"Staple" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tired, she felt too confused and faint to speak. A dim idea that her only chance of rescue lay in Jack made her continue to cling to him. He, meanwhile, was securing the end of the rope to a staple driven into the rock during the old smuggling days. The ledge on which he now sat was invisible from the Mermaid's Cave except to expert eyes, owing to its being so near the roof. From this ledge he looked down into that hidden storehouse for smuggled treasure of ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... disease, and infanticide.[362] Like the Papuans generally, they live in settled villages and engage in fishing, agriculture, and commerce. The houses are solidly built of wood and are raised above the ground upon piles, which consist of a hard and durable timber, sometimes iron-wood.[363] The staple food of the people is sago, which they obtain from the sago-palm. These stately palms, with their fan-like foliage, are rare on the coral island of Tumleo, but grow abundantly in the swampy lowlands of the neighbouring ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... years of travel I classified the fishes anew, all previous enumeration being paltry, and made the notes and queries which form the staple of my manuscript. I found fresh-water creatures to which the sheat-fish would be a morsel, and hydras to which the fabled sea-serpent would be a worm. I ascended the rivers with the salmon, and fathomed ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... course, curious creatures. I have said that we were always hungry. I think we were. And yet the staple of our breakfast (which never varied during the whole of my time there) was never once eaten by me, though I was repeatedly punished for leaving it. The dish was 'skilly,' or porridge of a kind, with which (except on the church's somewhat numerous fast-days) we were given treacle. ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... corresponding thought of that which does not pass, and is unaffected by time and change. Just as reason requires some unalterable substratum, below all the fleeting phenomena of the changeful creation—a God who is the Rock-basis of all, the staple to which all the links hang—so we are driven back and back and back, by the very fact of the transiency of the transient, to grasp, for a refuge and a stay, the permanency of the permanent. 'In the year that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... ideas are enjoyed and used, and in due time are sent back, often quite innocently, for re-issue. Nay, even what is popularly known in England as "modern American humour" has been claimed as a leaf out of Punch's book, quaint exaggeration forming its staple feature, as in the case where we are told that "a young artist in Picayune takes such perfect likenesses that a lady married the portrait of her lover instead ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... which hugged the citadel, presented but a mean appearance. Yet before long he described it to the Duke as "the best of all his majesty's towns in America," and assured his royal highness that, with proper management, "within five years the staple of America will be drawn hither, of which the brethren of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... loser, and so will the case be formed here; for such is the poverty and meanness of the people (by reason of the length and coldness of the winters, the difficulty of subduing a wilderness, defect of staple commodity, the want of money, etc.), that if with hard labour men get a subsistence for their families, 'tis as much as the generality are able to do, paying but very small rates towards the public charges; and yet if all the country ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... live on coarse bread made of bran, which was doled out to them by Bessas at a quarter of the price of wheat. Before long even this bran became a luxury beyond their power to purchase. Dogs and mice provided them with their only meals of flesh, but the staple article of food was nettles. With blackened skin and drawn faces, mere ghosts of their former selves, the once proud and prosperous citizens of Rome wandered about the waste places where these nettles ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... particularly esteemed. Indeed, so extensively was the hunting of deer practised that bows and arrows were often called kago-yumi and kago-ya (kago signifies "deer"). Fish, however, constituted a much more important staple of diet than flesh, and fishing in the abundantly stocked seas that surround the Japanese islands was largely engaged in. Horses and cattle were not killed for food. It is recorded in the Kogo-shui that the butchering of oxen to furnish meat for workers in a rice-field roused the resentment ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... war and political upheaval. It still remains, however, one of the world's poorest countries, with an estimated per capita GDP of about $130. The food situation is precarious; during the 1980s famine has been averted only through international relief. In 1986 the production level of rice, the staple food crop, was able to meet only 80% of domestic needs. The biggest success of the nation's recovery program has been in new rubber plantings and in fishing. Industry, other than rice processing, is almost nonexistent. Foreign trade is primarily ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... the state of commercial legislation of Great Britain as it bears upon our interests. It excludes with interdicting duties all importation (except in time of approaching famine) of the great staple of production of our Middle and Western States; it proscribes with equal rigor the bulkier lumber and live stock of the same portion and also of the Northern and Eastern part of our Union. It refuses even the rice of the South unless aggravated with a charge of duty upon ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... become filled. Men or lads remove the full bottles, replacing them by empty ones, while other hands convey them to the corkers, whose guillotine machines are incessantly in motion; next the agrafeurs secure the corks by means of an iron staple, termed an agrafe; and then the bottles are conveyed either to a capacious apartment aboveground, known as a cellier, or to a cool cellar, according to the number of atmospheres the wine may indicate. It should be explained that air compressed to half its volume acquires twice its ordinary ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... in my previous messages to the injurious and vexatious restrictions suffered by our trade in the Spanish West Indies, Brazil, whose natural outlet for its great national staple, coffee, is in and through the United States, imposes a heavy export duty upon that product. Our petroleum exports are hampered in Turkey and in other Eastern ports by restrictions as to storage and by onerous taxation. For these mischiefs adequate ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 8: Chester A. Arthur • James D. Richardson
... cotton gin worked another revolution in commerce, and rice proved to be an unfailing staple. Armies of negroes tilled the soil, and were happy in their circumscribed sphere, humanely cared ...
— Historic Papers on the Causes of the Civil War • Mrs. Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... basis, and to bring the best kinds of fruit within the reach of the middle classes, the artisans, and ultimately even the very poor. Just as wheaten bread from being a luxury reserved for the rich has become the staple of food for all grades of society, so fruits which are now commonly regarded as an indulgence, although a very desirable addition to the food of the well-to-do, must, in a short time, become practically a necessity to the great mass ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... as like him as pea to pea. He has a tolerable share of his good qualities; and as for his prejudices—oh, they are his meat and drink, and the very clothes he wears. He is made up of prejudices—he is covered all over with them. They are the staple of his dreams; they garnish his dishes, they spice his cup, they enter into his very prayers, and they make his will altogether. His oaks and elms in his park, and in his woods—they are sturdy timbers, in troth, and gnarled and knotted to some purpose, for they have stood for centuries; but what ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... of gallantry, jumped overboard up to the waist in full fig; and one of the men following his example, we were soon afloat. The ladies applauded, and the captain sat in his wet breeks for the rest of the voyage, in all the consciousness of being considered a hero. Ducks and onions are the grand staple of Bermuda, but there was a fearful dearth of both at the time I speak of—a knot of young West India merchants, who, with heavy purses and large credits on England, had at this time domiciled themselves in St. George's, to batten on the spoils of poor Jonathan, having monopolised all the good ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... goes rustically forward. Bucks, and bears, and rattle-snakes, and former mining operations, are the staple of men's talk. Agriculture has only begun to mount above the valley. And though in a few years from now the whole district may be smiling with farms, passing trains shaking the mountain to the heart, many-windowed hotels lighting up the night like factories, and a prosperous city occupying the ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... best enjoyed when it is sought for with some trouble and difficulty, and partly because such beauty, and the romance which is attached to it, should not make up the staple of one's life. Romance, if it is to come at all, should always come by fits ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... common with all other Shemitic races, a worship of one God as Supreme, though the Arabian Allah, like the Baal of Canaan and Phoenicia, was supposed to be attended by numerous inferior deities. Though Islam undoubtedly borrowed the staple of its truths from the Old Testament, yet there was a short confession strikingly resembling the modern creed of to-day, which had been upon the lips of many generations of Arabians before Mohammed's time. Thus it ran: ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... ranged upon either side of the road, and have all the necessary bathing appointments. Among the many novelties to a stranger was the process of dressing chicken, which was their staple article of food. The hot stream was the only necessary cauldron for the scalding process, while the feathers were thrown into the swift current, and rapidly carried away by the natural sewerage, a decidedly labor-saving process, and somewhat characteristic ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... spent by the Discovery in the south polar ice, seals and penguins formed staple articles of the diet of the men. Though the flesh of both of these creatures has a strong and peculiar flavor, it was found to be an agreeable change from pemican and other preserved material. So vigorous were the men's appetites, stimulated by the ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... only to arrive at truth from exterior evidence—is in a fitter state for belief of the fact from being already made aware that it was probable. Let it not then be inferred, somewhat perversely, that because antecedent probabilities are the staple of our present argument, the theme itself, Religion, rests upon hypotheses so slender: it rests not at all upon such straws as probabilities, but on posterior evidence far more firm. What we now attempt is not to prop the ark, but favourably to predispose the mind of any ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... product of the Mississippi farms and nothing else was raised to sell. Wheat, oats and rye were raised in limited quantities, but only for the slaves and the stock. All the fine flour for the master's family was bought in St. Louis. Corn was raised in abundance, as it was a staple article of food for the slaves. It was planted about the 1st of March, or about a month earlier than the cotton. It was, therefore, up and partially worked before the cotton was planted and fully tilled before ...
— Thirty Years a Slave • Louis Hughes
... hordes, whose herds he must often have captured, and whose supplies of forage he curtailed. It is difficult to say how far he penetrated. Herodotus was informed that he marched east to the Tanais (Don), and thence north to the country of the Budini, where he burnt the staple of Gelonus, which cannot well have been below the fiftieth parallel, and was probably not far from Voronej. It is certainly astonishing that he should have ventured so far inland, and still more surprising that, having ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... padlock attentively; then, drawing from his pocket one of those wonderful knives which are really miniature tool-chests, he raised from a grove the screw-driver which formed part of its equipment, and with neatness and dispatch unscrewed the staple to which ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... legislation, or even by direct coercion, to bring its materials to their own shores, and there to yield to them the advantages of the entrepot. Thus the preamble to one of the series of Navigation Acts states, as a direct object, the "making this Kingdom a staple[12] [emporium], not only of the commodities of our plantations, but also of the commodities of other countries, and places, for the supply of the plantations."[13] An instructive example of such indirect effort was the ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... alive to-day among the Ainos in the remote island of Saghalien. Among the Ainos the Bear is what psychologists rather oddly call the main "food focus," the chief "value centre." And well he may be. Bear's flesh is the Ainos' staple food; they eat it both fresh and salted; bearskins are their principal clothing; part of their taxes are paid in bear's fat. The Aino men spend the autumn, winter and spring in hunting the Bear. Yet we are told the Ainos "worship ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... article which departs, in ever so slight a measure, from the antediluvian patterns mostly used, practically prohibits their adoption. The carcass of the lock is of cast iron; the casting, like all the small American castings, is simply perfect; bosses are cast round the follower and keyholes; the box staple is one piece of ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various
... church of Wiggenhall, St. Mary the Virgin, the following books may be seen fastened by chains to a wooden desk in the chancel: Foxe's Book of Martyrs, in three volumes, chained to the same staple; the Book of Homilies; the Bible, with calendar in rubrics; and the works of Bishop Jewell, in one volume. The title-page is lost from all the above: in other respects they are in a fair state of preservation, considering their {596} antiquity, of which their characters being old English, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... be confessed that such low views of religion and morality are strangely at variance with the exalted notions of the disinterestedness of virtue which form the staple of one of Shaftesbury's most important treatises. To reconcile the discrepancy seems impossible. Only let us take care that while we emphatically repudiate the immoral compromise between truth and expediency which Shaftesbury recommends, we do not lose sight of the real ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... which is in a sense a private settlement, under the patronage of the Duke of Devonshire. Hastings is of the people; Brighton has a character almost continental; Eastbourne is select. Lawn tennis and golf are its staple products, one played on the very beautiful links behind the town hard by Compton Place, the residence of the Duke; the other in Devonshire Park. It is also an ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... the staple food of the population, which was made soon after the commencement of the war, was composed partially of rye and potato flour. It was not at all unpalatable, especially when toasted; and when it was seen that the war would not ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard
... were really between dead classics and dead science, or if science is to be vivified by an infusion of commercial, utilitarian spirit, then a thousand times rather let us keep to the classics as the staple of education. They at least have no "use." At least they hold the keys to the glorious places, to the fulness of literature and to the thoughtful speech of all kindred nations, nor are they demeaned ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... was no incoherent rant. Words of truth and soberness formed the staple of each sermon; and his burning words and startling images were only the electric scintillations along the chain of his scriptural eloquence. Though the common people heard him most gladly, he had occasional hearers of a higher class. Once ...
