of about thirty with sparse reddish hair, perspiration glistening on his upper lip, stood at the mouth of a narrow way like the one Brett had come through. He wore a grimy pale yellow shirt with a wide-flaring collar, limp and sweat-stained, dark green knee-breeches, soft leather boots, scuffed and dirty, ...
— It Could Be Anything • John Keith Laumer
... Orange Free State. Between these two settled districts there are only a few villages, scattered at intervals of many miles along a line of railway four hundred miles in length. In the Free State and the Transvaal the white population is extremely sparse, save in the mining region of the Witwatersrand, because ranching requires few hands, and only a few hundred square miles out of many thousands have been brought under cultivation. Thus, while the coolness of the climate has permitted Europeans ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... arose, a young woman with thin, sparse, gold-glinting hair, with face pallid and rounded, with broad forehead and gray eyes of remarkable clarity. She was slim, dressed in a little brown coat and a short brown skirt. She came forward, trembling, as if overcome ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... which hung down over his face. His thick, irregular nose, standing out between his sunken cheeks, gave evidence of emaciation that was the result of illness, and not natural. His restless lips, barely covered by a sparse, soft, whitish moustache, were constantly changing their shape as though they were trying to assume now one expression, now another. But all these expressions seemed to be endless, and his face retained one predominating expression of timidity and fright. Around his thin neck, where ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian • Various
... that long stretch of park wall which ran beside the road and the tramway. From where he sat he could see the other wing which led inward from the road at something like a right angle, but was presently lost to sight because of a sparse and unkempt patch of young trees and shrubs, well-nigh choked with undergrowth, which extended for some distance from the park wall backward along the road-side toward Vanves. Whoever owned that stretch of land had seemingly not thought it worth while to ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... which any stain of Devonshire scarlet mud was painfully conspicuous; when he was smartened up, his appearance suggested that somebody had given him a coating of that rich Western whitewash which looks like Devonshire cream. His locks were long and sparse, and as deadly black as his clothes were white. He was a modest, gentle man, with a wife even more meek and gracious than himself. They never, to my recollection, spoke unless they were spoken to, and their melancholy impassiveness used to vex my Father, who once, referring to the ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... west wind had increased suddenly, a cold steady wind, coasting down the Argentine pampas, bending the sparse trees and giant thistle, ruffling the river, shallowing it, until to-morrow many a poor sailorman would regret his optimistic anchorage ... Shane shivered.... To-morrow October would be making a din in the streets.... And the poor skippers fighting ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... months over 4,000 persons were there, digging for gold with great success. By July, 1849, it is thought, 15,000 had arrived. Nearly all were forced to live in booths, tents, log huts, and under the open sky. The sparse population previously on the ground left off farming and grazing and opened mines. People became insane for gold. Immigrants soon came in immense hordes. In 1846, aside from roving Indians, California had numbered ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... stood opposite each other, were a strange contrast, the one tall, grave, white, and emotionless, the other noisy and pompous, with protuberant military chest and rubicund features. They had one common characteristic, however. From under the shaggy eyebrows of the merchant and the sparse light-coloured lashes of the major there came the same keen, restless, shifting glance. Both were crafty, and each was keenly on his guard ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Bermudas" seemed plain and uninviting as the steamer passed St. David's Head. Moreover, as they steamed down along the north shore, the same appearance was visible throughout, its low undulating sea-front of black, honeycombed rock lacking character, the rare patches of sandy beach and sparse sunburned vegetation seeming bare ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... clusters. Allusion has been made to the Hyades, Pleiades, etc. Everyone has noticed the Milky Way. It seems like two irregular streams of compacted stars. It is not supposed that they are necessarily nearer together than the stars in the sparse regions about the pole. But the 18,000,000 suns belonging to our system are arranged within a space represented by a flattened disk. If one hundred lights, three inches apart, are arranged on a hoop ten feet ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... subside when the rash appears. In chickenpox preliminary discomfort is absent, or lasts but a few hours before the eruption. The eruption of smallpox usually occurs first on the forehead, near the hair, or on the palms of the hands, soles of the feet, the arms and legs, but is usually sparse on the body. The eruption appears about the same time in smallpox and not in successive crops, as in chickenpox. Chickenpox is more commonly a disease of childhood; smallpox attacks all ages. The crusts in chickenpox are thin, ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... "private," and there, near the window of his sanctum, sat a stout and elderly gentleman. In the unsparing revelation of the morning sunshine the visitor's face declared all its wrinkles. The whitening hair, growing sparse, was carefully combed across an arid patch of scalp. Hamilton Burton's smile died and his face grew for a moment solicitous as he read his father's troubled eyes. Old Thomas Burton was shaven and ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... of the crag was wet with spray in places; but Cleer didn't mind spray; she was accustomed to the sea in all its moods and tempers. She clambered up the steep side—a sheer wall of bare rock, lightly clad here and there with sparse drapery of green sapphire, or clumps of purple sea-aster, rooted firm in the crannies. Its front was yellow with great patches of lichen, and on the peaks, overhead, the gulls perched, chattering, or launched themselves in long ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... was of a most rudimentary description. It will be difficult for the modern English mind to grasp the parish of Newcastle, New Brunswick, in the 'eighties—sparse patches of cultivation surrounded by the virgin forest and broken by the rush of an immense river. For half the year the land is in the iron grip of snow and frost, and the Miramichi is frozen right down to its estuary—so that "the ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... a man of middle height and spare figure, nearly sixty years old, by constitution rather delicate in health, but wiry and active for his age. A sparse and straggling beard and mustache did not conceal a thin but kindly mouth; his eyes were keen and pleasant; his sharp nose and narrow jaw gave him very much the air of a priest, and this impression was helped by his commonplace dark clothes and soft black hat. He ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... little girl looked round to see where they came from, but everything looked just the same. Hundreds of ants, of all kinds and sizes, were hurrying to their nests; a few lizards were scuttling about amongst the dry twigs and sparse grasses; there were some grasshoppers, and in the trees birds fluttered to and fro. Then Dot knew that she was hearing, and understanding, everything that was being said by all the insects and ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... then, is likely to become a leading industry, and especially dairying, there being more meat than is needed by the sparse population. There are admirable dairy sites on the islands and mainland. The reindeer, recently introduced, are likely to prove invaluable to the natives, supplanting in great measure the dog for transportation purposes, and supplying also food and clothing. Reindeer milk makes excellent ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... tract of jungle, swamp, and alluvial plain, forming the lower portion of the Ganges delta; extends from the Hooghly on the W. to the Meghna on the E., a distance of 165 m.; rice is cultivated on the upper part by a sparse population; the lower part forms a dense belt of wild jungle reaching to the sea, and is infested by numerous tigers, leopards, rhinoceroses, pythons, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... saloon. The master, a worthy man, so far as I ever saw of him, was Goth, Vandal, Hun, Visigoth, all in one. The ship was damp, dark, dirty, old, and cold. She was not warmed by steam, and the fire could not be lighted because of a smoky chimney. There were no lamps, and the sparse candles were obviously grudged. The stewards were dirty and desponding, the serving inhospitable, the cooking dirty and greasy, the food scanty, the table-linen frowsy. There were four French and two Japanese male passengers, who sat at meals in top-coats, comforters, ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... advised me that in his country, owing to the sparse settlement, the game laws are not at all regarded, and sheep are hunted at all times of the year. The settlers themselves advocate the protection of the game, but there is really no one to enforce the laws. ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... beyond, the carcass of the dead grizzly. A dreadful fear leapt to his brain; he moved tottering. His action gained swiftness suddenly. He ran to the forest edge, and, with hungry eyes, gazed in beyond the sparse fringe of scrub. There was nothing there. He moved away to the right and ran in amongst the low-growing bush, only to reappear with more feverish haste, and eyes whose fiery glance seemed to shoot in every direction ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... 'The Harmonious Blacksmith.' My dear one had a great favour for this honest Darwin always; many a road to shops, and the like, he drove her in his cab, in those early days when even the charge of omnibuses was a consideration, and his sparse utterances, sardonic often, were a great amusement to her. 'A perfect gentleman,' she at once discerned him to be, and of sound worth and kindliness, in the most unaffected form." He died in 1881, aged 77, leaving no memorial to the public of his undoubtedly great abilities. Like his younger ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... Stuart started for the famous deposit of asphalt, about one mile inland. The countryside leading thither was not absolutely barren, but it was scrawny and dismal. A coarse sand alternated with chunks of black asphalt. A few trees managed to find a foothold here and there, and there was sparse vegetation in patches. ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... to proceed from two windows in the ground floor of a large house. The travellers had not advanced many paces towards them before the peaks of three gables rose above them, vandyking the sky and docking the last sparse branches of the elms. ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... in the middle of the field and rubbed his eyes to make sure that he was awake. There was not the slightest doubt that what he saw was very real. The river at that point was quite wide and its opposite shore was bordered with sparse woodland. ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... than those on the north and descend gradually into the Leschnitza Valley, out of which rise the lesser heights of the Iverak Mountains. Both these ranges are largely covered by prune orchards, intersected with some sparse timber. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... beautiful poetry within the strict and hard conditions of purely auricular art. Compare Homer's ambrosial glory with the descent tap-water of Hesiod; compare his continuous burnished gleam of wrought metal with the sparse grains that lie in the sandy diction of all the "authentic" epics of the other nations. And, by all ancient accounts, the other early Greek epics would not fare much better in the comparison. Homer's singularity in this respect is overwhelming; ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... much of his Memoir was dictated, based on an enormous mass of letters, papers, and private diaries, kept throughout his Government career. After 1891 there is only a scattered series of entries, increasingly sparse as time went on. Mr. Hudson recalls their walks from the station at Woking to Pyrford across the then open common, the lunch of eggs and milk, and the hours of work, during the period between the publication of Problems ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... party were comfortably ensconced in the shade of the sand hill whose sparse grasses ...
— Jewel's Story Book • Clara Louise Burnham
... slow; his black garments hung loosely about his shrunken limbs; his face was bloodless, like that of a corpse, his cheeks hollow, his large eyes so sunken that their light seemed to come from the depths of a cavern. His sparse hair, lightly blown about by the wind, was white as snow; his long, thin beard ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... surface of the chin; the under parts and the inside of the limbs vary from pale yellowish-white to a rich rufous orange; the basal portion of the hairs of the under-parts is dark brown or black, and the ventral area has frequently a dull hue where the yellow tips are sparse; the coats of these squirrels are generally sleek, glossy and deep black, and while in this condition the under surface is most brilliant, especially at its line of junction with the black, along the sides of the body and limbs, tending to form a ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... of woodland, rounded hill-summits, streams and torrents which pour through the valleys and glens—there you have Thagaste and the country round about—the world, in fact, as it revealed itself to the eyes of the child Augustin. But towards the south the verdure grows sparse; arid mountain-tops appear, crushed down as blunted cones, or jutted in slim Tables of the Law; the sterility of the desert becomes perceptible amid the wealth of vegetation. This full-foliaged land has ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... service was over, and the sparse congregation had dwindled away, she went round to the vestry and asked Jarper, the cross old verger, if she could see Mr Pendle. Jarper, who took a paternal interest in the curate, and did not like Miss Mosk over much, since she stinted him of his full measure of beer when he patronised ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... rocks. The yellow grass sloped away from his feet mile after mile to the timber, and beyond that to the prismatic mountains. The variegated lodges of the Chis-chis-chash village dotted the plain near the sparse woods of the creek-bottom; pony herds stood quietly waving their tails against the flies or were driven hither and yon by the herdboys—giving variety to the tremendous sweep of the ...
