"Oval" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... second turn the cliff ended in a vertical slit-glare of sunlight. The pony whinnied. Carmena led the way out into an oval cliff-walled valley, two or three miles long ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... the maid entered with Leighton's card, Folly was virtually indistinguishable. She could only be guessed at in the mummy-like form extended, but not stretched, if you please, on the operating-table. Her face, all but a central oval, was held in a thin mask of kidskin, and her whole body, from neck to peeping pink toes, was wrapped closely in bandages soaked with cold cream. The bath-tub was still half-full of tepid water, from which rose faint exhalations of the latest attar, ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... island by storms: its gravelly soil produces nothing but willows and persicaria, but there is in it a high hill well covered with greensward and very pleasant. The form of the lake is an almost regular oval. The banks, less rich than those of the lake of Geneva and Neuchatel, form a beautiful decoration, especially towards the western part, which is well peopled, and edged with vineyards at the foot, of a chain ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... produced a great transformation in his appearance. Dantes had entered the Chateau d'If with the round, open, smiling face of a young and happy man, with whom the early paths of life have been smooth, and who anticipates a future corresponding with his past. This was now all changed. The oval face was lengthened, his smiling mouth had assumed the firm and marked lines which betoken resolution; his eyebrows were arched beneath a brow furrowed with thought; his eyes were full of melancholy, and from their depths occasionally sparkled gloomy fires ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Fritz came running out of breath, crying out, "The bread-fruit tree! I have found the bread-fruit tree! Here is the fruit,—excellent, delicious bread. Taste it, father; here, Ernest; here, Jack;" and he gave us each a part of an oval fruit, about the size of an ordinary melon, which really seemed ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... logs and she bent over the fire, stretching her thin hands so close to it that a faint halo shone about the oval nails. The light touched to russet the rings of dark hair escaping from her braids, and made ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... long vista of memory, to the many faces turned to me from beds of pain, I find few to which I can attach a name, and one I seem never to have looked upon but once. It is a long, sallow face, surmounted by bushy, yellow hair; it has a clear, oval outline, and straight nose, brown eyes and a down of young manhood on the wasted, trembling lips; I knew it then, as the face of a fever patient, but not one to whom I had rendered any special service, and felt surprised when ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... work, alas! one plate now at the Louvre is all we have; and here in the ducal city on the hill rich and noble things were already being made in the stout and lustrous majolica that was destined to acquire later on so wide a ceramic fame. Jars and bowls and platters, oval dishes and ewers and basins, and big-bodied, metal- welded pharmacy vases were all made and painted at Urbino whilst Raffaelle Sanzio was running about on rosy infantine feet. There was a master-potter ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... sole is solid with the tile. The bottom is flat, but the bore is round, or oval, or egg-shaped, with the small end of ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... forest, we see the mild red orb, like an immense ruby, just in the act of sinking in the bank of pale blue which now thickens the Western horizon. But what have we here? A splendid butternut tree, with quantities of the oval fruit scattered about amidst the brown leaves, in their coats of golden green. What a rich lustre is upon them, made brighter by the varnish, and how delightful their pungent perfume. Let us crack a few of the strong, deeply-fluted shells. In their tawny nooks nestle the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... in its front and in its rear, at very short distances from the buildings. A little south of it, the mountains recede sufficiently to admit the bed of a small, dark, wintry-looking sheet of water, which is oval in form, and may cover fifty or sixty acres. This lake nearly fills the whole of the level part of the col, being bounded north by the site of the convent, east by the mountain, west by the path, for which there is barely room between the water and the rising rocks, and south by the same ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... high carved chimney-piece in one of the bedchambers there hung a little row of miniatures—old-fashioned oval miniatures, pale and faded—pictures of men and women with the powdered hair of the Georgian period, and the flowing full-bottomed wigs familiar to St. James's and Tunbridge-wells in the days of inoffensive Anne. There were in all seven miniatures, six of which specimens of antique portraiture ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... made in daylight. I was aloft in my swooper at the time, hanging motionless about a mile up. Below, the groundships looked like a number of oval lozenges gliding across a map, each surrounded by a circular halo of luminescence that was ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan
... of Gold Hill, directly overlooking the town—first the huge, dismantled mill; then the white slide of the waste dump; and then, up the gulch, the looming gallows-frame of the hoist and the dim bulk of abandoned houses. The mine had made the town, and the town had clustered near it in the broad oval of the valley below; but in its day the Paymaster had been a community by itself, with offices and bunk-houses and stores. Now all was deserted and in the pale light of the moon it seemed the mere ghost of a mine. A loose ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... and blue mountains, in her hand is a book; but one feels that she is thinking of neither book nor scenery but that her thoughts go back in saudade to the soft air and merry days of Lisbon. It might indeed be a picture of Saudade. There is a slight flush on her pale oval face. Her almond-shaped eyes are grey-green, her nose delicately aquiline. In the eyes and in the general expression there is a look of undeniable sadness. Her dress of plum, cherry-pink, gold and ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... permitted herself a tiny smile of malicious amusement. She was a small woman but one in whom smallness was charm and not defect. Once she had been exceedingly pretty; she was moderately pretty still. The narrow oval of her face remained unspoiled but the small features, once delicately clear, appeared in some strange way to be blurred and coarsened. The fine grained skin which should have been delicate and firm had coarsened ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... to step over to the two. Then he stopped abruptly as he heard a sharp metallic clang from the cone-building out in the purple mists beyond the end wall. He looked quickly up and saw that an oval window had opened in the structure near its tip. Framed in the opening was what seemed to be a large concave mirror. At one side of the mirror was a living being of some kind, but the intervening mists prevented Blake from making out any details beyond a ...
— Zehru of Xollar • Hal K. Wells
... in two plaits, a girlish coiffure which suited the melancholy face. There was a deceptive look of calm in the dark eyes, with the hollow, shadowy circles about them; sometimes, when she was off her guard, their expression told of secret anguish. The oval of her face was somewhat long; but happiness and health had perhaps filled and perfected the outlines. A forced smile, full of quiet sadness, hovered continually on her pale lips; but when the children, ...