— Life of Bunyan • Rev. James Hamilton
... guided, to some extent, by external similarity. We must choose the iambic movement as being most congenial to English; we must avoid the ten-syllable iambic as already appropriated to the longer Asclepiad line. This leads me to conclude that the staple of each stanza should be the eight-syllable iambic, a measure more familiar to English lyric poetry than any other, and as such well adapted to represent the most familiar lyric measures of Horace. With regard to the Sapphic, it seems desirable that it should be represented by a measure ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... primitive aspect of many of the Oneida countrymen passing upon the road—the clumsy contrivances of a hundred years ago, on which the gathered loads of hay were going homeward from some of the out-lands—and the long, low wagons on which great pyramids of boxes of cheese, the staple of the section, were being slowly dragged ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... The staple of their business was, however, the letting of bicycles on hire. It was a singular trade, obeying no known commercial or economic principles—indeed, no principles. There was a stock of ladies' and gentlemen's bicycles in a state of disrepair that passes description, and these, the hiring stock, ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... pen door, jammed the hardwood peg into the staple, ran her fingers nervously through the pale fluff of her hair, and came hurrying across the yard to the door with a smile on ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... and are brought forward on all occasions; they link our whole community together in good-humor and good-fellowship; they are the rallying points of home feeling; the seasoning of our civic festivities; the staple of local tales and local pleasantries; and are so harped upon by our writers of popular fiction that I find myself almost crowded off the legendary ground which I was the first to explore by the host who have followed in ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... to bear in mind by way of palliation that in Greek education Homer played as great a part as the Bible in ours. He might be taken simply or taken allegorically; but one way or the other he was the staple of education, and it might be assumed that every one would like the ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... had been chafing bitterly, and now South Carolina broke into open revolt. The whole South felt itself aggrieved by the tariff. Its industrial system was not suited to develop manufactures; it lacked the material for skilled labor; it lacked the artisan class who create a demand. Its staple industry was agriculture, the growth of tobacco, rice, sugar, and above all, cotton, and it went to the North and to Europe for its manufactured goods. A system of taxation which doubled the price of its imports without helping its exports, was resented ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... adjoining to a church, and inclosed with pales that separate it from the village of the Hurons. The Courriers de Bois have but a very small settlement here, at the same time it is not inconsiderable, as being the staple of all the goods that they truck with the south and west savages; for they cannot avoid passing this way when they go to the seats of the Illinese and the Oumamis on to the Bay des Puanto, and to the River Mississippi. Missilimackinac ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... composing verse, which was too thriftless an occupation to be continued long. They used it, perhaps, as the means of attracting notice to themselves at their first entrance on the world, but not as the staple on which they were afterwards to depend. When the song had drawn a band of hearers around them, it had done its duty. The crowd was to be detained and increased, by expectations of advantage rather than of pleasure. A writer consulted ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... the only countries thereabouts that we can extend our settlements to; which are so inconvenient to navigation, that nothing can be brought from them across the mountains, at least none of those gross commodities, which are the staple of North America; and they are as inconvenient to have any thing carried from them, nigh two thousand miles, down the river Ohio, and then by the Missisippi. For that reason those countries, which we look upon to be the ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... with 'Hail to the Protestant Chief!' in great scarlet letters. A third, if I remember right, bridged the entrance to the Castle yard, but the motto on it has escaped me. The cloth and wool industry is, as I have told you, the staple trade of the town, and the merchants had no mercy on their wares, but used them freely to beautify the streets. Rich tapestries, glossy velvets, and costly brocades fluttered from the windows or lined the balconies. East Street, High Street, and Fore Street were draped from garret ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... all appearance, rarely swung on its rusty hinges, was clamped to its stone jamb by a thick lock, which, red with rust, seemed like an enormous brick. The keyhole could be seen, and the robust latch, deeply sunk in the iron staple. The door was plainly double-locked. It was one of those prison locks which old Paris ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... hour he trudged along, making hard work of it in his chaps, boots, and spurs, stopping now and then to drive a staple or brace a post. The country was growing wilder and more broken, with cedar timber on the ridges and here and there a pine. Occasionally he could catch a glimpse of the black, forbidding walls of Tailholt Mountain. But Patches did not know that it was Tailholt. ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... point with him; and he saw that it was provided with a hasp and staple, so that the entrance could be secured by a padlock, though that was missing. Getting a piece of wood from the deck, he made a toggle that would fit the staple, and put the scuttle in a convenient place. Leaving the forward deck, he went aft, taking another look at the steamer in the north-west; ...
— Taken by the Enemy • Oliver Optic
... useful, more noble, or happier persons than our old maid can married life present? Is she not more worthy of imitation than the "Celias" and "Daphnes" whose delicate distresses have formed the staple of circulating libraries, or than those feeble spirits in real life, who, mistaking selfishness for sensibility, turn thanklessly from the blessings and coldly from the duties of life, because they have been denied the gratification of ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... was Felicia—and the sound ceased as suddenly as it had risen. Just a phrase, a stormy phrase, from an Italian folk-song which he had heard her sing to his mother. He caught the usual words—"morte"—"amore." They were the staple of all her songs; to tell the truth he was often bored by them. But the harsh, penetrating note—as though it were a note of anger—in the sudden sound, arrested him; and when it became silent, he still thought of it. It was a strange, big voice for ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... his neck, with blazing eyes and ugly gleaming teeth, crouched some unrecognisable creature, human yet inhuman, a monkey and yet a man. There were a couple of monkeys swinging by their tails from a bar, and a leopard chained to a staple in the ground, walking round and round in the far corner, snapping and snarling every time he glanced towards the new-comers. The creature in front of him stretched out a hairy hand towards a club, and gripped it. Quest drew a long breath. His eyes ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... we have given an account altogether too brief and too rapid for their importance, deserve to be studied, as containing some of the richest transcripts of the richest mind of England. Letters from various eminent persons diversify them, but the staple is Burke. If their style seldom rises to the elated ardour and buoyant strength of his speeches and pamphlets, they exhibit all his wisdom; they display the entire depth of that current which public difficulties and obstructions ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... the right hand, the point of the short end below the balancing disc resting on the ground and the long end on her knee, the spinner attaches the end of her staple close to the disc and then gives the spindle a rapid twirl. As it revolves she holds the yarn out so that it twists. As it tightens sufficiently she allows it to wrap on the spindle and repeats the operation until the spindle is full. The spinning is done loosely or tightly, ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... and commerce between the two nations, and afterwards, if Sweden held it fit, when they sent an ambassador to England, or otherwise, to propound anything concerning the fishing for herrings or the traffic in America, or touching a staple at Narva, Revel, or Gothenburg (which Eric likewise discoursed of at large), that the Protector would give ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... the prospects being excellent for enormous profits if the scheme proved successful. The cost of producing cotton varies from three to eight cents a pound. The staple would find ready sale at fifty cents, and might possibly command a higher figure. The prospects of a large percentage on the investment were alluring in the extreme. The plantations, the negroes, the farming utensils, and the working stock were to require no outlay. All that was demanded ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... understood the conversation and was interested in it. He followed the speakers with his eyes, and every now and then would utter a little cry, exactly as if to object and give his own opinion upon literature, which formed the staple of our talks. He was very fond of books, and when he found one open on the table, he would lie down by it, gaze attentively at the page and turn the leaves with his claws; then he ended by going to sleep, just as if he had really been reading a fashionable ...
— My Private Menagerie - from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19 • Theophile Gautier
... on this point. It cannot be doubted, I say, that, in spite of his professing to consider me as a dotard and driveller, on the ground of his having given up the notion of my being a knave, yet it is the very staple of his pamphlet that a knave after all I must be. By insinuation, or by implication, or by question, or by irony, or by sneer, or by parable, he enforces again and again a conclusion which he does ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... "cunningly devised fables"? It seemed to him that the old story had become so well worn that, for the sake of a little novelty, which might, perhaps, attract the people who stayed away, he might turn into some subject less hackneyed than the staple stock of pulpit addresses. The reason was a very plausible one, and the preacher altogether sincere. The people did come to hear him, too, as they had not come concerning the other matters he had been used to expound. There was a little mild sensation, ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... no less than one hundred weight: This was a matter of public and serious concern; for these nails, if circulated by the people among the Indians, would do us irreparable injury, by reducing the value of iron, our staple commodity. One of the thieves was detected, but only seven nails were found in his custody. He was punished with two dozen lashes, but would impeach none ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... often one does not need to look far for the reason. Life at the farm-house sinks into deep ruts, and becomes weary plodding. There are too many "one-ideaed" farmers and farms. It is corn, potatoes, wheat, butter, or milk. The staple production absorbs all thought and everything else is neglected. Nature demands that young people should have variety, and furnishes it in abundance. The stolid farmer too often ignores nature and the cravings of youth, and ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, and throughout the Rocky Mountains and the timbered ranges of the Pacific coast. In the East it has always ranked second only to the deer among the beasts of chase. The bear and the buck were the staple objects of pursuit of all the old hunters. They were more plentiful than the bison and elk even in the long vanished days when these two great monarchs of the forest still ranged eastward to Virginia and Pennsylvania. The wolf and the cougar were always too scarce and too shy to yield much ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... population and industries change. The first is largely composed of descendants of French colonists, termed creoles, with some Spanish intermixed, and the sugar cane is the staple crop, changing as the Gulf is approached to rice. At the point where the united Red and Washita Rivers join the Mississippi, which here changes direction to the east, the Atchafalaya leaves it, and, flowing due south ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... passing descriptive glimpse will not here be considered out of place. Cotton seems to be the most important crop as seen from the windows of my car, and for many a mile after leaving Alexandria we glide through luxuriant fields of that important Egyptian staple. ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... Boleyn, recently created Marquis (so she was styled, to indicate the possession of the peerage in her own right) of (p. 295) Pembroke,[818] took Catherine's place; and plans for the promotion of the divorce formed the staple of the royal discussions. Respect for the power of the two Kings robbed the subsequent interview between Emperor and Pope of much of its effect; and before Charles and Clement parted, the Pope had secretly agreed ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... nitrogen, was peculiar to animals, and that carbon was an element peculiar to plants, we now know that both elements are found in animals, just as both occur in plants. The chemistry of living things, moreover, when it did grow to become a staple part of science, revealed other and greater anomalies than these. It showed that certain substances which were supposed to be peculiar to plants, and to be made and manufactured by them alone, were also found in animals. Chlorophyl is the green coloring matter ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... derision of schoolmaster are staple subjects in the East as in the West, (Quem Dii oderunt pdagogum ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... about half an hour after she had been asleep, who should come snuffing about in the garden but Boxer, the gardener's ugly, old rough terrier. He had no business at all in the garden, but had managed to get his chain out of the staple, and there he was running about, and dragging it all over the flower beds, and doing no end of mischief; then he made a charge at Mrs Spottleover, who was on the lawn, where she had just punched out a fine grub, but ...
