"Top-heavy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cannot observe thy dethroning Or watch thy effulgence depart Without unaffectedly owning A pang of regret in my heart. I know thou wast stuffy, non-porous, Unstable, top-heavy and hot; But O! thou wast grimly decorous; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various
... windows are wider than the gable, that there is a disproportion between the little arcade in the lowest stage of the towers and the great lancets in the upper stages, that the height of the latter makes the towers appear top-heavy, that the whole facade lacks projection and depth of shade, and that there is too much glass. Some dissatisfaction was felt, as the Fabric Rolls indicate, in 1379, when masons were employed to divide ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ripon - A Short History of the Church and a Description of Its Fabric • Cecil Walter Charles Hallett
... which will soon be met sailing southward out of the Greenland fjords. The warm waters of the Atlantic will in the course of a few days be too much for it. The sun will be at work on it; it will get undermined by the wash of the breakers, until, being top-heavy, it will speedily capsize. Then the war between the ice and the elements will begin afresh, until the once stately ice-mountain will become the 'bergy bit,' as whalers call the slowly-lessening mass of crumbling, spongy ice, until it finally disappears in the waters; but only to rise again in the ...
— Tom Finch's Monkey - and How he Dined with the Admiral • John C. Hutcheson
... a donkey,"—Sally pointed to a tall, ungainly boy, who presented a droll aspect as he leaned up against the wall beside the musicians' platform. His thin body accentuated by the large donkey's head gave him a top-heavy expression, and the forefeet that covered his long arms hung dejectedly ...
— Phyllis - A Twin • Dorothy Whitehill
... which he lacks, yet Apemantus is contemptible beside him. The churlish philosopher is like some dingy little scow, which rides out the tempest because the small cargo which it has is all in its hold; Timon is like some splendid, but top-heavy, battleship, which turns turtle in the storm through lack of ballast. There is something lionlike and magnificent, despite its unreason, in the way he accepts the inevitable, and later, after the discovery of the gold, spurns away both the chance of wealth and the human ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... went on to the upper deck and took over the wheel, and screwed it over hard-a-port. The little top-heavy steamer swung round in a quick circle, lurching over dangerously to the outside edge. She ran for half a mile up stream, and then turned again and came back at the top of her gait. She was aiming at one particular canoe, which for a while came ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... offshore oil resources and favorable agricultural conditions, Cameroon has one of the best-endowed, most diversified primary commodity economies in sub-Saharan Africa. Still, it faces many of the serious problems facing other underdeveloped countries, such as political instability, a top-heavy civil service, and a generally unfavorable climate for business enterprise. The development of the oil sector led rapid economic growth between 1970 and 1985. Growth came to an abrupt halt in 1986, precipitated by ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... The top-heavy, four-horsed, yellow old coach from Vicenza, which arrived at Padua every night of the year, brought with it in particular on the night of October 13, 1721, a tall, personable young man, an Englishman, in a dark blue cloak, who swang briskly down from the coupe and asked in stilted Italian ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... thinking of the story of the Irishman, who, when the bottom and seat of his sedan-chair fell out, remarked to his bearers, that "he might as well walk, but for the honour of the thing." One feels so strongly that the Pope might every bit as well walk as ride in that ricketty, top-heavy chair, in which he sits, or rather sways to and fro, with a sea-sick expression. Then the ostrich feathers are so very shabby, and the whole get-up of the procession is so painfully "not" regardless of expense. You see Cardinals with dirty robes, under the most gorgeous stoles, while the ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... had a queer light on them which made the early green look a deeper and stronger colour than I have ever seen it. There appeared to be a sort of glare under the mist, and the fresh wet landscape, with its top-heavy sky, radiated with some light of its own. Oh, the intoxication of that damp, wet drive, with a fine rain in our faces, and the car bounding under us on the "pave"! If I am interned till the end of the war I don't care a bit! I have had some fresh air, and I have ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... clash of cymbals, a file of men in motley robes swaggered into position, wheeled, and formed the ragged front of a Falstaff regiment. Overcome by the scarlet ribbon, the long-coated "boy" bowed, just as through the gate, like a top-heavy boat swept under an arch, came heaving an unwieldy screened chair, borne by four broad men: not naked and glistening coolies, but "Tail-less Horses" in proud livery. Before they could lower their shafts, Heywood ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... bed, sat down in the low chair and thrust her hands info the thick coils of hair piled as always on top of her head. As she did so she caught sight of herself in the mirror and wondered absurdly why she should have kept all her hair and lost so much of her face. She looked more top-heavy than ever. Her face was a small oblong, her eyes out of all proportion. ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... and presently she found herself puzzling over a problem that had been growing upon her and now bulked big. The truth was that already the weight of the top-heavy household had fallen upon the girl's shoulders. Utterly unprepared and ignorant, she had been thrust into a tangled labyrinth of domestic affairs. The more familiar she had become with the internal working of the household, the more ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... not only would the locomotive as it shot along do such varied damage; in truth, it would not go at all; the wheels, declared eminent experts, would not grip on the smooth rails, or else the engines would prove top-heavy. ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... boats the curious little Japanese sailors, oddly dressed in thick padded coverings and bowl caps on their heads, with nothing on limbs and feet save small straw sandals, strapped to the feet between great and second toes, looked top-heavy. ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... a scream of delight. Jack had neatly joined a hollow iron globe, taken from the newel post of some old iron staircase railing, to the two prongs, and covered it with a coat of red fireproof paint. It was true that its complexion was rather high, that it was inclined to be top-heavy, and that in the long run the other dolls suffered considerably by enforced association with this unyielding and implacable head and shoulders, but this did not diminish Mary's joy over her restored first-born. Even its utter absence of features was no defect in ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... eyes—young Dippel, son of the rich drug-store man. Feuerstein saw that Dippel was on the verge of collapse from too much drink. As he still had his eighty-five cents, he pressed Dippel to drink and, by paying, induced him to add four glasses of beer to his already top-heavy burden. ...
— The Fortune Hunter • David Graham Phillips
... articles were followed, however, by others which were more within their range of comprehension—by a pair of dumb-bells, a purple cricket-bag, a set of golf clubs, and a tennis racket. Finally, when the cabman, all top-heavy and bristling, had staggered off up the garden path, there emerged in a very leisurely way from the cab a big, powerfully built young man, with a bull pup under one arm and a pink sporting paper in his hand. The paper he crammed into the pocket of his ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle
... an hour thereafter, St. Vincent, fascinated, studied his inscrutable countenance. To begin with, it was a massive head, abnormal and top-heavy, and its only excuse for being was the huge bull-throat which supported it. It had been cast in a mould of elemental generousness, and everything about it partook of the asymmetrical crudeness of the elemental. The hair, rank of growth, thick and unkempt, matted itself here ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... you say true," returned Bob, nodding his head aside; "I think my head's all alive inside like an old cheese, for I'm so full o' plans, one knocks another over. If I hadn't Mumps to talk to, I should get top-heavy an' tumble in a fit. I suppose it's because I niver went to school much. That's what I jaw my old mother for. I says, 'You should ha' sent me to school a bit more,' I says, 'an' then I could ha' read i' the books like fun, an' kep' my head cool an' ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... four windows and a door, and the one above (approached in the usual Swiss fashion by an external staircase), which is much the prettier, having six windows and a door. There are shutters outside, and the overhanging roof at first sight gives the building somewhat of a top-heavy appearance, but this impression wears off after a time, and it is found to be effective and well-proportioned. "The five mirrors" which Dickens placed in the chalet have been removed from the upper room, but they are scarcely necessary, the views ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... following the smooth little path to the side door. As for using the front door, that was a matter of great ceremony; the long grass grew close against the high stone step, and a snowberry bush leaned over it, top-heavy with the weight of a morning-glory vine that had managed to take what the fishermen might call a half hitch about the door-knob. Elijah Tilley came to the side door to receive me; he was knitting a blue yarn stocking without looking on, and was warmly ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... broken-backed, disjointed clauses, eked out with stammerings and throat-clearings. They possess the art (learned from the pulpit) of rounding an uneuphonious sentence by dwelling on a single syllable—of striking a balance in a top-heavy period by lengthening out a word into a melancholy quaver. Withal, they never cease to hope. Even at last, even when they have exhausted all their ideas, even after the would-be peroration has finally refused ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... yeh see, an' she's as top-heavy as a pile-driver. I was afeard she'd strike a low limb or somethin' an' git smashed. So I goes to settle her a bit an' lay her down on her back an' tie her on; but he says he don't know about that layin'-down business, an' declares she'll ride all right. He speaks ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... Bering's voyage had shown—then there must be a southern continent