"Sparse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Here shall I live! On this spot shall stand the probationary palace!" and so saying fired my rifle at a tree a few yard's off. But the stolid tree—a bloodwood, all bone, toughened by death, a few ruby crystals in sparse antra all that remained significant of past life—afforded but meagre hospitality to the, ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... not whether you tell me or no," he answered, looking up into her face from the low seat at her feet. "Birth cannot add to your beauty, nor sparse quarterings detract from your charm. I have enough of both, good lack! And little good they are like to ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... faint stirring of pleasure in the thought that she was doing something against his wish on this anniversary. Deliberately, she sat alone by the river, waiting for the pageant of sunset to pass; and when she reached home the moon was up, a great white moon that turned the waving waste of pale, sparse grasses to a ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... considerately left me to carry on my promenade alone. I crossed the ground she had traversed, noting every feature surrounding it, the curving wheel-track, the thin prickly sand-herbage, the wave-mounds, the sparse wet shells and pebbles, the gleaming flatness of the water, and the vast horizon-boundary of pale flat land level with shore, looking like a dead sister of the sea. By a careful examination of my watch and the sun's altitude, I was able to calculate what would, in all ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... at last, but still he drove steadily on through the sparse settlements. Just at nightfall we came to a beautiful little stream, and stopped to let the horses drink. I heard its rippling, reassuring song on the pebbles. Thereafter all is dim and vague to me until my mother called out ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... Natchitoches. Parishes in this region are civil divisions, derived from the former regime. They are often larger than our counties at the North. This country, from the character of its soil, cannot have a dense population, until the swamps are drained. The population, except the sparse inhabitants of the pine woods, is fixed along the margin of the water courses, and the greater part of the planters can convey their produce immediately on board the steam-boats.—Recollections of the Last Ten Years. Passed in Occasional Residences and Journeyings ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... resides, or Jenkins lives. It would be cruel—indeed it would. True, Mrs. Moggs expects little else from one of your dashing style and elegant appearance. Such a call rarely comes to her but with some profitless query; yet look around at the sparse candies, the withering apples, and the forlorn groceries—specimens of which are affixed to the window-panes in triangular patches of paste and paper—speak they not of poverty? Purchase, then, if ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... the English as well as the Indian infantry regiments halted before the jungle instead of pushing forward to the river. Not even riflemen were sent into it, although the bush was by no means too thick for a chain of riflemen to take cover. The prickly bushes on the river's bank were sparse enough, and the high grass reaching up to the mens' shoulders would have ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... dusty gray olive-trees, the shabby scrub oaks, the low-branched sycamores as if she had not been familiar with them all her life. To-day the birds seemed to dart about more swiftly and to utter sweeter songs as they flew. The few sheep she spied nibbling the sparse grass on the rocky hillsides were surely whiter than those at home. The field flowers, with faces upturned to the bright sun, glowed with splendid color. The whole world ...
— Christmas Light • Ethel Calvert Phillips
... appropriations should be made for this important object. Whatever may have been our policy in the earlier stages of the Government, when the nation was in its infancy, our shipping interests and commerce comparatively small, our resources limited, our population sparse and scarcely extending beyond the limits of the original thirteen States, that policy must be essentially different now that we have grown from three to more than twenty millions of people, that our commerce, carried in our own ships, is found ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... two hours we wander through a thin forest, From time to time the trail approaches the brink of the rocky chasm of the Canon del Alamo, near enough to have its echo return to us every word we may shout down into its depths. Suddenly the timber grows sparse and we behold an open space on a gentle rise before us. It is a bare, bleak spot, perhaps a quarter of a mile long, and occupying the entire width of the mesa, which here is not much broader. Beyond, the timber begins again, and in the centre of the opening we see the fairly preserved ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... nevertheless, to go round the people and tell them that what the Doctor had said was to be understood spiritually, and chiefly as a warning to other denominations, else there had been a thin kirk and but one sparse table instead of the usual four or five, on the day of high communion in ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... a sparse meal, it was decided to light a fire, more for the sake of the cheering sight than the need ...
— The Fiery Totem - A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian North-West • Argyll Saxby
... in a very arid region; mostly coarse black sand and pebbles, with typical desert shrubs and occasional bunches of tough grass. The slopes of Mt. Solimana on our left were fairly well covered with sparse vegetation. Among the bushes we saw a number of vicunas, the smallest wild camels of the New World. We tried in vain to get near enough for a photograph. They were extremely timid and scampered away before we were within three ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... wished he had gone to sea, before it was too late, or even to California, when the gold craze was on. Johnnie had the tongue of the improvisator, and he loved a listener. He liked to sit out on a log, in the sparse shadow of the one little grove the hill possessed, and, with the whispering leaves above him tattling uncomprehended sayings brought them by the wind, gather the old men about him, and talk them blind. As he sat there, Mary came walking ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... low greasewood and sparse yellow sage led to the first almost imperceptible rise of the valley floor on that side. The distant cedars beckoned to Slone. He was not patient, because he was on the trail of Wildfire; but, nevertheless, the hours ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... was pre-eminently the home of wandering, nomadic tribes. This wild, treeless region is divided by rocky ranges running from east to west. Parallel to these are deep, hot and for the most part waterless valleys. In the springtime these valleys are covered by a sparse vegetation; from a few perennial springs flow waters that irrigate the immediately surrounding land; but they soon lose themselves in the thirsty desert. During the summer the vegetation disappears almost entirely, and the struggle ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... the flat pulled them together again, and they plodded on by Bardie's Farm, where the scent became sparse, and on to Steg where, for the first time since leaving Templeton, they came ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... perfectly stupid than to have only one eye open and wear for ever in the great face of the world the expression of a knowing wink? At the theatre, on the numerous July evenings when the Comedie Francaise exhibited the repertory by the aid of exponents determined the more sparse and provincial audience should have a taste of the tradition, her appreciation was tremendously technical and showed it was not for nothing she was now in and out of Madame Carre's innermost counsels. But there were moments when even her ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... brown, wrinkled old man, with sparse pepper-and-salt whiskers and a parrot-like nose. "Sharper" was written all over his hatchet features; but probably his provincialism and lack of book education had kept him from ...
