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More "Sparse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not. They have been busy in governing, in making war, making peace, building bridges, laying down roads, and writing official reports. Our literature from that continent of our conquest has been sparse indeed, except in the way of biographies, of histories, and of rather local and unintelligible facetiae. Except the novels by the author of "Tara," and Sir Henry Cunningham's brilliant sketches, such as "Dustypore," and Sir Alfred Lyall's poems, we might almost say that India ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... and, to meet the visitor, slipped into the frock-coat, or possibly he was careless, taken up with abstractions, dreams, business affairs, plans. He was rather stout, with an oval, egg-shaped face; his beard, sparse and pointed and tinged with gray, had originally been light of hue; he had pale blue eyes, and ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... small-windowed and melancholy-looking: the sort of house that must have children, many flowers, open windows, and little vistas of bright things, to make it seem a joyous home. In this latter end of autumn, with a sparse remnant of yellow leaves falling slowly athwart the dark evergreens in a stillness without sunshine, the house too had an air of autumnal decline, and Mr. Casaubon, when he presented himself, had no bloom that could be thrown into ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... finds them in "The Slashes," a desolate region inhabited by squatters. As they jolt over corduroy roads between pools of stagnant waters, the travelers look out wearily upon a sparse growth of gallberry and scrub-pine. Now and then they pass the solitary hut of a charcoal-burner, surrounded by its little patch of meagre corn; a pack of cur dogs rush out and bark fiercely, within the safe limits ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... the reply is easy and convincing: "that, if the dead endanger the living when the population is dense, they certainly also endanger them when the population is sparse. The danger is only diluted. It still exists, and it ought to alarm us just as truly when a few are imperilled ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... Forks Settlement enjoyed the height of its prosperity—a prosperity based on the supply of dry-goods and machinery to a widely scattered and sparse population of small ranchers and farmers. These things brought it into existence and kept it afloat for some years. Then it gradually faded from ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... memorial stones close to the Laitkor road commemorate, also the lands of the Thang khiew clan, and many others. It has been explained, in a previous paragraph, how the clan grew out of the family. The clan lands originally, when population was sparse, were owned by families, but as the members of the family increased and a clan was formed, the lands became the property of the clan instead of the family. Such clan lands are properly demarcated by stone boundary marks. ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... golden club, with its gorgeous yellow spadix,—a plant that I had never seen in bloom before, although I had once admired a Cape Cod "hollow" full of the rank tropical leaves. St. Peter's-wort, a low shrub, thrives everywhere in the pine barrens, and, without being especially attractive, its rather sparse yellow flowers—not unlike the St. John's-wort—do something to enliven the general waste. The butterworts are beauties, and true children of the spring. I picked my first ones, which by chance were of the smaller ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... scarlet mud was painfully conspicuous; when he was smartened up, his appearance suggested that somebody had given him a coating of that rich Western whitewash which looks like Devonshire cream. His locks were long and sparse, and as deadly black as his clothes were white. He was a modest, gentle man, with a wife even more meek and gracious than himself. They never, to my recollection, spoke unless they were spoken to, and their melancholy ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... there, near the window of his sanctum, sat a stout and elderly gentleman. In the unsparing revelation of the morning sunshine the visitor's face declared all its wrinkles. The whitening hair, growing sparse, was carefully combed across an arid patch of scalp. Hamilton Burton's smile died and his face grew for a moment solicitous as he read his father's troubled eyes. Old Thomas Burton was shaven and manicured and betailored into ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... recovered from the effect of the spirit of disloyalty which culminated in the expulsion of the Acadians, although there followed a period of peace, but despite the efforts of the Government in making roads, and instituting public works, the settlements were sparse, and the Indian was still in the land. There was only one minister in the county, the Rev. John Eagleson, who had been sent out in 1769 by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, while in the province there were a few Anglican, ...
— William Black - The Apostle of Methodism in the Maritime Provinces of Canada • John Maclean
... The sparse population of this territory, the want of scientific information in its inhabitants, and the difficulties which have existed in the way of keeping up an intercourse with their fellow-citizens of ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... not tell you he brings me a little bunch of eels of his own spearing? that you must be careful at table he has enough to eat, he takes such small pieces? that he is altogether a sparse man? has rows of pins on his sleeve that he picks up?—an old-fashioned man, whose type is fast fading out from these "fast," "steep" times. He tells a story of a stream of black flies which came ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... land*, no doubt, originated in labor. A man was deemed the proprietor of so much ground as he tilled. In a sparse population there could have been no danger of mutual interference; and in every country, governments must have been instituted before there was a sufficiently close occupation of the soil to occasion collisions ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... briletajxo. Spanish-fly kantarido. Spare (extra) ekstra. Spare indulgi. Sparing, to be sxpari. Sparing (saving) sxparema. Spark fajrero. Sparkle brili. Sparrow pasero. Sparrow-hawk akcipitro. Sparse maldensa. Spasm spasmo. Spatter sxprucigi (sur). Spawn fisxsemo. Speak paroli. Speak through the nose nazparoli. Speaker parolanto. Spear lanco. Special speciala. Specialise specialigi. Specialist specialisto. Speciality specialo—eco. Specie monero. Species ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... into the spring dusk. She chose the road towards Barnham Wood because it was lonely there and the hedges were thin; you could feel the breath of the sea as it blew across the sparse fields. The hush of an English Sunday evening enfolded the road, the wood, the fields. The sun was very low and the saffron light penetrated the dark lines of the hedges and hung like a curtain of misty ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... that she was doing something against his wish on this anniversary. Deliberately, she sat alone by the river, waiting for the pageant of sunset to pass; and when she reached home the moon was up, a great white moon that turned the waving waste of pale, sparse grasses to ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... and becomes fleshy and swells into an ellipse similar to the turnip, of which it possesses all the merits of corpulence, flavour and delicacy; only the strange product serves as a base for a few sparse leaves, the last protests of a real stem that refuses to lose its attributes entirely. This is ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... De Soto's resolute mind now gave way. Broken down by his many labors and cares, perhaps assailed by the disease that was attacking his men, he felt that death was near at hand. Calling around him the sparse remnant of his once gallant company, he humbly begged their pardon for the sufferings and evils he had brought upon them, and named Luis de Alvaredo to succeed him in command. The next day, May 21, 1542, the unfortunate hero died. ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... watery, restless eyes of an insipid light blue; thin, yellow hair, almost white in its paleness; and twitching hands that played nervously all the time with a shadowy moustache. This shadowy moustache seemed to absorb as a rule the best part of his attention; it was so sparse and so blanched that he felt it continually—to assure himself, no doubt, of the reality of its existence. I need hardly add that ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... to shining in winter, and the Southwest to blowing, the corners of the earth cannot hide from him—the mornings are like halls full of light. Robert had spent his hopes upon a wet day that would have kept the congregation sparse and the guests at Fairly absent ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... hostile Indians, within the limits of the United States, have been furnished with arms and munitions of war by persons dwelling in conterminous foreign territory, and are thereby enabled to prosecute their savage warfare upon the exposed and sparse settlements of the frontier; ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... been assigned by his over-cultured parents. His slender body, with its narrow shoulders and sunken chest, frail as it was, seemed almost too heavy for his feeble legs. His thin face, bloodless and sallow, with a sparse, daintily trimmed beard and weak watery eyes, was characterized by a solemn and portentous gravity, as though, realizing fully the profound importance of his mission in life, he could permit no trivial thought to enter his bald, domelike head. One knew instinctively that ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... pebble and the thumb nail or the blade of the battle-ax and the bulb of the thumb are frequently used as forceps; they never cut the hair of the face. It is common to see men of all ages with a very sparse growth of hair on the upper lip or chin, and one of 50 years in Bontoc has a fairly heavy 4-inch growth of gray hair on his chin and throat; he is shown in Pl. XIII. Their bodies are quite free from hair. There is none on the breast, and seldom ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... to the cliffs high above the river, the opposite bank of which was much nearer than the swirling currents, crystal brown in the romantic shadows below. They walked in single file, the jury of view in their minds, and now and then referred to in their sparse speech. ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... with deep feeling. 'There was no better bed in Paris. Had he not himself put clean sheets on it that day?' He turned from the window, and with the hand of an expert displayed the beauties of the sparse blankets, the cotton sheets, and ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... dead thing in a dead landscape. To the left, but separated from it by a wide and slimy dyke, whence in times of flood the thick, brackish water trickled to the plain, stretched an arid area of sand-dunes, clothed with sparse grass, that grew like bristles upon the back of a wild hog. Beyond these dunes the ocean roared and moaned and whispered hungrily as the wind and weather stirred its depths. In front, not fifty paces away, ran the big dyke like a raised road, secured by embankments, and discharging ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... as to-day, it was pre-eminently the home of wandering, nomadic tribes. This wild, treeless region is divided by rocky ranges running from east to west. Parallel to these are deep, hot and for the most part waterless valleys. In the springtime these valleys are covered by a sparse vegetation; from a few perennial springs flow waters that irrigate the immediately surrounding land; but they soon lose themselves in the thirsty desert. During the summer the vegetation disappears almost entirely, and the struggle for subsistence ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... He wore sparse, sandy whiskers, now fast turning gray. The outthrust of the lower part of his face was as sharp as that of a fox, and he really looked like a fox. She was sure of his identity before uncle Henry wheeled and, seeing ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... the fur bearing animals abounded in the section, as they were found in hundreds of other portions of the vast area known under the general name of the Louisiana Territory. You must bear in mind that there were thousands of square miles that had not been trodden by a white man, and so sparse were the Indian villages that large portions of the country remained to be visited even ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... was burning in the grate, and the room presented a very comfortable and home-like appearance, for Diana had added a couple of easy-chairs and several Liberty cushions to its somewhat sparse furniture. A heavy curtain, hung in front of the door to exclude draughts, gave an additional cosy touch, and fresh flowers adorned ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... weapon of war in the shape of a blue ribbon, and began weaving it into her chestnut fuzz, too naturally wavy and long to require frizettes. Coey, who was rather pretty in the white kitten style, had sparse pale hair, never properly combed over her "water fall," as she called it, which obtruded itself like a crow's nest. This attractive peculiarity was more apparent than ever to-day, the frizette having been caught by a bough ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... places of repose, at mid-day and at night, for the ducks of this and two or three other species, notably the blue- and green-winged teal, which at other times haunt the clumps of oak and pecan that skirt the sparse streams and their summer-dry affluents, where nuts and acorns in great variety, those of the live-oak being very sweet, supply unfailing winter provision. The thickets of ilex that shade off these wooded reaches into the treeless prairie are the resort of many partridges. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... are stretched forth below, Tattered by thronging mad torrents descending; Beneath them the naked rocks downward are bending, Still deeper, the wild shrubs and sparse herbage grow; But yonder the forests stand verdant in flora And birds are a'twitter in ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... rocky pastures, its sparse but hardy corn, The mist roll off its forehead before a harvest morn; To hear the pine-trees crashing across its gulfs of snow Upon a roaring ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... greasewood and sparse yellow sage led to the first almost imperceptible rise of the valley floor on that side. The distant cedars beckoned to Slone. He was not patient, because he was on the trail of Wildfire; but, ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... once so populous. The mud huts which constituted the dwelling-places of by far the greater portion of the inhabitants have disappeared, and their materials overlie the rocky plain and form the support of a scanty and sparse vegetation. But the old water-channels remain, and by their aid the hollows and low ground have been converted into rich gardens and fields, bearing full crops of waving rice and sugar-cane. Vijayanagar ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... occasional baobabs, with trunks fifteen or twenty feet thick and offshoots covering a quarter of an acre. Then the trees thinned out to the sparse and shriveled all-but-dead things that struggle for existence on the border-lines between man's land and desolation. At last we drew down the smoked panes over the window to escape the glare and ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... perhaps—and his face was long, rather pale, and shrewd and gentle; something in its oddity not unremindful of the late Sol Smith Russell. His hat was tilted back a little, the slightest bit to one side, and the sparse, brownish hair above his high forehead was going to be gray before long. He ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... and thus to success. In this mighty work, it would brace us for larger efforts, and fit us for larger results. It would simplify and deepen our motives, and thus evolve from them nobler deeds and purer sacrifices. To all objections from so-called prudence, to all calculations from sparse results, to all cavils of onlookers who may carp and seek to hinder, we should have one all-sufficient answer. It is not for us to bandy arguments on such points as these. We care nothing for difficulties, for discouragements, for cost. We may think ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... feet and not uncommonly 50-60 feet high; trunk 8-15 inches in diameter, tapering, surmounted by a very open, irregular head of small, spreading branches; spray sparse, consisting of short, stout, leafy rounded shoots set at a wide angle; distinguished by the slenderness of its habit, the light color of trunk and branches, the deep red of the sterile catkins in early spring, and the almost ceaseless flutter ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... heard approaching. A little red dog with a curly white tail appeared in the light, sniffing at Yourii and Riasantzeff, and rubbing itself against Sanine's knees, who patted its rough coat. It was followed by a little, old man with a sparse beard and small bright eyes. He carried a rusty ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... like a dark pall, and in others, after a period of intense darkness the atmosphere gradually lightened again. In our day, a phenomenon of this kind would be thoroughly investigated to its most remote possible cause; but then owing to the sparse settlement of the country and the difficulties of travel, the investigation of distant causes could not be made. Large fires may have prevailed that spring in the forests of Western New York and Pennsylvania—a region then an absolute wilderness—the ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... the sea-birds nested by the million. The larger ones, however, had, through countless ages, accumulated a layer of earth that covered their gaunt sides except where an occasional naked rib of gray granite was thrust out. Sparse grass struggled with the junipers for a foothold along the slopes, and low black firs, whose seed had been wind-blown or bird-carried from the mainland, climbed the rugged crest of each island. Few men visited them, and almost none ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... age of four and a half years, the Wonder was bald, save for a few straggling wisps of reddish hair above the ears and at the base of the skull, and a weak, sparse down, of the same colour, on the top of his head. The eyebrows, too, were not marked by any line of hair, but the eyelashes were thick, though short, and several shades darker than the hair ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... Tate. "But it appears to be a duplicate of it." He was a mild-looking little man, well along in years, sparse and spruce in his Precol uniform. The small gray eyes in the sun-darkened, leathery face weren't really mild, if you considered them more closely, or if you knew ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... somewhat sparse at Oldfield. There were a few Eton boys, and one or two in that delightful transition age when youth is most bashful and uninteresting,—a sort of unfledged manhood, when the smooth boyish cheek contradicts the deepened bass of the voice,—an ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... reply, pushing Gootes aside with one plump hand while with the other he tidied the sparse black hairs of his mustache, which was trimmed down to an eyebrow shading his lip. After inspecting and rejecting several identical bucketseats he found one less to his distaste than the others and stowed his equipment, which was extensive, ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... principle was still unknown and not even guessed at, it is evident that many mistakes must have been made, and that many an instance, which until now has been considered reliable proof of a so-called single variation, is in fact only a case of vicinism. In reading the sparse literature on sports, numerous cases will be found, which cannot stand this test. In many instances crossing must be looked to as an explanation, [215] and in other cases the evidence relied upon does not suffice to exclude this assumption. ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... is that in the translation from an original paged manuscript to an unpaged "cyberscroll", page numbers are lost. In this edition subheadings are the only remaining indexing "handles" of sub-chapter scale. Unfortunately, in some stretches of text these subheadings may be as sparse as merely one in three pages. Therefore, it would seem to make best sense to save the reader time and temper by adopting a shortest path method to indicate ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... a bloodhound, following the hoof-marks out of the valley meadow to a ridge of sparse cedars where they showed clear on the bare earth, and then to a thicker covert where they were hidden among strong grasses. Suddenly he caught my shoulder, and pulled me to the ground. We crawled through a briery place to where a gap ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... though they are of vast extent and have employed centuries in their construction, are inferior in magnitude to the dikes or levees of the Mississippi, which are the work of scarcely a hundred years, and of a comparatively sparse population. On the right or western bank of the river, the levee extends, with only occasional interruptions from high bluffs and the mouths of rivers, for a distance of more than eleven hundred miles. The left bank is, in general, ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... your country, extending from the Alleghany Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, capable itself of sustaining in comfort a larger population than will be in the whole Union for one hundred years to come. Over this vast expanse of territory your population is now so sparse that I believe we provided, at the last session, a regiment of mounted men to guard the mail from the frontier of Missouri to the mouth of the Columbia; and yet you persist in the ridiculous assertion, "I want room." ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... rooted in the mud, that in the mist resembled, Alan thought, many-legged arboreal octopi feeling for their food, and tall reeds on the tops of which sat crowds of chattering finches. Then just as the sun broke out, strongly, cheering them with its warmth and sucking up the vapours, they entered sparse bush with palms and great cotton trees growing here and there, and so at length came to the ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... bottom lands—which sixty years ago were bald and bare of trees. Today they are heavy with timber. Westward, beyond the trees, lie the prairies, and beyond the prairies, the plains; the first are green with long grasses, the latter bare, brown and with a crisp, scorched, sparse vesture of vegetation scarce worth the name. As the trees march slowly westward in conquest of the prairies, so also do the prairies, in their verdant turn, become aggressors and push westward upon ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... after this, that scant and sparse were the jests played on the grim master of the Wolfsberg, or that the bay of a blood-hound tracking on the downs frightened the most stout-hearted rider in all ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... very gaiety of solemn earnestness that baffled the cunning skill of all childish imitators. A slender wisp of a girl she was, not more than ten years in appearance, though her age had been given to us as fourteen. The spindle ankles that she so airily flourished from the sparse concealment of a worn and shadowy calico skirt seemed scarce a fraction more in girth than the slim blue-veined wrists she tossed among the loose and ragged tresses of her yellow hair, as she danced around the room. She was, from the first, an object of curious and most ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... excluded from our common schools, in consequence of the prejudices of teachers and parents. In some of our cities there are schools exclusively for their use, but in the country the colored population is usually too sparse to justify such schools; and white and black children are rarely seen studying under the same roof; although such cases do sometimes occur, and then they are confined to elementary schools. Some colored young men, who could bear the expense, have obtained in European seminaries the education ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... way was easy, and by moving slowly he suffered less pain than he had expected. Around him the frost-smitten aspens were shivering in the wind, their sparse leaves dangling like coins of red-and-yellow gold, and all the billowing land below, to the west, was iridescent with green and flame-color and crimson. A voiceless regret, a dim, wide-reaching, wistful sadness came over him, ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... rock and waited for her. She came toward him, all the light of the world seeming to fall upon her and circle her in a halo that transformed her white draperies, and glistened like a million gems in the sparse grass about ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... beyond them were the radiant mists of the pit of the city, and through this precipitous gateway filtered the enveloping luminosity. On each side of us uprose gradually converging and perpendicular scarps along whose base huddled a sparse foliage. ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... still in its infancy, and that a proper handling of the materials it even now offers involves a more critical acquaintance with its innumerable dialects than I possess; but though the gleaning be sparse, it is enough that I break the ground. Secondly, religious rites are living commentaries on religious beliefs. At first they are rude representations of the supposed doings of the gods. The Indian ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... men enter the Legislative, about sunset or after; give the most pathetic detail of the frightful pass they were in:—Prussians billowing round by the myriad, volcanically spouting fire for fifteen hours: we, scattered sparse on the ramparts, hardly a cannoneer to two guns; our dastard Commandant Lavergne no where shewing face; the priming would not catch; there was no powder in the bombs,—what could we do? "Mourir! Die!" answer prompt voices; (Hist. Parl. xvii. 148.) and the dusty fugitives must shrink elsewhither ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... frowning at herself. "This dreariness is not our desert," she explained eagerly to the girl, as the horses dragged the carriage over the sandy earth, through whose hard brown surface the harsh, colourless blades of drinn pricked like a few sparse hairs on the head of a shrivelled old man. "In the Sahara, there are four kinds of desert, because Allah put four angels in charge, giving each his own portion. The Angel of the Chebka was cold of nature, with no kindness in his heart, and was jealous ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... densely fasciculate, filiform, black, entirely carbonous. Perithecia ovate, sparse, rarely developed. Spores (teste Fuckel), ovoid, ...
— Synopsis of Some Genera of the Large Pyrenomycetes - Camilla, Thamnomyces, Engleromyces • C. G. Lloyd
... Lepanto was in a great measure to be ascribed to the admirable tactics of their chief. The shock of the Turkish onset was effectually broken by the dexterous disposition made of the galeases of Venice. Indeed, had the great ships been there to strengthen the sparse line formed by these six vessels, it is not impossible that the Turks would have failed in forcing their way through the wall of that terrible fire. Each Christian vessel, by the retrenchment of its peak, enjoyed an advantage over its antagonist in the freer play of its artillery. When, however, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... lilies gradually disappeared, and the thatched cabins became more and more sparse, when from one of the latter, at a hundred paces from the caravan, issued a human figure. The man struck an attitude in the pathway of the travelers, his carbine on his shoulder, his fist on his hip and his nose saucily turned up in the air. Neither his Metamora-like ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... possible to recall its aspect in those earlier years when it was literally a strand, that is, a low-lying road by the side of the Thames, stretching from Temple-bar to Charing Cross. On the south side of the thoroughfare were the mansions of bishops and nobles dotted at sparse intervals; on the north was open country. To-day there are even fewer survivals of the past than might have been seen thirty years ago. The wholesale clearance of Holywell Street and the buildings to the north has completely transformed the neighbourhood, ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... that long stretch of park wall which ran beside the road and the tramway. From where he sat he could see the other wing which led inward from the road at something like a right angle, but was presently lost to sight because of a sparse and unkempt patch of young trees and shrubs, well-nigh choked with undergrowth, which extended for some distance from the park wall backward along the road-side toward Vanves. Whoever owned that stretch of land had seemingly not thought it worth while to cultivate it or to ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... the inside of the limbs vary from pale yellowish-white to a rich rufous orange; the basal portion of the hairs of the under-parts is dark brown or black, and the ventral area has frequently a dull hue where the yellow tips are sparse; the coats of these squirrels are generally sleek, glossy and deep black, and while in this condition the under surface is most brilliant, especially at its line of junction with the black, along the sides of the body and limbs, tending to form ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... recent sickness, patient and unimaginative in aspect. He preached extemporarily, with the aid of notes; and it cannot be said that his discourse was remarkable for interest, at any rate in its beginning. Doubtless the sparse congregation, so prone to slumber, discouraged him; for offering exhortations to empty benches is but weary work. Indeed he was meditating the advisability of bringing his argument to an abrupt conclusion when, chancing to glance ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... Don Antonio reached it, was rather better; the furnishings, though sparse, were massive and imposing; the tapestries on the walls, if old, were rich and choice. But everywhere the ill-assorted marriage of pretentiousness and neediness was apparent. The floors of hall and living-room were strewn with fresh-cut rushes, an ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... ear, so to deliver them to whom it is requisite; but not enjoining us to communicate to all without distinction what is said to them in parables. But there is only a delineation in the memoranda, which have the truth sown sparse and broadcast, that it may escape the notice of those who pick up seeds like jackdaws; but when they find a good husbandman, each of them will germinate and ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... to the Bugis camp, and led them across. After a short but quite silent scuffle, Cornelius, who had tried to slink away at the moment of landing, resigned himself to show the way where the undergrowth was most sparse. Brown held both his skinny hands together behind his back in the grip of one vast fist, and now and then impelled him forward with a fierce push. Cornelius remained as mute as a fish, abject but faithful to his purpose, whose accomplishment loomed before him dimly. At the edge of the ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... a career peculiar to herself. In St. Louis there was a strong Unionist majority, and especially the numerous German population was thoroughly anti-slavery, and was vigorously led by F.P. Blair, Jr. But away from her riverfront the State had a sparse population preserving the rough propensities of frontiersmen; these men were not unevenly divided between loyalty and secession and they were an independent, fighting set of fellows, each one of ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... promptly to be picturesquely crooked and twisty. As it grows and branches under the cultivation and guidance of the orchardist, it maintains a lusty, hearty aspect, its yellowish, reddish or brownish twigs—again according to variety—spreading out to the sun and the air freely. A decade passes, and the sparse showing of bloom that has decorated it each spring gradually gives place to a great glory of flowers. The tree is about to bear, and it assumes the character of maturity; for while it grows on soberly for many years, there is now a spreading, a sort of relaxation, very different ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... was set mosaic-like in the midst of green and blue-grey mountains that soared up from it—up, up, in shapes strange as a goblin's dream. Then, the azure star vanished, and rocky heights shut away the view of the distant sea. Vegetation grew sparse. At last we had reached the desolate and stony top of the mountain-range which a little while ago had touched the sky. Clouds like huge white swans swam in the blue air below us, where we could look down from some sheer precipice. But where was Schloss Hrvoya? And would Aunt Kathryn ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... and the most celebrated of four brothers, John, Robert, James and William Adam, was born at Kirkcaldy in 1728. For few famous men have we so little biographical material, and contemporary references to him are sparse. He certainly studied at the university of Edinburgh, and probably received his first instruction in architecture from his father, who gave proofs of his own skill and taste in the Edinburgh Royal ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... there was a line of poplars. On the slope of the hill nearer to us there were two or three field batteries in action. To the right of us a brigade of artillery was limbered up ready to go anywhere. In the left, at the bottom of the dip the 108th was in action, partially covered by some sparse bushes. A few ambulance waggons and some miscellaneous first-line transport were drawn up along the side of the road at the bottom of the dip. To the N.W. we could see for about four miles over low, rolling fields. We could see nothing to the right, as our view was blocked ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... great temptation—the magnificent Mungo Mah Lobeh—the Throne of Thunder. Now it is none of my business to go up mountains. There's next to no fish on them in West Africa, and precious little good rank fetish, as the population on them is sparse—the African, like myself, abhorring cool air. Nevertheless, I feel quite sure that no white man has ever looked on the great Peak of Cameroon without a desire arising in his mind to ascend it and know in detail the highest point on ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... mind, with leisure to expand and mature, in the green fields of literature. If New France has not yet produced such a gorgeous genius as he, of whom all those who speak Chatham's tongue are so justly proud, it has however out of its sparse population of one million, put forth a representative whom Old France with its thirty- eight millions has deemed a fit subject to honour in an unmistakable way. Shall I tell you how, figuratively, if you should prefer, ended for ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... per antico uso, di bianco, e con chiome sparse giu per le spalle, conteste con fila d'oro." "Dressed according to ancient usage in white, and with her hair thrown down upon her shoulders, interwoven with threads of gold." This was when she was first brought out of her chamber to be seen ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... husband returned from the west, and with many pleasant recollections of Battleford, we left for our own home, which I had pictured in my mind with joyous anticipation, as the place of our continued happiness: a beautiful oasis, in that land of prairie and sparse settlement, and with a buoyancy of spirit which true happiness alone can bring, I looked forward with anticipated pleasure, which made that little log house appear to me, a palace, and we its king ...
— Two months in the camp of Big Bear • Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney
... mile south, I made the following observation, namely: meridian altitude 72 degrees 33 seconds; latitude 20 degrees 41 minutes. Started after party at 12.20. At 1.27 came east half north for two and a half miles over rich undulating land to a watercourse. These downs are so sparse of trees that a small belt of brushwood on the top of an eminence was a remarkable feature. It is situated about a mile this side of the spot from which I made my observation; at 3.20, when we had come up the creek on an average ...
— Journal of Landsborough's Expedition from Carpentaria - In search of Burke and Wills • William Landsborough
... to find a refuge from a fate more cruel than death; a fate from which I was rescued by the intervention of my dear dead friend, Thomas Anderson. I was born on a lonely plantation on the Mississippi River, where the white population was very sparse. We had no neighbors who ever visited us; no young white girls with whom I ever played in my childhood; but, never having enjoyed such companionship, I was unconscious of any sense of privation. Our parents spared no pains to make the lives of their children (we were three) ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... permanent crops: 0% other: 100% (largely covered by permanent ice and snow with some sparse vegetation consisting of grass, moss, and ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... nuts each year, but the crop is not heavy enough to recommend them for planting in our climate. While the wood suffers no winter injury, the catkins for the most part get winter killed and, consequently, there is a very sparse crop. What is needed for northern latitudes is a filbert that will ripen in our fairly short growing season, and whose catkins are immune to winter kill. The Winkler seems to be more hardy than the others, but the nuts do not ripen. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... minute!" panted Madaline. "You have almost murdered us as it is," she proclaimed in her excitement, which always banished her ordinarily sparse supply of reasonable language. ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis
... glasses, his hands shutting off his vision on the sides, like blinders on a horse. Quickly Willie scurried up the tree, wrapping himself closely about the slender trunk, concealing as much of his body as he could, and snuggling behind the sparse clumps of foliage. Then he brought his glasses to bear, and sat ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... was familiar to O'Neill; to him, as to many another young painter of that time, it was an upstanding landmark on the road of art. He looked at it now, in the sparse light from the bedside lamp, with a fresh interest in its significance. He saw with new understanding the conventionalism of the pose—hip thrust out, arm akimbo, shoulder cocked—contrasted against the dark vivacity of the face and all the pulsing opulence ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... the Kansans he travelled on toward the Missouri, and soon struck the beginning of the sparse settlements. Just as evening was coming on, he arrived at a cluster of three little log-cabins, and was received with genuine backwoods hospitality by the proprietor, who had married an Osage squaw. Williams was not only ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... there entered a middle-aged, rather grizzled man, with shaggy eyebrows, sparse beard, and bent shoulders. He glanced in hesitatingly, his eyes wandering down ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... him fifty yards to where he lay dead. He was a fine trophy, and we at once set the boys to preparing it and taking the meat. In the meantime we sauntered down to look at the stream. It was a small rapid affair, but in heavy papyrus, with sparse trees, and occasional thickets, and dry hard banks. The papyrus should make a good lurking place for almost anything; but the few points of access to the water failed to show many interesting tracks. Nevertheless we decided ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... wrist, as though his tailor in cutting the garment had repudiated as fantastic the evidence of his measurements. Yet, when one might have expected to find hands of a talon-like knottiness, to correspond with the sparse rugosity of his person, one found to one's astonishment the most delicately shaped hands in the world, with long, sensitive, nervous fingers, like those of the thousands of artists who have lived and died without being able to ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... a fisherman is outlined on the grassy slope. Below it, crowding reeds rustle in the current; and where they are more sparse they fashion concentric orbs upon the gleaming, fleeing water. The landscape has something exotic or antique about it. You are no matter where in the world or among the centuries. You are on some corner of the eternal earth, where men and women are drawing near to each other, and cling together while ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... establishment. It was cruder and rougher than anything she had yet encountered; a white-pine table with a washbowl and a toothbrush mug, and a black iron bed that at first glance had sent darting through her a sinking sense of institution. But it was clean, and a sparse Irish landlady with a moist pink presence that steamed hot suds had left her without question and one week's advance ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... I had read "Deerslayer." Should I drop on my knees and crawl through the long grass, snooping round the beanpoles and taking the devoted block-house in flank? I swallowed my stiff-necked English pride and began to crawl. Then I saw a better plan. I slipped through the sparse line of dwarf oaks smothered with crimson poison-ivy that bordered the forest path and crept as silently as I could towards the street until I was abreast of the stump. As I paused Beppo was making his round of the fort and espied me. Instantly crying "Hostiles!" ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... it with gray, drifting ghosts: ghosts of the murdered clansmen; ghosts disappearing into dark, open doorways of rock castles, or falling on the green floor of the glen, to weep on the dim, faded purple of the sparse heather. The river into which the weeping cataracts shed their tears was black at first; but suddenly, though the rain did not stop, the sun tore a hole through a cloud, and shot a huge rainbow into the ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... very hard one, darkened by the ever-brooding shadow of disgrace. It was new to her to sit quietly looking out at the low meadows and glimmering white-walled villas, the patches of sparse woodland, the distant villages, the glimpses of rippling water, shining in the wintry sun. It was new to her to be loved by people whose minds were unembittered by the baneful memories of wrong and ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... the vegetation. The soil and climate are unsuited to the growth of large trees, but adapted to scrub jungle of a drought-resisting type, which at one time covered very large areas from the Jamna to the Jhelam. The soil on which this sparse scrub grew is a good strong loam, but the rainfall was too scanty and the water-level too deep to admit of much cultivation outside the valleys of the rivers till the labours of canal engineers carried their waters to the uplands. East of the Sutlej ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... inland we went the darker it became, until we were moving at last through an endless twi-light. The vegetation here was sparse and of a weird, colorless nature, though what did grow was wondrous in shape and form. Often we saw huge lidi, or beasts of burden, striding across the dim landscape, browsing upon the grotesque vegetation or drinking from the slow and sullen rivers that run down from the Lidi Plains to empty into ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... army in its retreat from Moscow suffered no more from the winter chill than did this migrating nation. On many a morning the dawning light shone on a circle that had gathered the night before around a sparse fire (made from the lading of the camels or from broken-up baggage-wagons), now dead and frozen stiff ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... by the changed circumstances, they are well content, for they rule now over their districts, not only as Irish chieftains, but as English lieutenants. You have seen, as you journeyed here, how sparse is the population of our hills, and how slight would be the opposition which we could offer, did the Earl of Ulster sweep down upon us with ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... willing, give, To feed an alien foe, The substance, all too poor and sparse, Our ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... storm is now subsiding and the horizon becoming serene, it is pleasant to consider the phenomenon with attention. We can no longer say there is nothing new under the sun. For this whole chapter in the history of man is new. The great extent of our republic is new. Its sparse habitation is new. The mighty wave of public opinion which has rolled over it is new. But the most pleasing novelty is, its so quietly subsiding over such an extent of surface to its true level again. The order and good sense displayed in this recovery ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... car through the intersection, Rick saw, before traffic started through the cross street. Scotty took another turn, doubled back, and went through another alley. As he emerged onto a street where traffic was sparse, ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... caressing. The irregularly paved yard was inclosed on two sides by the main building, and on the third by a species of log cabin, which, in Norway, is called a brew-house; but toward the west the view was but slightly obscured by an elevated pigeon cot and a clump of birches, through whose sparse leaves the fjord beneath sent its rapid jets and gleams of light, and its strange suggestions of distance, ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... air and gazing down the sloping side of the lawn. Women and girls were returning from the post-office, many of them with letters in their hands. Some of these were so impatient to know their contents that they were straining their eyes to read them in the sickly light that fell from a sparse row of electric lamps. I ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... the east to the Rio Grande on the west, and from the Gulf of Mexico on the south and east to the territory of the United States and New Mexico—another Mexican state at that time—on the north and west. An empire in territory, it had but a very sparse population, until settled by Americans who had received authority from Mexico to colonize. These colonists paid very little attention to the supreme government, and introduced slavery into the state almost from the start, though the constitution of Mexico did not, nor ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... worth working for or helpfully hinderous blast-furnaces to ambition. But one seat away was a man who was one of the greatest mine-owners in America, and controlled railways that were connected and dependent on these mines. Pale and sallow, with sparse hair over his big bulging forehead, power and decision and resolution were stamped on every line of his face; a small army of men worked for him—worked underground or on railroads, or looked to him as the donor of dividends, ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... Western men with more than average ability, and it required but little learning and culture under the sovereignty of "squatters" to become a member of the State legislature, especially in the border States, where population was sparse, and the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... agriculture, as already intimated in what has been said of the investment of capital. The enormous profits of cultivating a virgin soil without the need of artificial fertilization; the advantages which a sparse population derives from the privilege of selecting for tillage only the choicest spots,(371) those most accessible, most fertile, most easily brought under the plow; and the consequent abundance of food and ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... immediate theological campaign was merely that passion for doing things and for self-expression which were always conspicuous traits. His intense ambition as a boy is still remembered in this sleepy little village. He read every book in the sparse college library; he talked to his college mates and his professors on every imaginable subject; he led his associates in the miniature parliament—the Franklin Debating Society—to which he belonged; he wrote prose and verse at an astonishing rate; he explored the country for miles ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... Dobrava. The southern slopes of Tzer are less abrupt than those on the north and descend gradually into the Leschnitza Valley, out of which rise the lesser heights of the Iverak Mountains. Both these ranges are largely covered by prune orchards, intersected with some sparse timber. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... bridge—out across a stretch of open meadow, and then along a track that skirted the border of a sparse growth of trees, projecting itself like a promontory upon the level land—round its abrupt angle into a sweep of meadow again, on whose farther verge rose the ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... open and stiff; branches are usually many, sub-solitary or fascicled, spreading or suberect, capillary, stiff, again branching from near the base and about 3 inches long; rachis is angular, with glands and tufts of sparse white hairs at the angles of ...
— A Handbook of Some South Indian Grasses • Rai Bahadur K. Ranga Achariyar
... back of the saddle, while on one side were secured three bags of flour, and on the other several jack-rabbits were strung together. But the powerful beast remained unconcernedly nibbling at the sparse green peeping here and there through the carpet of rotting pine cones and needles which covered ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... swept the ground. Her turban was twice as large as the largest of any of the others; her eyebrows met, her nose was rather flat, her mouth was large but with ruddy lips, and her teeth, of which at times she allowed a glimpse, were seen to be sparse and ill-set, though as white as peeled almonds. She carried in her hands a fine cloth, and in it, as well as I could make out, a heart that had been mummied, so parched and dried was it. Montesinos told me that all those ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... by far the most important of the Outposts is Sumatra, an island four-fifths the size of France, as potentially rich in mineral and agricultural wealth as Java, but with a sparse and intractable population, certain of the tribes, notably the Achinese, who inhabit the northern districts, still defying Dutch rule in spite of the long and costly series of wars which have resulted from Holland's attempt to subjugate ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... Chinese squatted in such numbers that it was necessary to erect the ordinary Chinese civil administration. Thirty or forty miles due west of the town cultivation practically ceases; and then nothing meets the eye but the rolling grasslands of Mongolia, with their sparse encampments of nomad horsemen and shepherds which stretch so monotonously into ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... circumnavigated the barn and picked up the trail where it issued by way of a low shed roof on to the top of a fence. The fox thought he had us there, but we fooled him. Then straight away over two miles of rolling meadow, and awfully hard to follow, for the confetti was getting sparse. The rule is that it must be at the most six feet apart, but they were the longest six feet I ever saw. Finally, after two hours of steady trotting, we tracked Monsieur Fox into the kitchen of Crystal Spring (that's ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... the flat pulled them together again, and they plodded on by Bardie's Farm, where the scent became sparse, and on to Steg where, for the first time since leaving Templeton, they came upon traces ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... the Peace, is fast filling up with detritus the western portion of Lake Athabasca. There is a marked contrast between the upper and lower coasts of the lake. The north shore consists of Laurentian gneiss with a sparse wood growth; the south bank for the most part is low, the formation being a cretaceous sandstone. Ice holds fast this beautiful sheet for six months every year. As we puff along the surface of its incomparable blue it is hard to realise that, although the Peace ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... ferchunit t' have all seeh new-fangled idees in the house! It clean locoes me t' think Ah'm livin' wid sech fine contraptions." And Sary pressed her large freckled, hands over her sparse red hair to signify how ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... after an hour's halt, they again moved on, pausing occasionally to refresh themselves, until towards sunset, when the ground became more even and the soil more sandy. Here they noticed the vegetation was becoming more sparse, what trees there were having a stunted and gnarled appearance; after a long search they found a spring of pure water, by which they encamped for the night, being now relieved from the fear of an attack; for, had they been ever so well mounted they could not ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... morrow was not and never could be the same; when they were "cleaned out" it meant desolation. They went down under the weight and never came up, while the real gambler, in similar case, scraped his sparse resources together and blithely began all over again,—a smiling loser and a smiling winner. Full purse or empty, he was always the same. Rich to-day, poor to-morrow,—all the same to him. Philosopher, ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... and was down among the first at the hop. This function, it seemed, was going on in the parlor, which summed in itself the character of ball-room as well as drawing-room. The hop had now begun, and two young girl couples were doing what they could to rebuke the sparse youth of Lower Merritt Inn for their lack of eagerness in the evening's pleasure by dancing alone. Gaites did not even notice them, he was so intent upon the ladies of the orchestra, concerning whom he was beginning to have a troubled mind, not to ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... powerful music, and when she ceased the silence was like a taunt. It was not as if Joan were there and failed to answer; it was as if there were no longer any Joan anywhere. They came at last to the space of sparse trees which bordered ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... learned to know no fear, and with their wives and children formed as hardy a race as virgin soil ever produced. With these pioneers it was not a matter of great pride to have shot a lion, but it was considered a disgrace to have missed one. To husband their sparse supplies of ammunition was their chief object, and to waste a shot by missing the target was to become the subject of good-natured derision and ridicule. Fathers, sons, and grandsons entered the bush together, and when there was a lion or other wild beast to ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... parks, breathless descents, or sharp steep cuts at the bottom of which Spring Creek, or as much of it as was not turned into the Rockerville sluices, brawled or idled along. It was time for lunch, so they dismounted near a deep still pool and ate. The ponies cropped the sparse grasses, or twisted on their backs, all four legs in the air. Squirrels chattered and scolded overhead. Some of the indigo-coloured jays of the lowlands shot in long level flight between the trees. The girl and the boy helped each other, ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... period the missions of the Napo were both numerous and powerful. That was while they were under the superintendence of those active apostles, the Jesuit fathers; but most of their settlements have long ago disappeared; and now only a few sparse stations exist along the borders of ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... same if they had been mere goings and comings, past the white houses overlooking little lawns through the umbrage of their palm-trees. The lawns professed to be of grass, but were really mats of close little herbs which were not grass; but which, where the sparse cattle were grazing them, seemed to satisfy their inexacting stomachs. They are never very green, and in fact the landscape often has an air of exhaustion and pause which it wears with us in late ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... successful, the war on land had been for us full of humiliation. The United States then formed but a loosely knit confederacy, the sparse population scattered over a great expanse of land. Ever since the Federalist party had gone out of power in 1800, the nation's ability to maintain order at home and enforce respect abroad had steadily dwindled; and the twelve years' nerveless reign of the Doctrinaire Democracy had left us impotent ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... (1728—1792), British architect, the second son of William Adam of Maryburgh, in Fife, and the most celebrated of four brothers, John, Robert, James and William Adam, was born at Kirkcaldy in 1728. For few famous men have we so little biographical material, and contemporary references to him are sparse. He certainly studied at the university of Edinburgh, and probably received his first instruction in architecture from his father, who gave proofs of his own skill and taste in the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... this feudo-kingly rule. Then came a revolt, after the Reformation, against the government of kings. New England and other colonies became small republics, almost democracies. On the hills of New England, with a sparse rural population and small cities, the most primitive form of government was the best. It was virtually the government of townships. The selectmen were the overseers; and, following the necessities of the times, the ministers of the gospel were generally Independents or Congregationalists, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... left him high and dry between the past and the hereafter. A ragged chin beard, ashen in hue, hung below his gaping, empty mouth. But there was a spirit in his bosom still, for upon his head he wore a circle of bright flowers to supplement the sparse locks. ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... healthy growth, and rampant in its habit, thus making it useful where the large-flowered kinds have proved defective, as none of them are of what may be called free growth. They grow to a height of seven or eight feet—sometimes ten,—but have few branches, and sparse foliage. Paniculata, on the contrary, makes a very vigorous growth—often twenty feet in a season—and its foliage, unlike that of the other varieties, is attractive enough in itself to make the plant well worth growing. It is a rich, glossy green, and so freely produced ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... aspect that money-lending commonly bore in the Middle Ages. In those days land was hard to buy, agriculture backward, roads bad, seas unnavigable, carrying-trade precarious, messages slow, raids and marauders frequent, population sparse, commerce confined to a few centres, mines unworked, manufactures mostly domestic, capital yet unformed. Men kept their money in their cellars, or deposited it for safety in religious houses: whence the stories of treasure-trove belonging to ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... reminded one of parts of our own West—brown hills, with sparse pines and scrub-oaks, meadows ablaze with scarlet poppies, and over all blue sky, sunshine, and the breeze from the near-by sea. We passed camel trains, mule trains, horses, and tents masked with brush. Here evidently were the men we had seen marching day after day through the Constantinople streets—marching ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... is sometimes disseminated in an almost imperceptible manner in the mass of granite rocks itself, without our being able to admit that there is a ramification and an interlacing of small veins.' It is plain that Raleigh got hold of unusually rich specimens of the sparse auriferous quartz. He was accused on his return of having brought his specimens from Africa, but no one suggested that they did not contain gold. No doubt much of the sparkling dust he saw in the rocks was simply iron pyrites, ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... reply is easy and convincing: "that, if the dead endanger the living when the population is dense, they certainly also endanger them when the population is sparse. The danger is only diluted. It still exists, and it ought to alarm us just as truly when a few are imperilled as ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... really arise. Nowhere else, during the whole course of my various diplomatic wanderings, have I ever seen a happier people, who looked more cheerfully into the future. In view of the comparatively sparse population of the country, intensive agricultural production has only become necessary in a few isolated districts; there are always purchasers in plenty for the rich surplus of raw materials available, and industry has not yet been directed solely towards export. As a result of these ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... in the war, and thus the Pequots were left to fight the battle alone. But the Pequots, with their four thousand merciless warriors, were a fearful foe to rush from their inaccessible retreats, with torch and tomahawk, upon the sparse and defenseless settlements scattered along the banks of ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... and dry. They found themselves in a sparse pine forest where walking was easy. By nightfall they were out on an open prairie, and at midnight they came to the trading post ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... make sure of that and to search for footprints. But those he found were indistinct, blurred partly by the looseness of the sand and partly by the sparse grass that grew along the trail there, because the buggy had turned in a hollow. He went on a couple of rods, and he saw where an automobile had also come to this point and had turned and gone back toward town, or rather, it had swung ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... interminable distance, as it seemed to Mamie, until finally they stood upon the brink of a huge canon, with a snowy mountain range in the distance beyond, and in the intervening space, a vast panorama of granite mountain sides, almost white,—here and there covered with a sparse growth of timber. The waters from these mountain reaches had cut a channel for themselves known as Little Yosemite Valley, where pour the two wonderful cataracts known as Nevada Falls and Vernal ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... capable wife. He was a moderately good carpenter and joiner, but no man of the world, and he wanted one. Nobody could tell what might not have happened to Tommy Simmons if there had been no Mrs. Simmons to take care of him. He was a meek and quiet man, with a boyish face and sparse, limp whiskers. He had no vices (even his pipe departed him after his marriage), and Mrs. Simmons had ingrafted on him divers exotic virtues. He went solemnly to chapel every Sunday, under a tall hat, and put a penny—one returned ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... windows a specimen chart was framed. Maps are good; but how much better are charts, especially when you cannot read them except by guessing at their cryptic lettering! About the coast line the fathom marks cluster thickly, and venture to sea in lines which attenuate, or become sparse clusters, till the chart is blank, being beyond soundings. At the capes are red dots, with arcs on the seaward side to show at what distance mariners pick up the real lights at night. Through such windows, boys with bills of lading and mates' receipts in their pockets, being on errands to ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... as in a blissful dream and watched my road unfold. The sun set the pine-boles aflare where the hedge is sparse, and stretched the long shadows of the besom poplars in slanting bars across the white highway; the roadside gardens smiled friendly with their trim-cut laurels and rows of stately sunflowers—a seemly proximity ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... This stream, assisted by the Peace, is fast filling up with detritus the western portion of Lake Athabasca. There is a marked contrast between the upper and lower coasts of the lake. The north shore consists of Laurentian gneiss with a sparse wood growth; the south bank for the most part is low, the formation being a cretaceous sandstone. Ice holds fast this beautiful sheet for six months every year. As we puff along the surface of its incomparable blue it is hard to realise that, although the ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... end of the canal about three o'clock of the afternoon, and dropped anchor off the low-lying shores. Our binoculars showed us white houses in apparently single rank along a far-reaching narrow sand spit, with sparse trees and a railroad line. That was the town of Suez, and seemed so little interesting that we were not particularly sorry that we could not go ashore. Far in the distance were mountains; and the water all about us was the light, clear green of ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... couldn't get to his own desk without going through the clerk's, or couldn't get to the pulpit without going through the reading-desk—I forget which, and it is no matter—and by the presence of this personage among the exceedingly sparse congregation. I doubt if we were a dozen, and we had no exhausted charity school to help us out. The personage was dressed in black of square cut, and was stricken in years, and wore a black velvet cap, and cloth shoes. He was of a staid, wealthy, ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... system not perfect, but yet far in advance, as a system of national education, of anything we can show at home. It is indeed very remarkable to me that in a country, occupied in the greater part of its area by a sparse and anything but wealthy population, whose predominant characteristic is as far as possible removed from the spirit of enterprise, an educational system so complete in its theory and so capable of adaptation in practice should have been ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... were sheeted with the glittering, untrampled snow from which they derive their name. Stern and strong with the force of an unbroken wilderness, they formed at all times a forbidding background to the sparse settlements in the valleys and on ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... trees, sparse vegetation, and a very thin coating of soil, there is no agriculture, and the whole glory of the island is centered in the roaring city on ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... camp, and led them across. After a short but quite silent scuffle, Cornelius, who had tried to slink away at the moment of landing, resigned himself to show the way where the undergrowth was most sparse. Brown held both his skinny hands together behind his back in the grip of one vast fist, and now and then impelled him forward with a fierce push. Cornelius remained as mute as a fish, abject but faithful to his purpose, whose accomplishment loomed before him dimly. At ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... the towns and mainly Slovene in the country districts. It has been the deliberate policy of the Austrian Government to plant new Slovene colonies here from time to time and to render life intolerable for Italians. But, even so, the population is still sparse, and all the country is infertile, except for the Vippacco Valley, which, though wretchedly cultivated hitherto, would richly repay the application of capital and modern methods. Here, I think, ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... up at it, wondering, as many times she had gazed and wondered before. It was a marvelous survival of primaeval life. It was so vast, so forbidding. Its torn crown, so sparse and weary looking, its barren trunk, too, dark and forbidding against the dwarfed surroundings of green, were they not a fit beacon for the village below? It suggested to her imagination a giant, mouldering skeleton of some dreadfully evil creature. ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... would it have been possible to recall its aspect in those earlier years when it was literally a strand, that is, a low-lying road by the side of the Thames, stretching from Temple-bar to Charing Cross. On the south side of the thoroughfare were the mansions of bishops and nobles dotted at sparse intervals; on the north was open country. To-day there are even fewer survivals of the past than might have been seen thirty years ago. The wholesale clearance of Holywell Street and the buildings to the north has completely transformed ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... soft-voiced, gentle-mannered servitor in livery led them up the grand marble staircase and through an endless suite of airy, stately rooms—rooms with floors of polished concrete, displaying elaborate patterns, with tapestried walls and frescoed ceilings, with sparse but ancient and precious articles of furniture, chandeliers of Venetian glass, Venetian mirrors, and innumerable ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... however, made so lonely a journey. Not one human being did he meet—neither red man nor white—in all the long miles of the endless wilderness; naught astir save the sparse vernal shadows in the budding woods and the gentle spring zephyr swinging past and singing as it went. Now and again he noted how the sun slowly dropped down the skies that were so fine, so fair, so blue ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... green with slime and feathery with a kind of ghastly white fungus. Overhead, from the wooden roof, which formed the floor of the shop, hung innumerable spider's webs thick with dust. The floor was of large flags cracked in many places, and between the chinks in moist corners sprouted sparse, colorless grass. In the centre was a deal table, scored with queer marks and splotched with ink. Over this flared two gas-jets, which whistled shrilly. Against the wall, which was below the street, ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... Old Terran Italian, but he had slanted Mongoloid eyes and a sparse little chin-beard, which accounted for his nickname. The amount of intermarriage that's gone on since the First Century, any resemblance between people's names and their appearances is purely coincidental. Oscar Fujisawa, ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper
... commerce of the world, it must be equally right that the great store house of labor in Africa should be opened for the benefit of the human race. In the Western World, a vast continent of fertile land and propitious climate, was possessed, not improved, by a sparse hunter race; but the law of God and of nations required that the earth should be subdued and replenished, and now God has enlarged Japheth, and he dwells in these tents of Shem. China, Japan, and other regions of Asia, are inhabited by teeming ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... the impression that the whole surface crust of earth had been burned to a white heat ages ago. Low hills with clifflike faces; shallow nullahs used only a month or two a year to carry the monsoon deluges to the Nerbudda; the stones of the river bottoms bone-white—everywhere sparse and scrubby foliage with dust-covered leaves. There was no turf in this stony world except the sand of the hollows and the wind eddied most of these spaces like water, quickly covering all tracks. It was toward the end of the afternoon that Nels ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... approached were found to proceed from two windows in the ground floor of a large house. The travellers had not advanced many paces towards them before the peaks of three gables rose above them, vandyking the sky and docking the last sparse branches ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... lands—which sixty years ago were bald and bare of trees. Today they are heavy with timber. Westward, beyond the trees, lie the prairies, and beyond the prairies, the plains; the first are green with long grasses, the latter bare, brown and with a crisp, scorched, sparse vesture of vegetation scarce worth the name. As the trees march slowly westward in conquest of the prairies, so also do the prairies, in their verdant turn, become aggressors and push westward upon the plains. These last stretches, extending to the ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... sometimes languidly seated on its rim, stark, bloodless, with scarce seeing eyes, and the motionless agony of one recovering from a swoon, enduring the worst of all his martyrdom, the return to life in that chill, bleak landscape, where the sparse trees bend in the dawn wind; returning from death to a new, an endless series of sufferings, even as that legend made him answer the wayfaring Peter, returning to be ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... years that pocket had been the secret repository of Link Ferris's sparse wealth. The intruder's touch awakened him to a drowsy sense of peril. He thrust aside the fumbling hand and made a herculean ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... at the window; nothing particular going on. A square-built shortish steel-gray Gentleman, of military cut, past fifty, is strolling over the SCHLOSSPLATZ (spacious Square in front of the Palace), conspicuous amid the sparse populations there; pensively recreating himself, in the yellow sunlight and long shadows, as after a day's hard labor or travel. "Who is that?" inquires Friedrich Wilhelm, suspending his tobacco. Grumkow answers cautiously, after survey: He thinks it must be Ordnance-Master ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... balconies play an old refrain and the university cheering afterward; saw the old professor he had cared for most of all, with the thin white hair straggling over his silken hood, following the band in the sparse ranks of his class. And he saw his own Commencement Day—and the station at the junction where he stood the morning after, looking across the valley at the old towers for the last time; saw the broken groups of his class, standing upon the platform on the other side of the ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... entry, and opened Mrs. Field's door. She pressed the old brass latch with a slight show of ceremonious hesitancy, but she never thought of knocking. There was no one in the room, which had a clean and sparse air. The chairs all stood back against the walls, and left in the centre a wide extent of faded carpet, full of shadowy ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... that no physiognomies repel them; and Gouraud began to cast his eyes on the old maid's fortune. This imperial colonel, a short, fat man, wore enormous rings in ears that were bushy with tufts of hair. His sparse and grizzled whiskers were called in 1799 "fins." His jolly red face was rather discolored, like those of all who had lived to tell of the Beresina. The lower half of his big, pointed stomach marked the straight line ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... foot, a bit of stick in one hand, and often a straw in the mouth—he did not smoke—was familiar in the yard where he turned the handle of the separator, or in the fields and cowsheds, from daybreak to dusk, save for the hours of dinner and tea, which he ate in the farm kitchen, making sparse and surprising comments. To his peculiar whistles and calls the cattle and calves, for all their rumination and stubborn shyness, were amazingly responsive. It was a pretty sight to see them pushing against each ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... the one plant which may be considered as specially characteristic of the Devonian (though not confined to this series) is the Psilophyton (fig. 77) of Dr Dawson. These singular plants have slender branching stems, with sparse needle-shaped leaves, the young stems being at first coiled up, crosier-fashion, like the young fronds of ferns, whilst the old branches carry numerous spore-cases. The stems and branches seem to have attained a height of two or three feet; and they sprang from ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... place in the chief saloon, which was contiguous to the ball-room, and which was nearly as full of guests. Endymion, moving in the opposite direction, entered another drawing-room, where the population was sparse. It consisted of couples apparently deeply interested in each other. Some faces were radiant, and some pensive and a little agitated, but they all agreed in one expression, that they took no interest ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... and State or local fishing access points are sparse, so that for the most part the Basin's main flowing streams remain a closed book for people who lack the time, youth, equipment, or inclination to come at them by canoeing or some other more or less arduous means. And, as was noted earlier, ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... us most. It seemed to us as if we were walking through a large park, with wide open spaces and clumps of trees here and there; only the leaves of the trees hung down long and thin, with their edges upwards, and the grass, though tall, was sparse, the blades growing ...
— Peter Biddulph - The Story of an Australian Settler • W.H.G. Kingston
... scrub oaks, the low-branched sycamores as if she had not been familiar with them all her life. To-day the birds seemed to dart about more swiftly and to utter sweeter songs as they flew. The few sheep she spied nibbling the sparse grass on the rocky hillsides were surely whiter than those at home. The field flowers, with faces upturned to the bright sun, glowed with splendid color. The whole world ...
— Christmas Light • Ethel Calvert Phillips
... parts of the South where the industry has been longest established and a generation has been trained to the work, Southern labor is actually as well as nominally cheaper than Northern; whilst in other districts, where many mills have sprung up all at once amongst a sparse rural population, wholly untrained, the Southern labor at present procurable is really dearer than the Northern[1]." This does not mean that Southern labor is permanently inferior; but a highly skilled body of operatives requires years for ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... council was convoked to meet at Trent in March 1545, and Cardinals del Monte, Reginald Pole, and Marcello Cervini were appointed to represent the Pope. When the day fixed for the opening ceremony arrived, a further adjournment was rendered imperative owing to the very sparse attendance of bishops. The First Session was held on the 13th December 1545, and the second in January 1546. There were then present in addition to the legates and theologians only four archbishops, twenty-one bishops, and five generals of ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... hill, took fire; and every man vowed he wished he had gone to sea, before it was too late, or even to California, when the gold craze was on. Johnnie had the tongue of the improvisator, and he loved a listener. He liked to sit out on a log, in the sparse shadow of the one little grove the hill possessed, and, with the whispering leaves above him tattling uncomprehended sayings brought them by the wind, gather the old men about him, and talk them blind. As he sat there, Mary came walking swiftly by, a basket in ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... question as for a bludgeon. Davidge had some trouble in wielding it. He hated the thought so much that the words were unspeakable, and he hunted for some paraphrase. In the sparse thesaurus of his vocabulary he ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... inconsistency of great minds—he laboriously twirled heavenwards in the French fashion. It was, in fact, the guileless Alphonse's chief tribulation that, however industriously he cultivated that devil-may-care upward sweep, the sparse ornament to his upper lip invariably drooped downwards again before long. In the sunny land of France it is held that the mustache worn "en croc" not only confers upon its possessor an air of distinction, but renders that happy individual particularly irresistible ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... there was a Literary Society dinner in the University of Toronto at which Sir Wilfrid Laurier was the guest of honour and speaker on "Democracy." My own seat at a table was next to a restless, thick-bodied, sparse-haired man who seemed younger than his years and to whom I had not been introduced. During the hour that Laurier spoke this man continued to lean over the table so as to catch a view of his fascinating face. He interested me almost as much as did the speaker. I had never sat ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... forth at length, and as by accident, upon a lawn, sparse planted like an orchard, but with forest instead of fruit trees. That was the site of Silverado mining town. A piece of ground was levelled up, where Kelmar's store had been; and facing that we saw Rufe Hanson's house, still bearing on its ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... stopped and the lower valley began, came vegetation. Sparse at first, then springing to luxuriant growth, it contrasted strongly with the barren wall beside it and the equally barren waste of high ground where the ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... 1800. This is a distinct and pretty hardy species, a native of swampy low-lying districts. It grows about four feet high, and bears pure white, bell-shaped, Lily-of-the-Valley like flowers in great abundance during the summer. In too dry situations it becomes sparse of foliage and unhappy, but grows and flowers freely in light, peaty soil. Z. speciosa pulverulenta is a very desirable variety, the whole plant, stems, foliage, and flowers, being of a pleasing light gray or white colour. Individually ...
— Hardy Ornamental Flowering Trees and Shrubs • A. D. Webster
... she went to the fields. The heads of little stones stuck out of the ground like the heads of buried children. The field, washed with moonlight, sloped gradually downward to a murmuring brook. A few sheep went among the stones nibbling the sparse grass. ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... His step was feeble and slow; his black garments hung loosely about his shrunken limbs; his face was bloodless, like that of a corpse, his cheeks hollow, his large eyes so sunken that their light seemed to come from the depths of a cavern. His sparse hair, lightly blown about by the wind, was white as snow; his long, thin beard ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... me, or I ceased to notice it, and seeing a little way before me a bank above the road, and a fine grove of sparse and dominant chestnuts, I climbed up thither and turned, standing to ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... the pouched skin of his cheekbones, the eyes showed a tell-tale slackness in the under eyelid, where it merged into the loose wrinkles below. The lower part of the face was covered by a long but sparse moustache, through which at times could be discerned that terrible protrusion of the upper lip that seems the herald of senility. Yet Gustave, Grand Duke of Maasau, was only that day celebrating the completion ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... of those days in autumn when the dews linger in the shade till noon and the blackberry grows too watery for the connoisseur. On the ridge where we loafed, the short turf was dry enough, and the sun strong between the sparse saplings; but the paths that zigzagged down the thick coppice to right and left were soft to the foot, and streaked with the slimy tracks of snails. A fine blue mist filled the gulf on either hand, and beneath it mingled the voices of streams and of birds busy ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... destitute, and are annoyed at their inferiority in a place where rudimentary culture is so common. The greatest difficulty of such new communities is commonly geographical: the population is mostly scattered; and where population is sparse, discussion is difficult. But in a country very large as we reckon in Europe, a people really intelligent, really educated, really comfortable, would soon form a good opinion. No one can doubt that the New England States, if they were a separate community, would ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... the mangy Cats of Amochol trim my hatchet-sheath. When the young men ask me what this sparse and sickly fur may be, I shall strip it off and cast it at their feet, saying it is but Erie ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... the sparse little village I told him of the Dartons. I had had no news of them for the past four years, and inquiries among the neighbors left me only the more at sea. Lisbeth they seldom saw, they said; she never went to church or meetings; and, especially since ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Army band and the miserable music of winkles rattling on dinner-plates. The colours of the little girls' dresses slash the grey backgrounds of the pavement with rich streaks. Spears of sunshine, darting through the sparse plane-trees, play all about them, and ring them with radiance; and they look so fresh and happy that you want to ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... A region in an otherwise {flat} entity which is not actually present. For example, some Unix filesystems can store large files with holes so that unused regions of the file are never actually stored on disk. (In techspeak, these are referred to as 'sparse' files.) As another example, the region of memory in IBM PCs reserved for memory-mapped I/O devices which may not actually be present is called 'the I/O hole', since memory-management systems must skip over this area when filling user ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... swept the room, looking among the sparse furnishings for something they might be able to use as a weapon. He saw nothing, but the sight of the lump on the neck of a nearby slave gave him ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... on the camp bedstead prepared for him, his heydukes drew the large spurred boots from his feet, one of the peasant girls sat by his head stroking continually his sparse grey hairs, while the other sat at the end of the bed rubbing his feet with bits of flannel. Gyarfas, the poet, and Vidra, the jester, stood before him; a little further off the heydukes; the greyhound was under the bed. And thus, surrounded by gipsy, heydukes, jester, peasant-girls, ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... progress, and a merry party, including a number of ladies, were riding home from the mimic battlefield. We passed through a narrow lane, bordered on each side by groups of stunted willows and birch trees, under the sparse shadow of which nestled a few cottages painted in blue, pink, or yellow, in true Polish fashion. Suddenly our progress was arrested by terrifying screams proceeding from one of these hovels. Several ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... remain a mystery. Every such case is a law unto itself, and neither science nor poetry is ever able to analyze and explain its causes and effects. The conflicting stories then current, and the varying traditions that yet exist, either fail to agree or to fit the sparse facts which came to light. There remains no dispute, however, that the occurrence, whatever shape it took, threw Mr. Lincoln into a deeper despondency than any he had yet experienced, for on January 23, 1841, he wrote to his law partner, ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... dullness aloofly, then lifted over the nearby parapet and across the sparse terrestrial lawn which would grow only under the dome. The far cliffs of the Thaumasia Foelix Desert loomed darkly, distorted ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... of about thirty with sparse reddish hair, perspiration glistening on his upper lip, stood at the mouth of a narrow way like the one Brett had come through. He wore a grimy pale yellow shirt with a wide-flaring collar, limp and sweat-stained, dark green knee-breeches, soft leather boots, ...
— It Could Be Anything • John Keith Laumer
... was choked by her sobs. The whole valley was deserted and silent in the dazzling light, and the overwhelming heat, and only the grasshoppers uttered their shrill, continuous chirp among the sparse, yellow grass on both sides of ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... disappeared, and the thatched cabins became more and more sparse, when from one of the latter, at a hundred paces from the caravan, issued a human figure. The man struck an attitude in the pathway of the travelers, his carbine on his shoulder, his fist on his hip and his nose saucily turned ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... American linguistics is still in its infancy, and that a proper handling of the materials it even now offers involves a more critical acquaintance with its innumerable dialects than I possess; but though the gleaning be sparse, it is enough that I break the ground. Secondly, religious rites are living commentaries on religious beliefs. At first they are rude representations of the supposed doings of the gods. The Indian rain-maker mounts to the roof of his hut, and rattling vigorously a dry gourd ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... spring run, some one species predominates. I know invariably where to look for the first liverwort, and where the largest and finest may be found. On a dry, gravelly, half-wooded hill-slope the bird's-foot violet grows in great abundance, and is sparse in neighboring districts. This flower, which I never saw in the North, is the most beautiful and showy of all the violets, and calls forth rapturous applause from all persons who visit the woods. It grows in little ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... gradually grown much richer. The sparse and storm-buffeted pines and the rough scrub merged into a tangled mass of undergrowth and forest, where silver firs and deodars rose conspicuous. The little streams that rushed down the hillsides were fringed with maidenhair fern, lighted up here and there with ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... 4 utrinque ornato, 2 anterioribus minoribus; pedibus anterioribus elongatis, sparse spiosus; ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... company of Germans, employed in an optical shop; there also arrived a party of clerks from the fish and gastronomical store of Kereshkovsky, and two young people very well known in the Yamas—both bald, with sparse, soft, delicate hairs around the bald spots: Nicky the Book-keeper and Mishka the Singer—so were they both called in the houses. They also were met very cordially, just like Karl Karlovich of the optical shop and Volodka of the fish store—with raptures, cries ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... the length of his body and of his face. He has all the medals there are, but only wears two, a Vladimir Cross at the centre of his collar, like a brooch, and a Georgian on his chest. His head is long, and his cheeks seem to curve inwards from his temples. There is sparse grey hair on his whitish scalp, and lifting his full-sleeved arm he scratched his head with an open penknife ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... good service in north but sparse in south; domestic satellite system with 12 earth stations (20 additional domestic earth stations are planned) international: 5 submarine cables; microwave radio relay to Italy, France, Spain, Morocco, and Tunisia; coaxial cable to Morocco and Tunisia; participant ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... having considerably more than one hundred inches of rain annually are very apt to be forest-covered, and therefore to be deficient in food-producing plants. Such localities have usually a sparse population, in spite of the profusion of vegetation. In some parts of India, lands that have been left idle for a few seasons produce such a dense jungle of wild vegetation that to reclaim them for cultivation ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... the camels were turned out at once to graze off the unappetizing-looking thorns, sparse and dusty, that peppered the field of view like scabs on a yellow skin. There was no fear of their wandering too far, for if the camel ever was wild, as many maintain that he never was, that was so long ago that the whole species has ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... in the country till within the last fortnight, but have come up to town to prepare for our departure. London is almost empty, but the only topics that keep alive the sparse population of the club-houses are the dismissal of Baroness L—— from Court and her departure for Germany, and a terrible esclandre in a very high circle, including royal personages.... I treat you to the London scandal, and my doing so is ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... nothing is in reality derived from these few sparse villages; and from the tent Arabs less than nothing, for the Turks have to bribe these to abstain from plundering the regular soldiers ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... fosilo. Spade (at cards) piko. Spain Hispanujo. Spangle briletajxo. Spanish-fly kantarido. Spare (extra) ekstra. Spare indulgi. Sparing, to be sxpari. Sparing (saving) sxparema. Spark fajrero. Sparkle brili. Sparrow pasero. Sparrow-hawk akcipitro. Sparse maldensa. Spasm spasmo. Spatter sxprucigi (sur). Spawn fisxsemo. Speak paroli. Speak through the nose nazparoli. Speaker parolanto. Spear lanco. Special speciala. Specialise specialigi. Specialist specialisto. Speciality specialo—eco. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... Ocean or the Gulf of St. Lawrence) they had built "Forts:" "Stockades," or I know not what, "on the Missaquish" (HODIE Missiquash), a winding difficult river, northmost of the Bay of Fundy's rivers, which the French affirm to be the real limit in that quarter. The sparse French Colonists of the interior, subjects of England, are not to be conciliated by perfect toleration of religion and the like; but have an invincible proclivity to join their Countrymen outside, and wish well to those Stockades on the Missiquash. It must be owned, too, the French ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... limply; a pair of shoes stood beside the bed in the attitude of walking—tired-looking shoes, run down at the heels and skinned at the toes. And on the far side of the three-quarter bed the hump of an outstretched figure, face turned from the light, with sparse gray-and-black hair flowing ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... people idolise him. His almost blameless life has been passed among them, nothing in it hidden from their knowledge. When they look upon his dear presentment in the photographer's window—the shrewd, kindly eyes under the high forehead, the sparse locks so carefully distributed—words of loyalty only and of admiration rise to their lips. For of all princes in modern days he seems to fulfil most perfectly the obligation of princely rank. Nepios he might ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... Pee-wee stood was a sizable village, or young town, big enough to have traffic signs and parking zones and a main street and a movie show and such like pretentious things. Between this town and the shore were a few outlying houses, but mostly sparse woodland. To the north the ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... silent blessing, his eyes uplifted gratefully to Heaven. Too late Hannah felt the misconception and was remorseful. For the festival occasion Reb Shemuel elected to worship at the Great Synagogue; Hannah, seated among the sparse occupants of the Ladies' Gallery and mechanically fingering a Machzor, looked down for the last time on the crowded auditorium where the men sat in high hats and holiday garments. Tall wax-candles twinkled everywhere, in great gilt chandeliers ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... of their poets, "o chaque feuille qui tombe est une lgie toute faite." Through an avenue of scraggy poplars we approach a dilapidated chteau, whose owner is playing dominoes at the caf of the nearest provincial town, or exhausting the sparse revenues of the estate at the theatres, roulette-tables, or balls of Paris. People leave these for a rural vicinage only to economize, to hide chagrin, or to die. So recognized is this indifference to Nature and inaptitude for rural life in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the crag was wet with spray in places; but Cleer didn't mind spray; she was accustomed to the sea in all its moods and tempers. She clambered up the steep side—a sheer wall of bare rock, lightly clad here and there with sparse drapery of green sapphire, or clumps of purple sea-aster, rooted firm in the crannies. Its front was yellow with great patches of lichen, and on the peaks, overhead, the gulls perched, chattering, or launched themselves in long curves upon the evening air. Cleer paused half way ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... migration to the plains they left their villages unguarded, and found their property safe on their return. I suppose this resulted partly from an unwritten—may I say?—honourable understanding, that as in their sparse and widely-scattered population it was well-nigh impossible to guard their goods, the rights of property should be respected; and partly from the circumstance that there was little left behind in the villages which could be carried away. So far as others, especially Europeans, are concerned, ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... or seen, and were full size in forty-eight days, but travelled a day or two before beginning the pupa stage of their existence. The caterpillars were big fellows; the segments deeply cut; the bodies yellow-green, with a few sparse scattering hairs, and on the edge of each segment, from a triple row of dots arose a tiny, sharp spine. Each side had series of black touches and the head could be drawn inside the thorax. They were the largest in circumference of any I had raised, but only a little ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... lay in the bowels of a hollow. The hollow was crowded with spruce, a low, sparse-growing scrub, and mosquitoes. Its approach was a defile which suggested a rift in the hills at the back. Its exit was of a similar nature, except that it followed the rocky bed of a trickling mountain stream. A mile or so further on this gave on to the more ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... employs in telling these stories may seem at first glance to be simple: short sentences, a sparse vocabulary, uncomplicated syntax. In actuality, Anderson developed an artful style in which, following Mark Twain and preceding Ernest Hemingway, he tried to use American speech as the base of a tensed rhythmic prose that has an economy and a shapeliness ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... to the little sandy knoll with its sparse covering of grass, deserted—with scarcely a sign, even, that it had been the resting place of the caravan. The Professor gave vent ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Upon the top of Pap's head the sparse grey hairs bristled ominously. His teeth clicked; his eyes snapped. He was furiously angry—as I ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... of poplars. On the slope of the hill nearer to us there were two or three field batteries in action. To the right of us a brigade of artillery was limbered up ready to go anywhere. In the left, at the bottom of the dip the 108th was in action, partially covered by some sparse bushes. A few ambulance waggons and some miscellaneous first-line transport were drawn up along the side of the road at the bottom of the dip. To the N.W. we could see for about four miles over low, rolling fields. We could see nothing to the right, as our view was blocked by a cottage ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... wretched cayuse, with eyes blank alike of inward thought or outward observation. He was not yet forty years old, but bore the cast of premature decay, more aged than age. What showed of his hair beneath his hat was sparse and faded; and of his visible teeth he had no more than a perishing stump or two left in his jaws. His discontented, satiated, exhausted mien, had a strange look there in the fresh and ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... appear that he saw them; for he did not need that heightened condition of spiritual perception which appears to be meant by the opening of the eyes. And what a sight the trembling young man saw! Where he had seen only barren rock or sparse vegetation, he saw that same fiery host that had attended Elijah in his translation, now enclosing the unarmed prophet and himself within a flaming ring. The manifestation, not the presence, of the angel guards was the miracle. It was a momentary ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... overflowing with the host's ever-increasing antiquarian treasures. If a quartette were assembled,—and many times the musical party was enlarged to a quintette or a septette,—an adjournment was necessary to a room less crowded, but equally sparse of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... promising locality and proposed entering into partnership. "Murray and Robinson" was forthwith painted by the latter, (who was a bit of an artist), over the door of a small log-house, and the store soon became well known and much frequented by the sparse population as well as by those ...
— Fort Desolation - Red Indians and Fur Traders of Rupert's Land • R.M. Ballantyne
... after journeying a half-mile or so, the character of the country underwent a great change. The ground became more level, and they found themselves traveling among stunted trees and sparse vegetation. The moon did not rise until quite late, so that until then they could barely see each other's bodies as they moved along. This made them uncertain as to whether they were following the right course; but they were greatly pleased to find that they ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... is greater than in China, averaging eight hundred. This fact alone placed a much greater power in the masters' hands after emancipation, as the competition of labor must be so much more severe than with a more sparse population. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... less stale in the face than the member from Silver City, for instance, whose day-old black growth blurred his dingy chin, or the member from Big Camas, whose scantier red crop bristled on his cheeks in sparse wandering arrangements, like spikes on the barrel of a musical box. For comfort, most of the pistols were on the table with the Statutes of the United States. Secretary and Treasurer Hewley's lay on his strong-box immediately behind him. ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... "Here shall I live! On this spot shall stand the probationary palace!" and so saying fired my rifle at a tree a few yard's off. But the stolid tree—a bloodwood, all bone, toughened by death, a few ruby crystals in sparse antra all that remained significant of past life—afforded but meagre hospitality to the, ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... not whether you tell me or no," he answered, looking up into her face from the low seat at her feet. "Birth cannot add to your beauty, nor sparse quarterings detract from your charm. I have enough of both, good lack! And little good they are like to ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... faint stirring of pleasure in the thought that she was doing something against his wish on this anniversary. Deliberately, she sat alone by the river, waiting for the pageant of sunset to pass; and when she reached home the moon was up, a great white moon that turned the waving waste of pale, sparse grasses to a ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... considerately left me to carry on my promenade alone. I crossed the ground she had traversed, noting every feature surrounding it, the curving wheel-track, the thin prickly sand-herbage, the wave-mounds, the sparse wet shells and pebbles, the gleaming flatness of the water, and the vast horizon-boundary of pale flat land level with shore, looking like a dead sister of the sea. By a careful examination of my watch and the sun's altitude, I was able to calculate what would, in all ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... at last, but still he drove steadily on through the sparse settlements. Just at nightfall we came to a beautiful little stream, and stopped to let the horses drink. I heard its rippling, reassuring song on the pebbles. Thereafter all is dim and vague to me until my mother called out ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... Natchitoches. Parishes in this region are civil divisions, derived from the former regime. They are often larger than our counties at the North. This country, from the character of its soil, cannot have a dense population, until the swamps are drained. The population, except the sparse inhabitants of the pine woods, is fixed along the margin of the water courses, and the greater part of the planters can convey their produce immediately on board the steam-boats.—Recollections of the Last Ten Years. Passed in Occasional Residences and Journeyings ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... resides, or Jenkins lives. It would be cruel—indeed it would. True, Mrs. Moggs expects little else from one of your dashing style and elegant appearance. Such a call rarely comes to her but with some profitless query; yet look around at the sparse candies, the withering apples, and the forlorn groceries—specimens of which are affixed to the window-panes in triangular patches of paste and paper—speak they not of poverty? Purchase, then, if ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... the English as well as the Indian infantry regiments halted before the jungle instead of pushing forward to the river. Not even riflemen were sent into it, although the bush was by no means too thick for a chain of riflemen to take cover. The prickly bushes on the river's bank were sparse enough, and the high grass reaching up to the mens' shoulders would have ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... dusty gray olive-trees, the shabby scrub oaks, the low-branched sycamores as if she had not been familiar with them all her life. To-day the birds seemed to dart about more swiftly and to utter sweeter songs as they flew. The few sheep she spied nibbling the sparse grass on the rocky hillsides were surely whiter than those at home. The field flowers, with faces upturned to the bright sun, glowed with splendid color. The whole world ...
— Christmas Light • Ethel Calvert Phillips
... appropriations should be made for this important object. Whatever may have been our policy in the earlier stages of the Government, when the nation was in its infancy, our shipping interests and commerce comparatively small, our resources limited, our population sparse and scarcely extending beyond the limits of the original thirteen States, that policy must be essentially different now that we have grown from three to more than twenty millions of people, that our commerce, carried in our own ships, is found ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... two hours we wander through a thin forest, From time to time the trail approaches the brink of the rocky chasm of the Canon del Alamo, near enough to have its echo return to us every word we may shout down into its depths. Suddenly the timber grows sparse and we behold an open space on a gentle rise before us. It is a bare, bleak spot, perhaps a quarter of a mile long, and occupying the entire width of the mesa, which here is not much broader. Beyond, the timber begins again, and in the centre of the opening we see the fairly preserved ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... nevertheless, to go round the people and tell them that what the Doctor had said was to be understood spiritually, and chiefly as a warning to other denominations, else there had been a thin kirk and but one sparse table instead of the usual four or five, on the day of high communion in ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... a sparse meal, it was decided to light a fire, more for the sake of the cheering sight than the need ...
— The Fiery Totem - A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian North-West • Argyll Saxby
... in a very arid region; mostly coarse black sand and pebbles, with typical desert shrubs and occasional bunches of tough grass. The slopes of Mt. Solimana on our left were fairly well covered with sparse vegetation. Among the bushes we saw a number of vicunas, the smallest wild camels of the New World. We tried in vain to get near enough for a photograph. They were extremely timid and scampered away before we were within three ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... wished he had gone to sea, before it was too late, or even to California, when the gold craze was on. Johnnie had the tongue of the improvisator, and he loved a listener. He liked to sit out on a log, in the sparse shadow of the one little grove the hill possessed, and, with the whispering leaves above him tattling uncomprehended sayings brought them by the wind, gather the old men about him, and talk them blind. As he sat there, Mary came walking ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... low greasewood and sparse yellow sage led to the first almost imperceptible rise of the valley floor on that side. The distant cedars beckoned to Slone. He was not patient, because he was on the trail of Wildfire; but, nevertheless, the hours ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... was pre-eminently the home of wandering, nomadic tribes. This wild, treeless region is divided by rocky ranges running from east to west. Parallel to these are deep, hot and for the most part waterless valleys. In the springtime these valleys are covered by a sparse vegetation; from a few perennial springs flow waters that irrigate the immediately surrounding land; but they soon lose themselves in the thirsty desert. During the summer the vegetation disappears almost entirely, and the struggle ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... perfectly stupid than to have only one eye open and wear for ever in the great face of the world the expression of a knowing wink? At the theatre, on the numerous July evenings when the Comedie Francaise exhibited the repertory by the aid of exponents determined the more sparse and provincial audience should have a taste of the tradition, her appreciation was tremendously technical and showed it was not for nothing she was now in and out of Madame Carre's innermost counsels. But there were moments when even her ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... brown, wrinkled old man, with sparse pepper-and-salt whiskers and a parrot-like nose. "Sharper" was written all over his hatchet features; but probably his provincialism and lack of book education had kept him from ...
— Ruth Fielding on Cliff Island - The Old Hunter's Treasure Box • Alice Emerson
... altitude 72 degrees 33 seconds; latitude 20 degrees 41 minutes. Started after party at 12.20. At 1.27 came east half north for two and a half miles over rich undulating land to a watercourse. These downs are so sparse of trees that a small belt of brushwood on the top of an eminence was a remarkable feature. It is situated about a mile this side of the spot from which I made my observation; at 3.20, when we had come up the creek on an average ...
— Journal of Landsborough's Expedition from Carpentaria - In search of Burke and Wills • William Landsborough
... length, and as by accident, upon a lawn, sparse planted like an orchard, but with forest instead of fruit trees. That was the site of Silverado mining town. A piece of ground was levelled up, where Kelmar's store had been; and facing that we saw Rufe Hanson's house, still bearing on its front the legend Silverado Hotel. Not another sign ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... individual of between fifty and sixty years of age, was gaunt with recent sickness, patient and unimaginative in aspect. He preached extemporarily, with the aid of notes; and it cannot be said that his discourse was remarkable for interest, at any rate in its beginning. Doubtless the sparse congregation, so prone to slumber, discouraged him; for offering exhortations to empty benches is but weary work. Indeed he was meditating the advisability of bringing his argument to an abrupt conclusion when, chancing to glance round, ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... the hill nearer to us there were two or three field batteries in action. To the right of us a brigade of artillery was limbered up ready to go anywhere. In the left, at the bottom of the dip the 108th was in action, partially covered by some sparse bushes. A few ambulance waggons and some miscellaneous first-line transport were drawn up along the side of the road at the bottom of the dip. To the N.W. we could see for about four miles over low, rolling fields. ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... hedges. It was here that Geof had listened to the whistle of the blackbird only the other day, as his boat lay moored to the bank, while he sketched the tiniest of little chapels, nestling modestly in the sparse shade of two dark cypresses. His mind recurred to that peaceful hour, as he chatted in desultory fashion with May, but those quiet musings seemed very far away and unreal in the clear, matter-of-fact atmosphere that that charming ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... forehead, large hazel eyes within a singularly large orbit of brow; a straight, thin, slightly aquiline, well-cut nose—such features were at open variance with the broad, thick-lipped, sensual mouth, the heavy pendant jowl, the sparse beard on the glistening cheek, and the moleskin-like moustachio and chin tuft. Still, upon the whole, it was a face and figure which gave the world assurance of a man and a commander of men. Power and intelligence were stamped ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... road ran a fringe of trees, sparse in some places and thicker in others. It was Chester's plan to wheel the gun in among the trees at the proper moment and open on the foe when ...
— The Boy Allies At Verdun • Clair W. Hayes
... in reply, received a civil invitation to "step inside and wait." My suspense did not last long, for M. Pierre made his appearance very promptly. He was a tall, thin individual with a fried-looking complexion, keen sunken eyes, and sparse hair streaked with grey. He entered the room with a courteous bow and inquiring look. Rising from the chair in which I had rested myself by the fire, I advanced towards him and addressed him by name in ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... Gray, lean, hard-bitten faces, their eyebrows so light and sparse that it seemed their eyes were hard stones which never seemed to shift their straight-ahead gaze. Yet each man in the tonneau and the orderly beside the driver on the front seat saluted the Red Cross girl as she ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... to the whole kingdom, the band of emigrants that crossed from Antrim about A.D. 506 under the leadership of Fergus and the other sons of Erc; or, as the name of "Scoti" recurs more than once in the old sparse notices of the tribes of the kingdom before this date, had not an antecedent colony, under Cairbre Riada, as stated by Bede, already passed over and settled in Cantyre a ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... the Legislative, about sunset or after; give the most pathetic detail of the frightful pass they were in:—Prussians billowing round by the myriad, volcanically spouting fire for fifteen hours: we, scattered sparse on the ramparts, hardly a cannoneer to two guns; our dastard Commandant Lavergne no where shewing face; the priming would not catch; there was no powder in the bombs,—what could we do? "Mourir! Die!" answer prompt ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... from Reykjavik, had followed the line of the sea. We took our way through poor and sparse meadows, which made a desperate effort every year to show a little green. They very rarely succeed in ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... Harmonious Blacksmith.' My dear one had a great favour for this honest Darwin always; many a road to shops, and the like, he drove her in his cab, in those early days when even the charge of omnibuses was a consideration, and his sparse utterances, sardonic often, were a great amusement to her. 'A perfect gentleman,' she at once discerned him to be, and of sound worth and kindliness, in the most unaffected form." He died in 1881, aged 77, leaving no memorial to the public of his undoubtedly great abilities. Like his younger ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... the people idolise him. His almost blameless life has been passed among them, nothing in it hidden from their knowledge. When they look upon his dear presentment in the photographer's window—the shrewd, kindly eyes under the high forehead, the sparse locks so carefully distributed—words of loyalty only and of admiration rise to their lips. For of all princes in modern days he seems to fulfil most perfectly the obligation of princely rank. Nepios he might have been called in the ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... long it lasted! A whole eternity before they could deal with those two men! From the roots of Sarvoelgyi's sparse hair hot beads of sweat ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... drops fell from the invisible sky as Ivanov walked across the meadows; at first they were sparse, pattering noisily on his leather jacket; then they began to fall more heavily and he was soon enveloped in the sonorous downpour of a vernal shower. Close to the manor Gek darted aside and disappeared down the ravine, from whence arose the rustling of wings, and the perturbed cries of cranes. ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... nations being within hail of one another. The great autumnal military manoeuvres were in progress, and a merry party, including a number of ladies, were riding home from the mimic battlefield. We passed through a narrow lane, bordered on each side by groups of stunted willows and birch trees, under the sparse shadow of which nestled a few cottages painted in blue, pink, or yellow, in true Polish fashion. Suddenly our progress was arrested by terrifying screams proceeding from one of these hovels. Several of us were ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... cock-pit. The inveterate gambling propensities of the people find vent also at dominoes, cards, checkers, and chess in the bar-rooms, every marble table being in requisition for the purpose of the games on Sundays. Having noticed the sparse attendance at the cathedral, we remarked to Jane that the church was quite empty, whereupon she replied with a significant leer, "True, Senor, but the jail is full." More than once an underlying vein of sarcasm was ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... smooth peduncle, usually open and stiff; branches are usually many, sub-solitary or fascicled, spreading or suberect, capillary, stiff, again branching from near the base and about 3 inches long; rachis is angular, with glands and tufts of sparse white hairs at the angles ...
— A Handbook of Some South Indian Grasses • Rai Bahadur K. Ranga Achariyar
... camels were turned out at once to graze off the unappetizing-looking thorns, sparse and dusty, that peppered the field of view like scabs on a yellow skin. There was no fear of their wandering too far, for if the camel ever was wild, as many maintain that he never was, that was so long ago that the whole species has forgotten it, ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... cartridge-cases intensifies the length of his body and of his face. He has all the medals there are, but only wears two, a Vladimir Cross at the centre of his collar, like a brooch, and a Georgian on his chest. His head is long, and his cheeks seem to curve inwards from his temples. There is sparse grey hair on his whitish scalp, and lifting his full-sleeved arm he scratched his head with an open ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... haughtily. When it had passed the eastern ridge it began, after its habit, to lord it over Angel's, sending the thermometer up twenty degrees in as many minutes, driving the mules to the sparse shade of corrals and fences, making the red dust incandescent, and renewing its old imperious aggression on the spiked bosses of the convex shield of pines that defended Table Mountain. Thither by nine o'clock all coolness had retreated, and the "outsides" of the up stage ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... was growing sparse about them. He began to hear his feet. So did the men beyond the bank. There was the click of a cocking musket. The fellow was ready: the fellow would pot them at twenty yards as ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... great store house of labor in Africa should be opened for the benefit of the human race. In the Western World, a vast continent of fertile land and propitious climate, was possessed, not improved, by a sparse hunter race; but the law of God and of nations required that the earth should be subdued and replenished, and now God has enlarged Japheth, and he dwells in these tents of Shem. China, Japan, and other regions of Asia, are inhabited by teeming millions, rich in the productions of ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... the ear, so to deliver them to whom it is requisite; but not enjoining us to communicate to all without distinction what is said to them in parables. But there is only a delineation in the memoranda, which have the truth sown sparse and broadcast, that it may escape the notice of those who pick up seeds like jackdaws; but when they find a good husbandman, each of them will germinate and will ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... for driving cattle than for accommodating the scant local traffic. There had been a time when all that space was needed to give swing-room to twenty-mule teams, but that time was past and the two sparse rows of houses seemed dwarfed and pitifully few. Yet there were new ones going up, and quite a sprinkling of tents; and down on the corner Wunpost saw a big building which he knew must ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... arm and his fist came down like a hammer on his own skull, and his crooked fingers clutched pitilessly at the sparse growth of hair on the back of his head, until he held up a whole handful torn out by the roots, and ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... rocks. The yellow grass sloped away from his feet mile after mile to the timber, and beyond that to the prismatic mountains. The variegated lodges of the Chis-chis-chash village dotted the plain near the sparse woods of the creek-bottom; pony herds stood quietly waving their tails against the flies or were driven hither and yon by the herdboys—giving variety to the tremendous sweep of ...
— The Way of an Indian • Frederic Remington
... found in hundreds of other portions of the vast area known under the general name of the Louisiana Territory. You must bear in mind that there were thousands of square miles that had not been trodden by a white man, and so sparse were the Indian villages that large portions of the country remained to be ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... Spain. The prelates of the Church never lifted up their voice against the legality of this feudo-kingly rule. Then came a revolt, after the Reformation, against the government of kings. New England and other colonies became small republics, almost democracies. On the hills of New England, with a sparse rural population and small cities, the most primitive form of government was the best. It was virtually the government of townships. The selectmen were the overseers; and, following the necessities of the times, the ministers of the gospel ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... pitch dark in that part of the camp. The electric lights had a sparse reddish glow. Fuselli kept straining his eyes, expecting to see a wharf and the masts of a ship at the end of every alley. The line filed into a dim mess hall, where a thin stew was splashed into the mess kits. Behind the counter ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... one friend in the Chamber,—a deputy newly elected for Deux-Sevres, named M. Sarigue, a poor fellow not unlike the inoffensive, ignoble animal whose name he bore,[2] with his sparse, red hair, his frightened eyes, his hopping gait in his white gaiters. He was so shy that he could not say two words without stammering, almost tongue-tied, incessantly rolling balls of chewing-gum around in his mouth, which put the finishing touch to the viscosity of his speech; ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... structure. Rounded forms and breasts. Broad pelvis. Long and abundant hair. Low and narrow boundary of pubic hair. Sparse hair in armpit. No hair on body. Delicate skin. Rounded skull. Small face. Large orbits. High and slender eyebrows. Low and small lower jaw. Soft transition from cheek to neck. Rounded neck. Slender wrist. Small hand, with long index finger. Rounded shoulders. Straight, small clavicle. Small ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... manner in the mass of granite rocks itself, without our being able to admit that there is a ramification and an interlacing of small veins.' It is plain that Raleigh got hold of unusually rich specimens of the sparse auriferous quartz. He was accused on his return of having brought his specimens from Africa, but no one suggested that they did not contain gold. No doubt much of the sparkling dust he saw in the rocks was simply iron pyrites, or some other of the minerals which to this day are ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... lies my second charge; a third remains, Which, as a shaft from seasoned bow, not green, Shall pierce the marl. With convents still you sow The land: in other countries sparse and small They swell to cities here. A hundred monks On one late barren mountain dig and pray: A hundred nuns gladden one woodland lawn, Or sing in one small island. Well—'tis well! Yet, balance lost and measure, nought is well. The Angelic Life more common will become Than life of mortal men." ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... in the United States is for two purposes: to provide good government while population is sparse, and to encourage their development into self-governing commonwealths, and their incorporation into the federal system as rapidly as possible. (See ...
— Studies in Civics • James T. McCleary
... it appear that he saw them; for he did not need that heightened condition of spiritual perception which appears to be meant by the opening of the eyes. And what a sight the trembling young man saw! Where he had seen only barren rock or sparse vegetation, he saw that same fiery host that had attended Elijah in his translation, now enclosing the unarmed prophet and himself within a flaming ring. The manifestation, not the presence, of the angel ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... she had sunk back into a prosperous and comfortable mediocrity. She had made her flight—like the queen bee she had soared once into the farthest, bluest reaches of her heaven, and henceforth she was quite content to relapse into the utter commonplaces of the hive. Her yellow hair grew sparse and flat and streaked with gray, her pink-rose face became over plump and mottled across the nose, and her mind turned soon as flat and unelastic as her body; but she was perfectly satisfied with the portion she had had from life, for, having weighed all things, she had come to regard the ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... slippers. He had evidently been in neglige and, to meet the visitor, slipped into the frock-coat, or possibly he was careless, taken up with abstractions, dreams, business affairs, plans. He was rather stout, with an oval, egg-shaped face; his beard, sparse and pointed and tinged with gray, had originally been light of hue; he had pale blue eyes, and ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... the mountain tops ray-crowned Apollo Turns his swift arrows, dart on glittering dart, Let but a rock glint green, the wild goats follow Glad-grazing shyly on each sparse-grown part. ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... all things an end. The weary time of waiting and preparation was almost over. Sparse news filtered through that the northward advance towards Palestine had already begun; that there had been heavy fighting at Katia, where the Turks, under cover of a desert mist, surprised and cut up—but failed to defeat—our cavalry; and that we had at Romani inflicted ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... resident population is so sparse that there is not one person for every 20,000 acres; and most of these people live on the coast. Consequently, the vast interior could not be used for food supplies in any case. Besides, ever since the white man occupied the coast, the immediate hinterland, ...
— Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... positions and lucrative callings to carve out fresh careers, and even to become humble farmers wherever they found asylums and tolerance, men who became very valuable accessions to the nations who received them and a correspondingly significant loss to France. To those two main elements were added sparse accessions from other nations at later intervals, and also a strain of aboriginal blood, of which a more or less faint tinge is still discernible in some families, an admixture which many deplore and others consider as most serviceable, supplying a subtle ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... monotony along the snow-covered trail, through the sparse forest that fringed the ice-bound waters of the Riviere d'Or. Seen through our tinted snow-glasses, the landscape was a vast field of palest blue, dotted with scattered clusters of spruce ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... in its silence, for only the dimmest of path lights seemed alive over the big place, and not a breath of wind stirred the tenacious oak leaves or other rugged foliage, too sparse to be counted, now that winter had given warning and was on ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... or covered with heaps of ashes, a few hours after the eruption commenced the awful work was done, and that vast multitude had vanished from off the face of the earth. The fact that in the neighborhood of the mountain there was a sparse population accounts for there not being even a far greater ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... mingled grey, red, and flaxen hair of a perpetually moist appearance; oblique and ever-changing eyes which are permanently contracted; a pair of thick, parti-coloured eyebrows which cast deep shadows over the eyes; and temples whereon a number of blue veins struggle with an irregular, sparse coating of bristles. Finally, about his whole personality there is something ever variable ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... Europe. "The whole of the known world was covered with their settlements, in constant communication with one another through itinerant merchants, who effected an exchange of learning as well as of wares; while the other nations grew more and more isolated, and shut themselves off from even the sparse opportunities of mental ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... been successful, the war on land had been for us full of humiliation. The United States then formed but a loosely knit confederacy, the sparse population scattered over a great expanse of land. Ever since the Federalist party had gone out of power in 1800, the nation's ability to maintain order at home and enforce respect abroad had steadily dwindled; and the twelve years' nerveless reign of ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... stooping at one moment, where the bushes grew sparse; crawling in among some sheltering rocks at another, and even getting down to wriggle along like so many snakes, when not even so much as a bush offered a means of hiding from observation, in case hostile eyes happened to be turned ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Afloat • George A. Warren
... flume for a mill. In three months over 4,000 persons were there, digging for gold with great success. By July, 1849, it is thought, 15,000 had arrived. Nearly all were forced to live in booths, tents, log huts, and under the open sky. The sparse population previously on the ground left off farming and grazing and opened mines. People became insane for gold. Immigrants soon came in immense hordes. In 1846, aside from roving Indians, California had numbered ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... Cecilia that it resembled Hilary. Its look was kindly and uncertain; its colour a palish tan; the eyebrows of its windows rather straight than arched, and those deep-set eyes, the windows, twinkled hospitably; it had, as it were, a sparse moustache and beard of creepers, and dark marks here and there, like the lines and shadows on the faces of those who think too much. Beside it, and apart, though connected by a passage, a studio stood, and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... District Libraries. These, in the single state of New York, already contain nearly two millions of volumes. In some of the new states the system of Township Libraries has been adopted, which, on some accounts, is better adapted to a sparse population with limited means. These, in the State of Michigan, already contain one hundred thousand volumes. The director of each school district draws from the township library every three months the number of books ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... the soft track, the shadows fell long on the dusty little plain interspersed with dark bushes, mounds of turned-up earth, low wooden buildings with iron roofs of the Railway Company; the sparse row of telegraph poles strode obliquely clear of the town, bearing a single, almost invisible wire far into the great campo—like a slender, vibrating feeler of that progress waiting outside for a moment of ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... to go to Honolulu, I should have headed the Snark due west, instead of which I kept her south. Not until latitude 19 degrees did we encounter the first flying fish. He was very much alone. I saw him. Five other pairs of eager eyes scanned the sea all day, but never saw another. So sparse were the flying fish that nearly a week more elapsed before the last one on board saw his first flying fish. As for the dolphin, bonita, porpoise, and all the other ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... The halt had taken place almost exactly at the beginning of that long stretch of park wall which ran beside the road and the tramway. From where he sat he could see the other wing which led inward from the road at something like a right angle, but was presently lost to sight because of a sparse and unkempt patch of young trees and shrubs, well-nigh choked with undergrowth, which extended for some distance from the park wall backward along the road-side toward Vanves. Whoever owned that stretch of land had seemingly not thought it worth while to cultivate it or ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... since their power over the minor chiefs is extended, rather than decreased by the changed circumstances, they are well content, for they rule now over their districts, not only as Irish chieftains, but as English lieutenants. You have seen, as you journeyed here, how sparse is the population of our hills, and how slight would be the opposition which we could offer, did the Earl of Ulster sweep down upon us with trained ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... in the chief saloon, which was contiguous to the ball-room, and which was nearly as full of guests. Endymion, moving in the opposite direction, entered another drawing-room, where the population was sparse. It consisted of couples apparently deeply interested in each other. Some faces were radiant, and some pensive and a little agitated, but they all agreed in one expression, that they took no interest whatever in the solitary Endymion. Even their ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... against the commandant to the effect that the inhabitants are prevented working through deficiency of protection. Or if again, in spite of peace being secured to the works of the land by the military governor, the civil authority still presents a territory sparse in population and untilled, it is the commandant's turn to accuse the civil ruler. For you may take it as a rule, a population tilling their territory badly will fail to support their garrisons and be quite unequal to paying their tribute. Where a satrap ...
— The Economist • Xenophon
... understands his horse. He pushed the nose of his machine earthward and planed down through an interminable bank of clouds until he found a gray countryside running up to meet him. There were no houses, no lights, nothing but a wide expanse of country dotted with sparse copses. ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... thousand head of cattle on the Circle L range—the men had held them in the valley for a time during his absence on the trail, but the grass had grown sparse, and the herd was now grazing on the big plain beyond the northern ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... wonder after this, that scant and sparse were the jests played on the grim master of the Wolfsberg, or that the bay of a blood-hound tracking on the downs frightened the most stout-hearted rider in ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... left the sand and sagebrush, cacti and sparse bunch-grass was bounded by the horizon; behind him, in front of him, it was the same; only on the right was the monotony broken by foothills and beyond, a range of purple snow-covered peaks. From the slight elevation or "bench" upon which he sat he looked down upon a greasewood flat where ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... spell of silence, whilst on either hand the Campagna spread out as far as the eye could reach. All houses had long since disappeared; there was not a wall, not a tree, nothing but the undulating expanse whose sparse, short herbage was, with the approach of winter, beginning to turn green once more. A tower, a half-fallen ruin which came into sight on the left, rising in solitude into the limpid sky above the flat, boundless line of the horizon, suddenly assumed extraordinary importance. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... isolated part of barren country, where the grass was sparse and coarse, the soil poor and stony, and the timber stunted and scraggy; where, in fact, everything for which the white man had neither use nor need was to be found, and where nothing existed that he or his stock could utilize—a black-fellow's camp ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... arable land 1%; permanent crops 0%; meadows and pastures 8%; forest and woodland 0%; other 91%; includes irrigated NEGL% Environment: hot, dry, dust-laden ghibli is a southern wind lasting one to four days in spring and fall; desertification; sparse natural surface-water resources Note: the Great Manmade River Project, the largest water development scheme in the world, is being built to bring water from large aquifers under ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... helpful movement, since individuals unsuited to rural life may find themselves adapted to some type of urban life. When unneeded and unhelpful individuals are removed from the country, the rural population may be more efficient and more prosperous, even though relatively more sparse. ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... its perfect proportions. It was that of an elderly man clad simply in a gray business suit. The face was kind, its clear-chiselled features indicating fine spiritual strength; on the white forehead beneath the sparse gray hair were deep-sunken lines which spoke of years ...
— A Scientist Rises • Desmond Winter Hall
... be internal colonization. There are considerable tracts of land in what once was Russian Poland, the population of which, owing to the havoc of war, is abnormally sparse. Some districts, like that of the Pripet marshes, which even at the best of times had but five persons to the kilometer, are practically deserts. For the Russian army, when retreating before the Germans, drove before it a huge population computed at eight millions, who inhabited the territory ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... coast. The stones were covered with sparse lichen. The tide was already ebbing, leaving uncovered the sandy bottom of a sort of beach strewn with black blocks, resembling ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... went, and all the charm of my first visit repeated itself; but repeated itself with this difference—that it was no longer undisturbed. The possibility of a revolution in the Highlands had now become a matter of audible discussion even in the remote Macdonald country. The temper of the sparse population was there, indeed, not very violent, but the thought that some sort of disaffection was even there actually alive would often disturb my previous sense of peace, while the Glasgow and Edinburgh ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... state prison for house-breaking, dropped casually into the bank and asked the cashier to "back a letter" for him, since writing was not one of his own strong points. The cashier was obliging, and in as much as gossip was usually sparse in that community went on the while chatting with the president of the institution, who ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... bearded Councillors had the best of it, seeming after their vigil less stale in the face than the member from Silver City, for instance, whose day-old black growth blurred his dingy chin, or the member from Big Camas, whose scantier red crop bristled on his cheeks in sparse wandering arrangements, like spikes on the barrel of a musical box. For comfort, most of the pistols were on the table with the Statutes of the United States. Secretary and Treasurer Hewley's lay on his strong-box immediately behind him. The Governor's was a light one, ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... were obliged to feed on dogs and rats, an occasional small fish caught in the river, and similar sparse supplies. They died by hundreds. Disease aided starvation in carrying them off. The living were too few and too weak to bury the dead. Bodies were left unburied, and a deadly and revolting stench filled ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... consumed in England escape the duty. Several thousand seizures are made annually, and it has been testified before Parliament that not one evasion in sixteen is detected. If this be so in Great Britain, it is not surprising that the government has failed, in this country, with its sparse population, to collect a duty of 1000 per cent, or that the experiment has cost the nation more than fifty millions. Such excessive duties may well be styled over-taxation, and tend to demoralize and corrupt our revenue officers, to encourage ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... the doors opened, and there was Lupin. But again how changed! The clothes of the Duke of Charmerace littered the floor; the kit-bag was open; and he was wearing the very clothes of Chief-Inspector Guerchard, his seedy top-hat, his cloak. He wore also Guerchard's sparse, lank, black hair, his little, bristling, black moustache. His figure, hidden by the cloak, seemed to have shrunk to the ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... the ill-defined outlines of each other. The springbuck, possessing this feeling in an intense degree, and being eminently gregarious, becomes uneasy as the grass of the Kalahari becomes tall. The vegetation being more sparse in the more arid south, naturally induces the different herds to turn in that direction. As they advance and increase in numbers, the pasturage becomes more scarce; it is still more so the further they go, until they ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... way beyond, we plunged into the forest. It grew at first very sparse and park-like, the trees of a pale verdure, but healthy, the parasites, per contra, often dead. Underfoot, the ground was still a rockery of fractured lava; but now the interstices were filled with soil. A sedge-like grass (buffalo grass?) grew everywhere, and the horses ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... voices chimed in, and at last there was an outburst of applause, sparse and feeble, it ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... usually fine specimens of manhood. They are rather light in color, but frequently rub their bodies with some kind of oil, which gives the flesh a much redder and more glossy appearance. The hair is black and straight, and the eyes are black and deep set. The beard is sparse, and in former times was not allowed to grow at all, each hair being pulled out with a rude kind of tweezers. They are naturally of a gentle and friendly disposition, but their experience with the white race has made them ...
— Indians of the Yosemite Valley and Vicinity - Their History, Customs and Traditions • Galen Clark
... by the few sparse folk of the countryside; But how fared each with other? E'en beasts couch, hide by hide, In a growling, grudged agreement: so, father and son aye curled The closelier up in their den because the last of ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... assigned by his over-cultured parents. His slender body, with its narrow shoulders and sunken chest, frail as it was, seemed almost too heavy for his feeble legs. His thin face, bloodless and sallow, with a sparse, daintily trimmed beard and weak watery eyes, was characterized by a solemn and portentous gravity, as though, realizing fully the profound importance of his mission in life, he could permit no trivial thought to enter his bald, domelike head. One knew ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... later the secret agent of Mo, a tall, sparse figure, attired in shabby European clothes, entered, and, snapping fingers with his master, greeted and congratulated him. Then, casting himself upon the mat near us, he began to tell us what had occurred after our flight from Eastbourne, and relate ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... traces of them now remain, except in Thrace and Greece, except here and there a tower or a gate. All the men who opposed them they slew, young and old, and indeed spared not women, nor even children. Whence there is still but a sparse population in Italy. The plunder which they seized in every part of Europe was immense, and especially at Rome, where they left nothing, either public or private." In this latter description reference is also made to some later ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... a mile, however, above the head of the narrow pond, the ardent explorer came upon a level of sparse alder swamp. Here he found the stream just beginning to spread over its low banks. The cause of this spreading was a partial obstruction in mid-channel—what looked, at first glance, like an accidental accumulation ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the men to sobriety and virtue. Alas! how mistaken they have been! What they have endured! Of such was this woman! There she stood, the embodiment of woe. A tall, refined woman, her clothing poor and sparse, her head enveloped ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... takes to shining in winter, and the Southwest to blowing, the corners of the earth cannot hide from him—the mornings are like halls full of light. Robert had spent his hopes upon a wet day that would have kept the congregation sparse and the guests at Fairly absent from ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... into strands as it ran, raced along the edge. Higher they went, until Ridley and Rachel walked behind; next they turned along a lane scattered with stones, where Mr. Pepper raised his stick and silently indicated a shrub, bearing among sparse leaves a voluminous purple blossom; and at a rickety canter the last stage of ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... defiance. Stealthily he landed his men on the other side of the island opposite to the Bugis camp, and led them across. After a short but quite silent scuffle, Cornelius, who had tried to slink away at the moment of landing, resigned himself to show the way where the undergrowth was most sparse. Brown held both his skinny hands together behind his back in the grip of one vast fist, and now and then impelled him forward with a fierce push. Cornelius remained as mute as a fish, abject but faithful to his purpose, whose accomplishment loomed before him dimly. ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... I transplant them, and I treasure them like gold. One cluster bears light-coloured bloom; another bears dark shades. I sit with head uncovered by the sparse-leaved artemesia hedge, And in their pure and cool fragrance, clasping my knees, I hum my lays. In the whole world, methinks, none see the light as peerless as these flowers. From all I see you have no other friend more intimate than me. Such autumn splendour, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... and comings, past the white houses overlooking little lawns through the umbrage of their palm-trees. The lawns professed to be of grass, but were really mats of close little herbs which were not grass; but which, where the sparse cattle were grazing them, seemed to satisfy their inexacting stomachs. They are never very green, and in fact the landscape often has an air of exhaustion and pause which it wears with us in late ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... that other lying upon the ground at his feet, and, beyond, the carcass of the dead grizzly. A dreadful fear leapt to his brain; he moved tottering. His action gained swiftness suddenly. He ran to the forest edge, and, with hungry eyes, gazed in beyond the sparse fringe of scrub. There was nothing there. He moved away to the right and ran in amongst the low-growing bush, only to reappear with more feverish haste, and eyes whose fiery glance seemed to shoot in every direction at once. On he went, round ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... farther, the illusion of the mirage became more instead of less convincing; a shallow silver lake that spread for many miles, a little misty in the sunlight. Here and there one saw reflected the image of a heifer, turned loose to live upon the sparse sand-grass. They were magnified to a preposterous height and looked like mammoths, prehistoric beasts standing solitary in the waters that for many thousands of years actually washed over that desert;—the mirage itself may be the ghost of that long-vanished sea. Beyond the ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... out of it, I dare say!" He must protest, but if he failed to convince, how could he explain that part of his high mission to the ports of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom was to sweep from the Adriatic the Confederate privateers which Great Britain was then fitting out to prey upon our sparse commerce there? As a matter of fact he had eventually to do little or no sweeping of that sort; for no privateers came to interrupt the calm in which he devoted himself, unofficially, to writing a book about the chief of ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... town, and the towers above it. A little thoughtful we all were, I think. The times were rough and our errand was serious. But youth and early morning are fine dispellers of care; and once on the uplands we trotted gaily forward, now passing through wide glades in the sparse oak forest, where the trees all leaned one way, now over bare, wind-swept downs; or once and again descending into a chalky bottom, where the stream bubbled through deep beds of fern, and a lonely farmhouse ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman
... shore where Pee-wee stood was a sizable village, or young town, big enough to have traffic signs and parking zones and a main street and a movie show and such like pretentious things. Between this town and the shore were a few outlying houses, but mostly sparse woodland. To the north the ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... disfigured her face, and her lips, extremely thin, looked like a pale crack. Her thoughtful gaze alone possessed a certain melancholy attractiveness. But even here, her eyes, protruding too far for the harmony of the lines upon her face seemed always to be red, and her brows narrow and sparse. ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... province had not fully recovered from the effect of the spirit of disloyalty which culminated in the expulsion of the Acadians, although there followed a period of peace, but despite the efforts of the Government in making roads, and instituting public works, the settlements were sparse, and the Indian was still in the land. There was only one minister in the county, the Rev. John Eagleson, who had been sent out in 1769 by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, while in the province there were a few ...
— William Black - The Apostle of Methodism in the Maritime Provinces of Canada • John Maclean
... years old, small, thin, bent, with two big hands resembling the claws of a crab. His colorless hair was sparse and thin, like the down of a young duck, allowing patches of his scalp to be seen. The brown and wrinkled skin of his neck showed big veins which disappeared behind his jaws and came out again at the temples. He had the reputation of being ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... the rail and cast a wistful glance at the low-lying shore. He saw one corner of the white Residency, showing through the sparse isisi palm at the end of the big garden—a smudge of green on yellow from ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... these two settled districts there are only a few villages, scattered at intervals of many miles along a line of railway four hundred miles in length. In the Free State and the Transvaal the white population is extremely sparse, save in the mining region of the Witwatersrand, because ranching requires few hands, and only a few hundred square miles out of many thousands have been brought under cultivation. Thus, while the coolness of the climate has permitted Europeans to thrive in these comparatively low latitudes, ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... bloodhound, following the hoof-marks out of the valley meadow to a ridge of sparse cedars where they showed clear on the bare earth, and then to a thicker covert where they were hidden among strong grasses. Suddenly he caught my shoulder, and pulled me to the ground. We crawled through ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... pine is the commonest tree, and the most important. Nearly every mountain is planted with it to a height of from 8000 to 9000 feet above the sea. Some are covered from base to summit by this one species, with only a sparse growth of juniper on the lower slopes to break the continuity of its curious woods, which, though dark-looking at a distance, are almost shadeless, and have none of the damp, leafy glens and hollows so characteristic of other pine woods. ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... this man who had prodded me, with a long, pale face and pale eyes, a long reddish beard, and hair rather darker, both hair and beard being sparse. He was a fidgety person, always twitching with his hands, and he walked with something of a strut, as though the earth belonged to him. He snapped-to the case of his binoculars as though ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... extending from the Alleghany Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, capable itself of sustaining in comfort a larger population than will be in the whole Union for one hundred years to come. Over this vast expanse of territory your population is now so sparse that I believe we provided, at the last session, a regiment of mounted men to guard the mail from the frontier of Missouri to the mouth of the Columbia; and yet you persist in the ridiculous assertion, "I want room." One ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... Her profile, with its sparse wave of hair from the forehead, was repeated in grotesque exaggeration on the wall at her back. The iron will in her lent a certain metallic hardness to her features, and her shadow resembled in outline the ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... telling these stories may seem at first glance to be simple: short sentences, a sparse vocabulary, uncomplicated syntax. In actuality, Anderson developed an artful style in which, following Mark Twain and preceding Ernest Hemingway, he tried to use American speech as the base of a tensed rhythmic prose that has an economy and a shapeliness seldom ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... Perion who spoke first. They had passed the city walls, and had mounted the hill which leads toward the Forest of Sannazaro. Their road lay through a rocky pass above which the leaves of spring were like sparse traceries on a blue cupola, for April had ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... spring dusk. She chose the road towards Barnham Wood because it was lonely there and the hedges were thin; you could feel the breath of the sea as it blew across the sparse fields. The hush of an English Sunday evening enfolded the road, the wood, the fields. The sun was very low and the saffron light penetrated the dark lines of the hedges and hung like a curtain of misty gold before the approaches to the wood. The red-brown ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... district in 1901 was 455,593, and showed a large increase, owing in great part to immigration from the adjacent district of Sylhet. The plain is the most thickly populated part of the district; in the North Cachar Hills the population is sparse. About 66% of the population are Hindus and 29% Mahommedans. There are three administrative subdivisions of the district: Silchar, Hailakandi and North Cachar. The district takes name from its former rulers ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... failure. It has not made, I think, any substantial difference in politics. I think it is perhaps possible to say that its adoption has shown an improvement in the body politic, but it has been tested only in those States where population is sparse and where the problem of entrusting such power to women in the concentrated population of large cities is not presented. For this reason, if you will permit me to say so, my impression is that the task before you in securing ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... strand, that is, a low-lying road by the side of the Thames, stretching from Temple-bar to Charing Cross. On the south side of the thoroughfare were the mansions of bishops and nobles dotted at sparse intervals; on the north was open country. To-day there are even fewer survivals of the past than might have been seen thirty years ago. The wholesale clearance of Holywell Street and the buildings to the north has ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... emotional lift, and for all the unfailing distraction of the week. The repressed magnetic excitement in gatherings of familiar faces, fellow-beings bound by the same convention to the same kind of behaviour, is precious in communities where the human interest is still thin and sparse. It is valuable in itself, and it produces an occasional detached sensation. There was the case, in Dr Drummond's church, of placid-faced, saintly old Sandy MacQuhot, the epileptic. It used to be a common regret with ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... reflection will always remain a mystery. Every such case is a law unto itself, and neither science nor poetry is ever able to analyze and explain its causes and effects. The conflicting stories then current, and the varying traditions that yet exist, either fail to agree or to fit the sparse facts which came to light. There remains no dispute, however, that the occurrence, whatever shape it took, threw Mr. Lincoln into a deeper despondency than any he had yet experienced, for on January 23, 1841, he wrote to his law partner, ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... Telephone system: general assessment: sparse and limited system domestic: NA international: country code - 212; tied into Morocco's system by microwave radio relay, tropospheric scatter, and satellite; satellite earth stations - 2 Intelsat (Atlantic Ocean) linked ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... Telephone system: sparse and limited system domestic: NA international: tied into Morocco's system by microwave radio relay, tropospheric scatter, and satellite; satellite earth stations - 2 Intelsat (Atlantic Ocean) linked to ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... to the front with an improved decorative scheme, but the hard flags of to-day, the dusty gravel and the too sparse architectural embellishments do not mark the gardens of the Louvre as being anything remarkable save as a desirable breathing spot for Paris ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... about Avignon, the Interrupted Scolia used to prey upon the larva of the Shaggy Anoxia (A. villosa). At Serignan, which is surrounded by the same kind of sandy soil, without other vegetation than a few sparse seed-bearing grasses, I find her rationing her young with the Morning Anoxia (A. matutinalis). Oryctes, Cetoniae and Anoxiae in the larval state: here then is the prey of the three Scoliae whose habits we know. The three Beetles are Lamellicorns, Scarabaeidae. ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... stupidity and dullness," she said one day in disgust, after one of Theodore's long-awaited letters had proved particularly dry and sparse. "Just think of it! Dresden, Munich, Leipsic, Vienna, Berlin, Frankfurt! And from his letters you would never know he had left Winnebago. I don't believe he actually sees anything of these cities—their people, and ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... began to go astray and to mingle with other thoughts; the beech alley was transformed to a path between ilex-trees, and here and there a vine climbed from bough to bough, and sent up waving tendrils and drooped with purple grapes, and the sparse grey-green leaves of a wild olive-tree stood out against the dark shadows of the ilex. Clarke, in the deep folds of dream, was conscious that the path from his father's house had led him into an undiscovered ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... man of middle height and spare figure, nearly sixty years old, by constitution rather delicate in health, but wiry and active for his age. A sparse and straggling beard and mustache did not conceal a thin but kindly mouth; his eyes were keen and pleasant; his sharp nose and narrow jaw gave him very much the air of a priest, and this impression was helped by his commonplace dark clothes and soft black hat. He was a man of unusually ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... Spade (at cards) piko. Spain Hispanujo. Spangle briletajxo. Spanish-fly kantarido. Spare (extra) ekstra. Spare indulgi. Sparing, to be sxpari. Sparing (saving) sxparema. Spark fajrero. Sparkle brili. Sparrow pasero. Sparrow-hawk akcipitro. Sparse maldensa. Spasm spasmo. Spatter sxprucigi (sur). Spawn fisxsemo. Speak paroli. Speak through the nose nazparoli. Speaker parolanto. Spear lanco. Special speciala. Specialise specialigi. Specialist specialisto. Speciality specialo—eco. Specie monero. Species speco. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... through the bracken. He was an old acquaintance of theirs, and he enjoyed lying beside them to have his forehead scratched with a piece of sharp stick. His forehead was hard as rock, and the hair grew there as sparse as grass does on a wall, or rather the way moss grows on a wall—it was a mat instead of a crop. His horns were long and very sharp, and brilliantly polished. On this day the he-goat had two chains around his neck—one was made of butter-cups and the other ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... though heavy, and though there were some who verged strongly upon the Sto-lu type, there were others who were positively handsome and whose bodies were quite hairless. The Alus are all bearded, but among the Bo-lu the beard disappears in the women. The Sto-lu men show a sparse beard, the Band-lu none; and there is little hair upon the bodies ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... larger islands at the mouth of the Amazon, on one of which he immediately noticed the scarcity of trees, while "the abundance of every kind of animal life crowded into a small space was here very striking, compared with the sparse manner in which it is scattered in the virgin forests. It seems to force us to the conclusion that the luxuriance of tropical vegetation is not favourable to the production of animal life. The plains are always more thickly peopled ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... purchased its vast domain. The wolf-pack still clung to the flank of the cariboo-herd, singling out the weak and the big with calf, and pulling them down as remorselessly as were it a thousand, thousand generations into the past. The sparse aborigines still acknowledged the rule of their chiefs and medicine men, drove out bad spirits, burned their witches, fought their neighbors, and ate their enemies with a relish which spoke well of their bellies. But ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... arose, a young woman with thin, sparse, gold-glinting hair, with face pallid and rounded, with broad forehead and gray eyes of remarkable clarity. She was slim, dressed in a little brown coat and a short brown skirt. She came forward, trembling, as if overcome by the audience. She paused, raised her ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... in the last few years to a little more than 2,000,000, but only about two-thirds of these have subscribers; much of the infrastructure is outdated and inefficient domestic: good service in north but sparse in south; domestic satellite system with 12 earth stations (20 additional domestic earth stations are planned) international: 5 submarine cables; microwave radio relay to Italy, France, Spain, Morocco, and Tunisia; coaxial cable to Morocco and Tunisia; participant ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... keep warm. The heated soap-stone wrapped up at their feet, the warm buffalo robes under and over them, their thick overcoats and fur caps alike proved inadequate. Then one took his turn at driving, while the other crouched entirely covered beneath the robes. The wind drove the hard, sparse flakes from the low leaden sky like so many needles against the driver's face, filling his eyes with tears, causing his skin to glow and smart. Even in this was a certain joy and adventure. But again ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... corral, which they could distinguish as a black blotch in the sparse willow growth, Pink turned and stopped them. "I know the layout here," he whispered. "I'll just sneak ahead and rubber around. You Rubes sound like the beginning of a ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... her sparse face toward the down-town tide and against a light wind that tasted of rain and napped her skirts around ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... horseback, and was so done until lately, since the establishment of stages. Between the great towns and in other places where the population is dense stages are preferred because they afford an additional opportunity to make a profit from passengers; but where the population is sparse and on crossroads it is generally carried on horseback. Unconnected with passengers and other objects, it can not be doubted that the mail itself may be carried in every part of our Union with nearly as much economy and greater dispatch on horseback than in a stage, and in many ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 2: James Monroe • James D. Richardson
... is given by the sparse reports from the eastern army to the question of the entire foreign press: "Where has Hindenburg been keeping himself?" Wishes and speculations may thus busy themselves as much as they like with the answering of that question. In the Russian version of the war situation there is reference ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... stark still in the middle of the field and rubbed his eyes to make sure that he was awake. There was not the slightest doubt that what he saw was very real. The river at that point was quite wide and its opposite shore was bordered with sparse woodland. ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
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