— Featherland - How the Birds lived at Greenlawn • George Manville Fenn
... cried the clerk, and gripped his ankle. It was quite horrible having his ankle gripped like that, and Mr. Bensington tightened his hold on the iron staple above to a drowning clutch, and gave a faint squeal ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... C. F. Martelli of Staple Inn, London, who has so generously placed this information at my disposal. Mr. ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... Collector of Customs with two or three uncovenanted European assistants as patrol officers.[2] The rule now is to tax only the staple articles of produce from the west on their transit down into the valley of the Jumna and Ganges, and to have only one line on which these articles shall be liable to duties.[3] They are free to pass everywhere ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... decaying bodies of lizards and birds, a grinning human skull or two, broken pots and pieces of rag fluttering in the wind, all offered as propitiation to the presiding demon of the place, while away in the bush, behind the houses, we saw the giant leaves of the plantain groves that yielded the staple food ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... you that I do not yield to yourself in my desire to promote the extension of cotton cultivation in India, and, above all, improvement in the quality of the staple. I consider that the interests of India are involved in this improvement to a greater degree even than those of Great Britain; for, no doubt, if the quality of the Indian product were so far raised as to admit of its competing on terms approaching to equality ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... young lady might be, appearing perhaps somewhat in advance of her contemporaries, but rather from her training than from intrinsic force of character. The qualities of womanhood well developed, were so entirely the staple of her composition, that there is little to describe in her. Was not she one made to learn; to lean; to admire; to support; to enhance every joy; to soften every sorrow of the object ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... effect, place a fellow on the other side, and fit it with sunk bolts to shoot into the overhanging top and plinth. If you wish to avoid the expense and trouble of fitting a lock, substitute a padlock and a staple clinched through the front of a drawer and passing through a slot in ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... posxtmarko. Stamp with foot piedfrapadi. Stamper (marker) stampilo. Stanch (firm) firma, fortika. Stanch (trusty) fidela, fervora. Stanchion subteno. Stand stari. Stand piedestalo. Stand (trans.) starigi. Standard (flag) standardo. Standard (model) modelo. Stanza strofo. Staple komuna. Star stelo. Starboard dekstro. Starch amelo. Stare rigardegi. Stark rigida, tuta. Stark (adv.) tute. Starling sturno. Start (with fear) ektremi. Start ekiri. Startle ektremi. Starve malnutri. State (social condition) etato. State (condition) stato. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... getting accustomed to it. Gentlemen make themselves agreeable to ladies by reciting the number of deaths in this house or that. This together with talk of funerals, cholera medicines, cholera dietetics, and chloride of lime form the ordinary staple of conversation. Serious persons of course throw in moral ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... is a sociable being. This faith leads them to seek intercourse with him, to approach him by prayer, to give him their hearts, to live in communion with him. These exercises and the various states and changes of the inner life connected with them constitute the staple of what is commonly called religious experience. Such experience, of course, has more or less effect on the character and external conduct. We cannot live in familiar intercourse with human beings without becoming better ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... the tendons of his neck." This is the famous shoulder-cut (Tawash shuh) which, with the leg-cut (Kalam), formed, and still forms, the staple of Eastern ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... treaty with England on that subject with those we have made with other nations, it amounts to a positive compact to supply that nation exclusively with naval stores whenever they may be at war. Had the list of contraband articles been reduced—had naval stores and provisions, our two great staple commodities, been declared not to be contra-band, security would have been given to the free exportation of our produce; but instead of any provision being made on that head, an article of a most doubtful nature, and ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... influence and career of Roger Williams. Nor are such discrepancies surprising, when we remember how the history which transpires now and here fails of harmonious report. Every battle, diplomatic arrangement, political event, nay, each personal occurrence, which forms the staple of to-day's journalism and talk, is regarded from so many different points of view, and stated under so many modifying influences, that only judicial minds have a prospect of reaching the exact truth. Hence the true way to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... great staple of diet in ancient, as it is in modern, times. The importance attaching to it is shown by the fact that the Sun goddess herself is represented as engaging in its cultivation and that injuring a rice-field was among ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... commended in Tricoche et Cacolet is the satire of the hysterical sentimentality and of the forced emotions born of luxury and idleness. The parody of the amorous intrigue which is the staple of so many French plays is as wholesome as it is exhilarating. Absurdity is a deadly shower-bath to sentimentalism. The method of Meilhac and Halevy in sketching this couple is not unlike that employed by Mr. W.S. Gilbert in H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance. Especially ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... Their staple drink is water, but when travelling they cut down a species of bamboo, and drink the watery fluid which it contains. After boiling any food in bamboo stems they drink the water which has been used for the purpose, and which has become a sort of ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... had recently been assassinated. The strain of nearly twenty years of war was telling severely on the nation. It was no time to take on a new enemy, eight millions strong, especially one who supplied so many staple products during peace and threatened both the sea flank of the mother country and the land ...
— The War With the United States - A Chronicle of 1812 - Volume 14 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • William Wood
... should have any advantage of her production, and the British woollen manufacturing industry, confined to the use of coarser staples, languished. Now Australia, and Australia practically alone, produces the fine wool of the world. Australia merino wool is finer, more elastic, longer in staple, than any wool ever dreamed of a century ago, and its use alone makes possible some of the very fine ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox
... of fluted feeding rollers a narrow lap, about 71/2 in. wide, is passed into the head, in which the following action takes place: Assuming that the stroke is finished, the lap is seized near its end by a pair of nippers, so as to leave about half the length of the staple projecting. These projecting fibers are combed by a revolving cylinder, partially covered with comb teeth. When the front or projecting ends of the fibers are thus combed, a straight comb in front of the nippers drops into them, the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 481, March 21, 1885 • Various
... a time there was made a wondrous garden. It was called the earth. The flowers, the trees, the plants which afterwards became through man's skill our staple products—all these ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... Translations of the gospels and epistles, lives of the saints, collections of sermons, exegetic religious works, translations of Greek chronicles, and miscellanies such as the Sbornik of St Sviatoslav, formed the staple of the national literature. In the time of Tsar Simeon, himself an author, considerable literary activity prevailed; among the more remarkable works of this period was the Shestodnev, or Hexameron, of John the exarch, an account of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... subject is started, is willing or able to follow it out into its ramifications, to play with it, to embroider it with pathos or with wit, to penetrate to its roots, to trace its connexions and affinities. Question and answer, anecdote and jest are the staple of American conversation; and, above all, information. They have a hunger for positive facts. And you may hear them hour after hour rehearsing to one another their travels, their business transactions, their experiences in ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... the other one universal and proverbial character of foul-mouthed eloquence, which heard from infancy, could not but furnish a model almost unconsciously to those who had occasion publicly to practise vituperative rhetoric. What they remembered of this vernile licentiousness, constituted the staple of their talk in such situations. And the horrible illustrations left even by the most accomplished and literary of the Roman orators, of their shameless and womanly fluency in this dialect of unlicensed abuse, are evidences, not to be resisted, of ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... readers; correct intelligence, sprightly and elegant paragraphs, remarks on men and manners at once free and generous; and local intelligence pertaining to the district, such as please men of the Nith in a far land. These are the staple commodity of a newspaper, and these you can easily have. A few literary paragraphs you can easily scatter about; these attract booksellers, and booksellers will give advertisements where they find their works are noticed. Above all things, write cautiously concerning all ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... of the fur trade into a staple industry changed this point of view to a limited extent. The government, as we have seen, considered it desirable that colonists should be established in New France {62} at the expense of traders. For the St Lawrence, however, the first and only fruits ...
— The Founder of New France - A Chronicle of Champlain • Charles W. Colby
... help along a little by wearing high-heeled shoes. So you can do something to encourage yourself in serenity of aspect and demeanor, keeping your infirmities and troubles in the background instead of making them the staple of your conversation. This piece of advice, if followed, may be worth from three to five years of the fourscore which ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... is divided into two great portions, the UPPER, and LOWER VALLEY, according to its general features, climate, staple productions, and habits of its population. The parallel of latitude that cuts the mouth of the Ohio river, will designate these portions with ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... the Dominican's favorite staple has been cacao. The cacao or chocolate tree grows in a number of the West India Islands, but in none of them is it cultivated to such an extent as in Santo Domingo. Cacao is peculiarly fitted to be a "poor man's ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... Farm Book; The American Farm Book; or, a Compend of American Agriculture, being a Practical Treatise on Soils, Manures, Draining, Irrigation, Grasses, Grain, Roots, Fruits, Cotton, Tobacco, Sugar-Cane, Rice, and every staple product of the United States; with the best methods of Planting, Cultivating, and Preparation for Market. Illustrated by more than 100 ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... apparent. It makes the rich richer, and the poor poorer; for, as, according to the creed of the dynasty, capital should own labor, and the labor thus owned can alone successfully produce cotton, he who has must be continually increasing his store, while he who has not can neither raise the one staple recognized by the Cotton dynasty, nor turn his labor, his only property, to other branches of industry; for such have, in the universal abandonment of the community to cotton, been allowed to languish and die. The economical tendency of the Cotton dynasty is therefore ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... this time, had a great appetite for conversation: he talked well, listened well; one of his chief enjoyments was, to give and receive from his fellow-creatures in that way. I hope, and indeed have evidence, that he required good sense as the staple; but in the form, he allowed great latitude. He by no means affected solemnity, rather the reverse; goes much upon the bantering vein; far too much, according to the complaining parties. Took pleasure (cruel mortal!) in stirring up his company by the whip, and even by the whip applied to RAWS; for ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... water. It is possible, we will not say probable, that our present difficulties may result to the advantage both of England and America: to England, by giving her a real hold upon India as the source of her cotton-supply, and to America by making the North the best customer for the staple of the South. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... Ireland, however in former Times miserably restrained and limited, hath in this happy Reign received considerable Enlargements; such as, the opening several Wooll-Ports; the Bounty on Irish Linens, now our staple Commodity, imported into Great-Britain; and the Immunity lately granted of importing thither Beef, Butter, Tallow, Candles, Pork, Hides, live Cattle, &c. a Privilege that, in its Consequences, must prove of signal Advantage to both ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... to very recent days a spell of drinking—simple drinking—was the staple amusement of many an otherwise respectable farmer. Not many years since it was not unusual for some well-to-do farmer of the old school to ride off on his nag, and not be heard of for a week, till ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... Black Donald, not only doubly ironed but confined by a chain and staple to the wall. He was very pale and haggard from long imprisonment ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... a fact of the greatest importance, that King Cotton turns out to be a thorough citizen-king, and adapts himself very readily to changed events. The great Southern staple can be raised by small cultivators as easily as corn or potatoes; and difficulty begins only when sugar and rice are to be produced. Yet it will not be long before these also will come within reach of the freedmen, if they continue their present tendency towards joint-stock operations. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... feet. The dense forests which originally covered the island have been cut down, and the soil, which is of unusual fertility, is under thorough cultivation, yielding heavy crops of corn and manioc, which latter forms the staple food ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various
... arrived they were all put to sleep in cells opening upon a courtyard with a tank in the centre. They were supplied with mats for beds, and chained, each one by the ankle, to a staple in the wall. And without the dogs prowled and ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... in that part of the Western Presidency, profited enormously by the high price of the staple during the American war. Silver was poured into the country (literally) in crores (millions sterling), and cultivators who previously had as much as they could do to live, suddenly found themselves possessed of sums their imagination had never dreamt of. ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... a good deal of grist to feed so large a family, especially when hoecake was the staple food, and it was because of his frequent trips to the mill, across the swampy region called the "Slashes," that Henry was dubbed by the neighbors "The ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... onions, and salt. Dried beef and venison are also used, and wild pig and chickens and ducks are plentiful; other articles of food being maize, sweet potatoes, and many kinds of fruit, such as cocoa-nuts, bananas, mangoes, mangusteens, and so on. In the Moluccos the staple crop is not rice, but sago, which is prepared from the sap of the sago-palm. To an inhabitant of Java or Sumatra the cocoa-nut tree is indispensable; when a child is born, a nut is planted, and later on, if the child asks how old ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... done so, and there was no answer, the machinist took hold of the lock. To his own surprise and that of Tom, one of the staples pulled out and the door swung open. The place had evidently been forced before, and the lock had not been opened by a key. The staple had been pulled out and replaced ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Scout - or, Uncle Sam's Mastery of the Sky • Victor Appleton
... staple of our island, in which we are clothed, is very imperfectly to be traced on the books of the Custom-House: but I know that our woollen manufactures flourish. I recollect to have seen that fact very fully established, last year, from the registers kept in ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... fishing. Cashew crops have increased remarkably in recent years, and the country now ranks sixth in cashew production. Guinea-Bissau exports fish and seafood along with small amounts of peanuts, palm kernels, and timber. Rice is the major crop and staple food. However, intermittent fighting between Senegalese-backed government troops and a military junta destroyed much of the country's infrastructure and caused widespread damage to the economy in 1998; the civil war led to a 28% drop ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... successful, and by skill and care in breeding has been greatly improved, insomuch that intelligent judges are of opinion that some of the Vermont flocks are superior to the best in Europe, both in form, hardiness, quantity of fleece and staple. They are too well known to require a detailed description here. Suffice it to say that they are below rather than above medium size, possessing a good constitution, and are thrifty, and cheaply kept. Their chief merit is as fine wooled sheep, and as such they excel ...
— The Principles of Breeding • S. L. Goodale
... was only a latch to secure it, but I pulled a thin knife from my pocket, and just as I received a blow in the face from the first arrival which knocked me backwards, I had jammed it over the latch through the iron staple in which it worked. Before the first attempt to open it had been followed by the discovery of the obstacle, I was up, and the next moment, with a well-directed kick, disabled a few of the fingers which were fumbling to remove it. To protect the latch was now my main object, but my efforts would ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... more oppressive to those who have limited resources than the corresponding monotony of a town life. For this reason, and for many others, it is certain—and perhaps (unless we get to fighting with steam-men) it will continue to be certain through centuries—that, for the main staple of her armies and her navies, England must depend upon the quality of her bold peasantry and noble yeomanry; for we must remember that, of those huge-limbed men who are found in the six northern counties of England and in the Scottish Lowlands, of those ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... hospitality, and the ladies; and for that night our belief was unbounded. All had made up their minds that a new era of human felicity had arrived; that "all the world was a stage," in the most dancing and delightful sense of the words; and that feasting and fetes were to form the staple of life for every future age. We were to live in a rosebud world. I heard around me in a thousand whispers, from some of the softest politicians that ever wore a smile, the assurance, that France was to become a political Arcadia, or rather an original paradise, in which toil and sorrow ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... is not yet very good, it serves and will as long as flour holds out. No one complains, though we already lack many things. No merchandise can come out yet on the railroads, all the automobiles and most of the horses are gone, and shops are shy of staple things. ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... the Atlantic, and the railroad companies in New York allowed a percentage on every emigrant ticket. But a still larger revenue was derived from the outfitting on the frontiers. The agents purchased all the cattle, wagons, tents, wagon-covers, flour, cooking utensils, stoves, and the staple articles for a three months' journey across the Plains, and from them the Saints supplied themselves."—" Rocky Mountain Saints," ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... terribly that the two clenched fists, lashed together, had been forced up higher than the shoulder-blades. From there his eyes traced in one instantaneous glance the hide rope going upwards from the tied wrists over a heavy beam and down to a staple in the wall. He did not want to look at the rigid legs, at the feet hanging down nervelessly, with their bare toes some six inches above the floor, to know that the man had been given the estrapade till he had swooned. His first impulse was ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... staple fur of the country. Many surprising stories have been told of the sagacity with which this animal suits the form of its habitation, retreats, and dam, to local circumstances; and I compared the account of its manners given by Cuvier in his Regne Animal with the reports of ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... little community was already astir, and then the Angelus summoned all to the church, where mass was said, and a short time given to the religious instruction of the neophytes. Breakfast followed, composed mainly of the staple dish atole, or pottage of roasted barley. This finished, the Indians repaired in squads, each under the supervision of its alcalde, to their various tasks in workshop and field. Between eleven and twelve o'clock, a wholesome and ...
— The Famous Missions of California • William Henry Hudson
... praises which had been lavishly bestowed upon the gentlemen whose career generally terminated in Newgate or on the Tyburn Tree, and by giving "the accomplishment of verse" to the sentiments and the language which formed the staple of the popular thieves' literature of the circulating libraries. The medium chosen was the review of a manuscript, supposed to be sent to the writer by a man who had lived so fully up to his own convictions as to the noble ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... a match, and see the shed was only built against a cabin and hadn't no connection with it; and there warn't no floor to the shed, nor nothing in it but some old rusty played-out hoes and spades and picks and a crippled plow. The match went out, and so did we, and shoved in the staple again, and the door was locked as good as ever. Tom was joyful. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... worked in de garden too. My massa was good to all he slaves, but Missy Grace was mean to us. She whip us a heap of times when we ain't done nothing bad to be whip for. When she go to whip me, she tie my wrists together wid a rope and put that rope thru a big staple in de ceiling and draw me up off de floor and give me a hundred lashes. I think 'bout my old mammy heap of times now and how I's seen her whipped, wid de blood dripping off ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... employed to enable them to diversify their industries or to establish manufactures. They bought in the cheapest market every luxury and most of the necessities of life. British merchants supplied all their wants, carried their tobacco, and advanced them money. Cheap labor, a single staple with wide fluctuations of value, a credit system, entire dependence on foreigners, and absolute free trade according to the Manchester theories, should have produced an earthly paradise. As a matter of fact, the Virginia planters ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... who came to Lower Canada in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries found themselves located in a region of intense cold, where arable soil was inferior in quality and limited in amount, producing no staple like the tobacco of Virginia or the wheat of Maryland or the cotton of South Carolina or the sugar of the West Indies, by which a young colony might secure a place in European trade. But the snow-wrapped ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... his visitor by the shoulder and pushed him out of the entry. Then he closed and fastened the outer door. This was a matter of main strength, for the gale was fighting mad. When the latch clicked and the hook dropped into the staple he, too, entered the kitchen. Kent had obeyed orders to the extent of going over to the stove, but he had not removed his hat or coat and seemed to be quite oblivious of them or the fire or anything except the words ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... the staple of the Tahitian, was there aplenty. The plant or stalk was that of the banana, but very dark at the base, and the leaves thicker. The fruit was two or three times as large, and red, and a striking difference was that it was placed on the ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... far more insurrections and secessions, not one of which, I suppose some in this meeting must regret, has been tolerated by our Government or recognised by France. Our Government in India has existed for a hundred years in some portion of the country where cotton is a staple produce of the land. But we have had under the name of a Government what I have always described as a piratical joint-stock company, beginning with Lord Clive, and ending, as I now hope it has ended, with Lord Dalhousie. And under that Government I will undertake to ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... backgammon, capable of rough slashes of sarcasm when he opens his old beard for speech): these, and the like of these, intimate confidants of the King, men who could speak a little, or who could be socially silent otherwise,—seem to have been the staple of the Institution. Strangers of mark, who happened to be passing, were occasional guests; Ginckel the Dutch Ambassador, though foreign like Seckendorf, was well seen there; garrulous Pollnitz, who ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Parkinson, Bib. Banks, No. 89.—Native name, MADAWICK, "Skip-jack" of the settlers. "Rays, D. 8-28; A. 2-23; P. 15." Very common in shallow sandy bays, and forming the staple food of the natives, who assemble in fine calm days, and drive shoals of this fish into weirs that they have constructed of shrubs and branches of trees. Specimen caught by hook on ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... multitude of creeks and inlets and little bays, no two of them alike, yet all trackless abysses? We may almost fancy that Nature took pleasure in recording by ineffaceable hieroglyphics the symbol of Norwegian life, bestowing on these coasts the conformation of a fish's spine, fishery being the staple commerce of the country, and well-nigh the only means of living of the hardy men who cling like tufts of lichen to the arid cliffs. Here, through fourteen degrees of longitude, barely seven hundred thousand souls maintain existence. Thanks to perils devoid ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... him to fulfill, on failure of which the parchment should be torn up, and asked whether she might impose them. The devil politely replied in the affirmative. "Here, then," said she, "see this horse painted on the wall of the inn: I wish to mount him, and you must make me a whip of sand and a staple of walnuts." The devil bowed, and in a moment the horse was prancing before their eyes. The lady now had a large tub of holy water brought in, and invited the devil, as his second task, to plunge into it and refresh his weary limbs. He coughed, shivered, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... opportunity offered, the same as in all similar beginnings. Since the year of our Lord 1623, four forts have been built there by order of the Lords Directors,(2) one on the south point of the Manhatans Island, where the East and North Rivers unite, called New Amsterdam, where the staple-right(3) of New Netherland was designed to be; another upon the same River, six-and-thirty Dutch miles [leagues] higher up, and three leagues below the great Kochoos(4) fall of the Mohawk River, on the west side of the river, in the colony of Renselaerswyck, ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • Various
... cajolery. He met a suggestion that his superiors might disapprove of his doing so, by pointing out that they would all keep "yower side o' th' gayut" until the Bull—whose name, strange to say, seemed to be Zephyr—was safe in bounds, chained by his nose-ring to a sufficient wall-staple. ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... to Miss Paton, just opposite the ruined castle. Among other visitors to St. Andrews known to my father were Professors Tait and Crum Brown, who inveigled him into making trial of the "Royal and Ancient" game, which then, as now, was the staple resource of the famous little city. I have a vivid recollection of his being hopelessly bunkered three or four holes from home, and can testify that he bore the moral strain with more than usual calm as compared with the generality of golfers. Indeed, despite ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... earnings, and anxious for their bread. The freight of cotton has formerly been three pence sterling, from Charleston to Liverpool, in time of peace. It is now I know not what, or how many fractions of a penny; I think, however, it is stated at five eighths. The producers, then, of this great staple, are able, by means of this navigation, to send it, for a cent a pound, from their own doors to the best market ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... people of an independent nation in the trade and commerce of the world, American shippers found themselves no better off than they were as dependents of Great Britain. Orders in council at once closed the ports of the British West Indies to all staple products which were not carried in British bottoms. Certain commodities,—fish, pork, and beef,—which might compete with the products of British dependencies, were excluded altogether. The policy of France and Spain was scarcely ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... in the Botanical Museum—fibres, commercial specimens of rattan, india-rubber, and gutta-percha, barks for tanning purposes, Peruvian barks, vegetable oils, indigo samples, various kinds of meal, resins and damars. There is also a section devoted to forest and staple produce. ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... are they, that I have heard more than one lady declare that she didn't care if it was unjust, she should like to have slaves, rather than be plagued with servants who had so much liberty. All the novels, poetry, and light literature of the world, which form the general staple of female reading, are based upon aristocratic institutions, and impregnated with aristocratic ideas; and women among us are constantly aspiring to foreign and aristocratic modes of life rather than to those of native republican simplicity. How many women ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... good endowment of that kind of innocent hypocrisy which is needed as a staple in the lives of women who bridge a thousand awful chasms with smiling, unconscious looks, and walk, singing and scattering flowers, over abysses of fear, while their hearts are ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... wool, vexed in a Belgian loom, And into cloth of spongy softness made, Did into France or colder Denmark doom, To ruin with worse ware our staple trade." ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... of genius for the sake of aggrandizing the one at the expense of the other are the staple of the meaner kinds of criticism. No lover of art will clash a Venetian goblet against a Roman amphora to see which is strongest; no lover of nature undervalues a violet because it is not a rose. But comparisons used in the way of description ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... of the author's roses—every drop distilled at an immense cost." And, no doubt, it is a great slight to an author to skip his preface, though it cannot be denied that some prefaces are very tedious, because the writer "spins out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument," and none but the most hardy readers can persevere to the distant end. The Italians call a preface salsa del libro, the salt of the book. A preface may also be likened to the porch of a mansion, where it is not courteous to ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... carnal cravings until those in authority dismiss them, and next, the rule that the boys must take their food, not with their mother but with their master, and not till the governor gives the sign. They bring from home the staple of their meal, dry bread with nasturtium for a relish, and to slake their thirst they bring a drinking-cup, to dip in the running stream. In addition, they are taught to shoot with the bow and to ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... honor of opening the festivities was subsequently toasted as the reigning divinity of fashion for the hour. The "minuet de la cour" and stately "quadrille," varied by the "basket dance," and, on exceptional occasions, the exhilarating "cheat," formed the staple for saltatorial performance, until the hour of eleven brought the concluding country dance, when a final squad of roysterers bobbed "up the middle and down again" to the airs of "Sir Roger de ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... is to hail Mrs. Wood's appearance and success at the opera as an auspicium melioris aevi, as the dawn of a coming day, when the staple commodity of our Italian opera shall be furnished by our own island, instead of being imported from a country which, I boldly assert, does not produce either superior voices, or better educated musicians than our own—nay, so well educated. Has Italy ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various |