— The Way of an Indian • Frederic Remington
... latch-string was spitefully pulled, the door was pushed inward, and Jacob Relstaub entered. The angry man was short of stature, clumsily dressed, and the only weapon he carried was a heavy, knotted cane, if that may be termed such, which was his companion when moving about the sparse settlement. It has already been said that he was parsimonious, cross-grained, and cruel-hearted, and he had been in specially ill-temper since the return of his boy without the horse upon which ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... his headset, disarranging his sparse gray hair. His face was tired and worn but his jaw thrust ...
— The End of Time • Wallace West
... frowned grimly even in summer, dark with trackless forests, and for the larger part of the year were sheeted with the glittering, untrampled snow from which they derive their name. Stern and strong with the force of an unbroken wilderness, they formed at all times a forbidding background to the sparse settlements in the ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... between sunset and twilight. It was perfect, following a perfect day. Above the wood the sky had a violet lucidity, purer than the day; below it the pale brown earth wore a violet haze, and over that a web of green, woven of the sparse, thin blades of the young wheat. There were two ways up the hill; one over her own bridge across the river, that led her to the steep straight path through the wood; one over the Farm bridge by the slanting path up the field. ...
— The Flaw in the Crystal • May Sinclair
... In Colorado, likewise, the practice is very well established and the area is tolerably large. All in all, throughout the mountain states dry-farming may be said to be well established, though there is a great opportunity for the extension of the practice. The sparse population of the western states naturally makes it impossible for more than a small fraction of the land to be ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe
... extensive excursion into the interior, he spent some time on the larger islands at the mouth of the Amazon, on one of which he immediately noticed the scarcity of trees, while "the abundance of every kind of animal life crowded into a small space was here very striking, compared with the sparse manner in which it is scattered in the virgin forests. It seems to force us to the conclusion that the luxuriance of tropical vegetation is not favourable to the production of animal life. The plains ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... manner which I always associated with him, probably because it was thus I first saw him. He wore a plain yellow robe, and, his pointed chin resting upon his bosom, he looked down at me, revealing a great expanse of the marvellous brow with its sparse, neutral-coloured hair. ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... on a log he rested his chin in his hands. Below him twinkled the sparse lights of the Flat; shouts and singing rose from the circus.—And so John would have been willing to go surety for him! Let no one say the unexpected did not happen. All said and done, they were little more than strangers to each other, and John had no notion what his ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... itself that in a land of such sparse opportunities these returns could be wrung out only by a policy so tight-fisted as to be merciless. It must mean draining resources to their dregs. That was an unpleasant suspicion which she instantly expelled with the reminder that her ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... employs in telling these stories may seem at first glance to be simple: short sentences, a sparse vocabulary, uncomplicated syntax. In actuality, Anderson developed an artful style in which, following Mark Twain and preceding Ernest Hemingway, he tried to use American speech as the base of a tensed rhythmic prose ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... hut of a fisherman is outlined on the grassy slope. Below it, crowding reeds rustle in the current; and where they are more sparse they fashion concentric orbs upon the gleaming, fleeing water. The landscape has something exotic or antique about it. You are no matter where in the world or among the centuries. You are on some corner of the eternal earth, where men and women are drawing near to each other, and ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... low greasewood 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 Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... maid arrived, and invited her to a fire, and a sumptuous supper of bread, rank salt butter, and water, God had so comforted her and assured her of His favour and presence that she was filled with thankfulness and peace; the empty room and sparse, candle- lit meal seemed to her ...
— Fletcher of Madeley • Brigadier Margaret Allen
... cruder and rougher than anything she had yet encountered; a white-pine table with a washbowl and a toothbrush mug, and a black iron bed that at first glance had sent darting through her a sinking sense of institution. But it was clean, and a sparse Irish landlady with a moist pink presence that steamed hot suds had left her without question and one week's advance payment ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... sunk back into a prosperous and comfortable mediocrity. She had made her flight—like the queen bee she had soared once into the farthest, bluest reaches of her heaven, and henceforth she was quite content to relapse into the utter commonplaces of the hive. Her yellow hair grew sparse and flat and streaked with gray, her pink-rose face became over plump and mottled across the nose, and her mind turned soon as flat and unelastic as her body; but she was perfectly satisfied with the portion she had had from life, for, having weighed all things, ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... lazy heat of the mounting sun, tempered by the cool river draught, the yellow sandstone bluffs, whimsically decorated with sparse patches of greenery, seemed to waver as though seen through shimmering silken gauze. And over it all was the hush of a dream, except when, in a spasmodic freshening of the breeze, the rude mast creaked and a sleepy watery murmur grew up for a ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... reached it, was rather better; the furnishings, though sparse, were massive and imposing; the tapestries on the walls, if old, were rich and choice. But everywhere the ill-assorted marriage of pretentiousness and neediness was apparent. The floors of hall and living-room ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... they are heavy with timber. Westward, beyond the trees, lie the prairies, and beyond the prairies, the plains; the first are green with long grasses, the latter bare, brown and with a crisp, scorched, sparse vesture of vegetation scarce worth the name. As the trees march slowly westward in conquest of the prairies, so also do the prairies, in their verdant turn, become aggressors and push westward upon the plains. These last stretches, extending to the base of that bluff and sudden bulwark, ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... little man whose coat did not fit, and whose hair was sandy and sparse, and who had keen, twinkling blue eyes which managed to see a great deal more than one would suspect from the rest of his face. He pumped the Little Doctor's hand up and down three times and called her "My dear young lady." After the first ten minutes, the Little Doctor's spirits ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... lady of any worth or intelligence adopts unhesitatingly our view, and concurs in our measures. On the 19th inst. we met and organized a Woman's Equal Rights Union. Living in the country, where the population is sparse, we are consequently few; but hope to make up in zeal and energy for our lack of numbers. We breathe a freer, if not a purer atmosphere here among the mountains, than do the dwellers in cities,—have more independence,—are less subject to the despotism of fashion, and are less ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... showed his brassy face for a brief time. Such an opportunity was not to be neglected. Happy and grateful they were, the four monkey mothers, sitting on the dome of green leaves, each with her little one in her lap while her long fingers delved among its rather sparse fur. Then, like a bolt out of a blue sky it fell. A shadow plunged down from the heavens with a rush that was almost a roar; wide-spreading feet with long, curved talons shot out of the hurtling black mass, and Myla's lap was empty. She leaped high into the air after the ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... likely a shelter for a shipwrecked soul as could be found, at once a hiding-place and a sanctuary. Sparse grass grew among the rocks, but no tree or shrub of any kind at that time. The ruins of the holy place alone spoke of man and ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... Prince Edward Island the first free schools were established in 1852, and further improvements have been made of recent years. In British Columbia, the Legislature has adopted substantially the Ontario School Law with such modifications as are essential to the different circumstances of a sparse population. In the North-west, before the formation of the Province of Manitoba, education was in a much better condition than the isolation and scattered state of the population would have led one to expect. In 1857 there were seventeen schools in the settlements, ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... little bedroom with bare white walls and a stone floor and sparse old furniture. The beds—there were two—were made of iron, enameled black and painted with bunches of gay flowers. She lay putting off the great moment of going to the window as one puts off opening a precious letter, gloating over it. She had no idea what ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... been fixed upon its one end, which was above all such petty details of existence, might well have looked about her. No such dainty maiden bower was there in the whole village as this. Madelon's own chamber, carpetless and freezing cold, with its sparse furniture and scanty sweep of white curtains across the furred windows which filled the room with the blue-white light of frost, ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the height of about three thousand feet. It is a rough, broken country, cleft by many ravines and covered with forest, bush, or bamboo thickets; though here and there at rare intervals some brown patches mark the clearings which the sparse inhabitants have made for the purpose of cultivation. Water is plentiful. Springs gush forth everywhere in the glens and valleys, and rushing streams of crystal-clear water pour down the mountain sides, and in the clefts of the hills are lonely tarns, the undisturbed haunts of wild ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... he travelled on toward the Missouri, and soon struck the beginning of the sparse settlements. Just as evening was coming on, he arrived at a cluster of three little log-cabins, and was received with genuine backwoods hospitality by the proprietor, who had married an Osage squaw. Williams was not only very hungry, but very tired; ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... rain drops fell from the invisible sky as Ivanov walked across the meadows; at first they were sparse, pattering noisily on his leather jacket; then they began to fall more heavily and he was soon enveloped in the sonorous downpour of a vernal shower. Close to the manor Gek darted aside and disappeared down the ravine, from whence arose the rustling of wings, ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... as this he had never carried. A man who indeed wore outlandish fur-trimmed clothes, and had seen, if his servant's sparse words went for aught, outlandish service; but who neither swore, nor drank above measure, nor swaggered, nor threatened. Who would not dice, nor game—save for trifles. Who, on the contrary, talked of duty, and had a peaceful word for all, and openly condemned the duello, and was mild ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... which they traveled was familiar to Lewis, tedious to the stranger. Sand, sparse grass, and thorn-trees; thorn-trees and sand, was their daily portion. The sun beat down and up. They traveled long hours by night, less and less by day. They talked little, for night has a way of sealing the lips of those ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... singular feature of this canyon was that a heavy growth of spruce trees covered the slope facing northwest; and the opposite slope, exposed to the sun and therefore less snowbound in winter, held a sparse growth of yellow pines. The ranch house of Colonel Jorth stood round the rough comer of the largest of the three canyons, and rather well hidden, it did not obtrude its rude and broken-down log cabins, its squalid surroundings, ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... into the dark depths of this forest, whose shrubbery grew ever more sparse. I observed that vegetable life was disappearing more quickly than animal life. The open-sea plants had already left behind the increasingly arid seafloor, where a prodigious number of animals were still swarming: ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... the laboring class. The number to the square mile is greater than in China, averaging eight hundred. This fact alone placed a much greater power in the masters' hands after emancipation, as the competition of labor must be so much more severe than with a more sparse population. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... suggested the setting up of a store in a promising locality and proposed entering into partnership. "Murray and Robinson" was forthwith painted by the latter, (who was a bit of an artist), over the door of a small log-house, and the store soon became well known and much frequented by the sparse population as well as by those engaged in ...