somewhere, to keep the balance between the northern and southern hemispheres; else the world would turn upside down. And there must also be an ocean between northern Europe and northern Asia, else the world would be top-heavy and turn upside down. It was an age when the world accepted creeds for piety, and learned moonshine instead of scientific data; when, in a word, men refused ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... and how we had to get the boat up to Shepperton by five o'clock to meet him, and then he went for George. Why was George to fool about all day, and leave us to lug this lumbering old top-heavy barge up and down the river by ourselves to meet him? Why couldn't George come and do some work? Why couldn't he have got the day off, and come down with us? Bank be blowed! What good was he ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... I do. I sort of leaven the lump. Without me he'd be just a clever prig; he couldn't help it. With me he is only better than most men; and his lofty ideas don't get top-heavy, because I keep him in touch ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... say forty have been killed outright, and many fearfully injured. Entire families have been wiped out in some cases. Mr. —— has lost his wife, his sister, and three little children. This is the result of a Boer concession. The accident was caused by the Netherlands carriages being poorly built and top-heavy. In rounding a curve they were swung off the track—collapsed at once like card-houses, crushing and mangling ...
— A Woman's Part in a Revolution • Natalie Harris Hammond
... delaying, and I might as well go back to knitting sale-socks then as any time. However, I didn't go till October. You needn't think I'd stayed away from the farm all that time, while the tender things were opening, the tiny top-heavy beans pushing up, the garden-sarse greening, the little grass-blades two and two,—while all the young creatures were coming forward, the chickens breaking the shell, and the gosling-storm brewing and dealing destruction,—while the strawberries ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... the Bolshevik orators toured the barracks and factories, violently denouncing "this Government of civil war." One Sunday we went, on a top-heavy steam tram that lumbered through oceans of mud, between stark factories and immense churches, to Obukhovsky Zavod, a Government munitions-plant out on the ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... what it pretends to be—an elementary treatise on the subject, and is not rendered top-heavy, by overloading of extraneous matter. It will take one about an hour to read it, and he will then know how the game ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... You don't know Dan, I suppose? Squarest man you ever met! And he don't have to scratch gravel any more, either, for he has a third interest in that Twin Spring find, and it pans out big. They say the girl sold her share for two hundred thousand. She doesn't look top-heavy ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... grub-axe, whose wide edge clears the earth from the larger roots. Then he puts his pipe in his pocket, and settles to the serious work of the 'great axe,' as he calls it. I never could use this ungainly tool aright: a top-heavy, clumsy, awkward thing, it rules you instead of you ruling it. The handle, too, is flat—almost with an edge itself sometimes—and is quite beyond the grasp of any but hands of iron. Now the American ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... of its oil resources and favorable agricultural conditions, Cameroon has one of the best-endowed primary commodity economies in sub-Saharan Africa. Still, it faces many of the serious problems facing other underdeveloped countries, such as a top-heavy civil service and a generally unfavorable climate for business enterprise. Since 1990, the government has embarked on various IMF and World Bank programs designed to spur business investment, increase ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... years without parliament; but so had Wolsey, and Elizabeth had apologized when she called it together oftener than about once in five years. If the state had had more financial ballast, and the church had been less high and top-heavy, Charles might seemingly have weathered the storm and let parliament subside into impotence, as the Bourbons let the States-General of France, without any overt breach of the constitution. After all, the original design of the crown had ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... battens, hung water-colour paintings of his ships. A sloop of war under full sail; a brig, close-hauled, beating out of Plymouth Sound; a tiny gunboat at anchor in a backwater of the Upper Yangtse. There were spick-and-span cruisers; a quaint, top-heavy looking battleship that in her day had been considered the last word in naval construction, and whose name to-day provokes reminiscences from the older generation and from the younger half-dubious smiles; then, near the door, came modern men-of-war of familiar ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... precipice, on the edge of a volcano; in the lion's den, on slippery ground, under fire; not out of the wood. unwarned, unadmonished, unadvised, unprepared &c. 674; off one's guard &c. (inexpectant) 508[obs3]. tottering; unstable, unsteady; shaky, top-heavy, tumbledown, ramshackle, crumbling, waterlogged; helpless, guideless[obs3]; in a bad way; reduced to the last extremity, at the last extremity; trembling in the balance; nodding to its fall &c. (destruction) 162. threatening &c. 909; ominous, illomened; alarming ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... American coast drawn on a sheet of foolscap, with his lever watch and a quadrant for his instruments, he squared off for New London. A rough, hard passage they had of it. The ship's ballast was gone, by the bursting of the tanks; she was top-heavy and under manned. He spoke a British whaling bark, and by her sent to Captain Kellett his epaulettes, and to his own owners news that he was coming. They had heavy gales and head winds, were driven as far down as the Bermudas; the water left in the ship's tanks was brackish, and ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... remark of the Caterpillar in "Alice in Wonderland"—"Why not?" impresses us as his general motto. He could not see why he should not be on good terms with all things. The pomp of war and ambition, the great empire of the Middle Ages, and all its fellows begin to look tawdry and top-heavy, under the rationality of that innocent stare. His questions were blasting and devastating, like the questions of a child. He would not have been afraid even of the nightmares of cosmogony, for he had no fear in him. To him the world was small, not because he had any ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... finally, just as the rain began to pour, a self-sacrificing friend who had remained to help got into the cab with me, and we told the driver to go to number 33, such-a-street. It was at the furthest extremity of the town, and when we reached there, after two or three attempts on the part of the top-heavy cab to upset, I was greeted by the information that no such person as the landlady of whom I was in search lived there. What was worse, nobody had ever heard of her, and no cab containing a baby had called at the house that day. Where then was the baby, and its mother, and my wife, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... almost a miracle that the top-heavy sled did not upset. Had the course been less smooth and even, it must have done ...
— The Camp in the Snow - Besiedged by Danger • William Murray Graydon
... in the outer office, and a thin, piping voice was calling down all the curses of the Koran on the heads of my great top-heavy Hindu guards. ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... exact opposite of this. He has a top-heavy head, proportionately large for his body, and a ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... rather below the general level of the place. Its chief treasure is the throne itself, a stone chair, carved in rather rudimentary ornamentation, and about the size of an ordinary chair. The roof is supported by the curious, top-heavy-looking stone pillars, that are known to have prevailed not only in the Minoan but in Mycenaean period; monoliths noticeably larger at the top than at the bottom, reversing the usual form of stone pillar with which later ages have made us more ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... should be observed in the making of furniture, namely, harmony between the parts. For instance, a table with thin legs and a thick top gives the appearance of a top-heavy structure; or the wrong use of two different styles is bad from an artistic standpoint; moreover, it is the height of refined education if, in the use of contrasting woods, they are properly blended to form ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... which is irresponsible rule. And this has come upon us because we departed from the old morality in three essential points. First, we supported notions against normal customs. Second, we made the State top-heavy with a new and secretive tyranny of wealth. And third, we forgot that there is no faith in freedom without faith in free will. A servile fatalism dogs the creed of materialism; because nothing, as Dante said, less than the generosity of God could give to Man, after ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... wasn't torpedoed!" I blurted out before I knew that I was thinking aloud. Then I blushed furiously and wished that the most top-heavy skyscraper in New York would fall on my head. But the S. M. only laughed. "It was not," he replied. "When a man hasn't much he sticks to what he's got a good deal closer than a brother. My savings ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... a preposterous green bonnet, top-heavy with plumes, on a little lady in yellow, who sat in a carriage; the lady beside her, in winter costume of velvet pelisse and ermine boa, was fitted to a bride's head with its orange flowers and veil, and these works of art were sent over to Jack, labelled "Miss Laura and Lotty Burton going ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... horse-leech, which trade, for the girl's felicity, held him much abroad, and gave her occasion, seldom by her neglected, to prove to her intimate of the hour that there can be fire without smoke. Now I, being somewhat top-heavy at this season with the wine of so fair a lady's favors, thought that I might, with no small advantage to myself and no small satisfaction to my mistress, set me to doing her honor with some such tuneful words ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... painted entirely white, without masts, with two small black funnels alongside each other; and several erections one above another for decks, containing multitudes of windows about two feet square. The fabric seemed kept together by two large beams, which added to the top-heavy appearance of the whole affair. We entered by the paddle-box (which was within the outer casing of the ship), in company with a great crowd, into a large square uncarpeted apartment, called the "Hall," with offices at the sides for