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More "Bracing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... excavation. This was accomplished by temporary bridges for each track, each bridge consisting of a pair of timber trusses about 55 feet long, braced together overhead high enough to let a car pass below the bracing. These trusses were set up on crib-work supports at each end, and the track hung from the lower chords. (See photograph on page 42.) The excavation then proceeded until the trench was finished and posts could be put into place ...
— The New York Subway - Its Construction and Equipment • Anonymous
... is this little city. Situated high above sea level, with a climate so bracing and life-giving that the phthisis bacillus can hardly live in it, it seemed to our soldiers, after their long march across the veldt, a veritable City of Refuge. Alas! how soon it was to be turned into a ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... hopefully, "it was a good thing I said that to him. David is clever and good and dear and all that, but the trouble is he lacks ambition and push. He needs bracing up and to take things more seriously. Perhaps it will be just as well if I take ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... choir screen of the Duomo. At length he was picked up tenderly by the good Misericordia. His terrible wounds were reverently washed and his godlike body prepared for sepulture. News of his assassination had been swiftly carried out to Careggi, and Domina Lucrezia, bracing herself for the afflicting sight, hastened to lay his fair head in her lap, a very real replica of "La Pieta"—Blessed Mary and ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... peach trees were all in blossom and humming with bees, their rich, amethystine rose flung up against the gay April sky in a challenge of beauty and joy. The air was full of the promises of spring, keen, bracing, yet with an undercurrent of languorous warmth. There was a ragged fleece of bloom, sweet and alive with droning insects, over a plum thicket near the woods,—half-wild, brambly things, cousin on the one hand to the cultivated ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... tactics were resumed, and the toil over the raft went on, but there was still so much to do in the way of bracing and strengthening the rough craft so that it might withstand the fierce currents and concussions they were to expect at the lower part of the lake where the rapids began, that the hours glided by till late in the afternoon, and still ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... to the side of the canoe to help her to the bank, but she took his hand only to steady herself while rising. Stepping over the bracing-strips between the gunwales, she caught a swaying branch, and swung herself lightly ashore. Back from the water the ground rose into a low hill, covered with oak and elm and ragged hickory trees. Here, for a space, there was little undergrowth, ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... definite plan of exploration. Everything was alike new to him, and it mattered little in what direction his steps led him. It was a charming morning. The sun had risen, and hill and valley were glorified by its slanting rays. The air was bracing, and Ebenezer, though neither a poet nor a sentimentalist, felt his spirits rise, as with vigorous steps he strode on, letting his eyes wander ...
— The Young Miner - or Tom Nelson in California • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... reinforced imbecile, yet tyrannic governments, to appreciate the feelings of a young, well-born, gifted citizen, when suddenly checked in a liberal and progressive career, and remanded, as it were, from the bracing atmosphere of modern civilization and enlightened activity, to the passive, silent endurance of obsolete feudalism. It was the inevitable and deliberate protest against this wicked and absurd reaction which gave birth to the political organization of the Carbonari; wherein the noblest men ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... we can all do just now is to eat dinner. A square meal works wonders in bracing people up. Miss Standish, do you think you can rouse the maids to an effort to get us some sort of food? If not, we can forage for ourselves, in the icebox. What ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... think, Miss Priscilla," said the doctor, "though I am sorry to do it. The fact is, the air here is altogether too bracing for your sister. She will have to go to some inland town, where the east winds ...
— Only An Irish Boy - Andy Burke's Fortunes • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... girl's chief emotion was one of admiration for the pony. How accurate its movements in this crisis! How unerring its judgment! For though no word had been spoken—at least the girl heard none—the pony kept the rope taut, bracing against its burden as Randerson slid ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... Fig. 19 shows how the bark is placed like shingles overlapping each other so as to shed the rain. The doorway of the tent shack is made by leaning poles against forked sticks, their butts forming a semicircle in front, or rather the arc of a circle, and by bracing them against the forked stick fore and aft they add ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... shooting downward, the severed line whipping out after him. The first plunge flung him off his feet. A long swoop which he took on his back dizzied him. But as the fall continued, he was able to slow it a little by bracing arms and legs against ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... "There is always something going on outdoors worth seeing," says Charles Dudley Warner, and of no part of the world is this more true than of these apparently desolate plains at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. Rich is the reward of the daily stroller, not only in the inspiration of its pure, bracing air, the songs of its meadow-larks, and the glory of its grand mountain view, but in its ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... round the stem and over and under the branch, reefing it, making it taut and trim so that no strain could loosen it; and all the while he was conscious of the power in his arms and hands, the volume of air in his lungs, the flow of blood in his veins, the nervous force bracing and hardening his muscles. The rope was fast now. Now he assured himself that its free length—the part from the tree to the noose—was absolutely correct as to its amount. Nothing remained to do, nothing ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... are some exotics from the North, which droop with a homesick aspect. Plants, like human beings, will pine for their native atmosphere. If it be more rigorous and less genial at the North, still there is a bracing, tonic effect, imparting life and strength, which is wanting in the low latitudes. On one side of this fine square is the government house and barracks, opposite to which is an open-air theatre, and in front is the cathedral with ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... now here is luncheon all ready." So they sat down on the verge of the slope, and ate their cold chicken and tongue, with the relish imparted by youth, a long ride, and the bracing air. ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... which she was aware of not having yet quite sounded. The depths of his faith of course—there she could only scan and hesitate, but this was a brink upon which she did not often find herself, away from which, indeed, he sometimes gently guided her. The atmospheres of their talk were the more bracing ones of this world, and it was here that Hilda looked when she would make him a parallel for Lindsay, and here that she found her measure of disappointment. He warmed himself and dried his wings in the opulence of her spirit, ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... climate; eudiometer^. [Preservation of health] hygiene; valetudinarian, valetudinarianism; sanitarian; sanitarium, sanitOrium. V. be salubrious &c adj.; agree with; assimilate &c 23. Adj. salubrious, salutary, salutiferous^; wholesome; healthy, healthful; sanitary, prophYlactic, benign, bracing, tonic, invigorating, good for, nutritious; hygeian^, hygienic. innoxious^, innocuous, innocent; harmless, uninjurious, uninfectious. sanative &c (remedial) 662; restorative &c (reinstate) 660; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... now, and the air was bracing and exhilarating, for all the afternoon was mild. The trees were flaming with color, and the leaves had begun to sift down. In the ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... to a nose. It is a rank, living smell, and has none of the sickening qualities of disease or putrefaction. Indeed, I think a good smeller will enjoy its most refined intensity. It approaches the sublime, and makes the nose tingle. It is tonic and bracing, and, I can readily believe, has rare medicinal qualities. I do not recommend its use as eyewater, though an old farmer assures me it has undoubted virtues when thus applied. Hearing, one night, a disturbance among his hens, he rushed suddenly out to catch ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... his many vicissitudes and disappointments, by his noble wife. If he was treated with harshness by his political enemies, his consolation was in the tender affection which filled his home with sunshine. Though his public life was bracing and stimulating, he felt, nevertheless, that it was cold and calculating, and neither filled the soul nor elevated the character. "Man longs for a happiness," he says in his 'Memoires,' "more complete and more tender than that which all the labours and triumphs of active ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... stories by W. H. H. Murray, in both which appears John Norton, the trapper, a character that promises to become as much of a favorite as is the hero of the Leather Stocking novels. These stories have a bracing outdoor freshness and a delightfully crisp realism: are vigorous in tone, and strong and picturesque in the relation. Taken altogether, they may be pronounced in the most artistic of Mr. Murray's excursions into the realms of fiction, and fascinating ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... had somewhat told upon his health, and he felt that a few months or years in a warmer clime would result in the recovery of lost vigor. He had purchased a ticket for Wilmington, N. C. The air there was mild, bracing and dry and made health giving and mellow by the sweet odor of the yellow pine. And then, again, a field was open for the continuance of his work while he recuperated, a certain Baptist church in the old city had called him to its pastorate. Being a man ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... up. He heard the gates rattling open for the next boat-load, and took his stand again, bracing himself for another rebuff. The usual vanguard, the usual quicksilver bunch of humanity, massing, separating, flowing this way and that, and in the midst of them a fair-haired, timid-looking young girl, walking quietly with down-cast ...
— A Good Samaritan • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... the steam heaved up and burst before it could get out. And what are the black lines across, marked E E E? They are the streams of lava which have burrowed out, some covered up again in cinders, some lying bare in the open air, some still inside the cone, bracing it together, holding it up. Something like this is ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... into the earth and bury itself, it uses the fore-edge of its head, a sort of weeding-hoe with the two mandibles for points. The legs take part in this work, but far less effectually. In this way it contrives to dig itself a shallow pit. Then, bracing itself against the wall of the pit, with the aid of wriggling movements which are favoured by the short, stiff hairs bristling all over its body, the grub changes its position and plunges into the ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... head in his neck as though bracing himself. "I learned of it yesterday, Martha. Pray accept my condolences. I should have called ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... successive anterooms, the lounging aids, the good-natured and easy General,—easy by habit and energetic by impulse,—all had a certain air of Southern languor, rather picturesque, but perhaps not altogether bracing. General Hunter received us, that day, with his usual kindliness; there was a good deal of pleasant chat; Miles O'Reilly was called in to read his latest verses; and then we came to the matter ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... lying, one light, upon the distant water, like a ship, I came plashing through the silent and deserted streets; I felt as if the houses were reality—the water, fever-madness. But when, in the bright, cold, bracing day, I stood upon the piazza, this morning, by Heaven the glory of the place was insupportable! And diving down from that into its wickedness and gloom—its awful prisons, deep below the water; its judgment chambers, secret doors, deadly nooks, where the torches you carry ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... which has been alleged as a proof of its uselessness, and inferentially of its falsehood, puts us on the right track. It was not meant for their deliverance, but for their heartening, and for the bracing of all generations of Christians, by showing, at the first conflict with the civil power, that the Lord was with His Church. His strengthening power is operative when no miracle is wrought. If His servants are not delivered, it is not that He lacks angels, but that it is better for ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... laugh—the first since she had come home. She kept Betty gossiping for half an hour, and as the stream of the village life poured about her, in Betty's racy speech, it was as though some primitive virtue entered into her and cheered her—some bracing voice from the Earth-spirit—whose purpose ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... bracing himself to face what was now soon to happen. Well, it was the beginning of the end. Oh Dear knew. Soon more would know, all would know. And in a way he was glad of it, glad that the torment of suspense would ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... fresh, and striking into a canter the two men made for the open country. The excitement and motion combined with the bracing air drove the fumes of the liquor from Cook's head, and before many miles had been passed he was comparatively free from the terrible malady ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... hearty appetites for breakfast in spite of their restless and disturbed sleep, for the bracing effects of their swim, taken before the meal, more than made up for the lack of proper rest. And after breakfast Dolly asked permission to go out in the sloop, since one of the very few rules of ...
— A Campfire Girl's Happiness • Jane L. Stewart
... carpenter work on "The Curlew" at Portland made a bill of a hundred and nine dollars; seamen's wages to Gloucester, with car-fare back, nineteen dollars; bracing and strengthening the schooner, sixty-seven dollars; cost of getting in fuel and water, thirty-three dollars; and other bills to the amount of forty-nine dollars: in all, two hundred and seventy-seven dollars. We had thus to pay out at the start over ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... stimulus of the bracing early morning air. A new inspiration seemed to fire him, altogether dissimilar to the glow which he was wont to feel when plunging into a dangerous phase of a professional case. He slowly drew from his pocket the typed note-paper which had nestled ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... the many congenial texts to be gathered in their 'Holy Scripture.' Non-established priesthoods are but little more disposed to emancipate 'mind' and oil the wheels of political progression than those kept in state pay. The air of conventicles is not of the freest or most bracing description. The Methodist preacher, who has the foolish effrontery to tell his congregation 'the flush lusteth always contrary to the spirit, and, therefore, every person born into the world deserveth God's wrath and damnation,' may be ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell
... just to breathe the air! Never had her step been so light, or her daily walk to the dingy office—dingy no longer—so bracing. And the out-of-doors—the sky and drifting clouds; the low hills, bleak in the winter's gloom—what changes had come over them? Was it the first blush of the coming spring that had softened their lines, or had her eyes been blind to all their beauty? ...
— Abijah's Bubble - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... by the "Fougueux," by bracing up her yards, to cross under the stern of the "Weymouth." This, however, was quickly prevented by Captain Jumper, by a similar manoeuvre, as he had no intention of giving up the ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... months after we took the studio, and left me at a day's notice. The amount and kind of moral courage I had to summon up before I could go home alone the first evening after my comrade left me can only be appreciated by those who have undergone some similar torture. It was not like the bracing up a man goes through when he has to face some imminent known danger, but was of a more subtle and complex kind. "There is nothing to fear," I kept saying to myself, and yet I could not shake off a nameless dread. "You are in your right mind and have all your senses," I continually ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... letter and a parcel of yours, Paul: you had better look at them—we hope to start north in a day or two—you must get to a more bracing place." ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... political situation, both in Saxony and the rest of Germany, tended inevitably towards a catastrophe. Day by day this drew nearer, and I flattered myself into regarding my own personal fate as interwoven with this universal unrest. Now that the powers of reaction were everywhere more and more openly bracing themselves for conflict, the final decisive struggle seemed indeed close at hand. My feelings of partisanship were not sufficiently passionate to make me desire to take any active share in these conflicts. I was merely conscious of an impulse to give ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... reluctance. It was overcome, for when young Webster felt the power which was in him, he boldly employed it. At first, however, he was a failure as a public speaker. With all this, he went forward in the acquisition of knowledge and the bracing of his mind; and in his fifteenth year he once undertook to repeat five hundred lines of Virgil, if his ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... first exploratory ramble in Eigg an hour before noon. The day was bracing and breezy, and a clear sun looked cheerily down on island, and strait, and blue open sea. We rowed southwards in our little boat, through the channel of Eilean Chaisteil, along the trap-rocks of the island, and landed under the two pitchstone veins of Eigg, so generally ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... There was a bracing note in that vehemence. "Well, don't ask me to do any crossing of a bridge before I come to it. I think our friend down stairs is thinking of hospitals and nurses and all kinds of quirks that would drive me crazy. Tell him I know what I'm about. ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... distinction Chopin treats the bassoon, and how he is repaid with mocking ingratitude. But enough of the orchestral rabble. The Adagio is very fine in its way, but such is its cloying sweetness that one longs for something bracing and active. This desire the composer satisfies only partially in the last movement (Rondo vivace, 2-4, E major). Nevertheless, he succeeds in putting us in good humour by his gaiety, pretty ways, and tricksy surprises (for instance, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... which fine sheet of water, in a landlocked harbor, stands the town of Gaspe, distinguished as the place where Jacques Cartier landed in 1534. It is now a great fishing-station, employing thousands of men along the coast in the cod-fishery. Here are fine scenery, clear bracing air, good sea-bathing, excellent salmon- and trout-fishing and a comfortable hotel. What more can a well-regulated mind desire? Into Gaspe Bay flow the Dartmouth, the York and the St. John—good salmon-rivers, while both they and the smaller streams abound with sea-trout ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... sleigh, drawn by spirited steed, You glide o'er the snow with lightning speed, Whilst from harness, decked with silvery bells, sweet showers the sound on the clear air swells; And the keen bracing breeze, with vigor rife, Sends quick through your veins ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... else—on account of the joyousness of his soul. There was a contagious and a godlike hilarity in his broad, open brow, his frank, laughing eyes, and his mobile lips. He seemed to carry about with him a bracing moral atmosphere. The sight of him had the same effect on the dull man of ordinary life that the Himalayan air has on an Indian invalid; and yet Jack was head-over-heels in debt. Not a tradesman would ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... clear, lovely, October morning. The air was sharp and bracing, and the leaves which had taken their autumnal tints were falling from the trees. The road which wound by Westbourne Green, gave him a full view of the hill of Hampstead with its church, its crest of houses, and its villas peeping ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... these arches by wrought-iron vertical rods, with horizontal tie-bars to resist the thrust. The suspension-bolts are enclosed within spandril pillars of cast iron, which give great stiffness to the superstructure. This system of longitudinal and vertical bracing has been much admired, for it not only accomplishes the primary object of securing rigidity in the roadway, but at the same time, by its graceful arrangement, heightens the beauty of the structure. The arches consist of four main ribs, disposed in pairs with a clear distance ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... the same there was that subconscious sense of bracing air—something like the sense of climax in reaching a Northern station on a very hot day. We may be very hot, perhaps, at Carlisle or Edinburgh, but it is ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... owes it to the spirit within him not to stand or walk in such an attitude. He should brace up and keep bracing up persistently, unremittently, until he attains a ...
— What Dress Makes of Us • Dorothy Quigley
... love a clear bracing air!" said Mrs. Rothesay, with the restlessness peculiar to all invalids—and she had been a greater invalid ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... these hopes. A few days before Christmas it became known to Hanaford that Mrs. Westmore would return for the holidays. Cicely was drooping in town air, and Bessy had persuaded Mr. Langhope that the bracing cold of Hanaford would be better for the child than the milder atmosphere of Long Island. They reappeared, and brought with them a breath of holiday cheerfulness such as Westmore had never known. It had always been the rule at the ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... Joseph Marie Vien (1716-1809) there came towards the end of the eighteenth century the virile, revolutionary figure of Jacques Louis David (1748-1825), who burst like a thunderstorm on the corrupt artistic atmosphere of the age, sweetening and bracing French art for half a century. Shocked by the slovenly drawing and vulgarity of the fashionable masters, and nursed on Plutarch, he applied himself to the study of the antique with a determination to rejuvenate the ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... whenever it was possible. Loys was so happy it made you feel like a boy again to see her. She told me in private that it was wonderful how the air out here agreed with her, and I said it was considered mighty bracing, and never let on that they proclaimed their state of mind every time they looked at each other. I reckon old smart-Aleck Jonesy was the only party in the township who didn't understand. Kyle used to put vinegar in his coffee and things like that, and if you'd ask ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... sally forth (you will go with me in my heart) and try whether this fine bracing air will not give the vigour to the poor babe, it had, before I so inconsiderately gave way to the grief that deranged my bowels, and gave a turn ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... complaints would cease. The new abode contained five rooms for Napoleon's use, three for the Montholons, two for the Las Cases, and one for Gourgaud: it was situated on a plateau 1,730 feet above the sea: the air there was bracing, and on the farther side of the plain dotted with gum trees stretched the race-course, a mile and a half of excellent turf. The only obvious drawbacks were the occasional mists, and the barren precipitous ravines that flank the plateau on all sides. Seeing, however, that Napoleon ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... contrary, there is little of this struggle; the seasons are more equable, and the mild, soft air of the valleys tends to make the inhabitants luxurious and sensitive to hardships. It is only in exceptional mountain districts that one is here reminded of the rough, bracing air on the heights of Southern Germany. It is a curious fact that, as the air becomes gradually lighter and rarer from the North German coast toward Upper Germany, the average of suicides regularly decreases. Mecklenburg ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... gloriously clear, crisp, and frosty. The insects were inert. The air had lost its heat and murk. The sun struck upon the sides of the tepees with cheerful glow, and all was buoyant, normal, and bracing as the ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... in the dismal rainy season, when all the life of the region was at the lowest ebb of the year, and when comfort was hardly to be found. The extreme bitterness of Eastern winters was wanting; but the bracing tonic effect of honest cold was also denied them. Through many months they were to suffer from an uninterrupted downpour of rain, driven before the raw sea-winds, which drenched their ardor and made work of ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... sir. It's been under my pillow all night, and the cold has stopped it. Cheerful, wholesome, bracing sort of climate to live in; isn't it, sir? Never mind! ...
— The Frozen Deep • Wilkie Collins
... Tom assured him. And this was a fact. Tom had installed a wireless apparatus on his RED CLOUD recently, and it is well known that several of the modern biplanes can send wireless messages. The crossing and bracing wires of the frame are used for sending wires, and in place of ground conductors there are trailers which hang below the aeroplane. The current is derived directly from the engine, and the remaining things needed are a small step-up ...
— Tom Swift and his Wireless Message • Victor Appleton
... curiosity, turned to examine the picture, while Barraclough embraced the opportunity to slip the crook of his stick through the handle of the bag and tug hard. But the bag was heavier than he had imagined. It scarcely moved and only by bracing his foot on the seat opposite was he able to upset its balance. Just a fraction of a second too soon the man turned. Conceivably he saw murder in Barraclough's eyes or else he was unusually quick at grasping a situation. He flashed his eyes upward at the moment ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... all the seas. But the black North-easter, Through the snow-storm hurl'd, Drives our English hearts of oak Seaward round the world. Come, as came our fathers, Heralded by thee, Conquering from the eastward, Lords by land and sea. Come; and strong within us Stir the Vikings' blood, Bracing brain and sinew; ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... boarding of the sides below the floor level and place a heavy inverted pan, milk pan, between the top of each of the supporting posts and the floor beams. Care should be taken that the diagonal bracing of the underpinning or posts does not allow a rat to secure a foot hold near enough the floor ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... on the opposite shore, called New Brighton, has the same character, but enjoys a share of the open Irish sea, with its keen breezes. It must be bracing, healthy, ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... perishingly cold at Chittagong, i.e., in shade in the early morning, but it is bracing, A.1. weather for doing things. Last night I had three blankets and two sleeping suits and felt cold at that. The sides and windows of our cabin being made of open lattice woodwork we fix up some newspapers and a mat or two we have over these, which ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... The bracing tone made Gillian swallow her tears, the more easily because of the familiarity of home atmosphere, confidence, and protection; and a mute caress from her mother was ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... seen. Under the vast, vivid blue of the mountain skies they moved, indifferent to the splendid benevolence of the untroubled day. The pure wind swept in from the radiance in the east, flinging out multi-colored garments and scarves, rushing with its bracing chill without obstruction through even the compactest mass of wayfarers. The cedars on the hills about the little town whistled continuously and at times some extremely narrow defile with an uninterrupted draft would take voice and cry humanly. But there ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... shivering, Michael Daragh,—shivering in September! The incredible freshness of this morning, the bracing miracle of cold! I left Boston on the night boat and the stewardess rapped me firmly up at three-thirty to see the sun rise. I stayed stubbornly in my berth, at first, but presently a length of Quaker gray sky interlined with faintest rose brought me to my elbow and then ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... meal in short order and sipping hot bracing coffee, the three cadets took turns in telling Jeff of their conversations with Strong, their escape, and their near encounter with Vidac on the highway ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... ragged girl dragged a red, bawling infant along the crowded ways. He was hanging back, baby-like, bracing ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... in the country, ain't it? What a glorious thing the sun-rise is! How beautiful the dew-spangled bushes, and the pearly drops they shed, are! How sweet and cool is the morning air, and how refreshing and bracing the light breeze is to the nerves that have been relaxed in warm repose! The new-ploughed earth, the snowy-headed clover, the wild flowers, the blooming trees, and the balsamic spruce, all exhale their fragrance to invite you forth. While the birds offer up their morning hymn, as ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... Mr. Holladay brought his wife to Paris to secure the services of an experienced physician, perhaps; or perhaps a nurse, or linen, or all of them. That done, they proceeded to Etretat, which they may have visited before, and knew for a quiet place, with a bracing atmosphere and good climate—just such a place as they would naturally desire. Here, the daughter was born, and here, I am convinced, we shall find the key to the mystery, though I'm very far from guessing ...
— The Holladay Case - A Tale • Burton E. Stevenson
... among her own family again. Mr. Hewlitt was very tired after his long spell of arduous work in Paris, and was glad to rest his brains, so they spent most of the time boating on the lake, or strolling in the woods, getting new-made-over in the fresh, bracing country air. The car they had hired was to meet them at Lancaster. They went thus far south by train, then motored to Liverpool. Loveday, ready with suit-case packed, was eagerly expecting them. From the window of her aunt's drawing-room she watched the big six-seater car arrive at the door. Giles—a ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... entirely eaten out of his head; the gristle of his nose was mostly gone; his tongue was half eaten off, and the skin and flesh of his legs torn almost literally into strings. In this tattered and torn condition the poor old veteran stood bracing up in the midst of his devourers, who had ceased hostilities for a few minutes, to enjoy a sort of parley, recovering strength to resume the attack in a few moments again. In this group, some were reclining ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... Instability of the Air. We are usually not conscious of the air around us, but sometimes we realize that the air is heavy, while at other times we feel the bracing effect of the atmosphere. We live in an ocean of air as truly as fish inhabit an ocean of water. If you have ever been at the seashore you know that the ocean is never still for a second; sometimes the waves surge ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... alive and bracing book, full of suggestions and encouragement, Professor Bailey argues the importance of contact with nature, a sympathetic attitude toward which "means greater efficiency, hopefulness, ...
— Electricity for the farm - Light, heat and power by inexpensive methods from the water - wheel or farm engine • Frederick Irving Anderson
... timbers was such that the port hog-brace broke in two places, weakening the vessel so that her fate was apparent to all. Soldiers and sailors worked away with a frantic energy born by the fear of death, and succeeded in bracing up the timbers, so as to avoid, for a time, the breaking-up. Soon after, a heavy roll of the vessel broke the smokestack, and it was pitched overboard. Luckily it broke some three feet above the deck, so that the fires could still be kept up. ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... be holding its breath in anxious suspense, but Ulrich once more laughed joyously, then bracing his bare knee against a ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... stretch the long ridges of rough but picturesque highlands, which embrace the central ranges of the Suliman system (the prehistoric home of the Pathan highlander), where vegetation is often alpine, and the climate clear and bracing and subject to no great extremes of temperature. The average breadth of this northern Pathan district is 150 m., but it narrows to less than 100 m. on the line of the Gomal, and expands to more than 200 m. on the line of the railway. Here all the main drainage ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... and Mel changed into swimming trunks and donned hydrolungs. They went out through the air lock, plunged into the bracing salt water, and switched on their ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... where the force of the hurricane was not so fiercely felt, and where the angry argument of the sea was deadened by distance. There was a lovely perfume everywhere,—the dash of rain on the herbs and field flowers had brought out their scent, and the freshness of the stormy atmosphere was bracing and exhilarating. He put Charlie down on the grass, and was amused to see how obediently the tiny creature trotted after him, close at his heels, in the manner of a well-trained, well-taught lady's favourite. There was no danger of wheeled or motor traffic in this peaceful little glen, ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... of them swallow sand, ashes, and do their utmost to destroy their stomachs to get pale complexions. To make a fine Spanish body, what racks will they not endure of girding and bracing, till they have notches in their sides cut into the very quick, and ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... precipitous mountains and savage Koords, Dr. Grant was once more the guest of Mar Shimon, who kindly received the New Testament, the Psalms, and other books from the mission press. The Doctor was himself suffering from the effects of exposure in a wet dormitory the previous night; but the bracing air of that elevated region renewed his strength, and he was glad to resume his journey towards Asheta, which he had proposed as the site of his first mountain station. On this part of the way he had the company of Mar Shimon, ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson
... disturbed by anything. One would have supposed that, after so much hardship, they would have got up somewhat wearied. Strange to say, it was not so, for they arose quite refreshed. This Lucien attributed to the bracing influence of the light dry atmosphere; and Lucien was right, for, although an arid soil surrounded them, its climate is one of the healthiest in the world. Many a consumptive person, who has crossed the prairies with flushed cheek, uttering his hectic cough, has returned ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... she thought. She owed it to Frank. Her pretty face strengthened and hardened on the instant. Her small, white teeth set themselves in two even rows; and her father saw quite plainly that she was consciously bracing herself for an attack of some kind. He feared by this that she was guilty, and he was all the more distressed, ashamed, outraged, made wholly unhappy. He fumbled in the left-hand pocket of his coat and drew forth from ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... a way to force a door—that is, an ordinary door—and at the same time make very little noise. It is done—if the door opens inward—by seizing the knob firmly with both hands, having turned it, and then by bracing the body with one knee pressed firmly against the door directly under the knob. In this position, if it is assumed by a strong man, every effort may be centred upon one sudden impulse forward, which, while there is no visible or perceptible impact, will ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... the original, home of the Aryans was in Asia, to the eastward of the Semites, probably in the mountain district back of modern Persia. That is, they were not, like the other whites, a people of the marsh lands and river valleys. They lived in a higher, hardier, and more bracing atmosphere. Perhaps it was here that their minds took a freer bent, their spirits caught a bolder tone. Wherever they moved they came as ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... already begun to feel the bracing effect upon our economic system of a restored agriculture. The hundreds of millions of additional income that farmers are receiving are finding their way into the channels of trade. The farmers' share of the national ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Barclay's, Limited. He loved the sea, the sun, and the summer. He was off that day on a projected series of short country runs, in which it was his intention strictly to combine business and pleasure. Dartmoor, for example, as everybody knows, is a most delightful and bracing tourist district; but what more amusing to a man of taste than to go a round of the Moor with its heather-clad tors, and at the same time hunt up the parish registers of the neighbourhood for the purpose of discovering, if possible, ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... now—a road that ran south across the spaces, unwinding itself like a tape flung from a reel. Suddenly Cheyenne pulled to a stop. Bartley raced up, bracing himself as the big cow-horse ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... the wholesome, invigorating effects and the specially refreshing properties of the Borage are supposed to be mainly due. For which reason, the plant, "when taken in sallets," as says an old herbalist, "doth exhilarate, and make the mind glad," almost in the same way as a bracing sojourn by the seaside during an autumn holiday. The flowers possess cordial virtues which are very revivifying, and have been much commended against melancholic depression of the nervous system. Burton, in his [61] Anatomy of Melancholy ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... us a particularly heavy sea, into which the frigate dived until she was all a-smother for'ard. Yet, notwithstanding this, her head continued to sweep round—slowly, it is true; still—"Mainsail haul!" bellowed the first luff through his trumpet, and round swung the after yards, the men bracing them well up and rounding in on the main-sheet. Now her head was beginning to pay off, but slowly. The first lieutenant dashes up on the poop and looks over the side—she ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... on to assume that we are a mean people in America, and making larger and more handsome arrangements for being meaner than ever, still mightier engines for bracing against each other, we will turn to all together and make in the next four years a machine together that will express our better natures as well as our present ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... of it, Nelly. The sailor is just like the sea. He's noisy—so is the sea. Liable to storms—so is the sea. Blusters and boils, and rocks and reels—so does the sea. But he's sunny too, and open and free, and healthy and bracing, and the sea ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine
... some time, I noticed, before she rang the bell, and she looked at herself in the glass and cleared her throat. I knew she was bracing herself. ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... in the direction of the hills when, almost without warning, and with a great whistle and roar, a gale of wind swept down upon them. They stood still and looked at each other with startled faces, bracing with their feet against ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... in the open field night and day. In the winter they are fed entirely on oat-straw and turnips. Not a handful of hay or of meal is given them. The calves are allowed to suck their dams at pleasure. He is convinced that with this simple system of feeding, together with the bracing air of Aberdeenshire, he has obtained a tribe of animals of hardy and robust constitutions, of early maturity, well calculated to improve the ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... we add to this all the tarring, greasing, oiling, varnishing, painting, scraping, and scrubbing which is required in the course of a long voyage, and also remember this is all to be done in addition to watching at night, steering, reefing, furling, bracing, making and setting sail, and pulling, hauling, and climbing in every direction, one will hardly ask, "What can a sailor ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... a vast crop of a similar nature which you have in Western Ontario, for as I am informed by my honourable friend on my right, Mr. Mackenzie, the peaches are often given to the pigs. (Great laughter.) The pleasant and bracing seasons of Canada can be enjoyed in a country without its equal, for nowhere has the settler a more varied range of choice in the scenery, the locality, the soil which will finally determine him where to found a home. His fortune may be compared to that of a man entering one ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... the docksides is loud all the day, And the breezes come bringing off basin and pond And all the piled acres of lumber beyond From the Oregon ranges the tang of the pine And the breath of the Baltic as bracing as wine, In a fly-spotted window I there did behold, Among the stale odours of hot food and cold, A ship in a bottle some sailor had made In watches below, swinging South with the Trade, When the fellows were patching old dungaree suits, Or ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 22, 1920 • Various
... waves, resuming her wonted garments in the same way, after her bath. Margaret, till now, had never seen the ocean. It inspired no fear—only delight and pleasure—and she hurried into the water like a sea nymph, enjoying its bracing freshness. For many successive mornings she went down, in company with several other girls of various ages, to bathe and sport with glee in the bright waters of a little bay, sheltered on either side by high rocks from the gaze of ...
— Janet McLaren - The Faithful Nurse • W.H.G. Kingston
... branched off downward, at a sharp angle, overhead. Ray was able to turn about and get his feet in front of him; Yetsko had to crawl on until he had passed it, and then back into it after Ray had entered. Bracing one foot on either side, Ray inched his way down the forty-degree slope, hoping that the two hundred pound weight of Doug Yetsko wouldn't start ...
— Null-ABC • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... that giv'st the flabby Strength, and stingo'st up the weak:- Restful as a grand old Abbey— Bracing as ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... Daisy, take Dr. Bulling down to the cabin. I declare he looks as if he needed bracing up. I shall take ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... a sun of great brilliancy was shining, and over him arched the high skies of the great west. The air was thin and cool, easy to breathe and uplifting, and in the bracing morning he did not feel the loneliness and immensity of the wilderness. Boyd had already built a little fire among the bushes, and was warming some strips of dried beef ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... eloquence, but his ideas themselves were rousing. Whatever he touched upon, he treated, as we may still perceive from his writings, with a certain freshness and decided originality which must have provoked the dullest to some reflection, and in a bracing spirit of intellectual liberty which it was strength and life for the young mind to breathe. He was not long in Glasgow, accordingly, till he was bitterly attacked by the older generation outside the walls of the College as a "new light" fraught ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... itself, the fire had rushed on to the ocean, the atmosphere had became comparatively clear and the weather cool and bracing. ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... word of honour that he would welcome us as friends and allies if we went to his assistance, we had heard of his defeat and tragic end. Thus we ourselves were now on our guard night and day. It was a question of either fleeing the country or bracing ourselves for a decisive struggle. Some counselled the former alternative; the others declared their resolve to follow the advice of their dying father and to find a grave under the ruins of the keep. Any suggestion of flight or compromise they denounced as contemptible cowardice. The ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... had to wash in the laundry; weak as she was, they weakened her still further with steam and heat, and labour. Washing is hard work for those who enjoy health and vigour. To a girl, broken in heart and body, it is a slow destroyer. Heat relaxes all the fibres; Dolly's required bracing. Steam will soften wood and enable the artificer to bend it to any shape. Dolly's chest became yet more hollow; her cheek-bones prominent; she bent to the steam. This was the girl who had lingered in the lane to help the boy pick watercress, to gather ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... anywhere. The terrible glare of the summer sun beat down upon the whole length of the wooden platform at Amberley. Hot as was the dry, bracing air, it was incomparable with the blistering intensity of heat reflected from the planking, which burned through to the soles of the feet of the uniformed man who paced its ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... anxious to be present on the arrival of the herds, and again watch the "major-domo" run on the rope and fume and charge in vain. But the importance of blocking assistance was so urgent that I would gladly have ridden to Buford if necessary. In that bracing atmosphere it was a fine morning for the ride, and I was rapidly crossing the country, when a vehicle, in the dip of the plain, was sighted several miles ahead. I was following no road, but when the driver of the conveyance saw me he turned across my front ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... are looking very badly indeed for us, Christy," said the captain, bracing himself up as if for a renewed effort. "The Belle is almost up with the boat, and she will take Major Pierson and his party on board; and she is nearer to ...
— Taken by the Enemy • Oliver Optic
... a walk to the North Pole. I did not think that I could be many days' journey from it. But that did not matter. The air was so bracing that I could take any amount of exercise without fatigue, and was therefore able to walk all day, sitting down merely for convenience sake when I was enjoying my dinner off the preserved bear. I of course could not ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... yet returned. On his way home he had wandered aside, and visited the fashionable wells of Buxton, intending a three days' sojourn, to complete his bracing up for the winter. But the Pool of Siloam did not work pleasantly in the case of the robust general, who was attacked after his second dip with a smart fit of the gout in his left great-toe, where it went on charmingly, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... green, and adds to its brilliancy; it drinks in, too, the rain greedily, so that the wide common is nearly always fit for walking; and the air, unlike the heavy atmosphere of the University beneath it, is fresh and bracing. The gorse was still in bloom, in the latter end of the month of June, when Reding and Sheffield took up their abode in a small cottage at the upper end of this village—so hid with trees and girt in ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... at Lord Dreever enlightened her. That miserable creature was wearing the air of a timid child about to pull a large cracker. He seemed to be bracing himself up ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... men got the means of recruiting their strength in this manner, as the latter part of the march was a terrible teaser. We marched off from this place about twelve. Although we had found the morning pleasant enough, with a fine bracing breeze, yet in the afternoon, about half an hour after starting, the wind went down, and the sun shone out terribly; the sand in some parts was half knee deep, and although there was no breeze to blow it in our faces, yet ...
— Campaign of the Indus • T.W.E. Holdsworth
... and stumbling through the roots of the heather. Roddy gazed at them with his fixed and mournful eyes. He couldn't share your excitement. He drew back his shoulders, bracing himself to bear it; his lips tightened in a hard, bleak grin. He grinned at the absurdity of your supposing that he could be interested in anything ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... overdress, to over-decorate, to overdo almost everything. Indeed the day was demonstrative; if the now celebrated climate had not yet been elaborately advertised, no doubt there was something hi it singularly bracing. The elixir of it got into the blood and the brain, and perhaps the bones as well. The old felt younger than they did when they left "the States,"—the territory from the Rockies to the Atlantic Ocean was commonly known as "the States." The middle-aged renewed their youth, and youth was wild with ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... the tarring, greasing, oiling, varnishing, painting, scraping, and scrubbing which is required in the course of a long voyage, and also remember this is all to be done in addition to watching at night, steering, reefing, furling, bracing, making and setting sail, and pulling, hauling, and climbing in every direction, one will hardly ask, "What can a sailor find to do ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... within a day's march, was in sight from the loopings of the eastern approach. Lidgerwood, scanning the grades as the service-car swung from tangent to curve and curve to tangent up the steep inclines, was beginning to think of breakfast. The morning air was crisp and bracing, and he had been getting the full benefit of it for an hour or more, sitting under the umbrella roof at the ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... of myself, mon petit Asticot," she laughed, bracing her strong arms. "And suppose I wanted to go off with him? They are amusing sometimes, people like that. There is ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... now "free of bottom," as it is called, with her anchor catted and fished, and her position maintained in the basin where she lay, by the counter-bracing of her yards, and the counteracting force of the wind on her sails. It only remained to "fill away," by bracing her head-yards sharp up, when the vast mass overcame its inertia, and began to move through the water. As this was ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... conceive. Methodical, of course, he was; no long work of prose fiction was ever brought into existence save by methodical labour; but we know that there was no measuring of so many words to the hour. The picture of him at work which is seen in his own letters is one of the most bracing and inspiring in the history of literature. It has had, and will always have, a great part in maintaining Dickens' place in the love and reverence of ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... time to be frightened, no time even to think, as they shot through the fine bracing air like a ball from a cannon. Before they knew it, they were landed ...
— Grace Harlowe's Plebe Year at High School - The Merry Doings of the Oakdale Freshmen Girls • Jessie Graham Flower
... hatred of wrongdoing; with our just tolerance of men and opinions a righteous abhorrence of sin. All the more for the sweet humanities and Christian liberalism which, in drawing men nearer to each other, are increasing the sum of social influences for good or evil, we need the bracing atmosphere, healthful, if austere, of the old moralities. Individual and social duties are quite as imperative now as when they were minutely specified in statute-books and enforced by penalties no longer admissible. It ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... that we could find no place to fasten the lasso for the next descent; so I determined to try the climb with only as little aid as possible. Tying it round my breast again, I gave the other end into Cotter's hands, and he, bracing his back against the cliff, found for himself as firm a foothold as he could, and promised to give me all the help in his power. I made up my mind to bear no weight unless it was absolutely necessary; and for the first ten feet I found cracks and protuberances ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... reader will find there a caput mortuum of piety, with little indeed of its loveliness, but with most of its essentials; and these two qualities make him a wholesome, as his intellectual vigour makes him a bracing, writer. I should be much of a hound if I lost my gratitude ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... themselves to. Lastly, I would have you consider especially the moral atmosphere in which they have habitually breathed: according to the nature of this the mental health varies as certainly as the physical strength varies in a bracing or relaxing air. A strong bodily constitution may resist longer, and finally be less affected by a deleterious atmosphere than a weak or diseased frame; and so it is with the mental constitution. Minds insensibly imbibe the tone of the atmosphere in which ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... countless thousands, the bison covered the westward prairies, and there were officers who forbade their senseless slaughter to make food only for the worthless, prowling coyotes. No wonder the trooper hated to leave the foothills of the mountains, with the cold, clear trout streams and the bracing air, to take to long days' marching over dull waste and treeless prairie, covered only by sage brush, rent and torn by dry ravines, shadeless, springless, almost waterless, save where in unwholesome hollows dull pools of stagnant water still ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... by which I was to diverge from the main road, I bade farewell to my last remaining Poor Traveller, and pursued my way alone. And now the mists began to rise in the most beautiful manner, and the sun to shine; and as I went on through the bracing air, seeing the hoarfrost sparkle everywhere, I felt as if all Nature shared in the joy of ...
— The Seven Poor Travellers • Charles Dickens
... positively that Great Britain was declining, that Parliament was ruining itself, and that the colonies threatened a catastrophe. Catherine of Russia thought that nothing would restore its ancient vigour to the realm, short of the bracing and heroic remedy of a war. Even at home, such shrewd and experienced onlookers as Horace Walpole suspected that the state of the country was more serious than it had been since the Great Rebellion, and declared it to be approaching by fast strides to some sharp crisis. Men who remembered ...
— Burke • John Morley
... done without doubt or wavering. It must be so done or result in a three-storied drop, but when he turned and looked back, bracing himself to catch Alexander, he saw her turn again into the room, out of his range of vision. He could see Brent and Bud vociferously arguing with her and then she reappeared and lifted her pack and rifle over the sill. As she played out the improvised ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... make," said Harold; "namely that you all accompany us to the Oaks for a short call on Uncle Horace and the rest—and their Christmas tree of course—before going over to Ion. The air is delightfully bracing, the roads are good, and if we find there is time, perhaps we might as well extend our ride to the Laurels, and give Aunt Rose a call, in case we reach there before the family have left home for Ion. What do you say captain? and ...
— Christmas with Grandma Elsie • Martha Finley
... as Wynchcote, and there stopped abruptly. Past the bungalow lay the open wold with miles of heather, gorse, and bracken, and a road edged with low, grassy fern-covered banks instead of walls. The air blew freshly up here, and was far more bracing and healthy than down in the hollow of Grovebury. The residents of the new suburb affected seaside fashions, and went their moorland walks without ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... gentleness, and endowed with sensibilities originally too exquisite for such a warfare. But at nine or ten the masculine energies of the character are beginning to develop themselves; or, if not, no discipline will better aid in their development than the bracing intercourse of a great English classical school. Even the selfish are there forced into accommodating themselves to a public standard of generosity, and the effeminate in conforming to a rule of manliness. I was myself at two public schools, and I think with gratitude of the benefits which ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... to the old Phrygian who blabbed to mortals the secrets of the celestial banquets. Autumn is the season in which to indulge in a promenade through Quincy Market, after the leaf has been nipped by the frost and crimson-tinted, when the morning air is cool and bracing. Then the stalls and precincts of the chief Boston market are a goodly spectacle. Athenaeus himself, the classic historian of classic gluttons and classic bills of fare, could not but feel a glow at the sight of the good things here displayed, if he were alive. Quincy Market culminates ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... absence from the quarantine camp, as I was anxious to be present on the arrival of the herds, and again watch the "major-domo" run on the rope and fume and charge in vain. But the importance of blocking assistance was so urgent that I would gladly have ridden to Buford if necessary. In that bracing atmosphere it was a fine morning for the ride, and I was rapidly crossing the country, when a vehicle, in the dip of the plain, was sighted several miles ahead. I was following no road, but when ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... with a perceptible decline of baser appetites, so long his torment and his hindrance. His age was now seven and thirty; at forty he might hope to have utterly trodden under foot the instincts at war with mental calm. He saw before him long years of congenial fellowship, of bracing travel, of well-directed studiousness. Let problems of sex and society go hang! He had found a ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... away for other tasks of similar sort. One who watches Brother Pope, must do it on the run. One of the fairest spots on the Cumberland Plateau is Grand View. Here the American Missionary Association holds a strategic position. The wild, magnificent scenery and the cool, bracing air, tingling with ozone, make it an ideal spot for a great religious and educational centre. Already eyes are turning upward from the surrounding valleys to this mountain school. The first words I heard on landing ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 43, No. 7, July, 1889 • Various
... type, but realising the inherent dangers accruing from the employment of metal for the framework, its constructors have used wood, reinforced and strengthened where necessary by metallic angle-iron, plates, and bracing; this utilisation of metal is, however, carried out very sparingly. The first vessel of this class was a huge failure, while subsequent craft have not proved much ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... the ample opportunity he enjoyed for forming definite conclusions, Gerrard remained balanced between two contradictory opinions, and he was still much tumbled up and down in his mind when he landed and fell into the eminently bracing company of Charteris. British troops and siege-guns—not now to be spared from Granthistan—had come and were still coming up from Bombay, and the lines which had been fortified by the Darwanis and Habshiabad force ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... also soon began to feel the effects of the climate. He was still far from robust, and traded continually on his will and nerve. The native fever sapped his energy, and he was sent to recuperate, to Kashmir. He was enthusiastic about the scenery here, and his tramping and shooting trips in the bracing climate soon gave back his ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... increased as in the bearing of pain. The general impression seems to be that one should brace up to a pain; and very great strength of will is often shown in the effort made and the success achieved in bearing severe pain by means of this bracing process. But alas, the reaction after the pain is over—that alone would show the very sad misuse which had been made of a strong will. Not that there need be no reaction; but it follows naturally ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... largest class, each enjoying in abundance most of the elements of future greatness. Its soil is of the most productive character, yet our northern latitude saves us from malaria and death, which in other climes are so often attendant on a liberal soil. Our people, under the healthful and bracing influences of this northern climate, will never sink into littleness, but continue to possess the vigor and the energy to make the most of their ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... in the footstep that crunched the frosty ground, that broke the crusted snow; it was in the delicate wind that stirred the flag by the barracks away to the left; hope smiled in the wide prospect over which the thrilling, bracing air ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... and since he could skirt the beach and the wind came strongly off the land, the worst of his difficulties seemed to be past. Still, it would be a long tow to Santa Brigida, and bracing himself for the work, he ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... greatest number of articles on the least evidence; nor is that doctrine really the most productive of happiness which encourages us to cherish the greatest number of groundless hopes. The system which is really most calculated to make men happy is that which forces them to live in a bracing atmosphere; which fits them to look facts in the face and to suppress vain repinings by strenuous action ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... native on the ground making final spasmatic muscular movements in his death throes, and not more than three feet from him, coolly, David Moroka sat, bracing his elbows on his knees and aiming, two-handed, as his gun ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... long lash seemed alive; a thousand bits of foam had dried upon his vest and stained it; the rowels of his spurs were caked and enmeshed with horsehair; dust covered his face and sweat furrowed it, and a keen scent of horse-sweat passed from him through the room. For a moment he stood at the door, bracing himself with legs spread wide apart, and stared wildly about—then he reeled drunkenly across the room and fell into a chair, sprawling ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... Hallett and placed him beside Emily, where, by bracing themselves against the wall of the state-room, they might prevent their being dashed about by the rolling of the vessel. Emily welcomed him with an affectionate smile, and taking his hand, which now sometimes answered the clasp ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... proverbially synonymous with robust health? Why is it that a superior vitality, and a singular exemption from disease, notoriously distinguish dwellers in the open air, by land or sea? Without disparaging the virtues of exercise or of bracing temperature, indispensable as these are for the recuperation of enfeebled constitutions, we must admit that among the native and settled inhabitants of the open air high health is the rule in warm climates as ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... was a glorious morning, and we have seldom since been so young in feeling as never we are sure in years, as when we walked forth into its bracing air. And Aunt Rachel—she enjoyed it; the broad icy fields, the difficult ascent of the steep slippery hills and the "duckies" down them, and the crackling of the icicles as we thrust our way through the bristling under-brush of those diamond-cressed ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... a time busy in keeping his team upon the trail, but soon they settled down into a steady, shuffling trot, to which they held for mile after mile over the hard prairie road. The day was bright and clear, the air sweet and bracing. An hour's drive from the town, and the traveller seemed in a virgin world. A curious coyote sat on a hill, regarding intently the spectacle of a man travelling with wheels beneath him, instead of the legs of a horse. A band of antelope lined up on the crest ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... She thrived under its more bracing air. She loved the bustle, the stir. We were now in the midst of the presidential campaign, and Mammy and Jenny saw political enthusiasm in a new phase. Marching men passed through the street. There were shouts, torches, ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... speculated too heavily to accept defeat now! Bracing himself for the effort, Goujaud besought the lady's help with such a flood of blandishment during the drive that more than once she seemed at the point of yielding. Only one difficult detail had he ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... mess pork up to twenty dollars and nailed it there, some one saw him drinking a small bottle just before he went on 'Change, and told it round among the brokers on the floor. The bears thought Jim must have had bad news, to be bracing up at that time in the morning, so they perked up and everlastingly sold the mess pork market down through the bottom of the pit to solid earth. There wasn't even a grease spot left of that corner when they got through. As it ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... from the brown cup-board, found appropriate glasses and, in the ice-chest, club-soda and ginger ale. He poured himself a drink reminiscent of Paris—not that he felt he needed it for the reaction from bracing himself to die like a Pythias had left him elvishly grotesque in mind—gathered the bottles tenderly in his arms like small glass babies and ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... rushed for the table. Rick reached out and grabbed an ankle. Bracing his legs, he gave a mighty heave. Striped shirt went over backward in front of Barby, who stamped with both bare feet on his stomach. The breath went out of ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... Atlanta with the statement that the German consul there is Dr. E. Zoepffel. I doubt it—but let us pass over that. It describes Atlanta as "a prosperous commercial and industrial city and an important railroad center, well situated, 1030-1175 feet above the sea, enjoying a healthy and bracing climate." That is true. Atlanta is, if I mistake not, the highest important city east of Denver, and I believe her climate is in part responsible for her energy, as it is also for the fact that her vegetation is more ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... Started at ten, and drove fourteen miles to Omaha Ranch; then to St. Louis Ranch, six miles, Roland's Ranch, five miles, and Bailey's, five miles, on the North Fork of the South Fork of the Platte. The weather was fine, and the air beautifully clear and bracing. The road wound among the mountains, up a rocky ravine, down a wooded canon, then through little parks, surrounded by high hills and set with magnificent sugar pines, and carpeted with fresh grass and abundant flowers. In the ravines and on the mountain-sides the road was narrow, but ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... the sea was deadened by distance. There was a lovely perfume everywhere,—the dash of rain on the herbs and field flowers had brought out their scent, and the freshness of the stormy atmosphere was bracing and exhilarating. He put Charlie down on the grass, and was amused to see how obediently the tiny creature trotted after him, close at his heels, in the manner of a well-trained, well-taught lady's favourite. There was no danger of wheeled or motor traffic in ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... And when (bracing myself at last) I asked point-blank if anything had been sent to him as from me, and he answered "No," I might have been relieved, but I wasn't. Though I did not know then that my darling had burnt my letter, I began to feel that she ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... more blows, both of them upon the body, and then at last they had the poor boy down, with his face upon the ground and his arms pinned to his sides, and Blunt, bracing himself for the stroke, with a grin of rage raised a heavy clog for one terrible blow that ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... Come, and strong within us Stir the seaman's blood, Bracing brain and sinew; Come, ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... thirst seemed to grow upon him every minute. Then he grew desperate, and bracing himself, tried with all of his strength to burst the hollow tree asunder. But the ...
— Four Boy Hunters • Captain Ralph Bonehill
... and as good as bread," says Mr. Howells. "Read 'Eben Holden'" is the advice of Margaret Sangster. "It is a forest-scented, fresh-aired, bracing and wholly American story of country and town life. * * * If in the far future our successors wish to know what were the real life and atmosphere in which the country folk that saved this nation grew, loved, wrought and had their being, they must go back to ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... a lady to come and live with them. But she'll never go, John! Neither do any of these single gentlemen who want an airy bedroom, with the occasional use of a parlour, ever appear to come to terms with these other people who live in a rural situation remarkable for its bracing atmosphere, within five minutes' walk of the Royal Exchange. Even those letters of the alphabet who are always running away from their friends and being entreated at the tops of columns to come back, never DO come back, if we may judge from the number of times they ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... seemed to be bracing herself for that last effort. Now they could see the bare rocky outline of the summit of the hill. A few steps more, and they would pass through the gate. And then the sound came, the sound which somehow they had dreaded. Sharp and crisp through the twilight air came the report of ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... she had made upon it,—paid her bill, and bag in hand sallied forth to meet the storm. Before she had plowed her way to the nearest corner, she decided that a blizzard in New York was no joke. While she waited there in the teeth of the wind, bracing herself against it as it blew her hair in her eyes, whipped her skirt about her ankles, and swept the snow, sharp and cutting as needle-points, pitilessly against her cheeks, she was more than half minded to give up seeing Mr. ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... Whether it was the bracing effect of the fresh sea air, or the sight of his men's most obvious improvement, I know not, but from that day his strength increased with ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... was the morning of June twenty-eighth. The atmosphere was bracing and delightful, the azure of the sky above us shaded to the most delicate tints of blue at the horizon, and, here and there, bits of clouds, like bunches of cotton, flecked the sky. The sun broke grandly over the rugged hills, and the ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... wish to clear things up, to force her life, the lives of those few she cared for, out of mystery into a clear light. She had a desire to chastise thought by strong, bracing action. ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... panels bearing the arms of Llewellyn the Great, the red dragon of Cadwalader, the symbolical leek and the motto, Anorchfygol Ddraig Cymru ("The dragon of Wales is invincible"). The air is very cool and bracing on this hill. But the greatest crowd is on the sands and on the rocks of the cliff immediately backing the beach. It is difficult for one who is familiar only with the beach at Long Branch or Cape May to comprehend such a scene as this which I am trying to picture. In the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... inspirited by perceiving any door of escape. Any vivid sensation was welcome in the irksome vacancy that pursued her in the absence of immediate excitement. Devoid of the interest of opposition, and of the bracing changes to the Holt, her intercourse with the Charterises had become a weariness and vexation of spirit. Idle foreign life deteriorated them, and her principle and delicacy suffered frequent offences; but like all living wilfully in temptation, she seemed under ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... normal enough, though it might present difficulty later if persisted in. But the morning that they headed up through Sequam Pass between the spouting reefs of Sequam and Amlia Islands, she came on deck and went forward to the bows, taking in deep breaths of the bracing air and gazing north to the free expanse of Bering Strait. Rainey left her alone, but Lund welcomed her as she came ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... fog rose from the river, obscuring all objects, when the bordermen rolled out of their snug bed of leaves. The air was cool and bracing, faintly fragrant with dying foliage and the damp, dewy luxuriance of the ripened season. Wetzel pulled from under the protecting ledge a bundle of bark and sticks he had put there to keep dry, and built a fire, while Jonathan ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... and for an hour or two we were hard at work, making the booms well fast; unreeving the studding-sail and royal and skysail gear; getting rolling-ropes on the yards; setting up the weather breast-backstays; and making other preparations for a storm. It was a fine night for a gale; just cool and bracing enough for quick work, without being cold, and as bright as day. It was sport to have a gale in such weather as this. Yet it blew like a hurricane. The wind seemed to come with a spite, an edge to it, which threatened to scrape us off the yards. The ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... heart caused him for the first hour to be silent; but after that, the constant change of scene and the pure bracing air had the effect of restoring his spirits, and he felt a powerful inclination to sing. Just, however, as he was about to commence for his own amusement, the coach stopped to change horses. In less than two minutes they started again, and Valentine, who then felt ready ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... and striking into a canter the two men made for the open country. The excitement and motion combined with the bracing air drove the fumes of the liquor from Cook's head, and before many miles had been passed he was comparatively free from the terrible malady which ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... gathered in their 'Holy Scripture.' Non-established priesthoods are but little more disposed to emancipate 'mind' and oil the wheels of political progression than those kept in state pay. The air of conventicles is not of the freest or most bracing description. The Methodist preacher, who has the foolish effrontery to tell his congregation 'the flush lusteth always contrary to the spirit, and, therefore, every person born into the world deserveth God's wrath and damnation,' may be a liberal politician, one well fitted to ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell
... sat down, passive now, his hand grasping the arms of his chair like one bracing himself for ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... the boundary-line between the last days of vigor and the first of old age, they put forward the time of old age by many years. One sees their men rapidly sink into the softness and incapacity of senility, when a more bracing life would have kept them good for half-a-dozen years longer. But women do not care for this. They like men to be their own companions more than they care for any manly comradeship among each other; and most women—but not all—would rather have their husbands manly in a womanly ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... continued Dr. May, who felt it was the moment for bracing severity. "It is rendering you unmanly. ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... rivers and streams flow down, and thoroughly irrigate the greater part of this lovely island: indeed, it may well be looked on as the Paradise of the East; for though, in the low country, the climate is relaxing and enervating to European constitutions, in the higher regions the air is bracing and exhilarating in ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... and bracing of which hemicycle or arch, worthie of admiration, of a rare and subtile deuise, and exquisite polyture, did thus obiect and present it ...
— Hypnerotomachia - The Strife of Loue in a Dreame • Francesco Colonna
... MacAdamized road extending across the rolling plains and gently sloping hill sides, covered with waving cane, and interspersed with provision grounds, contributed with the fresh bracing air of the morning to make the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... the vat, and cut off a corner of it, the white streak already spoken of will appear more or less thick, until the tanning is completed; it has been generally supposed, that the tan in the tanpits had no other effect upon the leather than that of hardening and bracing the fibres of the skin, which has been relaxed by the preliminary of tanning. Mr. S——, however, examined the operation more closely, and discovered that there existed in the tan a principle which was soluble in water, by which the tanning was ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger
... we live fast here," said a general officer to me one day on the Missouri; "And we die fast too," echoed a major from another part of the room. As a matter of course, places possessing salubrious climates are crowded with pallid seekers after health, and as St. Paul enjoys a dry and bracing atmosphere from its great elevation above the sea level, as well as from the purity of the surrounding prairies, its hotels—and they are many—are crowded with the broken wrecks of half the Eastern states; some find ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... being addressed to his mother and other friends. I have several other letters concerned with Borrow's Bible Society work in Russia, but they are not inspiring. Borrow's correspondence with Hasfeld, of which Knapp gives us glimpses, is more bracing, and the two or three letters from that admirable Dane that are in my collection I am glad to ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... woman at this stage by twisting an ordinary bed sheet and putting it around one of the posts or bars of the foot of the bed. The patient may then pull on the ends during the pain; she may also find much comfort and aid by bracing her feet on the foot of the bed while pulling. It is desirable to instruct the nurse to press on the small of the back during these pains. Some women appreciate a hot water bottle in this region. If the pains are hard the patient may perspire freely; it is always refreshing occasionally ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... encouraged, amidst his many vicissitudes and disappointments, by his noble wife. If he was treated with harshness by his political enemies, his consolation was in the tender affection which filled his home with sunshine. Though his public life was bracing and stimulating, he felt, nevertheless, that it was cold and calculating, and neither filled the soul nor elevated the character. "Man longs for a happiness," he says in his 'Memoires,' "more complete and more tender ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... once but busied himself with his ponderous fur coat, which he buttoned, as if bracing himself for the start. Beneath her lashes she looked sideways at the deliberate hands and the lean strong face, burnt to a red-brown by sun and snow, half hidden in the fur collar of his ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... Musardu, the chief city of the Western Mandingoes, was at length reached, just on the edge of the primeval forest. Beyond lies a vast plateau covered with tall grass, showing here and there a solitary palm, and stretching away to the head waters of the Niger. The climate is wholesome, the air bracing, and the soil fertile. ...
— History of Liberia - Johns Hopkins University Studies In Historical And Political Science • J.H.T. McPherson
... confiding in Lord Selsey was at once soothing and bracing. He was a widower with no children, and Cecil was by way of being his heir. Since the death of his wife he lived in a kind of cultured retirement in a large old house standing a little by itself in Cambridge Gate. He used to ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... better than he knew." She needed no bracing; and she was, and is, a staunch, seaworthy little model. I fell in love with her from the start. I had at last found the canoe that I could ride in rough water, sleep in afloat, and carry with ease for miles. I paddled her early and late, mainly on the Fulton Chain; but I also ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... after the arrival of Mrs. Belgrade, Arch took her down to the beach to bathe. The beach was alive with the gorgeous grotesque figures of the bathers. The air was bracing, the surf splendid. ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... snipe; While on dreary moorlands Lonely curlew pipe. Through the black fir forest Thunder harsh and dry, Shattering down the snow-flakes Off the curdled sky. . . . . . Come; and strong within us Stir the Viking's blood; Bracing brain and sinew: ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... of the last letter it was impossible to say no. Darsie was not sure that she wanted to say no; on the other hand, she was aggravatingly uncertain if she wanted to say yes. At college and at home alike the atmosphere was at once austere and bracing; it would be agreeable to live for a time in the lap of luxury—to be regarded as a miracle of cleverness and beauty; which treatment was invariably bestowed upon her during her visits to The Manor. She would enjoy staying with the Percivals, ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... souls in quiet freedom. It is a small class, especially distinguished by the charm of its women. Everard had not adapted himself without difficulty to this new atmosphere; from the first he recognized its soothing and bracing quality, but his experiences had accustomed him to an air more rudely vigorous; it was only after those weeks spent abroad in frequent intercourse with the Brissendens that he came to understand the ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... stand off and admire himself. Ludlow Street Jail is a good deal like it in many ways, and I can see how in time the canker of unrest and the bitter memories of those who did us wrong but who are basking in the bright and bracing air, while we, to meet their obligations, sacrifice our money, our health and at last our minds, would ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... Carrie, "that's what I like! You're bracing up; I knew you would! However, I must go back. Breakfast ...
— Partners of the Out-Trail • Harold Bindloss
... she was being packed were ridiculously histrionic. As soon as the saddle was cinched, she spread her legs apart, bracing them firmly as though about to receive the weight of an iron safe. Then as each article of the pack was thrown across her back, she flinched and uttered the most heart-rending groans. We used sometimes to amuse ourselves by adding merely an empty sack, or other article quite without ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... air is mountain-air, minus the aroma and stimulus of evergreen forests, and plus the miasma of miles of marsh and peat-land and the foulnesses of the city exhalations. It is the thin air of a high elevation, pleasantly bracing to persons so fortunate as to possess nerves of iron and lungs of leather, but extremely irritating to sensitive brains and delicate chests, and too exhausting, after a time, in its demands upon the most abundant vitality. It is the boast of certain physicians in Munich that consumption ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... one way of securing permanent tenure, or stimulating the industry and sustaining the thrift of the farmer. But the nature of the different tenures, and the effect of each in bracing up or relaxing the nerves of industry, will be the object of deliberation with the Government and the legislature. It is said that, in the hands of small farmers, proprietorship leads to endless subdivision; that long leases generally ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... at least," I said. "In the morning when she found that the crime had been not only fruitless, but that she had searched the wrong berth and killed the wrong man; when she saw me emerge, unhurt, just as she was bracing herself for the discovery of my dead body, then she went into hysterics. You remember, I ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... institution might well seem to deserve a more tolerant and impartial investigation than it has yet received at the hands of our sociologists. A survival so picturesque could hardly be expected to outlive the bracing air of the nineteenth century. The north wind blew and by 1840 the cicisbeatura was a ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... fellow, and made a good soldier. I well remember our high spirits on this journey home. We were young, glowing with health and overflowing with liveliness and animation. There was a heavy snow on the ground, but the sky was clear, and the air was keen and bracing. Occasionally, when we would strike a stretch of level road, we would loose all the buttons of our overcoats save the top one, put the gad to our steeds, and waving our caps, with our long coat tails streaming in the wind, would yell like Comanches, ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... disturb their clients by calling out the names of stations. When New Brunswick is reached many think that they have arrived at West Philadelphia, or (worse still) have been carried on to Wilmington. They rush desperately to the bracing chill of the platform to learn where they are. There is a mood of mystery about this Owl of ours. The trainmen take a quaint delight in keeping the actual whereabouts of the caravan ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... recitation being from Shakespeare, and the reading from the Spectator. There were no children's books, properly so called, except the ballads, chap-books brought round by pedlers, often far from edifying, and the plunge from the horn-book into general literature was, to say the least of it, bracing. ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... day in November, when the sun seemed making a last effort to prevail against coming winter. The wind was fresh and bracing, and nature appeared bright and cheerful, on that ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... in listless incuriosity till he saw her straighten and stand away from the rail as if bracing herself ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... natural curiosity, turned to examine the picture, while Barraclough embraced the opportunity to slip the crook of his stick through the handle of the bag and tug hard. But the bag was heavier than he had imagined. It scarcely moved and only by bracing his foot on the seat opposite was he able to upset its balance. Just a fraction of a second too soon the man turned. Conceivably he saw murder in Barraclough's eyes or else he was unusually quick at grasping a situation. He flashed ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... holding firmly to the side of his berth with one hand, and bracing himself between his berth and the side of his wash stand cupboard with his knees, as the ship lurched to and fro, he contrived to dress himself, though he was a long time in accomplishing the feat. He then told Jennie ...
— Rollo on the Atlantic • Jacob Abbott
... brought the masts to their upright position. He then inserted the iron keys which kept them in their place, and hoisted the sails. By this time the boat had drifted to the lower extremity of the island; so, bracing her sharp up, he stood away across the river. Tacking before he reached the swift channel, which flowed close in shore, he laid the boat's course up the stream. The wind was blowing fresh, and, notwithstanding ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... intricately winding through mangroves and brambles, we entered the main body of the river in time to see the sun setting behind a glorious sky, directly before us. We were evidently near the sea, because the water was perfectly salt, and we scented also the cool and bracing sea breeze, with feelings of satisfaction and rapture. However, the wind became too stormy for our fragile canoe; the waves leaped into it over the bow, and several times we were in danger of being swamped. Our companion was far before us, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... of bracing or stringing the bow was as follows: Grasping it with his right hand at its center, with the belly toward him, and the lower end on his right thigh, he held the upper end with his left hand while the loop of the string rested between his ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... the room, and bracing for a second against the wall, he ran forward and threw himself at the boards. They gave way more easily than he had supposed, and a rapid effort landed him squarely on the leader, who had turned ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... quagmires from night showers, and I am cold-footed and moisture-abhorring as a cat; nevertheless I yesterday tramped to Waltham Cross; perhaps the poor bit of exertion necessary to scribble this was owing to that unusual bracing. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... went up on the fourth act—that in which Fogg was going to do something. He had in the meantime been bracing up. When he made his entry and spoke, his manner of speech was somewhat thick, but his acting was more energetic. Fogg never could take anything stimulating without its going to his head, and as his brain exercised a peculiar influence over other members of his body, they all contributed ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... a brilliant day, with a glorious blue sky overhead and a bracing breeze out of the east. Just beyond Long Island a low stratum of miasmic gray was the only shred of the usual fog to be seen on the whole horizon. In the little roadstead the vessels, black-hulled or white, rode eagerly and gracefully at their ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... his shoulders, unconsciously bracing himself to face what was now soon to happen. Well, it was the beginning of the end. Oh Dear knew. Soon more would know, all would know. And in a way he was glad of it, glad that the torment of suspense ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... places near the mountains, and the country well wooded and watered. The grass, consisting of several varieties of the grama, is of a superior quality, and grows luxuriantly. The climate is salubrious, and the almost constant cool and bracing breezes of the summer months, with the entire absence of anything like marshes or stagnant water, remove all sources of noxious malaria, with its attendant evils of autumnal fevers.—Marcy's Exploration of ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... Landiani Station in the province of Naivasha. Here we started in earnest on our big game expedition, which I am glad to say proved to be a most delightful and interesting one in every way. The country was lovely, and the climate cool and bracing. We all got a fair amount of sport, our bag including rhino, hippo, waterbuck, reedbuck, hartebeeste, wildebeeste, ostrich, impala, oryx, roan antelope, etc.; but for the present I must confine myself to a short account of how I was lucky enough ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... the rest! Bill, dear—when I am such a tired, cross apology for a wife!" Susan found nothing in life so bracing as the arm that was now tight about her. She had a full minute's respite before the ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... best joints, and though this is a little dearer than London, the meat is probably more wholesome from being in such good air as we enjoy. In wintertime the journey to town, half-an-hour by train, has a most bracing effect on those capable of bearing severe cold. For the rest, the incapables are a real blessing to those who sell mustard-plasters and extra-sized pocket-handkerchiefs. Our society is so select and refined that I verily believe Belgravia ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various
... out glances of protest. The elder man found himself once more struggling against the wave of sympathy which at times in the court-room had been almost too strong for him. He was forced to intrench himself mentally within the system he served before bracing himself to reply. ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... daybreak, I went on deck, and saw the shores of England. Only a few days before, we had left America behind us, brown and leafless, just emerging from the long gloom of winter; and now the slopes of another world arose green and inviting in the flush of spring. There was a bracing breeze; the dingy waters of the Mersey rolled up in wreaths of beauty; the fleets of ships, steamers, sloops, lighters, pilot-boats, bounding over the waves, meeting, tacking, plunging, swaying gracefully ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... displeasures and their griefs so great, so continual, and so many. It maketh me think on a good worshipful man who, when he divers times beheld what pain his wife took in tightly binding up her hair to make her a fair large forehead, and with tightly bracing in her body to make her middle small (both twain to her great pain) for the pride of a little foolish praise, he said unto her, "Forsooth, madam, if God give you not hell, he shall do you a great wrong. For it must needs be your own very right, for you ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... lady may have seen something about the strong, wholesome, well-groomed Englishman that pleased her, perhaps she was simply glad to be alive upon that glorious morning, with the bracing breeze blowing fresh from the lake, and the sun sending his welcome rays down upon the mountainside. At all events, her lips parted in the merest shadow of a smile as she walked along the gravelled path with the veriest air ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... with him, and then he went out somewhat dizzily to take counsel with himself how he should put the matter to her. She would be sure to ask what the price of the new room would be, and he debated whether to take it and tell her some kindly lie about it, or trust to the bracing effect of the sum named in helping restore the lost balance of her nerves. He was not so rich that he could throw six hundred dollars away, but there might be worse things; and he walked up and down thinking. All at once it flashed upon him that he had better see the doctor, anyway, and find out ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... hard study rather than in hard riding, had overworked, had brought back his Cuban fever, and was in poor shape to face the tropics. So, for two months before the transport was to sail, they ordered him to Cape Cod to fill his lungs with the bracing air ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... lies some twenty miles north of Landiani Station in the province of Naivasha. Here we started in earnest on our big game expedition, which I am glad to say proved to be a most delightful and interesting one in every way. The country was lovely, and the climate cool and bracing. We all got a fair amount of sport, our bag including rhino, hippo, waterbuck, reedbuck, hartebeeste, wildebeeste, ostrich, impala, oryx, roan antelope, etc.; but for the present I must confine myself to a short account of how I was lucky ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... qualities the wholesome, invigorating effects and the specially refreshing properties of the Borage are supposed to be mainly due. For which reason, the plant, "when taken in sallets," as says an old herbalist, "doth exhilarate, and make the mind glad," almost in the same way as a bracing sojourn by the seaside during an autumn holiday. The flowers possess cordial virtues which are very revivifying, and have been much commended against melancholic depression of the nervous system. Burton, in his [61] Anatomy of Melancholy (1676), ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... of these pioneers returned to the Golden State and civilization with the burden of their treasure, saying they had not come to Arizona for their health. Now in these present days there comes a throng of people in quest of health solely, and many are they who find its blessing in the sunny and bracing air of this climate, in hot springs and the balmy breath of the fir and juniper of our mountains. I found employment in a mercantile establishment of this little mining town and grew up with the country, as the saying is. I formed new acquaintances and made new friends. Among others, I met William ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... procured for him the use of the Imperial baths. His mind being thus relieved from the restless ecstasy which he had suffered in Rome, and the intensity of interest being diminished by the circumscribed nature of the society of Leghorn, together with the bracing effects of sea-bathing, he was soon again in a condition to resume his study in the capital. But the same overpowering attacks on his feelings and imagination soon produced a relapse of his former indisposition, and compelled him to return ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... considerations of rank and station. We were just a man and a woman whose fates were linked irrevocably by love. I stooped suddenly, under the sway of an impulse, I could not resist, and kissed her upturned face, turning almost dizzy in the act. Then I broke from her clasp, and bracing myself for the task to which we ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... ground alike leaves and remaining burs? There is something especially pleasant in the warmth of color and the crackle of sound on the forest floor, as one really shuffles through chestnut leaves in the bracing November air, stooping now and then for a nut perchance remaining in the warm and velvety corner of ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... of those intensely clear, sunny days which only our Lady of the Sunshine can produce, a day when the thermometer announces that it is very hot, but when Nature denies the slander and the blood dances to the time set by the bracing air. ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... novelty of the scene, one becomes a little fatigued by the long, hot ride; but as we draw nearer to Matanzas, the refreshing air from the Gulf suddenly comes to our relief, full of a bracing tonic which renders all things tolerable. The sight of the broad harbor, under such circumstances, lying with its flickering, shimmering surface under the afternoon sun, ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... size, shape, curvature, bracing and material, are all important. A great deal depends upon the curve of the surfaces. Two machines may have the same extent of surface and develop the same rate of speed, yet one may have a much greater lifting power than the other, provided it has a more efficient curve to its surface. Many people ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... satellites like swatting flies!" Fay proclaimed as the portent faded. "Bracing! Gussy, where's your tickler? I've got a new spool for ...
— The Creature from Cleveland Depths • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... swept the gap between the cars was bracing and cool. There was a moon, he saw water shine and dark pines stream past. The snorting of the locomotive broke in a measured beat through the roll of wheels; the rocks threw back confused echoes about the clanging cars. ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... great mudbanks had disappeared, save that here and there their dun-coloured convexity rose above the surface like the back of a sleeping leviathan. Overhead a great flock of wild geese were flapping their way southward, like a broad arrow against the sky. It was an exhilarating, bracing scene, and accorded well with her own humour. She felt so full of life and hope that she could hardly believe that she was the same girl who that very morning had hurled away the poison bottle, knowing in her heart that unless ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... since she had come home. She kept Betty gossiping for half an hour, and as the stream of the village life poured about her, in Betty's racy speech, it was as though some primitive virtue entered into her and cheered her—some bracing voice from the Earth-spirit—whose purpose ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... interesting, being addressed to his mother and other friends. I have several other letters concerned with Borrow's Bible Society work in Russia, but they are not inspiring. Borrow's correspondence with Hasfeld, of which Knapp gives us glimpses, is more bracing, and the two or three letters from that admirable Dane that are in my collection I am glad to ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... diagonals, the former being made of four angle-irons, and the latter of one angle-iron. Each pair of arches, longitudinal girders and uprights, is transversely 3 meters (9 ft. 10 in.) from center to center, and is connected by cross and diagonal bracing. On the top of the longitudinal girders are fixed cross pieces of single Barlow rails, upon which again are fastened two longitudinals of wood 12 in. square in section, and which in their turn carry the rails of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... attempt at decoration had been made, for tall glasses stood in the centre of the tables filled with ripe grasses and pretty autumn leaves, but, strange to relate, we were more interested in the contents of our soup plates and what was to follow. The cold and bracing air during our short walks on deck had given us all famous appetites, and we ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... said them, he put some of his own life into them and gave them a greater value than they deserved. The turn of his head was comic; a queer little helpless movement of his hands was comic; the way in which he seemed to stop short and gulp as if he were bracing himself up was comic; the swift downward and then upward glance of his eyes, followed by an assumption of complete humility and resignation, these were comic. And when he appeared on the stage, the audience, knowing something ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... to force a door—that is, an ordinary door—and at the same time make very little noise. It is done—if the door opens inward—by seizing the knob firmly with both hands, having turned it, and then by bracing the body with one knee pressed firmly against the door directly under the knob. In this position, if it is assumed by a strong man, every effort may be centred upon one sudden impulse forward, which, while there ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... TIMES.—'These are bracing songs, full of the Imperial spirit, of healthy sentiment and fresh air, and not without a true ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... scarcely interest the reader to follow Guy Elersley in his rambles, from the time he passed out of the dingy doorway of the village public-house until he drew up, after a long drive, before the imposing entrance of "Beauport Asylum." The bracing air of the country road that leads to this establishment had had a most beneficial effect on Guy's temperament, and therefore as he alighted from his caleche, his step had resumed something of its old lightness, and his face had lost ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... contented that thou art alone!" Fortunate was it, then, for Maltravers, that he was in his native land, not in climes where excitement is in the pursuit of pleasure rather than in the exercise of duties. In the hardy air of the liberal England, he was already, though unknown to himself, bracing and ennobling his dispositions and desires. It is the boast of this island that the slave whose foot touches the soil is free. The boast may be enlarged. Where so much is left to the people, where the ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... could not but conquer; and they will conquer to the end. All attempts to restore the monastic and feminine ideal, like that of good Nicholas Ferrar at Little Gidding, failed. They withered like hot-house exotics in the free, keen, bracing English air; and in our civil wars, Cavalier and Puritan, in whatever they differed, never differed in their sound and healthy conviction that true religion did not crush, but strengthened and consecrated ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... although Shakespeare's outlines are drawn with more regard to fidelity than to actual beauty, yet, like a great painter, he brings all Nature into sympathy with man. We feel the ghostly shudder of the November night in Hamlet, breathe the bracing Highland air in Macbeth, the air of the woods in As You Like It; the storm on the heath roars through Lear's mad outburst, the nightingale sings in the pomegranate ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... It was as if the common atmosphere had been purified of all grosser particles—as if its component gases had been mixed afresh, for Canadian use only. The cold was hardly felt, though Mr. Holt was sure the thermometer must be close upon zero; but a bracing exhilarating sensation strung every nerve with ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... hero bribes him once and again to unconscious false dealing. In his "Voltaire," and in his "Rousseau," Mr. Morley is so lofty in tone, expressing himself against the moral obliquities of the men with whom he is dealing, that often you feel the ethic atmosphere of the books to be pure and bracing, almost beyond the standard of biblical and Christian. But in his "Diderot and the Encyclopaedists," such fine severity is conspicuously absent. Mr. Morley is so deeply convinced that atheism is what we all most need just now, that when he has—not halting mere infidels, like ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... outrival that "Punic-faith" which has hitherto been the by-word for perfidious treachery. The heartening surprises of gallant little Belgium and Serbia; the renascence of Russia; the wonderful upleap to the needs of the times by Great, and still more by Greater Britain; and, not least, the bracing of the loins of our closest ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... desired her company, that she would not for the world have tried to destroy it. "I hope you will enjoy yourself very much, dear, and come back with some colour in your cheeks, though I am afraid that particular part of the 'seaside' is not very bracing. Tell Mrs Hilliard with my love that I shall be charmed to see ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... woman had been—were out of place on the spirit which was incarnated in Susan. Amid the cramping customs of the period, she moved large, free, and simple, as though she walked already in the purer and more bracing ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... would fall across mother's face, and she would murmur softly, "Poor little Darsie!" Darsie's own eyes filled at the pathos of the thought. She was filled with commiseration for her own hard plight... Father's letters were bracing. No pity here; only encouragement and exhortation. "Remember, my dear, a sacrifice grudgingly offered is no sacrifice at all. What is worth doing, is worth doing well. I hope to hear that you are not only an agreeable, ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... air, the bright sunshine, entered in quivering rays. Without, the snow-covered roofs stood out clearly against a soft blue sky, limpid and springlike. Light wreaths of smoke floated upward in the bracing atmosphere. ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... part of this lovely island: indeed, it may well be looked on as the Paradise of the East; for though, in the low country, the climate is relaxing and enervating to European constitutions, in the higher regions the air is bracing and ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... which denied the existence of death, naturally could not stoop to burial; but Midmore had to leave London for the dank country at a season when Social Regeneration works best through long, cushioned conferences, two by two, after tea. There he faced the bracing ritual of the British funeral, and was wept at across the raw grave by an elderly coffin-shaped female with a long nose, who called him 'Master Frankie'; and there he was congratulated behind an echoing top-hat by a man he mistook for a mute, ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... currants were glossy black and lusciously ripe. It was the season which Jolly Roger loved most of all, and it was the beginning of Peter's first September. The days were still hot, but at night there was a bracing something in the air that stirred the blood, and Peter found a sharp, new note in the voices of the wild. The wolf howled again in the middle of the night. The loon forgot his love-sickness, and screamed raucous defiance at the moon. The big snowshoes were no longer tame, but wary and alert, and ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... in the city and those who do not dislike raw, bracing winds from the ocean pronounce Los Angeles to be the only place worth living in in all Southern California. Each place has its supporters ignoring all other attractions, and absolutely opposite accounts of the ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... whose potent seed Nicotia, big from Bacchus, bore And cast upon Virginia's shore, I'll think,—So fill the fairer bowl And wise alembic of thy soul, With herbs far-sought that shall distil, Not fumes to slacken thought and will, But bracing essences that nerve To wait, to dare, to ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... varies in different regions, at different seasons of the year, and even different hours of the day. The odorous, fresh sea-breezes are distinct from the fitful breezes along river banks, which are humid and freighted with inland smells. The bracing, light, dry air of the mountains can never be mistaken for the pungent salt air of the ocean. The air of winter is dense, hard, compressed. In the spring it has new vitality. It is light, mobile, and laden with a thousand palpitating odours from earth, grass, and sprouting leaves. ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... either side seemed to Dorothy Thornton to close in and stifle her, and the bracing, effervescent air of the high places had become dead and lifeless in her nostrils, as to one ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... the girls thought they must have missed "their own particular four" and were bracing themselves to stand ...
— The Outdoor Girls at the Hostess House • Laura Lee Hope
... "It's bracing, tones up the mind," said Paul Lane. "But what about this new note? All we know is a Cornish extraction, a banker ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... any conspicuous or public position. Her health was as we have said impaired somewhat by her assiduous devotion to her duties in connection with the Association, but she made no complaint, and her family did not take the alarm. The spring of 1866 found her so feeble, that it was thought the pure and bracing air of the Green Mountains might prove beneficial in restoring her strength, but her days were numbered. On the 30th of August ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... AFT. To throw the breast backstays out of the cross-tree horns or out-riggers and bear them aft. If not done, when suddenly bracing up, the cross-tree horn is frequently sprung or ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... charm of the Transvaal lies in its climate, which is among the best in the world, and in all the southern districts very healthy. During the winter months, that is from April to October, little or no rain falls, and the climate is cold and bracing. In summer it is rather warm, but not overpoweringly hot, the thermometer at Pretoria averaging from 65 to 73 degrees, and in the winter from 59 to 56 degrees. The population of the Transvaal is estimated at about 40,000 ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... stage-coach. An hour and a half had elapsed when I perceived that the horses were dragging the vehicle slowly up a steep hill. The full-leaved trees are arching for us, overhead, a verdant canopy; the air becomes more bracing and elastic: and even I feel its invigorating influence, and cease to drop slily the gravelly dirt I had collected from my shoes, down the neck and back of a very pretty girl, who sat blushing furiously on my left. Now the summit is gained and, in another ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... the abrupt change of field and atmosphere—after what I have put in the preceding fifty or sixty pages—temporary episodes, thank heaven!—I restore my book to the bracing and buoyant equilibrium of concrete outdoor Nature, the only permanent reliance for sanity ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... turning out after a long sleep, felt quite different creatures to the tired band who had wearily crawled into the village. The bright sky, the fresh morning air, the pleasant odor of the great pine forest around them, and the bracing atmosphere—at the height of fifteen hundred feet above the sea—at once refreshed ...
— The Young Franc Tireurs - And Their Adventures in the Franco-Prussian War • G. A. Henty
... hearts are crass, but to stir them properly they must have men entering into glory with some pomp and circumstance. And that is why these stories of our sea-captains, printed, so to speak, in capitals, and full of bracing moral influence, are more valuable to England than any material benefit in all the books of political economy between Westminster and Birmingham. Greenville chewing wineglasses at table makes no very pleasant figure, any more than a thousand other artists when they are viewed ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... such advice cannot even seem to have an improper motive." Here she paused, feeling the difficulty of her task— aware that she could not conclude it without an admission which no woman willingly makes. But she shook away the impediment, bracing herself to the work, and went on steadily with her speech. "Coming from me, such motive may be imputed—nay, ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... for her on the verandah with his face turned up to the sky. He scarcely looked like a man bracing himself for a stiff ordeal, but it was not his way to stoop under his burdens. He had learned to tread jauntily while he ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... the inner bolt melted and the lock inoperative; and, placing his forearms on either side of the middle crack of the door, he stood bracing it. ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... make the effort necessary to move or to turn away, lest the shunning motion should carry conviction to her heart. Alas! conviction of the probable danger to her father's life was already there: it was that that was calming her down, tightening her muscles, bracing her nerves. In that hour she lost all her ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... come—she would hurry along Fifth Avenue, a Nordic Ganymede, her fur coat swinging fashionably with her steps, her cheeks redder by a stroke of the wind's brush, her breath a delightful mist upon the bracing air—and the doors of the Ritz would revolve, the crowd would divide, fifty masculine eyes would start, stare, as she gave back forgotten dreams to the husbands of many obese and ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... of his long arm. And as she looked, a lusty bass—heavy, full of fight—took the hook, and she saw the man stand motionless, intent, alert, at the instant he first felt the fish. Then she caught the skillful turn of his wrist as he struck—quick and sure; watched, with breathless interest as—bracing himself—the fisherman's powerful figure became instinct with life. With the boiling water grasping his legs, clinging to him like a tireless wrestler seeking the first unguarded moment; and with the plunging, tugging, rushing ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... side of the swell, passed a clump of bushes, and came face to face with Sylvia Morgan. She, too, leaving the speech, had been walking, and the color of her face was deepened by the exercise and the crisp, bracing air. It had given her, also, an obvious exhilaration, probably physical, that Harley had not seen before in a long time, and her smile was of ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... of inner steam, hot, close, and sticky as a brother: a brother whose wants are many and whose resources are few. The morning after the storm, there will be a keen thrill in the air, keen but wholesome and bracing as a good resolution and not necessarily more lasting. The asphalt has been washed as clean as a renovated conscience, and the city presses forward again to the future in which alone it has its being, with the gay confidence of a sinner who has forgiven ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... on "The Curlew" at Portland made a bill of a hundred and nine dollars; seamen's wages to Gloucester, with car-fare back, nineteen dollars; bracing and strengthening the schooner, sixty-seven dollars; cost of getting in fuel and water, thirty-three dollars; and other bills to the amount of forty-nine dollars: in all, two hundred and seventy-seven dollars. We had thus to pay out at ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... were dry again. The day was intensely pure: one of those incomparable bits of California winter, warm and balmy and full of white sparkling sunshine, redolent of all the purest influences of the spring, and at the same time enlivened with one of the most bracing wind-storms conceivable. Instead of camping out, as I usually do, I then chanced to be stopping at the house of a friend. But when the storm began to sound, I lost no time in pushing out into the woods to enjoy it. For on such occasions Nature has always something rare to show us, and the danger ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... indicated a range of hills. Here Tolly Trevor, unable to restrain his joy at the prospect of adventure before him, uttered a war-whoop, brought his switch down smartly on the pony's flank, and shot away over the plain like a wild creature. The air was bracing, the prospect was fair, the sunshine was bright. No wonder that the obedient pony, forgetting for the moment the fatigues of the past, and strong in the enjoyment of the previous night's rest and supper, went over the ground at a pace that ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... or what else should he do? As he was a little more inclined now to bet on calmness than on passion, he decided to take a seat in the parlor, and keep it, at least, till he could dispose of his present doubt. Easily might he have measured three miles over the Waltham hills, in the bracing morning-air, with his own locomotive apparatus, while he had been looking in vain for artificial conveyance. But if that plan had occurred to him at all at first, it would have been dismissed with contempt as unbusinesslike. He must not, by any possibility, appear to Captain Grant ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... the white memorial monument to Prince Albert, with its sculptured panels bearing the arms of Llewellyn the Great, the red dragon of Cadwalader, the symbolical leek and the motto, Anorchfygol Ddraig Cymru ("The dragon of Wales is invincible"). The air is very cool and bracing on this hill. But the greatest crowd is on the sands and on the rocks of the cliff immediately backing the beach. It is difficult for one who is familiar only with the beach at Long Branch or Cape May to comprehend such a scene as this which I am trying to picture. In the first ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... in a state of nature, but singularly beautiful as a landscape. It was an open prairie, traversed by what was called the North Platte River, with scarcely water enough in it to be called a creek, with rolling hills on either side, and above, a clear sky, and air pure and bracing. It was the first time I had been so far out on the plains, and I enjoyed it beyond expression. I was soon able to eat my full share of the plain fare of bread and meat, ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... the weather be intensely cold. I dislike fires in bedrooms, especially for children; they are very enervating, and make a child liable to catch cold. Cold weather is very bracing, particularly at night "Generally speaking," says the Siecle, "during winter, apartments are too much heated. The temperature in them ought not to exceed 16 deg. Centigrade (59 deg. Fahrenheit); and even in periods of great cold scientific men declare that 12 deg. or 14 ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... and placed him beside Emily, where, by bracing themselves against the wall of the state-room, they might prevent their being dashed about by the rolling of the vessel. Emily welcomed him with an affectionate smile, and taking his hand, which now sometimes answered the clasp of hers, told him that he must not be afraid, ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... over the tail, which he twisted about his right arm in a flash, at the same time throwing up his feet and bracing them against a wheel of ...
— The Circus Boys on the Flying Rings • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... the fourth act—that in which Fogg was going to do something. He had in the meantime been bracing up. When he made his entry and spoke, his manner of speech was somewhat thick, but his acting was more energetic. Fogg never could take anything stimulating without its going to his head, and as his brain exercised a peculiar influence over other members of his body, they all ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... a more open country, where I became conscious of a considerable change in the atmosphere. Hitherto the air had been tolerably warm, though bracing; it now grew sensibly cooler. Thick clouds were gathering in the sky. The wind, before a gentle breeze, now rose rapidly, and blew with violence. It soon became icy cold, and flakes of snow began to fall. Without ...
— In the Rocky Mountains - A Tale of Adventure • W. H. G. Kingston
... left me at a day's notice. The amount and kind of moral courage I had to summon up before I could go home alone the first evening after my comrade left me can only be appreciated by those who have undergone some similar torture. It was not like the bracing up a man goes through when he has to face some imminent known danger, but was of a more subtle and complex kind. "There is nothing to fear," I kept saying to myself, and yet I could not shake off a nameless dread. "You are in your right mind and have all your senses," I continually argued, ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... of paper came as a bracing tonic to Arthur Dean. It was an order, and just now he ached to be ordered. The curt message out-weighed all the burning words of the preacher. Even from three thousand miles away Lars Larssen could grip hold of the mind of the young ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... stood on the Wyddfa, in a cold bracing atmosphere, though the day was almost stiflingly hot in the regions from which we had ascended. There we stood enjoying a scene inexpressibly grand, comprehending a considerable part of the mainland of Wales, the whole of Anglesey, a faint ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... morning we proceeded in the same way as on the previous day. Thus for several days we travelled on, resting during the night at rude tambos, the inhabitants of which, directly Don Jose spoke to them, willingly undertook to give us accommodation. The weather was fine, the air pure, bracing, and exhilarating; and in spite of the fatigue we underwent, none of us suffered. Ellen and Maria bore the journey wonderfully. Although we were making our way towards the east, frequently we found ourselves riding round a mountain with our backs to the rising sun. Now we were ascending ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... Through the snow-storm hurl'd, Drives our English hearts of oak Seaward round the world. Come, as came our fathers, Heralded by thee, Conquering from the eastward, Lords by land and sea. Come; and strong within us Stir the Vikings' blood, Bracing brain and sinew; Blow, thou ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... latter to remain stationary on the sward, keeping a good look-out to guard against surprise. As by this arrangement his master would be kept in tolerable proximity, the old negro, whose repugnance to be left alone in that melancholy spot was invincible, offered no longer an objection, and Gerald, bracing more tightly round his loins, the belt which contained his pistols, proceeded cautiously to secure the stool, by the aid of which he speedily found his feet resting on the edge of the water butt, and his face ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... became necessary to change to thick garments. I went to St. George's in the morning clothed in the thinnest of linen, and reached home at five in the afternoon with two overcoats on. The nights are said to be always cool and bracing. We had mosquito-nets, and the Reverend said the mosquitoes persecuted him a good deal. I often heard him slapping and banging at these imaginary creatures with as much zeal as if they had been real. There are no mosquitoes in the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of any such adaptation will be a changed spirit in the general body of society. We have come to a serious condition of our affairs, and we shall not get them into order again without a thorough bracing-up of ourselves in the process. There can be no doubt that for a large portion of our comfortable classes existence has been altogether too easy for the last lifetime or so. The great bulk of the world's work has been done out of their sight ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... some of which I lingered at leisure, were tonic, bracing, inspiring, and made me ashamed because I was not young. I saw geography being taught with the aid of a stereoscopic magic-lantern. After a view of the high street of a village in North Russia had been exposed and explained by a pupil, the teacher said: "If ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... harbour and he were here with them, or even if she had had good tidings from him, Kate Bonnet would have been a very happy girl, for her present abode was vastly different from any home she had ever known. Her uncle's house on the highlands beyond the town lay in a region of cooler breezes and more bracing air than that of Barbadoes. Books and music and the general air of refinement recalled her early life with her mother, and with the exception of the anxiety about her father, there were no clouds in the bright blue skies of Kate Bonnet. ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton
... a very good dinner, and contrary to his custom drank the best part of a bottle of old port after it. He had an unpleasant business to face that evening, and felt as though his nerves required bracing. About ten o'clock he took his leave, and getting into a hansom bade the cabman drive to Rupert Street, Pimlico, where he arrived in due course. Having dismissed his cab, he walked slowly down the street till he reached a small house with red pillars to the doorway. ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... could be said to weaken the frame, or lower the action of the heart. There are only certain things they may eat and drink. They must have the right amount of sleep, and no more. Exercise of the most bracing kind they must take every day, and eschew every practice that could weaken the nerves or muscles in the ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... Peninsula the rainfall diminishes to 10 in. or less within the Arctic circle; the summer temperature is quite endurable but the winters are exceedingly rigorous.2 East of the mountains in south-eastern Alaska the atmosphere is dry and bracing, the temperature ranging from -14 deg. to 92 deg. F. In the farther interior, in the valleys of the Yukon, the Tanana, the Copper and the Sushitna the summers are much the same in character, the winters much more severe. On the Yukon at the international ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Lepcha, imprudently remaining for the night in the valley. Owing probably as much to the great exposure they had lately gone through, as to the sudden transition from a mean temperature of 50 degrees in a bracing wind, to a hot close jungly valley at 75 degrees, no less than seven were laid ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... Lastly, I would have you consider especially the moral atmosphere in which they have habitually breathed: according to the nature of this the mental health varies as certainly as the physical strength varies in a bracing or relaxing air. A strong bodily constitution may resist longer, and finally be less affected by a deleterious atmosphere than a weak or diseased frame; and so it is with the mental constitution. Minds insensibly imbibe ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... in, and Mrs. Cody got breakfast for us. He refused the drink I set out for him. I felt that I needed a good deal of bracing in this writ of replevin business, so I drank ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
... Moyat declared cheerfully. "More bracing, and suits his constitution better. I've heard him say ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... you on the accesion of your State to the new federal constitution. This is the last I have yet heard of, but I expect daily to hear that my own has followed the good example, and suppose it to be already established. Our government wanted bracing. Still we must take care not to run from one extreme to another; not to brace too high. I own, I join those in opinion, who think a bill of rights necessary. I apprehend too, that the total abandonment ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... am speaking chiefly of the western part of Normandy: the parts about Caen approach more nearly to the flatness, monotony, and dreary treelessness of ordinary French and German scenery. The air is pure and bracing,—especially in the little towns built on old castled heights. Why do we not always build our towns, when we can, on heights, in what Shakespeare calls ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... work is as bracing, as tonic, as instinct with the spirit of vigorous youth, as the mountain air which has never before been breathed. Woodberry well says: "He created lasting pictures of human life, some of which have the eternal outline and pose of a Theocritean ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... pine or spruce. Although the work was heavy, Stephen's heart was light. Not only did he feel the zest of one who had grappled with life in the noble effort to do the best be could, but he had Nellie's approbation. He drank in the bracing air of the open as never before, and revelled in the rich perfume of the various trees as he moved along their great cathedral-like aisles, carpeted with the whitest ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... his head in his neck as though bracing himself. "I learned of it yesterday, Martha. Pray accept my condolences. I should have called on you ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... The sky was pure as crystal, except a soft white fleece that veiled the snowy pinnacles of Taurus, folding and unfolding, rising and sinking, as if to make their beauty still more attractive by the partial concealment. The morning air was almost cold, but so pure and bracing—so aromatic with the healthy breath of the pines—that I took it down in the ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... thankful and relieved if you will manage this and take Mary to some fresh scenes, a place or country that she has not visited before. There is nothing like an entirely novel environment for distracting the mind, bracing the nerves, and ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... run out of water. But just then the whole Turkish reserve turned up on their right front and flank, having been hurried back from the right flank to which our feint had drawn them, across the bridge D. whence they deployed in crescent formation. Apparently this new danger had a very bracing effect on the thirsty ones; it is a rash man that stands between T.A. and his drink. They went straight for the centre of the crescent, as far as I can make out, with the Turkish reserves on their front ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... fact that he had a friend who lived in a village high up on those same downs. Many years ago he had visited her in the breezy place in which she had chosen to make her home, and if his memory served him rightly, and he had no doubt on that point, Windy Gap, as the village was called, would be bracing enough to please the doctor, and quiet enough to satisfy him. To the best of his belief there was scarcely another house within three or four miles, and even if she had possessed near neighbours Mrs. ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... had reached my neck. I cried out with terror as I felt myself borne from my feet. But Georgie kept hold of me, and bracing ourselves against the first low rock, we waited the coming of the great green wave that rolled surging toward us, raising its whitening crest high over our heads. It broke directly above us, and for a moment we stood dizzy with the ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... I slept very badly. I went for a walk yesterday evening for my health's sake; and I finished up at the club and read a book about a Polar expedition. There is something bracing in following the adventures of men who are battling ...
— Pillars of Society • Henrik Ibsen
... lord of the manor on duty as doorkeeper, and in no mood to see strangers. He held his door down by inserting his fangs in two fine holes near the edge and bracing himself, or, rather, herself (as, of course, it is the female), offered a degree of resistance surprising in an insect. If one persists with a needle, there is often danger of breaking the door. But when one has made a ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... life is great. Early to bed and early to rise makes a man's stomach digest mince pies—how's that? Notice the air out here? How pure and fresh and bracing! You ought to go out and run a ...
— Back to the Woods • Hugh McHugh
... a winter resort for consumptive patients, though, indeed, many people simply needed the change of a bracing climate went there to spend a few months; and came, away wonderfully better for the mountain air. This was what Bernardine Holme hoped to do; she was broken down in every way, but it was thought that ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden
... the new goal posts and ball, which Mr Freshfield, a junior master, was heard to explain was a present from the head-master to the school, had also a mollifying effect. And the bracing freshness of the air and the self-respect engendered by the sensation of their flannels (for most of the players had contrived to provide themselves with armour of this healthy material) completed their reconciliation to their lot, and ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... and listen to its gentle music, than might be seen when Mrs Huntingdon, her children, grandchildren, and sister-in-law issued forth for a morning stroll along the beach, to gather shells, or drink in the bracing air, as they watched some passing ship, or the sea-birds as ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... region of fire, now in the region of unmelting ice and snow. Here, I passed over trembling domes of ice, beneath which the cataract was roaring; and here was received under arches of icicles, of unspeakable beauty; and here the sweet air was so bracing and so light, that at halting-times I rolled in the snow when I saw my mule do it, thinking that he must know best. At this part of the journey we would come, at mid-day, into half an hour's thaw: when the rough mountain inn would be found on an island of deep mud in a sea of snow, while the baiting ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... Pine and fir on the mountain-slopes, and figs, olives, oranges, lemons, and grapes on the hillsides and plains below, were characteristic of the land. Fishing, agriculture, and the raising of cattle and sheep were the important industries. A temperate, bracing climate, short, mild winters, and a long, dry summer gave an opportunity for the development of this wonderful civilization. Like Southern California or Florida in winter, it was essentially an out-of-doors country. The high mountains to the rear, the sun-steeped ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... doorway, erect, his feet a little apart, like a man bracing himself against some shock. He seemed frozen in this tense attitude, so that he did not alter the rigid line of his body or shift a single immobile muscle when Hollister and Lawanne stepped in. His eyes turned sidewise in their sockets to rest briefly and blankly upon the intruders. ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... bored and pounded and wrenched, piercing his body with nervous, nagging drills; propping up his backbone, cutting out tender bits of flesh, carving—bracing—only to carve again. He had tried to wriggle and twist, but the mountain had held him fast. Once he had straightened out, smashing the tiny cars and the tugging locomotive; breaking a leg and an arm, and once a head, but the devils had begun again, boring and digging and the cruel wound ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... thoughtful now, but cheerful and alert) was talking with the foremost driver. As Vendale stretched his limbs, circulated his blood, and cleared off the lees of his lethargy, with a sharp run to and fro in the bracing air, the line of carts moved on: the drivers all saluting ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... at the camp a few days and had begun to get acquainted, they let drop hints regarding Jimmy's prowess that aroused the interest of the lumbermen. He was covertly watched at meal times, and as the bracing woodland air and long hikes combined to give an added edge to his appetite, his ability began to command attention. There were several among the woodsmen who had a reputation for large capacity, but it was soon evident ...
— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman
... the sun shone bright - the air was fresh and bracing; but a slight breeze rippled the waters, and there was little or no surf. The various fragments of the wreck were tossed by the little surf that still remained; many things were lying on the beach which had landed during the night, and many more ...
— Masterman Ready • Captain Marryat
... Withal, he never failed to hold up to ridicule anything showing a tendency to the sentimental; he would test me on this point in various ways, and always betrayed pleasure when he found me quick to detect the sentimental or mawkish taint in literature or life. I breathed a manly, robust, and bracing atmosphere in his company, and when I reflect upon what were my proclivities to folly during this impressionable period, I thank my stars ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... health. And the promotion of health is now regarded, in every enlightened community, as one of the objects of government. The enjoyment of life depends in great measure upon the state of our health. When the air feels bracing, and food and drink taste sweet to us, much else in life tastes sweet which would otherwise taste sour and disagreeable. Good drainage and vaccination are not the only means available for the promotion of the public health. People should be encouraged ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter
... couldn't get around and she couldn't go through. My natural gallantry got the better of my resentment, and I went out to help her over, notwithstanding what she had said when I was under the counter. Planting one foot firmly in the center of the puddle and bracing the other against the curb-stone, I extended ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... clear, bracing afternoon and evening, wherein were blended the characteristics of both autumn and winter, and the young people returned with ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... produced in instalments all that goes to make cake and cocoa. She did not speak. Presently, filling Space, there sprang into being an Odour; and as it reached him Mr Ferguson stiffened in his chair, bracing himself as for a fight to the death. It was more than an odour. It was the soul of the cocoa singing to him. His fingers gripped the arms of the ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... the Wisconsin territory as the finest portion of North America, not only from its soil, but its climate. The air is pure, and the winters, although severe, are dry and bracing; very different from, and more healthy than, those of the Eastern States. At Prairie du Chien every one dwelt upon the beauty of the winter, indeed they appeared to prefer it to the other seasons. The ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... this scene of watery commotion and got out into the deeper water, the sea smoothed down a great deal; but sea-sickness began to claim its victims, at first a few, then more and more, till the greater part were quite badly affected. I had a touch of it myself, but managed to keep my feet by bracing out pretty wide, and hugging everything I could get hold of that seemed to offer a steady support, and I did not lie down until after I had thrown my ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... earnestness of the converts, all bespoke a future of much promise. At last, however, completely prostrated by repeated attacks of illness, the only hope of restoration seemed to lie in a voyage to England and a brief stay in its more bracing climate; and this necessity, painful though it seemed at the time, proved to be only another opportunity for the manifestation of the faithfulness and loving care of Him "who worketh all things after the counsel ...
— A Retrospect • James Hudson Taylor
... husband!" For hours afterward, if I could have stopped the mail, I would have done it. I hated the conductor, the kindest of men. I hated the Spanish ponies that drew us, the cheeriest animals that ever jingled a string of bells. I hated the bright day that would make things pleasant, and the bracing air that forced me to feel the luxury of breathing whether I liked it or not. Never was a journey more miserable than my safe and easy journey to the frontier. But one little comfort helped me to bear my heart-ache resignedly—a stolen morsel of Eustace's ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... greatest interests and pleasures we have in life is the realising of different temperaments and different points of view. It is not only interesting, it is wholesome and bracing. It helps us out of egotism; it makes us sympathetic; and I wish with all my heart that people would put more of their own unadulterated selves into books; that would be real, at all events. But what writers so often do is to tell the adventures of imaginary people, write plays where persons behave ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... few, and their displeasures and their griefs so great, so continual, and so many. It maketh me think on a good worshipful man who, when he divers times beheld what pain his wife took in tightly binding up her hair to make her a fair large forehead, and with tightly bracing in her body to make her middle small (both twain to her great pain) for the pride of a little foolish praise, he said unto her, "Forsooth, madam, if God give you not hell, he shall do you a great wrong. For it must needs be your own ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... he said. "And curiously enough, I did not either realize or fear the news at the time; it left my feelings almost blank. I won't deny that it has caused me some painful thought since.... He gave me a few simple directions: I was to avoid bracing climates, hard physical work, or, indeed, mental effort—anything exhausting; to keep regular hours, avoid hot rooms and society and smoking; but that I might do, in moderation, anything that interested me, write or read; and, above all things, ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... them different, but all of them raving in one common darkness and with one common gesture plucking out their vitals for exportation? There is no doubt that our continuous receipt of this commodity has had a bracing effect on our national character. We used to be rather phlegmatic, used we not? We have ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... morning of November 23d, in a clear, bracing atmosphere of twenty-five degrees below zero, we arrived at the mouth of the large river called the Penzhina, which empties into Penzhinsk Gulf, at the head of the Okhotsk Sea. A dense cloud of frozen mist, which hung over the middle of the gulf, showed the presence there of open ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... turn to their leader and search his very soul to see of what quality he was. Far better a man should die than falter. He had not failed to notice the startled look in Cameron's eyes when Hobbs blurted out his news. Some way must be found for the bracing up of the nerve, the steadying of the ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... [Preservation of health] hygiene; valetudinarian, valetudinarianism; sanitarian; sanitarium, sanitOrium. V. be salubrious &c adj.; agree with; assimilate &c 23. Adj. salubrious, salutary, salutiferous^; wholesome; healthy, healthful; sanitary, prophYlactic, benign, bracing, tonic, invigorating, good for, nutritious; hygeian^, hygienic. innoxious^, innocuous, innocent; harmless, uninjurious, uninfectious. sanative &c (remedial) 662; restorative &c (reinstate) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... rose from the river, obscuring all objects, when the bordermen rolled out of their snug bed of leaves. The air was cool and bracing, faintly fragrant with dying foliage and the damp, dewy luxuriance of the ripened season. Wetzel pulled from under the protecting ledge a bundle of bark and sticks he had put there to keep dry, and built a fire, while Jonathan fashioned a cup from a green fruit resembling a gourd, filling it ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... of the writer's paper, "The Bracing of Trenches and Tunnels, With Practical Formulas for Earth Pressures,"[B] certain minor experiments were noted in connection with the arching properties of sand. In the present paper it is proposed to take up again the question of earth pressures, but in more detail, and to note ...
— Pressure, Resistance, and Stability of Earth • J. C. Meem
... slightly in her seat. It was the instinctive movement of a woman bracing herself secretly for a ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... habits so far as circumstances allow, and by the use of the English language, they draw to Europeans, yet they are forced to feel they do not belong to them. They occupy an awkward middle position, and the knowledge that they do leads to unpleasant grating. Then they have not had the bracing which comes from residence in a Christian land. Though proud of their Christian name and profession, they have been injuriously affected by the moral atmosphere of their surroundings. The lower their social position, the closer ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... way of securing permanent tenure, or stimulating the industry and sustaining the thrift of the farmer. But the nature of the different tenures, and the effect of each in bracing up or relaxing the nerves of industry, will be the object of deliberation with the Government and the legislature. It is said that, in the hands of small farmers, proprietorship leads to endless subdivision; that long leases generally cause ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... times to see Mrs. Tracy, but she put him off with one excuse after another, until Tom took the matter in hand and told her she was acting like a fool and putting on quite too many airs. Then she appointed an interview, and, bracing herself with a tonic, went down to the darkened, cheerless room, and by her manner so managed to impress him with her superiority over him and his that he forgot entirely the speech he had prepared with infinite pains, and which had in it a good deal about ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... to be frightened, no time even to think, as they shot through the fine bracing air like a ball from a cannon. Before they knew it, they were ...
— Grace Harlowe's Plebe Year at High School - The Merry Doings of the Oakdale Freshmen Girls • Jessie Graham Flower
... could not deceive her, and not till he had explained how matters really stood, could he induce her to return to her cabin. Meantime Pedro Alvarez had succeeded in bracing round the head yards and furling all the after sails. Slowly the ship answered her helm and fell off; but as she did so, two seas in quick succession struck her abeam, dashing across her deck, and carrying away the boats stowed on the ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... from the chill sea-fogs of San Francisco, never lost the fierce unrest that had driven them here. Unaccustomed to leisure, their enforced idleness impelled them to seek excitement in the wildest gayeties; the bracing mountain air only reinvigorated them to pursue pleasure as they had pursued the occupations they had left behind. Their sole recreations were furious drives over break-neck roads; mad, scampering cavalcades through the sedate ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... glass of liqueur, which made me all on fire to possess her again; but she would not listen to anything of the kind, ordering me to have a good ride on my pony before luncheon. It was a bracing ride, but my thoughts were too distracted to think of anything but my Mother, and I returned possessed by a Fucking Devil to surprise Patty sleeping on Mary's bed, having undertaken to make the beds ...
— Forbidden Fruit • Anonymous
... very good dinner, and contrary to his custom drank the best part of a bottle of old port after it. He had an unpleasant business to face that evening, and felt as though his nerves required bracing. About ten o'clock he took his leave, and getting into a hansom bade the cabman drive to Rupert Street, Pimlico, where he arrived in due course. Having dismissed his cab, he walked slowly down ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... stinging rain; and a very occasional burst of sunlight served only to emphasize the evil by reminding one of the season it really was, or should have been, even if it did not entice one to the wetting which was the sure reward of a walk abroad. The Delverton air was strong and bracing enough, but the patron wind of the district bit to the bone through garments ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... not to make my visit to America this summer, unless you should absolutely prohibit it. If neither of those days should suit you, could you kindly suggest another day? I hope, however, you can spare me half an hour on one of those days, as I like to get as much of this bracing air as I can. Will you kindly name the hour when I may call on you, and address me at this hotel. Excuse this slovenly note in pencil, but it fatigues my head and arm much more to sit at a writing-table with ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... white banks and hollows toward the big timber. The dog, Bony, came along with them, wallowing to his ears and barking merrily. Since morning the sun had begun to warm the air, and a light breeze had risen. The boy sat bracing on a rope fastened before and looped around him. As they went along he was oversown with sparkling crystals. They made his cheeks tingle, and almost took his breath as he went plunging into steep hollows. Often he tipped over and sank in the white ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... Mrs. Miller, seemed to relieve her. "I suffer from the liver," she said. "I think it's this climate; it's less bracing than Schenectady, especially in the winter season. I don't know whether you know we reside at Schenectady. I was saying to Daisy that I certainly hadn't found any one like Dr. Davis, and I didn't believe ...
— Daisy Miller • Henry James
... to follow? Something he felt must happen, and though he was curious, he cared singularly little what it might be. The sun hung high overhead, under foot the snow crunched pleasantly, and the air was clear and bracing—a day to inspire an adventurer and a skald. His thoughts began to take a rhyming turn, and he caught himself repeating ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston
... the 19th century Chile was a colony whose resources had hardly been touched, with a population of about 500,000 persons, of Spanish and mixed Spanish and Indian blood: a people endowed with the vigour of character bred by a mountainous country and a bracing climate and by a hard struggle for existence, but ignorant through lack of education, shut out by a narrow-minded commercial system from knowledge of the outside world, and destitute of the character-training ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... now in the region of fire, now in the region of unmelting ice and snow. Here, I passed over trembling domes of ice, beneath which the cataract was roaring; and here was received under arches of icicles, of unspeakable beauty; and here the sweet air was so bracing and so light, that at halting-times I rolled in the snow when I saw my mule do it, thinking that he must know best. At this part of the journey we would come, at mid-day, into half an hour's thaw: when the rough mountain ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... been feeling rather personal. "That would be a change indeed—the very thing after South Africa," he added, looking with a keen professional eye at Major Dene's gaunt cheeks and too sharply outlined profile. "There are some pleasant places on the west coast—bracing, yet not too cold. In my boyhood I spent a summer in a village called St. Aidens. It was out of the way, certainly, but you could not go to ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... followed, Ruth sat in the quiet corner just out of sight of the vestry door, bracing herself to meet Tots and implore him to set her free. It was a bad quarter of an hour for her, and when, at the end of it, Tots came, she looked on the verge of ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... trembled, awaiting the disclosure. "Now for the bank-notes!" he reflected, bracing his nerves. He shook ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... the attempt in despair, and saved themselves across the border. But I have always valued myself on my fidelity, and I did not shrink. If not to-day, to-morrow; if not this time, next time. The dice do not always turn up aces. Bracing myself, therefore, to the occasion, I crept, as soon as the house was quiet, to the window, a small, square, open lattice, much cobwebbed, and partly stuffed with hay. I looked out. The village seemed to be asleep. The dark branches of trees hung a few feet away, and almost obscured a grey, cloudy ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... up, and went off to the seaside. The bracing air did for Clemence what the doctor's medicine had failed to accomplish. In spite of the languid interest she took in everything, hope grew stronger each day in the care of her watchful friend. And at last the roses came back to her cheeks, and when they went back to the city, ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... put out the lights. Joan hurried through the cabin and outside. The gray obscurity had given way to dawn. The air was cold, sweet, bracing with the touch of mountain purity in it. The men, except Kells, were all mounted, and the pack-train was in motion. Kells dragged the rude door into position, and then, mounting, he called to Joan to follow. She trotted her horse after him, down the slope, across the brook ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... sat there, certainly, for more than an hour, when I heard steps, steps soft and slow, I knew not where, I was unable to locate them, but bracing myself up, I called out anew, whereupon I perceived a glimmer of light ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... to do too much the first two days after coming out. The height affects people more than they realize at first, and great energy, due to the bracing air, is often followed by great lassitude. Most people are not in training, and Ski-ing tries the lungs, nerves, and muscles of the fittest as the whole system seems to be ...
— Ski-running • Katharine Symonds Furse
... separated instinctively without a word. You want to be with the Taj alone, for it leads you captive and invites to secret communion. I wandered around many hours, gazing at every turn, deliciously, not joyously happy; there was no disposition to croon over a melody, nor any bracing quality in my thoughts—not a trace of the heroic—but I was filled with happiness which seemed to fall upon me gently as the snow-flakes fall, as the zephyr comes when laden with sweet odors. I sat down at length in the garden in full view of ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... I had nothing else to do, I saddled up an extra pony express horse, and arming myself with a good rifle and pair of revolvers, struck out for the foot hills of Laramie Peak for a bear-hunt. Riding carelessly along, and breathing the cool and bracing autumn air which came down from the mountains, I felt as only a man can feel who is roaming over the prairies of the far West, well armed, and mounted on a fleet and gallant steed. The perfect freedom which he enjoys is in itself a refreshing stimulant to the ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... preceding winter, but Hawthorne became dissatisfied with the way in which the subject developed itself and so set the manuscript aside until he could come to it again with fresh inspiration. With the more bracing weather of September he commenced on it again, and wrote during the next two months that portion which we now have. On December 1 he forwarded two chapters to Ticknor & Fields, requesting to have them set up so that ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... lonely, youthful years, which moulded the pure-hearted muser with ethereal, unsuspected fingers. Elsewhere, Hawthorne has given another glimpse into his interior life at this time: "This scene came into my fancy as I walked along a hilly road, on a starlight October evening; in the pure and bracing air I became all soul, and felt as if I could climb the sky, and run a race along the Milky Way. Here is another tale in which I wrapped myself during a dark and dreary night-ride in the month of March, till the rattling of the wheels and the voices of my companions seemed ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... wash-bowl or pitcher turned to solid ice. Night after night, Clover, who was a chilly little creature, lay shivering and unable to sleep, notwithstanding the hot bricks at her feet, and the many wraps which Katy piled upon her. To Katy herself the cold was more bracing than depressing. There was something in her blood which responded to the sharp tingle of frost, and she gained in strength in a remarkable way during this winter. But the long storms told upon her spirits. She pined for spring and home more ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... Roger Browne suggested was carried out. Geoffrey was first lowered to his place by the side of the window, and bracing himself against its side with a foot on the sill he managed to stand upright, leaning against the rope that Job Tredgold held from above. Job had instructions when Geoffrey lifted his arm to ease the ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... tolerance of men and opinions a righteous abhorrence of sin. All the more for the sweet humanities and Christian liberalism which, in drawing men nearer to each other, are increasing the sum of social influences for good or evil, we need the bracing atmosphere, healthful, if austere, of the old moralities. Individual and social duties are quite as imperative now as when they were minutely specified in statute-books and enforced by penalties no longer admissible. It is well that stocks, whipping-post, and ducking- stool ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... sail the ship; but I found that it continued so for two years, and at the end of two years there was as much to be done as ever. If, after all the labour on sails, rigging, tarring, greasing, oiling, varnishing, painting, scraping, scrubbing, watching, steering, reefing, furling, bracing, making and setting sail, and pulling, hauling, and climbing in every direction, the merchants and captains think the sailors have not earned their twelve dollars a month, their salt beef and hard bread, they keep them picking oakum—ad infinitum. The Philadelphia ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... revived these hopes. A few days before Christmas it became known to Hanaford that Mrs. Westmore would return for the holidays. Cicely was drooping in town air, and Bessy had persuaded Mr. Langhope that the bracing cold of Hanaford would be better for the child than the milder atmosphere of Long Island. They reappeared, and brought with them a breath of holiday cheerfulness such as Westmore had never known. It ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... up on the fourth act—that in which Fogg was going to do something. He had in the meantime been bracing up. When he made his entry and spoke, his manner of speech was somewhat thick, but his acting was more energetic. Fogg never could take anything stimulating without its going to his head, and as his brain exercised a peculiar influence over other members of his body, they all contributed their ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... haversack!" said he. He sat up, and, bracing himself against the roll of the vessel, he opened the bag and carefully examined its contents. In an inner pocket he found an old letter of Doctor Glyphic's to Thor; another from Thor to his son, dated three years back; ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... attached to the body proper by rigid flanges, reinforced by wires running from tip to tip of the planes, passing directly over the body, and not elevated on bracing chandelles. These wires were taut and made a part of the planes, much like reinforcing ribs. Beneath the planes three heavy wires ran from their forward tips to ...
— On the Edge of the Arctic - An Aeroplane in Snowland • Harry Lincoln Sayler
... morning the sun shone bright—the air was fresh and bracing; but a slight breeze rippled the waters, and there was little or no surf. The various fragments of the wreck were tossed by the little surf that still remained; many things were lying on the beach which had landed during the ...
— Masterman Ready - The Wreck of the "Pacific" • Captain Frederick Marryat
... character. His type of religion, cheerful and robust, was described as "muscular Christianity." Strenuous, eager, and keen in feeling, he was not either a profoundly learned, or perhaps very impartial, historian, but all his writings are marked by a bracing and manly atmosphere, intense sympathy, and great ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... the door, and took the step unsteadily. He stopped for a second, bracing his shoulders; then he walked firmly across the room. While his hand was on the handle, he heard Mr. ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... was the bracing effect of the fresh sea air, or the sight of his men's most obvious improvement, I know not, but from that day his ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... his uplifted wrist, and bracing himself against the wheel, jerked his assailant into the wagon-box, and tumbled him out in a disjointed heap on the other side before he ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... fight—took the hook, and she saw the man stand motionless, intent, alert, at the instant he first felt the fish. Then she caught the skillful turn of his wrist as he struck—quick and sure; watched, with breathless interest as—bracing himself—the fisherman's powerful figure became instinct with life. With the boiling water grasping his legs, clinging to him like a tireless wrestler seeking the first unguarded moment; and with the plunging, tugging, ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... a road, now—a road that ran south across the spaces, unwinding itself like a tape flung from a reel. Suddenly Cheyenne pulled to a stop. Bartley raced up, bracing himself as the big cow-horse set up in ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... want—a regular change, something bracing. You don't look at all well, that's the fact. A winter in London tries any man—it does me, I know. I've been seedy myself these last few weeks. Edith wants me to take her over to Paris at the end of this ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... winding round the foot of the Batu Tujoh, a limestone mountain of 5000 feet. All this country is at a considerable height above sea-level (1000 feet and more), and the climate is much cooler and more bracing than that of the lower levels. It is a land of many streams and hills. All the lower slopes have been cleared and cultivated by the Kenyahs, so that it presents a more open and smiling aspect than the lower country, where the clearings are but tiny islands in the vast ocean of gloomy forest. ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... Smith, his thick, squat figure growing tense where he sat as though with a sudden nervous bracing ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... dark, Lord Vargrave's carriage picked up Mr. Onslow at the door of a large old-fashioned house, at the entrance of the manufacturing town of ——-. The party were silent and sleepy till they arrived at Lisle Court. The sun had then appeared, the morning was clear, the air frosty and bracing; and as, after traversing a noble park, a superb quadrangular pile of brick flanked by huge square turrets coped with stone broke upon the gaze of Lord Vargrave, his worldly heart swelled within him, and the image of Evelyn became ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VII • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... was to diverge from the main road, I bade farewell to my last remaining Poor Traveller, and pursued my way alone. And now the mists began to rise in the most beautiful manner, and the sun to shine; and as I went on through the bracing air, seeing the hoarfrost sparkle everywhere, I felt as if all Nature shared in the joy ...
— The Seven Poor Travellers • Charles Dickens
... did start off heroically upon a bracing winter walk, determined to shake off, in solitude and exercise, the constant hunger for his presence, torturing possibilities would swarm into her mind, and weaken her almost while she thought them banished. She could catch him at his club; ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... have faded and shrivelled indeed, after another year or two of anything but hospitality as generous as that of New York. Well-nourished and undimmed, however, it concealed for them admirably the fact that it was the hospitality they were after, and not the bracing climate or the desire to see the fascinating Americans of London and Paris at home. New York found them agreeable specimens of high-spirited young English people, and played with them indefinitely. Miss Forde, when she sat imperturbably on a cushion in the ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... and saw Amos Carhill standing there, bracing himself against the corridor wall. There was no color at all ...
— An Empty Bottle • Mari Wolf
... long coat and high hat and started for the money markets of the East, seeking whom he might devour. At the close of the eighties the Colonel and all his tribe found that the stock of Eastern capitalists who were ready to pay good prices for the fine shimmering blue sky and bracing ozone of the West was running low. It was said in town that the Colonel had come to the end of his string, for not only were the doors of capital closed to him in the East, but newcomers had stopped looking for farms at home. There was nothing to do but to sit down and swap jack-knives ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... did well, though the place has its drawbacks. It is a long way from London and the opera. Still, I could not bear to live quite in town; the air there stifles me. After the clear bracing air of Canada, I find London very oppressive. But, M. Lacroix, you must be tired after your long walk up the hill. Do take that comfortable arm-chair and let me give you a cup ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... and the dull air reeks with a sort of inner steam, hot, close, and sticky as a brother: a brother whose wants are many and whose resources are few. The morning after the storm, there will be a keen thrill in the air, keen but wholesome and bracing as a good resolution and not necessarily more lasting. The asphalt has been washed as clean as a renovated conscience, and the city presses forward again to the future in which alone it has its being, with the gay confidence of a sinner who has forgiven himself his ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... walk to the North Pole. I did not think that I could be many days' journey from it. But that did not matter. The air was so bracing that I could take any amount of exercise without fatigue, and was therefore able to walk all day, sitting down merely for convenience sake when I was enjoying my dinner off the preserved bear. I of course could not cut the flesh with my knife, as it was frozen ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... Rotherhithe way, Where the din of the docksides is loud all the day, And the breezes come bringing off basin and pond And all the piled acres of lumber beyond From the Oregon ranges the tang of the pine And the breath of the Baltic as bracing as wine, In a fly-spotted window I there did behold, Among the stale odours of hot food and cold, A ship in a bottle some sailor had made In watches below, swinging South with the Trade, When the fellows were patching ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 22, 1920 • Various
... Peter at last breaking the silence, and bracing himself to hear unpleasant news, "I want to know what is wrong. What is the matter?" and he feared to hear ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... atmosphere of the New Hampshire highlands is exceptionally bracing and stimulating, and a fine aid to hard and continuous work. It is a just claim, I think. I came in May, and wrought 35 successive days without a break. It is possible that I could not have done it elsewhere. I do not know; I have not had any disposition to try it, before. I think I got the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... feebleness in the handwriting, and Haldane's anxiety was so strongly aroused in behalf of his friend that he returned to Hillaton at once, hoping, however, that since the heats of August were nearly over, the bracing breath of autumn ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... sowing had done, for by day the bright sunshine shone down on standing wheat and lengthening rows of sheaves. It was in the bracing cold of sunrise the work began, and the first pale stars were out before the tired men and jaded horses dragged themselves home again. Not infrequently it happened that the men wore out the teams and machines, but there was no stoppage ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... you in your natural desire to have your TSAR FERDINAND home again, and we share your sanguine belief that the tonic air of Sofia (never more bracing than at the present moment) ought speedily to cure him of his malignant catarrh. His Austrian physicians however advise him to remain away, and he himself holds the view, coloured a little by superstition, that his return ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various
... silent will. Before the throne of the Great King, His servants are to stand like those long rows of attendants we see on the walls of Eastern temples, silent, with folded arms, straining their ears to hear, and bracing their muscles to execute his whispered commands, or even his gesture and his glance. A man's will should be an echo, not a voice; the echo of God, not the voice of self. It should be silent, as some sweet instrument is silent till ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... ridicule anything showing a tendency to the sentimental; he would test me on this point in various ways, and always betrayed pleasure when he found me quick to detect the sentimental or mawkish taint in literature or life. I breathed a manly, robust, and bracing atmosphere in his company, and when I reflect upon what were my proclivities to folly during this impressionable period, I thank my ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... is said to be superior in point of salubrity to that of Bengal; what is termed the cold season, however, can scarcely merit the name, there being nothing like the bracing weather experienced at the same period of the year in the neighbouring presidency. One peculiarity of Bombay consists in the wind blowing hot and cold at the same time, so that persons who are liable to rheumatic pains are obliged to wrap themselves up much more warmly than is agreeable. ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... looked about, half in apprehension, half in anticipation, as he entered the dining-room the following morning. Jewel had not arrived, so he settled himself to read his paper. Each time there was a sound he glanced up, bracing himself for the approach of light feet, beaming face, and an ardent embrace. His interest in the news gradually lessened, and his expectancy increased. She did not come. At last he began to suspect that the unprecedented had ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... superfluous and dangerous tension is so rapidly increased as in the bearing of pain. The general impression seems to be that one should brace up to a pain; and very great strength of will is often shown in the effort made and the success achieved in bearing severe pain by means of this bracing process. But alas, the reaction after the pain is over—that alone would show the very sad misuse which had been made of a strong will. Not that there need be no reaction; but it follows naturally that the more strain ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... there was nowhere else to go," was an oft-heard remark at Scott that summer. But breathes there a woman who cannot find excuse for shopping? And shopping was hungry work and the drive was long, the air keen, bracing, appetizing. What more natural than that Mr. Courtenay and Mr. Fowler of the bank, Mr. Willett or Mr. Burtis of the Cattle Club,—such charming dancers these,—should sometimes, indeed frequently, suggest just a little bite, just ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... and carpenter work on "The Curlew" at Portland made a bill of a hundred and nine dollars; seamen's wages to Gloucester, with car-fare back, nineteen dollars; bracing and strengthening the schooner, sixty-seven dollars; cost of getting in fuel and water, thirty-three dollars; and other bills to the amount of forty-nine dollars: in all, two hundred and seventy-seven dollars. We ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... ennui, the tender longings, the exquisite art-finish of those choice poets are mainly unseen and unmet in him,—perhaps because he cannot achieve them, more likely because he disdains them. But there is an electric living soul in his poetry, far more fermenting and bracing. His wings do not glitter in their movement from rich and varicolored plumage, nor are his notes those of the accustomed song-birds; but his flight is the flight ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... Chester again and being irresistibly impelled to some course of which he entirely disapproved but which he knew that he was destined to undertake. He watched Ann as a trapped man might watch a ticking bomb, bracing himself for the explosion and knowing that he is helpless. She was Hammond Chester's daughter, and she spoke to him with the voice of Hammond Chester. She was her father's child and she was ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... seen some of them swallow sand, ashes, and do their utmost to destroy their stomachs to get pale complexions. To make a fine Spanish body, what racks will they not endure of girding and bracing, till they have notches in their sides cut into the very quick, and ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... at last and opening my eyes, I missed Rima. The old man appeared to be asleep, although still in a sitting posture close to the fire. I rose and hurried out, drawing my cloak close around me to protect me from the rain; but what was my surprise on emerging from the cave to feel a dry, bracing wind in my face and to see the desert spread out for leagues before me in the brilliant white light of a full moon! The rain had apparently long ceased, and only a few thin white clouds appeared moving swiftly over the wide blue expanse of heaven. It was a welcome ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... securing it good drainage, abundant water, sunshine, and the easy command of water-power. Whoever selected the spot had an excellent eye for beauty and utility in a country site. The views are lovely, broad, and varied; the air is pure and bracing; and, in short, a company of people desiring to seclude themselves from the world could hardly have ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... began to crawl in and out among the rocks. Bransome joined Thurston, and both men broke into a smart trot. They were heading for the bush until Geoffrey, halting near it, ran back at full speed towards the gorge. All who watched him were astonished, for they were already bracing themselves to face ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... specially refreshing properties of the Borage are supposed to be mainly due. For which reason, the plant, "when taken in sallets," as says an old herbalist, "doth exhilarate, and make the mind glad," almost in the same way as a bracing sojourn by the seaside during an autumn holiday. The flowers possess cordial virtues which are very revivifying, and have been much commended against melancholic depression of the nervous system. Burton, in his [61] Anatomy of Melancholy (1676), ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... Pampa the food which they liked. Furthermore, they could have found the seclusion and safety which they craved just as well in several other parts of the province, particularly at Machu Picchu, together with a cool, bracing climate and food-stuffs more nearly resembling those to which they were accustomed. Finally Calancha says "Vilcabamba the Old" was "the largest city" in the province, a term far more applicable to Machu Picchu or even to ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... to keep you, and I shall personally be very thankful and relieved if you will manage this and take Mary to some fresh scenes, a place or country that she has not visited before. There is nothing like an entirely novel environment for distracting the mind, bracing the nerves, and ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... before her was not so luxuriantly beautiful, perhaps, as that other one which she knew so well; yet it was more cheering. It lacked the intensely blue atmosphere of the rival vale, and its heavy soils and scents; the new air was clear, bracing, ethereal. The river itself, which nourished the grass and cows of these renowned dairies, flowed not like the streams in Blackmoor. Those were slow, silent, often turbid; flowing over beds of mud into which the incautious wader might sink and vanish unawares. The Froom waters were clear ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... inch of precedence. In the sitting-room of the private suite the senator snapped the latch on the door, and pressed the wall-button for the electric lights. McVickar dragged a chair over to one of the windows commanding a view of the busy street, and dropping solidly into it, like a man bracing himself ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... and started again toward her own room. She was afraid that the door would open and the boy come upon her. When she had reached a safe distance and was about to turn a corner into a second hallway she stopped and bracing herself with her hands waited, thinking to shake off a trembling fit of weakness that had come upon her. The presence of the boy in the room had made her happy. In her bed, during the long hours ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... come to a stop, bracing himself for the shock, and when Gladiator came to the end of the rope he turned completely over, and landed on his back with a thud ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor
... fast recovering. He could now take long walks; and one bright day of snow he set off with his brother's Dog. His steps bent hillward. The air was bright and bracing, he stepped with unexpected vigour, and he made for far Glenyan, without at first meaning to go there. But, drawn by the ancient attraction, he kept on. The secret path looked not so secret, now ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... high, and he sang as he leaped down, agile as a goat, to the sea. He meant to return as he had come, and at the water's edge he stripped off his clothes once more, tied them into a bundle, plunged into the sea, and struck out for the beach opposite. As he did so, as the cold, bracing water seized him, he heard far above him the musical cry of the siren of the night. He answered it with a loud, ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... spirits are affected by certain well-known conditions of age and health. In spite of the 'coelum non animum mutant' of Horace, few men fail to experience how different is the range of spirits in the limbo-like atmosphere of a London winter and beneath the glories of an Italian sky or in the keen bracing atmosphere of the mountain side, and it is equally apparent how differently we judge the world when we are jaded by a long spell of excessive work or refreshed after a night of tranquil sleep. Poetry and Painting are ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... followed him out under the porch, and stood bracing her supple body clothed in lilac linen. Red rambler roses formed a sort of crown to her dark head; her ivory-coloured face had in it just a suggestion of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... change of position very agreeable, the fine bracing air from the sea acting like a charm upon the invalids, and driving away those wandering minstrels, the mosquitoes. Besides, there was the daily trip on shore in the "fast boat," available to those whose duties would ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... to that door, you! Back up!" Sandy's voice was almost conversational but it was profoundly convincing. The bully obeyed him, standing at the door in the place of the assayer, who stepped aside, feeling a little sick at the stomach, Sam bracing him in friendly ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... gale was blowing. By ten Babcock's men were bracing the outer sheathing of the coffer-dam, strengthening the derrick-guys, tightening the anchor-lines, and clearing the working-platforms of sand, cement, and other damageable property. The course-masonry, fortunately, was above the water-line, but the coping was still ...
— Tom Grogan • F. Hopkinson Smith
... give way utterly to fear, and not so terrified but that she could note all Hemstead did; and for some reason she believed he would be equal to the emergency. His confidence, moreover, communicated itself to her. She saw that he did not jerk or saw on the reins at first, but, bracing his large powerful frame, drew steadily back, and that the horses yielded somewhat to ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... Timothy's. She seemed to have been weighing every word he had spoken. There was none of that hungry pleasure in her face which shone from the other woman's and was reflected in the faces of many of the others. She seemed to be bracing herself for a shock. Sir Timothy looked over his shoulder towards the door which opened upon the ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... up in the carriage, bracing his courage for the emergency. He could take a cushion, jump out and attack the man with that. It was not a deadly weapon, and would require considerable force back of it to do damage. The whip might be better. He reached for the whip and turned the handle ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... virtues, the sudden shining forth of a tenderness that lay too deep for tears; his children, Adar and her bowel complaint, and Adar's doll. No, death could not be suffered to approach that head even in fancy; with a general heat and a bracing of his muscles, it was borne in on Herrick that Adar's father would find in him a son to the death. And even Huish showed a little in that sacredness; by the tacit adoption of daily life they were become brothers; there ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... at the horizon, cutting sharply against its colour. Around the edges of the cow-lot peach trees were all in blossom and humming with bees, their rich, amethystine rose flung up against the gay April sky in a challenge of beauty and joy. The air was full of the promises of spring, keen, bracing, yet with an undercurrent of languorous warmth. There was a ragged fleece of bloom, sweet and alive with droning insects, over a plum thicket near the woods,—half-wild, brambly things, cousin on the one hand to the cultivated farm, and on the other to the ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... he was appalled by the spectacle. But it was only for a moment! Recalling his manhood and her weakness, he stopped, and bracing his foot against a stone, with a graceful flourish of his lasso around his head, threw it in the air. It uncoiled slowly, sped forward with unerring precision, and missed! With the single cry of "Saved!" the fair stranger sank fainting in his arms! ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... entranced with Chicago. She thrived under its more bracing air. She loved the bustle, the stir. We were now in the midst of the presidential campaign, and Mammy and Jenny saw political enthusiasm in a new phase. Marching men passed through the street. There were shouts, torches, many ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... the range of religion. "Candour, moral courage, intellectual honesty, scrupulous accuracy, chivalrous fairness, endless docility to facts, disinterested collaboration, unconquerable hopefulness and perseverance, manly renunciation of popularity and easy honours, love of bracing labour and strengthening solitude; these, and many other cognate qualities," says Baron von Huegel, "bear upon them the impress of God and His Christ." What Dr. Inge, who quotes these words, says of Plotinus declares his own character. He speaks of "the intense honesty of the ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
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