— La Grenadiere • Honore de Balzac
... temper, and presumably there is a matrimonial tiff. Very likely most of this is fiction, bred of the popular prejudice. The King loved her, that is certain. She was a beautiful high-spirited woman, so beautiful that many hundreds of years after, when her grave was opened, the delicate oval of her skull excited admiration yet. But the people hated her. Twenty generations after her death it was their custom when passing her grave to spit on it with the exclamation "Out upon thee, Bengerd! God ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... savory, was the prelude at all dinners in New France. A salmon speared in the shallows of the Chaudiere, and a dish of blood-speckled trout from the mountain streams of St. Joachim, smoked upon the board. Little oval loaves of wheaten bread were piled up in baskets of silver filigree. For in those days the fields of New France produced crops of the finest wheat—a gift which Providence has since withheld. "The wheat went away with the Bourbon lilies, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... of pure white feathers, which shine like satin; and from the sides of the head spring the six wonderful feathers from which the bird receives its name. These are slender wires, six inches long, with a small oval web at the extremity. In addition to these ornaments, there is also an immense tuft of soft feathers on each side of the breast, which when elevated must entirely hide the wings, and give the bird au appearance of being double its real bulk. The bill ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... they call her the Rose Queen," Barlow was communing with himself. For the oval face with its olive skin, as fair as a Kashmiri girl's, was certainly beautiful. The black hair was smoothed back from a wide low forehead, after the habit of the Mahratti women; the prim simplicity of this seeming to add to the girlish effect. ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... slopes with blue-green thickets of pine. Across the river was a choppy sea of sand-dunes stretching away to the north as far as sight could reach. Here and there a high-flung mound, smooth and oval or capped with ledges of black, glistening rode broke ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... caught by a pair of fine eyes, a Grecian nose, and a brilliant complexion. Mr. Wendover was no doubt a great deal too wise to have any serious ideas about such a person as Ida Palliser; but he liked to talk to her, he liked to watch the sensitive colour come and go upon the perfect oval of her cheek, while the dark eye brightened or clouded with every change of feeling; and while he was yielding to these vulgar distractions there was no chance of his falling ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... horizon, aft of us. But suddenly, just at the moment the sun must have been descending below the horizon to the south of it, the black wall of cloud slowly parted, and the opening so made widened until it became an enormous oval, reaching from horizon half-way to zenith, framing a scene of astounding beauty and grandeur. Range after range of cloud crests that looked like mountain folds rose one above another, with the appearance of vast intervening space between, some of the ranges ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... flight of steps in order to obtain a good view of the grotto, an oval opening in the rocks made to look like a stalactite cave, with scores and hundreds of ex-votos in the shape of crutches. Judging from this display, there should be no more lame folks left in France. The Virgin ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... still separated by a long interval from the pretended race of giants. As for the family to which it belongs, it is evidently Caucasian. It is the white race, our own. The skull of this fossil is a regular oval, or rather ovoid. It exhibits no prominent cheekbones, no projecting jaws. It presents no appearance of that prognathism which diminishes the facial angle. [1] Measure that angle. It is nearly ninety degrees. But I will go further in my deductions, ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... squat-built man, and his pale, oval face was strangely illuminated by piercing eyes of a forbidding expression. His moustache hung straggling about the corners of his mouth, and there was something indicative of cruelty and meanness about ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... slight. Her hair and eyes were light yellow-brown, and the former had a natural wave in it. Her shoulders and bust were superb, and her small head was beautifully set on a lovely, rather long, neck. She had an oval face, with straight, delicate features, now slightly distorted by temper. But the most remarkable thing about her was her complexion. Her skin was exquisite, delicately smooth and white, warmly white like a white ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... was in store for me ere the greatest happiness of all arrived; for that morning, from Virginia, a little packet came to Elsin; and opening it together, we found a miniature of his Excellency, set in a golden oval, on which we read, inscribed: "With great ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... for directly behind the little circle of hearers the heavy curtains had been pushed aside, and a girl stood framed there against the dull red of the draperies. She was rather above medium height, with a figure rounded by exercise, a face oval and lighted by deep blue eyes underneath masses of burnished, coppery hair. Her personality seemed to fill the room. She breathed wholesomeness, vigor, sincerity ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... wide mouth, and turned-up nose of the Saxon race, so common among the lower classes in Britain, are here succeeded in the next generation, by the small oval face, straight nose, and beautifully-cut mouth of the American; while the glowing tint of the Albion rose pales before the withering influence ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... altogether mockingly now, and sat holding her shapely hands, which were neither so large nor so rough as they might have been, across her middle and watching her son while the machine pushed about under his palm, and he bent his wan eyes upon one of the oval-framed photographs on the wall, as if rapt in a supernal vision. The boy stared drowsily at the planchette, jerking this way and that, and making abrupt starts and stops. At last the young man lifted his palm from it, and put it aside ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... no other damage, save the shattering of the glass, had been done. I could not but notice the strange arrangement of the curios on the shelf of the cabinet. All the scarabs, rings, amulets, &c. were arranged in an uneven oval round an exquisitely-carved golden miniature figure of a hawk-headed God crowned with a disk and plumes. I did not wait to look further at present, for my attention was demanded by more pressing things; ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... follows another long pause, and at last footsteps are heard approaching from within. The bolts are drawn, the door is opened, and you are led up to a spacious drawing-room. At the wall opposite the windows there is sure to be a sofa, and before it an oval table. At each end of the table, and at right angles to the sofa, there will be a row of three arm-chairs. The other chairs will be symmetrically arranged round the room. In a few minutes the host will appear, in his long double-breasted black coat and well-polished long boots. His ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... face was of a perfect oval, his features high and noble, his complexion was fair, his eyes light blue, and, contrary to the custom of the time, when wigs were almost universally worn, he allowed his hair to fall in long ringlets on his neck. His manner was graceful, and although he always ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... The orange-gorgeted flycatcher. A small brown bird with an oval patch of bright chestnut on the throat, and some white at the base of the tail. (This white is very conspicuous when the bird is flying.) This flycatcher, which is very common about Darjeeling, often alights ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... thought, staring down at the dim oval of her face. Again he twitched a little. Again his fingers tightened on her arms. He twisted her around with a kind of ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... with a horizontal blue stripe in the center superimposed on a vertical red band, also centered; five white, five-pointed stars are arranged in an oval pattern in the center of the blue band; the five stars represent the five main islands of Bonaire, Curacao, Saba, Sint ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... rear is opened and Eileen enters. She is just over eighteen. Her wavy mass of dark hair is parted in the middle and combed low on her forehead, covering her ears, to a knot at the back of her head. The oval of her face is spoiled by a long, rather heavy Irish jaw contrasting with the delicacy of her other features. Her eyes are large and blue, confident in their compelling candour and sweetness; her lips, full and red, half-open over strong, even teeth, droop at the corners into ...
— The Straw • Eugene O'Neill
... his mouth, the Very Young Man shouted up: "It's too far away. We can't make it—we're too small." They waited. Suddenly, without warning, a great wooden oval bowl fifteen or twenty feet across came at them with tremendous speed. ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... appearance, barely passed the boundary between childhood and girlhood—she could hardly be more than fifteen or sixteen years old. Her eyes, of the purest and loveliest blue, rested on Amelius with a vacantly patient look, like the eyes of a suffering child. The soft oval outline of her face would have been perfect if the cheeks had been filled out; they were wasted and hollow, and sadly pale. Her delicate lips had none of the rosy colour of youth; and her finely modelled chin was disfigured ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... of a slender, girlish figure, similar in every detail to the earthly women of my past life. She did not see me at first, but just as she was disappearing through the portal of the building which was to be her prison she turned, and her eyes met mine. Her face was oval and beautiful in the extreme, her every feature was finely chiseled and exquisite, her eyes large and lustrous and her head surmounted by a mass of coal black, waving hair, caught loosely into a strange yet becoming coiffure. Her skin was of a light reddish copper color, against ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... The building was oval in form, and composed of a golden fleecy incrustation from which it derived it, name. Within, the "Nest" ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... opened the upper part of the sound, we saw a very large fire about three or four miles higher up, which formed a complete oval, reaching from the top of the hill down almost to the water-side, the middle space being inclosed all round by the fire, like a hedge. I consulted with Mr Fannin, and we were both of opinion that we could expect to reap no other advantage than the poor satisfaction of killing ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... ginger carefully, trying a level spoonful first. Then mix all into a paste. If the flavor of ginger is not strong enough, add more; they should taste well of it, without being hot in the mouth. Roll the paste a quarter of an inch thick, and cut into small oval or round cakes, sift powdered sugar over them, and bake rather slowly a very ...
— Choice Cookery • Catherine Owen
... there no sergeants in the white saloon Brewing their punch upon the golden stove? No bristling veterans in the china-room? And in the galleries? The Grenadiers Saw you come strolling as a matter-of-course? A man may cross the oval cabinet And not be turned to mince-meat ...
— L'Aiglon • Edmond Rostand
... indistinct horizons of this cloud sea was at first starry and then paler with a light that crept from north to east as the dawn came on. The Milky Way was invisible in the blue, and the lesser stars vanished. The face of the adventurer at the steering-wheel, darkly visible ever and again by the oval greenish glow of the compass face, had something of that firm beauty which all concentrated purpose gives, and something of the happiness of an idiot child that has at last got hold of the matches. His companion, a less imaginative type, sat with his legs spread wide over the long, coffin-shaped ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... dissection, and set them at liberty that they might seek the males. The first which did so, was seized the instant she returned, and without dissection spontaneously exhibited what we were so impatient to behold. Examining the under part of the belly, we saw the oval end of a white substance which distended the sexual organs. The belly was in constant motion, by alternate extension and contraction. Already had we prepared to sever the rings, and by dissection to ascertain the ...
— New observations on the natural history of bees • Francis Huber
... conjectured that the figure of the earth might be spheroidal before Newton or Huyghens turned their attention to the subject. At a meeting of the Royal Society on the 28th of February, 1678, a discussion arose respecting the figure of Mercury which M. Gallet of Avignon had remarked to be oval on the occasion of the planet's transit across the sun's disk on the 7th of November, 1677. Hooke was inclined to suppose that the phenomenon was real, and that it was due to the whirling of the planet on an axis "which made it somewhat of the shape of a turnip, or of a solid made ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... unfeeling artisans. In architecture, mechanical necessities and forms threaten to supplant aesthetic principles and shapes. The heavy square blocks, the rectangular lines, seem the antithesis of life and beauty. "All warmth, all movement, all love is round, or at least oval.... Only the cold, immovable, indifferent, and hateful is straight and square.... Life is round, and death is angular." [Footnote: Ellen Key, The Few and the Many, translated from a quotation in Max Dessoir, ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... blue which recall the skies of the north or the waters of the Danube; an aquiline nose, the nostrils open and slightly projecting, where emotions palpitate and courage is evidenced; a large mouth, Austrian lips, that is, projecting and well defined; an oval countenance, animated, varying, impassioned, and the ensemble of these features, replete with that expression, impossible to describe, which emanates from the look, the shades, the reflections of the face, which encompasses ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... 1 cup milk, grated rind 1 lemon, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 5 slices stale cake, 1/2 teaspoon powdered cinnamon, sugar and few grains salt. Cake should be about a 1/4 of an inch thick, not less. Cut out into oval or round shapes with cutter. Beat egg, mix with milk, lemon rind, salt, and about 1 teaspoon sugar. Lay slices of cake in this custard until they are soft, but not crumbly; time will depend upon how stale cake is. Heat 1/2 Crisco in frying pan, lift ...
— The Story of Crisco • Marion Harris Neil
... royal character"—"[Greek: grammasin Aithiopikois oy demotikois, alla basilikois]." This distinction between the royal and popular system of hieroglyphics, as well as the etiquette, before mentioned, of inscribing the title of the king within a circle or oval, is borrowed, as need hardly be mentioned, from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... the west, and back again to the north. If the movement had been quite regular, the apex would have described a circle, or rather, as the stem is always growing upwards, a circular spiral. But it generally describes irregular elliptical or oval figures; for the apex, after pointing in any one direction, commonly moves back to the opposite side, not, however, returning along the same line. Afterwards other irregular ellipses or ovals are successively described, with their longer [page 2] axes directed to different points ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... as the living insect, the first living creature seen coming to life from the fertilizing mud of the Nile, under the influence of the hot rays of the sun, after the subsidence of the inundating waters of that river. The royal cartouches of their kings is in an oval taken from the form of its under side. And this oval form has existed from the most remote times that we have any ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... photograph, in an oval frame of old-time water gilt, was a portrait of Miss Herold's mother. What a charming face, with its delicate, high-bred nose and lips! The boy, Jim, had her mouth and nose, and his sister her eyes, slightly tilted to a slant at the outer corners—beautifully shaped eyes, ...
— Blue-Bird Weather • Robert W. Chambers
... ceiling is coffered, and the male and female patterns are counterchanged diagonally. Bosses of lions' heads and rosettes project from the surfaces of the beams, between which the intarsia panels are flat. The central features in the several divisions are sunk, a central oblong with an oval in centre bearing the subject of the Resurrection and two side diamonds. The panels surrounding these have raised mouldings, so that there is considerable variety of level, and the whole is raised on a bracketed cornice, the flat surface of which has small panels inlaid in the ...
— Intarsia and Marquetry • F. Hamilton Jackson
... piece of confidence so unprecedented, that I must have been blind, indeed, not to have foreseen what it prefaced. I had seen her face the first time I entered his house, where her photograph hung on a conspicuous wall: the charming, oval face of a young girl, little more than a child, with great eyes, that one guessed, one knew not why, to be the colour of violets, looking out with singular wistfulness from a waving cloud of dark hair. Afterwards, he told me ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... had she been three inches shorter, would have passed for a graceful slenderness. But Brent took this in at a glance; his attention was more particularly concentrated on the girl's face—a delicate oval, framed in a mass of dark hair. She was all dark—dark hair, an olive complexion, large, unusually lustrous dark eyes, fringed by long soft lashes, an almost dark rose-tint on her cheeks. And in the look which she gave him there was something ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... another ball of clay. This she dabs upon the plastic foundation, and continues the apparently rude operation until some twenty or thirty pills of clay are adhering at equal distances. She then forms these into a number of neat oval-shaped cells, about the size of a wren's egg, and in each cell she deposits one egg. She then flies off in search of spiders, which are to be laid tip in stores within the cells as food for ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... length portrait of a handsome youth. He was not tall, but he was gracefully proportioned. His shoulders were broad; and, rising from the midst of a slender throat, adorned with a fall of lace, appeared his stately head crowned with a wealth of long, brown curls. His face was of a beautiful oval, his complexion clear, his mouth wreathed with happy smiles. The brow was high and arched, and the fine gray eyes beamed with hope and energy. In one hand he held a rose, which he extended to a person not represented in the picture; the other band, half veiled by its overhanging fall of gossamer ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... assumed for aw in that the opening of the lips is larger, the upper lip is raised higher, the flat portion is wider, and the under lip is a little relaxed. The form of the opening to produce aw is oval; the form for ah is more ...
— Resonance in Singing and Speaking • Thomas Fillebrown
... innumerable wheat plants which are fixed in the soil of the field, about harvest time, you will find that it consists of a stem which ends in a root at one end and an ear at the other, and that blades or leaves are attached to the sides of the stem. The ear contains a multitude of oval grains which are the seeds of the wheat plant. You know that when these seeds are cleared from the husk or bran in which they are enveloped, they are ground into fine powder in mills, and that this powder is the flour of which bread is made. If a handful of flour mixed with a ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... It may be that it originated from the quadripartite vaulting of the Normans, the segmental groins of which, crossing diagonally, produced to appearance the pointed arch. It may be that it was derived from that mystical figure of a pointed oval form, the vesica piscis. It may be, lastly, that it was suggested simply by the intersection of semicircular arches, so frequently found in ornamental arcades. The last cause may perhaps be the true one; but it matters little whence the pointed arch came. ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... too, thus combining two tools in one. It should be more generally known and used. With the ordinary fork, used for handling manure and gathering up trash, weeds, etc., every gardener is familiar. The type with oval, slightly up-curved tines, five or six in number, and a D handle, is the most convenient and comfortable for ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... time and a hundred leagues of space. But since this is a long leap, a few stepping-stones will be convenient. The Parson, then, has brought in on the way a nice batch of velvet duck, noticeable for their extremely large, oval, elevated, scarlet nostrils; we have shot at seals, and almost hit them in the most admirable manner; we have hunted for an indubitable polar bear,—and found a dog and a midnight mystification; we have played at chess, euchre, backgammon, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... disturbed, for I thought that a more sympathetic lover would have noted that his companion was not so enthusiastic as himself. Indeed Miss Warren seemed to bring in with her the cold pale moonlight. Her finely- chiselled oval face looked white and thin as if she were chilled, and I noticed that she ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... bringing an album bound in pigskin, in which he asked Frederick and Schmidt to write their names. Then he opened a very practical closet reaching to the floor, one of Willy's contrivances, and took out a carved wooden figure, a German Madonna by Till Riemenschneider. The sweet oval of her lovely face was not so much that of a Madonna as ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... Apterous, oval; thorax in front semicircular, shrouding the head; posterior angle sharp, rounded behind, the frontal edge bent slightly back, and yellowish; the upper surface brown, rather obscure, the surface irregularly raised, below deep shining pitchy brown. Abdomen yellowish ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... Dates are oval in shape, and have a long solid stone. They form the principal food of the inhabitants of some of the eastern countries, and are an important article ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes
... George," said Fanny, as the carriage reached the oval in front of the house, and swept around towards the portico. "It's a younger man; and ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... a slight figure swathed in velvety darkness of furs and veils that gave out a faint perfume of violets, and the suggestion of a pale, oval face. Her voice ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... side of the stage, one foot from the drop curtain; Love at the left hand side, the same distance from the curtain; Faith and Charity at equal distances from Love and Hope, and three feet from the drop curtain. Placed in this manner, they will form a half oval. The stage furniture consists of four small pedestals, twenty-four inches square, with a cap and base extending out two inches, covered with white cloth, and ornamented in front with a small wreath of myrtle. Faith takes ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... European ancestors, had ever beheld. Of commanding stature and physique, with an air of highest breeding and repose, he looked both a man of the great world and an intolerant leader of men. His long oval face was thin and somewhat lined, the mouth heavily moulded and closely set, suggestive of sarcasm and humor; the nose long, with arching and flexible nostrils. His eyes, seldom widely opened, were light blue, very keen, usually cold. ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... to excuse me, I went to the hedge and faced the Frenchman with the frightful calm of despair. He was a short, stout little man, with blue cheeks, sparkling black eyes, and a vivacious walnut-coloured countenance; he wore a short black alpaca coat, and a large white cravat, with an immense oval malachite brooch in the centre of it, which I mention because I found myself staring mechanically at it ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... These increase in size and cause a swelling often of extraordinary dimensions, the surface of which appears hard, irregular, bumpy and in certain parts yielding and elastic. If the process is extended to the testicle, this also increases in size. Then both together form an oval swollen mass and can not be ...
— Prof. Koch's Method to Cure Tuberculosis Popularly Treated • Max Birnbaum
... Some had soft flapping blinkers, others wore them goffered and stiffened with starch; these hid their face at the bottom of a deep white tunnel; others, on the contrary, showed their countenance set in an oval frame of pleated cambric, prolonged behind into conical wings of starched linen lustrous from heavy irons. As he looked over this expanse of caps, Durtal was reminded of the Paris landscape of roofs, in shapes resembling ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... be made by shaping each portion of dough into small oval rolls quite tapering at each end, allowing them to become light, and baking far enough apart so that one will not ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... midst of a rocky and barren country, the walls of Jerusalem [59] enclosed the two mountains of Sion and Acra, within an oval figure of about three English miles. [60] Towards the south, the upper town, and the fortress of David, were erected on the lofty ascent of Mount Sion: on the north side, the buildings of the lower town ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... her mind upon a "chest of drawers," and now that that particular piece of furniture stood proudly in her room, much of her day was given to polishing it and the half-dozen stuffed bottomed chairs, which were the envy of every housewife in the village. A large oval mirror stood upon the top of the drawers, and was draped with a piece of cheap curtain cloth, bleached to the whiteness of ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... that you immediately forgave her the indecency of her pitiful little gown. She was pretty in a daringly demure fashion, like a wicked little Puritan, or a poverty-stricken Cleo de Merode, with her smooth brown hair parted in the middle, drawn severely down over her ears, framing the lovely oval of her face and ending in a simple coil at the neck. Some serpent's wisdom had told Sophy to eschew puffs. But I think her prettiness could ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... a tight bunch and sat twisting her long thickish fingers. Eve stood up in her tears. Her smile and the curves of her mouth were unchanged by her weeping, and the crimson had spread and deepened a little in the long oval of her face. Miriam watched the changing crimson. Her eyes went to and fro between it and the neatly pinned masses of ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... were mimic battles often on the islands. A hidden couple found out and dragged back. A lone man attacked and pelted with flowers by a band of marauding girls. A diving platform at one end of an oval lagoon. Girls mounting it to dive into the red-shimmering water, where waiting youths were swimming, and by their prowess in downing other contenders would seize upon the girls and carry them off to where a barge was loading its passengers for the ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... we'll bring her!" answered Archie, issuing some mysterious order, which was so promptly obeyed that, before Rose could get out of the carriage, the boys had caught hold of the pole and rattled her out of the barn, round the oval and up to the front door with a cheer that brought two caps to an upper window, and caused Debby to cry ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... his arrangements so cleverly, that none was very far behind his neighbour. And as to the difference of shape in the first young leaves, what could it signify? It is true the young mustards were round and thick; the cresses oval and pointed; the carrots mere green threads; the onions sharp little blades; while the beets had an odd, stainy look. But they all woke up to the same life and enjoyment, and were all greeted with friendly welcome as they appeared, ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... of chestnuts and found that he was beside the open rond point, where the pool lay within its stone circumference, unclean and choked with lily-pads, and the fountain—a naked lady holding aloft a shell—stood above. The rond point was not in reality round; it was an oval with its greater axis at right angles to the long, straight avenue of larches. At the two ends of the oval there were stone benches with backs, and behind these, tall shrubs grew close and overhung, so that even at noonday the spots ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... arm and went on in front of him through the narrow paths bordered with low myrtle hedges. She walked as if fatigued, turning round every few minutes to smile back at her lover. She was dressed in black and wore a black veil that cast over her faint and trembling smile a shadow of mourning. Her oval chin was paler and purer than the roses she carried in ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... opened, and the lady under discussion entered the room. Taller than Lady Lisle or Philippa, she was more slender and fragile-looking than either. Hair of pale shining gold framed a face very white and fair, of that peculiar pure oval shape, and those serene, regular Grecian features, which marked the royal Plantagenets. For this lady was of the bluest blood, and but for an act of cruel treachery on the part of King Edward the Fourth, she might have been the Princess ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... his life Mr. Chester had come to resemble one. With his lean body and drooping oval head, he was not unlike the figure nine, an analogy that might be continued by saying that nine is the highest degree a bachelor number can achieve, the figures after that going in couples. It was an open secret that the tragedy of ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... consists of two oval blades of either bone, ivory, mother of pearl or tortoise-shell, pointed at both ends, and joined together in the middle. A good shuttle contributes materially to the rapid and perfect execution of the work and attention ...
— Encyclopedia of Needlework • Therese de Dillmont
... eye. Scarcely are these visitors well ensconced in the chimney corner, after their fur wrappings are removed, before the sound of wheels is again heard, and shouts of joy announce the arrival of the Greens. That tall, slender, intellectual girl, with pale oval face and expressive eyes, is Ellen. Her cousins are very proud of her, for she has just returned from boarding-school with a high character for scholarship, and has carried away the prize medal for poetry from all competitors; ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... she turned with him and walked along the mosaic pavement of the terrace. She was little more than a girl, with a slim, graceful figure, and clad in a simple white morning gown, which served to enhance her youthful beauty. Her face was a pure oval, with clear-cut features and an exquisitely curved, sensitive mouth, while her grey-blue eyes gazed from beneath their thick lashes with a calm serenity that bred faith and confidence in those who looked upon them. Crowned with a wealth of pale golden hair, ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... power of the castle an idea may be formed from the extent of the fosse, little less than half a mile in circumference. The outline of the walls is irregularly oval, and the even front is interrupted by towers of various sizes, and placed at unequal distances. On the northern side, where the hill is steepest, there are no towers; but the walls are still farther ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... When they reached the summit, which was not more than twenty feet in width and entirely barren, a magnificent scene burst in view. For ten or fifteen miles round on every side, the eye could discern oval, oblong, and circular groves of various dimensions, scattered over the rich virgin soil. The gentle undulations of the prairie resembled the boundless ocean entranced, as if the long swells had been suddenly abandoned by the wind, and yet remained ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... floated on through the windows into the moonlight; one by one the older part of my guests left me; only a few of the gayest and youngest still persevered in that indefatigable waltz, the oval room looking as if a score of bubbles were playing hop and skip,—for in the crinoline expansions the gentlemen's black pen-and-ink outlines were all lost. At length even these went; the music died; its soul went up with a long, broken cry; its body was put ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... rain the water rose before morning so it was ten feet deep. We made a boat of one of the wagon beds, and had a regular ferry, and when they pulled the wagons over they sank below the surface but came out all right. We came to Pawnee Village, on the Platte, a collection of mud huts, oval in shape, and an entrance low down to crawl in at. A ground owl and some prairie dogs were in one of them, and we suspected they might be winter ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... plants in the great lower corridors and porticos, and vast hall of entrance, oval and open to the roof, with its marble gallery surrounding it and suspended midway, secured by its exquisite and lace-like screen of iron balustrading. Pictures of the great modern masters adorn ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... were of the oval kind; and in her right she had a dimple, which the least smile discovered. Her chin had certainly its share in forming the beauty of her face; but it was difficult to say it was either large or small, though perhaps it was rather of the former kind. ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... for all the mild weather, were hermetically closed and calked—these tenantless balconies hung over the sea as if it were the grand Venetian canal. But the principal relic of faded grandeur was the ample oval of the shield-like stern-piece, intricately carved with the arms of Castile and Leon, medallioned about by groups of mythological or symbolical devices; uppermost and central of which was a dark satyr in a mask, holding his foot on the prostrate neck ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... stone seats; that this door opened and revealed a circle of merry-voiced young people gathered around a great fireplace. As the impressive under-butler took her bags from Williams one of the group rose quickly and came toward her. She was very tall and slender with an oval-shaped face and a prominent nose like Mrs. Granger's. Robin knew she was Miss Alicia. She answered something unintelligible to Miss Alicia's informal greeting and let herself be ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... hard, granular snow, up which I scampered in fine tone, intending to follow it to its head, and cross the rocky spur against which it leans, hoping thus to come direct upon the base of the main Ritter peak. The surface was pitted with oval hollows, made by stones and drifted pine-needles that had melted themselves into the mass by the radiation of absorbed sun-heat. These afforded good footholds, but the surface curved more and more steeply at the head, and the pits became shallower and less abundant, until I found myself in danger ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... bottom is visible. Even a pin, dropped upon the stones below, is seen shining quite distinctly. A stone wall, level with the water, thirty feet high, encloses it, on which I ventured to walk all round the tank, which is of an oval form, with the assistance of our host, going one by one. A fall would be sufficiently awkward, involving drowning on one side and breaking your neck on the other. The water is beautiful—a perfect mirror, with long green ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... her eyes, and they looked at each other long and silently. The face on the pillow had still the remains of beauty. The powerful mouth and chin, the nose, which was long and delicate, the deep-set eyes, and broad brow under strong waves of hair, were all fused in a fine oval; and the modelling of the features was intensely and passionately expressive. That indeed was at once the distinction and, so to speak, the terror of the face,—its excessive, abnormal individualism, its surplus of expression. A woman to fret herself ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... are also some cherry trees. From Hieres to the sea, which is two or three miles, is a grove of orange trees, olives, and mulberries. The largest orange tree is of two feet diameter one way, and one foot the other (for the section of all the larger ones would be an oval, not a round), and about twenty feet high. Such a tree will yield about six thousand oranges a year. The garden of M. Fille has fifteen thousand six hundred orange, trees. Some years they yield forty thousand livres, some only ten thousand; ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Her face was oval; eyes black and large; and her hair black as the raven's wing; her features were small and regular; her teeth white and good; but her complexion was very pallid, and not a vestige of colour on her cheeks. As I have since thought, it was more ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... killed at the battle of Salamanca. Close by, too, is a picture of his charger, Billy Pitt, which he rode in the battle, and which lived, as is written on the picture, for many years afterwards. Again, as a pendant to the Captain's picture hangs a portrait of a lady, showing a beautiful oval face with three chestnut curls on each side of it and a mass of chestnut hair above, and two blue eyes as clear and as pure as a child's; and underneath this portrait is written the name of Lady Eleanor Bracefort, wife and widow of Captain ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... crown of the head in the same way that the individual had worn them during life. The sunken cheeks were rendered yet more ghastly by the rows of glistening teeth which protruded from between the lips, while the sockets of the eyes—filled with oval bits of mother-of-pearl shell, with a black spot in the centre—heightened the hideousness ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... will eventually break off, or occasionally automatic grafting takes place, and they unite. In the Verderer's Hall at Lyndhurst specimens are to be seen which have crossed and joined a second time, so that a complete hollow oval, or irregular circle of the wood could be cut ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... an oval area in Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, whose longer axis extends from north to south through Cincinnati, the Ordovician strata rise in a very low, broad swell, called the Cincinnati anticline. The Silurian and Devonian strata thin out as they approach this area and seem never to have ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... taken in another way. A party of natives proceed to a lagoon, or lake of still water, each carrying in his hand a small net (ken-de-ran-ko) of a semi-oval shape, about twenty inches long, from seven to nine inches across, and from five to seven inches deep. This net is kept in shape by a thin hoop of wood running round it in the upper part. With this the native dives to the bottom, ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... the buttress-crest still supports a double concentric circle with a maximum diameter of about fifteen feet; the outside is of earth, apparently thrown up for a rampart behind a moat, and the inside is of rough stones. Going south along the dorsum, we found remains of oval foundations; a trench apparently cut in the rock, pottery often an inch and more thick, and broken handmills made of the New Red Sandstone of the Hisma. Finally, at the northernmost point, where the cliff-edge falls abruptly, with a natural arch, towards the swamp, about one kilometre broad at ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... hides delivered at Whoop-Up. West turned and went straddling to the place where he and Morse had left their horses. On the way he came face to face with a girl, a lithe, dusky young creature, Indian brown, the tan of a hundred summer suns and winds painted on the oval of her lifted chin. She was carrying a package of sacks to the place where ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... traveller, and I might have guessed her nationality from the fact that, unlike the Englishwomen present, she was breakfasting in her hat. She was a pretty woman—no longer quite young—with a pale oval face and deep brown hair. As I approached she, having breakfasted, was drawing her veil down over her face, and subsequently attended to her hat with pretty, studied movements of the hands and arms which ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... be near was continually visiting her when she saw his face in this way, without its vivid animation; and now, to the rest of her grief, was added the regret that she had been unable to control the violent outburst which had shaken him. She sat watching him—her oval cheeks pallid, her eyes with the sorrowful brilliancy left by young tears, her curls in as much disorder as a just-awakened child's—watching that emaciated face, where it might have been imagined that a veil had been drawn never to be lifted, as if it were her dead joy which ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... seldom true circles, being usually elongated one way or another. Some instances occur which are rectangular, such as the room shown in figure 19, which was apparently a kiva. Nordenskioeld[19] illustrates an example which appears to have been oval by design, differing in this respect from anything found in De Chelly. Most of the kivas have an interior bench, about a foot wide and 2 feet above the floor. This bench is sometimes continuous around the whole interior, sometimes extends only partly ...
— The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... page is from an example in the same museum, shewing a different decoration, the oval plaques of figures and coats of arms being of carved ivory let into the surface of the coffer. This is an early specimen, and belongs as much to the last chapter ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... few hundred yards off is a headland called "Doctor Johnson's Head," because the rocks at the extremity present somewhat the appearance of a human face with massive features, like those of the great lexicographer. The point is surmounted by an oval boulder, which is so easily poised on one point that it rocks far more easily than the better ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... genteel and benevolent. The white stone steps and window-sills and the white fan over the door gave a certain effect of clean linen that was singularly pleasing. The young doctor, unlike Doctor Johnson, had a passion for clean linen. The knocker, too, was of the graceful long oval shape he liked, and burnished to the last point of perfection, and the shining windows were so placed as to give an air of cheerful ...
— Geoffrey Strong • Laura E. Richards
... a wood fire, very small and very bright, on the hearth—neat little logs laid on brass fire-dogs. Some portraits of powdered ladies and gentlemen hung in oval frames on the pale walls. There were silver candlesticks on the mantelpiece, and there were chairs and a table, very slim and polite, with slender legs. The room was extremely bare, but with a bright foreign bareness that ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... checked the growth of his genius by adhering closely to a prescribed cycle of effects. The praises of his patrons and the prosperity of his trade proved to his keen commercial sense that the raised ecstatic eyes, the upturned oval faces, the pale olive skin, the head inclined upon the shoulder, the thin fluttering hair, the ribands and the dainty dresses of his holy persons found great favour in Umbrian palaces and convents. Thenceforward he painted but little else; and when, ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... of engrossing interest are still far off in the distance. Staffa, the smaller and nearer of the two, presents but an unimposing front from the quarter by which we approach, being oval in form, low, and with a gently undulating surface, in which respect it does not differ materially, except in its dimensions, from the inferior islands among which we are steering our course, and which, cold, bald, and of a monotonous and desolate uniformity, betray their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... sort had trunks of about 7 or eight foot in circumference and about 80 or 90 foot high. These had branches at the top like coconut-trees, and their fruit like coconuts, but smaller: the nut was of an oval form, and about the bigness of a duck's egg: the shell black and very hard. It was almost full of kernel, having only a small empty space in the middle, but no water as coconuts have. The kernel is too hard to be eaten. ...
— A Continuation of a Voyage to New Holland • William Dampier
... that Lesbia's cheek was paler than of old, her eyes less bright. There was a heavy look that told of broken slumbers, there was a pinched look in that oval check. Good heavens! if her beauty were to pale and wane, before society had bowed down and worshipped it; if this fair flower were to fade untimely; if this prize rose in the garden of beauty were to wither and decay before it won ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... toward the speaker and now for the first time had a fair chance to look into the face of the voice's owner. She looked and saw the oval of a most comely face, white and drawn as though by exhaustion or by deep sorrow, or perhaps by both. For all their pallor the cheeks were full and smooth; the brow was broad and low; the mouth firm and sweet. From between the tall collars of the cape the throat, ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... like the first, by four horses in rich housings, containing two very beautiful damsels, one of whom attracted so much of the attention of the youthful nobles, that it was with difficulty they could preserve due order of march. The young dame in question was about seventeen; her face was oval in form, with features of the utmost delicacy and regularity. Her complexion was fair and pale, and contrasted strikingly with her jetty brows and magnificent black eyes, of oriental size, tenderness, and lustre. Her dark and luxuriant tresses were confined by a cap of black velvet ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... there could be none. He had seen them on the lady's person and had heard them described so accurately that he could not be mistaken; and then the box was the same he had once seen when Jack took him to his mother's room to show him what Uncle Arthur had brought. That was a tortoise shell, of an oval shape, lined with blue satin, and this was a tortoise shell, oval shaped, and lined with blue satin. Harold felt, when at last the daylight shone into his room, that if it had tarried a moment longer he must have gone mad. He ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... other broods of chickens to arrive in the hen-house, and I did not desire any more bantam and turkey performances. So, to avoid confusion, I played a trick upon Em'ly. I went down to Sunk Creek and fetched some smooth, oval stones. She was quite satisfied with these, and passed a quiet day with them in a box. This was not fair, the ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... before them a small glade—oval in shape. Tall firs edged this open space as evenly as graceful columns in a magnificent salle. The blue of the sky above it seemed especially bright, pure and dominant. The glade was full of children of various ages. They were sitting and reclining all around ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... engraver, "one must allow people to be happy in their own way. But it's a horrible way. Just think—a poor devil wants to create something in the joy of his heart; and he scratches like a chicken in the earth, longish or oval, until he makes a bed, and is proud and happy. That's the way life is—all a miserable fraud. There's eating—and most people understand how to do that fairly well—but outside of that there's little except scratching up the earth. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... in his turn was studying her, and held up her head and faced him sturdily. In spite of her drenched condition she did not look so very bedraggled, thanks to the simple linen suit she had worn. Her jet black hair, loose and damp, framed an oval face which lacked color without appearing unhealthy. The skin was dark—the gypsy dark of one who has lived much out of doors. Both the nose and the chin was of fine and rather delicate modeling ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... mind an immediate complete image of the hyperthyroid face, one should think of Shelley. The oval shape of it, with the delicate modeling of all the features, the wide, high brow, the large, vivacious, prominent eyes with the glint of a divine fire in them and the sensitive lips all belong to the classical picture. Generally flushed over ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... uncontaminated bloom, the subdued brilliancy of nature's most perfect growing things. It was in the deep clear eyes, in the satin sheen of her bare shoulders under the sordid gaslight; it was in the strong smooth lips, delicately shaded from salmon colour to the faintest peach-blossom; it was in the firm oval of her face, in the well-modelled ear, the straight throat and the curving neck; it was in her graceful attitude; it was everywhere. 'No doubt,' the ghosts might have said, 'there are more beautiful women in England than this one, ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... bank of the river, accompanied by three of the natives: they soon crossed the river and came to the encampment. The natives, who were Matabili, were tall, powerful men, well proportioned, and with regular features; their hair was shorn, and surmounted with an oval ring attached to the scalp, and the lobe of their left ears was perforated with such a large hole, that it contained a small gourd, which was used as a snuff-box. Their dress was a girdle of strips ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... I seek it vainly— With that record again to shine, Midst crack names in our Cycling Organ, But they never mention mine. It may be some day at the Oval I may cut that record again, But at present the Cups ...
— Mr. Punch Awheel - The Humours of Motoring and Cycling • J. A. Hammerton
... figure was superb; her dark hair crowned with a tiara of curious workmanship. Her rounded arm was covered with costly bracelets, but not a jewel on her finely-formed bust, and the least possible rouge on her still oval cheek. Madame Colonna retained ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... fingers Honor opened the little box which revealed to view a spangling collection of diamonds. It was an oval locket, profusely set with diamonds with her initials turned artfully on the surface. Inside were the miniature pictures of her father and mother. She laid down the costly gift and went over to her benefactor with tear-dimmed eyes. She put both her slender arms around his neck and pressed ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... been permitted to fabricate silver and copper medals or tokens, for public convenience, the most beautiful of which are those of M. Monneron. The largest is of almost pure copper, exactly of the size and thickness of the crown piece; in an oval is represented a female figure with a helmet on, sitting on an elevated place, on which is Dupre f. (or fecit) holding a book, inscribed Constitution des Francois; at her side is a shield with the arms of France, and at her feet an altar, on one side of which is the profile of the king; several ...
— A Trip to Paris in July and August 1792 • Richard Twiss
... was pretty well pleased with his attitude, and almost more the next day, when we met to go before the chiefs, to see him so stern and resolved. The chiefs awaited us in one of their big oval houses, which was marked out to us from a long way off by the crowd about the eaves, a hundred strong if there was one—men, women, and children. Many of the men were on their way to work and wore green wreaths, and it put me in thoughts ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson
... are frequently quoted as exhibiting a gradual passage from a more generalised to a more specialised type, seeing that the elongated, or oval, Spatangoids appear after the spheroidal Echinoids. But here it might be argued, on the other hand, that the spheroidal Echinoids, in reality, depart further from the general plan and from the embryonic ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... saved the situation. She turned to Jim Airth, with that impulsive sweetness which could never be withstood. In the rapidly deepening twilight, he could just see the large wistful grey eyes, in the white oval ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... She told herself that it was very much as though a sculptor's finished work had been rudely copied in wood. He was of a larger build than Adriance, and his shoulders were broad and heavy, while those of his brother were slender and rather girlish. His face was of the same oval mold, but it was gray and darkened about the mouth by continual shaving. His eyes were of the same inconstant April color, but they were reflective and rather dull; while Adriance's were always points of highlight, ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... conscious of them perhaps a month later—but the wilful charm, the enigmatic fascination, of the still face. The eyes were long and half closed under finely arched brows, there was a minute patch at the right corner of a pale scarlet, smiling mouth; a pointed chin marked an elusive oval beneath black hair drawn down upon a long slim neck, hair to which was pinned an odd headdress of old gilt with, at the back, pendent ornamental ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... relations and others in the place that she was not only the best person to seek information from, but was also the sweetest person in the village. She was a native born; her family had lived there for generations, and she was of that best South Hampshire type with an oval face, olive-brown skin, black eyes and hair, and that soft melancholy expression in the eyes common in Spanish women and not uncommon in the dark-skinned Hampshire women. She had been taught at the village school, and having attracted the attention and interest of the great lady of ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson
... of Kennington Oval Kerry was effectually aroused to the realities. A little runabout car passed his cab, coming from a southerly direction. Proceeding at a rapid speed it was lost in the traffic ahead. Unconsciously Kerry had glanced at the occupants and had recognized Margaret Halley and Seton Pasha. ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... recognized type of prettiness; a pure oval; from the smooth forehead to the dimpled little chin all its lines were soft and graceful. Her lack of colour, by heightening the effect of black eyebrows and darkly lustrous eyes, gave her at present a more spiritual cast than her character justified; but a thoughtful firmness ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... she said, pointing with a twig to the different parts as she named them, "right here, in the exact center of the blossom, is a bunch of green growing in the form of an oval, shaped somewhat like an egg with the smaller ...
— Every Girl's Book • George F. Butler
... the entrance to a tube and Hawkes handed him a small oval object with figures engraved on it. "That's your tube-token. It goes in ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... of still more remote days, for the whole of the summit was once a fortified camp of the ancient Britons. A roughly-piled, but massive wall, now almost all broken down, surrounded it, and within its grass-grown oval are two additional walls, at the east and the west ends of the enclosure, and many hut-circles, evidences of the rude dwellings of our remote ancestors. Excavations here many years ago brought to light a jasper ball, ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... had been lying all the time in her lap, white upon black, had at length drawn and fixed Gibbie's attention. They were very lady-like hands, long-fingered, and with the orthodox long-oval nails, each with a quarter segment of a pale rising moon at the root—hands nearly faultless, and, I suspect, considered by their owner entirely such—but a really faultless hand, who has ever seen?—To Gibbie's eyes they were ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... an air of calm composure reigned around my "Father's Fireside." He seated himself in his arm-chair, while my mother busied herself in preparing tea, and each little one took his appointed place around the oval wainscot table. The turf fire burned cheerily on the hearth. The tea-kettle gave out its hissing sounds, indicative of comfort; and the solitary candle diffused light on the fair young faces which brightened as the oat-cake and the "buttered pieces" ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... oval of the schooner's broad bilge showed above water, and the old Polly was so flat and tubby that their floating islet ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... had the intensely feminine curves which artists have caused to be associated with women of the Latin races; her eyes were like those of her elder sister, but larger and more brilliant. So big and splendid they were that they made the smooth oval of her olive face seem small. Quantities of heavy black hair rippled away from a forehead which would have been square if the hair had not grown down in a point like a Marie Stuart cap. Her chin was pointed, with ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... that attracted one, a pale sad face that was stamped on every feature with the impress of a determined will and of an intense womanliness. From the pronounced jaw that melted its squareness of profile in the oval of the full face to the dark brown eyes that rarely veiled themselves beneath their long-lashed lids, everything told that the girl possessed the indefinable something we call character. And if there was in ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... beneath, wherever he wished to form a bed. This variety served to amuse him and Betts, and they worked with so much the greater zeal, as their labours produced objects that were agreeable to the eye, and which amused them now, while they promised to benefit them hereafter. As each bed, whether oval, winding or straight, was dug, the loam and sea-weed was mixed up in it, in great abundance, after which it was ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... the fire to rise, and so let it lie almost one hour, turning it often, then pull it in pieces again, and strew in half a pound of Caraway Comfits, mingle them with the Paste, then take it lightly with your hand, fashion it like an Oval, and make it higher in the middle than the sides, let your Oven be as hot as for a Tart, be sure your Oven or Cake be ready both at once, put it upon a double paper buttered, and let it stand almost an hour, when it goes ...
— The Queen-like Closet or Rich Cabinet • Hannah Wolley
... of the nose was gone; but the left eye, in the first moment of exposure, was open and full, though it vanished almost immediately: and the pointed beard, so characteristic of the reign of King Charles, was perfect. The shape of the face was a long oval; many of the teeth remained; and the left ear, in consequence of the interposition of the unctuous matter between it and the cere-cloth, ...
— Shakespeare's Bones • C. M. Ingleby
... each cheek, and a blue circle under each eye, with a red spot in the centre of each. So far, the work was very striking and suggestive, but when Powlet finished off by drawing a series of blue, red, and white lines over Olaf's eyes, in the forms that usually indicate astonishment, added a red oval to the chin, with a blue spot in the middle of it, and stuck some feathers in his hair, the effect was absolutely tremendous, for it caused the native boys to yell with delight, and Snorro almost to fall off his protector's knee in ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... coolies. The gambier (Funis uncatis) was formerly called terra japonica, from being supposed to be an earth and to come from Japan. It is grown on sandy soil or dry hills, and requires very little labor in cultivation. It is a slender-stemmed, vine-like shrub with oval-shaped leaves and pale purplish flowers in clusters. The seeds germinate in forty days, and the seedlings are transplanted when about nine inches high. When full grown they reach a height of ten feet or more, and after the first year the leaves and branches are regularly gathered ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... the most irregularly shaped bodies of water that can be imagined. It has no well-defined form, being neither oval nor circular, but rather a combination of curves and varied outlines made by peninsulas and bays, of which only a map could convey any accurate idea. Ten islands are found upon its surface, and seven rivers and creeks enter it from various directions. It extends ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens |
