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More "Tapering" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... organized of the mollusks, started into existence, so far as the record shows, toward, the end of the Cambrian, with the long extinct ORTHOCERAS (STRAIGHTHORN) and the allied genera of its family. The Orthoceras had a long, straight, and tapering shell, divided by cross partitions into chambers. The animal lived in the "body chamber" at the larger end, and walled off the other chambers from it in succession during the growth of the shell. A central tube, the SIPHUNCLE, passed through from the body ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... masculine fingers and disproportionately small finger-nails in the hands of Professor Weekes, the sculptor. There is scarcely any perceptible tapering at the third joint, and the fingers all exhibit very little prominence of knuckle or contour. It is anything but an artistic hand, and yet its owner was a man of the ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... streaks, resembling a comet's tail, which extend over the Mare towards its E. border N. of Lubbock, and are crossed obliquely by a narrower streak. Messier and Messier A stand near the S. and narrowest end of a tapering curved light area. There is a number of craterlets and minute pits in the neighbourhood, and under a high light two round dusky spots are traceable in connection with the "comet" marking, one just beyond its northern, and the other beyond its southern ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... have done it before, do it now; or, better, when you are alone by yourselves. It is easy to imagine that a line is straight. But did you ever see the point of a needle under a microscope? However finely it is polished, and apparently tapering regularly, the scrutinising investigation of the microscope shows that it is all rough and irregular. What would a builder do if he had not a T-square and a level? His wall would be ever so far out, whilst he thought it perfectly perpendicular. And remember ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... is only a few acres in extent—not more than six, I fancy, and four-fifths of it are walled about with walls that stand knee-deep in sea-grasses. Along, and above it, are thrust the tapering tops of those highly decorative cypresses without which Italy would not be herself at all. There is such a monastery there—an ideal one, with cloister, and sundial, and marble-curbed well, and all that; at least so I am told; we poor feminine creatures are not permitted to ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... holes, there is something still more delicate in the processes that produce such fine wire as this. That something is the filing of a long point on the wire to enable the poking of the end of it through the draw plate so that it can be caught by the nippers. Imagine yourself filing a long, tapering point on the end of a wire only one eighteen-hundredths of an inch in diameter, in order to get it through a draw plate that will bring it down to one two-thousandths. My son does that without using a magnifying glass. I cannot say positively ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... was used to keep them in subjection. This was of braided walrus hide an inch thick at its butt and tapering to a thin lash. To the butt was attached a short wooden handle a foot in length, to which was fastened a loop which was hooked over the protruding end of the forward cross-bar and the whip permitted to trail upon the ice when not ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... river cutting it off from the road, and crossed by two wooden bridges, beside each of which stood a weeping-willow, budding with fresh spring foliage. Opposite were houses of various pretentious, and sheer behind them rose the steep hill, with the church nearly at the summit, the noble spire tapering high above, and the bells ringing out a cheerful chime. The mist had drawn up, and ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... adopted in London for several projects of the same kind. The length of this cylinder from end to end is exactly seventy meters, and its maximum breadth of beam is eight meters. So it isn't quite built on the ten-to-one ratio of your high-speed steamers; but its lines are sufficiently long, and their tapering gradual enough, so that the displaced water easily slips past and poses no obstacle to the ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... with head up-stream and belly about two inches from the sandy bottom, gently fanning the water with his party-coloured fins, and opening and closing his rosy gill-fringes as he breathed. In length he was something over twenty inches, with a thick, deep body tapering finely to the powerful tail. Like all the trout of the Clearwater, he was silver-bellied with a light pink flush, the yellow and brown markings on his sides light in tone, and his spots of the most high, intense vermilion. His great lower jaw was thrust forward in ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... coronation, when it is carried by the lord mayor as on the occasion narrated above, and at the annual election of the chief magistrate of the city, when it is formally handed by the Chamberlain to the lord mayor elect. The mace consists of a tapering shaft of rock crystal mounted in gold, with a coroneted head also of gold, adorned with pearls and large jewels. Its age is uncertain. Whilst some hazard the conjecture that it may be of Saxon origin, there are others who are ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... quarter and a schooner on the other, and in disengaging the rigging which had caught in the spars. The sloop had the appearance of a wreck. The laniards of the shrouds had been cut away on both sides, and the tall and tapering mast was quivering and bending like a whipstock, from the action of the wind and the waves. One of the cables, it was supposed, had parted; the sails, not having been properly furled, were fluttering and struggling, not altogether in vain, ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... vessel, huge of beam and length, her superstructure towering proudly aloft, her massive armoured sides sweeping up in noble curves, a Super-Dreadnought complete from trucks to keelson. Yacht-like she sat the water all buoyant grace from lofty prow to tapering counter, and to me there was something sublime in the grim and latent power, the strength and beauty ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... built. A foundation piece, broad in the middle and rising considerably at each end, is first laid on blocks and properly shored up. The edges of this are worked true and smooth with the adze, and a plank, properly curved and tapering at each end, is held firmly up against it, while a line is struck along it which allows it to be cut so as to fit exactly. A series of auger holes, about as large as one's finger, are then bored along the opposite edges, and pins of very hard wood are fitted to these, so that the two planks are ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... be angry with me for buying a rowboat; but I also knew that the little bowsprit suggesting a jib, and the tapering mast ready for its few square feet of canvas, were trifles not likely to meet his approval. As far as rowing on the river, among the wharves, was concerned, the Captain had long since withdrawn his decided objections, having ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the grub or larva; third, the chrysalis or pupa; fourth, the imago, or perfect insect. The eggs are small, ovate, yellowish white objects, which hatch in about fifteen to thirty days. The larvae are small legless grubs, quite large at the apex of the abdomen and tapering toward the head. Both eggs and pupa are incessantly watched and tended, licked and fed, and carried to a place of safety in time of danger. The larvae are ingeniously sorted as regards age and size, and are never mixed. The larvae period generally ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... for personal comfort in a draughty corner of the hotel garden, with Mrs. Callowgas. Affected by the poetic influences of moon, stars, and sea, affected also conceivably by pagan amorous influences, naughtily emanating from the neighbouring Venus Temple—whose elegant tapering columns adorn the facade of the local Mairie—Mrs. Callowgas became extensively reminiscent of her dear dead Lord Bishop. Protracted anecdotes of visitations and confirmation tours, excerpts from his sermons, speeches and charges, arch revelations of his diurnal and ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... enduring an impossible climate because of an idiotic hope. He uttered the word "Arizona." He spoke of hot deserts, solitudes under the stars, mirages less mocking than his aspirations. As he contemplated her delicately fervent face, her tapering, graceful body, wrapped like something very precious in pale gold, his eyes glittered ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... Sweet gum A E G Irregularly 3-7-lobed, serrate-dentate with equal teeth Mulberry A E H Pointed or bristle-tipped lobes Black oaks A E H Coarse-toothed or pinnate-lobed, short lobes ending in sharp point Sycamore B Outline entire, ovate, veins prominent Flowering dogwood B Outline serrate, apex often tapering Sheep berry B ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... fair these names, how much unlike they look To all the blurr'd subscriptions in my book! The bridegroom's letters stand in row above, Tapering, yet straight, like pine-trees in his grove; While free and fine the bride's appear below, As light and slender as ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... a lump of crumbled earth under his feet—a cool, moist, black path of richness. The furrow-slice was a long, almost unbroken ribbon of turf, each one laid smoothly against the former strand, and under it lay crumpled and crushed the layer of grass and flowers. The plow-point was long and tapering, like the prow of a clipper, and ran far out under the beam, and above it was the rolling colter, a circular blade of steel, which cut the edge of the furrow as cleanly as cheese. The lay of the plow, filed sharp at every ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... as he never had seen before. He was trim and slender. He wore a reddish-brown coat with a white waistcoat. But the things that made Peter stare very impolitely were his tail and his legs. His tail was nearly twice as long as his body, slim and tapering, and his hind legs were very long, while his fore legs were short. It took only one glance to convince Peter that here was a born jumper. Any one built ...
— Mother West Wind "Where" Stories • Thornton W. Burgess
... they are out in the blinding sunlight, hurrying through the clear, golden day as though life and death depended upon its speed. On, on, past the green meadows, where the hedgerows were filled with woodbines and wild roses, and the clover filled the air with fragrance; past gray old churches whose tapering spires pointed to heaven; past quiet homesteads sleeping in the sunshine; past silent, quaint villages and towns; past broad rivers and dark woods. Yet never once did the silent woman raise her eyes, never once did she look from the windows at the glowing landscape that lay ...
— Marion Arleigh's Penance - Everyday Life Library No. 5 • Charlotte M. Braeme
... made a fine expedition to the woods—the whole party, the donkey-cart, and one of the keepers to choose the Tree—a most important performance, as we wanted the real pyramid "sapin," tapering off to a fine point at the top. Labbey (keeper) told us his young son and the coachman's son had been all the morning in the woods getting enormous branches of pine, holly, and ivy, which we would find at the church. We came across various old ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... drummers beat the long roll for the muster of winter days; past gates letting into fields, clamped and chained to their posts as if jealous of the plenty which they guarded; past farmsteads set in dark forests of orchard trees and tall windbreaks of tapering poplar, where never a light gleamed from a pane, where sons and daughters, worn husbandmen and weary wives, lay soothed in honest slumber; past barn-yards, where cattle sighed as they lay in the moonshine champing upon their cuds; down into swales, where the air was damp and cold, like ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... flight of perhaps one hundred stone steps, and find at their summit a second torii, from whose lower cross-beam hangs festooned the mystic shimenawa. It is in this case a hempen rope of perhaps two inches in diameter through its greater length, but tapering off at either end like a snake. Sometimes the shimenawa is made of bronze, when the torii itself is of bronze; but according to tradition it should be made of straw, and most commonly is. For it represents the straw rope which the deity Futo-tama-no-mikoto stretched behind the Sun-goddess, ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... strings, and bent the dizzy, tapering masts till they threatened to snap. But the bark bore bravely through it, while the huge waves seemed bearing her down to those coral labyrinths, where ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... orange, to pale yellow and dull grey—harmonises with the brilliant greenery of Lombard vegetation and with the deep azure of the distant Alpine range. Reared aloft above the flat expanse of plain, those square torroni, tapering into octagons and crowned with slender cones, break the long sweeping lines and infinite horizons with a contrast that affords relief, and yields a resting-place to tired eyes; while, far away, seen ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... far as I could ascertain it, was revealed by his mouth and chin, and by a certain nervousness of his hands, hands where a square, practical palm was belied by the slight tapering of his fingers, the mark of the dreamer. His mouth was unquestionably sensuous, with the lips full and now and then revealing out of the studied practiced calm of his face an almost imperceptible twitching, ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... therefore appear, after all, that the cathedral of Angers, built during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, is a sufficiently honorable church; the more that its high west front, adorned with a very primitive Gothic portal, supports two elegant tapering spires, between which, unfortunately, an ugly modern pavilion ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... "eccentricity" or "throw" of an eccentric is the distance between C^2, the centre of the shaft, and C^1, the centre of the sheave. The throw must equal half of the distance which the slide-valve has to travel over the steam ports. A tapering steel wedge or key, K, sunk half in the eccentric and half in a slot in the shaft, holds the eccentric steady and prevents it slipping. Some eccentric sheaves are made in two parts, bolted together, so that they may be removed ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... the wealthy condition of the natives; and the huts scattered over a large area are entirely concealed by fruit-trees. A separate race-course is laid out; here is a court-house, there a store; farther on a mill on a mill pond; and high above the luxuriant fruit-trees rise the tapering spires of the Catholic and Protestant churches.[12] I was surprised in entering the latter sanctuary at beholding a beautifully painted glass window reflecting its mellow tints ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... me the truth, the truth, Have I merited woe at your tapering hands, Have you wilfully burst love's twining strands, And cast to the winds ...
— Armenian Literature • Anonymous
... of these gins when set produced a vivid impression that it was endowed with life. It exhibited the combined aspects of a shark, a crocodile, and a scorpion. Each tooth was in the form of a tapering spine, two and a quarter inches long, which, when the jaws were closed, stood in alternation from this side and from that. When they were open, the two halves formed a complete circle between two and three feet in ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... meditation, he did as follows. He took the rotundity of the moon, and the curves of creepers, and the clinging of tendrils, and the trembling of grass, and the slenderness of the reed, and the bloom of flowers, and the lightness of leaves, and the tapering of the elephant's trunk, and the glances of deer, and the clustering of rows of bees, and the joyous gaiety of sunbeams, and the weeping of clouds, and the fickleness of the winds, and the timidity of the hare, and the vanity of the peacock, and the softness of the parrot's bosom, and ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... soldierly kind of a man I had seen in many days, save the Brigadier—so white and fat was Chautonville, the top of his head small, his legs short and thick, hands fat and white and tapering, a huge neck and chin with folds of white fat under it—a sort of a perfect bird dressed for present to the Emperor. Chautonville was big-eyed with all this—large, innocent brown eyes—innocent to me, but it was the superb health of the creature, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... sole is very like any other fish-baby; but from now onwards it enters on a most remarkable career. At six days old he shows all the promise of a well-grown fish; that is to say, his body is round and tapering, he has an eye in each side of his head, and both sides of the body are alike in colour—in other words, he ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... Of these four stripes the posterior one was very minute and faint; the anterior one, on the other hand, was long and broad, but interrupted in the middle, and truncated at its lower extremity, with the anterior angle produced into a long tapering point. I mention this latter fact because the shoulder-stripe of the ass occasionally presents exactly the same appearance. I have had an outline and description sent to me of a small, purely-bred, light ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... lazily overside, ready to drop. The watchers on the quay could note the gentle rise and fall of the crack little vessel as the tide lifted her from behind. She seemed to be dancing to her home like a maiden back from school. The swing of her tapering masts spoke of the heaving seas she had ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... me gravely and I contemplated her, waiting till she should choose to speak. At length, having examined me inch by inch, she saluted by raising her rounded arm and tapering hand, and remarked in ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... apparently composed of a mosaic of rare Chinese enamels, cunningly put together by the deft and patient fingers of the oriental craftsmen. Extending from the widely curving bowl below was an extremely long, narrow, tapering neck. ...
— The Romance of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... she observed scornfully to the empty air, her chin propped on her hand, that hand never extended to any man, that no one had ever grasped—for I had only grasped her shoulder once—that generous, fine, somewhat masculine hand. I knew well the peculiarly efficient shape—broad at the base, tapering at the fingers—of that hand, for which there was nothing in the world to lay hold of. ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... fascination about it, but many inappropriate things were done in its name. The furniture of the time was firmly placed upon the ground, the arm-chairs had strong straining-rails, square or curved backs, scroll arms carved and partly upholstered and stuffed seats and backs. The legs of chairs were usually tapering in form and ornamented with gilding, or marquetry, or richly carved, and later the feet ended in a carved leaf design. Some of the straining-rails were in the shape of the letter X, with an ornament at the intersection, ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... common insects so familiar to all, with strongly veined white wings, bearing three black spots, two on the upper and one on the lower wing, and dark coloring on the corner of the upper wings. The antennae, as with all butterflies, are clubbed at the extremity—unlike moths', which are tapering—and the large black staring eyes are the optical apparatus, containing, we are told, thousands of lenses, each a perfect, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... those round, pot-bellied towers, like tuns of wine stood upon end?" he said—"those donjons at the corners, tapering at the top, and presenting the very image of noble bottles? There needs nothing but that palace to convince you that you have arrived in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... the sandy bank, and saw that a little mossy ride ran straight in among the trees. He put his horse at the gap, and was soon cantering happily through the wood. Thus he came short upon an adventure. The path ran ahead of him in a tapering vista, but just where it should meet in a point it broadened out suddenly so as to make a double bay. The light fell splashing upon this cleared space, and he saw what ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... oblong metal box, tapering toward the ends, with the greatest width forward of the middle. Twin tubes projected from the end of it, lenses in them glistening like eyes. Just below them sprang out steely, glistening tentacles several ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... into a sleep from which it would seem she could never waken. We sent Matthias back to tell mother, and say that we should both stay all night if necessary. This girl could not be more than twenty, we thought. Her fingers were small and tapering, and on her right hand she wore a ring set with several diamond stones. Her dress was of silk, and her shawl fine but thin. Her head covering had doubtless fallen off and then been carried by the wind, for we saw nothing of it. She was a beautiful picture as she lay there, for the blood had ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... his soul. His chin was pointed but firm, and his lips were set; around his mouth were marked the tiny, almost imperceptible lines which mean cruelty. His nose was aquiline, his ears large at the top, tapering almost to a point at the lobe, and his forehead unusually high and broad. His hair was soft, and his skin, although ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... projections, bends downwards a little from the centre towards the head and stern, giving it the appearance of what is in ships called “broken-backed.” The gunwales are of fir, in some instances of one piece, three or four inches broad in the centre and tapering gradually away towards the ends. The timbers, as well as the fore-and-aft connecting pieces, are of the same material, the former being an inch square, and sometimes so close together as to require between forty and fifty of them in one ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... at the compact clusters of nuts, nestling beneath the graceful tufts of long leaves that crowned each straight and tapering trunk; but he had so recently learned from experience, the hopelessness of undertaking to climb a cocoa-nut tree, that he was not at present disposed to renew the attempt. Max, however, who greatly valued himself upon his agility, and professed ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... quieter now. She lay, looking at him, drinking in his dark hair, blue eyes, handsome face, the shape of his intelligent head, the slope of his neck and shoulders, the tapering waist, all the masculine grace and beauty. She pressed her closed fist into her mouth. All the beauty she might never see again, feel enfolded around ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... nought cares he For number or proportion. Mockingly, On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths; A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn; Fills up the farmer's lane from wall to wall, Maugre the farmer's sighs; and at the gate A tapering turret overtops the work. And when his hours are numbered, and the world Is all his own, retiring, as he were not, Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone, Built ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... is the mast, rising thirty feet or more, and the long yard, suspended by ropes, large at the lower part, but tapering toward the extreme point, where floats the pennant which you ...
— Harper's Young People, January 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... and watched him as he lay on his back, dreaming of days at home with his work. As he lay there, she studied his hands. They were practically healed, and she noticed they were well-shaped, the fingers long and tapering, yet with an appearance of unusual strength. She knew already that they were sensitive; when he had cut out a piece of wood to heat water in, she had seen that. So they were sculptor's hands. What a revelation, and what a pity that he was blind! She fell to wondering if ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... friend, who had gone off for an early walk in the woods. He expected that a renewal of the attack would be necessary before the sacrifice of the yellow locks could be accomplished, and he stood on the steps of the hotel, clad in the most exquisite of grays, tapering down to the most brilliant of boots. He had a white rose in his buttonhole, and his great black dog was lying at his feet, having for a wonder found his master, for the beast was given to roaming, or to the plebeian society of Barker's servant. The American's ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... and sky. To the captain's merry challenge to find anything so grand as the ocean, she replied, "Yes, these mighty forces in nature do indeed fill me with awe; but this vessel, with deep-buried fires, powerful machinery, spacious decks, and tapering masts, walking the waves like a thing of life, and all the work of man, impresses one still more deeply. Lo! in man's divine creative power is fulfilled the prophecy, 'Ye shall be ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... of the most delicate whiteness. Although it was so hot, he did not perspire visibly, while I had to keep mopping my face. His hands are large and massive, but in perfect proportion to the arms; the fingers long, strong, white, and tapering to a blunt end. His nails are square, showing about an eighth of an inch separate from the flesh, and I noticed that there was not a particle of impurity beneath any of them. But his majesty is concentrated in his head, which is set with leonine grace and dignity upon his broad, square shoulders; ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... about an hundred of them in all, squatting over the ground, and along the parapet of the new-made dam. They were of a dark-brown, or rather a chestnut colour; and reminded me of so many gigantic rats— except that their tails were pot elongated and tapering like these. Their backs, however, were arched, and their bodies of a thick rounded shape, similar to animals of the rat kind. Moreover, I could perceive that they were armed with the cutting teeth, which distinguish the family of the rodentia, ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... been added to the number of spectators. This was a young man, dressed in the height of the fashion, that is to say, in a be-frogged and be-laced frock coat with a standing collar, a pair of cossack pantaloons tapering down to the foot with a notch cut in the front for the instep, and a hat about twice as large at the crown as at the rim, much resembling in shape an inverted sugar-loaf, with the smaller end cut away. He had a reckless, dare-devil, good humored look, and very ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... These fenders standing on claw feet were afterwards fitted with bottom plates of iron, on which was a ridge or rest against which the fire brasses were prevented from slipping. Then came iron or steel scroll-shaped fenders, tapering down from a few inches in height at the ends to centres almost level with the ground. To obviate the inconvenience of there being no resting-place for the fireirons loose supports were fitted into sockets at the ends, and these ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... toothed; head smooth, high on the side; mouth large; eyes convex, swollen above, tympanum scarcely visible; back rather convex, high on the sides; skin smooth, not porous; limbs rather short; toes 4.5, tapering to a point, nearly free, the palms with roundish tubercles beneath; the fourth hind toe elongate, the rest rather short; the ankle with an oblong, compressed, horny, sharp-edged tubercle on the inner side at the base of the inner ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... Cathedral Mountain—both on Wellington Island—specially attracted our attention to-day. The first-named presents a wonderful appearance, from whichever side you view it; the second reminds one of the beautiful double spires at Tours; while the last resembles the tapering spire of a cathedral, rising from a long roof, covered with delicate towers, fret-work, and angles. In Wide Channel we felt really compelled to stop again to admire some of the unnamed mountains. One we christened Spire Mountain, to distinguish ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... for an instant, the Cepheid's bright wink was dulled; eclipsed. A tapering streamlined shape slipped silently across it, and then was gone in the blackness, and the white dwarf resumed ...
— The Women-Stealers of Thrayx • Fox B. Holden
... proceeded, making a deep vertical line between the eyes, and that the fingers of the hand nearest me closed on the chair-arm firmly. The hand attracted me. It was long, the fingers were shapely, but not markedly tapering, and suggested firmness. I remarked afterward, when I chanced to shake hands with her, that her fingers enclosed one's hand; it was not a mere touch or pressure, but an unemotional and possessive clasp. I felt sure that ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... terminate quite bluntly! Albert Duerer's "Cannon" furnishes a very peculiar and curious example of this entirely equal line, even to the extreme distance; being in that respect opposed to nearly all his other work, which is wrought mostly by tapering lines; and his work in general, and Holbein's, which appear to me entirely typical of rightness in use of the graver and pen, are to be considered carefully in their relation to Rembrandt's loose etching, as in the ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... well-closed harbour amidst a fleet of some hundred and fifty sail, of all sizes and of every variety of rig, from the simple two-sailed heavy sloop to that perfection of naval architecture, the Clipper schooner of Baltimore, with her long tapering masts raking over her taffrail, and her symmetrical hull fairly leaping out of water, as though she moved from wave to wave by a succession of graceful bounds rather than held her course by cleaving a pathway through them, as did ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... twenty and more cells wide, and several hundred cell rows in height, which amount commonly to one or more inches. These large rays are conspicuous on all sections. They appear as long, sharp, grayish lines on the cross-sections; as short, thick lines, tapering at each end, on the tangential or "bastard" face, and as broad, shiny bands, "the mirrors," on the radial section. In addition to these coarse rays, there is also a large number of small pith rays, which can be seen only when magnified. On the whole, the pith rays form a much larger part of ...
— Seasoning of Wood • Joseph B. Wagner
... with mine, and whose wicked plans have proved the master influence of my life. It was a strong, cruel, wolfish face—the face of a man near sixty, with a fierce yellow-gray mustache and imperial—a face broad at the temples and tapering down into a firm, unyielding jaw, and marked then with all the lines of rage, hatred, and chagrin at the ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... of the piano-notes, and sat expectant. With a sharp click at the end of ten seconds a sliding shutter flew open, and a small tray protruded bearing two long tapering ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... yet had reach'd the other bank, We enter'd on a forest, where no track Of steps had worn a way. Not verdant there The foliage, but of dusky hue; not light The boughs and tapering, but with knares deform'd And matted thick: fruits there were none, but thorns Instead, with venom fill'd. Less sharp than these, Less intricate the brakes, wherein abide Those animals, that hate the cultur'd fields, Betwixt Corneto and Cecina's stream. Here the brute Harpies make their nest, ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... yet," said Nariaki, raising a long, bony, tapering hand. "There are a few formalities which our guests have to ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... about three feet in length, covered with bull's hide, having the hair outward and studded with nails. The shape of the bow was not essentially different from that used in Europe in the Middle Ages, being about five feet and a half long, round, and tapering at the ends; the bowstring was of hide or catgut. The arrows of the archers averaged about thirty inches in length, and were made of wood or reeds, tipped with a metal point, or flint, and winged with feathers. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... Mueller girl—what a wonderful woman she is. George, do you suppose—" Fenn caught Grant's eyes wandering toward them. The name of Margaret Mueller had reached his ears. But Fenn went on, lowering his voice: "I honestly believe she could, if any one could." Fenn put his lean, tapering hand upon Brotherton's broad fat paw, and smiled a quaint, appreciative smile, frank and gentle. It was one of those smiles that carried agreement with what had been said, and with everything that might be said. Brotherton took up the hallelujah chorus for Margaret with: "Fine girl—bright, ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... canvas, or of a twilled sacking, and, when spread out, measure 4-1/2 feet by 3-1/2; but when lashed up, and ready for stowing away in the netting, they form long sacks, about as big as a man's body, but not tapering to ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... could fail to see that the slight girlish figure was of ravishing perfection. The waist was slender, the partly revealed arms were as delicate as lilies, the tiny hands with their tapering fingers were like those of a fairy, while the countenance was one of the fairest that ever sun ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... turned from the sun, was towards them and in darkness, they waited. "In this blaze of sunlight," said Cortlandt, "I am afraid we can see nothing." Fortunately, at this moment the Callisto entered the moon's tapering shadow. "This," said Ayrault, "is good luck. We could of course have gone into the shadow; but to change our course would have delayed us, and we might have lost part of the chance of increasing our speed." "There will be no danger from, meteors or sub-satellites here," ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... "A-chee-o! Ah-chee! boo-ooh-oo-ooh!" tapering off with divers curses and threats, upon Old Tantabolus and his villanous habits of arousing "the whole community" in "the dead watches and middle of the night," with heat and smoke, no flesh and blood but ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... tangle (ore-weed, as they call it in the south), and the delicate green ribbons of the Zostera (the only English flowering plant which grows beneath the sea). What are they all? What are the long white razors? What are the delicate green-grey scimitars? What are the tapering brown spires? What the tufts of delicate yellow plants like squirrels' tails, and lobsters' horns, and tamarisks, and fir-trees, and all other finely cut animal and vegetable forms? What are the groups of grey bladders, with something like a little bud at ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... myself among some bales and contemplated the town's frontage. Over one end of it rose, tapering like a walking-stick, a factory chimney, while at the other end, as well as in the middle, rose belfries, one of which had a gilded steeple, and the other one a steeple either green or blue, but looking black in the moonlight, and shaped ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... that a chiromantist might have set me down as rude or doltish: indeed, should such an one examine my hand, he would be ashamed to say what he thought. In it the line of life is short, and that named after Saturn long and well marked. My left hand, however, is seemly, with fingers long, tapering, and well-set, and shining nails. My neck is longer and thinner than the rule, my chin is divided, my lower lip thick and pendulous, my eyes are very small, and it is my wont to keep them half-closed, peradventure lest I should discern things ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... The fingers are extremely slender and tapering. The wrists are round and almost as innocent of sinews as the wrists of a woman, save when he grips something, and then how they stand out. But, most remarkable of all, the skin of the palms of those hands is amazingly soft. ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... alternately from one pole and from the other. In the south, a clump of ice-bound land, well within the Antarctic Circle, surrounds the pole. All else is a wide domain of ocean broken only where tapering and isolated tongues of land, South America, the Cape, Australia, lean down from the great land masses of the north. On the other hand, all the great land masses expand in the Northern Hemisphere, and shoulder one another round the North Pole. America is separated from Asia ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... perceived a patch of somewhat yellow, which had greatly the appearance of a corn field, yet was probably nothing more than some dead flags, which are not uncommon in swampy places:[52] At some distance we saw groves of trees, which appeared high and tapering, and being not above two leagues from the south-west cod of the great bay, in which we had been coasting for the two last days, I hoisted out the pinnace and long-boat to search for fresh water; but just as they were about to put off, we saw several boats full ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... to lose. As a result of this passion for gambling, the city is full of pawnshops, some streets containing scarcely anything else. At the far end of one of the bazaar streets is the largest idol manufactory in Siam, for the temples whose graceful, tapering towers dot the landscape are filled with images of Buddha, in all sizes and of all materials from wood to gold set with jewels, most of them donated by the devout in order to "make merit" for themselves. ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... six inches upwards, why has it not also extended two inches downwards so as to narrow the broadened end? The narrowness seems to be a mainly relative or negative effect produced by the broadening out of a long tapering feather at its end under the influence of sexual selection. Several other birds have similarly narrowed or spoon-shaped feathers and do not bite them. Is it not more feasible to suppose that this attractive peculiarity first suggested its artificial intensification, ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball
... Rings tapering 3/4 in. and 1-1/2 in. in width were used for changes in alignment and grade, the former being used approximately at every fourth ring on the 1 deg. 30' curves. The 1-1/2-in. tapers were largely used for changes in grade where it was desired to free the iron from binding on the ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • James H. Brace, Francis Mason and S. H. Woodard
... Mehemet Ali, with its tapering minarets overlooking all Cairo, was found to be quite a modern edifice, scarcely more than half a century in age, but it is a very remarkable and beautiful structure, and of great cost. The spacious ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... fortunately, the very interesting story of the starfish is easily learned from the geological chronicle. Reflect on the flower-like expansion of its arms, and then imagine it mounted on a stalk, mouth side upward, with those arms—more tapering than they now are—waving round the mouth. That, apparently, was the past of the starfish and its cousins. We shall see that the earliest Echinoderms we know are cup-shaped structures on stalks, with a stiff, limy frame ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... I. four outer perigone leaves (sepals) (F), small, green, pointed leaves traversed by three simple veins, and together forming the calyx; II. four larger, white, inner perigone leaves (petals) (G), broad and slightly notched at the end, and tapering to the point of attachment. The petals collectively are known as the "corolla." The veins of the petals fork once; III. and IV. two sets of stamens (E), the outer containing two short, and the inner, four longer ones arranged in pairs. Each stamen ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... was held high in regal pride, but her eyes were the wide dark eyes of a fawn, fear-haunted, at the gaze. Her throat and shoulders gleamed white as starlight while her tapering arms would have urged an envious sigh from a Phidias or a David. Her gown of silk was snow white; the light clung to its watered woof waving and trembling in its folds as though upon a frosted glass. Diagonally from right to left across ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... by an exaggeration of the infantile type of larynx. The epiglottis will be found long and tapering, its lateral margins rolled backward so as to meet and form a cylinder above. The upper edges of the aryepiglottic folds are approximated, leaving a narrow chink. The lack of firmness in these folds and the loose tissue in the posterior portion of the larynx, favors the drawing ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... ship sailed along the western shore, the expectations which had been formed of a strait leading through the continent to the Gulf of Carpentaria faded away. The coast lost its boldness, the water became more and more shallow, and the opposite shore began to show itself. The gulf was clearly tapering to an end. "Our prospects of a channel or strait cutting off some considerable portion of Terra Australis grew less, for it now appeared that the ship was entering into a gulph." On the 10th, the Investigator having passed Point Lowly, and having on the previous day suddenly come into two-and-a-half ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... clear and serene, canopied the city of smoke and toil; in all directions rose the columns of the factories, dark and defined in the purple sky; a glittering star sometimes hovering by the crest of their tall and tapering forms. ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... command, Nor seeking higher, led them till the day Of triumph and the nation's jubilee. Among the first that answered to my call The hero came whose story you shall hear. 'Tis better I describe him: He was young— Near two and twenty—neither short nor tall— A slender student, and his tapering hands Had better graced a maiden than a man: Sad, thoughtful face—a wealth of raven hair Brushed back in waves from forehead prominent; A classic nose—half Roman and half Greek; Dark, lustrous eyes beneath dark, jutting brows, Wearing a shade of sorrow, yet so keen, ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... in the pie crust. Aunt Hannah now always will cut the leaves all the way of a size, as if any one with half an eye couldn't see that it isn't the way they grow by nature, but broad at the bottom and tapering off like an Injun arrow at the top. Besides, Mary, it's between us, you know, aunt Hannah never does make her thumb-marks even about the edges, but Nathan, now I dare say, don't know the difference between her work, and a ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... Shoulders very Small in proportion to the other parts. It was hair lipt, and the Head and Ears were most like a Hare's of any Animal I know; the Tail was nearly as long as the body, thick next the Rump, and Tapering towards the End; the fore Legs were 8 Inches long, and the Hind 22. Its progression is by Hopping or Jumping 7 or 8 feet at each hop upon its hind Legs only, for in this it makes no use of the Fore, which seem to be only design'd for Scratching in the ground, ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... flew English colors and was a veritable floating palace. There are few crafts afloat even at this day that equal it in elegance. It had been built by the most skilful carpenters in the world at that time, and the long, tapering masts, the deck and bows were more of the modern style than ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... but little and the petiole not at all; nor do the internodes revolve; so that here we have the tendril alone moving. On the other hand, with most of the species of Bignonia and the Eccremocarpus, the internodes, tendrils, and petioles all revolved. The long, straight, tapering main stem of the tendril of the Cobaea bears alternate branches; and each branch is several times divided, with the finer branches as thin as very thin bristles and extremely flexible, so that they are blown about ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... a finely cut face, and deep black eyes looked innocently from underneath long eyelashes. The fingers which played on the instrument were long and tapering, and every movement of the body ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... cold or tawdry or washed out. His canvas, with its superbly vigorous drawing, at once became the sensation of the exhibition. Sunday supplements reproduced it with a photograph of Querida looking amiably at a statuette of Venus which he held in his long, tapering fingers; magazines tried to print it in two colours, in three, in dozens, and made fireworks of it to Querida's inwardly suppressed agony, and their own satisfaction. Serious young men wrote "appreciations" about it; serious young ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... royally with breaks and dashes, like the waters of that royal river, and antique, quaint, and Gothic times, be reflected in it. Alas! this evening my style flows not at all. Flow, then, into this smoke-colored goblet, thou blood of the Rhine! out of thy prison-house,—out of thy long-necked, tapering flask, in shape not unlike a church-spire among thy native hills; and, from the crystal belfry, loud ring the merry tinkling bells, while I drink a health to my hero, in whose heart is sadness, and in whose ears the bells ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... further brought us to a tree which Dr. Treub said had no special characteristics, but was a perfect natural specimen of the palm family. It stood about forty feet in height, and was furnished with foliage which hung gracefully suspended from a straight tapering stem. Then at the next corner, where its beauty showed to advantage, we came upon a group of red-stemmed palms from the little island of Banka. A fortnight later I was anchored off Mentok, the capital of that island, in a Dutch mail boat; but at this time I had no knowledge ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... and drive My blood from hands and face back to the heart. Cry over ridges and down tapering coombs, Carry the flying dapple of the clouds Over the grass, over the soft-grained plough, Stroke with ungentle hand the hill's rough hair Against its usual set. Snatch at the reins in my dead hands and push me Out of ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... looking through the arched opening, one could see the dirty town, straggling along the canal or harbour, which runs parallel with the sea. A black stain was the hull of a great steamer lying on her side in the mud, but the tapering masts of yachts were beautiful on the sky, and at the end of a row of slatternly houses there were sometimes spars and rigging so strange and bygone that they suggested Drake and the ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... great voice, at whose behests Trembled a hundred martial breasts, Be heard without a smile Urging astonished Cingalese To tap the tapering rubber trees Upon their ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 5, 1919 • Various
... beam of the vessel. Every eye looked over the gunnel to witness what had occasioned such exclamations. Philip, Schriften, and the captain, were side by side. On the beam of the ship, not more than two cables' length distant, they beheld slowly rising out of the water the tapering masthead and spars of another vessel. She rose, and rose, gradually; her topmasts and topsail yards, with the sails set, next made their appearance; higher and higher she rose up from the element. Her lower masts and rigging, and, lastly, ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... on very sharp stakes. The soldiers called these "cippi." Before these, which were arranged in oblique rows in the form of a quincunx, pits three feet deep were dug, which gradually diminished in depth to the bottom. In these pits tapering stakes, of the thickness of a man's thigh, sharpened at the top and hardened in the fire, were sunk in such a manner as to project from the ground not more than four inches; at the same time for the purpose of giving them strength and stability, ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar
... and one-third along the slope. This part had been chipped ready for grinding, and the article was evidently unfinished; one side still wanted polishing, and the part opposite the bevel showed signs of tapering, as if a point instead of an edge had been intended. At Axim I split off by gads and wedges a large slice of the grooved rocks described by Burton; it came home with me, and is now ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... with the readiest market, and is easiest procurable. But even in that there is the most unjustifiable wastefulness practised. I was among the lumberers once, and saw the way they square the white pine. You know that every tree is of course tapering in the trunk, narrower at the top than at the base; now, to square the log, the best timber of the lower part must be hewn away, to make it of equal dimensions with the upper part. I am not above the mark when I say that millions of excellent boards ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... deal of laughter, they dressed themselves in their new garb. Hil had neglected nothing, and had even provided two pairs of specially-made corsets which enabled the waist to appear even with the hips, instead of tapering. Loose flannel shirts, with collars attached, obviated all differences of appearance about the bust. Padded boots, two sizes too large for them, met the difficulty ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... there are good points," says Roth, "such as the blending of the two bell forms into the common handle, the happy tapering of the ornamentation into the Normian bird's beak; the increasing size of the side cups as they rise to correspond to the enlarged opening of the bell form; the truthfulness to nature in an essential like the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... beard. His shoulders were two ells broad; his arms were as thick as the trunk of a tree and as hard as a stone. He had strong, well-proportioned hands. The middle of his body was of a graceful tapering shape, but his loins and hips were wondrously strong; his feet beautiful and well-proportioned; his thighs of enormous bigness. His strength was much beyond the ordinary strength of men. The size of Theodoric's body was equalled by the qualities ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... returned to where he could see the hurtling object before him, he saw that it was a ship. A tapering ...
— Salvage in Space • John Stewart Williamson
... inches in circumference at the ground and tapering toward the upper end. Paint a black or white 2-inch band around the pole 6 feet above the ground. Draw a circle about the pole on the ground having a 3-foot radius. A 20-foot line must bisect the circle. Use a tennis ball having a netted or tightly fitting linen cover. The ball is fastened ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... round, many oval, others elongated, others thin and pointed, like a pencil; others oblong—while on Clyde, some are round, one is coffin-shaped, others are palette-shaped, others are pear- shaped (the oval tapering to one extremity), one is triangular, one is oblong. {77} In Australia, as on Clyde, the stones bear some of the archaic markings common on the rock faces both in Scotland and in Central Australia: on large rocks they are painted, in ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang
... gelatinous bodies glowing with pale and ever-changing opalescence. The things were roughly pear-shaped, with the large end upward. Deep within this globular portion glowed a large nucleus spot of red. From the tapering lower part of each slug's body there sprouted scores of long slender tendrils like the gelatinous fringe of ...
— The Cavern of the Shining Ones • Hal K. Wells
... for children. Then there are the different kinds of baskets (ki khoh) which are carried on the back, slung across the forehead by a cane head-strap. These, again, are of different sizes. They are, however, always of the same conical shape, being round and broad-mouthed at the top and gradually tapering to a point at the bottom. A bamboo cover is used to protect the contents of the basket from rain. There is a special kind of basket made of cane or bamboo with a cover, which is used for carrying articles on a journey. These baskets, ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... excavation ran shining steel rails upon which were mounted tapering structures of steel, from which cables crossed the gorge, carrying great buckets of concrete for the work below. Heavy walls were growing out ...
— Boy Scouts in the Canal Zone - The Plot Against Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... mile from shore. They had, of course, no objection to going farther out, but neither had they any object in doing so, since the fish-life on which they fed as they journeyed was the more abundant where the sea began to shoal. With their slim, sleek, rounded bodies, thickest at the fore flippers and tapering finely to tail and muzzle, each a lithe and close-knit structure of muscle and nerve-energy, they could swim with astounding speed; and therefore, although there was no hurry whatever, they went along at the ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... of the true Parisian woman,—self-willed, merry, well-informed, but inaccessible to vulgar seductions. Her hands, which were almost transparent, were hanging down at the end of each arm of her chair; the tapering fingers, slightly turned up at their points, showed nails like almonds, which caught the light. Adam smiled at his wife's impatience, and looked at her with a glance which two years of married life had not yet chilled. Already the little countess ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... rubbed to a gradually tapering point, to the thick, knobby end of which a string of human hair, plaited, was cemented, the other end of a length of several yards being similarly cemented to the interior of a hollow bone, also human. When the stiletto-shaped bone is directed ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... became occupied with Kate's beauty. He thought he had never seen her so bewitching or in such good spirits. From his six feet and an inch of vantage his eyes followed her sloping shoulders and tapering arms and rested on her laughing, happy face—rose-colored in the soft light of the candles—a film of lace looped at her elbows, her wonderful hair caught in a coil at the back: not the prevailing fashion but one most becoming to her. ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... colliers—all crowded together, and among them but one single sailing vessel—a Liverpool barque of 1,000 tons, loading wool. She looked lost, abandoned, out of place, and my heart went out to her as my eyes travelled from her shapely lines and graceful sheer, to her lofty spars, tapering yards, and curving jibboom, the end of the latter almost touching the stern rail of an ugly bloated-looking German tramp steamer of 8,000 tons. On that very spot where I stood I, when a boy, had played at the foot of lofty trees—now ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... beneath the Incense-Burner Peak, I was enamoured by the unequalled prospect of cloud-girt waters and spray-clad rocks. Unable to leave this place, I built a cottage here. Before it stand ten tall pines and a thousand tapering bamboos. With green creepers I fenced my garden; with white stones I made bridge and path. Flowing waters encircle my home; flying spray falls between the eaves. Red pomegranate and white lotus cluster on the steps of the pond. All is after this pattern, though ...
— More Translations from the Chinese • Various
... of the field before he opened up the cannonade of questions that was to follow. We in turn were just as busily engaged in taking a mental sketch of his most prominent physical characteristics. His face was distinctly oval, tapering from a very broad forehead to a sharp pointed chin, half-obscured by his thin, gray "goatee." The crown of his head was shaven in the usual Tsing fashion, leaving a tuft of hair for a queue, which in the viceroy's case was short and very thin. ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... on this. Mix quickly and thoroughly. Have a tin mould similar to the border moulds shown in the chapter on Kitchen Furnishing, but of oval shape, higher and plain. It should be about four inches high, and six wide and eight long, top measurement—the mould tapering. The space between the outer and inner walls should be an inch and a half. Butter this mould and pour the cake mixture into it. Bake slowly for forty-five minutes. Let it stand in the mould until nearly cold. Turn on a flat ...
— Miss Parloa's New Cook Book • Maria Parloa
... No one in the crowd noticed that this hand of unwonted delicacy and whiteness did not seem to comport well with the dress of a vender of vegetables from the market; no one noticed that on one of the tapering fingers a jewel ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... a striking fact in urban landscape, for the most part stout iron erections rather like tapering trestles, and painted a bright bluish green. One, it happened, bestrode Tom's house, which looked still more retiring and apologetic beneath its immensity; and another giant stood just inside the corner of his garden, which was still not built upon and unchanged, ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... that the slender, tapering hand had almost a man's strength of grip. "You needn't tell me anything about yourself," she added, "for I already know a lot—all I need to know: about you—and about Maggie Carlisle. You see an hour ago a messenger brought me a long letter he'd written ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... currents will be congregated more in the equatorial regions of the earth than in any other part of the earth's surface. The further also they extend into space the less depth they will have, gradually tapering off, as shown in the illustration, where E represents the earth and B C ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... he pointed, I saw, above the adjacent headland, the tapering spars of a ship. Slowly she hove into view, boltsprit, forecastle, waist and poop, until she was plain to view, and I knew her for that same black ship that fouled us in Deptford Pool. She was standing in for the ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... front door is precisely in the middle of the front of the house, inwards it faces the chimney. In fact, the opposite wall of the landing-place is formed solely by the chimney; and hence-owing to the gradual tapering of the chimney—is a little less than twelve feet in width. Climbing the chimney in this part, is the principal staircase—which, by three abrupt turns, and three minor landing-places, mounts to the second floor, where, over the front door, runs a ...
— I and My Chimney • Herman Melville
... There are a few lofty fan-palms here too, great rarities in this soil and elevation: one, about eighty feet high, towered above some wretched hovels, displaying the curious proportions of this tribe of palms: first, a short cone, tapering to one-third the height of the stem, the trunk then swelling to two-thirds, and again tapering to the crown. Beyond this, the country again ascends to Burree (alt. 1169 feet), another dawk bungalow, a barren place, which we left ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... air, and almost filling the glade from end to end with her enormous length, was an object measuring no fewer than six hundred feet long, of cylindrical shape, sixty feet in diameter at her so-called "midship" section, and tapering away fore and aft by a series of finely curved lines, to the pointed extremities of the bow and stern. The bow portion of the structure was considerably longer and more sharply pointed than the after extremity, to which ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... and by far the most important ancient code hitherto discovered is that of Hammurabi (circa 2250 B.C.). The source for this is a block of black diorite about 2.25 metres high, tapering from 1.90 to 1.65 metres in circumference. It was found by De Morgan at Susa, the ancient Persepolis, in December, 1901, and January, 1902, in fragments, which were easily rejoined. The text was published by the French Ministry of Instruction from "squeezes" by the process of photogravure, ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... Hampshire, in the spring of 1741, it left a gore of land, previously belonging to the west parish of Dunstable, lying north of the territory of Groton and contiguous to it. It formed a narrow strip, perhaps three hundred rods in width at the western end, running easterly for three miles and tapering off to a point at the Nashua River, by which stream it was entirely separated from Dunstable. Shaped like a thin wedge, it lay along the border of the province, and belonged geographically to the west precinct ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... his kayah from shore. It was a funny sort of boat, according to our notions. It was only nine inches deep, and about a foot and a half wide in the middle, tapering to a point at either end and curving upward. It was about sixteen feet long. Its frame was of very light wood, and this was covered with tanned seal-skin. Sammy's mother was a Greenlander, and she could sew on seal-skin very handily, using sinews for thread; and ...
— Connor Magan's Luck and Other Stories • M. T. W.
... Generators having a constant voltage regulator have a constant voltage of about 7.5, the charging current depending upon the condition of the battery. A discharged battery thus receives a high charging current, this current gradually decreasing, or "tapering" as the battery becomes more fully charged. This system has the desirable characteristic that a discharged battery receives a heavy charging current, and a fully charged battery receives a small charging current. The time of charging ...
— The Automobile Storage Battery - Its Care And Repair • O. A. Witte
... embodiment of neatness, feminine in build—it seemed that nature intended to form a woman instead of a man. Like a woman, he plaited his hair and drew it down behind his ears. His hands and feet were small, his fingers tapering; his face was black, his eyes small, his lips and nose thin, his voice fine, but harsh, and he slightly stooped or bent forward as he walked. There is poetry in every move of his bent figure as he slowly walks down the street on this autumn morning. As we gaze upon ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... on the surface of the globe is to be got by considering the globe alternately from one pole and from the other. In the south, a clump of ice-bound land, well within the Antarctic Circle, surrounds the pole. All else is a wide domain of ocean broken only where tapering and isolated tongues of land, South America, the Cape, Australia, lean down from the great land masses of the north. On the other hand, all the great land masses expand in the Northern Hemisphere, and shoulder one another ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... to be watched by maidenly and matronly eyes. Quite as good was it, too, for their occasional heavy-gun practice with two or three huge, new-cast, big-breeched "hell-hounds," as Charlie and others called them, whose tapering black snouts lay out on the parapet's superior slope, fondled by the soft Gulf winds that came up the river, and snuffing them for ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... earth it dug huge hooked claws, and from its tapering muzzle a wormlike tongue licked about, gathering the outrushing white ants into its gullet. For minutes Tim lay blinking at it, wondering if he ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... was not beautiful, her nose was too large, her chin was too small, her neck was too thin. But her skin was clear and fine, she had a high-bred sensitiveness. This queer, brave, high-bred quality she shared with her father. The charity boy could see it in her tapering fingers, which were white and ringed. The same glamour that he knew in the elderly man he now saw in the woman. And he wanted to possess himself of it, he wanted to make himself master of it. As he went about through the old pottery-yard, his secretive ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... elevation of the mucous membrane, covered by epithelium and surrounded by a trench. On the sides of the papillae, embedded in the epithelium, are small oval bodies called taste-buds. These taste-buds consist of a sheath of flattened, fusiform cells, enclosing a number of spindle-like cells whose tapering ends are prolonged into a hair-like process. As the filaments of the gustatory nerves terminate between these rod-like cells, it is probable that they are the true sensory cells ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... Nagarah was a great kettledrum, formed like a brazen caldron, tapering to the bottom and covered with buffalo-hide—at least 3-1/2 or 4 feet in diameter. Bernier, indeed, tells of Nakkaras in use at the Court of Delhi that were not less than a fathom across; and Tod speaks ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... quaint obliquities I might pursue These cravings; when the fox-glove, one by one, Upwards through every stage of the tall stem, Had shed beside the public way its bells, 395 And stood of all dismantled, save the last Left at the tapering ladder's top, that seemed To bend as doth a slender blade of grass Tipped with a rain-drop, Fancy loved to seat, Beneath the plant despoiled, but crested still 400 With this last relic, soon itself to fall, Some vagrant ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... be sure that it was not the snow sinking and crisping beneath his feet. All around him was still as a world too long frozen: in the heavens alone was there motion. There this entrancing dance of colour and shape went on, wide beneath, and tapering up to the zenith! Truly there was revelry in heaven! One might have thought that a prodigal son had just got home, and that the music and the dancing had begun, of which only the far-off rhythmic shine could reach the human sense; for a dance in heaven might ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... and down dale, through the most majestic forests, delightful to the gaze but unrelieved by a patch of cultivation, and miserably profitless to the commonwealth, till we came to a height covered with loose rocks and pasture. "There is Tronosha," said the Natchalnik, pulling up, and pointing to a tapering white spire and slender column of blue smoke that rose from a cul-de-sac formed by the opposite hills, which, like the woods we had traversed, wore such a shaggy and umbrageous drapery, that with a slight transposition, I could exclaim, "Si ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... PONTOONS.—We are now ready to design the shapes. Fig. 75 shows three general types, A being made rectangular in form, with a tapering forward end, so constructed as to ride up ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... standing and reached him her hand. No one in the crowd noticed that this hand of unwonted delicacy and whiteness did not seem to comport well with the dress of a vender of vegetables from the market; no one noticed that on one of the tapering fingers a jewel ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... presently I saw smoke and a great wave, and heard the sea roaring. Then for very fear the oars flew from their hands, and down the stream they all splashed, and the ship was holden there, for my company no longer plied with their hands the tapering oars. But I paced the ship and cheered on my men, as I stood by each one and ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... cut out the base. The tapering sides may be cut to lines by saw, plane or chisel. The curve at the base may be bored by 1/2-inch auger, and in this way a better curve ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... were just then called aft by the captain to assist in bearing off a sloop on one quarter and a schooner on the other, and in disengaging the rigging which had caught in the spars. The sloop had the appearance of a wreck. The laniards of the shrouds had been cut away on both sides, and the tall and tapering mast was quivering and bending like a whipstock, from the action of the wind and the waves. One of the cables, it was supposed, had parted; the sails, not having been properly furled, were fluttering and struggling, not altogether in vain, to get loose; and the deck ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... of the huge, solid brown mass, tapering to a point, from summit to base reaching half the height of the cathedral- spire, its original height in all probability having ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... she really given, him her whole heart unconstrainedly; she shed a few tears as the vessel left the quay, then turning homewards she mentally counted the weeks which were to elapse ere she should again see the tapering masts of the "Glenalpine." She made her preparations for her wedding methodically and without excitement, and, following her suitor's instructions, bought furniture according to her taste for the little cottage he had rented in anticipation of his ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... struck slanting on the water and ran in tapering lustre to our feet. The gilded ripple slipped and murmured below us; the bronzed leaves overhead bent carefully to veil her answer. The bird within the covert uttered an ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... strikingly like those of the Rocky Mountain sheep of America, except they are much larger. They spring up from the forehead, tilt backward, then boldly curve below the muzzle, before finally again pointing upward and tapering into a sharp and delicate point. They are hollow, though exceedingly stout and elastic, and strengthened on the outside by a number of ridges or horny rings set very close together. They are found ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... River throwing-stick (and we should include the Mackenzie River district) is a very primitive affair in the National Museum, being only a tapering flat stick of hard wood (Fig. 5). Marks 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 are wanting. The index-finger cavity is large and eccentric and furnishes a firm hold. The shaft-groove is a rambling shallow slit, not over half an inch wide. There is no hook or spur of foreign material inserted ...
— Throwing-sticks in the National Museum • Otis T. Mason
... of the stern, sculptured heads of the Roman emperors, and the fragments of gods and goddesses which are the best testimony of the artistic aspirations of Greece. In the entresol of this house was one of his finest treasures—a carved and floriated base bearing a tapering monolith some four feet high, crowned by the head of a peculiarly goatish Pan, by the side of which were the problematic remains of a lovely nude nymph—just the little feet broken off at the ankles. The base on which the feet of the nymph and the ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... and broad; cheek bones sufficiently outstanding to give face angular appearance, tapering from above, ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... of the fixed retortiis I was speaking about," remarked Victor Nelson as he paused to point out a tapering brass tube which was mounted on a platform above the long staircase up which he and Alden were toiling. "It's a big brute: see how small the gunners look beside it? These steam ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... evening-dress was worthy of notice. He wore trousers of the workman type, made in the reign of Louis Philippe, very large about the hips, tapering down to the ankles; a flowing redingote, dating from the same reign, shaped in order to fit over the voluminous trousers; a fancy velvet waistcoat and a huge tie bulging over his shirt-front (if he had a shirt-front, which I doubt). He asked permission to keep on his calotte, which I fancy ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... measured not one was less than thirty inches in circumference, and it was rare to meet with one that small. At first I thought a waist that tapered from the arm pits would be an added beauty, if only these ladies would be taught how to acquire it. But I lived long enough among them to look upon a tapering waist as a disgusting deformity. They considered a large waist a mark of beauty, as it gave a greater capacity of lung power; and they laid the greatest stress upon the size and health of the lungs. One little lady, not above five ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... are a few other slight variations in detail which assist in distinguishing them. The rods are sometimes very blunt at the ends, almost as if cut square across, while in other species they are more rounded and occasionally slightly tapering. Sometimes they are surrounded by a thin layer of some gelatinous substance, which forms what is called a capsule (Fig. 10). This capsule may connect them and serve as a cement, to prevent the separate elements of a ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn
... domestic economy. Those living on the borders of the numerous lakes and rivers of Canada, which are invariably stored with fine fish, are provided with either a light boat, log, or what is by far the best, a bark canoe; a barbed fishing spear, with light tapering shaft, about twelve or sixteen feet long, and an iron basket for holding pine knots, and capable of being suspended at the head of the boat when fired. In the calm evenings after dusk, many of these lights are ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 541, Saturday, April 7, 1832 • Various
... by tight-lacing into a notable specimen of the peg-top figure, bulgy at the bust and shoulders, and tapering off at the waist. She had also squeezed her feet into boots that were much too small for them, and fluffed her hair out till her head seemed preposterously large—by which means she had achieved the appearance known to ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... stuff in big lumps with a broad-headed spear; and stood, his whip in one hand and the meat in the other. Each beast was called by name, the weakest first, and woe betide any dog that moved out of his turn; for the tapering lash would shoot out like thonged lightning, and flick away an inch or so of hair and hide. Each beast growled, snapped, choked once over his portion, and hurried back to the protection of the passage, ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... language of France and preserving her institutions, still people the shores of the River and the Gulf. Their white cottages dot the banks like an endless string of pearls, their willows shade the hamlets and lean over the courses of brooks, their tapering parish spires nestle in the landscape of their ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... spot where I might repose in safety, my attention was attracted to a small green plant of so lively a hue as to form a striking contrast with deep pine foliage. For closer examination I pulled it up by the root, which was long and tapering, not unlike a radish. It was a thistle. I tasted it; it was palatable and nutritious. My appetite craved it, and the first meal in four days was made on thistle-roots. Eureka! I had found food. No optical illusion deceived me this time; I could subsist until I rejoined my companions. ...
— Thirty-Seven Days of Peril - from Scribner's Monthly Vol III Nov. 1871 • Truman Everts
... nearly a foot high, crowned by two or more large deep yellow flowers,—flowers the shape of little bonnets or hoods. One almost expected to see tiny faces looking out of them. This illusion is heightened by the horn or spur of the flower, which projects from the hood like a long tapering chin,—some masker's device. Then the cape behind,—what a smart upward curve it has, as if spurned by the fairy shoulders it was meant to cover! But perhaps the most notable thing about the flower was its fragrance,—the richest and strongest perfume I have ever found in a wild flower. ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... nose, large dark eyes, hair caught back by tortoise-shell combs under a peculiar head-dress, having a gleam of gold directly on the top. Her gown was of dark green, with white puffs let into the sleeves below the elbows; around her tapering waist was a narrow belt of jewels; the front of her corsage was also trimmed with jewels. But the most distinctive feature of her costume consisted in a floating scarf of old-rose, worn like the frontispiece lady in some ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... or design the lamp had been so placed that as the two men approached its light fell full upon their faces, while that of the prisoner remained in shadow. He was leaning forward with both elbows on the table, his thin, tapering fingers toying with the pen and ink-horn which had been placed close to ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... grooved (sulcate), flesh white, reddish under the cuticle. Stem 1 1/2 to 3 inches long, 3/4 of an inch thick, white or with a reddish hue, spongy, stuffed, stout, elastic when young, fragile when old, even, tapering slightly upward. Gills ...
— Among the Mushrooms - A Guide For Beginners • Ellen M. Dallas and Caroline A. Burgin
... blades mentioned above are of two kinds, and either may be used for this work. Those generally used are of a straight diagonal shape, making a perforation the shape of a diamond, *; the others are perfectly round, tapering gradually to a fine point. To fix them in the boxwood handles, place the blade in a vise, leaving the unpolished part above the jaws; hold the handle above this, and commence driving it down, taking care that the blade is penetrating the middle of the handle. Continue tapping the handle ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... an inch thick, and the stern-post, five-sixteenths of an inch, are sawed out, and tacked in place temporarily, and a wooden keel of the shape shown in Fig. 4 (marked "Lead Keel"), half an inch thick, tapering to five-sixteenths where it joins the stern-post, is fitted ...
— Harper's Young People, April 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... was ninety-five feet in length, and its diameter twenty feet in the broadest part, tapering off to a point at ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... taking a piece of 1/2-in. galvanized pipe 3-1/2 in. long and filling it with babbitt metal; then drill a 3/16-in. hole through its center. Make this hole conical, tapering from 3/16 in. to a full 1/2 in. This is best done by using a square taper reamer. Then place the nozzle in the position shown in Fig. 1, which allows the stream of water to strike the buckets full in the center when ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... tall figures came looming, ghostly-fashion, out of chaos, to take slow shape and form, to resolve themselves into tapering lodges, into ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... very common among those of the lower orders, to blacken the edge of the eyelids, both above and below the eye, with a black powder, which they term kohhl. The kohhl is applied with a small probe of wood, ivory, or silver, tapering towards the end, but blunt. This is moistened sometimes with rose-water, then dipped in the powder, and drawn along the edges of the eyelids. It is thought to give a very soft expression to the eye, the size of which, in appearance, it enlarges; to ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... meadow-lark. What a twang there is about this bird, and what vigor! It smacks of the soil. It is the winged embodiment of the spirit of our spring meadows. What emphasis in its "z-d-t, z-d-t," and what character in its long, piercing note! Its straight, tapering, sharp beak is typical of its voice. Its note goes like a shaft from a crossbow; it is a little too sharp and piercing when near at hand, but, heard in the proper perspective, it is eminently melodious and pleasing. ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... grandeur of the ocean. In ranging over these boundless wastes, the eye catches sight here and there of a straggling herd of cattle attended by a lonely herdsman, motionless as a statue, with his long, slender pike tapering up like a lance into the air; or, beholds a long train of mules slowly moving along the waste like a train of camels in the desert; or, a single herdsman, armed with blunderbuss and stiletto, and prowling over the plain. Thus the country, the habits, the very ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 547, May 19, 1832 • Various
... aerial, airy. afn m. eager desire, longing, anxiety, effort, toil, difficulty, bustle. afanar distress; —se desire eagerly, struggle for. afeminado, -a effeminate. afilado, -a sharp, slender, thin, tapering. afligido, -a troubled, distressed. afligir pain, grieve. afrenta f. insult, affront. gil adj. nimble, light. agilidad f. quickness, nimbleness, activity. agitar agitate, move, stir, stir up, sway, shake, disturb. agolpado, -a curdled. agolpar ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... and disproportionately small finger-nails in the hands of Professor Weekes, the sculptor. There is scarcely any perceptible tapering at the third joint, and the fingers all exhibit very little prominence of knuckle or contour. It is anything but an artistic hand, and yet its owner was a man of ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... comprises a base about thirty inches high, with well-rounded corners of molded brick work. The pedestal proper is five feet six inches in diameter, ten feet in height, and a cornice, ornamental in style, about three feet in height. From this rises a tapering shaft of about twenty-eight feet. The whole is surmounted by a capstone eighteen inches high. Three stories are told ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... equal to the office assigned it? We dare not attempt to carve a single stone from the living rock,—all our modern appliances fail to make the task as easy to us as it seems to have been to the early Egyptians. No artistic skill is required in giving a four-square tapering figure to a stone column. If we cannot shape a solid obelisk of the proper dimensions, we can build one of separate blocks. How can we give it the distinction we demand for it? The nation which can brag that it has "the biggest show on earth" cannot boast a great deal in the way of architecture, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... "calvilles" in light yellow gowns, sanguineous-looking "Canadas," blotched "chataignier" apples, fair freckled rennets and dusky russets. Then came the pears—the "blanquettes," the "British queens," the "Beurres," the "messirejeans," and the "duchesses"—some dumpy, some long and tapering, some with slender necks, and others with thick-set shoulders, their green and yellow bellies picked out at times with a splotch of carmine. By the side of these the transparent plums resembled tender, chlorotic virgins; ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... things! Her splendid beauty was not a cheap beauty. She was no coarse-blown, gorgeous flower, imperfect at telltale points. It was good blood that had modelled her dark perfection, good blood that had shaped her long and slim and tapering hands. ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... perfectly calm waters, shining like polished steel,—and the warm stillness of the summer night was deliciously soothing and restful. Our captain and one or two of the sailors were about on duty, and I sat in the stern of the vessel looking up into the glorious heavens. The tapering bow-sprit of the 'Diana' pointed aloft as it were into a woven web of stars, and I lost myself in imaginary flight among those glittering unknown worlds, oblivious of my material surroundings, and forgetting that despite the splendid ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... 5 feet long, one-half an inch thick, and 1-1/2 inches wide in the middle, tapering at the ends to 1 inch. The back of the bow is undressed, the bark simply having been removed. The string, which resembles ordinary twine, is said to be made of wild hemp. The arrows are 40 inches in length. ...
— Illustrated Catalogue of a Portion of the Collections Made During the Field Season of 1881 • William H. Holmes
... she screamed again. And Tommy Reames was deathly, terribly cool. The whole thing had happened in seconds only. He was submerged in slimy, sticky ooze which was the crushed fungus that had tripped him. But he cleared the gun. The flashlight limned a ghastly, obscenely fat body and a long tapering tail. Tommy aimed at the base of that tail and pulled the ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... horned snakes With spines contorted: like to torrid sand Ammodytes, of hue invisible: Sole of all serpents Scytale to shed In vernal frosts his slough; and thirsty Dipsas; Dread Amphisbaena with his double head Tapering; and Natrix who in bubbling fount Fuses his venom. Greedy Prester swells His foaming jaws; Pareas, head erect Furrows with tail alone his sandy path; Swift Jaculus there, and Seps (25) whose poisonous juice Makes putrid flesh ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... also dispensed with the audiometer. He has used a strip of zinc tapering from a width of 4 mm. (.16 inch) at one end to a sharp edge or point at the other. The piece to be tested being in place in one coil, the strip is moved across the face of the other until ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... the Texas steer! To right and left of him is one long tapering tine. Each of them, naked as a tusk, has a peculiar twist which suggests that it is perfectly scientific. Immediately you are impressed ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... sister, was like a water-lily in a pool of ooze and slime, delicately floating on the stagnant waters without a visible stain at a single point of contact. She had the Ellwell features, regular, angular, prominent; with her father's high forehead and finely tapering hands, and also her father's thin unwholesome skin. But instead of the livid tan complexion of the man who had beaten about the years of his life, the woman's pinkish transparency likened her again to the water-lily of the Middleton ponds. Her sister Ruby was ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... distance and flicked at his victim as the ring-master in the circus flicks at the clown. Perhaps horsewhips for this particular purpose could be obtained from the Army and Navy Stores. It should be about three feet long, flexible and tapering to a point. Unconsciously his inventive faculty began to work. When he had devised an adequate instrument, made of fine steel wires ingeniously plaited, he awoke, somewhat shame-facedly, to the commonplaces of the original problem. What was to ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... help looking behind him occasionally, as he pulled the boat, to observe the beautiful proportions, and the comely, tapering spars of the yacht. Beside the Penobscot, even the Skylark ...
— Little Bobtail - or The Wreck of the Penobscot. • Oliver Optic
... the boundaries of the South Central District showing the course of Dry River and the San Felipe trail, for the first time his long, tapering fingers, tapping softly the arm of his chair, smoothing his gray cheek and caressing his chin betrayed emotion. The spot where the San Felipe trail crossed Dry River and where the banker and his party had found the baby girl ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... the edges, in which the straps ride. The "eccentricity" or "throw" of an eccentric is the distance between C^2, the centre of the shaft, and C^1, the centre of the sheave. The throw must equal half of the distance which the slide-valve has to travel over the steam ports. A tapering steel wedge or key, K, sunk half in the eccentric and half in a slot in the shaft, holds the eccentric steady and prevents it slipping. Some eccentric sheaves are made in two parts, bolted together, so that they may be removed easily without ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... and is extremely long in many of the lower vegetable-feeding mammals. In the marsupial koala it is actually more than thrice as long as the whole body. (46. Owen, 'Anatomy of Vertebrates,' vol. iii. pp. 416, 434, 441.) It is sometimes produced into a long gradually-tapering point, and is sometimes constricted in parts. It appears as if, in consequence of changed diet or habits, the caecum had become much shortened in various animals, the vermiform appendage being left ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... a clump behind, to the top of which was attached transversely, both by way of ornament and of talisman, the mystic whistle, made of the wingbone of the war eagle, and endowed with various magic virtues. From the back of his head descended a line of glittering brass plates, tapering from the size of a doubloon to that of a half-dime, a cumbrous ornament, in high vogue among the Dakotas, and for which they pay the traders a most extravagant price; his chest and arms were naked, the buffalo ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... at the guards and they went in. She strolled about the tapering, snub-winged craft, apparently inspecting it closely. Grant's thought was that she felt she had to dramatize understanding something ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... through metal, use a tool steel punch with its end slightly tapering to a size a little smaller than the hole to be punched. The end of the punch must be square across and never pointed ...
— Oxy-Acetylene Welding and Cutting • Harold P. Manly
... gown, with long sleeves tapering to a point, and buttoned at the elbow; noblemen undergraduates a black silk gown, with full sleeves, "couped" at the elbows, and a velvet cap with gold tassel; scholars the same shaped gown, of a common ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... was in progress, another had been added to the number of spectators. This was a young man, dressed in the height of the fashion, that is to say, in a be-frogged and be-laced frock coat with a standing collar, a pair of cossack pantaloons tapering down to the foot with a notch cut in the front for the instep, and a hat about twice as large at the crown as at the rim, much resembling in shape an inverted sugar-loaf, with the smaller end cut away. ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... sky. To the captain's merry challenge to find anything so grand as the ocean, she replied, "Yes, these mighty forces in nature do indeed fill me with awe; but this vessel, with deep-buried fires, powerful machinery, spacious decks, and tapering masts, walking the waves like a thing of life, and all the work of man, impresses one still more deeply. Lo! in man's divine creative power is fulfilled the prophecy, ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... speaking to one another. Presently, a little head not much bigger than a pea was seen peeping up, and then a body followed, which in size did not exceed that of a large gooseberry! To this a tail was suspended, just one inch in length, of a square shape, and tapering from root to point, like that of any other mouse. The little creature was covered with a close smooth fur, of a clove-brown colour above, but more yellowish upon the belly and sides; and was certainly, as it sat upon the even surface of the snow, the most diminutive ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... and they survive in us still, for the arterial and nervous systems are trees, the roots of one in the heart, of the other in the brain. Has not our body its trunk, bearing aloft the head, like a flower: a cup to hold the precious juices of the brain? Has not that trunk its tapering limbs which ramify into hands and feet, and these into fingers and toes, after the manner of the twigs ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... mournful shining, Delicate sniffs of sea-breeze, smells of sedgy grass and fields by the shore, death-messages given in charge to survivors, The hiss of the surgeon's knife, the gnawing teeth of his saw, Wheeze, cluck, swash of falling blood, short wild scream, and long, dull, tapering groan, These so, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... pearly gossamers frail, My mast is a tapering reed, My rudder a blush-rose petal pale, My ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... almost intellectually delicate atmosphere of Greece was gone; and he saw for a moment the umber mystery of Stamboul, lifted under tinted clouds of the evening beyond the waters of the Golden Horn; the great rounded domes and tapering speary minarets of the mosques, couchant amid the shadows and the trailing and gauzy smoke-wreaths, a suggestion of dense masses of cypresses, those trees of the night which only in the night can be truly themselves, guarding the innumerable ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... the wall; in a Gothic cathedral most elaborately by a kind of segregation, or breaking up, analogous to that which a tree undergoes—the strong, relatively unbroken base corresponding to the trunk, the diminishing buttresses to the tapering limbs, and the multitude of delicate pinnacles and crockets, to the outermost branches and twigs, seen against ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... snarl of tangled wheels and driving-arms and axles a ready picture of the nature of the accident and how much of the wreckage offered possibilities for repair. Again, the engineer sees in a tree, with its tapering trunk, the symbol of all tower construction, just as he sees in the shape of a man's arm the pattern to follow when devising a cast-iron lever for an automatic machine. He sees things, does the engineer; sees objectively; follows ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... except at the cross-trees and truck, which were painted black. The standing and running rigging was in the most perfect order, and the sails white as snow. In short, everything, from the single narrow red stripe on her low black hull to the trucks on her tapering masts, evinced an amount of care and strict discipline that would have done credit to a ship of the Royal Navy. There was nothing lumbering or unseemly about the vessel, excepting, perhaps, a boat, which lay on the deck with its keel up between ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... this, that Vixen was a giantess, it may be as well to state that her height was five feet six, her waist twenty-two inches at most, her shoulders broad but finely sloping, her arms full and somewhat muscular, her hands not small, but exquisitely tapering, her foot long and narrow, her instep arched like an Arab's, and all her movements instinct with an untutored grace and dignity. She held her head higher than is common to women, and on that score was ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... most desperate valor. There is much of romance about service on the blue ocean which is not to be found in routine duty along the yellow muddy streams that flowed through the territory claimed by King Cotton. The high, tapering masts, the yards squared and gracefully proportioned, the rigging taut, and with each rope in its place, of an ocean-frigate, are not seen in the squat, box-like gunboats that dashed by the batteries ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... is produced by an exaggeration of the infantile type of larynx. The epiglottis will be found long and tapering, its lateral margins rolled backward so as to meet and form a cylinder above. The upper edges of the aryepiglottic folds are approximated, leaving a narrow chink. The lack of firmness in these folds and the loose tissue in the posterior ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... we came to a cypress swamp, and for several miles waded through water ankle-deep although on a bottom of firm sand. Hardly any undergrowth was here, but in all directions stood gray, dismal cypress trees, coarsely buttressed at the water's edge and tapering to slender tips. Draped in long streamers of Spanish moss which were delicately swayed by an almost imperceptible current of air, this was a ghoulish place—suggesting a rookery for shrouded spirits which perched along the bonelike branches awaiting their ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... picked it up. He opened the little fingers, and called up in fancy the white and tapering hand that glove could fit. He laid the glove softly on his own palm, and eyed it with dreamy tenderness. "So this is the hand that hath solaced my loneliness," said he: "a hand fair as that angelical face, and sweet as the kind heart that doeth ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... with the tapering rods and rattling reels of modern days, fishers never become fully aware of the strength of salmon, unless, indeed, a hitch in their line occurs, and everything snaps! It was otherwise about the beginning of the sixteenth century. It is ...
— The Crew of the Water Wagtail • R.M. Ballantyne
... Large-flowered Wake-Robin, or White Wood Lily (T. grandiflorum). Under favorable conditions the waxy, thin, white, or occasionally pink, strongly veined petals may exceed two inches; and in Michigan a monstrous form has been found. The broadly rhombic leaves, tapering to a point, and lacking petioles, are seated in the usual whorl of three, at the summit of the stem, which may attain a foot and a half in height; from the centre the decorative flower arises on ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... being tapering toward the base of the tongue. —Contributed by Wm. D. Mitchell, Yonkers, ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... possessed, while I roll out the gingerbread and cut some brake leaves in the pie crust. Aunt Hannah now always will cut the leaves all the way of a size, as if any one with half an eye couldn't see that it isn't the way they grow by nature, but broad at the bottom and tapering off like an Injun arrow at the top. Besides, Mary, it's between us, you know, aunt Hannah never does make her thumb-marks even about the edges, but Nathan, now I dare say, don't know the difference between her work, and a ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... hovering, hesitating, like a bunch of thistledown, while I counted one hundred and ninety. All this time the ordinary amount of water was coming over the cliff and accumulating in the air, swedging and widening and forming an irregular cone about seven hundred feet high, tapering to the top of the wall, the whole standing still, jesting on the invisible arm of the North Wind. At length, as if commanded to go on again, scores of arrowy comets shot forth from the bottom of the suspended mass as if escaping ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... Here, there shot up, almost perpendicularly, into the sky, a height so steep, as to be hardly accessible to any but the sheep and goats that fed upon its sides, and there, stood a mound of green, sloping and tapering off so delicately, and merging so gently into the level ground, that you could scarce define its limits. Hills swelling above each other; and undulations shapely and uncouth, smooth and rugged, graceful and grotesque, thrown negligently side by side, ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... three ladies went together and rather silently down the plank walk that led from the See House to the main road. Their eyes were on the tapering spars of the yacht that floated so gracefully a ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... speed of their vessels above those of the Tyne and the Wear; and the above facts probably explain the cause of the difference. The Aberdeen clipper is narrow, very keen and penetrating in front, gracefully tapering at the stern, and altogether calculated to 'go ahead' through the water in rapid style. As compared with one of the ordinary old-fashioned English coasting brigs of equal tonnage, an Aberdeen clipper will attain nearly double the speed. One of these fine vessels, the Chrysolite, in a ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... fixed by the strange contrast between his massive jaw and short neck which spoke the physical strength of an ox, and the slender gracefully tapering fingers of his small hand. The wrist was small, the fingers almost ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... enough, the dear creature, not only in her eyes, which were of uncertain hue, veiled or laughing like the sky of her Paris, but in her voice, in the folds of her dress, in everything, even to the long curl that shaded her straight, graceful statue-like neck and attracted you by its tapering shaded point, deftly curled over ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... the old gentleman is their private tutor. He is white-bearded and shaven-pated, and has rather long finger-nails, as the fashion is in China among those who do not have to work with their hands. Long finger-nails with them are like white hands and tapering fingers ...
— Harper's Young People, May 4, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... Nature in thousands of weird, glossy crystals; every tree of the forest, according to its instinct, its nature, writhing in the conqueror's cold embrace—rigid, creaking, ready to snap in twain rather than bend, as the red oak or sugar maple, or else meekly, submissively curving to the earth its tapering, frosted limbs, like the silver birch— elegant, though fragile, ornament of the Canadian park, or else, rearing amid air a graceful net-work—waving, transparent sapphire-tinted arabesques, stretched on amber pillars; ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... helm put it so much to port, that the end of one of the long tapering yards of the speronara nearly got foul ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... partner deftly massaged his long tapering digits in the perfumed water, he leaned over and whispered to Inspector Letstrayed, who sat next to him. Letstrayed's eyes bulged out, and Holmes then arose, pushed his chair back, inserted his left thumb in the left ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry
... scrutinizing it as if it had been a bit of precious porcelain or ivory. It was small and soft, a mere featherweight, a puff-ball of a hand—not quick and thrilling, not a speaking hand, but one to be fondled and dressed in rings, and to leave a rosy blur in the brain. The fingers were short and tapering, dimpled at the base, with nails as smooth as rose-leaves. Ralph lifted them one by one, like a child playing with piano-keys, but they were inelastic and did not spring back far—only far enough ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... I always liked to be there. Sometimes in spring there was a sheen of blue-bells covering acres; the doves cooed; the blackbirds whistled sweetly; there was a taste of green things in the air. But it was the tall firs that pleased me most; the glance rose up the flame-shaped fir-tree, tapering to its green tip, and above was the azure sky. By aid of the tree I felt the sky more. By aid of everything beautiful I felt myself, and in that intense sense of consciousness prayed for greater perfection ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... there is the xanthorea, or grass-tree, a plant which cannot be intelligibly described to those who have never seen it. The stem consists of a tough pithy substance, round which the leaves are formed. These, long and tapering like the rush, are four-sided, and extremely brittle; the base from which they shoot is broad and flat, about the size of a thumb-nail, and very resinous in substance. As the leaves decay annually, others are put forth above the bases of the ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... and flue sheet to remove any soot or ashes that may have collected around them. After this is done you will force the expander into the flues driving it well up, in order to bring the shoulder of expander up snug against the head of the flue. Then drive the tapering pin into the expander. By driving the pin in too far you may spread the flue sufficient to crack it or you are more liable, by expanding too hard, to spread the hole in flue sheet and thereby loosen other flues. You must be careful about this. When you think you have expanded sufficient, ...
— Rough and Tumble Engineering • James H. Maggard
... bare legs because they live in marshy places, and long necks and beaks to catch the small animals upon which they feed. Snipe and Woodcock have long tapering bills which are alive to the very points with what are called nerves, so that they may be able to feel for worms as they dig for them in the soft sand and mud, where they cannot see them. Two birds of this family, ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... to his club; that the plump, ruddy, high-bred woman, surveying the West disapprovingly through a lorgnon, would be her mother. Shepler he knew by sight, with his big head, massive shoulders, and curiously short, tapering body. Some other men and a woman were scanning the hoisting machinery ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... in his chair and put the tips of his fingers together. Long, tapering fingers they were, sensitive and well shaped, though sadly marred by acid stains. It was in his hands alone that Dr. Bird showed the genius in his make-up, the artistry which inspired him to produce those miracles of experimentation which had made ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... long roll for the muster of winter days; past gates letting into fields, clamped and chained to their posts as if jealous of the plenty which they guarded; past farmsteads set in dark forests of orchard trees and tall windbreaks of tapering poplar, where never a light gleamed from a pane, where sons and daughters, worn husbandmen and weary wives, lay soothed in honest slumber; past barn-yards, where cattle sighed as they lay in the moonshine champing upon their cuds; down into swales, where the air ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... was unbelievable, not yet to be credited by his jarred brain. How incredibly blind he had been! What an idiot of sorts! Why, the marks of sex sat on her beyond any possibility of doubt. Every line of the slim, lissom figure, every curve of the soft, undulating body, the sweep of rounded arm, of tapering waist-line, of well-turned ankle, contributed evidence of what it were folly to ask further proof. How could he have ever seen those lovely, soft-lashed eyes and the delicate little hands without conviction coming home to him? And how could he have heard ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... Parasara, in course of his wanderings. As she was gifted with great beauty, an object of desire even with an anchorite, and of graceful smiles, the wise sage, as soon as he beheld her, desired to have her. And that bull amongst Munis addressed the daughter of Vasu of celestial beauty and tapering thighs, saying, 'Accept my embraces, O blessed one!' Satyavati replied, 'O holy one, behold the Rishis standing on either bank of the river. Seen by them, how ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... his short tail had always been a matter of mortification to Danny Meadow Mouse. All his cousins in the Mouse family and the Rat family have long, smooth, tapering tails, and they have always been a source of envy to Danny Meadow Mouse. He had felt his queer short tail to be a sort of disgrace. So when he would meet one of his cousins dancing down the Lone Little Path, with his long, slim, tapering tail ...
— Mother West Wind's Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... Journal, page 207, there is some mention of the patented rolling process for tapering bar-iron by machinery. This important invention is not of American origin, as persons unacquainted with the facts might imagine: it was first practised at the Mersey Steel and Iron Company's works at Liverpool, and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... trumpet. After the blast had ended the echoes continued, retreating further and further from the point of observation, and finally dying away at great distances. The echoes were perfectly continuous as long as the sea was clear of ships, 'tapering' by imperceptible gradations into absolute silence. But when a ship happened to throw itself athwart the course of the sound, the echo from the broadside of the vessel was returned as a shock which rudely interrupted the continuity of ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... fiscal year to the individuals now on relief, or until such time as private employment is available. In order to make adjustment to increasing private employment, work should be planned with a view to tapering it off in proportion to the speed with which the emergency workers are ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... a tall and well-thewed lad for his age. His muscle fiber had drawn strength from the ax and the log-pole, but as yet it had not become heavy with decades of hard labor. He still stood slender and gracefully tapering from shoulders to waist and just now there was something trance-like in his earnestness which made wild prophecies seem almost inspired. The hard-headed father eyed him with ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... with a florid glossy roundness, gradually tapering away to the knees, seemed pillars worthy to support that beauteous frame at the bottom of which I could not, without some remains of terror, some tender emotions too, fix my eyes on that terrible machine, which had, ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... to catch a peculiar sort of fish called the "sting-rae." These curious creatures have a sharp bony spike about two inches in length near the tail and this I found admirably adapted for arrow-heads. The body of the fish resembled a huge flounder, but the tail was long and tapering. They would come close in-shore, and I would spear them from the rocks with a Papuan fishing-spear. The smallest I ever caught weighed fifteen pounds, and I could never carry home more than a couple of average weight. They have the power of stinging, I believe, electrically, hence ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... the thimble on her second finger. Her fingers were small, white, and tapering. The thimble exactly fitted the narrow tip on ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... summit, he glanced down to see the sun steeping the valley in a lake of gold. Near the canyon, enormous rocks loomed protrudent, like fantastic Negro skulls. The pitaya trees rose tenuous, tall, like the tapering, gnarled fingers of a giant; other trees of all sorts bowed their crests toward the pit of the abyss. Amid the stark rocks and dry branches, roses bloomed like a white offering to the sun as smoothly, ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... of sod cut in lengths of from two to four feet, four inches in thickness and eighteen inches in width and laid grass side down. The side walls were laid either single or double, six feet in height, with the end walls tapering upward. A long pole was then placed from peak to peak and shorter poles from side walls to ridge pole. Four inches of grass covered the poles and the same depth of earth completed the structure making the best fortifications ever devised; no bullet was able to penetrate ...
— Dangers of the Trail in 1865 - A Narrative of Actual Events • Charles E Young
... hospitals, the plaza, the Almonaster stores, and the busy rue Toulouse; and, for the rest of the town, a pleasant confusion of green tree-tops, red and gray roofs, and glimpses of white or yellow wall, spreading back a few hundred yards behind the cathedral, and tapering into a single rank of gardened and belvedered villas, that studded either horn of the river's crescent with a style of home than which there is probably nothing in ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... lying stretched between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, upon the tapering base of North America, is a country whose name is fraught with colour and meaning. The romance of its history envelops it in an atmosphere of adventure whose charm even the prosaic years of the twentieth century have not entirely dispelled, and the magnetism ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... seated myself among some bales and contemplated the town's frontage. Over one end of it rose, tapering like a walking-stick, a factory chimney, while at the other end, as well as in the middle, rose belfries, one of which had a gilded steeple, and the other one a steeple either green or blue, but looking black in the moonlight, and ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... blind like us. Your hurt no man designed, And no man claimed the conquest of your land. But gropers both, through fields of thought confined, We stumble and we do not understand. You only saw your future bigly planned, And we the tapering paths of our own mind, And in each other's dearest ways we stand, And hiss and hate. And the blind fight ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... war spears are made out of a very hard-wooded palm tree and another hard red-wooded tree, the name of which I do not know. They are round in section, tapering at both ends, and are generally from 10 to 12 feet long, and about three-quarters of an inch in diameter at the widest part. There are three forms of point. The first (Plate 73, Fig. 1) is simply a tapering off in round section. The second (Plate ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... was probably about as slender as it is possible for a mountain to be. Compared, or contrasted, with a nearby and characteristic mountain of the range, it was as a lady's finger to a telescoped giant's thumb. High Peak, as the tapering sugar-loaf of earth was called, was located west of Hollyhill, close to the town. In fact the portion of the city inhabited by the main colony of miners' families was built on the sloping ground that formed a foothill of ...
— Campfire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains - or, A Christmas Success against Odds • Stella M. Francis
... and the sunny spots had hardly felt the sun. The horizontal rays made every shallow dip in the ground to show as a well-marked hollow. Even the channel of the path was enough to throw shade, and the very stones of the road cast tapering dashes of darkness westward, as long as ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... wide, and several hundred cell rows in height, which amount commonly to one or more inches. These large rays are conspicuous on all sections. They appear as long, sharp, grayish lines on the cross-sections; as short, thick lines, tapering at each end, on the tangential or "bastard" face, and as broad, shiny bands, "the mirrors," on the radial section. In addition to these coarse rays, there is also a large number of small pith rays, which can be seen only when magnified. On the whole, the pith rays form a much larger part ...
— Seasoning of Wood • Joseph B. Wagner
... warmest nights. Shepherds with the regulation crooks also were watching herds of sheep. Here and there a cluster of red-roofed houses were huddled together into a village, and in all directions rose tapering spires. Especially we marked the steeple of Blenheim, where Jack Churchill won the name for his magnificent country-seat, early in the eighteenth century. All this plain where the silly geese feed has been marched over and fought ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Ajeet dipped a tapering finger in the pitcher of blood, touched the swaying bag of sugar, and laying the hand against his forehead said, in a ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... the most approved shape and marks of a good dairy cow are as follows: Head small, long, and narrow toward the muzzle; horns small, clear, bent, and placed at considerable distance from each other; eyes not large, but brisk and lively; neck slender and long, tapering toward the head, with a little loose skin below; shoulders and fore quarters light and thin; hind quarters large and broad; back straight, and joints slack and open; carcass deep in the rib; tail small and long, ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... different kinds of baskets (ki khoh) which are carried on the back, slung across the forehead by a cane head-strap. These, again, are of different sizes. They are, however, always of the same conical shape, being round and broad-mouthed at the top and gradually tapering to a point at the bottom. A bamboo cover is used to protect the contents of the basket from rain. There is a special kind of basket made of cane or bamboo with a cover, which is used for carrying articles on a journey. These baskets, ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... food and especially of pigs, which are accordingly bred and kept nominally for this purpose, but really to furnish a banquet for the men alone. The ceremony is performed at irregular intervals of several years. A long hut, entered through a high door at one end and tapering away at the other, is built in a lonely part of the forest. It represents the monster which is to swallow the novices in its capacious jaws. The process of deglutition is represented as follows. In front of the entrance to ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... is supported by very powerful muscles, attached to the projecting spinous processes of the dorsal vertebrae; and these muscles, together with a quantity of fat, constitute the hump on the shoulders. The horns are short, tapering, round, and very distant from each other, as are also the eyes, which are small and dark. The head, neck, shoulders, and fore-legs, to the knee-joints, are covered with long woolly hair, which likewise forms a beard under the mouth. The rest of the body is clothed only ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... women reclined on long, low rustic couches in the big, cleared half-oval that was the Playground for their children. It began—this half-oval—in high land among the trees and spread down over a beach to the waters of a tiny cove. Between the high tapering boles of the pines at their back the sky dropped a curtain of purple. Between the long ledges of tawny rock in front the sea stretched a carpet of turquoise. And between pines and sea lay first a rusty mat of pine-needles, then a ribbon of purple ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... With fingers tapering and well-kept, though somewhat too thin, Mme. de Bargeton amiably pointed to a seat by her side, M. du Chatelet ensconced himself in an easy-chair, and Lucien then became aware that there was no ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... some way below the surface. Peter and I were looking over the side—one of the other men being at the helm—when we noticed a dark pointed object floating alongside; another came up near it. Looking down, we with a shudder discovered the long tapering bodies of two sharks swimming just on our quarter. Nothing is so hateful to a sailor, even when he has a sound plank under his feet, as a sight of those tigers of the deep. Happening shortly after to go over to the other ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... a thin laminated piece of steel from 15 to 25 centimeters long with a thin, tapering rod somewhat shorter, projecting in the line of the axis, and a hilt of banti through which the projection of the blade passes. It is carried in a sheath which is held at the wearer's ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... constructed of the yellow bamboo, tastefully twisted together in a kind of wicker-work, and thatched with the long tapering leaves of the palmetto, are scattered irregularly along these valleys beneath the shady branches of the ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... these were, and they were described to him as small brushes made of camels' hair fastened in a quill. As there were, however, no camels in America, he could not think of any substitute, till he happened to cast his eyes on a black cat, the favourite of his father; when, in the tapering fur of her tail, he discovered the means of supplying what he wanted. He immediately armed himself with his mother's scissors, and, laying hold of Grimalkin with all due caution, and a proper attention to her feelings, cut off the fur at the end of her tail, and with this made his first ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... surfaces of the block, but it was too large to hide in anything but a huge space. They saw before them its great bulk, bright red skin blotched with black, which rose and fell with the breathing of the reptile. Its long, powerful tail, tapering off from the fat, loathsome body, was curled around the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... hand-writing compensated for the hands; and as she attached great importance to blood and race, that she did not live to read Byron's "thoroughbred and tapering fingers," or to be shocked by his theory that "the hand is almost the only sign of blood which aristocracy can generate." Her Bath friend appeals to a miniature (engraved for this work) by Roche, of Bath, ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... piece of hide, not twisted in any way; just clean cut out and trimmed round all the way down. It is about three feet long, and at the end which the flogger holds it is about two and a half inches in circumference, tapering down gradually to a rat-tail point. It is a terrible weapon when the person who wields it is bent on business, and is not manufacturing poetry or mingling thoughts of home and mother with the flogging. Truth to tell, I don't think they do much ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... entreaty: but he only put out his hand and laid it tenderly upon hers: the beautiful, tapering fingers trembled under his touch, then slowly quieted, for there was a ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... measure on the average 2 ft. 8-1/2 in. in circumference, at the base, tapering so much that under the lowest fillet of their necks they measure only 2 feet round, though their height is only 5 ft. 6 in., losing thus eight inches of girth in five feet and a half of height. They are delicately curved all the way up; and ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... strangely beautiful girl with her skin showing very brown beneath a wonderful silver tiara-like headdress, and in the broad interstices of a cloth-of-silver robe with short, stiffly wired-out skirt. She was seated, an idol, on a glittering black throne, at her feet with their tapering dyed nails a ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... and a half in diameter and a bevel-edge of two inches and one-third along the slope. This part had been chipped ready for grinding, and the article was evidently unfinished; one side still wanted polishing, and the part opposite the bevel showed signs of tapering, as if a point instead of an edge had been intended. At Axim I split off by gads and wedges a large slice of the grooved rocks described by Burton; it came home with me, and is now lodged ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... pointing finger, Pierre saw one of those mute tragedies of the gambling hall. Cochrane, an old cattleman whose carefully trimmed, pointed white beard and slender, tapering fingers set him apart from the others in the room, was rather far gone with liquor. He was still stiffly erect in his chair, and would be till the very moment consciousness left him, but his eyes were misty, and when he spoke the fine-cut lips moved slowly, as though ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... outline the island resembles a pear—and suggests to its admiring inhabitants the figure of those pearls which from their elongated form are suspended from the tapering end. When originally upheaved above the ocean its shape was in all probability nearly circular, with a prolongation in the direction of north-east. The mountain zone in the south, covering an area of about 4212 ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... a cross between Black Hamburg and Muscat of Alexandria, and is an intermediate in most fruit characters between these two standard sorts. It is not, however, very generally grown, although it well deserves to be because of its large, beautiful, tapering clusters of ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... River and the Mississippi River, in what is known as the Great American Bottom - the particular point I refer to was then called Zeal-no-waw, the Island of Nuts. It was nineteen miles from the point of the bluffs to the mouth of the Okaw River; ten miles wide up at the bluffs and tapering to a point where the rivers united. Large bands of wild horses - French ponies, called "punt" horses - were to be found any day feeding on the ever green and nutritious grasses and vegetation. Cattle and hogs were also running wild in great numbers; every kind of game, large ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... plant our feet upon the solid rocks, they seem to tremble like the mists of the sea from which they once slowly emerged. When the eye longs for the light, and the moon rises behind the firs, reflecting their tapering tops against the bright rock opposite, it appears to us like the dead hand of a clock which was once wound up, and will some day cease to strike. There is no retreat for the soul, which feels itself alone and forsaken even among the stars, or in the heavenly world ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... peculiarities of born criminals and the morally insane may be classed as professional characteristics acquired through the habit of evil-doing, especially the naso-labial and zygomatic wrinkles, cynical expression, tapering fingers, etc. Many anomalies also in the bones, hair, ears, eyes, and the monstrous development of the jaws and teeth, must be explained by arrested development in the fifth or sixth month of ultra-uterine existence, corresponding to the characteristics of inferior ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... of the glassiest clarified gold, and squares of the glassiest jet, corner to corner, each square 2 ft. wide. Around the edge of the platform on top run 48 square plain gold pilasters, 12 on each side, 2 ft. high, tapering upwards, and topped by a knob of solid gold, pierced with a hole through which passes a lax inch-and-a-half silver chain, hung with little silver balls which strike together in the breeze. The mansion consists of an outer court, facing east ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... eleven bullets left. As none of the men budged, I slipped one of my revolvers under my arm and took from my pocket two small boxes of cartridges containing fifty more bullets. And from my belt I drew three great knives, all of them nicely tapering and pointed. Half of the troop made signs of submission and drew up in line behind me. The other half capitulated a moment after. The battle was over. It had not lasted ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... a great water-snake began to swim slowly round our ship in decreasing circles. Its length could not have been less than 200 feet, while its girth, in the middle, was almost that of a fair-sized whale, tapering towards the head and tail. Lashing the sea around it into foam, the serpent drew closer until it looked as though it would crush the ship in its folds. Hartog, the only man amongst us who preserved his presence of mind, ordered our guns to be loaded and fired at the ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... beautiful town of Damascus, set in a land so rich and green with tapering trees, vineyards, and fields of grass, and watered with such delightful streams, that the Arabs, coming on their camels from the yellow sands of the hot desert, cried out, when they saw its white walls hung with green creepers, that it shone ...
— Children of the Old Testament • Anonymous
... great, there being at least fourteen distinct kinds. Their clubs are three in number, made of the tough heavy wood called wallaru, a kind of gumtree, the ironbark of New South Wales; one is cylindrical, four feet long, tapering at each extremity; the other two, of similar length, are compressed, with sharp edges—one narrow, the other about four inches in greatest width, and resembling a cricket-bat in shape. These weapons on account ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... may be an old one, in love or not in love, has obtained possession by a contract duly recorded at the registration office in heaven and on the rolls of the nation, of a young girl with long hair, with black liquid eyes, with small feet, with dainty tapering fingers, with red lips, with teeth of ivory, finely formed, trembling with life, tempting and plump, white as a lily, loaded with the most charming wealth of beauty. Her drooping eyelashes seem like the points of ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... their use, and others only affording matter of ingenious speculation to the antiquary, but all bearing evidence of early civilisation. The frontlet of gold indicated noble estate, and the long and tapering bodkin of the same metal, with its richly enchased knob or pendent crescent, implied the robe it once fastened could have been of no mean texture, and the wearer of no mean rank. Weapons were there, too, of elegant form and exquisite workmanship, ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... "Little, tapering fingers," he said, "spoiled by work. They could be made very white, very soft and beautiful. Have you ever considered what a truly fascinating thing a girl's ...
— Sue, A Little Heroine • L. T. Meade
... are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed, And no man claimed the conquest of your land. But gropers both through fields of thought confined We stumble and we do not understand. You only saw your future bigly planned, And we, the tapering paths of our own mind, And in each other's dearest ways we stand, And hiss and hate. And the blind fight ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... can imitate, and receiving the blow of his tomahawk upon my own, thrown up in true military guard, plunged my knife into his body with such suddenness and force, that on examining it afterwards, I found that at least half an inch of the tapering handle had followed the blade. The savage fell dead without uttering a groan, a sight which, instead of checking the advance of his companion, rather urged him to revenge his fall. He had now come ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... story had excited our interest ever since the ship came into the port. He was a delicate, slender little fellow, with a beautiful pearly complexion, regular features; forehead as white as marble, black hair curling beautifully round it; tapering, delicate fingers; small feet, soft voice, gentle manners, and, in fact, every sign of having been well born and bred. At the same time there was something in his expression which showed a slight deficiency of intellect. How great ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... will bud soon," answered Dong-Yung, glancing over her shoulder at the tapering, yellowing ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... meets with the readiest market, and is easiest procurable. But even in that there is the most unjustifiable wastefulness practised. I was among the lumberers once, and saw the way they square the white pine. You know that every tree is of course tapering in the trunk, narrower at the top than at the base; now, to square the log, the best timber of the lower part must be hewn away, to make it of equal dimensions with the upper part. I am not above the mark when I say ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... type of criminal were they? In her research courses at the University she had visited court rooms, jails and reformatories. Criminals were not new to her. But these men lacked utterly the markings of the average city criminal. Their eyes lacked the keen alertness, their fingers the slim tapering points of the professional crook. Suddenly, as she pondered, there came to her mind a paragraph from one of her text-books ...
— Triple Spies • Roy J. Snell
... Suggestions of movement in pictures are of two kinds—given by lines pointing in a direction which the eye of the spectator tends to follow, and by movement represented as about to take place and therefore interpreted as the product of internal energy. Thus, the tapering of a pyramid would give the first kind of suggestion, the picture of a runner the second kind. Translated into terms of experiment, this distinction would give two classes dealing with (A) the direction of a straight ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... said nothing more, but rummaged among the riff-raff on an upper shelf. He got down with the tapering, translucent, wicked-looking thing in his hand. "I reckon ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... call distingue; dressed to perfection from head to foot; neat and finished as an epigram; her face in shape like a thoroughbred cobra-capella,—low smooth frontal widening at the summit, chin tapering but jaw strong, teeth marvellously white, small, and with points sharp as those in the maw of the fish called the "Sea Devil;" eyes like dark emeralds, of which the pupils, when she was angry or when she was scheming, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... chair and hid a yawn behind tapering pink finger-nails. "'Slife, you had a cursed run of the ivories to-night, Kenn! When are you for your revenge? Shall we say to-morrow? Egad, I'm ready to sleep round the clock. Who'll take a seat in my coach? ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... little woman, with a pretty florid face and the prominent bosom and tapering waist of forty years ago, turned from the Governor as Corinna and the Judge entered, and hurried forward in her animated way, which reminded one of the manner of a child that is trying to make a success of ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... rising, she attired herself in a vermilion gown over which she drew a white jacket of Eastern silk embroidered with nightingales. Into her golden tresses she braided the necklaces that he had offered her. Her tapering milky fingers sparkled with rings. Her former beauty had not returned—another, greater beauty had taken ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... scene below. Mrs. Leslie reached her side unperceived. The moonlight was exceedingly bright; and just beyond the garden, from which it was separated but by a slight fence, lay the solitary churchyard of the hamlet, with the slender spire of the holy edifice rising high and tapering into the shining air. It was a calm and tranquillizing scene; and so intent was Lady Vargrave's abstracted gaze, that Mrs. Leslie was unwilling ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... variety of little hill and plain to change their verdant surface. Here, there shot up, almost perpendicularly, into the sky, a height so steep, as to be hardly accessible to any but the sheep and goats that fed upon its sides, and there, stood a mound of green, sloping and tapering off so delicately, and merging so gently into the level ground, that you could scarce define its limits. Hills swelling above each other; and undulations shapely and uncouth, smooth and rugged, graceful and grotesque, thrown negligently side by side, ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... had greatly the appearance of a corn field, yet was probably nothing more than some dead flags, which are not uncommon in swampy places:[52] At some distance we saw groves of trees, which appeared high and tapering, and being not above two leagues from the south-west cod of the great bay, in which we had been coasting for the two last days, I hoisted out the pinnace and long-boat to search for fresh water; but just as they were about to put off, we saw ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... no longer able to support their own weight; and then large pieces break off, which we call ice-islands. Such as have a flat even surface, must be of the ice formed in the bays, and before the flat vallies; the others, which have a tapering unequal surface, must be formed on, or under, the side of a coast composed of pointed rocks and precipices, or some such uneven surface. For we cannot suppose that snow alone, as it falls, can form, on a plain surface, such as the sea, such a variety ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... of the apparatus is so simple as to call for little comment. The tail of the vane is made of two pieces of zinc, tapering from 8 inches wide at the rear to 4 inches at the rod, to which they are clipped by 4 screws and nuts. A stay soldered between them near the stern keeps the broader ends a couple of inches apart, giving to the vane a wedge shape which is more sensitive to the wind than ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... fine moonlight night on my return from the Scala, which gave a very pleasing effect to the Duomo or Cathedral as I passed by it. The innumerable aiguilles or spires of the most exquisite and delicate workmanship, tapering and terminating in points all newly whitened, gave such an appearance of airiness and lightness to this beautiful building that it looked more visionary than substantial, and as if a strong puff of wind would blow it away. ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... and nature with her silent face terrifies rather than consoles us. Even when we firmly plant our feet upon the solid rocks, they seem to tremble like the mists of the sea from which they once slowly emerged. When the eye longs for the light, and the moon rises behind the firs, reflecting their tapering tops against the bright rock opposite, it appears to us like the dead hand of a clock which was once wound up, and will some day cease to strike. There is no retreat for the soul, which feels itself alone and forsaken ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... that hung from the tree were six or eight inches long, fat in the middle, and tapering at both ends. The skin was a pale chartreuse ...
— Cum Grano Salis • Gordon Randall Garrett
... day, when a broad, pearl-gray sky was powdering the motionless air with misty snow, the sisters sat together at their sewing in what had been known, since his accident, as Bressant's room. There was no stove; but a rustling, tapering fire was living its ardent, yellow, wavering life upon the brick hearth, and four or five logs of birch and elm were reddening and crackling into embers beneath its intangible intensity. It made a grateful contrast to the soft, ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... I drank rum?' he asked, fiercely—and without waiting for a reply, continued: 'I never was drunk in my life. I take a glass now and again, when I feel the need of it; and lately I've been tapering off. I am going to stop it, by-and-by, when ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... roomy enough landing-place, I admit, but not attaining to the dignity of a hall. Now, as the front door is precisely in the middle of the front of the house, inwards it faces the chimney. In fact, the opposite wall of the landing-place is formed solely by the chimney; and hence-owing to the gradual tapering of the chimney—is a little less than twelve feet in width. Climbing the chimney in this part, is the principal staircase—which, by three abrupt turns, and three minor landing-places, mounts to the second floor, where, over the front door, runs a sort of narrow gallery, something less than ...
— I and My Chimney • Herman Melville
... a bell in Moscow, While on tower and kiosk O! In Saint Sophia The Turkman gets, And loud in air Calls men to prayer From the tapering summits Of tall minarets. Such empty phantom I freely grant them; But there 's an anthem More dear to me,— 'Tis the bells of Shandon, That sound so grand on The pleasant waters Of the ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... banks of discount for cash, as on the continent of Europe, there can be no objection, because there can be no danger of abuse, and they are a convenience both to merchants and individuals. I think they should even be encouraged, by allowing them a larger than legal, interest on short discounts, and tapering thence, in proportion as the term of discount is lengthened, down to legal interest on those of a year or more. Even banks of deposite, where cash should be lodged, and a paper acknowledgment taken out as its representative, entitled to a return of the cash on demand, would be convenient ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... are pearly gossamers frail, My mast is a tapering reed, My rudder a blush-rose petal pale, My ballast ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... as a stalk of asparagus, with two little caps at the ends; and here you have a short thick column, as solid as a haystack, with two fat caps at the ends; and here you have two caps fastened together, and no column at all between them! Then here is a crystal with its column fat in the middle, and tapering to a little cap; and here is one stalked like a mushroom, with a huge cap put on the top of a slender column! Then here is a column built wholly out of little caps, with a large smooth cap at the top. And ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... Wahkan", Chapter VI. The Ta-sha-ke—literally, "Deer-hoofs"—is a rattle made by hanging the hard segments of deer-hoofs to a wooden rod a foot long—about an inch in diameter at the handle end, and tapering to a point at the other. The clashing of these horny bits makes a sharp, shrill sound something like distant sleigh-bells. In their incantations over the sick they sometimes use the ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... He paused again, taking in the full length of her—her trim brown shoes, her scant, tapering, rough skirt, and her coat of brown and green, her long green tippet and her mad little rough hat in the mad mode—all suited to ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... their hair and beards hanging in masses down to their waists. Each carried an iron-headed axe in a girdle, a bow about six feet in length strung with twisted bark, and a few ill-made arrows with peacocks' feathers at one end and an iron unbarbed head tapering to a point at the other. After we had given them the deer's flesh we had prepared, we set up a mark and told them to shoot at it. They were miserable marksmen, not one arrow in half-a-dozen hitting the target. They said that all they required ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... beam and length, her superstructure towering proudly aloft, her massive armoured sides sweeping up in noble curves, a Super-Dreadnought complete from trucks to keelson. Yacht-like she sat the water all buoyant grace from lofty prow to tapering counter, and to me there was something sublime in the grim and latent power, the strength and ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... through the orchard pass; Bow low, as in lords' halls; and springtime grass Tangles a snare to catch the tapering toe. ...
— Silverpoints • John Gray
... he continued, "who are working on flying-machines could learn a good deal from this fellow. The dragon-fly is made for flight. A long, slender, tapering body that cuts the air, moved by four narrow, gauzy wings, and steered by that pointed abdomen. They eat, mate, and lay their eggs while they are flying. I don't know that they are still for ...
— Little Busybodies - The Life of Crickets, Ants, Bees, Beetles, and Other Busybodies • Jeanette Augustus Marks and Julia Moody
... coping saw to cut out the base. The tapering sides may be cut to lines by saw, plane or chisel. The curve at the base may be bored by 1/2-inch auger, and in this way a better curve ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... which all the world has been agog for so long, arose and stood for three hours above the city, some two hundred and fifty feet. The whole mighty sphere was ablaze with myriads of electric lights, from the ball of the tapering flagstaff to the beautiful cabin below. As it hung suspended above the city, connected with the earth by but a slender aluminum chain that looked like a thread of silver piercing the skies, a great hush fell upon the hundreds ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... occupied with Kate's beauty. He thought he had never seen her so bewitching or in such good spirits. From his six feet and an inch of vantage his eyes followed her sloping shoulders and tapering arms and rested on her laughing, happy face—rose-colored in the soft light of the candles—a film of lace looped at her elbows, her wonderful hair caught in a coil at the back: not the prevailing fashion but one most becoming to her. What had not this admixture of Scotch and Virginia blood—this ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... quite well and strong again, I wondered how the sailors could really like such stuff; but many of them had a jug of it, besides the Greenlander, which they brought along to sea with them, to taper off with, as they called it. But this tapering off did not last very long, for the Jamaica was all gone on the second day, and the jugs were tossed overboard. I wonder where ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... off three breadths, and with a long rule and a pencil, mark and cut off the gores; thus from one breadth cut off two gores the whole length, each gore one fourth of the breadth at the bottom, and tapering off to a point at the top. The other two breadths are to have a gore cut off from each, which is one fourth wide at the top and two fourths at bottom. Arrange these pieces right and they will make two chemises, one ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... a bit of precious porcelain or ivory. It was small and soft, a mere featherweight, a puff-ball of a hand—not quick and thrilling, not a speaking hand, but one to be fondled and dressed in rings, and to leave a rosy blur in the brain. The fingers were short and tapering, dimpled at the base, with nails as smooth as rose-leaves. Ralph lifted them one by one, like a child playing with piano-keys, but they were inelastic and did not spring back far—only far enough ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... slowly along, her attention was surprised by a thin tapering flame, that appeared, by fits, at the point of the pike, which Bertrand carried, resembling what she had observed on the lance of the sentinel, the night Madame Montoni died, and which he had said was an omen. ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... putting between himself and her the whole width of the civilization into which her marriage had absorbed her. And there was such fear in the thought—he read such derision of what he had to offer in the splendour of the great avenues tapering upward to the sunset glories of the Arch—that all he had meant to say when he finally spoke compressed itself at last into ...
— Madame de Treymes • Edith Wharton
... mud mortar being used when about the consistency of modeling clay. In front of this room, about 5 feet distant and on the edge of the sloping rock, a hole has been pecked into the solid rock of the ledge. This hole is 12 inches wide on top, slightly tapering, 10 inches deep on the upper side, and 4 inches on the lower. Twelve feet to the northeast there is a similar hole, and below it, distant 10 inches, another, and beyond this others, distributed generally along the foot of the sloping rock forming the back ...
— The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... that Vixen was a giantess, it may be as well to state that her height was five feet six, her waist twenty-two inches at most, her shoulders broad but finely sloping, her arms full and somewhat muscular, her hands not small, but exquisitely tapering, her foot long and narrow, her instep arched like an Arab's, and all her movements instinct with an untutored grace and dignity. She held her head higher than is common to women, and on that score was found ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... brigadier-general of volunteers in the next year and was severely wounded at Antietam, after which he was made major-general and commanded the Twenty-third Army Corps in Burnside's campaign of East Tennessee.] He was a large man, of heavy frame; his face was broad, and his bald head, tapering high, gave a peculiar pyramidal appearance to his figure. He was systematic and accurate in administrative work, patient and insistent in bringing the young volunteer officers in his department into habits of order and good military form. His coolness tempered the impulsiveness of ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... away, and the air was thin and clear, although vapourish mists were being driven swiftly across the moon. The sky was once more a deep and solemn blue, and the shape of the earth was visible at the bottom of the air, enormous, dark, and solid, rising into the tapering mass of the mountain, and pricked here and there on the slopes by the tiny lights of villas. The driving air, the drone of the trees, and the flashing light which now and again spread a broad illumination over the earth filled Mrs. Flushing with exultation. ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... the redwood tree! And the redwood is more beautiful even than the stone-pine of Italy. Gray lavender in color, hard as though cut from stone, swelling at the base to an incredible bulk, shooting straight to an incredible height and tapering exquisitely as it soars, it drops not foliage but plumage. To walk in a redwood forest at night and to look up at the stars tangled in the tree-tops, to watch the moonlight sift through the masses of soft black-green ...
— The Californiacs • Inez Haynes Irwin
... the center, in age somewhat darker to umber or fuliginous, moist when fresh, surface soon dry, flesh tinged with yellow. The gills are white when young, then grayish to pale rose, and finally light purple brown, rounded in front, tapering behind (next the stem) and rounded, free from the stem, 4—5 mm. broad. Basidia clavate, 25—30 x 5—6 mu. Spores small, oval, 3—4 x 2—3 mu, in mass light purple brown. The stem tapers above, ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... waggon—in the capital which is like no other city in the world! Before him there lay spread out the whole field of life, like a sort of Arabian Nights—a picture made up of the Nevski Prospect, Gorokhovaia Street, countless tapering spires, and a number of bridges apparently supported on nothing—in fact, a regular second Nineveh. Well, he made shift to hire a lodging, but found everything so wonderfully furnished with blinds and Persian carpets and so forth that he saw ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... structures of stone or sometimes brick, resting generally on square bases and tapering upwards with triangular sides, found in different parts of the world, but chiefly in Egypt, where they exist to the number of 70 or 80, and of which the most celebrated are those of Ghizeh, 10 m. W. of Cairo, three in number, viz., the Great Pyramid of Cheop, 449 ft. high, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... coming? Since then I have seen her more daintily shod than when her bare brown legs hurried from view into broken shoes of twice her size. Since then the hard little hand has turned white and thin and tapering, to such a hand as women are wont to let dawdle over the arms of chairs. Then I was a boy, with a boy's haughty way of regarding girlish softness. I was haughtier that day because I sought in my pride ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... brown-skinned and dark-eyed, with a wide mouth, prominent cheekbones and a short, square jaw. Unlike the others, he was armed, with a knife and pistol on his belt, and on the breast of his black tunic he wore a scarlet oval patch on which a pair of black wings, with a tapering silver object ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... once he pulled one uh these ol'-style revolvers an' points it at 'em, an' yells: 'Indicaziones! Indicaziones! T'ell weez your indicaziones! Now you show me zee me-tall!'" Casey stopped, reached for his plug and remembered that he mustn't. The Little Woman laughed. She didn't seem to need the tapering off of the ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... are her hands. Indeed, it was through my attention being called to the latter, that I am indirectly indebted for this story. Miss North has typically psychic hands—exquisitely white and narrow, and her long, tapering fingers and filbert nails (which, by the way, are always trimly manicured) are the most perfect I have ever seen. I was alluding to them, on our way back to the hotel after her performance, ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... been a great sculptor, though his name is little known out of Nuremberg. Perhaps his finest work is in St. Lawrence Cathedral—the Sacramentshauslein, or the repository for the sacred wafer—a graceful tapering stone spire of florid Gothic open work, more than sixty feet high, which stands at the opening of the right transept. Its construction and decoration occupied the sculptor and his two apprentices no less than five ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... paper, skeleton, shadow, anatomy, spindleshanks[obs3], lantern jaws, mere skin and bone. middle constriction, stricture, neck, waist, isthmus, wasp, hourglass; ridge, ghaut[obs3], ghat[obs3], pass; ravine &c. 198. narrowing, coarctation[obs3], angustation[obs3], tapering; contraction &c. 195. V. be narrow &c. adj.; narrow, taper, contract &c. 195; render narrow &c. adj; waste away. Adj. narrow, close; slender, thin, fine; thread-like &c. (filament) 205; finespun[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... India Company's ship. His singular character and story had excited our interest ever since the ship came into the port. He was a delicate, slender little fellow, with a beautiful pearly complexion, regular features, forehead as white as marble, black haired, curling beautifully, rounded, tapering, delicate fingers, small feet, soft voice, gentle manners, and, in fact, every sign of having been well born and bred. At the same time there was something in his expression which showed a slight deficiency of intellect. ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... though even then being boiled and eaten with salt-pork or beef, it serves instead of turnips and is as much esteemed. The papaw-tree is about 10 or 12 foot high. The body near the ground may be a foot and a half or 2 foot diameter; and it grows up tapering to the top. It has no branches at all, but only large leaves growing immediately upon stalks from the body. The leaves are of a roundish form and jagged about the edges, having their stalks or stumps longer or shorter as they grow near to or ...
— A Voyage to New Holland • William Dampier
... limbs. As Charley uttered his defiance, his glance rested for a moment on the most advanced of these and a gleam of hope lit up his face. Although this dead giant of the island was many feet from the sinking lad, yet in its youth it had sent out nearly over him one long, slender, tapering limb. In a second Charley's quick eyes had taken in the possibility and the risk, the next moment he had skirted round the quagmire at the top of his speed and was swinging up ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... serpentine or double curved chute gates, O O, when formed with surfaces tapering or sloping from their centers towards their ends, and so arranged, relative to intermediately situated diaphragms or plates, r r, that one of the tapering ends of said chute gates, O O, shall project beyond ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... at last, Each tall and tapering mast Is swung into its place; Shrouds and stays Holding it firm and fast! Long ago, In the deer-haunted forests of Maine, When upon mountain and plain Lay the snow, They fell,—those lordly pines! Those grand, majestic ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... brown Holland, and make a bag in the form of a cone, about five inches over at the top. Cut a small hole at the bottom, and tie in a small pipe of a tapering form, about two inches long; and the bore must be large or small, according to the size of the biscuits or cakes to be made. When the various mixtures are put in, lay the pipe close to the paper, and press ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... black. The standing and running rigging was in the most perfect order, and the sails white as snow. In short, everything, from the single narrow red stripe on her low, black hull to the trucks on her tapering masts, evinced an amount of care and strict discipline that would have done credit to a ship of the Royal Navy. There was nothing lumbering or unseemly about the vessel, excepting, perhaps, a boat, which lay on the deck with its keel up between the fore and main masts. It seemed disproportionately ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... foliage. Mr. Downing thinks the difference lies in the fact that, while the Versailles strain produces many short bunches like the Cherry, it also frequently bears clusters, and that such long, tapering clusters are never formed on the Cherry. This is the only difference, I think, if any exists; but in no instance have I been able to find this distinction well defined and sustained by the bearing plantations that I have seen. ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... brushes! I had not thought of them! By mere chance a few years since I happened upon some of these bamboo brushes in a Japanese shop—large, long-handled brushes, with pure white hair nicely stiffened to a tapering point, which was neatly protected with a sheathing cover of bamboo. A number of them were at my elbow, a few inches distant, in a glass of water, and on the table by the vase beyond were a dozen or so in a ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... she! Near to where the men were working, by the river's brink, there was a space of level ground, perhaps a hundred feet long, and tapering from half that breadth to a point. And this was simply crimson and purple with a ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... beautiful girl with her skin showing very brown beneath a wonderful silver tiara-like headdress, and in the broad interstices of a cloth-of-silver robe with short, stiffly wired-out skirt. She was seated, an idol, on a glittering black throne, at her feet with their tapering dyed nails a fantastically ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... plane one side of the stick straight and smooth. This is to be the 'back' of the bow, and mustn't be touched again. Next mark the middle of the stick, and lay off four and a half inches to one side for a handle. Then turn the stick on its back, and plane away the 'belly' of the bow, tapering it truly from handle to 'tip.' Do the same to the sides, leaving each tip about three-eighths of an inch square. Now take a file or a spokeshave, and round off the 'sides' and 'belly' carefully, taking care not to touch the 'back' of the bow. There, the bow is in good shape, but it may not ...
— Harper's Young People, July 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... he could not have meant it—he is not a brute!" she cried, as she began to nervously clasp her hands and turn her wedding ring over and over again on her tapering finger, until it seemed a band of fire to her ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... rode from her moorings at morning, 'Neath bright sunny skies, and prosperous gales, With streamlet and banner, in beauty adorning Her tapering ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... days, while the leaves last for months. Every tree indeed is a picture in itself: The gnarled and rugged Oak, the symbol and source of our navy, sacred to the memory of the Druids, the type of strength, the sovereign of British trees; the Chestnut, with its beautiful, tapering, and rich green, glossy leaves, its delicious fruit, and to the durability of which we owe the grand and historic roof ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... were Miss Sawyer's pride, and they grew in a stately line beneath the four kitchen windows, their tapering tips set thickly with gay satin circlets of pink or ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... cord. He undid it, and found the skull and bones of a child within. Mr. Kekwick brought it to me this morning for my inspection. It certainly is the finest piece of workmanship I have ever seen executed by natives. It is about twelve inches deep and ten wide, tapering off at the ends. Small lines are cut along both sides of it. It has been cut out of a solid piece of wood, with some sharp instrument. It is exactly the model of a canoe. I told him to do it up again, and replace it as it was found. If it is here when I return, I will endeavour to take it to ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... teaching me the intricacies of flying and of repairing the dainty little contrivances which the Martians use for this purpose. The body of the one-man air craft is about sixteen feet long, two feet wide and three inches thick, tapering to a point at each end. The driver sits on top of this plane upon a seat constructed over the small, noiseless radium engine which propels it. The medium of buoyancy is contained within the thin metal walls of the body and consists of the ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... reef. The island, which, being dry, was of course the highest part of the atoll, measured about three and a quarter miles long, and was crescent-shaped, being about three-eighths of a mile wide in the middle, tapering off north and south in the form of the cusps of the crescent moon; and from the extremities of the two cusps there swept away the encircling reef which enclosed the lagoon in a very perfect natural breakwater, ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... at the top of it. Then further back, higher than the candelabrum, and much higher than the altar, rose the Moloch, all of iron, and with gaping apertures in his human breast. His outspread wings were stretched upon the wall, his tapering hands reached down to the ground; three black stones bordered by yellow circles represented three eyeballs on his brow, and his bull's head was raised with a terrible effort as if in order ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... rafters inside the house lay a hard-pine pole eighteen feet long, ending in a tapering two-foot iron. Strung on a fish-line hanging from a spike were a half-dozen swordfish darts. These were sharp, stubby metal arrows, all head and tail and no body, with a socket cast on one side to admit the top of the pole-iron. Back of the arrow-head was a hole, through ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... corolla fine, cleft, and of a greenish yellow color; the staminae are five in number, and short; the pistil is longer than the corolla; the flowers are destitute of fragrance; the capsules (as correctly stated by Mr. Hunter) are stalked oblong, incrusted, and crowned with a calyx; tapering to a point below; two celled, two valved, the valves adhering at the apex, splitting at the sides; seeds very numerous, oblong, very small, compressed, furnished at both ends ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... there tall figures came looming, ghostly-fashion, out of chaos, to take slow shape and form, to resolve themselves into tapering lodges, into hunched ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... on which to iron shirt-bosoms, should be made, one foot and a half long, and nine inches wide, and covered with white flannel. A skirt-board on which to iron frock-skirts, should be made, five feet long, and two feet wide at one end, tapering to one foot and three inches wide, at the other end. This should be covered with flannel; and will save much trouble, in ironing nice dresses. The large end may be put on the table, and the other, on the back of a chair. Both these boards ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... parts are a thin laminated piece of steel from 15 to 25 centimeters long with a thin, tapering rod somewhat shorter, projecting in the line of the axis, and a hilt of banti through which the projection of the blade passes. It is carried in a sheath which is held at the wearer's ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... dug huge hooked claws, and from its tapering muzzle a wormlike tongue licked about, gathering the outrushing white ants into its gullet. For minutes Tim lay blinking at it, wondering if he really ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... desert and mountain, like the splendid things of life, must be climbed for. In this instance I was suddenly and stunningly confronted by a yellow gulf of cone-shaped and fan-shaped ridges, all bare crinkly clay, of gold, of amber, of pink, of bronze, of cream, all tapering down to round-knobbed lower ridges, bleak and barren, yet wonderfully beautiful in their stark purity of denudation; until at last far down between two widely separated hills shone, dim and blue and ghastly, with ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... page and showed her the tapering goddesses of the straight front, the tooth-powder, the camera, the breakfast-food, ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... of Borneo, excessively elongated secondaries; and its tail is not formed of normal rectrices, from the middle of which spring two very long feathers, a little curved and arranged like a roof; but it consists of twelve wide plane feathers, regularly tapering, and ornamented with ocellated spots, arranged along the shaft. Its head is not bare, but is adorned behind with a tuft of thread-like feathers; and, finally, its system of coloration and the proportions of the different parts of its body are not ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... Britannica," "been able to supersede or equal handwork in the production of good sword blades. The swordsmiths' craft is still, no less than it was in the Middle Ages, essentially a handicraft, and it requires a high order of skill. His rough material is a bar of cast and hammered steel, tapering from the centre to the ends; when this is cut in two each half is made into a sword. The 'tang,' which fits into the handle, is not part of the blade, but a piece of wrought iron welded on to its base. ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... friends he had among the men. His hair was brown, sprinkled liberally with silver; his mouth, an admirable mouth in every way, was shaded and half-hidden by a long, drooping mustache to which, some men thought and some women said, his tapering white fingers paid too much attention, but I doubt if a knowledge of this criticism would have led to the faintest alteration in the habit. Generally the expression of Armstrong's face was grave, and, on duty, a trifle stern; and not ten people in ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... is sweet to see; full of fine maples—long avenues of green and gold. And in August, high in air, the beautiful and bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer the passer-by their tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms. So omnipotent is art; which in many a district of New Bedford has superinduced bright terraces of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... he has led the march to the grave. As I recollect Uncle Guy, he was the embodiment of neatness, feminine in build—it seemed that nature intended to form a woman instead of a man. Like a woman, he plaited his hair and drew it down behind his ears. His hands and feet were small, his fingers tapering; his face was black, his eyes small, his lips and nose thin, his voice fine, but harsh, and he slightly stooped or bent forward as he walked. There is poetry in every move of his bent figure as he slowly walks down ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... alleviating poverty, given its high population growth and unequal distribution of income. MACAPAGAL-ARROYO averted a fiscal crisis by pushing for new revenue measures and, until recently, tightening expenditures. Declining fiscal deficits, tapering debt and debt service ratios, as well as recent efforts to increase spending on infrastructure and social services have heightened optimism over Philippine economic prospects. Although the general macroeconomic outlook has improved significantly, the Philippines ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... given her, the little world of Wareham would probably at once have dubbed her a beauty. The long black braids were now disposed after a quaint fashion of her own. They were crossed behind, carried up to the front, and crossed again, the tapering ends finally brought down and hidden in the thicker part at the neck. Then a purely feminine touch was given to the hair that waved back from the face,—a touch that rescued little crests and wavelets from ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the altar placed in the centre near a little portable organ over which a cover had been thrown. However, as she raised her eyes above the rock, she once more beheld the slender white Basilica profiled against the sky, its slight, tapering spire soaring into the azure of the Infinite like ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... figure illustrates this very noticeably. The arm of the Virgin forms by its position, along with the body of the child, a base, from which two other lines rise, tapering to the top of the head; the child's head lies right in the course of one of these lines. Thus mother and child together form a single figure, ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... ordinary Thames boat: a long, narrow, flat-bottomed, shallow craft with tapering ends decked over to serve as seats, the whole propelled by a pole the size of a tight-rope dancer's and ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Maharajah's territory towards Sir Ivor's headquarters. On the third day out from the lamasery we camped in a romantic Himalayan valley—a narrow, green glen, with a brawling stream running in white cataracts and rapids down its midst. We were able to breathe freely now; we could enjoy the great tapering deodars that rose in ranks on the hillsides, the snow-clad needles of ramping rock that bounded the view to north and south, the feathery bamboo-jungle that fringed and half-obscured the mountain torrent, whose cool music—alas, fallaciously cool—was borne to us through ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... for many weeks standing in a South-window, on which the Sun lay very much, but the Casements were kept close shut; after some time coming to take account of his Dew, He found it very full of little Insects with great Heads and small tapering Bodies, somewhat resembling Tadpoles, but very much less. These, on his approach to the Glass, would sink down to the bottom, as it were to hide themselves, and upon his retreat wrigle themselves up to the top of the water again. Leaving it thus ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... be represented by a fine member of his species in these ornamental patios. He is a gaudy, noisy fellow. The head, breast, and back are of a deep red, the wings yellow, blue, and green. The tail is composed of a dozen feathers, six of which are stout, short, and tapering, while the rest are fourteen inches in length. He passes his time in screaming, and scrambling about with the aid of his claws and hooked beak combined, going as far as the tiny chain which is attached ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... young woman. His trousers sank over his heels, he moved with a sort of slinking evasion, more crushed with odd self-consciousness now he had the slim old arm-chair to carry, his arm over the back, the four fine, square tapering legs swaying perilously near the granite setts of the pavement. And yet he was somewhere indomitable and separate, like a quick, vital rat. He had a queer, subterranean beauty, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... sir, you must be posted on the affairs of our government." So he commenced an analysis of nearly an hour long, and in it gave some astonishing accounts of the wonderful statesmanship of Calhoun, Butler, and Rhett, tapering down with a perfect fire-and-thunder account of the military exploits of General Quattlebum and Captain Blanding. The Captain began to stretch and gape, for he labored under the fatigue of a perilous voyage, and repose was ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... more species of bananas native to Queensland, and they form a conspicuous feature of the jungle. With remarkable rapidity one of the species shoots up a ruddy symmetrical, slightly tapering stem—smooth and polished where the old leaf-sheaths have been shed—to a height of 20 and 30 feet, producing leaves 15 feet long and 2 feet broad, small and crude flowers, and bunches of dwarf fruit containing little but shot-like seeds. ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... the ship's deck one could not see the water—schools of porpoises surrounded the ship, setting the water alive with phosphorescent splendors: "Like glorified serpents thirty to fifty feet long. Every curve of the tapering long body perfect. The whole snake dazzlingly illumined. It was a weird sight to see this sparkling ghost come suddenly flashing along out of the solid gloom and stream ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... looked upon as an inalienable right. The Glorious Fourth had been celebrated, come rain, come shine. Usually the celebration was so generous that it did not stop at midnight; anywhere within a week was considered permissible, a gradual tapering off—not to say sobering up—being the custom with the more ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... golden-brown carpet, newly cleaned, was speckless again. Marie moved about, improving on the table arrangements, and the hands which touched this or that into better design were little, slim and white. The finger nails had regained their tapering prettiness. And as she smiled with pleasure, between her lips an unblemished row of teeth showed. She wore black, to her mother's memory, but her gown was the last word in cut and contour; it opened in a long V to show her plump white neck; underneath the filmy bodice a hint of ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... differ very materially from the wedge-drain. Instead of the whole trench forming a gradually tapering wedge, the upper portion of the shoulder-drain has the sides of the trench nearly perpendicular, and of considerable width, the last spit only being taken out with a narrow, tapering spade, by which means a shoulder ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... pointed, had even at an early age begun to show signs of turning gray. His nose was aquiline, his bearing was distinguished, and his manners were stamped with a high breeding that befitted the 'Cavalier' lineage. His hands were delicate and white, by no means thin, and the fingers tapering. His gestures were not many, but swift, graceful, and expressive; the tone of his voice was low; his figure was willowy and lithe; and in stature he seemed tall, but in reality he was a little below six feet — withal there was a native ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... Canada, being rather more plentiful in the cold northern localities than in the southern latitudes. It is an amphibious animal, and can remain for a long time beneath the water. In size it is larger than a cat, and it possesses a tapering tail some eighteen inches in length. Its fur is of a rich brown color, and the hair is of two kinds, the one a close, fine, and exquisitely soft down, which lies next the skin, and which serves to protect the animal from the extremes of heat and cold, and ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
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