the sale of railway ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... could be so jolly," he continued. "As a rule I don't like Germans. When they try to be jolly they generally only succeed in being top-heavy. But, of course, your friend is half-English. Can't he play, too? And to think of your having written those ripping tunes. His sister, too—no wonder we haven't seen much of you, Mike, if that's where you've been spending your time. She's rather like the new girl at the Gaiety, but ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... large soldiers with five large kits, the aspect of the room filled us with terror. The fiercest frost or foe we could have faced, but the bravest man may quail before wax-flowers and fragile tables top-heavy with ornaments and knick-knacks, and all felt that to encounter such things within the Arctic Circle was an unfair test of our fortitude. Why had not the War Office or some ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... accretions a decent inheritance tax. He does not spoil his case by conventional or academic timidities. He does not ask this tax merely as a fiscal device, but as a measure that makes for more rational, social equalities. He asks it in order that the common wealth may grow larger and the top-heavy fortunes (the larger portion of which privilege has made) may be lessened for the common good. The fatuous outcry that this is to be opposed because it is "Socialism" will, of course, continue, although the ...
— The Conflict between Private Monopoly and Good Citizenship • John Graham Brooks
... mean, this garrulous, super-subtle, so-called Philosopher, who first set me upon the building of 'The Three Volumes,' it is true, but whose stipulation that he should occupy so large a portion of them has made them rock top-heavy, to the forfeit of their stability. He maintains that a story should not always flow, or, at least, not to a given measure. When we are knapsack on back, he says, we come to eminences where a survey of our journey past and in advance ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... remarkable for the prodigious height to which they struggle upwards from the dense jungle towards the air and light; and one of the most curious of nature's devices, is the singular expedient by which some families of these very tall and top-heavy trees throw out buttresses like walls of wood, to support themselves from beneath. Five or six of these buttresses project like rays from all sides of the trunk: they are from six to twelve inches thick, and advance from five to fifteen feet outward; and ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... Admiral at 0853, and at 0855 were on our way. We were part of a broad hemispherical screen surrounding the Cruiser Force which englobed the Line and supply train—the heavies that are the backbone of any fleet. We were headed roughly in the direction of the Rebel's fourth sector, the one top-heavy with metals industries. Our exact course was known only to the brass and the computers that planned our interlock. But where we were headed wasn't important. The "Lachesis" was finally going to war! I could feel the change in the ...
— A Question of Courage • Jesse Franklin Bone
... top-heavy with gin, And rehearsing his speech on the weight of the crown, He tript near a sawpit, and tumbled right in, "Sinking Fund," the last words as his noddle came down. Oh! ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... diminutive farm-house. Three watch-dogs came from beneath the little front porch, but, recognizing the visitor, they stood wagging their tails cordially and uttering low whines of welcome. There was a broken harrow, with rusty iron teeth, leaning against the house near the log steps; a top-heavy ash-hopper and a lye-stained trough stood under the spreading branches of a beechnut-tree beside a rotting cider-press and a huge pot for heating water during hog-killing or for boiling lye and grease for the making ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... however, to such a work we come in the splendidly composed Rape of the Sabines by Giovanni da Bologna in the Loggia itself. Spoiled a little by its too laboured detail, its chief fault lies in the fact that it is top-heavy, the sculptor having placed the mass of the group so high that the base seems unsubstantial and unbalanced. Bologna's other group here, Hercules and Nessus, which once stood at the foot of the Ponte Vecchio, is dramatic and well composed, ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... aeroplane was overhead. There were armoured cars on the road, going toward the front; top-heavy machines that made surprisingly little noise, considering their weight. Some had a sort of conning tower at the top. They looked sombre, menacing. The driving of these cars over slippery roads must be difficult. ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... banks of the great river were gray and mysterious under the effulgence of a top-heavy yellow moon. The search-light on the peak pierced out the fact that a low, swirling mist was creeping up from the river's ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... all know that Sefborough's ministry is —well, top-heavy," he said. "Sefborough is building his card house just a story too high. It's a toss-up what 'll upset the balance. It might be the army, of course, or it might be education; but it might quite as well be a matter ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... unequal &c. adj.; countervail; have the advantage, give the advantage; turn the scale; kick the beam; topple,topple over; overmatch &c. 33; not come up to &c. 34. Adj. unequal, uneven, disparate, partial; unbalanced, overbalanced; top-heavy, lopsided, biased, skewed; disquiparant[obs3]. Adv. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... business, and Church's fish pails only of the ordinary size. There is never any ill-feeling after a little spar, and each proceeds, in the most amicable way, to steal some other pelican's fish. A spar at this club, by-the-bye, is a joyous and hilarious sight. Two big birds with stumpy legs and top-heavy beaks, solemnly prancing and manoeuvring before one another with an accompaniment of valiant gobbles and a punctuation of occasional pecks—a ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... a siding of the railway that runs from Moscow to Warsaw through Smolensk, was a string of thirteen freight cars, the short, chunky Russian kind—barely half as long as the American—looking as flimsy, top-heavy, and unwieldy as houseboats on wheels. No locomotive was tied to the string, and from the windward side, where the cars were whitewashed by the biting blizzard that had already stopped all traffic with its drifted barricades, they had the desolate look of stranded ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... a tremendous top-heavy burden of responsibilities; his death would be no more disastrous than a scandal that would tend to destroy public confidence ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... and when these were in their places, the whole of the interior formed an enclosed apartment, of a height sufficient to allow even a man to stand erect without his hat. It is true, this arrangement rendered the boat clumsy, and, to a certain extent, top-heavy and unmanageable; but so long as it could be retained, it also rendered it infinitely more comfortable than it could possibly be without it. The roof, moreover, might be cut away in five minutes, at any time, should circumstances ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... a horse, for society fitted, Be doomed to employment so utterly bad, And why should a coarse-looking man be permitted To dance on his back on a top-heavy pad? ...
— Davy and The Goblin - What Followed Reading 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' • Charles E. Carryl
... of sight. One of my brothers—one of God's children under the Southern Cross. Did these old fellows really believe in the God whose name they mentioned so glibly? I wondered. But I am thankful that while at Caddagat it was only rarely that my old top-heavy thoughts troubled me. Life was so pleasant that I was content merely to be young—a chit in the first flush of teens, health, hope, happiness, youth—a heedless creature recking ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... night my head appeared to have grown considerably. I wondered idly for the moment whether I had not made a mistake and put on Minikin's; if so, I should be glad to exchange back for my own. This thing I had got was a top-heavy affair, ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... Launceston and Hobart are the only towns that have gas, and while the moon is shining, or is due to shine, even that is not lighted—a piece of economy that may be excused where gas is about ten shillings per thousand. The next day I returned by land to Hobart, travelling to Bridgewater by a top-heavy coach, which at every turn sent my heart into my mouth, but ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton
... men cloaked in scarlet and blue, top-heavy under prodigious white turbans, and fully conscious of the power there is in the lustre of a ribbon and the incisive gleam of gold, whether in bracelet or necklace, or in rings for the finger or the ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... it. But I was in hopes that provident fear might prevent fruitless penitence. I trusted that danger might produce at least circumspection. I flattered myself, in a moment like this, that nothing would be added to make authority top-heavy,—that the very moment of an earthquake would not be the time chosen for adding a story to our houses. I hoped to see the surest of all reforms, perhaps the only sure reform,—the ceasing to do ill. In the mean ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... The state systems were top-heavy with administrative machinery and were officered by incompetent and corrupt officials. Such men as Cloud in Alabama, Cardozo in Mississippi, Conway in Louisiana, and Jillson in South Carolina are fair samples of them. Much of the ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... of the twentieth century," he said, "I should have had to reverse that proportion—in fact, my entire list would then have been top-heavy, and I should have been forced to give half of all the places to agriculture. But thanks to our scientific farming, the personnel employed in cultivation is now reduced to a minimum while showing maximum results. I have already stored the ark with seeds of the latest scientifically developed ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... has passed out of modern sport; but I remember mine with regret, and think I shall some day buy another. I still find that the best double-barrel seems top-heavy in comparison; in poising it the barrels have a tendency to droop. Guns, of course, are built to balance and lie level in the hand, so as to almost aim themselves as they come to the shoulder; and those who have always shot with a double-barrel are probably quite satisfied with the ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... brigadier, however, Bourgain-Desfeuilles, in whose command the 106th was, was certain to be there, brawling as loud as ever, and trundling his fat body about on his short, pudgy legs, with his red nose and rubicund face, vouchers for the good dinners he had eaten, and not likely ever to become top-heavy by reason of excessive weight in his upper story. There was a stir and movement about the farmhouse that seemed to be momentarily increasing; couriers and orderlies were arriving and departing every minute; they were awaiting there, with feverish anxiety of impatience, the belated dispatches ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... a verb, signifies to steady;—as a substantive, a comprehensive mind. A man is said to "lose his ballast" when his judgment fails him, or he becomes top-heavy ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... the command, and so distinguished was the cavalcade that the viceroy would have appointed each of the gentlemen a captain but for fear of making the command top-heavy with officers. It was early in 1540 that the gallant expedition set out, some of the horsemen arrayed in brilliant coats of mail and armed with swords and lances, others wearing helmets of iron or tough bullhide, while the footmen ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... waning, sickly, moth-eaten, top-heavy, and altogether out of condition—as if it had been on duty for weeks on end. In other respects, too, its appearance was not quite normal. In fact, it soon took to behaving in the most extraordinary fashion. Sometimes ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... astonished old mares facing each other, sat the warriors in their saddles, or, rather, in the place where their saddles would have been had they possessed them. Each grasped the headstall reins firmly in his left hand, and with his right aimed his top-heavy lance in a somewhat wobbling manner at his adversary. It must soon be known to all the world of knighthood which was the grimmer champion! At middle distance and well to one side, stood Grand Marshal Valentine, racking his brains for the lines which should give the signal for the ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... co-operation; we might have Anarchist Communism; we might have a hundred things. I am not saying that any of these are right, though I cannot imagine that any of them could be worse than the present social madhouse, with its top-heavy rich and its tortured poor; but I say that it is an evidence of the stiff and narrow alternative offered to the civic mind, that the civic mind is not, generally speaking, conscious of these other possibilities. The civic mind is not free or alert enough to feel how much it has the world before ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... four of us, in an open waggonette with a pair of horses, for Monte Oliveto, the luggage heaped mountain-high and tied in a top-heavy mass above us. After leaving the gateway, with its massive fortifications and frescoed arches, the road passes into a dull earthy country, very much like some parts—and not the best parts—of England. The beauty of the Sienese contado is clearly on the sandstone, not upon the clay. Hedges, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... correction is the diminution in diameter or taper, and the entasis or convex curve of the tapered outline of the shaft of the column. Without the taper, which is perceptible enough in the order of this building, and much more marked in the order of earlier buildings, the columns would look top-heavy; but the entasis is an additional optical correction to prevent their outline from appearing hollowed, which it would have done had there been no curve. The columns of the Parthenon have shafts that are over 34 ft. high, and diminish from a diameter of 6.15 ft. ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... on the trees. The jungle was dense, though by no means so much so as those of the Far East. On either hand were hundreds of native shacks,—mongrel little huts of earth floors, transparent walls of a sort of corn-stalk, and a thick, top-heavy roof of jungle grass or banana leaves, set carelessly in bits of space chopped out of the rampant jungle. Now and then we passed gangs of men fighting back the vegetation that threatened to swallow ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... Fathers as necessary for meeting the claims of the Tractarians, and did not think that that study was sufficiently encouraged by the Nonconformists. Any one who has been in Mr. Taylor's study at Stanford Rivers, and who remembers the top-heavy row of patristic folios that crowned his collection of books, and the glance of pride he cast on them as he asked his visitor whether many men in his Church were well read in the Fathers, will be at no loss to ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... asked Mary Jane, who had never heard the word before. But before her father could answer they were pushed into the crowd at the crossing, hurried across and the next second Mr. Merrill had hailed a great, lumbering, top-heavy automobile and was helping the ...
— Mary Jane's City Home • Clara Ingram Judson
... at the portrait again. The artist had given it a head that would have been, in an intellectual point of view, top-heavy for Shakespeare. 'Romance, however,' Flora went on, busily arranging Mr F.'s Aunt's toast, 'as I openly said to Mr F. when he proposed to me and you will be surprised to hear that he proposed seven times once in a hackney-coach once in a boat once in a pew once on a donkey at Tunbridge ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... been a slender, wide-mouthed child, top-heavy with her damp clumps of hair. Now she was squaring and thickening and looking horrid, like Mr. Hancock. Beside her Harriett felt tall and ...
— Life and Death of Harriett Frean • May Sinclair
... sounds of falling, the fall of the standing fatness. The silent fall of the tobacco, to be hung head downward in fragrant sheds and barns. The felling whack of the corn-knife and the rustling of the blades, as the workman gathers within his arm the top-heavy stalks and presses them into the bulging shock. The fall of pumpkins into the slow-drawn wagons, the shaded side of them still white with the morning rime. In the orchards, the fall of apples shaken thunderously down, and the piling ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... moose-hopple leaves. Often they plunged into swamp mud nearly to their knees. The fallen logs over which they climbed were as slippery as wet glass—the branch spikes on these logs as dangerous under slipping feet as upturned pitchforks. The men were top-heavy under their packs; the women uncomplaining and soaked to their skins. The moist air was still impregnated with the scent of smoke—a sinister odour which kept in their minds the events ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... European plum, when worked on Prunus Americana, the American plum. In that case, the top always outgrows the stock, and in ten years it presents a very curious appearance. It presents the appearance of a very top-heavy head on a very spindling stem. The bearing is usually encouraged, but the fruit is usually small. The amount of fruit measured by numbers is increased, but the amount of fruit measured by the size of individual ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Second Annual Meeting - Ithaca, New York, December 14 and 15, 1911 • Northern Nut Growers Association
... that the weight of the planks upon the deck must not only keep the vessel deeper in the water, but make her more top-heavy, and I determined to throw them overboard; but first I looked for something to eat, and found plenty of victuals in the iron pot in which the men had cooked their supper ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... visited Paris only twice and briefly), her mind charmingly developed by conscientious tutors. But at the moment he thought that the compelling power lay in some deep subtlety of eye, her little air of lofty aloofness, her classic small features in a small face, and the top-heavy masses of blue black hair which she carried with a certain naive pride as if it were her only vanity; in her general unlikeness to the gray-eyed fair-haired American—a type to which himself belonged. Her only point in common with this fashionable set patronizing ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... longer in the day than cooking for four—half an hour off your sleep, or half an hour off your march? I do not believe that five men on the lid of a crevasse are as safe as four. Wilson writes that the stow of the sledge with five sleeping-bags was pretty high: this makes it top-heavy and liable to capsize in ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... top-heavy," Jack at one time called out. "You can see that it leans toward the north; and sometimes I've thought it wobbled considerably, though that may have been the plane ...
— Air Service Boys Over the Atlantic • Charles Amory Beach
... disposition, Mr Sudberry was about to address this ill-favoured beggar—for such he evidently was—when the coach came round a distant bend in the road at full gallop. It was the ordinary tall, top-heavy mail of the first part of the nineteenth century. Being a poor district, there were only two horses, a white and a black; but the driver wore a stylish red coat, and cracked his whip smartly. The road being all down hill at that part, the coach came on at ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... iron picket-fence of a millionaire across the street. The motors speeding along the avenue were compelled to stop, and in a jiffy were piled three, five, and six deep at the edge of the crowd; auto-busses, top-heavy turtles of traffic, plunged into the jam, their passengers crowding to the edges of the roofs in wild excitement and peering down into the centre of the mass, which presently could hardly be seen ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Shakespeare (1709), and that by Grignion so late as 1786, for anything but copies of the design in Dugdale, with modifications made a plaisir. In Pope's edition (1725) Vertue gives the monument with some approach to accuracy, but for the bald plump face of the bust presents a top-heavy and sculpturally impossible face borrowed from "the Chandos portrait," which, in my opinion, is of no more authority than any other portrait of Shakespeare. None of them, I conceive, ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... which Mr. Banks and Dr. Solander were to have sailed was the Endeavour. It was, they said, unfit for the voyage. The Admiralty altered it in such a way as to render it top-heavy. It was nearly overset on going down the river. Then it was rendered safe by restoring it to its former condition. When the explorers raised their former objections, they were told to take it or none. Ann. Reg. xv. 108. See also Boswell's Hebrides, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell |
