"Brassy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... leg climbed to the top of one of the buttes to get a better view of the country, and to the northward saw a high mountain; but before descending, he observed some black stones under his feet and on picking one up found it heavy and filled with a brassy-colored metal. He then picked up several of the stones and put them into his pockets, but being desirous of reaching water as soon as possible, he gave little thought ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... of a cheap store. All the senoras were smoky looking with snakish eyes, and the dresses under their heavy-fringed black mantillas were more frowsy than those of their daughters. They certainly were not imposing; and if they wore jewelry at all it looked brassy ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... where the four territories met, New Reno flung its sprawling, dirty carcass over the muddy soil and roared and hooted endlessly, laughed with the rough boisterousness of miners and spacemen, rang with the brittle, brassy laughter of women following a trade older than New Reno. It clanged and shouted and bellowed so loudly that quiet sobbing ...
— Foundling on Venus • John de Courcy
... is blowing dull and hollow from south-west; the clouds are rolling faster and faster up from the Atlantic; the sky to westward is brassy green; the glass is falling fast; and there will be wind and rain enough to-night to sweep even Aberalva clean for the ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... Course, she'd only borrowed it for Pa Sykes to wear on a Sunday afternoon call, him bein' a little runt of a gent, with watery eyes and a red nose, that never does anything on his own hook. And if he hadn't denied it so brassy I shouldn't have called him down so hard, right in the front hall with half ...
— Torchy • Sewell Ford
... roof of the church swung upon its arms like an acrobat in petticoats, and loudly pealed the hour of seven. Its hammer boomed against the brassy gown, the town rang from end to end with the clamour of the curfew, and its tale of another day gone rumoured up the glens. Near at hand the air of the playground and of the street was tossed by the sound ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... were glazed right curiously, His sword-sheath was of ivory, His helm all brassy bright; His saddle was of jet-black bone, His bridle like the bright sun shone, Or like ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... friend's alarm to the uttermost. His nose changed from the natural copper hue which it had acquired from many a comfortable cup of claret or sack, into a palish brassy tint, and his teeth chattered with apprehension at the unveiled audacity of my proposal, which seemed to place the barefaced plunderer before him in full atrocity. As he faltered for an answer, I relieved ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... "As brassy as that, was he! I wish to goodness it was the fashion to have a cistern in your house-roofs!" ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... feat, it was far less so than a young man's performance of the ophicleide, a serpentine instrument that coiled round and about its player, and when breathed into persuasively gave forth prodigious brassy sounds that resembled the night-noises of beasts of prey. This item roused the Indian god from his umbilical contemplations, and as the young ophicleide player, somewhat breathless, passed down the room with his brazen ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... correct to speak of his having met her, for she grew up in the town, and had been working for the Markley Mortgage and Investment Company for half-a-dozen years before he began to notice her. From a brassy street-gadding child of twelve, whose mother crowded her into grown-up society before she left the high school, and let her spell her name Ysabelle, she had grown into womanhood like a rank weed; had married at nineteen, was divorced at twenty-one, and having tried music teaching ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... would designate pallid, and your enemies sallow, a coat of pea-green or snuff-brown must be scrupulously eschewed, whilst black or invisible green would, by contrast, make that appear delicate and interesting, which, by the use of the former colours, must necessarily seem bilious and brassy. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... so many before it; the sun was low on the horizon, and its yellow beams were throwing a brassy tint over the sea and sky; the sailors were engaged, some fishing with patient assiduity, others, grouped into small knots, listening to prosy yarns; while a few were prostrated round the decks in attitudes of perfect abandonment or sleep. The officers were leaning over the taffrail, trying, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... think of Savina as removed from whatever had described and touched other special women. The words which had always been the indispensable property of such affairs were now distasteful to him. They seemed to have a smoothly false, a brassy, ring; while he was fully, even gaily, committed, he had a necessity to make his relationship with Savina Grove wholly honest. As he paid the account she asked him if ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... After the introduction of nickel from the mines in Saxony, the words "German silver" became truthfully appropriate as applied to that metal, but so habituated have the trade and the public become to brassy mixtures that German silver must always be understood as ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... in front of the residence of a young lawyer of my friends, after performing in whose honour, through the medium of a very brassy band, a Secession Schottische or Palmetto Polka, it clamorously demanded his presence. After a very brief interval he appeared, and altho' he is in private life an agreeable and moderately sensible ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... the purest sort in the untracked snows of northern forests, but never a white so pure, so soft, so warm as this. And then he saw by the undulations of the streak that it was a flock of long, graceful birds moving in single file from west to east. Shimmering in the brassy dawn sun, they rode like dream birds upon a vermilion sea, their slow movements so graceful, so rhythmic as seemingly to represent no effort, as if the birds merely floated along, their beauty and grace the ultimate expression of the spirit of the scene. They flew with their delicate necks bent ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... the letter "L," another like an axe-head, and one like a peasant's sabot. Some were almost black with iron stains, and some were set with "jewels" of quartz, but for the most part they were formless fragments of a rich and brassy yellow. ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... was sitting in the old black panther's cage with the brute's head in his lap, stroking and twisting its ears as if it were a kitten. The cage door was wide open, and the day was already growing hot and brassy in ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... second lieutenant in the gallant Twenty-ninth; but it often happens that a young man has an old head on his shoulders, and as one after the other of my superior officers—superior in rank—bit the dust—— That ball is badly cupped. You will hardly get it away with a brassy; if I were you I should play my niblick. Well out, sir! A fine recovery! On this very spot I saw a bomb burst. The air was filled with arms and legs. It seemed as if they would never come down. I shall play my brassy spoon, Purnell, the one with the yellow head. I see you don't ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... better after old Brindle fills up on this dust," observed Martin, belligerency in his brassy voice. ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... have become hard. The timothy stalk is like a file; the rye straw is glazed with flint; the grasshoppers snap sharply as they fly up in front of you; the bird-songs have ceased; the ground crackles under foot; the eye of day is brassy and merciless; and in harmony with all these things is the rattle of the mower and ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... at the window looked like that of an East Indian!" declared Will. "His skin was brassy, and his eyes had the devil's leer in them just as the eyes of the Little Brass God are ...
— Boy Scouts in Northern Wilds • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... one another for a space of three or four breaths. Waters was frankly aghast; this, upon the top of his other troubles, was overwhelming. The istvostchik ruptured the moment with a brassy yell. ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... littoral, the waters, healthfully agitated, vary in saltiness according to the proximity of the rivers. The rocks and deeps are covered with a vegetation which is green near the surface, becoming darker and darker, even turning to a dark red and brassy yellow as it gets further from the light. In this oceanic paradise of nutritive and luminous waters charged with bacteria and microscopic nourishment, life is developed in exuberance. In spite of the continual traps of the fishermen, the marine ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Dull! Why, on shore we should gaze out on the same streets or fields or trees; but here our residence is driven along like a flying cloud, and we gain a fresh view with every mile! I confess that I like sailing in populous waters, for indeed the lonely tropical seas and the brassy skies are not by any means to be regarded as delightful; but for the present we are supposing ourselves to be in the track of vessels, and there is some new and poignant interest for every hour. Watch this vast pallid cloud that looms up far away; the sun strikes ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... Cardinal's abode, which was then at the Hotel de Cleves, near the Louvre. Among the domestics let into the secret, Henri de Campion names positively Gauseville. Over them were placed "the Sieurs d'Avancourt and De Brassy, Picardians, very resolute men and intimate friends of Lie." The pretext given out was that the Condes proposing to put an affront upon Madame de Montbazon, the Duke de Beaufort, in order to oppose it, desired to have in hand a troop of gentlemen well mounted and armed. Their parts were allotted ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... the black and white creeping warbler, whose fine strain reminds me of hairwire. It is unquestionably the finest bird-song to be heard. Few insect strains will compare with it in this respect; while it has none of the harsh, brassy character of the latter, ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... a moment the bold, brassy look was gone from her face, like a mask that had slipped. "I'm sorry. And I'll ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... Percha Balls with the intent swiftness of trained Bird Dogs, and each talked feverishly of Brassy Lies, and getting past the Bunker, and Lofting to the Green, and Slicing into the Bramble—each telling his own Game to the Ambient Air, and ignoring what the ...
— Fables in Slang • George Ade
... and bird-notes as might warrant the hope that Madame de Mauves would renew with him for an hour or two the exploration of the forest. Her sister-in-law, however, whose hair was not yet dressed, emerged like a brassy discord in a maze of melody. At the same moment the servant returned with his mistress's regrets; she begged to be excused, she was indisposed and unable to see Mr. Longmore. The young man knew just how disappointed he ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... was a brassy blue, and Applehead won Luck's fierce enmity by remarking that he "calc'lated he'd better get his garden in." Luck went away off somewhere on the snuffy little bay, that day, and did ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... throughout his orchestra scores. Never have wind instruments sounded more richly, dulcetly, than in that "Serenade fuer dreizehn Blaeser." At a first hearing of "Also Sprach Zarathustra," it seemed as though the very dayspring had descended into the orchestra to make that famous, brassy opening passage. For here, in the hand of Strauss, the orchestra begins to round out its form and assume its logical shape. The various families of instruments are made independent; often play separately. The shattering brass of which ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... struts the limelit boards: With false moustache, set smirk and ogling eyes And straddling legs and swinging hips she tries To swagger it like a soldier, while the chords Of rampant ragtime jangle, clash, and clatter; And over the brassy blare and drumming din She strains to squirt her squeaky notes and thin Spirtle of ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... it proved to be the driest known in years. Days, weeks, and even months passed without a drop of rain falling from the brassy sky, and the fine powdery dust permeated everywhere. The weather prophet lost caste, but he persisted in announcing rain, knowing that he had only to stick to it long enough to hit it ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... loaded. Having eaten he lit a cheroot and was jotting down in his notebook the information that he had gathered that morning, when a shrill trumpet from the invisible Badshah made him grasp his rifle. Skilled in the knowledge of the various sounds that elephants make he knew by the brassy note of this that the animal was in deadly fear. He sprang up to go to his assistance, when Badshah burst through the trees and came towards him at his fastest pace, his drooping ears and tail and outstretched trunk showing that ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... the house of Cleisthenes, Have inspired these wretched women all our wealth and pay to seize. Pay from whence I get my living. Gods! to hear these shallow wenches taking citizens to task, Prattling of a brassy buckler, jabbering of a martial casque! Gods! to think that they have ventured with Laconian men to deal, Men of just the faith and honour that a ravening wolf might feel! Plots they're hatching, plots contriving, plots of rampant ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... lying forward under the awnings—a fiend-tempered outfit of Laskars and Chinese. Captain Carreras appeared on deck through the companion-way still farther aft and nodded to Bedient. Then both men looked at the sky, which was brassy above, but thickening in the North. It augmented darkly and streakily—like a tub of water into which bluing is added drop by drop.... A Chinese arose and tossed a handful of joss-tatters into the still air. And now the voice of the Captain ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... at