— Ruth Fielding on Cliff Island - The Old Hunter's Treasure Box • Alice Emerson
... altitude 72 degrees 33 seconds; latitude 20 degrees 41 minutes. Started after party at 12.20. At 1.27 came east half north for two and a half miles over rich undulating land to a watercourse. These downs are so sparse of trees that a small belt of brushwood on the top of an eminence was a remarkable feature. It is situated about a mile this side of the spot from which I made my observation; at 3.20, when we had come up the creek on an average ...
— Journal of Landsborough's Expedition from Carpentaria - In search of Burke and Wills • William Landsborough
... length, and as by accident, upon a lawn, sparse planted like an orchard, but with forest instead of fruit trees. That was the site of Silverado mining town. A piece of ground was levelled up, where Kelmar's store had been; and facing that we saw Rufe Hanson's house, still bearing on its front the legend Silverado Hotel. Not another sign ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... individual of between fifty and sixty years of age, was gaunt with recent sickness, patient and unimaginative in aspect. He preached extemporarily, with the aid of notes; and it cannot be said that his discourse was remarkable for interest, at any rate in its beginning. Doubtless the sparse congregation, so prone to slumber, discouraged him; for offering exhortations to empty benches is but weary work. Indeed he was meditating the advisability of bringing his argument to an abrupt conclusion when, chancing to glance round, ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... the hill nearer to us there were two or three field batteries in action. To the right of us a brigade of artillery was limbered up ready to go anywhere. In the left, at the bottom of the dip the 108th was in action, partially covered by some sparse bushes. A few ambulance waggons and some miscellaneous first-line transport were drawn up along the side of the road at the bottom of the dip. To the N.W. we could see for about four miles over low, rolling fields. ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... hedges. It was here that Geof had listened to the whistle of the blackbird only the other day, as his boat lay moored to the bank, while he sketched the tiniest of little chapels, nestling modestly in the sparse shade of two dark cypresses. His mind recurred to that peaceful hour, as he chatted in desultory fashion with May, but those quiet musings seemed very far away and unreal in the clear, matter-of-fact atmosphere that that charming ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... forehead, large hazel eyes within a singularly large orbit of brow; a straight, thin, slightly aquiline, well-cut nose—such features were at open variance with the broad, thick-lipped, sensual mouth, the heavy pendant jowl, the sparse beard on the glistening cheek, and the moleskin-like moustachio and chin tuft. Still, upon the whole, it was a face and figure which gave the world assurance of a man and a commander of men. Power and intelligence were stamped ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... road ran a fringe of trees, sparse in some places and thicker in others. It was Chester's plan to wheel the gun in among the trees at the proper moment and open on the foe when ...
— The Boy Allies At Verdun • Clair W. Hayes
... in reply, received a civil invitation to "step inside and wait." My suspense did not last long, for M. Pierre made his appearance very promptly. He was a tall, thin individual with a fried-looking complexion, keen sunken eyes, and sparse hair streaked with grey. He entered the room with a courteous bow and inquiring look. Rising from the chair in which I had rested myself by the fire, I advanced towards him and addressed him by name in ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... Gray, lean, hard-bitten faces, their eyebrows so light and sparse that it seemed their eyes were hard stones which never seemed to shift their straight-ahead gaze. Yet each man in the tonneau and the orderly beside the driver on the front seat saluted the Red Cross girl as she ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... to the whole kingdom, the band of emigrants that crossed from Antrim about A.D. 506 under the leadership of Fergus and the other sons of Erc; or, as the name of "Scoti" recurs more than once in the old sparse notices of the tribes of the kingdom before this date, had not an antecedent colony, under Cairbre Riada, as stated by Bede, already passed over and settled in Cantyre a ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... the Legislative, about sunset or after; give the most pathetic detail of the frightful pass they were in:—Prussians billowing round by the myriad, volcanically spouting fire for fifteen hours: we, scattered sparse on the ramparts, hardly a cannoneer to two guns; our dastard Commandant Lavergne no where shewing face; the priming would not catch; there was no powder in the bombs,—what could we do? "Mourir! Die!" answer prompt ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... from Reykjavik, had followed the line of the sea. We took our way through poor and sparse meadows, which made a desperate effort every year to show a little green. They very rarely succeed in ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... Harmonious Blacksmith.' My dear one had a great favour for this honest Darwin always; many a road to shops, and the like, he drove her in his cab, in those early days when even the charge of omnibuses was a consideration, and his sparse utterances, sardonic often, were a great amusement to her. 'A perfect gentleman,' she at once discerned him to be, and of sound worth and kindliness, in the most unaffected form." He died in 1881, aged 77, leaving no memorial to the public of his undoubtedly great abilities. Like his younger ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... the people idolise him. His almost blameless life has been passed among them, nothing in it hidden from their knowledge. When they look upon his dear presentment in the photographer's window—the shrewd, kindly eyes under the high forehead, the sparse locks so carefully distributed—words of loyalty only and of admiration rise to their lips. For of all princes in modern days he seems to fulfil most perfectly the obligation of princely rank. Nepios he might have been called in the ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... The sparse population of this territory, the want of scientific information in its inhabitants, and the difficulties which have existed in the way of keeping up an intercourse with their fellow-citizens of the centre of the republic, are causes weighty enough for explaining the ignorance ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... long it lasted! A whole eternity before they could deal with those two men! From the roots of Sarvoelgyi's sparse hair hot beads of sweat ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... drops fell from the invisible sky as Ivanov walked across the meadows; at first they were sparse, pattering noisily on his leather jacket; then they began to fall more heavily and he was soon enveloped in the sonorous downpour of a vernal shower. Close to the manor Gek darted aside and disappeared down the ravine, from whence arose the rustling of wings, and the perturbed cries of cranes. ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... nations being within hail of one another. The great autumnal military manoeuvres were in progress, and a merry party, including a number of ladies, were riding home from the mimic battlefield. We passed through a narrow lane, bordered on each side by groups of stunted willows and birch trees, under the sparse shadow of which nestled a few cottages painted in blue, pink, or yellow, in true Polish fashion. Suddenly our progress was arrested by terrifying screams proceeding from one of these hovels. Several of us were ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... cock-pit. The inveterate gambling propensities of the people find vent also at dominoes, cards, checkers, and chess in the bar-rooms, every marble table being in requisition for the purpose of the games on Sundays. Having noticed the sparse attendance at the cathedral, we remarked to Jane that the church was quite empty, whereupon she replied with a significant leer, "True, Senor, but the jail is full." More than once an underlying vein of sarcasm was ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... smooth peduncle, usually open and stiff; branches are usually many, sub-solitary or fascicled, spreading or suberect, capillary, stiff, again branching from near the base and about 3 inches long; rachis is angular, with glands and tufts of sparse white hairs at the angles ...
— A Handbook of Some South Indian Grasses • Rai Bahadur K. Ranga Achariyar
... camels were turned out at once to graze off the unappetizing-looking thorns, sparse and dusty, that peppered the field of view like scabs on a yellow skin. There was no fear of their wandering too far, for if the camel ever was wild, as many maintain that he never was, that was so long ago that the whole species has forgotten it, ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... cartridge-cases intensifies the length of his body and of his face. He has all the medals there are, but only wears two, a Vladimir Cross at the centre of his collar, like a brooch, and a Georgian on his chest. His head is long, and his cheeks seem to curve inwards from his temples. There is sparse grey hair on his whitish scalp, and lifting his full-sleeved arm he scratched his head with an open ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... haughtily. When it had passed the eastern ridge it began, after its habit, to lord it over Angel's, sending the thermometer up twenty degrees in as many minutes, driving the mules to the sparse shade of corrals and fences, making the red dust incandescent, and renewing its old imperious aggression on the spiked bosses of the convex shield of pines that defended Table Mountain. Thither by nine o'clock all coolness had retreated, and the "outsides" of the up stage ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... was growing sparse about them. He began to hear his feet. So did the men beyond the bank. There was the click of a cocking musket. The fellow was ready: the fellow would pot them at twenty yards as ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... great store house of labor in Africa should be opened for the benefit of the human race. In the Western World, a vast continent of fertile land and propitious climate, was possessed, not improved, by a sparse hunter race; but the law of God and of nations required that the earth should be subdued and replenished, and now God has enlarged Japheth, and he dwells in these tents of Shem. China, Japan, and other regions of Asia, are inhabited by teeming millions, rich in the productions of ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... the ear, so to deliver them to whom it is requisite; but not enjoining us to communicate to all without distinction what is said to them in parables. But there is only a delineation in the memoranda, which have the truth sown sparse and broadcast, that it may escape the notice of those who pick up seeds like jackdaws; but when they find a good husbandman, each of them will germinate and will ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... for driving cattle than for accommodating the scant local traffic. There had been a time when all that space was needed to give swing-room to twenty-mule teams, but that time was past and the two sparse rows of houses seemed dwarfed and pitifully few. Yet there were new ones going up, and quite a sprinkling of tents; and down on the corner Wunpost saw a big building which he knew must ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... arm and his fist came down like a hammer on his own skull, and his crooked fingers clutched pitilessly at the sparse growth of hair on the back of his head, until he held up a whole handful torn out by the roots, and ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... rocks. The yellow grass sloped away from his feet mile after mile to the timber, and beyond that to the prismatic mountains. The variegated lodges of the Chis-chis-chash village dotted the plain near the sparse woods of the creek-bottom; pony herds stood quietly waving their tails against the flies or were driven hither and yon by the herdboys—giving variety to the tremendous sweep of ...
— The Way of an Indian • Frederic Remington
... found in hundreds of other portions of the vast area known under the general name of the Louisiana Territory. You must bear in mind that there were thousands of square miles that had not been trodden by a white man, and so sparse were the Indian villages that large portions of the country remained to be ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... Spain. The prelates of the Church never lifted up their voice against the legality of this feudo-kingly rule. Then came a revolt, after the Reformation, against the government of kings. New England and other colonies became small republics, almost democracies. On the hills of New England, with a sparse rural population and small cities, the most primitive form of government was the best. It was virtually the government of townships. The selectmen were the overseers; and, following the necessities of the times, the ministers of the gospel ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... pitch dark in that part of the camp. The electric lights had a sparse reddish glow. Fuselli kept straining his eyes, expecting to see a wharf and the masts of a ship at the end of every alley. The line filed into a dim mess hall, where a thin stew was splashed into the mess kits. Behind the counter ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... one friend in the Chamber,—a deputy newly elected for Deux-Sevres, named M. Sarigue, a poor fellow not unlike the inoffensive, ignoble animal whose name he bore,[2] with his sparse, red hair, his frightened eyes, his hopping gait in his white gaiters. He was so shy that he could not say two words without stammering, almost tongue-tied, incessantly rolling balls of chewing-gum around in his mouth, which put the finishing touch to the viscosity of his speech; ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... structure. Rounded forms and breasts. Broad pelvis. Long and abundant hair. Low and narrow boundary of pubic hair. Sparse hair in armpit. No hair on body. Delicate skin. Rounded skull. Small face. Large orbits. High and slender eyebrows. Low and small lower jaw. Soft transition from cheek to neck. Rounded neck. Slender wrist. Small hand, with long index finger. Rounded shoulders. Straight, small clavicle. Small ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... manner in the mass of granite rocks itself, without our being able to admit that there is a ramification and an interlacing of small veins.' It is plain that Raleigh got hold of unusually rich specimens of the sparse auriferous quartz. He was accused on his return of having brought his specimens from Africa, but no one suggested that they did not contain gold. No doubt much of the sparkling dust he saw in the rocks was simply iron pyrites, or some other of the minerals which to this day are ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... lies my second charge; a third remains, Which, as a shaft from seasoned bow, not green, Shall pierce the marl. With convents still you sow The land: in other countries sparse and small They swell to cities here. A hundred monks On one late barren mountain dig and pray: A hundred nuns gladden one woodland lawn, Or sing in one small island. Well—'tis well! Yet, balance lost and measure, nought is well. The Angelic Life more common will become Than life of mortal men." ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... in the United States is for two purposes: to provide good government while population is sparse, and to encourage their development into self-governing commonwealths, and their incorporation into the federal system as rapidly as possible. (See ...
— Studies in Civics • James T. McCleary
... it appear that he saw them; for he did not need that heightened condition of spiritual perception which appears to be meant by the opening of the eyes. And what a sight the trembling young man saw! Where he had seen only barren rock or sparse vegetation, he saw that same fiery host that had attended Elijah in his translation, now enclosing the unarmed prophet and himself within a flaming ring. The manifestation, not the presence, of the angel ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... she had sunk back into a prosperous and comfortable mediocrity. She had made her flight—like the queen bee she had soared once into the farthest, bluest reaches of her heaven, and henceforth she was quite content to relapse into the utter commonplaces of the hive. Her yellow hair grew sparse and flat and streaked with gray, her pink-rose face became over plump and mottled across the nose, and her mind turned soon as flat and unelastic as her body; but she was perfectly satisfied with the portion she had had from life, for, having weighed all things, she had come to regard the ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... slippers. He had evidently been in neglige and, to meet the visitor, slipped into the frock-coat, or possibly he was careless, taken up with abstractions, dreams, business affairs, plans. He was rather stout, with an oval, egg-shaped face; his beard, sparse and pointed and tinged with gray, had originally been light of hue; he had pale blue eyes, and ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... the mountain tops ray-crowned Apollo Turns his swift arrows, dart on glittering dart, Let but a rock glint green, the wild goats follow Glad-grazing shyly on each sparse-grown part. ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... all things an end. The weary time of waiting and preparation was almost over. Sparse news filtered through that the northward advance towards Palestine had already begun; that there had been heavy fighting at Katia, where the Turks, under cover of a desert mist, surprised and cut up—but failed to defeat—our cavalry; and that we had at Romani inflicted ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... resident population is so sparse that there is not one person for every 20,000 acres; and most of these people live on the coast. Consequently, the vast interior could not be used for food supplies in any case. Besides, ever since the white man occupied the coast, the immediate hinterland, ...
— Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... positions and lucrative callings to carve out fresh careers, and even to become humble farmers wherever they found asylums and tolerance, men who became very valuable accessions to the nations who received them and a correspondingly significant loss to France. To those two main elements were added sparse accessions from other nations at later intervals, and also a strain of aboriginal blood, of which a more or less faint tinge is still discernible in some families, an admixture which many deplore and others consider as most serviceable, supplying a subtle ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... monotony along the snow-covered trail, through the sparse forest that fringed the ice-bound waters of the Riviere d'Or. Seen through our tinted snow-glasses, the landscape was a vast field of palest blue, dotted with scattered clusters of spruce ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... in its silence, for only the dimmest of path lights seemed alive over the big place, and not a breath of wind stirred the tenacious oak leaves or other rugged foliage, too sparse to be counted, now that winter had given warning and was on ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... or covered with heaps of ashes, a few hours after the eruption commenced the awful work was done, and that vast multitude had vanished from off the face of the earth. The fact that in the neighborhood of the mountain there was a sparse population accounts for there not being even a far greater ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... mingled grey, red, and flaxen hair of a perpetually moist appearance; oblique and ever-changing eyes which are permanently contracted; a pair of thick, parti-coloured eyebrows which cast deep shadows over the eyes; and temples whereon a number of blue veins struggle with an irregular, sparse coating of bristles. Finally, about his whole personality there is something ever variable ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... Europe. "The whole of the known world was covered with their settlements, in constant communication with one another through itinerant merchants, who effected an exchange of learning as well as of wares; while the other nations grew more and more isolated, and shut themselves off from even the sparse opportunities of mental ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... been successful, the war on land had been for us full of humiliation. The United States then formed but a loosely knit confederacy, the sparse population scattered over a great expanse of land. Ever since the Federalist party had gone out of power in 1800, the nation's ability to maintain order at home and enforce respect abroad had steadily dwindled; and the twelve years' nerveless reign of ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... stooping at one moment, where the bushes grew sparse; crawling in among some sheltering rocks at another, and even getting down to wriggle along like so many snakes, when not even so much as a bush offered a means of hiding from observation, in case hostile eyes happened to be turned ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Afloat • George A. Warren
... flume for a mill. In three months over 4,000 persons were there, digging for gold with great success. By July, 1849, it is thought, 15,000 had arrived. Nearly all were forced to live in booths, tents, log huts, and under the open sky. The sparse population previously on the ground left off farming and grazing and opened mines. People became insane for gold. Immigrants soon came in immense hordes. In 1846, aside from roving Indians, California had numbered ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... Cecilia that it resembled Hilary. Its look was kindly and uncertain; its colour a palish tan; the eyebrows of its windows rather straight than arched, and those deep-set eyes, the windows, twinkled hospitably; it had, as it were, a sparse moustache and beard of creepers, and dark marks here and there, like the lines and shadows on the faces of those who think too much. Beside it, and apart, though connected by a passage, a studio stood, and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... District Libraries. These, in the single state of New York, already contain nearly two millions of volumes. In some of the new states the system of Township Libraries has been adopted, which, on some accounts, is better adapted to a sparse population with limited means. These, in the State of Michigan, already contain one hundred thousand volumes. The director of each school district draws from the township library every three months the number of books ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... the soft track, the shadows fell long on the dusty little plain interspersed with dark bushes, mounds of turned-up earth, low wooden buildings with iron roofs of the Railway Company; the sparse row of telegraph poles strode obliquely clear of the town, bearing a single, almost invisible wire far into the great campo—like a slender, vibrating feeler of that progress waiting outside for a moment of ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... to go to Honolulu, I should have headed the Snark due west, instead of which I kept her south. Not until latitude 19 degrees did we encounter the first flying fish. He was very much alone. I saw him. Five other pairs of eager eyes scanned the sea all day, but never saw another. So sparse were the flying fish that nearly a week more elapsed before the last one on board saw his first flying fish. As for the dolphin, bonita, porpoise, and all the other ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... The halt had taken place almost exactly at the beginning of that long stretch of park wall which ran beside the road and the tramway. From where he sat he could see the other wing which led inward from the road at something like a right angle, but was presently lost to sight because of a sparse and unkempt patch of young trees and shrubs, well-nigh choked with undergrowth, which extended for some distance from the park wall backward along the road-side toward Vanves. Whoever owned that stretch of land had seemingly not thought it worth while to cultivate it or ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... since their power over the minor chiefs is extended, rather than decreased by the changed circumstances, they are well content, for they rule now over their districts, not only as Irish chieftains, but as English lieutenants. You have seen, as you journeyed here, how sparse is the population of our hills, and how slight would be the opposition which we could offer, did the Earl of Ulster sweep down upon us with trained ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... in the chief saloon, which was contiguous to the ball-room, and which was nearly as full of guests. Endymion, moving in the opposite direction, entered another drawing-room, where the population was sparse. It consisted of couples apparently deeply interested in each other. Some faces were radiant, and some pensive and a little agitated, but they all agreed in one expression, that they took no interest whatever in the solitary Endymion. Even their ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... against the commandant to the effect that the inhabitants are prevented working through deficiency of protection. Or if again, in spite of peace being secured to the works of the land by the military governor, the civil authority still presents a territory sparse in population and untilled, it is the commandant's turn to accuse the civil ruler. For you may take it as a rule, a population tilling their territory badly will fail to support their garrisons and be quite unequal to paying their tribute. Where a satrap ...
— The Economist • Xenophon
... understands his horse. He pushed the nose of his machine earthward and planed down through an interminable bank of clouds until he found a gray countryside running up to meet him. There were no houses, no lights, nothing but a wide expanse of country dotted with sparse copses. ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... thousand head of cattle on the Circle L range—the men had held them in the valley for a time during his absence on the trail, but the grass had grown sparse, and the herd was now grazing on the big plain beyond the northern ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... wonder after this, that scant and sparse were the jests played on the grim master of the Wolfsberg, or that the bay of a blood-hound tracking on the downs frightened the most stout-hearted rider in ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... left the sand and sagebrush, cacti and sparse bunch-grass was bounded by the horizon; behind him, in front of him, it was the same; only on the right was the monotony broken by foothills and beyond, a range of purple snow-covered peaks. From the slight elevation or "bench" upon which he sat he looked down upon a greasewood flat where ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... spell of silence, whilst on either hand the Campagna spread out as far as the eye could reach. All houses had long since disappeared; there was not a wall, not a tree, nothing but the undulating expanse whose sparse, short herbage was, with the approach of winter, beginning to turn green once more. A tower, a half-fallen ruin which came into sight on the left, rising in solitude into the limpid sky above the flat, boundless line of the horizon, suddenly assumed extraordinary importance. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... isolated part of barren country, where the grass was sparse and coarse, the soil poor and stony, and the timber stunted and scraggy; where, in fact, everything for which the white man had neither use nor need was to be found, and where nothing existed that he or his stock could utilize—a black-fellow's camp ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... arable land 1%; permanent crops 0%; meadows and pastures 8%; forest and woodland 0%; other 91%; includes irrigated NEGL% Environment: hot, dry, dust-laden ghibli is a southern wind lasting one to four days in spring and fall; desertification; sparse natural surface-water resources Note: the Great Manmade River Project, the largest water development scheme in the world, is being built to bring water from large aquifers under ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... approached were found to proceed from two windows in the ground floor of a large house. The travellers had not advanced many paces towards them before the peaks of three gables rose above them, vandyking the sky and docking the last sparse branches ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... helpful movement, since individuals unsuited to rural life may find themselves adapted to some type of urban life. When unneeded and unhelpful individuals are removed from the country, the rural population may be more efficient and more prosperous, even though relatively more sparse. ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... its perfect proportions. It was that of an elderly man clad simply in a gray business suit. The face was kind, its clear-chiselled features indicating fine spiritual strength; on the white forehead beneath the sparse gray hair were deep-sunken lines which spoke of years ...
— A Scientist Rises • Desmond Winter Hall
... be internal colonization. There are considerable tracts of land in what once was Russian Poland, the population of which, owing to the havoc of war, is abnormally sparse. Some districts, like that of the Pripet marshes, which even at the best of times had but five persons to the kilometer, are practically deserts. For the Russian army, when retreating before the Germans, drove before it a huge population computed at eight millions, who inhabited the territory ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... coast. The stones were covered with sparse lichen. The tide was already ebbing, leaving uncovered the sandy bottom of a sort of beach strewn with black blocks, resembling ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... went, and all the charm of my first visit repeated itself; but repeated itself with this difference—that it was no longer undisturbed. The possibility of a revolution in the Highlands had now become a matter of audible discussion even in the remote Macdonald country. The temper of the sparse population was there, indeed, not very violent, but the thought that some sort of disaffection was even there actually alive would often disturb my previous sense of peace, while the Glasgow and Edinburgh ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... state prison for house-breaking, dropped casually into the bank and asked the cashier to "back a letter" for him, since writing was not one of his own strong points. The cashier was obliging, and in as much as gossip was usually sparse in that community went on the while chatting with the president of the institution, who ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... bearded Councillors had the best of it, seeming after their vigil less stale in the face than the member from Silver City, for instance, whose day-old black growth blurred his dingy chin, or the member from Big Camas, whose scantier red crop bristled on his cheeks in sparse wandering arrangements, like spikes on the barrel of a musical box. For comfort, most of the pistols were on the table with the Statutes of the United States. Secretary and Treasurer Hewley's lay on his strong-box immediately behind him. The Governor's was a light one, ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... were obliged to feed on dogs and rats, an occasional small fish caught in the river, and similar sparse supplies. They died by hundreds. Disease aided starvation in carrying them off. The living were too few and too weak to bury the dead. Bodies were left unburied, and a deadly and revolting stench filled ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... consumed in England escape the duty. Several thousand seizures are made annually, and it has been testified before Parliament that not one evasion in sixteen is detected. If this be so in Great Britain, it is not surprising that the government has failed, in this country, with its sparse population, to collect a duty of 1000 per cent, or that the experiment has cost the nation more than fifty millions. Such excessive duties may well be styled over-taxation, and tend to demoralize and corrupt our revenue officers, to encourage ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... the doors opened, and there was Lupin. But again how changed! The clothes of the Duke of Charmerace littered the floor; the kit-bag was open; and he was wearing the very clothes of Chief-Inspector Guerchard, his seedy top-hat, his cloak. He wore also Guerchard's sparse, lank, black hair, his little, bristling, black moustache. His figure, hidden by the cloak, seemed to have shrunk to the ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... the ill-defined outlines of each other. The springbuck, possessing this feeling in an intense degree, and being eminently gregarious, becomes uneasy as the grass of the Kalahari becomes tall. The vegetation being more sparse in the more arid south, naturally induces the different herds to turn in that direction. As they advance and increase in numbers, the pasturage becomes more scarce; it is still more so the further they go, until they ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... way beyond, we plunged into the forest. It grew at first very sparse and park-like, the trees of a pale verdure, but healthy, the parasites, per contra, often dead. Underfoot, the ground was still a rockery of fractured lava; but now the interstices were filled with soil. A sedge-like grass (buffalo grass?) grew everywhere, and the horses ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... voices chimed in, and at last there was an outburst of applause, sparse and feeble, it ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... usually fine specimens of manhood. They are rather light in color, but frequently rub their bodies with some kind of oil, which gives the flesh a much redder and more glossy appearance. The hair is black and straight, and the eyes are black and deep set. The beard is sparse, and in former times was not allowed to grow at all, each hair being pulled out with a rude kind of tweezers. They are naturally of a gentle and friendly disposition, but their experience with the white race has made them ...
— Indians of the Yosemite Valley and Vicinity - Their History, Customs and Traditions • Galen Clark
... by the few sparse folk of the countryside; But how fared each with other? E'en beasts couch, hide by hide, In a growling, grudged agreement: so, father and son aye curled The closelier up in their den because the last of ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... assigned by his over-cultured parents. His slender body, with its narrow shoulders and sunken chest, frail as it was, seemed almost too heavy for his feeble legs. His thin face, bloodless and sallow, with a sparse, daintily trimmed beard and weak watery eyes, was characterized by a solemn and portentous gravity, as though, realizing fully the profound importance of his mission in life, he could permit no trivial thought to enter his bald, domelike head. One knew ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... later the secret agent of Mo, a tall, sparse figure, attired in shabby European clothes, entered, and, snapping fingers with his master, greeted and congratulated him. Then, casting himself upon the mat near us, he began to tell us what had occurred after our flight from Eastbourne, and relate ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... traces of them now remain, except in Thrace and Greece, except here and there a tower or a gate. All the men who opposed them they slew, young and old, and indeed spared not women, nor even children. Whence there is still but a sparse population in Italy. The plunder which they seized in every part of Europe was immense, and especially at Rome, where they left nothing, either public or private." In this latter description reference is also made to some later ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... a mile, however, above the head of the narrow pond, the ardent explorer came upon a level of sparse alder swamp. Here he found the stream just beginning to spread over its low banks. The cause of this spreading was a partial obstruction in mid-channel—what looked, at first glance, like an accidental accumulation ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the men to sobriety and virtue. Alas! how mistaken they have been! What they have endured! Of such was this woman! There she stood, the embodiment of woe. A tall, refined woman, her clothing poor and sparse, her head enveloped ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... takes to shining in winter, and the Southwest to blowing, the corners of the earth cannot hide from him—the mornings are like halls full of light. Robert had spent his hopes upon a wet day that would have kept the congregation sparse and the guests at Fairly absent from ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... into strands as it ran, raced along the edge. Higher they went, until Ridley and Rachel walked behind; next they turned along a lane scattered with stones, where Mr. Pepper raised his stick and silently indicated a shrub, bearing among sparse leaves a voluminous purple blossom; and at a rickety canter the last stage of ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... defiance. Stealthily he landed his men on the other side of the island opposite to the Bugis camp, and led them across. After a short but quite silent scuffle, Cornelius, who had tried to slink away at the moment of landing, resigned himself to show the way where the undergrowth was most sparse. Brown held both his skinny hands together behind his back in the grip of one vast fist, and now and then impelled him forward with a fierce push. Cornelius remained as mute as a fish, abject but faithful to his purpose, whose accomplishment loomed before him dimly. ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... I transplant them, and I treasure them like gold. One cluster bears light-coloured bloom; another bears dark shades. I sit with head uncovered by the sparse-leaved artemesia hedge, And in their pure and cool fragrance, clasping my knees, I hum my lays. In the whole world, methinks, none see the light as peerless as these flowers. From all I see you have no other friend more intimate than me. Such autumn splendour, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... and comings, past the white houses overlooking little lawns through the umbrage of their palm-trees. The lawns professed to be of grass, but were really mats of close little herbs which were not grass; but which, where the sparse cattle were grazing them, seemed to satisfy their inexacting stomachs. They are never very green, and in fact the landscape often has an air of exhaustion and pause which it wears with us in late ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... that other lying upon the ground at his feet, and, beyond, the carcass of the dead grizzly. A dreadful fear leapt to his brain; he moved tottering. His action gained swiftness suddenly. He ran to the forest edge, and, with hungry eyes, gazed in beyond the sparse fringe of scrub. There was nothing there. He moved away to the right and ran in amongst the low-growing bush, only to reappear with more feverish haste, and eyes whose fiery glance seemed to shoot in every direction at once. On he went, round ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... farther, the illusion of the mirage became more instead of less convincing; a shallow silver lake that spread for many miles, a little misty in the sunlight. Here and there one saw reflected the image of a heifer, turned loose to live upon the sparse sand-grass. They were magnified to a preposterous height and looked like mammoths, prehistoric beasts standing solitary in the waters that for many thousands of years actually washed over that desert;—the mirage itself may be the ghost of that long-vanished sea. Beyond the ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... out of it, I dare say!" He must protest, but if he failed to convince, how could he explain that part of his high mission to the ports of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom was to sweep from the Adriatic the Confederate privateers which Great Britain was then fitting out to prey upon our sparse commerce there? As a matter of fact he had eventually to do little or no sweeping of that sort; for no privateers came to interrupt the calm in which he devoted himself, unofficially, to writing a book about the chief of ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... town, and the towers above it. A little thoughtful we all were, I think. The times were rough and our errand was serious. But youth and early morning are fine dispellers of care; and once on the uplands we trotted gaily forward, now passing through wide glades in the sparse oak forest, where the trees all leaned one way, now over bare, wind-swept downs; or once and again descending into a chalky bottom, where the stream bubbled through deep beds of fern, and a lonely farmhouse ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman
... end of the canal about three o'clock of the afternoon, and dropped anchor off the low-lying shores. Our binoculars showed us white houses in apparently single rank along a far-reaching narrow sand spit, with sparse trees and a railroad line. That was the town of Suez, and seemed so little interesting that we were not particularly sorry that we could not go ashore. Far in the distance were mountains; and the water all about us was the light, clear green of the ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... shore where Pee-wee stood was a sizable village, or young town, big enough to have traffic signs and parking zones and a main street and a movie show and such like pretentious things. Between this town and the shore were a few outlying houses, but mostly sparse woodland. To the north the ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... disfigured her face, and her lips, extremely thin, looked like a pale crack. Her thoughtful gaze alone possessed a certain melancholy attractiveness. But even here, her eyes, protruding too far for the harmony of the lines upon her face seemed always to be red, and her brows narrow and sparse. ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... province had not fully recovered from the effect of the spirit of disloyalty which culminated in the expulsion of the Acadians, although there followed a period of peace, but despite the efforts of the Government in making roads, and instituting public works, the settlements were sparse, and the Indian was still in the land. There was only one minister in the county, the Rev. John Eagleson, who had been sent out in 1769 by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, while in the province there were a few ...
— William Black - The Apostle of Methodism in the Maritime Provinces of Canada • John Maclean
... years old, small, thin, bent, with two big hands resembling the claws of a crab. His colorless hair was sparse and thin, like the down of a young duck, allowing patches of his scalp to be seen. The brown and wrinkled skin of his neck showed big veins which disappeared behind his jaws and came out again at the temples. He had the reputation of being ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... the rail and cast a wistful glance at the low-lying shore. He saw one corner of the white Residency, showing through the sparse isisi palm at the end of the big garden—a smudge of green on yellow from ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... these two settled districts there are only a few villages, scattered at intervals of many miles along a line of railway four hundred miles in length. In the Free State and the Transvaal the white population is extremely sparse, save in the mining region of the Witwatersrand, because ranching requires few hands, and only a few hundred square miles out of many thousands have been brought under cultivation. Thus, while the coolness of the climate has permitted Europeans to thrive in these comparatively low latitudes, ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... bloodhound, following the hoof-marks out of the valley meadow to a ridge of sparse cedars where they showed clear on the bare earth, and then to a thicker covert where they were hidden among strong grasses. Suddenly he caught my shoulder, and pulled me to the ground. We crawled through ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... pine is the commonest tree, and the most important. Nearly every mountain is planted with it to a height of from 8000 to 9000 feet above the sea. Some are covered from base to summit by this one species, with only a sparse growth of juniper on the lower slopes to break the continuity of its curious woods, which, though dark-looking at a distance, are almost shadeless, and have none of the damp, leafy glens and hollows so characteristic of other pine woods. ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... this man who had prodded me, with a long, pale face and pale eyes, a long reddish beard, and hair rather darker, both hair and beard being sparse. He was a fidgety person, always twitching with his hands, and he walked with something of a strut, as though the earth belonged to him. He snapped-to the case of his binoculars as though ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... extending from the Alleghany Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, capable itself of sustaining in comfort a larger population than will be in the whole Union for one hundred years to come. Over this vast expanse of territory your population is now so sparse that I believe we provided, at the last session, a regiment of mounted men to guard the mail from the frontier of Missouri to the mouth of the Columbia; and yet you persist in the ridiculous assertion, "I want room." One ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... Her profile, with its sparse wave of hair from the forehead, was repeated in grotesque exaggeration on the wall at her back. The iron will in her lent a certain metallic hardness to her features, and her shadow resembled in outline the ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... gradually grown much richer. The sparse and storm-buffeted pines and the rough scrub merged into a tangled mass of undergrowth and forest, where silver firs and deodars rose conspicuous. The little streams that rushed down the hillsides were fringed with maidenhair fern, lighted up here and there with a bunch ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... telling these stories may seem at first glance to be simple: short sentences, a sparse vocabulary, uncomplicated syntax. In actuality, Anderson developed an artful style in which, following Mark Twain and preceding Ernest Hemingway, he tried to use American speech as the base of a tensed rhythmic prose that has an economy and a shapeliness seldom ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... Perion who spoke first. They had passed the city walls, and had mounted the hill which leads toward the Forest of Sannazaro. Their road lay through a rocky pass above which the leaves of spring were like sparse traceries on a blue cupola, for April had ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... spring dusk. She chose the road towards Barnham Wood because it was lonely there and the hedges were thin; you could feel the breath of the sea as it blew across the sparse fields. The hush of an English Sunday evening enfolded the road, the wood, the fields. The sun was very low and the saffron light penetrated the dark lines of the hedges and hung like a curtain of misty gold before the approaches to the wood. The red-brown ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... district in 1901 was 455,593, and showed a large increase, owing in great part to immigration from the adjacent district of Sylhet. The plain is the most thickly populated part of the district; in the North Cachar Hills the population is sparse. About 66% of the population are Hindus and 29% Mahommedans. There are three administrative subdivisions of the district: Silchar, Hailakandi and North Cachar. The district takes name from its former rulers ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... failure. It has not made, I think, any substantial difference in politics. I think it is perhaps possible to say that its adoption has shown an improvement in the body politic, but it has been tested only in those States where population is sparse and where the problem of entrusting such power to women in the concentrated population of large cities is not presented. For this reason, if you will permit me to say so, my impression is that the task before you in securing ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... strand, that is, a low-lying road by the side of the Thames, stretching from Temple-bar to Charing Cross. On the south side of the thoroughfare were the mansions of bishops and nobles dotted at sparse intervals; on the north was open country. To-day there are even fewer survivals of the past than might have been seen thirty years ago. The wholesale clearance of Holywell Street and the buildings to the north has ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... emotional lift, and for all the unfailing distraction of the week. The repressed magnetic excitement in gatherings of familiar faces, fellow-beings bound by the same convention to the same kind of behaviour, is precious in communities where the human interest is still thin and sparse. It is valuable in itself, and it produces an occasional detached sensation. There was the case, in Dr Drummond's church, of placid-faced, saintly old Sandy MacQuhot, the epileptic. It used to be a common regret with ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... reflection will always remain a mystery. Every such case is a law unto itself, and neither science nor poetry is ever able to analyze and explain its causes and effects. The conflicting stories then current, and the varying traditions that yet exist, either fail to agree or to fit the sparse facts which came to light. There remains no dispute, however, that the occurrence, whatever shape it took, threw Mr. Lincoln into a deeper despondency than any he had yet experienced, for on January 23, 1841, he wrote to his law partner, ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... Telephone system: general assessment: sparse and limited system domestic: NA international: country code - 212; tied into Morocco's system by microwave radio relay, tropospheric scatter, and satellite; satellite earth stations - 2 Intelsat (Atlantic Ocean) linked ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... Telephone system: sparse and limited system domestic: NA international: tied into Morocco's system by microwave radio relay, tropospheric scatter, and satellite; satellite earth stations - 2 Intelsat (Atlantic Ocean) linked to ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... to the front with an improved decorative scheme, but the hard flags of to-day, the dusty gravel and the too sparse architectural embellishments do not mark the gardens of the Louvre as being anything remarkable save as a desirable breathing spot for Paris ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... excluded from our common schools, in consequence of the prejudices of teachers and parents. In some of our cities there are schools exclusively for their use, but in the country the colored population is usually too sparse to justify such schools; and white and black children are rarely seen studying under the same roof; although such cases do sometimes occur, and then they are confined to elementary schools. Some colored young men, who could bear the expense, have obtained in European seminaries ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... about Avignon, the Interrupted Scolia used to prey upon the larva of the Shaggy Anoxia (A. villosa). At Serignan, which is surrounded by the same kind of sandy soil, without other vegetation than a few sparse seed-bearing grasses, I find her rationing her young with the Morning Anoxia (A. matutinalis). Oryctes, Cetoniae and Anoxiae in the larval state: here then is the prey of the three Scoliae whose habits we know. The three Beetles are Lamellicorns, Scarabaeidae. ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... stupidity and dullness," she said one day in disgust, after one of Theodore's long-awaited letters had proved particularly dry and sparse. "Just think of it! Dresden, Munich, Leipsic, Vienna, Berlin, Frankfurt! And from his letters you would never know he had left Winnebago. I don't believe he actually sees anything of these cities—their people, and ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... began to go astray and to mingle with other thoughts; the beech alley was transformed to a path between ilex-trees, and here and there a vine climbed from bough to bough, and sent up waving tendrils and drooped with purple grapes, and the sparse grey-green leaves of a wild olive-tree stood out against the dark shadows of the ilex. Clarke, in the deep folds of dream, was conscious that the path from his father's house had led him into an undiscovered ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... man of middle height and spare figure, nearly sixty years old, by constitution rather delicate in health, but wiry and active for his age. A sparse and straggling beard and mustache did not conceal a thin but kindly mouth; his eyes were keen and pleasant; his sharp nose and narrow jaw gave him very much the air of a priest, and this impression was helped by his commonplace dark clothes and soft black hat. He was a man of unusually ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... Spade (at cards) piko. Spain Hispanujo. Spangle briletajxo. Spanish-fly kantarido. Spare (extra) ekstra. Spare indulgi. Sparing, to be sxpari. Sparing (saving) sxparema. Spark fajrero. Sparkle brili. Sparrow pasero. Sparrow-hawk akcipitro. Sparse maldensa. Spasm spasmo. Spatter sxprucigi (sur). Spawn fisxsemo. Speak paroli. Speak through the nose nazparoli. Speaker parolanto. Spear lanco. Special speciala. Specialise specialigi. Specialist specialisto. Speciality specialo—eco. Specie monero. Species speco. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... through the bracken. He was an old acquaintance of theirs, and he enjoyed lying beside them to have his forehead scratched with a piece of sharp stick. His forehead was hard as rock, and the hair grew there as sparse as grass does on a wall, or rather the way moss grows on a wall—it was a mat instead of a crop. His horns were long and very sharp, and brilliantly polished. On this day the he-goat had two chains around his neck—one was made of butter-cups and the other ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... disappeared, and the thatched cabins became more and more sparse, when from one of the latter, at a hundred paces from the caravan, issued a human figure. The man struck an attitude in the pathway of the travelers, his carbine on his shoulder, his fist on his hip and his nose saucily turned up in the air. Neither his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... though heavy, and though there were some who verged strongly upon the Sto-lu type, there were others who were positively handsome and whose bodies were quite hairless. The Alus are all bearded, but among the Bo-lu the beard disappears in the women. The Sto-lu men show a sparse beard, the Band-lu none; and there is little hair upon the bodies ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... larger islands at the mouth of the Amazon, on one of which he immediately noticed the scarcity of trees, while "the abundance of every kind of animal life crowded into a small space was here very striking, compared with the sparse manner in which it is scattered in the virgin forests. It seems to force us to the conclusion that the luxuriance of tropical vegetation is not favourable to the production of animal life. The plains are always more thickly peopled ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... purchased its vast domain. The wolf-pack still clung to the flank of the cariboo-herd, singling out the weak and the big with calf, and pulling them down as remorselessly as were it a thousand, thousand generations into the past. The sparse aborigines still acknowledged the rule of their chiefs and medicine men, drove out bad spirits, burned their witches, fought their neighbors, and ate their enemies with a relish which spoke well of their bellies. But ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... arose, a young woman with thin, sparse, gold-glinting hair, with face pallid and rounded, with broad forehead and gray eyes of remarkable clarity. She was slim, dressed in a little brown coat and a short brown skirt. She came forward, trembling, as if overcome by the audience. She paused, raised her ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... in the last few years to a little more than 2,000,000, but only about two-thirds of these have subscribers; much of the infrastructure is outdated and inefficient domestic: good service in north but sparse in south; domestic satellite system with 12 earth stations (20 additional domestic earth stations are planned) international: 5 submarine cables; microwave radio relay to Italy, France, Spain, Morocco, and Tunisia; coaxial cable to Morocco and Tunisia; participant ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... keep warm. The heated soap-stone wrapped up at their feet, the warm buffalo robes under and over them, their thick overcoats and fur caps alike proved inadequate. Then one took his turn at driving, while the other crouched entirely covered beneath the robes. The wind drove the hard, sparse flakes from the low leaden sky like so many needles against the driver's face, filling his eyes with tears, causing his skin to glow and smart. Even in this was a certain joy and adventure. But again ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... corral, which they could distinguish as a black blotch in the sparse willow growth, Pink turned and stopped them. "I know the layout here," he whispered. "I'll just sneak ahead and rubber around. You Rubes sound like the beginning of a ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... her sparse face toward the down-town tide and against a light wind that tasted of rain and napped her skirts around ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... horseback, and was so done until lately, since the establishment of stages. Between the great towns and in other places where the population is dense stages are preferred because they afford an additional opportunity to make a profit from passengers; but where the population is sparse and on crossroads it is generally carried on horseback. Unconnected with passengers and other objects, it can not be doubted that the mail itself may be carried in every part of our Union with nearly as much economy and greater dispatch on horseback than in a stage, and in many ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 2: James Monroe • James D. Richardson
... is given by the sparse reports from the eastern army to the question of the entire foreign press: "Where has Hindenburg been keeping himself?" Wishes and speculations may thus busy themselves as much as they like with the answering of that question. In the Russian version of the war situation there is reference ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... stark still in the middle of the field and rubbed his eyes to make sure that he was awake. There was not the slightest doubt that what he saw was very real. The river at that point was quite wide and its opposite shore was bordered with sparse woodland. ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh |
