"Tapering" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... 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 to ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... 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 |
