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Shaft   /ʃæft/   Listen
Shaft

noun
1.
A line that forms the length of an arrow pointer.
2.
An aggressive remark directed at a person like a missile and intended to have a telling effect.  Synonyms: barb, dig, gibe, jibe, shot, slam.  "She threw shafts of sarcasm" , "She takes a dig at me every chance she gets"
3.
A long rod or pole (especially the handle of an implement or the body of a weapon like a spear or arrow).
4.
A column of light (as from a beacon).  Synonyms: beam, beam of light, irradiation, light beam, ray, ray of light, shaft of light.
5.
The main (mid) section of a long bone.  Synonym: diaphysis.
6.
Obscene terms for penis.  Synonyms: cock, dick, pecker, peter, prick, putz, tool.
7.
A long pointed rod used as a tool or weapon.  Synonyms: lance, spear.
8.
A vertical passageway through a building (as for an elevator).
9.
(architecture) upright consisting of the vertical part of a column.  Synonym: scape.
10.
A long vertical passage sunk into the earth, as for a mine or tunnel.
11.
A revolving rod that transmits power or motion.  Synonym: rotating shaft.
12.
The hollow spine of a feather.  Synonyms: calamus, quill.



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"Shaft" Quotes from Famous Books



... of the scribe cometh by opportunity of leisure; and he that hath little business shall become wise. How shall he become wise that holdeth the plow, that glorieth in the shaft of the goad, that driveth oxen, and is occupied in their labours, and whose discourse is of the stock of bulls? He will set his heart upon turning his furrows; and his wakefulness is to give his heifers their fodder. So is every artificer and workmaster, ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various

... of the founding of the city placed the scenes of its leading incidents, and the straw-covered house of Romulus, the shepherd's hut of his foster-father Faustulus, the sacred fig-tree towards which the cradle with the twins had floated, the cornelian cherry-tree that sprang from the shaft of the spear which the founder of the city had hurled from the Aventine over the valley of the Circus into this enclosure, and other such sacred relics were pointed out to the believer. Temples in the proper sense of the term were still at this ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... over the small one so as to have but a single rod for the two pistons; and the two cylinders have then one bottom in common, which is furnished with a stuffing-box in which the rod moves. With this arrangement we have but a single connecting rod and a single crank for the shaft; but, the stuffing-box not being accessible so that it can be kept in a clean state, there occur after a time both leakages of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various

... localities where the settlement to which they belonged has wholly disappeared. Though simple graves were always in use among the poorest folk, the commonest form of tomb at all periods is a rock-cut chamber entered by a door in one side, to which access is given by a shaft or sloping passage (dromos) cut likewise in the rock. The earliest are but a few feet from the surface, just deep enough to ensure a firm roof to the chamber; later the depth is as much as 12 or 15 feet. Occasionally the chamber, and even the passage, ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various

... the other end, chews with her lips and of course I'm always excited for fear her dinner will fall overboard. The way she juggles food would get her a job in the vaudeville game any day. She sits up as tho' she'd been impaled, and the shaft broken ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr

... twanged. Dicon of Rye fell back with a shaft through his shoulder. "God help me, I ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle

... Captain Jack and Pie Face standing, with bridle reins dropped, across the street and in the broad shaft of light streaming from the open door of the pool-room, ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman

... Dorthe again that day. When night came, he was given a cave to himself. He hung up his robes on a jutting point of rock, and slept the sleep of the weary. At the first shaft of dawn he rose, intending to stroll down to the beach in search of a bay where he could bathe; but as he stepped across the prostrate Californians, asleep at the entrance of his cave, he paused abruptly, and changed ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton

... and chains, All the dread ills that wait on civil war;—— How I could glut my vengeful eyes to see The weeping maid thrown helpless on the world, Her sire cut off.—Her orphan brothers stand, While the big tear rolls down the manly cheek. Robb'd of maternal care by grief's keen shaft, The sorrowing mother mourns her starving babes, Her murder'd lord torn guiltless from her side, And flees for shelter to the pitying grave To screen at once ...
— The Group - A Farce • Mercy Warren

... then That timid eye, was it those maiden hands That sped the shaft, which saved me and avenged ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... waiting for a reply, he began to disentangle them, not without a good deal of fidgeting from the horse, which delayed him. His mouth twitched with laughter as he bent over the shaft. Deny that she was Mrs. Delane! That was a good one. Why, now that he had seen her close, he ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... suitable to a warrior who delighted in the spirit-stirring scenes of his profession, his eye was attracted by the figure of an old woman, who approached him with a trembling step, leaning on a staff, and holding in her left hand three English cloth-shaft arrows. ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous

... the stinging arrow felt when that same son of Jupiter assailed him in the very gates of hell, and wrought him keenest anguish. Pierced with pain, to the high Olympus, to the courts of Jupiter groaning he came. The bitter shaft remained deep in his shoulder fixed, and grieved his soul." In the mythical system the gods are not presented as creators or first causes. Homer says, They were in the beginning generated from the waters of the ocean, and thousands were added by deifying departed heroes ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880

... fall. In a hollow of this back fall is sunk the so-called plate, furnished with a number of sharp steel cutters or knives, lying alongside of each other. A roller of solid oakwood, the circumference of which is also furnished with sharp steel cutters or knives, is fastened upon a shaft and revolves within the hollow. The journal bearings of the shaft are let into and fastened in movable wooden carriers. The carriers of the bearings may be raised and lowered by turning suitable thumbscrews, whereby the distance ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various

... turns to go, but as he wends, One swift irrelevant retort he sends. "Your logic and your taste I both disdain, You've quoted wrong from Jonson and Montaigne." The shaft goes home, and somewhere in the rear Birrell in smallest print is heard ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt

... French garden had been laid out here, of which only the box borders remained; bushes which had habituated themselves to the shade, no doubt, for they grew vigorously, as tall as trees. And the charm of this shady nook was a fountain, a simple leaden pipe fixed in the shaft of a column; whence flowed perpetually, even in the greatest drought, a thread of water as thick as the little finger, which supplied a large mossy basin, the greenish stones of which were cleaned only once in three or four years. When all the wells of the neighborhood were dry, La ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola

... seemed at the first glance to be one between a grown man and a child, so unequal was the size of the combatants. But the second look showed that the advantage was by no means with Ironhook. Stumbling to and fro with the broken shaft of a javelin sticking in his thigh, he vainly tried to seize and crush Hereward in his enormous arms. Hereward, bleeding, but still active and upright, broke away, and sprang round him, watching for an opportunity ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley

... guard on the other side in turn made a thrust. Others followed. For some moments they continued their sport, the reward of long waiting. The man was not yet dead. Impatient the do[u]shin gave the shaft of a spear a violent upward thrust. Its point appeared through the left shoulder. The head fell forward on the breast and hung limp. ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville

... for these seventeen years since I saw my husband drown, has there been a dark night between this window and the sea. Not once has my spark been put out: and I will not think it now. God can kindle fire where He pleases. I have heard tell that people in foreign countries have seen a lightning-shaft dart down into a forest, and make a tree blaze up like a torch. ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau

... was wide and low; railed in; and, except for the square of light, cast in dimness. A dozen men sat in chairs, smoking. Across the shaft of light the smoke eddied strangely. A woman's voice accompanied softly the tinkle of a piano inside. The sounds, like the lamplight, were softened by the distance of the ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White

... the woman!" he broke out, sotto voce, "she's a born natural! Did ye never hear of a shaft? or millions o' gallons a day? It's better nor a California ranch, I tell ye. Mebbe," charitably, "ye didn't know Poke ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis

... great plains, whose aspect is more changeable than one might think, but studies on the various floors of the mill, and in the roundhouse, where old meal- bins and swollen sacks looked picturesque in the dim light falling from above, in which also the circular stones, the shaft, and the very hoppers, became effective subjects for the ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... eagle old, Mount, whose brow so white and cold, Kisses the last ray of even! And, O thou that lov'st to mark Morn's first sunbeam pierce the dark, Mount, O mount, thou joyous lark— Joyous lark, O mount to heaven! And now say, from topmost bough, Towering shaft, and peak of snow, And heaven's arch—O, can you see One white plume that like a star, Streams along the plain afar, And a steed that from the war Bears my lover ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo

... meet Father Xavier. The party halted and waited hour after hour for the priest, but he did not come. Finally two went back in search, and found him lying upon the sod with upturned face—the place where he had written last in his journal marked by a few drops of his heart's blood, and the long shaft of an arrow protruding from his breast. They drew it out, but the arrow-head had been attached, as is the custom in some Indian tribes, by means of a soft wax, which is melted by the warmth of the body, and it remained in the heart. Father Xavier had been dead some hours. They buried ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various

... of loops on loops, to lose itself at last in the cooler promise of the first bulwark of the mountains. They looked cooler, the distant wooded hills; for all the shimmering heat waves that danced and eddied in the gaps and glanced, shaft-like, from the brittle needles of the pines which sentineled the ridges, they hinted at depths to which the sun's rays could not penetrate; they hinted at chasms padded with moss, shadowed and dim beneath chapel arches of spruce and hemlock, even chilly with the spray of spring-fed brooks ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans

... first into a rich orange, then into purest amber, the colours being faintly reflected on the most distant edges of the vast cloud-bank floating below; and at length, just as the hands of the clock marked thirty-five minutes after one, an arrowy shaft of pure white light shot upward into the sky, swiftly followed by another and another; and then, with a dazzling flash of golden light, the upper edge of the sun's disc rose slowly into view, soaring higher and higher until the whole of the glorious luminary was revealed, whilst ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... till there was room for a hand to appear, holding a tiny scrap of paper. This was passed through very slowly, to be followed by wrist, elbow, and then the whole of an arm so long that it stretched out like a spear-shaft, and the fingers reached the King's plate and ...
— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn

... long before the time of Quill, or it may have been Quill himself,—had chiselled hand and toe niches in the sides of this well and had used the strange shaft as means of getting into and out of the cave. Windom's father had closed this shaft when David was a small boy, after the venturesome youngster had gone down into the cave and, unable to climb out again, had been the cause of an all-day search by his distracted ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon

... quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword." And Isaiah says, in the name of the Servant of the Lord, "He hath made my mouth like a sharp sword; in the shadow of His hand hath He hid me, and made me a polished shaft; in His ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker

... Littlehampton, Sussex. This firm has erected over 400 windmills, which, after the test of time, have proved thoroughly efficient. From Fig. 20 it will be seen that the power applied by the wheel is transmitted through spur and pinion gearing of 2 1/2 ratio to a crank shaft, the gear wheel having internal annular teeth of the involute type, giving a greater number of teeth always in contact than is the case with external gears. This minimises wear, which is an important matter, as it is difficult to properly lubricate these appliances, and they are exposed ...
— The Sewerage of Sea Coast Towns • Henry C. Adams

... the latter region beds of limestone carry lenses of sulphur and gypsum which are apparently localized in dome-like upbowings of the strata. The deposits are overlain by several hundred feet of loose, water-bearing sands, through which it is difficult to sink a shaft. An ingenious and efficient process of mining is used whereby superheated water is pumped down to melt the sulphur, which is then forced to the surface by compressed air and allowed to consolidate in large bins. The Sicilian deposits are similar lenses in clayey limestones containing ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith

... on a large block of wood, his feet half hidden in a pile of chips. A hand-saw, hanging on the wall, caught a shaft of light from the sun, and threw it into his eyes. He turned slightly ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read

... speak what was in his mind. He uttered a silly attack on the Preacher. It moved Belle and brought the colour to her face. His bitter comments on their own relations had not called forth any response from her, but this shaft went home, as he meant it should. She controlled herself ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton

... robin, where grow the alders, and the hazels rich with brown nuts, the beeches and the oaks; where the flower of the yellow broom blazes like gold in the noontide sun; where the stockdove coos overhead in the ivy; where the kingfisher darts past like a shaft of sapphire, and the water ouzel flies up stream; where the pheasant glides out from his home in the wood to feed on the headland of the wheat field; where the partridge broods in the dust with her young; where the green lane is bordered by the guelder-rose or ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale

... Hard by a Norman shaft, along the floor A portraiture on ancient bronze designed In Academic hood and robes of yore, Commemorates some by-gone lord of mind. Mournful the face and dignified the head: A man who pondered ...
— Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure • W.D. Lighthall

... be,[1314] was that awful "If" hurled at Him by the devil's emissaries in the time of mortal agony; as in the season of the temptations immediately after His baptism it had been most insidiously pressed upon Him by the devil himself.[1315] That "If" was Satan's last shaft, keenly barbed and doubly envenomed, and it sped as with the fierce hiss of a viper. Was it possible in this the final and most dreadful stage of Christ's mission, to make Him doubt His divine Sonship, or, failing such, ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage

... at last one of them shot at him a forked[FN80] arrow, which pierced his vitals and reached his heart and killed him in front of the Jackal's hole. Then the hunters came up and finding him dead, pulled out the shaft from his heart, but only the wood came away and the forked head abode in the Ass's belly. So they left him where he lay, expecting that others of the wild beasts would flock to him; but, when it was eventide and nothing fell to ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton

... and filled into a receptacle and worked up, screened from pebbles, and made fit for use in a short time, so as not to have to wait a whole winter. This is done in some sort of pug mill. A pug mill is a machine consisting of a large cylinder with a central shaft passing through it from top to bottom. Knives or blades are arranged spirally on the shaft, and other blades project into the interior of the cylinder from the walls of it. The material, after being screened, is fed into this at the top, and properly moistened. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various

... that has accumulated. If a man wishes to build a house in Rome or in Jerusalem he has to go fifty or sixty feet down, through potsherds and broken tiles and triturated marbles, and the dust of ancient palaces and temples. We have to drive a shaft clear down through all the superficial strata, and to lay the first stones on the Rock of Ages. Do not build on that which quivers and shakes beneath you. Do not try to make your life's path across the weeds, or as they call it in Egypt, the 'sudd,' that floats ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... and forward over her body; then she lay quiet again on her back or side. "Good gracious! what a lot of meat!" said Juell, who was cook. More and more cautiously we drew near. While I sat ready with the gun, Henriksen took a good grip of the harpoon shaft, and as the boat touched the floe he rose, and off flew the harpoon. But it struck too high, glanced off the tough hide, and skipped over the backs of the animals. Now there was a pretty to do! Ten or twelve great weird ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen

... the captain uses the word "ripples"—suddenly appeared. Shaft followed shaft, upon the surface of the sea. But it was only a faint light, and, in about fifteen minutes, died out: having appeared suddenly, having died out gradually. The shafts revolved at a velocity of about 60 ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort

... dare To die, and leave their children free, Bid Time and Nature gently spare The shaft we raise ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... in a shaft of sunlight from the great altar window that Paul first saw his son. The tiny upright figure in its blue velvet suit, heavily trimmed with sable, standing there proudly. A fair, rosy-cheeked, golden-haired English child—the living reality of that ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn

... rage the knight ran at him with uplifted lance, and struck him a violent blow with the shaft between the neck ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert

... rapidly with instead of against the tide in the Bay. He realized that in that short time the tide had turned, either about some point of land, or in the River. He began to tread water while he tried to lift his head and gaze across the waves. Then a broad shaft of dazzling light shot across the Bay from a nearby reflector. At the same time Tom heard the tolling of a bell-buoy, not very ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... our Puritan fathers, the gentlemen who braved the danger of the deep for the sake of worshiping God and persecuting their fellow men. I belong to their blood, and the best thing I can say about them, and that which rises like a white shaft to their eternal honor, is that they were ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll

... usages. "English soldiers," he says, "have never been the men they were in the days of the cross-bow and the long-bow; when they depended upon the strength of the arm, and the English archer could draw a cloth-yard shaft to the head. These were the times when, at the battles of Cressy, Poictiers, and Agincourt, the French chivalry was completely destroyed by the bowmen of England. The yeomanry, too, have never been what they were, when, in times of peace, they were constantly exercised with the bow, and archery ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving

... basement of their building. There is a large one hundred and fifty horse-power engine which runs during the day, and a seventy-five horse-power which relieves it at night. From this shafting and belting distribute the power in every direction. One shaft runs to and across Frankfort street, supplying THE MAIL and other offices, another crosses William street and runs the six cylinder presses which pile the three hundred thousand copies of the Ledger in its beautiful press-room. Another shaft ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin

... is to individualise this broad, universal love, and to say, in the simplicity of a glad faith, 'He loved me and gave Himself for me.' The breadth is world-wide, and the whole breadth is condensed into, if I may so say, a shaft of light which may find its way through the narrowest chink of a single soul. There are two ways of arguing about the love of Christ, both of them valid, and both of them needing to be employed by us. We have a right to say, 'He loves all, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... to set this fear at rest, I changed the form of my inquiries; and spying an honest fellow coming along a lane on the shaft of his cart, I asked him if he had ever heard tell of a house they called the ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson

... body in an old shaft—not far from Winfield. He had the stolen property on him, so there's no doubt of his guilt. So that clears your Hermit, ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce

... is sharper than a sword; the soul with ecstasy It takes and longing leaves behind, that nothing may assain. As at the casement high she sat, her charms I might espy, For from her cheeks the envious veil that hid them she had ta'en. She shot at me a shaft that reached my heart and I became The bond- man of despair, worn out with effort all in vain. Fawn of the palace, knowst thou not that I, to look on thee, The world have traversed, far and wide, o'er ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne

... remarkablest Pontiff that has darkened God's daylight, or painted himself in the human retina, for these several thousand years. Nay, since Chaos first shivered, and 'sneezed,' as the Arabs say, with the first shaft of sunlight shot through it, what stranger product was there of Nature and Art working together? Here is a Supreme Priest who believes God to be—What, in the name of God, does he believe God to be?—and discerns that all worship of God is a scenic phantasmagory of wax-candles, organ-blasts, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle

... are in this city now seventy-one thousand eight hundred and seventy-seven totally dark rooms; some of them connected with an air-shaft twenty-eight inches wide and seventy feet deep; many of them absolutely without access to even a dark shaft; and that these rooms are the only place in the whole wide, beautiful world for thousands of little children, unless they stay ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill

... "connaughts," or subterranean aqueducts flowing from mountain streams, which are practically inexhaustible. In order to keep a straight line, shafts are dug every fifty yards or so, and the earth thrown out of the shaft forms a mound, which is not removed. Thus a Persian landscape, dotted with hundreds of these hillocks, often resembles a field full of huge ant-hills. The mouths of these shafts, left open and unprotected, are a source of great danger to travellers by night. ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt

... in Tusayan (p. 121) it was shown that the chimney is not used in any form in these ceremonial chambers; but the simple roof-opening forming the hatchway serves as a smoke vent, without the addition of either an internal hood or an external shaft. In the Zui kivas the smoke also finds vent through the opening that gives access to the chamber, but in the framing of the roof, as is shown elsewhere, some distinction between door and chimney is observed. The roof-hole ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff

... the shaft of the hammer of Thor, but an ell's length the sword blade of Frey; 'Tis enough, for your weapon will ne'er be too short if you dare near ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner

... that would make him shrivel up on the spot. Miss puny little Edy's countenance fell to no slight extent and Gerty could see by her looking as black as thunder that she was simply in a towering rage though she hid it, the little kinnatt, because that shaft had struck home for her petty jealousy and they both knew that she was something aloof, apart, in another sphere, that she was not of them and never would be and there was somebody else too that knew it and saw it ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... they stretched prone, they saw Cain running toward the ship from a great open shaft in the ground, a round, shiny thing ...
— The Women-Stealers of Thrayx • Fox B. Holden

... words a cold sickness rushed all over Alfred, beginning at his heart. He stood white and stupefied a moment; then, in the anguish of his heart, broke out into a great and terrible cry; it was like a young lion wounded with a poisoned shaft. ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade

... was not a painting, but a sculpture. It was not entirely completed until 1526. The cemetery is surrounded by a covered gallery open on the inside, where it was supported by thirty-nine columns, distant about eleven feet from each other. Thirty-one of these still exist; and upon the shaft of all but four of them, on the side facing the court of the cemetery, is sculptured, in high relief, a group of two figures,—one a living personage, and the other the cadaverous body by which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various

... eight or ten inches long, the barbless end being swathed in fibre so that it may fit easily into the socket of the eight or ten feet shaft. A long line is tied to a point above the swathing, and, being drawn taut along the shaft, is secured to the end by a series of clove-hitches. When the fish is struck the point is drawn from the socket, while the shaft acts as a cheek on, and an ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... where a heavy oil is prescribed will break down a machine or heat up a moving shaft so that it will "freeze" ...
— Simple Sabotage Field Manual • Strategic Services

... we owe our first duty to ourselves; wherefore, my soft-hearted young friend, it is better to spend a year or two raking in a fortune and ameliorating the lot of humanity, than to die in a state of soak, and a disused shaft, on or around the Rand, even as did Pulman the ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford

... staircase), the inclination is not very apparent; but, at the summit, it becomes so, and gives one the sensation of being in a ship that has heeled over, through the action of an ebb-tide. The effect UPON THE LOW SIDE, so to speak—looking over from the gallery, and seeing the shaft recede to its base—is very startling; and I saw a nervous traveller hold on to the Tower involuntarily, after glancing down, as if he had some idea of propping it up. The view within, from the ground—looking up, as through a slanted tube—is ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens

... search the whole country through for the little girl and find her at last, that Eudoxia felt that the moment of her triumph had come. She quietly allowed the bishop to depart, and then only did she send her last and best shaft at Joanna by informing her that she had in fact encouraged the child in her exploit on purpose to save her from the cloister. Her newly-found motherly feeling made her eloquent, and with a result that she had almost ceased to hope for: the warm-hearted ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... and strongly made of bejuco as to be well-nigh indestructible under ordinary conditions. Mr. Maimban got me a pair of defensive spears (so-called because never thrown, but used at close quarters) with hollow-ground blades of tempered steel, the head of the shaft being wrapped with bejuco, ornamentally stained and ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox

... Ilion is rent By shaft and pit; foiled waters wander slow Through plains where Simois and Scamander went To war with Gods and heroes long ago. Not yet to tired Cassandra, lying low In rich Mycenae, do the Fates relent: The bones of Agamemnon are a show, And ruined ...
— Rhymes a la Mode • Andrew Lang

... turning pale; "when last there I chanced suddenly upon her; and then at length I learned my boy's fate, and the truth of my own surmise; she confessed to the theft—and my child was dead! I have not dared to tell Adeline of this; it seems to me as if it would be like plucking the shaft from the wounded side—and she would die at once, bereft of the uncertainty that rankles within her. She has still a hope—it comforts her; though my heart bleeds when I think on its vanity. Let this ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... that it is not seen by it; for as that which looks receives the form of the pupil by a right line, so by that same line its form passes into that eye which gazes. And many times in the direction of that line a shaft flies from the bow of Love, with whom each weapon is light. Therefore, when I ask, "When first into mine eyes looked she?" it is as much as to ask, "When did her eyes and mine ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri

... of us kept on mining. Our luck was not very good, but we persevered, for there was nothing to be gained by fainting by the way. I went into an old abandoned shaft about ten feet deep and found the bottom filled with a big quartz boulder, and as I had been a lead miner in Wisconsin, I began drifting, and soon found bed rock, when I picked up a piece of pure gold that weighed four ounces. This was what I called a pretty ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly

... heavy indifference of the old man's mood flashed a sickening shaft of dread. He took the torch and the matches, and then with a cowardice that was alien to his character he stood trembling like a frightened child, while the dark figures disappeared as ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... the reader will learn in time, was not the only shaft by which my tranquillity was to be assaulted. My mother though she was, there was yet another death infinitely more heart-rending hanging over my head. The recollection is anguish that cannot end! Cannot did I say? Absurd mortal. Live for the living; and grieve ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... peered at the cable. Through the shaft she saw the angry flames shooting upward. The sparks were flying. The elevator had made its last trip and she realized it. She turned to the hall window and looked down upon the crowd. A ladder was raised. ...
— Ethel Hollister's Second Summer as a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson

... the counsels which he meditated; sublime and resolute was the conduct he adopted. He decided, with an originality of genius to which the conqueror of Marengo might have vailed, that the neck of the foe was the point at which the first fatal shaft of his excommunicating ire should be hurled. With rapid and decisive energy he concentrated all his powers for instantaneous action. He retired for a day to the seclusion of solitude, to summon and to spur the energies of the most self-reliant mind ...
— The Laws of Etiquette • A Gentleman

... ours, is becoming sated with cleverness, it is a delight to read the unvarnished story of Champlain. In saying that the adjective is ever the enemy of the noun, Voltaire could not have levelled the shaft at him, for few writers have been more sparing in their use of adjectives or other glowing words. His love of the sea and of the forest was profound, but he is never emotional in his expressions. Yet with all his soberness and steadiness ...
— The Founder of New France - A Chronicle of Champlain • Charles W. Colby

... would he exclaim, "that disdainful Apollo. Thus cold, callous, and triumphing in the work of destruction, must be the angel of death, who winged the shaft at my bright Acme. ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman

... it could sting a number of times, it would be much more difficult to bring it into a state of thorough domestication. A quiver full of arrows in the hand of a skilful marksman, is far more to be dreaded than a single shaft. ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth

... large club with a long shaft; the head is wood. It is used to start and when the ball is ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort

... "The shaft can be lowered to within a few inches of the top of the water," the lieutenant explained, "thus guarding against the danger of being hit. The officer in the conning tower peers into the binoculars and sees just what the ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake

... a frame above each animal's shoulders, and tuned to scale, so as to form two octaves, running from the highest note on the right or off-side of the leader to the lowest on the left or near-side of the shaft-horse. Melbury was among the last to retain horse-bells in that neighborhood; for, living at Little Hintock, where the lanes yet remained as narrow as before the days of turnpike roads, these sound-signals were still as useful to him and his neighbors as they had ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... hours at high speed. They then had to come up, as the navy saying has it, for "more juice." To be more explicit, a submersible has a mechanical process, a combination motor and dynamo between the engine, which drives the boat when it is on the surface, and the thrust block through which the shaft runs to the propeller. This motor-dynamo, serving as a motor, drives the boat when she is beneath the water. When the electric power is exhausted the boat comes to the surface, the motor is disconnected from the shaft and is run as a dynamo generating ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry

... Here, at the throat. The wound is small and deep, as though a shaft Of lightning struck him there between the helm And ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various

... bow, nor, conversely, a heavy arrow with a light bow. Arrows are generally made of one piece of wood, but sometimes a harder kind is used for the part joining the tip and which is dovetailed into the shaft. The tip is formed of steel, and is cylindrical in form. The length varies. A lady's bow of 5 feet calls for a 24-inch arrow, the customary length of ...
— Entertainments for Home, Church and School • Frederica Seeger

... my thigh, and shaped broad one end and thence to a point; and when I had made holes in the piece of bark, I lasht the broad end to the crosspiece, and the end that did be narrowed, I lasht secure to the shaft, and likewise made holes down the length of the bark, and lasht it also thereby to the shaft, and thiswise I had a pretty good paddle, that did be about ten feet long in the clear shaft, and the head to be ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson

... beneath a low spreading, rambling maple tree whose summer shade had not for years been pierced by a single shaft of sunlight. A rustic table and some rustic chairs were there. It was a spot she chose for the examination ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris

... room with a wash-hand stand and a very dirty window covered with yellow paper. I pulled open this window with great difficulty—it cannot have been opened for years—and found it gave on to a very small and deep interior court, just an air shaft round which the house was built. At the bottom was a tiny paved court not more than five foot square, entirely isolated save on one side where there was a basement window with a flight of steps leading down from the court through an iron grating. From this ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams

... affording relief. Nay, I am satisfied that there was genuine philosophy in the custom of the Greeks and the ancient Germans, in forcing victims of great sorrows to weep out the rankling barbed shaft. These had a species of licensed mourners, whose duty it was to soften the heart by melting strains of mournful melody, whereby, as by the application of a bland liniment, the rigid issues of the feelings were softened and opened, and the oppressed organ, the heart, was relieved of the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton

... an' twenty other men, were lowered down the shaft; an' before we saw daylight again, the Fair-Haired Annie an' the Bloody Thunder had gone to war. That was the first o' the underground fights which took place on the Comstock. I picked my men, and paid 'em ten dollars a day, an' called my gang 'The Avengers o' the Lord.' No one 'cept ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson

... a tried and trusted fellow-peon. A pocketful of "high-grade" might be worth several dollars. The American "jefe" sat in the hoisthouse, writing out requisitions for candles, dynamite, and kindred supplies for the "jefecitos," or straw bosses, of the hundred or more peons still lined up before the shaft. With the last batch of these in the bucket, we white men stepped upon the platform below it and dropped suddenly into the black depths of the earth, with now and then a stone easily capable of cracking a skull bounding swiftly with ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck

... most mighty on the cross there didst Thou do. Blind was Longinus never had seen from his birth-year. The side of our Lord Jesus he pierced it with the spear. Forth the blood issued swiftly, and ran down the shaft apace. It stained his hands. He raised them and put them to his face. Forthwith his eyes were opened and in every way might see. He is ransomed from destruction for he straight believed on Thee. From the sepulchre Thou rosest, and into Hell didst go, According to Thy purpose, and its gates didst ...
— The Lay of the Cid • R. Selden Rose and Leonard Bacon

... produced he deftly fashioned a shaft with which he hastened back to Idavold, where the gods were still hurling missiles at Balder, Hodur alone leaning mournfully against a tree the while, and taking no part in the game. Carelessly Loki approached ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber

... picturesque to our forerunners. The sedan chair, the blue china, the fan, farthingale, and powdered head dress have now got the "rime of age" and are seen in fascinating perspective, even as the mailed courser, the buff jerkin, the cowl, and the cloth-yard shaft were seen by the men ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... for the want-way; he saw Ralph presently, and stopped, and bent a bow which he held in his hand, and then came towards him warily, with the arrow nocked. But Ralph went to meet him with his sword in his sheath, and leading Falcon by the rein, and the man stopped and took the shaft from the string: he had no armour, but there was a little axe and a wood-knife in his girdle; he was clad in homespun, and looked like a carle of the country-side. Now he greeted Ralph, and Ralph gave him the sele of the day, and saw that the new-comer was ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris

... much to interest her. Its helter-skelter streets following the line of least resistance, its slapdash buildings, the scarred hillsides dotted with red shaft-houses beneath which straggled slate-colored dumps like long beards, were all indigenous to a life the manner of which she could only guess. Judged by her Bret Harte, the place ought to be picturesque. Perhaps it was, but Moya was given little ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine

... fireflies began to twinkle. In the steep curve of the Cinder and Bloodshot (between Fisher's and Wister stations) a cheerful train rumbled, with its engine running backward just like a country local. Its bright shaft of light wavered among the tall tree trunks. One would not imagine that it was less than six ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley

... only immovable, without even locks to pick or panels to break in, but the place was bare of windows, and the only communication which it could be said to have with the outside world at all was a shaft rising from the ceiling almost to the top of the house. Whether this served as a ventilator, or a means of lighting up the hole when both doors were shut, it was much too inaccessible to offer any apparent ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green

... combining all the excellences of the craft, being at once a "sound archer," who shot by ear, when his object was out of sight; "a lightning archer," whose arrow was as rapid as a thunderbolt; and a "sand-archer," who could send the shaft through a cart filled with sand and through hides "an hundred-fold thick."—Mahawanso, ch. xxiii. p. 143. In one of the legends connected with the early life of Gotama, before he attained the exaltation of Buddhahood, he is represented as displaying his strength by taking "a ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... him even to tremble at the audacity with which he overturned and invented theories, and to wonder at the depth at which he wrought beneath the superficialness and mock-mystery of the medical science of those days, like a miner sinking his shaft and running a hideous peril of the earth caving in above him. Especially did he devote himself to these plants; and under his care they had thriven beyond all former precedent, bursting into luxuriance of bloom, and most of them bearing ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... shieling, Thy graceful air, like arrow-shaft, A fiery flame concealing, Has left me to the marrow chaf'd. So winsome is thy smiling, Thy love-craft so beguiling, It binds me like the wilding, And I yield, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... "the Toffs' Shanty," and from both sides of the river the diggers begin to assemble in anticipation of a "spree." Across the scarred, disfigured valley, over the mullock-heaps, from every calico tent, from out of every shaft, from the edge of the dark forest itself, bearded men, toil-stained but smiling, bent on festivity, collect in Canvas Town's ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace

... discouraged, repeated: "Sir, bitte darf ich, may I be permitted?" And Brown's eyes flashed back a lightning shaft of inquiry. Then, carelessly smiling, he passed the Ross rifle over to the Herr Professor; and, at the same time, drew toward him that gentleman's silver-mounted ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers

... and I say, also, let each of us have a care lest he lose touch with the eternal pillar of the truth. There it is. It rises before you, gentlemen, that silent, somber shaft. It finds its summit in the sky. I pray God to keep my own hand in touch thereto, and my eyes turned not aside. And my life, with that of these others, is offered freely in proof that we covet not lawlessness, ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough

... cloth of their garments was somewhat coarse, but stout and serviceable. I knew, somehow, that they had been shooting at the butts, and, indeed, I could still hear a noise of men thereabout, and even now and again when the wind set from that quarter the twang of the bowstring and the plump of the shaft in the target. ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris

... the sage-brush bore a thin rim of frost. The herd, aroused, the dew glistening on flank and horn, were chewing the first cud of the day, and in twos and threes moving toward the water-hole for the morning's drink. Far off toward the camp the breakfast fire sent a shaft of blue smoke straight into the moveless air. A jack-rabbit, with erect ears, limped from the sage-brush just out of pistol-shot and regarded us a moment, his nose wrinkling and trembling. By the ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris

... glorious, gem our cloudless skies; And how to us his hand hath kindly given His peaceful laws, the purest grace of heaven, With power to widen his terrestrial sway, And give our blessings where he gives the day. Yet, should the stubborn nations still prepare The shaft of slaughter for the barbarous war, Tell them we know to tread the crimson plain, And God's own children never yield ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow

... above his back, were all that could be seen—perhaps a painted face would be seen for an instant under the horse's neck, but instantly disappearing—while the hiss of an arrow would tell that the rider had sped the shaft to its mark; the horse all the while going at full gallop. At no moment could any one of us have fired with any chance of hitting an Indian. The horses we could have shot without difficulty, but this was just what our enemies wanted. Could they but induce ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman

... You poor, poor thing,' she cried. For Wombo, tweaking aside the concealing blanket, showed the smooth shaft of a spear transfixed in the quivering flesh of Oola's arm, above the elbow. He had broken off the long end of the spear to expedite their flight—so he explained in his queer lingo—but Oola had cried ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed

... his heels and the friendly copse again. No one appearing he repeated the experiment twice and even thrice with a larger stone and at a nearer distance. Then he boldly skirted the cabin and dropped into the race-way at its side. Following it a few hundred yards he came upon a long disused shaft opening into it, which had been covered with a rough trap of old planks, as if to protect incautious wayfarers from falling in. Here a sudden and inexplicable fear overtook Johnny, and he ran away. When he reached the hotel, almost the first sight that met ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte

... under Virginia and Gold Hill, and the signal-bells that tell them what the superintendent above ground desires them to do are struck by telegraph as we strike a fire alarm. Sometimes men fall down a shaft, there, a thousand feet deep. In such cases, the usual plan is ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... they had one end of it fixed in a sort of coupling just above the cow-catcher. It was pretty hard keeping us off the platform, so we saw everything they did. The other end of that bar they held up so it stuck out like a shaft, and then the engine moved about an inch, then stopped, then moved about another inch, then stopped. Gee whiz, I was glad I wasn't down there with those men. Yum, yum, I like sandwiches, but I don't like being the middle part of one. Then ...
— Roy Blakeley's Camp on Wheels • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... with Taku-Wakin, he kept all the god customs of the people, but he never doubted, when he had found what he wanted to do, that the gods would be on his side. He showed me how every arrow was a little different from the others in the way the blood drain was cut or the shaft feathered. ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al

... was shot from the bow to gratify a request. She followed the quivering thing with her eye, as it sped like a shaft of light to its destined mark. To retrieve it she walked with the youth to where, fixed in a bale of cotton, it trembled, some hundred yards away. Slowly she returned by the youth's side, and drooped her head, listening to the wild mountain ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks

... beckoned him across the hall into the opposite room, the parlor. The parlor had a musty smell which was not unpleasant; in fact, slightly aromatic. There were wooden shutters which were tightly closed, all except one, through an opening in which a sunbeam came and transversed the room in a shaft ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... Holroyd's—Azuma-zi would sit and watch the big machine. Now and then the brushes would sparkle and spit blue flashes, at which Holroyd would swear, but all the rest was as smooth and rhythmic as breathing. The band ran shouting over the shaft, and ever behind one as one watched was the complacent thud of the piston. So it lived all day in this big airy shed, with him and Holroyd to wait upon it; not prisoned up and slaving to drive a ship as the other engines he knew—mere captive ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... the cliffs. Instead of the great arched vault of heaven one usually looks up to, one sees only that part of the sky immediately above the valley. It was like looking at the heavens from the bottom of a deep, narrow shaft. I looked in vain for well known beacon lights. They were not in sight. The towering cliffs shut them out. The sky looked strange to me, yet how beautiful it was! Through the gathering darkness we took one more look at the Yosemite Falls and betook ourselves to bed, to sleep the sleep once ...
— Out of Doors—California and Oregon • J. A. Graves

... some bright white shaft Burnt through the pine-tree roof, here burnt and there, As if God's messenger through the close wood-screen Plunged and re-plunged his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various

... rise of the steps, and the advantage the robbers were thereby acquiring. He and two of his men threw themselves forward, seized the ladder, if so it may be called, dragged it once more to the ground, and ascended. But Clifford, grasping with both hands the broken shaft of a cart that lay in reach, received the foremost invader with a salute that sent him prostrate and senseless back among his companions. The second shared the same fate; and the stout leader of the enemy, who, like a true general, had kept himself in ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... satisfactory, and more convenient to make. Much discomfort was caused by the excessive vibration caused by the early screws, but various improvements in their design reduced this. The fans of the screws are now attached by means of; bolts to a hollow sphere on the end of the shaft, and should a fan be damaged, it can be readily replaced. At first all screws were so constructed, that they could be lifted up through a well when sails alone were being used, so that it would not impede the ship. The funnels, too, being made to shut up like a telescope, a steamer could thus be ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston

... closet, and jerked open the door, at the same time throwing out his right hand, the better to judge the depth of the dark closet. His groping fingers closed on cold steel. His heart lost a throb, then raced madly on, as he clung weakly to the metal. An elevator shaft, and he had mistaken it ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln

... one or two smaller camps on the way to Osages, with board shanties and a shaft here and there sticking up from the earth. "All going on," the Senator said. I can't tell you, Mamma, the fun we had in the car; the party is so harmonious, and Nelson and the friend such amusing people to keep it going. The friend is too attractive, that long lean shape like Tom, and the ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn

... shape hovered before him in the garden, halfway between the gate and the house; it remained outside of the broad shaft of lamplight projected from the window. It wavered for a moment after it had become aware of his observation and then whisked round the corner of the lodge. This characteristic movement so effectually ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James

... and then crunched down, breaking off the point and splintering the thin, whittled wood for about an eighth of an inch. The fact that I could not control it bothered me inside and I instinctively clutched at the shaft of the pencil. It cracked in three places in my hand; the top end with the eraser fell down over my wrist to the bureau top and rolled in a rapid rattle to the edge where it fell to ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith

... comes not yet. [THUNDER, AND THE SOUND OF A STORM.] What! can the everlasting elements Feel with a worm like man? If so, the shaft Of mercy-winged lightning would not fall On stones and trees. My wife and children sleep: 5 They are now living in unmeaning dreams: But I must wake, still doubting if that deed Be just which is most necessary. O, Thou unreplenished lamp! whose narrow fire Is shaken by the wind, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... architecture in Vitruvius, IV, Chap. I (Gwilt's translation), quoted by Hart: "They measured a man's foot, and finding its length the sixth part of his height, they gave the column a similar proportion, that is, they made its height six times the thickness of the shaft measured at the base. Thus the Doric order obtained its proportion, its strength, and its beauty from the human figure. With a similar feeling they afterward built the Temple of Diana. But in that, seeking a new proportion, they used the female ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey

... also its difficulty. Is it easy to tell the exact truth, not as a moral exercise, but merely as a matter of exactness? Why do the careless talkers speak so often of "a sort of pink" or "a kind of revolving shaft" or tack on at the end of phrases the meaningless "something" or "everything" except that even in their unthinking minds there is the hazy impression—they really never have a well-defined idea—that they have not said exactly what they want ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton

... in many ways was Janki Meah, the white-haired, hot-tempered, sightless weaver who had turned pitman. All day long—except on Sundays and Mondays when he was usually drunk—he worked in the Twenty-Two shaft of the Jimahari Colliery as cleverly as a man with all the senses. At evening he went up in the great steam-hauled cage to the pit-bank, and there called for his pony—a rusty, coal-dusty beast, nearly as old as Janki Meah. The pony would ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling

... more ado, he led me in and out the marshy places, to a great round hole or shaft, bratticed up with timber. I never had seen the like before, and wondered how they could want a well, with so much water on every side. Around the mouth were a few little heaps of stuff unused to the daylight; and I thought at once of the tales I had heard concerning mines in Cornwall, ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore

... five-and-twenty yards or so, hoping that the roughness of the ground would cause him to stumble and the shield to shift so that I could get a chance at him behind it. But I did not, so at last, again praying to St. Hubert, I drew the big bow till the string touched my ear, and let drive. The shaft, pointed with tempered steel, struck the shield full in the centre, and by Heaven, pierced it, aye, and the mail behind, aye, and the flesh it covered, so that he, too, got ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard

... question, for Paul knew very well that the cable was all out. Our young readers may not all understand the meaning of Paul's question. If the vessel rides at anchor with a short cable, her motion, as she rises and falls with the sea, raises up the shaft of the anchor, which has a tendency to detach the flukes, or points from the bottom. But Paul had been careful the night before to give the Fawn all the cable he could spare; and it was evident, therefore, that the anchor was ...
— Little By Little - or, The Cruise of the Flyaway • William Taylor Adams

... interior blackness of the vault. For a time I believe I was indeed mad—the echoes rang with the piercing shrieks I could not restrain! Silent at last through sneer exhaustion I glared about me. The moonbeam had vanished, in its place lay a shaft of pale gray light, by which I could easily distinguish the whole length of the staircase and the closed gateway it its summit. I rushed up the ascent with the feverish haste of a madman—I grasped the iron grating with both hands and shook it fiercely It was firm as a rock, locked fast. I called ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli

... further counsel to prevent his fear, he turned away his face lest he should be scared at the sight of the weapon. Then taking three arrows from the quiver, he struck the mark given him with the first he fitted to the string. But, if chance had brought the head of the boy before the shaft, no doubt the penalty of the son would have recoiled to the peril of the father, and the swerving of the shaft that struck the boy would have linked them both in common ruin. I am in doubt, then, whether to admire ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent

... turning his attention to the huge ventilator shaft that fed fresh air into the Dewey when she was cruising on the surface. He remembered well that first undersea dive back home in an American port when he and Jack had discussed the possibilities of ever ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll

... to play in, with just as much lawn as would give them room to run,—no more—and that you could not change your abode; but that, if you choose, you could double your income, or quadruple it, by digging a coal-shaft in the middle of the lawn, and turning the flower-beds into heaps of coke. Would you do it? I hope not. I can tell you, you would be wrong if you did, though it gave you income sixty-fold instead ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... trotted, while the other galloped, holding his head very low and turned outward. This is due to a check rein, which keeps him in a position hardly natural. The orthodox mode in Russia is to have the shaft horse trotting while the other runs as described; the difference in the motion gives an attractive and dashy appearance to the turnout. Existence would be incomplete to a Russian without an equipage, and if he cannot own one he keeps it on hire. The gayety of Russian cities ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox

... the participatory efforts of the peasants rose to an unprecedented degree of enthusiasm, and they shouted in an intermittent chorus the advice, "Do you, Andrusha, take the head of the trace horse on the right, while Uncle Mitai mounts the shaft horse. Get up, Uncle Mitai." Upon that the lean, long, and red-bearded Uncle Mitai mounted the shaft horse; in which position he looked like a village steeple or the winder which is used to raise water from wells. The coachman whipped up his steeds afresh, but nothing came of it, and Uncle ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... and every stone of each of these is carved with varying ornamental designs. Between the second and third of them runs a line of cable moulding, an ornament which occurs also inside the door. Each arch has its own shaft, and the groups of five on each side are elaborately banded. The shafts have richly sculptured capitals, and in those on the south side, as well as in the tympanum, the signs of the Evangelists appear. The shafts second from the door on either side ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer

... remonstrated against this, her reply was, "The little things like it so much!" There was no use in telling her that the fifth comfit weighed a quarter of an ounce, and made every sale into a loss to her pocket. So I remembered the green tea, and winged my shaft with a feather out of her own plumage. I told her how unwholesome almond-comfits were, and how ill excess in them might make the little children. This argument produced some effect; for, henceforward, instead of the fifth comfit, she always told them to hold ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... good shot. The man made no sound as the arrow struck, but clawed for an instant at the shaft in his side, then dropped, to slide down the face of a low cliff. Musa, followed by his guards, ...
— The Players • Everett B. Cole

... what he wanted them to do. It gave Teddy an opportunity to talk back, and many a keen-pointed shaft did he hurl at the unwary who had been imprudent enough to try to make sport ...
— The Circus Boys On the Mississippi • Edgar B. P. Darlington

... a great poetic idea. To be sure there is a touch of stereotype in the chords and even in the pinch and clash of hostile motives. And there is not the distinctive melody,—final stamp and test of the shaft of inspiration. Yet in the enchantment of motion, sound and form, it seems mean-spirited to cavil at a want of something greater. One stands bewildered before such art ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp

... 8 Thou shaft not commit fornication, nor adultery. Neither shalt thou corrupt thyself with mankind. Thou shalt not make use of the word ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake

... lever of interference controlling diaphragm valve that operates interference clutch. G, feed controlling diaphragm valve. H, diaphragm valve controlling operation of interference clutch. I, interference pin to engage emergency clutch. J, main shaft driving carbide feeding disc. Y, safety ...
— Oxy-Acetylene Welding and Cutting • Harold P. Manly

... again about the low raftered loft. The window in the rafters was hung with cob-webs; the light came through it dimly, a shaft of sun-beams dancing on the floor; they fell on her hair beneath the cap and the curls glistened like gold. Her eyes were ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs



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