— Fort Desolation - Red Indians and Fur Traders of Rupert's Land • R.M. Ballantyne
... excluded from our common schools, in consequence of the prejudices of teachers and parents. In some of our cities there are schools exclusively for their use, but in the country the colored population is usually too sparse to justify such schools; and white and black children are rarely seen studying under the same roof; although such cases do sometimes occur, and then they are confined to elementary schools. Some colored young men, who could bear the expense, have obtained in European seminaries the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... hearts that are trembling at every danger, real and imaginary. Inside the fold is tranquillity, repose for the wearied frame, safety, and the companionship of the Shepherd; and without, ravening foes and a dreary wilderness, and flinty paths and sparse herbage and muddy pools. Inside is life; without is death. That is ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... and sagebrush, cacti and sparse bunch-grass was bounded by the horizon; behind him, in front of him, it was the same; only on the right was the monotony broken by foothills and beyond, a range of purple snow-covered peaks. From ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... limbs. His arms swung long and ungainly, the sleeves of his tunic far above the bony wrist, as though his tailor in cutting the garment had repudiated as fantastic the evidence of his measurements. Yet, when one might have expected to find hands of a talon-like knottiness, to correspond with the sparse rugosity of his person, one found to one's astonishment the most delicately shaped hands in the world, with long, sensitive, nervous fingers, like those of the thousands of artists who have lived and died without being able to express themselves in any artistic medium. ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... belong to other Surrey hills; but Chobham Common has its own features of sandy hillocks topped by clumps of pines, which set an austere gauntness on the place unlike the rolling flanks and ridges by Frensham and Hindhead. In May the heather is dark and dry; there are sparse patches of gorse scattered about the slopes, and looking across at a group of pines edging the horizon you sometimes get a setting of black, yellow, and blue, which belongs peculiarly to this corner of Surrey. ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... Scotsman, who carried the economy of his race even to the extent of flesh, of which he was sparse, greeted the reproof by casting down his eyes into the ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... ran, raced along the edge. Higher they went, until Ridley and Rachel walked behind; next they turned along a lane scattered with stones, where Mr. Pepper raised his stick and silently indicated a shrub, bearing among sparse leaves a voluminous purple blossom; and at a rickety canter the last stage ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... was fascinating in its silence, for only the dimmest of path lights seemed alive over the big place, and not a breath of wind stirred the tenacious oak leaves or other rugged foliage, too sparse to be counted, now that winter had given warning and was ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... Atlantic a hundred feet high, and on whose tops the sea-birds nested by the million. The larger ones, however, had, through countless ages, accumulated a layer of earth that covered their gaunt sides except where an occasional naked rib of gray granite was thrust out. Sparse grass struggled with the junipers for a foothold along the slopes, and low black firs, whose seed had been wind-blown or bird-carried from the mainland, climbed the rugged crest of each island. Few men visited them, and almost ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... sixty years of age, was gaunt with recent sickness, patient and unimaginative in aspect. He preached extemporarily, with the aid of notes; and it cannot be said that his discourse was remarkable for interest, at any rate in its beginning. Doubtless the sparse congregation, so prone to slumber, discouraged him; for offering exhortations to empty benches is but weary work. Indeed he was meditating the advisability of bringing his argument to an abrupt conclusion when, chancing to glance round, he became aware that he had at least one sympathetic ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... stretched away before us clad in the silver robe of the moonlight. We were camped—Harry and I, two Kaffirs, a Scotch cart, and six oxen—on the swelling side of a great wave of bushclad land. Just where we had made our camp, however, the bush was very sparse, and only grew about in clumps, while here and there were single flat-topped mimosa-trees. To our right a little stream, which had cut a deep channel for itself in the bosom of the slope, flowed musically on between banks green with maidenhair, wild asparagus, and many beautiful grasses. ...
— A Tale of Three Lions • H. Rider Haggard
... most important of the Outposts is Sumatra, an island four-fifths the size of France, as potentially rich in mineral and agricultural wealth as Java, but with a sparse and intractable population, certain of the tribes, notably the Achinese, who inhabit the northern districts, still defying Dutch rule in spite of the long and costly series of wars which have resulted from Holland's attempt to subjugate them. The unmapped interior of ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... across the Niemen could scarce sustain its own sparse population, and had nothing to spare for an invading army. This had once been Poland, and was now inimical to Russia; but Russia did not care, and the friendship of Lithuania was like many human friendships which we make sacrifices to preserve—not ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... landscape," I says, wavin' my arm about the hor'zon, "remind you much of fish? Stranger," I says, "fish an' christians is partic'lar sparse ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... enter the Legislative, about sunset or after; give the most pathetic detail of the frightful pass they were in:—Prussians billowing round by the myriad, volcanically spouting fire for fifteen hours: we, scattered sparse on the ramparts, hardly a cannoneer to two guns; our dastard Commandant Lavergne no where shewing face; the priming would not catch; there was no powder in the bombs,—what could we do? "Mourir! Die!" ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... the smoking-room; the doors opened, and there was Lupin. But again how changed! The clothes of the Duke of Charmerace littered the floor; the kit-bag was open; and he was wearing the very clothes of Chief-Inspector Guerchard, his seedy top-hat, his cloak. He wore also Guerchard's sparse, lank, black hair, his little, bristling, black moustache. His figure, hidden by the cloak, seemed to have shrunk to the ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... indefinably a little gayer than you did. He was tall, thin—even gaunt, perhaps—and his face was long, rather pale, and shrewd and gentle; something in its oddity not unremindful of the late Sol Smith Russell. His hat was tilted back a little, the slightest bit to one side, and the sparse, brownish hair above his high forehead was going to be gray before long. He looked ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... a man of thirty sat reading or chatting in a subdued voice with the young woman. He was short, delicate, and in manner languid. With his fair hair devoid of lustre, his sparse beard, his face covered with red blotches, he resembled a sickly, spoilt child ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... rare fortune, can be given to English readers almost unabridged, in view of the singular delicacy and pure-mindedness of the Jurgen mythos: in all, not more than a half-dozen deletions have seemed expedient (and have been duly indicated) in order to remove such sparse and unimportant outcroppings of mediaeval frankness as might conceivably offend ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... that hostile Indians within the limits of the United States have been furnished with arms and munitions of war by persons dwelling in conterminous foreign territory, and are thereby enabled to prosecute their savage warfare upon the exposed and sparse settlements of the frontier: ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... monotony of pine trees, vividly green and far apart, into which Diane presently rode. A buzzard floated with uptilted wings above the sparse woodland to the west. A gorgeous butterfly, silver-spangled, winged its way over the saw palmetto and sedge between the trees to an inviting glade beyond, cleft by a shallow stream. Swamp, jungle, pine and palmetto were vocal with the ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... of greenery, a species of transition between the plant and animal, where life makes haste to come in flowers and insects, floating there like worlds in ether:—be it a cottage with its garden of cabbages, its vineyards, its hedges overhanging a bog, surrounded by a few sparse fields of rye; true image of many humble existences:—be it a forest path like some cathedral nave, where the trees are columns and their branches arch the roof, at the far end of which a light ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... The sparse population of this territory, the want of scientific information in its inhabitants, and the difficulties which have existed in the way of keeping up an intercourse with their fellow-citizens of the centre ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... She loved to cuddle down close beside him, her arms around his shaggy neck; and croon queer little high-voiced songs to him; her thin cheek against his head. She used to save out fragments from her own sparse lunch to give to him. She was inordinately proud to walk at his side during Lad's rare rambles around the Place. Child and dog made a ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... very slow affair. As we ascended, the trees decreased in size. We had long ago left the deciduous foliage behind us; but the pines themselves were smaller, interspersed with what is called "crooked timber," which grows in grotesque dwarf-like forms. The forest at last diminished into mere sparse shrubs, and finally we reached the treeless region, called in German the Alpen, where there is rich pasturage for cattle and sheep during the summer. We were now on tolerably level ground, and I ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... with stars, the people were strolling—folk from the towns, down for their fortnight's holiday. In twos and threes, in parties of six or eight, they passed the wall at the end of Lord Dennis's little domain; and the sound of their sparse talk and laughter, together with the sighing of the young waves, was blown over the wall to the ears of Harbinger, Bertie, Barbara, and Lily Malvezin, when they strolled out after dinner to sniff the sea. The holiday-makers stared dully at the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... son of William Adam of Maryburgh, in Fife, and the most celebrated of four brothers, John, Robert, James and William Adam, was born at Kirkcaldy in 1728. For few famous men have we so little biographical material, and contemporary references to him are sparse. He certainly studied at the university of Edinburgh, and probably received his first instruction in architecture from his father, who gave proofs of his own skill and taste in the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary (now demolished). His mother was the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... sparse at Oldfield. There were a few Eton boys, and one or two in that delightful transition age when youth is most bashful and uninteresting,—a sort of unfledged manhood, when the smooth boyish cheek contradicts ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... then dabbled her brown slender fingers in the shining depths, watching, with a smile, concentric, widening ripples as they hurried out across the glassy surface, to the ferned bank beyond. A few yards away a hidden cascade murmured musically. Through the sparse and tender foliage of spring above her, the sunlight flickered in bright, moving patches of golden brilliance, falling on the breast of her rough, homespun gown, like decorations given by a fairy queen. Around the water's edges ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... section, as they were found in hundreds of other portions of the vast area known under the general name of the Louisiana Territory. You must bear in mind that there were thousands of square miles that had not been trodden by a white man, and so sparse were the Indian villages that large portions of the country remained to be ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... continued plumb; some bobbed forward, others tipped backward, while a few seemed disposed to fall apart; all had a compost of earth, brought from heaven knows where, in the nooks and crannies hollowed by the rain, in which the spring-tide brought forth fragile flowers, timid creeping plants, and sparse herbage. Moss carpeted the roof and draped its supports. The corner pillar, with its composite masonry of stone blocks mingled with brick and pebbles, was alarming to the eye by reason of its curvature; it seemed on the point of giving way under ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... a sitting-room, a bed-room, and off it a sleeping-closet for her maid,—this was the private lodging accorded to the new daughter of the house. Bessie gazed about, taking in a general impression of faded, delicate richness, of white and gold and sparse color, in elegant, antiquated taste, like a boudoir in an old Norman chateau that she ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... in what sparse cover they will manage to lie up. So admirably do their stripes mingle with the withered and charred grass-stems and dried up stalks, that it is very difficult to detect the dreaded robber when he is lying flat, extended, close to the ground, so still and motionless that you cannot distinguish ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... up the struggle. With his Creole wife and their two sons he moved into the swamps. Working first as a guide and trapper and then as a hunter of birds, he managed to make a sparse living. His eldest son followed in his footsteps, but the younger took to the sea. Roderick St. Jean, the eldest son, died of yellow fever in 1890. He left one son to the guardianship of his brother who had come home from the sea. That son came to look upon ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... and catarrhs," were unknown, so wholesome and healthful was the smoke. Earl Godwin's favourite hound, old, like himself, lay at his feet, dreaming, for it whined and was restless. And the Earl's old hawk, with its feathers all stiff and sparse, perched on the dossal of the Earl's chair and the floor was pranked with rushes and sweet herbs—the first of the spring; and Githa's feet were on her stool, and she leaned her proud face on the small hand which proved her descent from the Dane, and rocked herself ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of Germans, employed in an optical shop; there also arrived a party of clerks from the fish and gastronomical store of Kereshkovsky, and two young people very well known in the Yamas—both bald, with sparse, soft, delicate hairs around the bald spots: Nicky the Book-keeper and Mishka the Singer—so were they both called in the houses. They also were met very cordially, just like Karl Karlovich of the optical shop and Volodka of the fish store—with raptures, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... for larger efforts, and fit us for larger results. It would simplify and deepen our motives, and thus evolve from them nobler deeds and purer sacrifices. To all objections from so-called prudence, to all calculations from sparse results, to all cavils of onlookers who may carp and seek to hinder, we should have one all-sufficient answer. It is not for us to bandy arguments on such points as these. We care nothing for difficulties, for ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... quarter of a mile, however, above the head of the narrow pond, the ardent explorer came upon a level of sparse alder swamp. Here he found the stream just beginning to spread over its low banks. The cause of this spreading was a partial obstruction in mid-channel—what looked, at first glance, like an accidental accumulation of brush and stones and mud. ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... stretch of country is hard on the mules and oxen. But on this day the sky speedily grew overcast and a cool wind blew in our faces as we travelled at a quick, running walk over the immense rolling plain. The ground was sandy; it was covered with grass and with a sparse growth of stunted, twisted trees, never more than a few feet high. There were rheas—ostriches—and small pampas-deer on this plain; the coloration of the rheas made it difficult to see them at ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... waited patiently till a time when it seemed as if the force of the Latins was at the lowest; that is, when Prince Henry, brother of the Emperor, had crossed the Hellespont with the flower of the troops. The empire in Europe was covered with thin and sparse garrisons; there were no forces in Constantinople to come to their succor should they try to hold out; they might be taken in detail and at once. And then those Byzantine Vespers began. It was a revolt of thousands against tens; ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... more than average ability, and it required but little learning and culture under the sovereignty of "squatters" to become a member of the State legislature, especially in the border States, where population was sparse, and the people mostly ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... Avignon, the Interrupted Scolia used to prey upon the larva of the Shaggy Anoxia (A. villosa). At Serignan, which is surrounded by the same kind of sandy soil, without other vegetation than a few sparse seed-bearing grasses, I find her rationing her young with the Morning Anoxia (A. matutinalis). Oryctes, Cetoniae and Anoxiae in the larval state: here then is the prey of the three Scoliae whose habits we know. The three Beetles are Lamellicorns, Scarabaeidae. We shall have occasion later to consider ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... opened slowly; and there entered a middle-aged, rather grizzled man, with shaggy eyebrows, sparse beard, and bent shoulders. He glanced in hesitatingly, his eyes wandering down ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... his grey and already sparse locks with the same gesture which he used once to toss back his ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... for she was choked by her sobs. The whole valley was deserted and silent in the dazzling light, and the overwhelming heat, and only the grasshoppers uttered their shrill, continuous chirp among the sparse, yellow grass on both sides ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... to herself. In St. Louis there was a strong Unionist majority, and especially the numerous German population was thoroughly anti-slavery, and was vigorously led by F.P. Blair, Jr. But away from her riverfront the State had a sparse population preserving the rough propensities of frontiersmen; these men were not unevenly divided between loyalty and secession and they were an independent, fighting set of fellows, each one of whom intended to follow his own fancy. The result was that Missouri for a long while carried on a ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... intonation, and a very gaiety of solemn earnestness that baffled the cunning skill of all childish imitators. A slender wisp of a girl she was, not more than ten years in appearance, though her age had been given to us as fourteen. The spindle ankles that she so airily flourished from the sparse concealment of a worn and shadowy calico skirt seemed scarce a fraction more in girth than the slim blue-veined wrists she tossed among the loose and ragged tresses of her yellow hair, as she danced around the room. She was, from the first, an object of curious and most refreshing interest ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... North America as the domestic bovine species is at present. The elk, the moose, the musk ox, the caribou, and the smaller quadrupeds popularly embraced under the general name of deer, though sufficient for the wants of a sparse savage population, were never numerically very abundant, and the carnivora which fed upon them were still less so. It is almost needless to add that the Rocky Mountain sheep and goat must ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... were different, too. Gray, lean, hard-bitten faces, their eyebrows so light and sparse that it seemed their eyes were hard stones which never seemed to shift their straight-ahead gaze. Yet each man in the tonneau and the orderly beside the driver on the front seat saluted the Red Cross girl as ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... contrary, well caparisoned by their man milliner, well groomed, well curled, were a marked feature of the sparse congregation. The spectator of so many points, all made the most of, unconsciously felt with a sense of oppression that everything that could be done had been done. No stone had been ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... civilised nations, women there were not interested in the question of votes. Thereupon the young man asked whether Tibet offered a promising market for automobiles. He was pleased to learn that Tibet, with its extremely sparse population and its very precipitous cliffs, was an ideal place for ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... everything, so much so that the stalk yields to the grower's suggestions and becomes fleshy and swells into an ellipse similar to the turnip, of which it possesses all the merits of corpulence, flavour and delicacy; only the strange product serves as a base for a few sparse leaves, the last protests of a real stem that refuses to lose its attributes entirely. This is ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... some fairly big towns, such as Malines and Bruges, are mediaeval from end to end. This, of course, is not true of Belgian Luxembourg and the region of the Ardennes, where the population is much more sparse; where we do not stumble, about every fifteen miles or so, on some big town of historic name; and where the endless chessboard of little fields that lies, for example, between Ghent and Oudenarde, or between Malines and Louvain, is replaced ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... the gray stone embrasure at that place by Holmes, who quickly forced the eleventh and last diamond cuff-button out of his nerveless grasp, then turned triumphantly to me, his faithful but out-of-breath squire, while the spring breezes ruffled the sparse hair on his uncovered head, and the gentle afternoon sun shone down on as queer a scene as had ever taken place during ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry
... habit, thus making it useful where the large-flowered kinds have proved defective, as none of them are of what may be called free growth. They grow to a height of seven or eight feet—sometimes ten,—but have few branches, and sparse foliage. Paniculata, on the contrary, makes a very vigorous growth—often twenty feet in a season—and its foliage, unlike that of the other varieties, is attractive enough in itself to make the plant ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... Blank, who belongs to the Methodist wing of this camp-meeting, was sent out by the conference to a sparse Western district, where the meeting-houses were a good way apart, and there was any amount of horseback riding to be done. On the cross-roads, near one of the stations, there was a blacksmith shop, where a great, two-fisted, tough old sinner was blowing up red-hot coals into red-hot flames, ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... waters of Boston harbor are a living tradition in all New England; the saintly and sainted Peter Williams, whose views of the best means of our elevation are in triumphant activity to-day; William Hamilton, the thinker and actor, whose sparse specimens of eloquence we will one day place in gilded frames as rare and beautiful specimens of Etruscan art—William Hamilton, who, four years afterwards, during the New York riots, when met in the street, loaded down with iron missiles, ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... There was a sparse crop of brown grass growing on the grave to which he led his companion. A cracked wooden head-board, already tilting rakishly, marked Henry's devotion. It had been white-washed and the inscription done in black letters, now partly washed away by ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... make the body subservient to the spirit. Elijah was able to live on the sparse food brought by ravens, or provided from the meal barrel of the widow, was able to outstrip the horses of Ahab's chariot in their mad rush across the valley of Jezreel; and after a brief respite, given to sleep and food, ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... days was sparse, and the movement of so large a number of men along a certain route completely exhausted all the resources of the inhabitants; and although willing to pay for all that his men required, the Earl of Evesham had frequently to lie down on the turf ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... chair and hung limply; a pair of shoes stood beside the bed in the attitude of walking—tired-looking shoes, run down at the heels and skinned at the toes. And on the far side of the three-quarter bed the hump of an outstretched figure, face turned from the light, with sparse gray-and-black ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... settlements, in constant communication with one another through itinerant merchants, who effected an exchange of learning as well as of wares; while the other nations grew more and more isolated, and shut themselves off from even the sparse opportunities of mental ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... of the same structure throughout. At the borders, it is a gossamer weft of sparse threads; nearer the centre, the texture becomes first fine muslin and then satin; lower still, on the narrower part of the opening, it is a network of roughly lozenged meshes. Lastly, the neck of the funnel, the usual resting-place, is formed ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... though they are of vast extent and have employed centuries in their construction, are inferior in magnitude to the dikes or levees of the Mississippi, which are the work of scarcely a hundred years, and of a comparatively sparse population. On the right or western bank of the river, the levee extends, with only occasional interruptions from high bluffs and the mouths of rivers, for a distance of more than eleven hundred miles. ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... Ah Wing! That boy knows me. A tot of gin with a stinger, and thank you kindly. A master should go with his ship," and he touched his sparse white hair which showed his scalp, and nodded his head, staring out over the bay as if in a reverie. The colour was bleached out of his failing eyes and they had a habit of roving about unsteadily, a quality common in old sailors and probably acquired in a lifetime of watching ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... work. Pop was meek and soft; he cried gently of a Sunday evening at church, the tears trickling down the furrowed leather-colored skin into the sparse beard, and on week-days he was wont to wear a wide and vacuous smile; yet somehow, if Pop said this or that should be, it was,—at least in the little house on the edge of ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... gallop brought the riders in sight of the twinkling light of the camp, just as the stars came out. It lay in a little hollow, where a small stream ran through a sparse grove of young white oaks. A half dozen tents were pitched under the trees, horses and oxen were corraled at a little distance, and a group of men sat on camp stools or lay on blankets about a bright fire. The twang of a banjo became audible as they drew nearer, and they saw a couple of negroes, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... rocky pastures, its sparse but hardy corn, The mist roll off its forehead before a harvest morn; To hear the pine-trees crashing across its gulfs of snow Upon a roaring ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... tree, ordinarily 35-40 feet and not uncommonly 50-60 feet high; trunk 8-15 inches in diameter, tapering, surmounted by a very open, irregular head of small, spreading branches; spray sparse, consisting of short, stout, leafy rounded shoots set at a wide angle; distinguished by the slenderness of its habit, the light color of trunk and branches, the deep red of the sterile catkins in early spring, and the almost ceaseless flutter ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... often spoken of them, and yet he felt the sensation of something extraordinary, as if looking at them for the first time. They were black, with enormous, knotted, open trunks, swelling with great excrescences, and the foliage was sparse. These were olive trees which had stood for centuries, which had never been pruned, in which age robbed the sap from the branches to distend the trunk with the protuberances of a slow and painful circulation. ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Paradise," Marcel explained, in answer to Keeko's expressed delight at the wide openness of it all, and at the sight of the sparse, lean Arctic grass which replaced the monotony of the shadowed river. "Guess it's a matter of contrasts," he went on. "It's kind of light, I guess, and it makes you think it's green. There's bush, or scrub, and bluffs ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... in those days was sparse, and the movement of so large a number of men along a certain route completely exhausted all the resources of the inhabitants; and although willing to pay for all that his men required, the Earl of Evesham had frequently to lie down on the turf ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... mean, ugly, frowzy, and unimaginative. He pictured the heavy, gloomy, lethargic life within. The slatternly servants pottering about the bases of the sooty buildings sickened and saddened him. A solitary Earl's Court omnibus that lumbered past with its sinister, sparse cargo seemed to be a spectacle absolutely tragic—he did not know why. The few wayfarers were obviously prim and smug. No joy, no elegance, anywhere! Only, at intervals, a feeling that mysterious and repulsive wealth was hiding ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... the sand rocks. The yellow grass sloped away from his feet mile after mile to the timber, and beyond that to the prismatic mountains. The variegated lodges of the Chis-chis-chash village dotted the plain near the sparse woods of the creek-bottom; pony herds stood quietly waving their tails against the flies or were driven hither and yon by the herdboys—giving variety to the tremendous ...
— The Way of an Indian • Frederic Remington
... over a lace-curtain-cleaning establishment. It was cruder and rougher than anything she had yet encountered; a white-pine table with a washbowl and a toothbrush mug, and a black iron bed that at first glance had sent darting through her a sinking sense of institution. But it was clean, and a sparse Irish landlady with a moist pink presence that steamed hot suds had left her without question and one week's advance payment ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... Monte, Reginald Pole, and Marcello Cervini were appointed to represent the Pope. When the day fixed for the opening ceremony arrived, a further adjournment was rendered imperative owing to the very sparse attendance of bishops. The First Session was held on the 13th December 1545, and the second in January 1546. There were then present in addition to the legates and theologians only four archbishops, twenty-one bishops, and five generals ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... Gray, lean, hard-bitten faces, their eyebrows so light and sparse that it seemed their eyes were hard stones which never seemed to shift their straight-ahead gaze. Yet each man in the tonneau and the orderly beside the driver on the front seat saluted the Red Cross girl as she stood by ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... and studies of those days are to be derived from any other source than from a comparison of the few catalogues of contemporary libraries remaining to us; and these help to show that the century was approaching its close before a few sparse rays of the first dawn of the Italian Renascence reached England. But this ray was communicated neither through the clergy nor through the Universities; and such influence as was exercised by it upon the national mind, was directly due to profane poets,—men ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... and private subscriptions, statues and other monuments have at different times been erected; and many others doubtless will be erected in them hereafter. Some of them are in secluded situations, where for many mites the population is sparse, and the few people that live near them cherish tenderer recollections of the "Lost Cause" than of that which finally won. But such of them as are contiguous to cities are places of interest to more or less of the neighboring population; and, in some of them, there are commemorative services ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... sixty-eight years old, small, thin, bent, with two big hands resembling the claws of a crab. His colorless hair was sparse and thin, like the down of a young duck, allowing patches of his scalp to be seen. The brown and wrinkled skin of his neck showed big veins which disappeared behind his jaws and came out again at the temples. ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... covered with green baize, on high legs, so that like a soldier too he could stand as he wrote (Crozier had made that high stand for the desk himself). That was what the room conveyed to her—the spirit of the soldier, bare, clean, strong, sparse: a workshop and a chamber of sleep in one, like the tent of an officer on the march. After the feeling had come to her, to heighten the sensation she espied a little card hung under the small mirror on the wall. There was writing on it, and going ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... then, lying off the island and scanning its sparse crown of cocoanut palms, looking for a French flag among their wavy tufts. There was none in sight. We were the winners in the long race. Directly a whale-boat was lowered, and rowed around the white fringe of tremendous surf that broke ceaselessly ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... his body and of his face. He has all the medals there are, but only wears two, a Vladimir Cross at the centre of his collar, like a brooch, and a Georgian on his chest. His head is long, and his cheeks seem to curve inwards from his temples. There is sparse grey hair on his whitish scalp, and lifting his full-sleeved arm he scratched his head with an ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... the valley of the On, he having been of late a frequent attendant at Mr. Price's church. The vicar was much beloved by all his parishioners, beloved and respected by high and low, but still his congregation was sparse and uncertain, so that every new member was quickly noticed and welcomed by him—more especially any stray sheep from the dissenting fold possessed for him all the interest of the sheep in the parable, for ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... wanted. Upon the top of Pap's head the sparse grey hairs bristled ominously. His teeth clicked; his eyes snapped. He was furiously angry—as I ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... though a little box of a garage had been one of the "all modern conveniences" so fervidly painted in the real estate agent's advertisement, the Crowes had no car. It was the last house on Undercliff Road that had any pretense to sparse grass and a stubbly hedge—beyond it were sand-dunes, delusively ornamented by the signs of streets that as yet only existed in the brain of the owner of the "development," and, a quarter of a mile away, the long blue streak of ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... of green and blue-grey mountains that soared up from it—up, up, in shapes strange as a goblin's dream. Then, the azure star vanished, and rocky heights shut away the view of the distant sea. Vegetation grew sparse. At last we had reached the desolate and stony top of the mountain-range which a little while ago had touched the sky. Clouds like huge white swans swam in the blue air below us, where we could look down from some sheer ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... middle height and spare figure, nearly sixty years old, by constitution rather delicate in health, but wiry and active for his age. A sparse and straggling beard and mustache did not conceal a thin but kindly mouth; his eyes were keen and pleasant; his sharp nose and narrow jaw gave him very much the air of a priest, and this impression was helped by his commonplace dark clothes and ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... painfully conspicuous; when he was smartened up, his appearance suggested that somebody had given him a coating of that rich Western whitewash which looks like Devonshire cream. His locks were long and sparse, and as deadly black as his clothes were white. He was a modest, gentle man, with a wife even more meek and gracious than himself. They never, to my recollection, spoke unless they were spoken to, and their ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... visible to him. Gulping hard, Masten sent the pony cautiously forward. He skirted the corral fence, keeping the shack between him and the point at which he divined Catherson was then riding, and loped the pony into some sparse ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... small cottages, with plots of flowers, very lowly, but bright and fragrant. Finally they reached an open field, bare and lonely-looking. There were two or three little bushes in it, without flowers, and the grass was sparse and thin. In the centre of the field was a tiny hut, hardly big enough for a shepherd's shelter. It looked as if it had been built of discarded things, scraps and fragments of other buildings, put together with care and pains, by some one who had tried to make the most of cast-off material. There ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... knowledge, and expound them aloft and conspicuously; and as we have heard in the ear, so to deliver them to whom it is requisite; but not enjoining us to communicate to all without distinction, what is said to them in parables. But there is only a delineation in the memoranda, which have the truth sown sparse and broadcast, that it may escape the notice of those who pick up seeds like jackdaws; but when they find a good husbandman, each one of them will germinate and ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... thumps for attention to be called to 'the strangeness of it,' that a poor, small, sparse village, hardly above a hamlet, on the most unproductive of Kentish heights, part of old forest land, should at this period become 'the cynosure of a city beautifully named by the poet Great Augusta, and truly indeed the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in sight, with a B. and A. boat landing concrete bags at the end of its wharf; and on beyond, the sparse roofs of the capital of the Free State blistered and buckled under the sun. The steamer, with hooting siren, ran up her gaudy ensign, and came to an anchor in the stream twenty fathoms off the State wharf. A yellow-faced Belgian, with white sun helmet ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... people idolise him. His almost blameless life has been passed among them, nothing in it hidden from their knowledge. When they look upon his dear presentment in the photographer's window—the shrewd, kindly eyes under the high forehead, the sparse locks so carefully distributed—words of loyalty only and of admiration rise to their lips. For of all princes in modern days he seems to fulfil most perfectly the obligation of princely rank. Nepios he might have been called in the heroic ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... a sparse frill of grey hair growing right round his face, his chin and long upper lip guiltless of hirsute appendages. A gorgeous suit of a very baggy cut, flowered satin waistcoat, and a basket of apples and cooking pears in his hand, as ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... spots and tiny clouds of pale soft purple, and then there are an infinite variety of hair-line hieroglyphics, twisted and scrawled in brownish or reddish purple, about the egg. The markings are nowhere as a rule crowded, and towards the small end are usually sparse and occasionally wholly wanting. In some eggs a bad pen seems to have been used to scribble the pattern, and every here and there instead of a fine hair-line there is a coarse ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... caught my fancy. Here were the high and low, slaves and masters, beauty and ugliness, cleanness and filth. Their feet were bare and scaled with patches of tar and pitch. Their unbathed bodies were garmented in the meanest of clothes, dingy, dirty, ragged, and sparse. Each one had on but two garments—dungaree trousers ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... ill-defined outlines of each other. The springbuck, possessing this feeling in an intense degree, and being eminently gregarious, becomes uneasy as the grass of the Kalahari becomes tall. The vegetation being more sparse in the more arid south, naturally induces the different herds to turn in that direction. As they advance and increase in numbers, the pasturage becomes more scarce; it is still more so the further they go, until they are at last obliged, ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... in the country till within the last fortnight, but have come up to town to prepare for our departure. London is almost empty, but the only topics that keep alive the sparse population of the club-houses are the dismissal of Baroness L—— from Court and her departure for Germany, and a terrible esclandre in a very high circle, including royal personages.... I treat you to the London scandal, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... period the north of England had remained the poorest part of the country. The population was sparse, ignorant, and unprosperous. It was in the south that improvements originated. In the reign of Henry VIII, the North fought against the dissolution of the monasteries (SS352, 357); in Elizabeth's reign it resisted Protestantism; in that of ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... properly makes such a proceeding a crime, and punishes it as such. He does meddle with his neighbour's freedom, and that seriously. So it might, perhaps, be a tenable doctrine, that it would be needless, and even tyrannous, to make education compulsory in a sparse agricultural population, living in abundance on the produce of its own soil; but, in a densely populated manufacturing country, struggling for existence with competitors, every ignorant person tends ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... first at the hop. This function, it seemed, was going on in the parlor, which summed in itself the character of ball-room as well as drawing-room. The hop had now begun, and two young girl couples were doing what they could to rebuke the sparse youth of Lower Merritt Inn for their lack of eagerness in the evening's pleasure by dancing alone. Gaites did not even notice them, he was so intent upon the ladies of the orchestra, concerning whom he was beginning to have a troubled ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... Gray Dragon, it made the Pass more wild and grim if possible, filling it with gray, drifting ghosts: ghosts of the murdered clansmen; ghosts disappearing into dark, open doorways of rock castles, or falling on the green floor of the glen, to weep on the dim, faded purple of the sparse heather. The river into which the weeping cataracts shed their tears was black at first; but suddenly, though the rain did not stop, the sun tore a hole through a cloud, and shot a huge rainbow into the rushing water. It split into a thousand fragments, ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... I look along the years And see the flowers you threw... Anemones And sprigs of gray Sparse heather of the rocks, Or a wild violet Or daisy of a daisied ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... becoming serene, it is pleasant to consider the phenomenon with attention. We can no longer say there is nothing new under the sun. For this whole chapter in the history of man is new. The great extent of our republic is new. Its sparse habitation is new. The mighty wave of public opinion which has rolled over it is new. But the most pleasing novelty is, its so quietly subsiding over such an extent of surface to its true level again. The order and good ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... smoking-room; the doors opened, and there was Lupin. But again how changed! The clothes of the Duke of Charmerace littered the floor; the kit-bag was open; and he was wearing the very clothes of Chief-Inspector Guerchard, his seedy top-hat, his cloak. He wore also Guerchard's sparse, lank, black hair, his little, bristling, black moustache. His figure, hidden by the cloak, seemed to have shrunk to the ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... the glow of the heather belong to other Surrey hills; but Chobham Common has its own features of sandy hillocks topped by clumps of pines, which set an austere gauntness on the place unlike the rolling flanks and ridges by Frensham and Hindhead. In May the heather is dark and dry; there are sparse patches of gorse scattered about the slopes, and looking across at a group of pines edging the horizon you sometimes get a setting of black, yellow, and blue, which belongs peculiarly to this corner of Surrey. Chobham Common ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... pre-historic garment known as a basque. She curved in where she should have curved out, and she bulged where she should have had "lines." About her neck was suspended a string of cannon-ball beads that clanked as she walked. On her forehead rested a sparse fringe. ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... in the translation from an original paged manuscript to an unpaged "cyberscroll", page numbers are lost. In this edition subheadings are the only remaining indexing "handles" of sub-chapter scale. Unfortunately, in some stretches of text these subheadings may be as sparse as merely one in three pages. Therefore, it would seem to make best sense to save the reader time and temper by adopting a shortest path method ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... this foodful little pine is the commonest tree, and the most important. Nearly every mountain is planted with it to a height of from 8000 to 9000 feet above the sea. Some are covered from base to summit by this one species, with only a sparse growth of juniper on the lower slopes to break the continuity of its curious woods, which, though dark-looking at a distance, are almost shadeless, and have none of the damp, leafy glens and hollows so characteristic of other pine woods. Tens of thousands of acres ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... great prairies have but a very sparse growth of wood or vegetation upon their banks, so that one of the fundamental causes for the generation of noxious malaria does not, to any great extent, exist here, and I believe that persons may encamp with impunity directly ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... after journeying a half-mile or so, the character of the country underwent a great change. The ground became more level, and they found themselves traveling among stunted trees and sparse vegetation. The moon did not rise until quite late, so that until then they could barely see each other's bodies as they moved along. This made them uncertain as to whether they were following the right course; but they were greatly pleased to find that they had deviated but ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... wires thrummed, thrummed, thrummed above them; the rails were glaring hard lines; the goldenrod smelled dusty. Across the track was a pasture of dwarf clover and sparse lawn cut by earthy cow-paths; beyond its placid narrow green, the rough immensity of new stubble, jagged with wheat-stacks ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... mountain tops ray-crowned Apollo Turns his swift arrows, dart on glittering dart, Let but a rock glint green, the wild goats follow Glad-grazing shyly on each sparse-grown part. ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... Bertie in the interval as a successful debutante as a reader of Shakespeare, and had received her sparse and sparkling letters confirming report, truly "angel visits, few and ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... and wind-shifted sand lay many more people than lived in Drybone. They passed by the fence of this shelterless acre on the hill, and shoutings and high music began to reach them. At the foot of the hill they saw the sparse lights and shapes of the town where ended the gray strip of road. The many sounds—feet, voices, and music—grew clearer, unravelling from their muffled confusion, and the fiddling became a ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... the road passed small log ranches crouching low on the banks of creeks; but aside from these—and the sparse animal life around them—no sign of settlement could be seen. The valley lay as it had lain for thousands of years, repeating its forests as the meadows of the lower levels send forth their annual grasses. Norcross said to himself: "I have circled the track of progress and have re-entered the border ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... per 100 persons; the number of fixed main lines increased in the last few years to a little more than 2,000,000, but only about two-thirds of these have subscribers; much of the infrastructure is outdated and inefficient domestic: good service in north but sparse in south; domestic satellite system with 12 earth stations (20 additional domestic earth stations are planned) international: 5 submarine cables; microwave radio relay to Italy, France, Spain, Morocco, ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... on the other hand, had new areas been available the chief effects of their exploitation would have been to heighten the prices of slaves and lower the prices of crops. Actual expansion had in fact been too rapid for the best interests of society, for it had kept the population too sparse to permit a proper development of schools and ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... him to the island—But in what size? Very small? But then, if we were very small it would take us hours to get from here to the boat. Glora pointed out where it would land—just beyond the village where the houses were set in a sparse fringe. It would be there, apparently, in ten or fifteen minutes. Polter probably was there now ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... road commemorate, also the lands of the Thang khiew clan, and many others. It has been explained, in a previous paragraph, how the clan grew out of the family. The clan lands originally, when population was sparse, were owned by families, but as the members of the family increased and a clan was formed, the lands became the property of the clan instead of the family. Such clan lands are properly demarcated ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... where the large-flowered kinds have proved defective, as none of them are of what may be called free growth. They grow to a height of seven or eight feet—sometimes ten,—but have few branches, and sparse foliage. Paniculata, on the contrary, makes a very vigorous growth—often twenty feet in a season—and its foliage, unlike that of the other varieties, is attractive enough in itself to make the plant ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... old Public Letter-Writer, more like a great, gaunt bird than a human being, with those spectacles of his, and his long, very sparse and very lanky fringe of a beard which fell from his cheeks and chin and down his chest for all the world like a crumpled grey bib. He was wrapped from head to foot in a caped coat which had once been green in ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... on the rough platform of Manuel's wagon for fear of falling off, saw very little of the country through which they traveled that evening. That the way was rough they knew, and that sparse trees bordered it on either hand was likewise apparent even in the dusk. But they saw no habitations and no light save the ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... of the Khabur and the Balikh, the Euphrates winds across a vast table-land, ridged with marly hills; the left bank is dry and sterile, shaded at rare intervals by sparse woods of poplars or groups of palms. The right bank, on the contrary, is seamed with fertile valleys, sufficiently well watered to permit the growth of cereals and the raising of cattle. The river-bed is almost everywhere wide, but strewn with dangerous rocks and sandbanks which render ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... usually open and stiff; branches are usually many, sub-solitary or fascicled, spreading or suberect, capillary, stiff, again branching from near the base and about 3 inches long; rachis is angular, with glands and tufts of sparse white hairs at the angles of branches ...
— A Handbook of Some South Indian Grasses • Rai Bahadur K. Ranga Achariyar
... in many regions it may at present prove impossible to consolidate all the rural schools. In places where the population is so sparse as to require transportation for very long distances, or where the country roads are still in such a condition in wet seasons as to be practically impassable, consolidation must of necessity be delayed. In such communities, however, the rural school need not be completely at a standstill. ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... briars were covered with orange and scarlet berries; the black-plumed pine trees rose solemnly behind. A flat country, for the most part; and, as the travellers slowly receded westward, settlements became sparse and small; the grand forests closed more densely round them; solitary clearings ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... gave up the struggle. With his Creole wife and their two sons he moved into the swamps. Working first as a guide and trapper and then as a hunter of birds, he managed to make a sparse living. His eldest son followed in his footsteps, but the younger took to the sea. Roderick St. Jean, the eldest son, died of yellow fever in 1890. He left one son to the guardianship of his brother who had come home from the sea. That son came to look upon his uncle as his father and ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... endless monotony of pine trees, vividly green and far apart, into which Diane presently rode. A buzzard floated with uptilted wings above the sparse woodland to the west. A gorgeous butterfly, silver-spangled, winged its way over the saw palmetto and sedge between the trees to an inviting glade beyond, cleft by a shallow stream. Swamp, jungle, pine and palmetto were vocal with the melody ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... during which time Mary Louise caught herself leaning forward and holding her breath in an instinctive impulse to help the labouring car. And then they gained the top. Before them lay a tableland of many acres thickly covered with trees. The grass, in the open spaces between, was sparse, and there was much moss and lichen and drifts of withered leaves, dried by the sun of more than one summer; and here and there in the northern shadow of some gnarled trunk and in dipping hollows the leaves were packed close in a damp and moulding compress. ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... go to Honolulu, I should have headed the Snark due west, instead of which I kept her south. Not until latitude 19 degrees did we encounter the first flying fish. He was very much alone. I saw him. Five other pairs of eager eyes scanned the sea all day, but never saw another. So sparse were the flying fish that nearly a week more elapsed before the last one on board saw his first flying fish. As for the dolphin, bonita, porpoise, and all the other hordes ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... Edgeworthii, all white-flowered bushes, of which the two first rise to the height of small trees.] The yew appears at 7000 feet, whilst, on the outer ranges (as on Tonglo), it is only found at 9,500 to 10,000 feet; and whereas on Tonglo it forms an immense tall tree, with long sparse branches and slender drooping twigs, growing amongst gigantic magnolias and oaks, at Choongtam it is small and rigid, and much resembling in appearance our churchyard yew.* [The yew spreads east from Kashmir ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... would give it an official countenance, and serve, in some things, as a convenient basis for meetings during the few years that precede a State government, while our literary population continues sparse. My experience in the East had shown me that quorums are not readily attained in literary societies, which is a sore hindrance to the half dozen efficient laborers out of a populous city, who generally hold the laboring oar ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... vegetation. The soil and climate are unsuited to the growth of large trees, but adapted to scrub jungle of a drought-resisting type, which at one time covered very large areas from the Jamna to the Jhelam. The soil on which this sparse scrub grew is a good strong loam, but the rainfall was too scanty and the water-level too deep to admit of much cultivation outside the valleys of the rivers till the labours of canal engineers carried their waters to the uplands. East of ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... from Longwi. Wayworn, dusty, disheartened, these poor men enter the Legislative, about sunset or after; give the most pathetic detail of the frightful pass they were in:—Prussians billowing round by the myriad, volcanically spouting fire for fifteen hours: we, scattered sparse on the ramparts, hardly a cannoneer to two guns; our dastard Commandant Lavergne no where shewing face; the priming would not catch; there was no powder in the bombs,—what could we do? "Mourir! Die!" answer prompt voices; (Hist. Parl. xvii. 148.) and the dusty ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... Dore pictures," she murmured to Rose-Marie—down three, crumbling brick steps, where the little fellow picked his way as daintily as a careful lady, and across the dusty road into a pasture trail that led to a wood stretch, sparse at first, thicker as one plunged in deeper. The sun filtered through in delicious diamonds; here and there a resinous pine, steeped in heat, threw out a cloud of balmy odor; a chipmunk scuttered across their path, clicking ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... the counties lying on the Missouri border, where the pro-slavery party was strong, the work of both was exceedingly imperfect, and in many instances with notorious discrimination against free-State voters. While the disfranchised counties had a comparatively sparse population, the number of voters in them was too considerable to be justly denied their due representation.[5] The apportionment of delegates was based upon this defective registration and census, and this alone would have given the pro-slavery party a disproportionate ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... the full crown of which was not entirely bald, but partially covered with a few sparse long hairs. And full across this crown, disappearing in the thicker fringe above the ears, ran the most prodigious scar I had ever seen. Because the vision of it was so fleeting, ere the match blew out, and because of the scar's very prodigiousness, I may possibly exaggerate, ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... from a native word meaning "red" and was given to the mountain people because in their attacks upon the lowlanders they wore, as a distinguishing mark, red trousers or a dash of red colour elsewhere about their sparse clothing. They raided coast towns and did immense damage before they were finally brought under control. It should be remembered that these conditions were allowed to arise by a Filipino provincial governor, and by Filipino municipal officials. It is altogether ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... that is solid and sparse and all in a shape and largely very largely. Interleaved and successive and a sample of smell all this makes ...
— Tender Buttons - Objects—Food—Rooms • Gertrude Stein
... confronted with my great temptation—the magnificent Mungo Mah Lobeh—the Throne of Thunder. Now it is none of my business to go up mountains. There's next to no fish on them in West Africa, and precious little good rank fetish, as the population on them is sparse—the African, like myself, abhorring cool air. Nevertheless, I feel quite sure that no white man has ever looked on the great Peak of Cameroon without a desire arising in his mind to ascend it and know in detail the highest point on the western side of the continent, and indeed one ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... battered-looking individual of between fifty and sixty years of age, was gaunt with recent sickness, patient and unimaginative in aspect. He preached extemporarily, with the aid of notes; and it cannot be said that his discourse was remarkable for interest, at any rate in its beginning. Doubtless the sparse congregation, so prone to slumber, discouraged him; for offering exhortations to empty benches is but weary work. Indeed he was meditating the advisability of bringing his argument to an abrupt conclusion when, chancing to glance ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... wealthy, thickly settled, and firmly governed coast of India, the settlers were only a few servants of the company. If, on the other hand, the region for which the monopoly of the company was granted was a broad and temperate tract, occupied by a sparse population of savages, and offering only such objects of trade or profit as could be collected slowly or wrested by European labor from, the soil or the forest, the quickest way to a commercial profit was the establishment ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... said she; "there wasn't any card with them." As she spoke she seemed to see the face of the young history teacher, Mr. Latimer, with his sparse, sandy beard, and she felt how very distasteful he was to her, even if gilded, so ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... form are everywhere almost the same in colour and in form of wings, save for a few variations in the sparse black markings on the pale yellow ground. But the females occur in several quite different forms and colourings, and one of these only, the Abyssinian form, is like the male, while the other three or four are mimetic, that is to say, they copy a butterfly ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... her head in silent blessing, his eyes uplifted gratefully to Heaven. Too late Hannah felt the misconception and was remorseful. For the festival occasion Reb Shemuel elected to worship at the Great Synagogue; Hannah, seated among the sparse occupants of the Ladies' Gallery and mechanically fingering a Machzor, looked down for the last time on the crowded auditorium where the men sat in high hats and holiday garments. Tall wax-candles twinkled everywhere, in great gilt chandeliers depending from the ceiling, ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Environment: sparse bunch grass, prostrate vines, and low-growing shrubs; lacks fresh water; primarily a nesting, roosting, and foraging habitat for seabirds, shorebirds, and ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... the towns and mainly Slovene in the country districts. It has been the deliberate policy of the Austrian Government to plant new Slovene colonies here from time to time and to render life intolerable for Italians. But, even so, the population is still sparse, and all the country is infertile, except for the Vippacco Valley, which, though wretchedly cultivated hitherto, would richly repay the application of capital and modern methods. Here, I think, is a clear case where strategic considerations, which are definite, must prevail over racial considerations, ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... the road in a rough sort of column, the old timers riding ahead in a group of their own. No injunction had been laid as to keeping quiet; nevertheless, conversation was sparse and low voiced. The men mostly rode in silence smoking their cigarettes. About half way the leaders summoned me, and I trotted up to ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... candlestick on the mantel-shelf, and threw some pine-knots on the fire, which immediately broke into a blaze, and showed him to be a lank, narrow-chested man, past sixty, with sparse, steel-gray hair, and small, deep-set eyes, perfectly round, like a fish's, and of no particular color. His chief personal characteristics seemed to be too much feet and not enough teeth. His sharply cut, but rather simple face, as he turned it towards ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... a point where the ground fell away more abruptly and the character of the timber changed, as well. Instead of the stately pines, this more abrupt declivity was covered with hickory and oak. The sparse brush sprang ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... habits quite similar to the brigadier we used sometimes to hear, but rarely saw, on our way over to the "Aunt Hannah lot," an adjunct of the Old Squire's farm, to reach which we crossed a tract of sparse woods. Its notes, prolonged on a very sharp, high key, resembled the words, My fee-fee-fee-fee-fee! each louder ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... a large company of Germans, employed in an optical shop; there also arrived a party of clerks from the fish and gastronomical store of Kereshkovsky, and two young people very well known in the Yamas—both bald, with sparse, soft, delicate hairs around the bald spots: Nicky the Book-keeper and Mishka the Singer—so were they both called in the houses. They also were met very cordially, just like Karl Karlovich of the optical shop and Volodka of the fish store—with raptures, cries and kisses, flattering to their self-esteem. ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... wonder after this, that scant and sparse were the jests played on the grim master of the Wolfsberg, or that the bay of a blood-hound tracking on the downs frightened the most stout-hearted rider in all that ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... of authentic epic who had sufficient genius to make unfailingly, nobly beautiful poetry within the strict and hard conditions of purely auricular art. Compare Homer's ambrosial glory with the descent tap-water of Hesiod; compare his continuous burnished gleam of wrought metal with the sparse grains that lie in the sandy diction of all the "authentic" epics of the other nations. And, by all ancient accounts, the other early Greek epics would not fare much better in the comparison. Homer's singularity ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... there, grave economic problems never really arise. Nowhere else, during the whole course of my various diplomatic wanderings, have I ever seen a happier people, who looked more cheerfully into the future. In view of the comparatively sparse population of the country, intensive agricultural production has only become necessary in a few isolated districts; there are always purchasers in plenty for the rich surplus of raw materials available, ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... man withal; nothing of the hypocrite, nothing of the cynic. A tragic dreamer. He was one of those whom crime leaves pensive; he had the brow of an incendiary tempered by the eyes of an archbishop. His sparse gray locks turned to white over his temples. The Christian was evident in him, complicated with the fatalism of the Turk. Chalkstones deformed his fingers, dissected by leanness. The stiffness of his tall frame was grotesque. He ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... Pop was meek and soft; he cried gently of a Sunday evening at church, the tears trickling down the furrowed leather-colored skin into the sparse beard, and on week-days he was wont to wear a wide and vacuous smile; yet somehow, if Pop said this or that should be, it was,—at least in the little house on the ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... certainly nothing very elevating about it. Worldliness, sensuality, and devilism are things helped forward by their gibberish. Words dealing with honesty, uprightness, fidelity, industry, religion, cleanliness, and love are very sparse. ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... just as he expected them to. Wilson ran his hand through his sparse, gray hair and murmured something about it being a shame to have to leave the natives on their own after having more or less dragged them out of their comfortable swamps. A glance from his ...
— Narakan Rifles, About Face! • Jan Smith
... North Atlantic Ocean between North America and Europe; sparse population confined to small settlements along coast, but close to one-quarter of the population lives in the capital, Nuuk; world's ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... of people whose conditions, whose advantages and disadvantages, whose opportunities and mode of life, and consequently whose desires and needs, are of a wholly different nature? Could the tyranny of the majority take a more obnoxious form than that of sparse rural populations, scattered over the whole area of the country from Maine to Texas and from Georgia to Oregon, deciding for the crowded millions of New York and Chicago that they shall or shall not be permitted to drink a glass of beer? Nor is ...
— What Prohibition Has Done to America • Fabian Franklin
... grey and already sparse locks with the same gesture which he used once to toss back his ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... to rely on such a supposition; and after an hour's halt, they again moved on, pausing occasionally to refresh themselves, until towards sunset, when the ground became more even and the soil more sandy. Here they noticed the vegetation was becoming more sparse, what trees there were having a stunted and gnarled appearance; after a long search they found a spring of pure water, by which they encamped for the night, being now relieved from the fear of an attack; for, had they been ever so well mounted they could not have made a greater ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... corpses on battle-fields, that no physiognomies repel them; and Gouraud began to cast his eyes on the old maid's fortune. This imperial colonel, a short, fat man, wore enormous rings in ears that were bushy with tufts of hair. His sparse and grizzled whiskers were called in 1799 "fins." His jolly red face was rather discolored, like those of all who had lived to tell of the Beresina. The lower half of his big, pointed stomach marked the straight line which characterizes ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... tree shall blossom, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and the caperberry shall burst: the three are linked together as being images from natural objects, not because of their symbolising similar things. The blossoming of the almond tree probably refers to the sparse white hairs of age. The name of this tree in Hebrew is founded on the fact that it is the first to blossom; though not strictly white, its blossoms may be called whitish: the whitish blossoms, solitary while all is bare around, just yield the image required. The grasshopper is ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... A gaunt man of about thirty with sparse reddish hair, perspiration glistening on his upper lip, stood at the mouth of a narrow way like the one Brett had come through. He wore a grimy pale yellow shirt with a wide-flaring collar, limp and sweat-stained, dark green knee-breeches, ...
— It Could Be Anything • John Keith Laumer
... manoeuvres were in progress, and a merry party, including a number of ladies, were riding home from the mimic battlefield. We passed through a narrow lane, bordered on each side by groups of stunted willows and birch trees, under the sparse shadow of which nestled a few cottages painted in blue, pink, or yellow, in true Polish fashion. Suddenly our progress was arrested by terrifying screams proceeding from one of these hovels. Several of us were ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... tremendous and stormy sunset, as we approached the place, and lo! it looked exactly as it had done when first I saw it more than a score of years before, forbidding as the mouth of hell, vast and lonesome. There stood the columns of boulders fantastically piled one upon another; there grew the sparse trees upon its steep sides, mingled with aloes that looked like the shapes of men; there was the granite bottom swept almost clean by floods in some dim age, and the little stream that flowed along it. There, too, was the spot where once I had ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... outer offices to the door marked "private," and there, near the window of his sanctum, sat a stout and elderly gentleman. In the unsparing revelation of the morning sunshine the visitor's face declared all its wrinkles. The whitening hair, growing sparse, was carefully combed across an arid patch of scalp. Hamilton Burton's smile died and his face grew for a moment solicitous as he read his father's troubled eyes. Old Thomas Burton was shaven and manicured and betailored into a model of well-nourished—possibly over-nourished—senectitude. His mustaches ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... were halted, and began to graze, while the party rode through the lush saplings and bushes that had sprung up so that it was hard work to get through, till they passed under the spreading branches of the trees, where the undergrowth became thin and sparse. ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... desolation save the petulant chirp of the cricket. At the sides an occasional stream tumbled out of the mountains to be all but drunk away at once by the thirsty sands. Along the banks of these was the only green to be found, sparse fringes of willow and wild rose. On the borders of the valley, where the steeps arose, were little patches of purple and dusty brown, oak-bush, squaw-berry, a few dwarfed cedars, and other scant growths. At long intervals ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... civil invitation to "step inside and wait." My suspense did not last long, for M. Pierre made his appearance very promptly. He was a tall, thin individual with a fried-looking complexion, keen sunken eyes, and sparse hair streaked with grey. He entered the room with a courteous bow and inquiring look. Rising from the chair in which I had rested myself by the fire, I advanced towards him and addressed him by name in my suavest tones. He inclined his head ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... feet and not uncommonly 50-60 feet high; trunk 8-15 inches in diameter, tapering, surmounted by a very open, irregular head of small, spreading branches; spray sparse, consisting of short, stout, leafy rounded shoots set at a wide angle; distinguished by the slenderness of its habit, the light color of trunk and branches, the deep red of the sterile catkins in early spring, and the almost ceaseless ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... on, down and down, till he was brought up short by a great mossy block of stone just as another volley was fired, apparently from the mule-track high above him; and half-unconsciously, in the confusion and excitement of the moment, he lay perfectly still, cowering amongst the sparse growth in the hope that he might not be seen from the shelf-like mule-track above, though expectant all the while that the next shot fired would ...
— !Tention - A Story of Boy-Life during the Peninsular War • George Manville Fenn
... stone, green with slime and feathery with a kind of ghastly white fungus. Overhead, from the wooden roof, which formed the floor of the shop, hung innumerable spider's webs thick with dust. The floor was of large flags cracked in many places, and between the chinks in moist corners sprouted sparse, colorless grass. In the centre was a deal table, scored with queer marks and splotched with ink. Over this flared two gas-jets, which whistled shrilly. Against the wall, which was below the street, were three green painted safes fast locked: but the opposite wall had in it the narrow door ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... height that would in the East entitle them to be called mountains. Every such tract was riven in all directions by deep chasms and narrow ravines, whose sides sometimes rolled off in gentle slopes, but far more often rose as sheer cliffs, with narrow ledges along their fronts. A sparse growth of grass covered certain portions of these lands, and on some of the steep hillsides, or in the canyons, were scanty groves of coniferous evergreens, so stunted by the thin soil and bleak weather that ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... prevent them, the innocent man was sure to suffer for the misdeeds of the guilty, unless both joined together for defence, the former had no alternative save to make common cause with the latter. Moreover, in a sparse backwoods settlement, where the presence of a strong, vigorous fighter was a source of safety to the whole community, it was impossible to expect that he would be punished with severity for offences which, ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... Head. Moreover, as they steamed down along the north shore, the same appearance was visible throughout, its low undulating sea-front of black, honeycombed rock lacking character, the rare patches of sandy beach and sparse sunburned vegetation seeming bare ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... one friend in the Chamber,—a deputy newly elected for Deux-Sevres, named M. Sarigue, a poor fellow not unlike the inoffensive, ignoble animal whose name he bore,[2] with his sparse, red hair, his frightened eyes, his hopping gait in his white gaiters. He was so shy that he could not say two words without stammering, almost tongue-tied, incessantly rolling balls of chewing-gum around in his mouth, which put the finishing ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... frozen into silence. The big river continued its course between the same high hills and, as the last cabin disappeared, the boys headed the Gitchie Manitou directly for the top of the hills, where the plains began that led onward and onward until the sparse forests finally disappeared in the broken land of the Barren Grounds. And on these, not much farther to the North, they knew that caribou and moose roamed in herds of thousands, and that the musk ox, the king of the Northland big game, made ...
— On the Edge of the Arctic - An Aeroplane in Snowland • Harry Lincoln Sayler
... deserted; sparse grass grows in spots, mingled here and there with tufts of purple flowers and nettles. On the summit is a dilapidated casemate, with a courtyard enclosed by crumbling walls. Beneath this ruin, and half-way up the hill, is ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... salon with an active step for a man who was over seventy-seven years of age. Thanks to his robust constitution, he had changed but little since the day of his arrival in Paris, and, despite his tall figure, he walked erect. His hair, now white and sparse, left uncovered a broad and protuberant skull, which gave a strong idea of his character and firmness. His face, seamed with deep wrinkles, had taken, with age, a nobler expression, preserving the pallid tones which inspire ...
— Vendetta • Honore de Balzac
... gaunt, straight, twisting his sparse imperial, and blinking a bit doubtfully at the messenger. But Linton was not so much at a loss for reasons. He was an earnest young man with slow, ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... is hard on the mules and oxen. But on this day the sky speedily grew overcast and a cool wind blew in our faces as we travelled at a quick, running walk over the immense rolling plain. The ground was sandy; it was covered with grass and with a sparse growth of stunted, twisted trees, never more than a few feet high. There were rheas—ostriches—and small pampas-deer on this plain; the coloration of the rheas made it difficult to see them at a distance, whereas the bright red coats of the little deer, and their uplifted flags as they ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... wearing a loose grey suit, and sprawling in the large grey arm-chair. The soft lamp-light fell on his clean, bald, Michael-Angelo head, across which a few pure hairs glittered. His chin was sunk on his breast, so that his sparse but strong-haired white beard, in which every strand stood distinct, like spun glass lithe and elastic, curved now upwards and inwards, in a curious curve returning upon him. He seemed to be sunk in stern, prophet-like meditation. As a matter ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... callings to carve out fresh careers, and even to become humble farmers wherever they found asylums and tolerance, men who became very valuable accessions to the nations who received them and a correspondingly significant loss to France. To those two main elements were added sparse accessions from other nations at later intervals, and also a strain of aboriginal blood, of which a more or less faint tinge is still discernible in some families, an admixture which many deplore and others consider as ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... between the work of the two men. Graydon had kept to the towns and cities on the south coast; Borrow's methods were different. He circulated his books largely among villages and hamlets, where the population was sparse and the opportunities of distribution small. He had gone out into the highways, risking his life at every turn, penetrating into bandit- infested provinces in the throes of civil war, suffering incredible hardships and fatigues and, never sparing ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... steamer—the Frontenac—running on Lake Ontario, and others soon followed. The increase was much more rapid after the date referred to, and the improvement in construction and speed was equally marked. Owing to our sparse and scattered population, as well as our inability to build, we did not undertake the construction of railroads until 1853, when the Northern Railroad was opened to Bradford; but after that, we went at it in earnest, and we have kept at it until we have made our Province a network ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... road. The halt had taken place almost exactly at the beginning of that long stretch of park wall which ran beside the road and the tramway. From where he sat he could see the other wing which led inward from the road at something like a right angle, but was presently lost to sight because of a sparse and unkempt patch of young trees and shrubs, well-nigh choked with undergrowth, which extended for some distance from the park wall backward along the road-side toward Vanves. Whoever owned that stretch of land had seemingly not thought it worth while to cultivate it ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... and of Chaleur Bay. The seigneury of Sorel was well peopled, for each grantee received only sixty acres and a town lot, taking the rest of his allotment in some of the newer settlements. The settlement in the Gaspe peninsula was more sparse; the chief centre of population was the tiny fishing village of Paspebiac. In addition to these settlements, some of the exiles took up land on private seigneuries; these, however, were not many, for the government discouraged the practice, and refused supplies to all who ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... the day was fallen into a wonderful still evening. Gnats were dancing in the sparse strips of sunlight that slanted across the dark water, now that the sun was low. From the fields, bereft of workers, came the scent of hay and the heavy scent of meadow-sweet; the musky odour of the backwater was confused with them into one brooding perfume. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... olive green in colour, with white blotches and sparse, coarse bristles, the animal has no comeliness, and yet when a herd frolics in the water, rising in unison with graceful undulatory movements for air, and the sunlight flashes in helioscopic rays from wet backs, the spectacle is rare and fine. Rolling and lurching along, gambolling like good-humoured, ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... that many mistakes must have been made, and that many an instance, which until now has been considered reliable proof of a so-called single variation, is in fact only a case of vicinism. In reading the sparse literature on sports, numerous cases will be found, which cannot stand this test. In many instances crossing must be looked to as an explanation, [215] and in other cases the evidence relied upon does not suffice to exclude ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... first time De Soto's resolute mind now gave way. Broken down by his many labors and cares, perhaps assailed by the disease that was attacking his men, he felt that death was near at hand. Calling around him the sparse remnant of his once gallant company, he humbly begged their pardon for the sufferings and evils he had brought upon them, and named Luis de Alvaredo to succeed him in command. The next day, May 21, 1542, the ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... dismal saloon. The master, a worthy man, so far as I ever saw of him, was Goth, Vandal, Hun, Visigoth, all in one. The ship was damp, dark, dirty, old, and cold. She was not warmed by steam, and the fire could not be lighted because of a smoky chimney. There were no lamps, and the sparse candles were obviously grudged. The stewards were dirty and desponding, the serving inhospitable, the cooking dirty and greasy, the food scanty, the table-linen frowsy. There were four French and two Japanese male passengers, who sat at meals in top-coats, comforters, and ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
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