once detect any variation from this character. Further, he knows how the tones of a badly-played instrument would sound if the instrument were correctly handled. An unskilled trumpeter in an orchestra, for example, may draw from his instrument tones that are too brassy, blatant, or harsh. An observant hearer knows exactly what these tones would be if the ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... the air-passage causes cyanosis and dyspnoea. When the oesophagus is pressed upon, the patient may have difficulty in swallowing. The left recurrent nerve may be stretched or pressed upon as it hooks round the arch of the aorta, and hoarseness of the voice and a characteristic "brassy" cough may result from paralysis of the muscles of the larynx which it supplies. The vagus, the phrenic, and the spinal nerves may also be pressed upon. When the aneurysm is on the transverse part of the ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... jumpin'!" exclaimed Captain Shad. "Did you ever hear such brassy talk in your life! I wish to thunder I'd been here. There'd have been one mighty sick patient ready for the doctor and he wouldn't have been a South Harniss native either. But Mary-'Gusta didn't take none of his sauce, I tell you; that girl ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... it be written in the terms of peace, And evermore on brassy tablets graven, That England shall demand no right nor lease Of frontier nor of town, nor armoured haven, But cede with unreluctant paw To Germans and to German law The whole of this egregious SHAW, And only re-annex ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 2, 1914 • Various
... enjoy a symphony without precise knowledge of the instrument that gives the tune? If an oboe sound a melody, must one bestow a special praise, with a knowledge of its function in the concert? Or if a trombone please, must one know the brassy creature by its name? Rather, whether I listen to horns or birds, in my ignorance I bestow loosely a general approbation; yet ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... Alix up to the road and laid her upon a motor robe that some kindly spectator had spread in the deep dust. AH about he heard the quick, horrified breathing and muttering of the shocked and sympathetic neighbours who had gathered, but to him there was a brassy light in the world and a hideous taste of inky bitterness in the very air he breathed, and ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... unearthly light died out of the dim prairie, the veil swept across into place again; and he managed to check his wild flight, and look about him. His empty lips were gibbering without a sound escaping them, and his very heart shivered with cold, for all the brassy heat of the day. But the breeze was wandering on again; under the great sun the prairie spread dim to the southwest, and tawny to the northeast; only between his own loose knees the horse trembled in every ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... regular and well formed. His skin is coarse, unwrinkled and weather-beaten, his eyes possess a natural and unaffected fierceness, the most extraordinary I ever beheld: they are full, bright, and of a brassy colour. He looked directly at me, and his stare is by far the most intense I ever beheld. This time, however, curiosity made me a match, for I vanquished him. It is when he regards you, that you mark the singular expression of his eyes—no frown—no ill-humour—no affectation of appearing terrible; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various
... The sun's brassy edge glittered above the blue chain of hills as I walked across the pasture towards the path that led winding among the alders to the brook below. I followed it in the deepening evening light and sat down on a log, watching the water swirling through the flat stepping-stones ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... of '49. He had scores of nuggets as large as a man's thumb, but the feature of the collection was one about the shape and size of a full-grown potato. This nugget was said to be worth $250. Those who have seen the Alaska gold say it is very bright, and brassy in color, but not as fine in quality ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 41, August 19, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... Sabbath days, His face is not a face o'er brassy; Her mither sits to praise the claes; Holds him her box; to win the lassie He taks a pinch, and greets wi' granny, And helps his chair up nearer Jenny, And vows he loves her muir than any. She thinks her mither seldom wrong, And "Loggan ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... his eyes open and lift his eyebrows up. A man with a pervading appearance on him of being inflated like a balloon, and ready to start. A man who could never sufficiently vaunt himself a self-made man. A man who was continually proclaiming, through that brassy speaking-trumpet of a voice of his, his old ignorance and his old poverty. A man who was the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... visitor bore every mark of being an average commonplace British tradesman, obese, pompous, and slow. He wore rather baggy grey shepherd's check trousers, a not over-clean black frock-coat, unbuttoned in the front, and a drab waistcoat with a heavy brassy Albert chain, and a square pierced bit of metal dangling down as an ornament. A frayed top-hat and a faded brown overcoat with a wrinkled velvet collar lay upon a chair beside him. Altogether, look as I would, there was nothing remarkable about the man save his blazing red head, ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... and the black night air glowed with the flaring gas-jets and the naphtha-lamps, hissing and wavering before the February wind. Voices, raucous, clamant, abominable, were belched out of the blazing public-houses as the doors swung to and fro, and above these doors were hideous brassy lamps, very slowly swinging in a violent blast of air, so that they might have been infernal thuribles, censing the people. Some man was calling his wares in one long continuous shriek that never stopped or paused, and, ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... good time." In the pancake phone Fay's laugh was brassy. "But I'm glad you've decided to lend a hand, Gussy. This thing is moving faaaasst. Nationwise, adult underground ticklerization ...
— The Creature from Cleveland Depths • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... wrathful sunset had burned itself out on a brassy sky. The sun, a lurid ball of fire, had sunk in billows of blood-red cloud, and pitch blackness had fallen upon earth and sky and sea. Everything above and below breathed of speedy tempest, but the midnight was drawing near, and the storm had ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... soon after supper-time the Doctor had joined him, and with an unusual expression of leisure and friendliness had settled down lollingly on the other side of the fireplace with his great square-toed shoes nudging the bright, brassy edge of the fender, and his big meerschaum pipe puffing the whole bleak room most deliciously, tantalizingly full of forbidden tobacco smoke. It was a comfortable, warm place to chat. The talk had begun with politics, drifted a little way ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... retrieving lost balls or replacing America. Whether it was that Archibald pressed too much or pressed too little, whether it was that his club deviated from the dotted line which joined the two points A and B in the illustrated plate of the man making the brassy shot in the Hints on Golf book, or whether it was that he was pursued by some malignant fate, I do not know. Archibald ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... was not present, it could not do much good. Arethusa did not forget a single creature at the Farm. Beginning with Miss Asenath, every living thing had a gift. Miss Johnson had a collar of wonderfully shiny, brassy beauty; old Baldy, the horse, had a new blanket; and there was even a catnip ball for the grey cat that slept in front of Mandy's stove. There were so many cats at the Farm that it was quite impossible to remember them all, but Arethusa reasoned that they would all ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... all is not gold in the El Dorado of the West. Many schemes and laws have its lustre; but they have the brassy sound of the neo-pagan state-monopoly ideal. This thought of the supremacy of State in matters of education permeates Dr. Foght's report from cover to cover. In general, legislation is looked upon in our new Provinces as the universal panacea for all evils. The West is the land of experimental ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... while his opponent had played eighteen. But th' pace had been too swift an' it was merely a question iv which wud be th' first to crack. That misfortune fell to th' lot iv th' sicrety iv war. Findin' himsilf in a bad lie, he undhertook to use a brassy in a spirit iv nawthin' venture nawthin' gain. It was raaly a brillyant shot. A foot nearer th' ball an' he might have accomplished a feat in golufing histhry. But th' luck iv war was against him an' he sthruck himsilf upon th' ankle. Th' prisidint, resolvin' to give him ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne
... were woods in the distance. A rich sandy light, (nay, of a much deeper colour than sandy,) lay over these woods that blackened in the blaze. Over that part of the woods which lay immediately under the intenser light, a brassy mist floated. The trees on the ramparts, and the people moving to and fro between them, were cut or divided into equal segments of deep shade and brassy light. Had the trees, and the bodies of the men and women, been divided into equal segments by a rule or pair of ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... are generally brighter-coloured than those confined to cold and deeper seas. The birds which are confined to continents are, according to Mr. Gould, brighter-coloured than those of islands. The insect-species confined to sea-coasts, as every collector knows, are often brassy or lurid. Plants which live exclusively on the sea-side are very apt to have fleshy leaves. He who believes in the creation of each species, will have to say that this shell, for instance, was created with bright colours for a warm sea; but that this other ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... to the hot glare from a brassy sky or an oven where the July caloric blazed like a blast from the open mouth of a retort—such that day seemed Moosac Square in the heart of the cotton-mill city. High buildings closed in its treeless, ill-paved, dirty area. The air, made ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... Huggin big schooner, sah," said Caesar sharply; and he had hardly spoken when the heavy but sharp brassy sound of a big gun came from quite another direction. "And dat Massa Huggin oder schooner, sah. ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... Not the melody of the singing-bird—far from it; the common musician might think without melody, but surely having to the finer ear a harmony of its own; monotonous—but what a swing there is in that brassy drone, round and round, cymballine—or like the whirling of ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... come to. It's the nights that are the worst. I'm glad to get up at dawn and see to the beasts. And there's that infernal watching of the sky—looking out all the time for clouds that don't come—or if they do, end in nothing. You know that brassy glare of the sun rising that means always scorching dry heat? Think of it a hundred times worse than you've ever seen it! The country as far as you can look is like the floor of an enormous oven, with the sky, red and white-hot for a roof, and all the life there is, being slowly baked inside. ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... to shake them off. The hills seem near, and the trees on the summit are distinctly visible. Such noises as are heard seem exaggerated and hollow. There is but little cloud, mere thin flecks; but the horizon has a brassy look, and the blue of the sky is hard and opaque. Farmer George recollects that the barometer he tapped before coming out showed a falling mercury; he does not like these appearances, more especially the heated breeze. There is a large quantity of hay in the meadow, much of it quite ready for ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... occurs. The minerals which I remarked among the schists here as most abundant are a kind of black ironstone, exceedingly tough and hard, occurring in detached masses, and a variety of bright pyrites disseminated among the darker flagstones, either as irregularly-formed, brassy-looking concretions of small size, or spread out on their surfaces in thin leaf-like films, that resemble, in some of the specimens, the icy-foliage with which a severe frost encrusts a window-pane. Still further on I came upon a vein of galena; but a miner's excavation in ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... motorcars, as to what really constitutes a garage. He usually does not even know what the word means. Any roofed-over shed or shack, with doors or not, is what one generally has to put up with to-day, for housing his resplendent brassy ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... to life with sudden, brassy violence. Someone was counting backward. When he reached zero, the first stage engine burst into life, the rocket lifted off its platform, slowed, began to tilt slowly to one side and settled back ...
— If at First You Don't... • John Brudy
... which is of the brassy brow and insensate nerves; but I love the courage of the strong heart, the fervour of the generous blood; I loved with passion the light of Frances Evans' clear hazel eye when it did not fear to look straight into ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... public was not slow to imagine plenty of reasons for the separation. This, together with the fact that men had begun to penetrate the veil of romantic secrecy with which Byron surrounded himself and found a rather brassy idol beneath, turned the tide of public opinion against him. He left England under a cloud of distrust and disappointment, in 1816, and never returned. Eight years were spent abroad, largely in Italy, where he was associated with Shelley until the latter's tragic death in 1822. His house was ever ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... a part of him as his flesh, and I respect him for disdaining to shirk the difficulty by throwing the meanness of a cloak over it, and for recognizing the folly of masquerading our Yankee statesman in a Roman toga, and the indecorousness of presenting him as a brassy nudity. It would have been quite as unjustifiable to strip him to his skeleton as to his flesh. Webster is represented as holding in his right hand the written roll of the Constitution, with which he points to a bundle of fasces, which he keeps from falling by the ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... his head on one side, sparrow-wise, looked for a moment at the young man and piped, "You're a brassy pup, ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... ridiculous in the aspect of some of its conditions which belongs to the sagacious common-sense side of his nature. The married women, he says, were against the community. "It was to them like the brassy and lacquered life in hotels. The common school was well enough, but to the common nursery they had grave objections. Eggs might be hatched in ovens, but the hen on her own account much preferred the old way. A hen without her chickens was but half a hen." Is not the inaudible, inward ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... and the actors in this scene, make it among the grandest in history. A nation, with its king, has come together, at the bidding of one man, to settle no less a question than whom they shall worship. There, on the slope of Carmel, with the brassy heaven gleaming hard and dry above them, and the yellow, burnt-up plain of Jezreel at their feet, the expectant people stand. The assembly was a singular proof of Elijah's ascendency; for Ahab's bluster had sunk, cowed in his presence, and he had meekly done the prophet's bidding in summoning 'all ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... of the Faithful were in three divisions dismounted. Throwing off their clumsy gowns, they stood forth in glittering mail, and shaking their brassy shields in air, shouted the old salute: "Live the ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... moment he began to plead this heat not merely as an excuse for his uneasiness, but as a reason for returning to camp. The heat was intense, he argued. Above him the light of an African midday sun poured out of a brassy sky into a sort of inverted funnel, and lay in blinding pools upon the scattered slabs of rock. Within the hollow, every cup of the innumerable flowers which tapestried the cliffs seemed a mouth breathing ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... their number, however, when asked if they were not rather too self-important, bent his head quickly downward, and replied that he couldn't see the point, which was exceedingly brassy for a pin. ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... another soul in the church. A terrible silence fell with the gathering darkness. In a little wicker basket at the foot of the benignant mother were about twenty photographs of soldiers, some in little brassy frames with spots of verdigris on them, some the old-fashioned "cabinet" kind, some on simple post-cards. There was a young, dark Zouave who stood with his hand on an ugly little table, a sergeant of the Engineer Corps ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... fantastic, upon the ball of the world, balanced amazingly with his feet on the slope of a golden corridor, and, hypnotised, she watched his face, bent into the horn of a young moon—Julien, and yet unearthly and impossible. There were his two hands, lit in a brassy fire, hanging down his sides, and the cane which he held in his left went out beyond the scope of the corridor. The three others hung around him like bent corn. She watched these yellow shades, as tall as ladders, talk and act in ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... have to play short here," grumbled Dick Tresize. "He ought to have insisted on Trevanion giving him strokes. By George, he's surely not going to be such a fool as to risk a brassy!" ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... writes.] — Six yards of stuff for to make a yellow gown. A pair of lace boots with lengthy heels on them and brassy eyes. A hat is suited for a wedding-day. A fine tooth comb. To be sent with three barrels of porter in Jimmy Farrell's creel cart on the evening of the coming Fair to Mister Michael James Flaherty. With the best compliments ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... the room. Someone gave a choking cough and then a brassy voice fairly shouted, 'Why, man, they're dead! My Lord! What ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... a brassy ball of fire hangs low upon the threatening horizon; the next, it has dropped into the belt of grayish mist that marks the earth's end and darkness has spread its silent, ominous mantle over the forest. Almost, as a room is plunged into blackness upon the snuffing out of a candle at midnight, so ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... will endure The pangs of death, most resolute to live. This God of riddles that shaped a thing so frail For his worst torment hid mysterious powers Within her breast who can like lilies prevail Through rains of doom that conquer brassy towers. Her heart lies broken; when some trivial chord Of sweetness chimes reveille through the sense,— A rose, a song, a smile, a courtly word. She wakes, and sighs, and softly passes thence Back to the masquers, though her ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... particular with anything, and in the late afternoon I roused myself, put them all back, and shut the glass doors. I had nothing to show for my day's experience except a deep little round ache in the back of my neck and a faint brassy taste in my mouth. I complained of it to ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge
... was when Americans and occidentals in general laughed at Chinese music, but this was due to their own ignorance of its full import and to the fact that they heard only the dirges of a Chinese funeral procession or the brassy noises that feature a celestial festival. They did not have opportunity to be enthralled by the throaty, vibrant melodies—at once so lovingly seductive and harshly compelling—by which Chinese poets and lovers have revealed their thoughts and won their quest for centuries. ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... arrived Mr. Brassy, her father's solicitor, from Cator Hill. He had been often in the house, a short fat man with a purple face, clothes of a horsy cut, and large, red, swollen fingers. He took now possession of the house with much self-importance. "Well, Miss Maggie" (he ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... Magee, staring at the very brassy bars at the foot of his bed, "what new variations on seclusion the day will ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... tasted of brassy doubt. He didn't know where he'd be, or what luck, good or bad, he might run into, within ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... was leaning by the doorway, and he heard her laugh and saw her feet twinkle like blood-red moths, and he called to Sir Dinar. But Sir Dinar heard only the brassy music, nor did any of the dancers turn their heads, though Sir Galhaltin called a second time and more loudly. Then Sir Sentrail and Sir Ozanna also began to call, fearing they knew not what for their comrade. But the guests ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... imparts to the listeners is apt to be tempered by a certain sense of incongruity between the peaceful citizens who compose it and the bellicose din they produce. There is a note of barbarism in the brassy jar and clamor of the instruments, enhanced by the bewildering ambition of each player to force through his piece the most noise and jangle, which is not always covered and subdued into a harmonious whole by the whang of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... with his brassy voice, again went the rounds, announcing the day's event and the tardy fulfillment of the boy's commission. Then came the bustle of preparation. The out-door toilet of the people was performed with care. I cannot describe just how I was attired or ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... the clarionet. "No doubt the trombone is a little cracked and brassy, so to speak, because of a hinfluenza as has wonted him for some weeks; but there's good stuff in 'im, sir, and plenty o' lungs. The key-bugle is a noo 'and, but 'e's capital, 'ticklerly in the 'igh notes an' flats; besides, bein' young, 'e'll improve. As to the French ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... of a slumbering child, came a faint air from the land. The bell of the frigate, clanging in its brassy throat, struck for midnight. The sentinels on their posts cried "All's well!" The old brig was letting fall her top-sails, and the sound of the oars in ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... Grackle with the sun shining on him was truly beautiful. His head and neck, his throat and upper breast, were a shining blue-black, while his back was a rich, shining brassy-green. His wings and tail were much like his head and neck. As Peter watched it seemed as if the colors were constantly changing. This changing of colors is called iridescence. One other thing Peter noticed and this was that Creaker's eyes were ...
— The Burgess Bird Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... what to look for: the brassy, regularly cut crystals with the black stripings, such as has led countless men to go through untold hardships in the belief that they had found gold. In fact, iron pyrites is often called "fool gold," ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... man was at the ship's side, shading his eyes against the dazzle that made a brassy light over sea and sky. The Ryukyu Islands, off the port beam, were not visible in the metallic haze that grew as the sun arched higher. The fitful wind gave promise of stopping altogether and leaving ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... meagre shoulders. It came into my head, as disconnected ideas will come at all sorts of times into one's head, that this, most likely, was the very room where, if the tale were true, Falk had been lectured by Mr. Siegers, the father. Mr. Siegers' (the son's) overwhelming voice, in brassy blasts, as though he had been trying to articulate his words through a trombone, was expressing his great regret at a conduct characterised by a very marked want of discretion... As I lived I was being lectured too! His deafening gibberish was difficult ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... ringing a sort of triumphal peal to the procession of the judges between the court-room and the inn. Contesting with its not too dulcet music blared forth the fanfare of two gorgeous trumpeters in scarlet and gold lace, tie wigs, silk stockings, and huge cocked hats, who filled the street with a brassy melody that suggested Gabriel's stern and awful judgment-summons rather than gave lightness and rhythm to the feet of those who made up the procession. The procession itself had some dreadful aspects and elements as well as others incongruous and comical. The humorous fancy might ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... splotches, refulgent patches, explosions, vibrating surfaces; surfaces that are smooth and oily surfaces, as in his waters, that are exquisitely translucent. You can't pin him down to a particular formula. His technique in other hands would be coarse, crashing, brassy, bald, and too fortissimo. It sometimes is all these discouraging things. It is too often deficient in the finer modulations. But he makes one forget this by his entrain, sincerity, and sympathy with his subject. As a composer he is less ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... plantation, Mr. Bartram was shown a vast fountain of hot mineral water, which issued from a ridge or bank of the river, in a great cove or bay. The water, though hot and of a disagreeable brassy and vitriolic taste, and very offensive to the smell, was perfectly transparent, and exhibited to view a prodigious number of fish, and alligators, which were ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... patriarchal beards, slim saleswomen who wore masses of marcelled curls and real Irish lace, she watched them all. She drank in the music of the Park concerts, she dreamed in the libraries, she eagerly caught the first brassy mutter of the ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... of Summer shines from out a brassy sky, And has parched and browned the meadows, and the creek's run dry, O sweet it is to wander there and hear the water sing It's rippling song of gladness from ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... again; the child turned over and unclosed her eyes. A brassy light glimmered between leafless apple branches outside her window. Through the frosty radiance of ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... dead trees raised their barkless and whitened trunks and leafless branches for three or four miles, and the grey and brown grass stood tall between, dying in the first breaths of the coming drought. All was becoming grey and ashen here, the heat blazing and dancing across objects, and the pale brassy dome of the sky cloudless over all, the sun a glaring white disc with its edges almost melting into the sky. Job held his gun carelessly ready (it was a double-barrelled muzzle-loader, one barrel ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... if the air had glowed there with its own cold, bluish, and dazzling light. This magic spot, behind the black trunks of trees and masses of inky foliage, breathed out sweet sounds mingled with bursts of brassy roar, sudden clashes of metal, and grave, ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... it happened. "Get out of the way!" a voice shrieked "out of the way, out of the way, OUT OF THE WAY!" Her heart lurched, her stomach twisted convulsively, and there was a brassy taste in her mouth. Instinctively, she stamped down on the brake pedal, swerved sharply into the outer lane. By the time she had topped the rise, she was going a cautious 50 miles an hour and hugging the far edge of the freeway. ...
— The Sound of Silence • Barbara Constant
... I could not catch. They half halted and made a brave attempt to pose as Germans, to judge by their guttural talk and brassy front. ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... of that speech, and he kept the treasure. There had been another thing with it, tied on with string. But Aunt Maud had found that, and taken it away "to take care of," and he had never seen it again. It was brassy, with a white stone and some sort of pattern on it. He had the treasure, and he had not the least idea what it was, with its bells that jangled such pretty music, and its white spike so hard and smooth. He did not know—but ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... of an oasis. For fifty kilometres the earth under our wheels was made up of a kind of glistening red slag covered with pebbles and stones. Not the scantest and toughest of rock-growths thrust a leaf through its brassy surface, not a well-head or a darker depression of the rock gave sign of a trickle of water. Everything around us glittered with the ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... and bloat, a gas-bag and fanfaron, a Gascon and a carajo, alma miserabile, and a pudding-head, a sacre menteur and a verfluchte prahlerische Hauptesel, a brassy old blunder-head and a spupsy, un sot sans pareil and a darned old hoffmagander; a pepper-pot-pourri, a thafe of the wurreld and an owld baste, the divil's ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the peridium persistent with a silver metallic, sometimes brassy, lustre; stipe long, brown or black, tapering upward; hypothallus well developed, brown or purple, usually not continuous; columella swollen, obtuse, short at best, hardly attaining the centre of the sporangium; capillitium very rigid, of simple or sparingly branched, dark-brown threads ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... of life he had dreamed of. No Martian whiskey, no drugs, no night spots, no bigtime gamblers slapping him on the back and calling him "pal," no brassy blondes giving him the eye. Still, it was better than the life he had actually lived, much better. It would do, it ...
— Divinity • William Morrison
... the town of Birmingham that night, I recall an active and interested mood. I spent the night in Birmingham because the train service on was disarranged, and I could not get on. I went to listen to a band that was playing its brassy old-world music in the public park, and I fell into conversation with a man who said he had been a reporter upon one of their minor local papers. He was full and keen upon all the plans of reconstruction that were now shaping over the lives of humanity, and I know that something of ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... river and the high hills. George MacDougall could plainly hear the loud talking and shouts of those bent on dissipation while crossing the ice by dog-team to West Dawson. Glancing in that direction he saw the brilliantly lighted dance-house and saloon, whose blare of brassy instruments reached his unwilling ears at that distance; the still, cold air of an Arctic night being a perfect conductor of sound. Under the sheltering, furry fringe of his cap his forehead gathered itself into ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... (Eriodendron samauma); and on the inner sides lined with of the tips of palm-fronds. They are long and purseshaped. The young when first hatched have very much shorter bills than their parents. The only species of Trochilinae which I found at Caripi were the little brassy-green Polytmus viridissimus, the sapphire and emerald (Thalurania furcata), and ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... dead calm of the desert there was no sound or movement. On all sides the vast gray waste stretched, a yawning inferno of dead, dry sand overhung with a brassy, cloudless sky in which swam the huge ball of molten silver that for ages had ruled ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... but she said nothing. After frozen seconds, she sighed and went to open it. The curtains billowed, and a babble of conversation blew in from the terrace of the Keith mansion. With the sound came the occasional brassy discord of a musician tuning his instrument. She clutched the window-sash as if she wished to slam it ...
— Death of a Spaceman • Walter M. Miller
... and fastened under a small hat pinned precariously aloft; her eyes were steady, like his own. She wore a black dress ornamented with large carmine dots, with a scant black ribband about her waist, her sole adornment a brassy wedding ring, that almost covered an entire joint. She spoke in a rapid, absent voice, as if her attention were perpetually wandering down from the subject in hand to an invisible kitchen stove, or a child temporarily ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... some courage from the relaxation in the savage grimness of his captors, which seemed implied by this rough pleasantry, and with him such recuperation of spirits naturally took the form of brassy self-assertion. ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... the world seems when one doesn't have to begin the day with an alarm clock! There is a hateful authority in its brassy, peremptory summons that puts one on the defensive immediately. To be sure, Nance dreamed she heard it the following day at noon, and sprang up in bed with the terrifying conviction that she would be late at Miss Bobinet's. But when she saw where she was, she gave a sigh ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... clearing his throat before blowing a bugle, and then, full, rich, deep, and flute-like, he lazily gave out the first bars of his song. Instantly, almost as if it had been a signal, a great tit-mouse sang out, "Tzur ping-ping! tzur ping-ping!" in metallic, ringing notes; a thrush struck in with his brassy, clarion challenge, thrush after thrush taking it up, till, with the clear warble of robin and higher, squeaking notes of hedge-sparrow and wren joining in, the wonderful first bars of the Dawn Hymn of the birds rolled away over the fields to ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... most certainly did not like this aspersion on his native district. He gazed in silence at Mr. Bryany's brassy and yet simple face, and did not like the ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... in that high brassy pitch of voice which Jem and I had adopted for this bravado period of our existence—"I think she's like our old white hen that turned up its eyes and died of the pip. ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... he's managed to bump into and spill in the slush just as he fetched the curb. He has his hat off and is beggin' her pardon in his best society way too; although he must have seen at a glance what she was,—one of these brassy-eyed parties with a hand-decorated complexion and a ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... the mucous membrane. On being brought to the surface and into contact with the inspired air, this substance grows thick and tough, or leathery, as we find it. It is the obstruction in the respiratory canal which this foreign matter causes that gives rise to the labored breathing, and the ringing, brassy cough, together with the crowing or whistling inspiration characteristic of croup. Before recovery can take place this membrane must be detached and expelled. The cough is nature's effort to accomplish ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... round, and a rumbling as from its subterranean vaults—if there are any—fills the castle. The lightning repeats itself, and, coming after the aforesaid thoughts of martial men, it bears a fanciful resemblance to swords moving in combat. It has the very brassy hue of the ancient weapons that here were used. The so sudden entry upon the scene of this metallic flame is as the entry of a presiding exhibitor who unrolls the maps, uncurtains the pictures, unlocks the cabinets, ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... drew near to Murray. From the hills above their camp Denver could see the dumps and hoists, and the mill that was going up below, and as the ore-trains glided by on the newly finished narrow-gauge he picked up samples of the copper. It was the same as his vein, a brassy yellow chalcopyrites with chunks of red native copper, and he forgot the daily heart-ache and the ignominy of his task as he contemplated the wealth that awaited him. Yes, the mine was still his, though he was herded with common felons and compelled to build a road for Murray; ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge |
