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Snowball   Listen
verb
Snowball  v. i.  
1.
To throw snowballs.
2.
To increase in magnitude at an accelerating rate, achieving large proportions; by analogy with a snowball rolling down a steep hill, causing a large snow slide.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Snowball" Quotes from Famous Books



... solved the problem without waiting for the government to make up its mind. They just made up their swags and "humped the bluey" [2] for the coast. That is how the remarkable phenomenon of the human snowball marches commenced. ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett

... beaming and his eyeballs rolling with delight as he danced nimbly about the deck, dodging the strokes of that terrible tail, with his gleaming axe upraised in readiness to deal a blow at the first opportunity. At length there was a momentary pause in the tremendous struggles, a pause of which Snowball (all black cooks who go to sea seem to be dubbed "Snowball") promptly availed himself. A quick flash of his axe-blade in the sun, a dull crunching thud, and the back-bone was severed at the junction of the ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood

... evil and repress them, would be the duty of society and governments, if less noble thoughts did not occupy their attention. The evil is that the indolence in the Philippines is a magnified indolence, an indolence of the snowball type, if we may be permitted the expression, an evil that increases in direct proportion to the square of the periods of time, an effect of misgovernment and of backwardness, as we said, and not a cause thereof. Others will hold the contrary opinion, especially those who have a hand in the ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal

... with outdoor ferns, bowers of snowy dogwood in season and the fluffy wild pink azalea are very decorative, and so are the spring and early summer shrubs: syringa, deutzia, flowering almond and Japanese snowball. ...
— Entertaining Made Easy • Emily Rose Burt

... Poor Brother started out, with the ham under his arm, to find the home of the dwarfs. He trudged on through the snow until he saw seven queer little dwarfs rolling a huge snowball, at the ...
— Story Hour Readers Book Three • Ida Coe and Alice J. Christie

... made a great snowball, And brought it in to roast; He laid it down before the fire, And soon ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole

... court to see Phineas Finn tried, and all the world who could find an entrance would do the same to see the great statesmen and the noble lords. The importance of such an affair increases like a snowball as it is rolled on. Many people talk much, and then very many people talk very much more. The under-sheriffs of the City, praiseworthy gentlemen not hitherto widely known to fame, became suddenly conspicuous and popular, as being the dispensers of admissions to seats in the court. ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope

... gentlemen, source of my tenderest care; the brokerage, the speculation for the account, and my good friend, the Minister of the Interior, and of the Travaux Publics; and the snowball of my fortune, which must stop unproductive till I recover;—how can I ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle

... ever-increasing halo of charm and splendor, and this halo of sexual origin increases in its turn the sentiments of sympathy; and the sentiments of sympathy increase the sexual desire. In this way mutual suggestions grow like a snowball, and rapidly attain the culminating point of amorous intoxication, or what is called ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... the two hostile forces were called North-Enders and South-Enders. In 1850 the North-Enders still survived as a legend, but in practice it was a battle of the Latin School against all comers, and the Latin School, for snowball, included all the boys of the West End. Whenever, on a half-holiday, the weather was soft enough to soften the snow, the Common was apt to be the scene of a fight, which began in daylight with the Latin ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... do not suit me. They wear their hearts on their hands and on their mouths. You present yourself for admission to a club. They say, 'I promise to give you a white ball. It will be an alabaster ball—a snowball! They vote. It's a black ball. Life seems a vile affair when ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France

... When we came within a town, and found the church clocks all stopped, the dial-faces choked with snow, and the inn-signs blotted out, it seemed as if the whole place were overgrown with white moss. As to the coach, it was a mere snowball; similarly, the men and boys who ran along beside us to the town's end, turning our clogged wheels and encouraging our horses, were men and boys of snow; and the bleak wild solitude to which they at last dismissed us was a snowy Sahara. One ...
— The Holly-Tree • Charles Dickens

... not considered as yet,—that of immense pressure in consequence of the vast accumulations of snow within circumscribed spaces. We see the same effects produced on a small scale, when snow is transformed into a snowball between the hands. Every boy who balls a mass of snow in his hands illustrates one side of glacial phenomena. Loose snow, light and porous, and pure white from the amount of air contained in it, is in this way presently converted into hard, compact, almost ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various

... I used to do in the city, when the boys in the street were throwing snowballs, and I had to go by with a high hat on my head and pretend not to know they were behind me. I always felt a cold chill down my spinal column, and I could feel that snowball, whether it came or not, right in the small of my back. And I can feel one of those men pulling his bow now, and the arrow sticking ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis

... branch, twists an' turns an' ramifications, but I never heerd tell of a Keehotey amongst 'em. Not even 'mongst their wives' folks, nuther. Your own ma was a Woodley, and your pa's second was a Snowball, ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond

... Roll a snowball and put it on a plate. While rolling, contrive to slip a piece of camphor into the top of it. The camphor must be about the size and shape of a chestnut, and it must be pushed into the soft snow so as to be invisible—the smaller end uppermost, ...
— My Book of Indoor Games • Clarence Squareman

... his lips, "how can I part with you?" And dropping his head on the hard, prickly cushion, by which he knelt, he cried in a way that would considerably have astonished the youths with whom he had, a few hours earlier, engaged in a vigorous snowball fight. They only knew a bright, mirthful Aubrey Clare, the cleverest lad in his class, and the "jolliest fellow out;" none but Kate had any idea of the deepest affections of his boyish heart, and she truly sympathised with her half-brother in his love ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various

... Marvyn set his face as a flint, and said, "He went out from us because he was not of us,"—whereat old Candace lifted her great floury fist from the kneading-trough, and, shaking it like a large snowball, said, "Oh, you go 'long, Massa Marvyn; ye'll live to count dat ar' boy for de staff o' your old age yet, now I tell ye; got de makin' o' ten or'nary men in him; kittles dat's full allers will bile over; good yeast will ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various

... north in the merchant town (Nidaros), in an assault upon him in the twilight as he was going to the evening song. When he heard the whistling of the blow he held up his cloak with his hands against it; thinking, no doubt, it was a snowball thrown at him, as young boys do in the streets. Ottar fell by the stroke; but his son, Alf Hrode, who just at the same moment was coming into the churchyard, saw his father's fall, and saw that the ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson

... forgetfulness, you must keep it up; regret comes back threefold with soberness. It seems silly and weak for a man who has been buffeted as I have, who is supposed to gather wisdom and philosophy as a snowball gathers snow as it rolls down hill, to try to drown regret and disappointment in liquor. A man never knows how weak he is till he meets the one woman and she will ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath

... records were engraved with a special knife upon bamboo slips and wooden tablets. The impracticability of such a process, as applied to books, never seems to have dawned upon those writers; and this snowball of error, started in the 7th century, long after the knife and the tablet had disappeared as implements of writing, continued to gather strength as time went on. Recent researches, however, have placed it beyond doubt that ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various

... 1897 was as the rolling snowball. It is unnecessary to refer to them all in detail. The Union Ground, one of the public squares of Johannesburg, was granted to a syndicate of private individuals upon such terms that they were enabled to sell the right, or portion of it, at once for L25,000 in cash. ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick

... way to do that," said Roger. "But with the communications controlled by Vidac's men, we don't have the chance of a snowball on ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell

... figured in my dreams, not including indefinite ferns, moss, grass, weeds and trees, and several plants noted somewhat in detail yet unlike any form known to me. Of the recognizable plants a number were used somewhat cleverly for their analogical significance. Of these may be mentioned the snowball and hydrangea whose flowers as every botanist knows are sterile, the size of the individual blossom being gained at the expense of loss of stamens and pistils. These plants were plainly used to indicate barrenness and the predominance of traits ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... middle period his pages overflow with decorative Cupids and tiny devils, joyful girls, dainty amourettes, and Parisian putti—they blithely kick their legs over the edges of eternity, and smile as if life were a snowball jest or a game at forfeits. They are adorable. His women are usually strong-backed, robust Amazons, drawn with a swirling line and a Rubens-like fulness. They are conquerors. Before these ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... open, and I saw Mrs. Mitchell holding her head with both hands, and the face of Turkey grinning round the corner of the open door. Evidently he wanted to entice her to follow him; but she had been too much astonished by the snowball in the back of her neck even to look in the direction whence the blow had come. So Turkey stepped out, and was just poising himself in the delivery of a second missile, when she ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald

... dress. It is said that when he was a freshman, the boys at the Cambridge High School, a good many of whom were much bigger than he was, undertook to throw snowballs at him one day as he went by. Whereupon Curtis marched up to the biggest boy and told him if another snowball were thrown at him he would thrash him and he might pass it over to the boy who did it. The result was that ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... amber fluid that tasted like particularly bad consomme. Again it would be served with all the thickness of a puree. Her bread was similarly variable in its undesirability. There were biscuits that held all the flaky charm of a snowball. There were loaves of bread that reminded one of the stories of hardtack in Cuba during the late unpleasantness. There were English muffins that rested upon poor Brinley's digestion as the world may fairly be presumed to rest upon the shoulders of Atlas, and, indeed, it is a tradition ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs

... and imposing as might be; because we could not help remembering that this magnificent fleet was sailing in an enemy's bay, and that it was filled with troops for the invasion of that enemy's country. Thus, like a snowball, we had gathered as we went on, and from having set out a mere handful of soldiers, were now become an army, formidable as well from its numbers ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig

... could have no triumph over him. He was alone in his great flight. Once a projection caused him to turn a little to one side. He was in momentary danger of turning entirely, and then of rolling head over heels like a huge snowball, but with a mighty effort he righted himself, and continued the descent on the runners, with the heels plowing into the ice ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler

... admiration for Teter Johnston. His undaunted courage, as exhibited in snowball fights, when, with only a handful of followers he would charge upon the rest of the school, and generally put them to flight; his reckless enterprise and amazing luck at marbles and other games; his constant ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley

... that the balance they gave for nothing to my father was large. He bought more cotton, and more machinery, and more factories with it; employed more men to make wealth for him, and saw his fortune increase like a rolling snowball. He prospered enormously, but the work men were no better off than at first, and they dared not rebel and demand more of the money they had made, for there were always plenty of starving wretches outside willing to take their places on the old terms. Sometimes he met with a check, ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw

... better received. Party politics had crushed out the best elements of political life, and to be independent of either party gave a candidate, as an agent told Judge Lindsay when he was contesting the governorship of Colorado, "as much chance as a snowball would have in hell." So that reformers everywhere were eager to hear of a system of voting that would free the electors from the tyranny of parties, and at the same time render a candidate independent of the votes of heckling minorities, and dependent only on the votes of the men who ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence

... "Styx"; plied with music and guns the echoes in these alarming galleries; saw every form of stalagmite and stalactite in the sculptured and fretted chambers,—the icicle, the orange-flower, the acanthus, the grapes, and the snowball. We shot Bengal lights into the vaults and groins of the sparry cathedrals, and examined all the masterpieces which the four combined engineers, water, limestone, gravitation, and time, could ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... mind perceives IN ITSELF, or is the immediate object of perception, thought, or understanding, that I call IDEA; and the power to produce any idea in our mind, I call QUALITY of the subject wherein that power is. Thus a snowball having the power to produce in us the ideas of white, cold, and round,—the power to produce those ideas in us, as they are in the snowball, I call qualities; and as they are sensations or perceptions in our understandings, ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke

... could snowball on Ravenhurst. It isn't only the rats that desert a sinking ship; so does anyone else who has ...
— A Spaceship Named McGuire • Gordon Randall Garrett

... played with one small ball, in size anywhere from that of a golf to a tennis ball. If played in the snow, a hard frozen snowball may be used, or ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft

... wonder. Then she went slowly up and down the box-bordered walks, the full skirt of her "old lady's gown" trailing stiffly over the white gravel, her delicate face rising against the blossomless shrubs of snowball and bridal-wreath, like a faintly tinted flower that had been blighted before it fully bloomed. Around her the garden was fragrant as a rose-jar with the lid left off, and the very paths beneath were red and white with fallen petals. Hardy cabbage ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow

... might say that it is a spheroid about the size of an apple, and the color of one of Lorraine's sunsets. This would be absolutely worthless to a child of the frigid zone. Had he been told that an orange was about the size of a snowball, much the color of the flame of a candle, that the peeling came off like the skin from a seal, and that the inside was good to eat, he would have known more of this fruit. The images which lie in our minds and from which we construct new pictures are ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster

... in the early part of the month. The best sorts now are White Gem, or Snowball. All the Year Round will please those who like ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons

... you think it would be the best way? I never can save enough,—never can pay off what I owe; and it rolls like a snowball." ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... hearing. More than the prospect had at first promised or threatened she had felt herself going on in a crowd and with a multiplied escort; the four ladies pictured by her to Sir Luke Strett as a phalanx comparatively closed and detached had in fact proved a rolling snowball, condemned from day to day to cover more ground. Susan Shepherd had compared this portion of the girl's excursion to the Empress Catherine's famous progress across the steppes of Russia; improvised settlements appeared at each turn of the road, villagers ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James

... part of the earth's surface are nearly always white. They have forced their way to the sun along a frozen path and look akin to the perils of their road: the snow-threatened lily of the valley, the chill snowdrop, the frosty snowball, the bleak hawtree, the wintry wild cherry, the wintry dogwood. As the eye swept the park expanse this morning, here and there some of these were as the last tokens of winter's mantle instead of ...
— A Cathedral Singer • James Lane Allen

... of [snowballs] to throw at the snowman. Just as Bob threw one, Jimmy Crow lit on the shoulder of the [snowman], and the [snowball] knocked him off into a deep drift! [Jimmy Crow] was not hurt, but he was angry. He flew at [Bob], and carried off his [cap] in his [beak], and dropped it into that same deep [snowdrift]. Then [Bob] had to wade through snow over his [boots], ...
— Jimmy Crow • Edith Francis Foster

... claimed to have piloted rafts of big men up and down the Nile, and was not to be frowned down by anybody. He was a gorgeous, oriental dresser, and had a wardrobe as big and grand as Berry Wall's; so the "Corks" were fortunate indeed in securing the great man. He was known descriptively as the "Snowball of the Nile." ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne

... "My two friends, Johnson and Jones, were once having an argument. There were eight or nine inches of snow on the ground. The argument got heated, and Johnson picked up a snowball and threw it at Jones from a distance of not more than five yards. During the transit of that snowball, believe me or not, as you like, the weather changed and became hot and summer like, and Jones, instead of being hit with a snowball, ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers

... freedom expressed in the merry uproar of all their voices! What care they for the ferule and birch rod now? Were boys created merely to study Latin and arithmetic? No; the better purposes of their being are to sport, to leap, to run, to shout, to slide upon the ice, to snowball. ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... exist on your mountain in this rude season! Sure you must be become a snowball! As I was not in England in forty-one, I had no notion of such cold. The streets are abandoned; nothing appears in them: the Thames is almost as solid. Then think what a campaign must be in such a season! Our army was under ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... envious thoughts too. 'I should like very well to wear a scarlet riding-dress and fur tippet, and a long red feather in my hat, and go a-hunting on old Snowball, instead of having to stop at home and take care of grandfather and ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin

... first baby blue fox said to the second, "Who are the snow ghosts the ghosts of?" The second baby blue fox answered, "Everybody who makes a snowball, a snow man, a snow fox or a snow fish or a snow pattycake, everybody ...
— Rootabaga Stories • Carl Sandburg

... reasonably state that the problems of mankind have not been solved by the use of brute force. World War I produced a world-chilling snowball of war karma that swelled into World War II. Only the warmth of brotherhood can melt the present colossal snowball of war karma which may otherwise grow into World War III. This unholy trinity will banish forever the ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda

... downward swoop towards the river, tearing open the liquid blackness with its crystal blade of fire. The rain ceased not. But soon the moon, peeping out from the tops of a jagged wall above us, looking like a soiled, half-melted snowball, shone full down the far-stretching gorge, and now its broad lustre shed itself, like powdered silver, over the whole scene, so that one could have imagined oneself in the living splendor of some eternal sphere ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle

... were called in by their captain, for they were first at bat. The Kingstonians dispread themselves over the field in their various positions. The umpire tossed to the nervous Reddy what seemed to be a snowball, whose whiteness he immediately covered with dust from the box. The Charlestonian batter came to the plate and tapped it smartly three or four times. ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes

... little girl is not named Sarah," said Mrs. Cat. "She is called Snowball, and she is just as cute as she can be. She is all white, like a ball of snow, and so we call her Snowball. But she is lost, and I'm afraid I'll never find her again," and the kittie's mamma began to cry, and she wiped ...
— Uncle Wiggily's Travels • Howard R. Garis

... Ponderosa, Golden Queen or Sunrise, Peach, Plum-Shaped Yellow, Red Cherry, Strawberry or Ground Cherry Turnips.—Milan Extra Early, Purple Top, Early White Flat Dutch Strap Leaf, Early Six Weeks or Snowball, Purple Top Strap Leaf, Purple Top White Globe, Purple Top Scotch or Aberdeen, Amber Globe, Seven Top, Skirving's Imp. Purple Top, White Sweet or White Russian, Sweet German Miscellaneous Beggar Weed Broom Corn.—Evergreen Canary Chafas Hemp—Russian Honey Locust ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis

... boy," said I, "that isn't what I want. Run, and jump, and shout as much as you please; skate, and slide, and snowball; but do it with politeness to other boys and girls, and I'll agree you shall find just as much ...
— The King's Daughter and Other Stories for Girls • Various

... his brother to the most secluded corner of the garden. There, in a thicket of lime-trees and old bushes of black currant, elder, snowball-tree, and lilac, there stood a tumble-down green summer-house, blackened with age. Its walls were of lattice-work, but there was still a roof which could give shelter. God knows when this summer-house was built. There was a tradition ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... A snowball hit the window before him, a soft crash and spread of drip, and there rose from the mob a fiendish yell that seemed itself a power, making the heart ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim

... the Snowball bush, where the ground was covered with white petals dropped from the countless blossom-balls that made passers-by ...
— The Long Ago • Jacob William Wright

... Will Bailey, throwing himself into a great arm-chair before the glowing fire. "My! I believe I'm a snowball." ...
— Tip Lewis and His Lamp • Pansy (aka Isabella Alden)

... Johnny, 'that's easy. Boule de neige is the French for snowball, and jaune means yellow, so jaune jaquette means yellow jacket. I learned that in our French reader. I expect one of the cats is all white and the other is a yellow one. ...
— Dickey Downy - The Autobiography of a Bird • Virginia Sharpe Patterson

... along in then, and read while I get the children ready. Oh, they're out now," she added, as they turned the comer and saw the twins, looking like industrious brownies, rolling a huge snowball across the yard, while Molly was expending her artistic talent on the building ...
— Glenloch Girls • Grace M. Remick

... beauty was a huge black cat, called Snowball. He was given to Mr. Connor by a miner's wife, who lived in a cabin high up on the mountain. She said she would let him have the cat on the condition that he would continue to call him Snowball, as she had done. She named him Snowball, she said, to make herself laugh every ...
— The Hunter Cats of Connorloa • Helen Jackson

... ancestor. Besides the fact that the number of stories in which the contamination is found is relatively very small, there is also to be considered the fact that these few examples are recent. No one is known to have existed more than seventy-five years ago. Hence the "snowball" theory will better explain the composite nature of the gypsy version and our story of "Zaragoza" than a "missing-link" theory. These two cycles, consisting as they do of a series of tests of skill, are peculiarly ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler

... time that I have my cheeks filled out with paraffin, which I believe cakes and gives the appearance of youth. But Mrs. Ostermaier knew a woman who had done so, and being hit on one side by a snowball, the padding broke in half, one part moving up under her eye and the second lodging at the angle of her jaw. She tried lying on a hot-water bottle to melt the pieces and bring them together again, but they did ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... guy!" cried Ed Brown, with a laugh, sending a well-aimed snowball straight against the umbrella, which it shook with a thud. He was on the point of following up ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley

... began. "We really thought it was time to begin work on the land," said the people; but they could put up with the cold—there was still time enough. They proceeded to snowball one another, and set their sledges in order; all through the winter there had been no toboggan-slide. Soon the snow was up to one's ankles, and the slide was made. Now it might as well stop snowing. It might lie a week or two, so that people might enjoy a few proper sleighing-parties. But ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... lighted up like a pastry-cook on twelfth-day; wanted something solid, and got a great lump of sweetmeat; found it as cold as a stone, all froze in my mouth like ice; made me jump again, and brought the tears in my eyes; forced to spit it out; believe it was nothing but a snowball, just set up for show, and covered over with a little sugar. Pretty way to spend money! Stuffing, and piping, and hopping! never could rest till every farthing was gone; nothing left but his own fool's pate, and even that he could ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)

... bitter in their faces, and that peculiar thickening of the air which they had noticed had become first a dark blue and then a whitening pall, in which the bear was lost. They still kept on. Suddenly Julian felt himself struck between the eyes by what seemed a snowball, and his companions were as quickly spattered by gouts of monstrous clinging snowflakes. Others as quickly followed—it was not snowing, it was snowballing. They at first laughed, affecting to retaliate with these whirling, flying masses shaken like clinging feathers ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte

... concentrated all their energies in their lungs, so that up and down the street the one cry shrilled increasingly: "Git a hoss! Git a hoss! Git a hoss! Mister, why don't you git a hoss?" But the mahout in charge, sitting solitary on the front seat, was unconcerned—he laughed, and now and then ducked a snowball without losing any of his good-nature. It was Mr. Eugene Morgan who exhibited so cheerful a countenance between the forward visor of a deer-stalker cap and the collar of a fuzzy gray ulster. "Git a hoss!" the ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington

... the travellers, and then" (Homais lowered his voice and looked round him) "who is to prevent me from sending a short paragraph on the subject to the paper? Eh! goodness me! an article gets about; it is talked of; it ends by making a snowball! ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert

... out, and returned to a diversion they had been amusing themselves with for several days, the making a prodigious snowball. They had begun by making a small globe of snow with their hands, which they turned over and over, till, by continually collecting fresh matter, it grew so large that they were unable to roll it any farther. Here Tommy observed ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day

... I'm a proud man when I think of it. There were others who did the showy part of the work, of course, the speechmaking and the bill-framing and all that, but I was the first man to set the Protection snowball rolling. It wasn't much I had to say, but I said it. A glass of wine with you, Sir ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... that date was a snowball fight. Whether snow is less plentiful, or students are too cultured and too refined for these rough pastimes it is impossible to say, but certain it is that a really great snowball fight is also a thing of the past. In those days they were ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black

... be built by one patrol according to their own ideas of fortification, with loopholes, etc., for looking out. When finished, it will be attacked by hostile patrols, using snowballs as ammunition. Every scout struck by a snowball is counted dead. The attackers should, as a rule, number at least twice the strength of ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America

... suddenly pivoted clear around and sat now facing him, an eager, mittened hand staying his hard, skilful, obedient fingers, already making the snowball. ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson

... long as he does," growled Terry, "and that'll be about as long as a snowball in hell. What you ought to do, Jones, is what any man of spirit ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White

... the movement goes on more and more quickly, and on an ever- increasing scale, like a snowball, till at last a public opinion in harmony with the new truth is created, and then the whole mass of men is carried over all at once by its momentum to the new truth and establishes a new social order ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy

... he not laugh, and say it was nothing? Alberic quite knocked me down with a great snowball the other day, and Sir Eric laughed, and said I ...
— The Little Duke - Richard the Fearless • Charlotte M. Yonge

... stately habit is the old Snowball. When well grown, few shrubs can surpass it in beauty. Its great balls of bloom are composed of scores of individually small flowers, and they are borne in such profusion that the branches often bend beneath their weight. Of late years there has been widespread ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford

... this, with no bed-curtains and the snow just over us. It is rum, though—summer and winter all muddled up together so closely that you stand with your right leg in July, picking flowers and catching butterflies, and the left leg in January, so that you can turn over and make a snowball or pick icicles off ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn

... Fredrikke S. Palmer Mrs. Oakes Ames The Woman's Journal Printers: E.L. Grimes, M.J. Grimes, William Grimes Mary A. Livermore William Lloyd Garrison Wendell Phillips Julia Ward Howe Armenia White Margaret Foley Thomas Wentworth Higginson Mrs. David Hunt The Anti and the Snowball ...
— The Torch Bearer - A Look Forward and Back at the Woman's Journal, the Organ of the - Woman's Movement • Agnes E. Ryan

... stand behind this tree, I will stand behind that one." She took for herself the larger shelter. "Then you, each of us, get ready this way a pile of snowballs. I say, Make ready! Fire! and we snowball one another like everything. The first Indian that's hit, he falls down dead. Then the other rushes ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell

... half an hour was allowed for getting ready, and most of that time was consumed in making snowballs and in fortifying the edge of the woods by throwing up a snowbank. Then a bugle belonging to one of the students sounded out, and the great snowball battle began. ...
— Dave Porter and His Rivals - or, The Chums and Foes of Oak Hall • Edward Stratemeyer

... recalled her excited little face, flushed with eagerness as she described the expected spread. Mentally also he conceived a vivid picture of the long waiting on Christmas Eve, the slowly fading hope, the final bitter disappointment. While engaging in furious snowball fights with Ginger, Douglas, and Henry, while annoying peaceful passers-by with well-aimed snow missiles, while bruising himself and most of his family black and blue on long and glassy slides along the garden paths, while purloining his family's clothes to adorn various unshapely snowmen, ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton

... a pile of these arrears very soon, and it swells like a rolling snowball. The bigger it gets, the more stupid I get. The case is so hopeless, and I feel that I am wallowing in such a bog of nonsense, that I give up all idea of getting out, and abandon myself to my fate. The despairing ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... albinesses. There are others that are shot through with golden light, with tawny or fulvous tinges in various degree,— POSITIVE or STAINED blondes, dipped in yellow sunbeams, and as unlike in their mode of being to the others as an orange is unlike a snowball. The albino-style carries with it a wide pupil and a sensitive retina. The other, or the leonine blonde, has an opaline fire in her clear eye, which the brunette can hardly match with her ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... "I saw you throw a snowball. Aren't you ashamed of yourself that you, a fellow at the head of the eleven, should set such a bad example? Don't suppose that your size or position shall get you off. Come before ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar

... through solar engines, or by concentrating it in furnaces. At the St. Louis Exposition a few years ago, a Portuguese priest exhibited a solar engine called a heliophore, in which, by means of the sun's rays, the temperature was raised to 6000 degrees F., and a cube of iron placed in it melted like a snowball. The sun helps to raise the tides and some day they may be used to produce power. Many experiments are being made with both solar and tidal energy, some of them successful in a small way, but nothing that is ready to stand the test of every-day ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory

... his efforts. Johnny meanwhile, who was as hard as nails, no sooner recovered from a thumping than he renewed and redoubled his loud contempt for a great lout over six feet high, who had never drawn a sword or pulled a trigger. And now for the winter this book would be a perpetual snowball for him to pelt his big brother with, and yet (like a critic) be scarcely fair object for a hiding. In season out of season, upstairs down-stairs, even in the breakfast and the dinner chambers, this young imp poked ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore

... see, where I made my mistake, as I have said, was in forgetting that in doing as I did, picturing horror, like a snowball rolling, it would grow greater. The idea of horror, started, my mind pictured one, and it inspired greater horror, which in turn reacted on my all too reactive apparatus. As you said, the things changed as you watched, ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell

... ceremonies, adding another link to the Park-to-Park plan. If it had not been for the saltpeter from this cave the Battle of New Orleans would have been lost, for from this mineral gunpowder that saved the day was made. So vast is one of its caverns, the Snowball Dining Room, 267 feet underground, that hundreds of members of the Associated Press held a dinner there in 1940. Mammoth Cave is reached by U. S. Highway 70, west from Cave City, and one hundred miles south of Louisville. The vast national park of which it is ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas

... I'll do, Miss Grey," he said, "and what I'll get our fellows to do. We'll have one, big snowball fight. And the side that gets licked 'll stay licked till school's out next spring. And there won't be any more scrapping all winter. We'll do that, won't ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene

... clicked and she glanced down at the yard. Her father was bringing Rose and Nan to the house! They were walking briskly, and advanced to the door laughing. The women looked up, saw Phil, and waved their hands. Her father flung a snowball at the window. Happiness was in the faces of the trio—a happiness that struck Phil with forebodings. She had never in her imaginings thought an hour would come when she would begrudge her father ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson

... griffins on the doorstep stared straight before them with an expression of utter indifference; the feathery foliage of the white birch swayed gently back and forth; the peonies lifted their crimson heads airily; the snowball bush bent under the weight of its white blooms till it swept the grass; the fountain ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard

... emerging, and lay about two hundred small eggs to the female, from which the caterpillars soon hatch, and begin their succession of moults. One writer gave black haw and snowball as their favourite foods, and the length of the caterpillar when full grown nearly two inches. They are either a light brown with yellow markings, or green with yellow; all of them have white granules on the body, and a blue-black horn ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter

... he would fight too if I were not careful. It is a singular fact, though, that the white squirrel has not even a little pugnacity. He either cannot fight, or he is too well behaved. Here, Mr. Clarke, show Snowball this nut, and then hide it in your pocket, and see ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey

... Judge Popinot, the gifts obtained through the Abbe de Veze, and the assistance lent by the firm of Mongenod must produce a large capital; and that this capital, increased during the last dozen years by grateful returns from those assisted, must have grown like a snowball, inasmuch as the charitable stewards of it spent so little on themselves. Little by little he began to see clearly into this vast work, and his desire to co-operate in ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac

... contrive in a colder climate with smaller means. Here was a fountain trellised over by a framework rich in roses and our lady's bower; here were pinks, gilly-flowers, pansies, lavender, and the new snowball shrub recently produced at Gueldres, and a little bush shown with great pride by Anton, the snow-white rose grown in King ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge

... accompanied by some lady friends and Mr. Brace, and at another point by Mr. Whalley, the chairman of the company. These arrivals were acknowledged with vociferous cheering. The procession, like a rolling snowball, gained bulk as it proceeded, and before it reached the station, comprehended a very large proportion of the inhabitants,—ladies and gentlemen,—with a good sprinkling of their neighbours. At the station there was a considerable delay, awaiting the arrival of the train from Newtown. At last ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine

... front yard sloping up to the house was almost full of shrubbery in a state of overgrown prosperity. There were lilacs, dark with buds, and what Anne, who was devotedly curious in matters of growing life, thought althea, snowball and a small-leaved yellow rose. All this runaway shrubbery looked, in a way of speaking, inpenetrable. It would have taken so much trouble to get through that you would have felt indiscreet in trying it. The driveway only seemed to have been brave enough to pass it without getting choked up, a ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown

... friends were patched up. Dig, under a pledge of secrecy, was initiated into the whole mystery of the sack, and the wedge of paper, and the wax vestas, promising on his part to respect his friend's reputation in the matter of the "fifty-six billion Snowball." ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed

... window open? There are three or four windows open!" gleefully shouted a fuzzy, Woolen Boy Doll. "Look at the snow blowing in! Hurray! Now we can have a snowball fight without going outside. Come on!" cried the Woolen Boy Doll to a little Flannel Pig who had just been stuffed with cotton. "Come on, have a ...
— The Story of a Plush Bear • Laura Lee Hope

... items of information Peter and Nat added to their accumulating fund. Through the long summer they worked hard, classifying all they learned and collecting more as one gathers up snow by rolling a snowball. ...
— The Story of Leather • Sara Ware Bassett

... Again these fellows were blue-eyed and drab, and, as such, were decent and reasonable, while he was brown-eyed and preposterously fair-haired. To be sure, it was only his oval face that saved him from the horrible indignity of being called "Snowball." ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond

... meeting of the local branch of the Painters' Society, of which Owen was the secretary, and as the snow continued to fall, he occupied himself after dinner in the manner his wife suggested, until four o'clock, when Frankie returned from school bringing with him a large snowball, and crying out as a piece of good news that the snow was still falling heavily, and that ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell

... of an individual player is too strongly aroused, he spoils the game, just as an angry player spoils a friendly wrestling match or snowball fight, and just as a thoroughly frightened passenger spoils a trip down the rapids, which was meant to be simply thrilling. The instincts are active in play, but they must not be too active, for ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth

... I'd have broken the—the truth to my mother then, only something in her face corked me tight. From the moment I took the plunge, the consciousness of what a rotten ass I'd been had been growin' like a snowball. But on the voyage out"—a change comes into the weary, level voice in which Beauvayse has told his story—"I forgot to grouse, and by the time we'd lifted the Southern Cross I wasn't so much regretting what I'd done as wondering whether I should ever shoot myself because ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... said Edward, "after getting a certain amount of knowledge, other knowledge comes very fast; it gathers like a snowball—or perhaps it would be better to illustrate the fact by a milldam. You know, when the water is low in the milldam, the miller cannot drive his wheel; but the moment the water comes up to a certain level it has force to work the mill. And so it is with knowledge; when once you get it ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover

... insignificance; to eat was impossible, and with difficulty she conversed before the servants. Fortunately, Denzil was in his best spirits; he enjoyed the wintery atmosphere, talked of skating on the ice which had known him as a boy, laughed over an old story about a snowball with a stone in it which had stunned him in one of the fights between town ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing

... he wished to be in readiness to deliver up the command on the expected arrival of Richard from Ireland; but at the same time he left open the road from Yorkshire to the metropolis, and allowed the adventurer to pursue his object without impediment. Henry was already on his march. The snowball increased as it rolled along, and the small number of forty followers, with whom he had landed, swelled by the time that he had reached St. Albans to sixty thousand men. He was preceded by his messengers and letters, stating not ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... did look in one day to ask if they'd like some sweetpeas, but I found the Ethels were ahead of me. The old lady has a fine snowball bush and a beauty syringa in front of the house. When I spoke about them she said she had always wanted to have a bed of white flowers around the two bushes, so I offered to make one ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith

... bold as to criticise what you, my Elder Brother, may be responsible for, I'd suggest that the place to sleep on might be made a shade softer.—Yes, we are becoming effeminate, I know—we were becoming so alas, as far back as "the 45," when The M'Lean found his son with a snowball for a pillow; still, we must go with the times, and even if the berths must be hard, at least let them be level. Please note, all soldier men who run railways in India, and receive my blessing ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch

... known by a special name—virgin's bower. With its delicate leaves, almost as beautiful as a maidenhair fern, and its dainty pink flower, it festooned the ripening corn as wantonly and luxuriantly as it encircled the snowball and lilac bushes. ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle

... the edge of the cliff. He fell, struck the steep grass slope, and began to roll. Over and over and over he went, gathering speed like a snowball, getting smaller and smaller until he disappeared in the brush far below, a ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White

... somebody. And certainly this girl beat anything he had ever been up against before. Again he told the driver to go ahead. Did she mean that she would think of marrying him, by any chance? Of course she did, Alphonse. Hadn't he seen that all over her face three days ago? If he hadn't, he was a snowball. ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather

... "the Seed" in the North of England. It was, we are now well aware, out of the Seeker-groups of the northern counties of England that the new "Society" was actually born, and it grew, like a rolling snowball, as it gathered in the prepared groups of "Seekers," both north and south in England, and a ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones

... Providence, was throughout his life timid in a coach—would have said to this, I went to open the curtains, and had effected this to some extent, when one of a crowd of idlers who stood on the raised pavement deliberately lifted up his arm and flung a snowball ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman

... kittens, I will tell you all about them. Goldie! come down from that stool, and sit down like a good kitten. Sweep! leave off sharpening your claws on the furniture; that always ends in trouble and punishment. Snowball! you're asleep again! Oh, well; if you'd rather sleep ...
— Pussy and Doggy Tales • Edith Nesbit

... isn't a case of a snowball growing bigger the farther it rolls, I can't account for it," said he. "This thing ought to have died down long ago. It's been fomented very skilfully. Such a campaign as this one against us takes both ability and money—more of either than I ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White

... pick them off); and there in the front of the coast-guard lieutenant's house, is Cobaea scandens, covered with purple claret-glasses, as it has been ever since Christmas: for Aberalva knows no winter: and there are grown-up men in it who never put on a skate, or made a snowball in their lives. A most cleanly, bright-coloured, foreign-looking street, is that long straggling one which runs up the hill towards Penalva Court: only remark, that this cleanliness is gained by making ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley

... seeking me, with a very relieved and happy face; and found me trimming a grape-vine in our back garden, near the palings that separated our ground from Mr. Faringfield's. On the Faringfield side of the fence, at this place, grew bushes of snowball and rose. ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens

... the snowball were in blossom and there was a big hawthorn tree which smelt sweet and sweet. They could not see the drift of smuts on the blossoms, they only smelled the sweetness and sat under the hawthorn and sniffed and sniffed. The ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... younger children with equally poetic names, (Nassif, Iskunder, and Furkha,) and included in the coterie was a good-humoured negress, the general handmaid, whose original cognomen of Saade, was lost in the apposite soubriquet of Snowball.'—Although the greater part of the inhabitants of Beyrout are Christians, generally speaking, of the Greek Church, to which persuasion likewise belonged the family of our host Giorgio; still in this land of bigotry and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various

... man's school, where I earned my schooling by making the fires and sweeping the schoolroom, and here I learned some Latin and the higher rules in arithmetic by rote, always with the reputation of a stupid boy, good in the snowball fights of the intermission, when we had two snow forts to capture and defend; in running foot-races, the speediest, and in backhand wrestling, the strongest, but mentally hopeless. All this period of my life seems dreary and void, except when I got to nature, and ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James

... kitchen, William the coachman was, of course, the great centre of attraction to a large gathering of domestics, and of neighbours also, who soon came flocking in, spite of the lateness of the hour, to get an authentic version of the accident, which, snowball-like, would, ere noon next day, get rolled up into gigantic proportions, as it made its way through many mouths to the farther end of ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson

... hit palpably, cousin Charlotte,' said Knight. 'You are like the boy who puts a stone inside his snowball, and I shall play with you no longer. Excuse me—I am going ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy

... thousand spears, and his force was growing in snowball fashion as he progressed through the land. The great road which Notiki, the northern chief, had started by way of punishment was beginning to take shape. Bosambo had moved with ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace

... out the icy pastry, gathered all his strength to hurl a ball back at Frank. But he "wound up," as baseball pitchers call that curving swinging of the arm just before the ball is thrown, with such vigor that he lost his balance. His feet went up into the air and he came down ker-plunk! but the snowball left his hand with what proved to ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll

... strict and literal sense invisible; that is to say, that by our bodily eyes it cannot properly be seen. But the moon is a much simpler thing; a naked and nursery sort of thing. It hangs in the sky quite solid and quite silver and quite useless; it is one huge celestial snowball. It was at least some such infantile facts and fancies which led Evan again and again during his dehumanized imprisonment to go out as if to shoot ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton

... a snowball, since we started," the prince said; "and I am ashamed to invade your chateau with ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty

... younger men.—"Are we bloomin' masheens?" inquired Donkin in a piercing tone, and dived under the elbows of the front rank.—"Soon show 'im we ain't boys..."—"The man's a man if he is black."—"We ain't goin' to work this bloomin' ship shorthanded if Snowball's all right..."—"He says he is."—"Well then, strike, boys, strike!"—"That's the bloomin' ticket." Captain Allistoun said sharply to the second mate: "Keep quiet, Mr. Creighton," and stood composed in the tumult, listening with profound attention to mixed ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad

... a brilliant throng of exquisitely gowned, bejeweled women and well-groomed men, in fact a house such as Wood's leading lady had never before confronted! A chance for triumph or for disaster—and triumph it was! Like a rolling snowball, it grew as the play advanced. Again and again Clara Morris took a curtain call with the other actresses. Finally the stage manager said to Mr. Daly, "They want her," and Mr. Daly answered, sharply: ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... prevent nor repair. One grieved me particularly. The plumber hitched his horse to a tree in the front yard one morning, and, before the damage he had done was discovered, the herbivorous beast had eaten up a white lilac bush and a snowball bush, thus completing a destruction for which there would seem to be no compensation. Upon another occasion a stray cow invaded the premises and laid waste the tulip bed and chewed off the tender buds on the ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field

... off, or very mediaeval, but it was really lots of fun, or far more fun than one would have thought. The storming of the castle was very sincere, and the fortress was honestly defended. Miss Macroyd was made umpire, as she wished, and provided with a large snowball to sit on at a safe distance; as she was chosen by the men, the girls wanted to have an umpire of their own, who would be really fair, and they voted Verrian into the office. But he refused, partly because he did not care about being paired off with Miss Macroyd so conspicuously, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... me the boy who never threw A stone at someone's cat, Or never hurled a snowball swift At someone's high silk hat— Who never ran away from school, To seek the swimming hole, Or slyly from a neighbor's yard Green apples ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest

... of the gangway the hosts received their guests, and the numbers in which they trooped on board gave some warrant to Lionel Beauchamp's laughing assertion that giving a party in London is something like the making of a snowball: it increases with ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart



Words linked to "Snowball" :   sweet sand verbena, snow, sand verbena, ball, bombard, pelt, increase, frozen dessert



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