"Zigzag" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... entertaining, restful, and real talk which is the most roving. You may begin in Portland and end in San Francisco. You may start talking about preserving peaches, and halt on the latest sensation. It is often very amusing to trace the line of such converse: it moves in a zigzag course, and terminates many miles out of the original direction. By this discursiveness I do not mean gossip. Of course talk of that kind has no good part in conversation: it is the slave of ignorance and bad character. I might, however, differ ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... for it was not still like the others, but went stopping and starting and scuttling like a crab over the grass—sometimes upright like a man and sometimes on all fours like a beast. At last it stood up and ran from tree to tree in a swaying, moving zigzag. I could see then that it was a man, but for the life of me I could not remember where I'd seen his like. Then another cloud slid over the moon and the night was as dark as ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... Derwent,—a passage which half a dozen strokes of the oars accomplished, —and reached a very pleasant seclusion called "The Lovers' Walk." A ferriage of twopence pays for the transit across the river, and gives the freedom of these grounds, which are threaded with paths that meander and zigzag to the top of the precipitous ridge, amid trees and shrubbery, and the occasional ease of rustic seats. It is a sweet walk for lovers, and was so for us; although J——-, with his scramblings and disappearances, and shouts from ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... swiftness, with more than Indian discipline; discharged their fire with some approach to regularity, in three successive lines, the signals being given by the captain's horn. They were full of ingenuity: marked their movements for each other by scattered leaves and blazed trees; ran zigzag, to dodge bullets; gave wooden guns to their unarmed men, to frighten the plantation negroes on their guerrilla expeditions; and borrowed the red caps of the black rangers whom they slew, to bewilder the aim of the others. One of them, finding himself close to the muzzle ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... cheap prescription, costing only twelve and a half cents, but it proved very effective. Old Belz put the stuff into an earthenware bottle, which he corked with a corncob. Michael started for home by the zigzag path which led up the steep limestone bluff, but his steps were slow and unsteady; he sat down on a rock, and took another dose out of his bottle. He never went any further of his own motion, and we buried him next day. ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... up to it. It took three-quarters of an hour to climb the series of precipitous zigzags by which this remarkable pass is surmounted; darkness came on, accompanied by thunder and lightning, and just as we arrived a tremendous zigzag of blue flame lit up the house and its interior, showing a large group sitting round a wood fire, and then all was thick darkness again. It had a most startling effect. This house is magnificently situated, almost hanging over the edge of the knife-like ridge of the pass of Kuruma, ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... ox, and whipping with ease every man who could force him into a fight. So that, in the whole man, a sensitive observer would have felt a peculiar pathos, as though nature had given him a desire to be, and no power to become, and had then sent him on his zigzag way, never to ...
— Christmas Eve on Lonesome and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.
... position was not yet very safe, we again resumed our march at a brisk trot. We travelled three or four more miles along the foot of a high ridge, and discovered what seemed to be an Indian trail, leading in a zigzag course up the side of it. This we followed, and soon found ourselves on the summit of the ridge. There we were again gratified at finding spread out before us a perfectly level prairie, extending as far as the eye could reach, without ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... that any one has yet made a study of this part of the subject. My own birds seemed to come, as a rule, by easy stages. In the long narrow valley east of the roost, where I oftenest watched their approach, they followed habitually—not invariably—a zigzag route, crossing the meadow diagonally, and for the most part alighting for a little upon a certain wooded hill, whence they took a final flight to their nightly haven, perhaps a quarter of a mile beyond. Farther down the valley, a mile or more from the roost, ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... it is apt to vary in colour, according to the locality which it frequents, and therefore is the less easily observed. The colour is always some shade of brown, from a dull yellow to an olive tint; but it may be specially known by the zigzag, black markings along the back, and its broad head, with V-shaped mark in the centre. Its length is from a foot to a foot-and-a-half, although specimens have been killed as long as four feet. (“Naturalist,” 1895, p. 206.) The female is larger than the male. Its bite is ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... Cecile, afterward took the veil, and William founded, at the same place, the Abbey of St. Stephen, of which Lanfranc was the first abbot. But fair as were the proportions of that exquisite building, noble as were its clustered columns, and rich as were the zigzag mouldings of its deep arches, its foundation was insecure, for it was on iniquity. It stood on ground violently taken from a number of poor people; and where could the blessing ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... on each side, another in front, and the fourth in the rear. At the base of the citadel, crowding against one another, a group of houses stood within the circle of a wall, whose outlines undulated with the unevenness of the soil. A zigzag road, cutting through the rocks, joined the city to the fortress, the walls of which were about one hundred and twenty cubits high, having numerous angles and ornamental towers that stood out like jewels in this crown of stone overhanging ...
— Herodias • Gustave Flaubert
... earth. They moved upward, looking in the darkness like golden particles of the sun. And soon they formed an oblique streak, a streak which suddenly twisted, then extended again until it curved once more. At last the whole hillside was streaked by a flaming zigzag, resembling those lightning flashes which you see falling from black skies in cheap engravings. But, unlike the lightning, the luminous trail did not fade away; the little lights still went onward in the same slow, gentle, gliding ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... is only twenty-five miles from Epi, I was five days on the way, so zigzag a route did the steamer pursue. But if one is not in a hurry, life on board is quite entertaining. The first day we anchored near the volcano of Lopevi, a lofty peak that rises from a base six kilometres in diameter to ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... good old priest, that he believed heaven to be a great echoing palace in which God and the archangels dwelt alone waiting for that great day when the elected dead should rise and enter the Presence together, for he was a simple old man who had read and thought little; but he had a zigzag of fancy in his humble mind, and he saw his friends and his ancestors' friends as I have related to you, soul and body in the deep undreaming sleep of death, but sleep, not a rotted body deserted by its affrighted ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... Falls, switch back up the side of the deep Paradise canyon to the beautiful valley of the same name above, and, still climbing, reach Camp of the Clouds and its picturesque tent hotel. The road has brought you a zigzag journey of twenty-five miles to cover an air-line distance of twelve and a gain in elevation of 3,600 feet. It is probably unique in its grades. It has no descents. Almost everywhere it is a gentle climb. {p.062} ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... to the town by a dusty highway, with the remains of little trees which one Europeanizing mayor planted, and which all died; or else by zigzag paths, up which saddle-animals and ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... at ease. He followed his guide mechanically as they made their way, in zigzag fashion, down the precipitous slopes and over slippery plateaus; and when at last he came in sight of the mighty arch, the long cavern, and the glimmer of sea and shore that could be seen through it, he began to put down the outlines of the picture as rapidly as possible, but with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... Dutch school cultivates grace as well. The Frieslanders are stiff in their motions; they throw their bodies forward, and hold themselves very straight, looking as though they were starched, and keeping their eyes fixed on the goal. The Dutch skate with a zigzag movement, swaying from left to right and from right to left with an undulating motion of the body. The Frieslander is an arrow, the ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... which the rain from the tiles is received in a stone gutter supported by small brackets, delicately moulded, and having its outer lower edge decorated with the English dogtooth moulding, whose sharp zigzag mingles richly with the curved edges of the tiling. I know no cornice more beautiful in its extreme simplicity ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... December 12th. We had an exciting trip across the North Sea, taking zigzag courses to avoid mine-fields and sighting numerous destroyers and one sunken ship. We successfully avoided either hitting a mine or running into a torpedo. The boat was packed down with Belgian and French refugees. One Luxembourger had been a whole month getting to ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... top of the world, and you see San Francisco spread out below you as multicolored as a rug of Kermanshah. No other city in the two Americas, not excepting Quebec or Rio de Janeiro, so overwhelms the beholder with its vistas—with its luminous enchantments. At night the lights of the city zigzag in patterns of distracting loveliness, and Market street reaches from the foot of the mountain to the Embarcadero like the tail of some flaming comet ...
— Fascinating San Francisco • Fred Brandt and Andrew Y. Wood
... farm to the Chester Pike. Another lane runs from the Mills farm to the same Pike. The small crossmarks on the road lines indicate barbed wire fences; the round circles indicate smooth wire; the small, connected ovals (as shown around the cemetery) indicate stone walls, and the zigzag lines (as shown one mile south of Boling) represent ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... of "Five Dots" is "Outlines." Instead of dots a line, straight, zigzag, or curved, is made at random on the paper. Papers are then exchanged and this line must be fitted naturally into a picture, as in the ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... on boats, starboard and port, and stood her ground as if more anxious to help the many sailors who were in the water than to save herself. In common with the method of defending herself against a submarine attack, she steamed in a zigzag course, and this made it necessary for me to hold my torpedoes until I could lay a true course for them, which also made it necessary for me to get nearer to the Cressy. I had come to the surface for a view and saw how wildly the fire ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... should have done so if the great streaks of lightning which now and then shot zigzag through the sky had taken the shape of words and bid us all beware. I was not one to be daunted, and knew no other course than that of advance when once a stroke of justice had been planned, and the ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... path appearing plain before us. We had no difficulty in following it up the lesser heights, around the base. It wound on over rock and bog, among the heather and broom with which the mountain is covered, sometimes running up a steep acclivity and then winding zigzag round a rocky ascent. The rains two days before had made the bogs damp and muddy; but, with this exception, we had ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... this to be our place of refuge in case of danger, sir," observed Ready; "and therefore I have selected this thick part of the wood, as it is not very far from the house, and by cutting the path to it in a zigzag, it will be quite hidden from sight; and we must make the path just wide enough to allow the wheels to pass, and stump up the roots of the trees which we are obliged to cut down, otherwise the stumps ...
— Masterman Ready - The Wreck of the "Pacific" • Captain Frederick Marryat
... promontory, from whence its bell may be heard at a distance by the mariner at night. It is said to have given the name to the port of Havre-de-Grace, which lies directly opposite, on the other side of the Seine. The road up to the chapel went in a zigzag course, along the brow of the steep coast; it was shaded by trees, from between which I had beautiful peeps at the ancient towers of Honfleur below, the varied scenery of the opposite shore, the white buildings of Havre in the distance, and the wide sea ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... of the sun burned down upon the yellowish gray wall of cliff into which the promenade of Nervi is hewn, and which slopes down to the sea in a zigzag of towering bowlders. ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... tortuous, straight or zigzag, dotted, slightly elevated, dark-gray or blackish thread-like linear formations, varying in length from an eighth to a half ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... I left Alta in order to clear the Peregrino Pass and reach Tierra Colorado that day. In a few hours I gained the top of the pass, and sat down to take a survey of the zigzag way up which my old horse had climbed, and of the extensive region of hill and mountain country before me. It is difficult to believe that over this slight mule-path all the Spanish commerce of ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... considerable height, almost overhung them. Just beyond this a beautiful bay opened up to view, with a narrow strip of yellow shingle round the base of the cliffs, which here lost for a short distance their rugged character, though not their height, and were covered with herbage. A zigzag path led to the top, and the whole neighbourhood was full of ocean-worn coves and gullies, some of them dry, and many filled with water, while others were filled at high tide, and left empty when ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... the darkness and the zigzag turns of the stairs, Wolf was so familiar with every corner of the old house that he did not even need to grope his way ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... any of the troop—as the major had ascertained before starting. The account was not reassuring. The guide reported that it stood on a rock, which rose perpendicularly some eighty or a hundred feet from the plain; the only access being by a zigzag road cut in the face of the cliff, with a gateway defended by a gun, and loopholed walls at each turn, and with a very strong wall all round the edge of the rock. The garrison, they had learned from the persons at ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... were not certain. Then they stopped playing and talked, and their voices sounded goblin-like in their dark recess, where candles were carried about in an uncertain wavering manner, reminding Ruth of the flickering zigzag motion of ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... France; of Henry VII. of England; and Ferdinand and Isabella, of course; with notices of various movements in those countries in their several reigns. The second chapter is got up in the same manner, taking a zigzag course over our continent, north, south, east, and west, with occasional excursions to Europe to keep up the variety. This procedure often produces an assemblage of events, as we have said, on the same page, rather startling to themselves as well as to us.—Thus on page 48 ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... surprise in the streets of Maraucourt when the villagers saw the head of the firm seated beside a little girl wearing a hat of black straw and a black dress, who was gravely driving old Coco at a straight trot instead of the zigzag course that William forced the old animal to take in spite of herself. What was happening? Where was this little girl going? They questioned one another as they stood at the doors, for few people in the village knew of her and of the position that ...
— Nobody's Girl - (En Famille) • Hector Malot
... ground. River-bank is followed where possible; but where windfall or precipice drives back from the bed of the river over the mountain spurs, the pathfinder takes his bearings from countless signs. Moss is on the north side of tree-trunks. A steep slope compels a zigzag, corkscrew ascent, but the slope of the ground guides the climber as to the way to go; for slope means valley; and in valleys are streams; and in the stream is the 'float,' which is to the prospector the ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... aspiration towards the region of freedom and perfection which was beyond the immediate and above the successful. This faith in God, this faith in the reality of the ideal of perfection, has built up all that is great in the human world. To keep indefinitely walking on, along a zigzag course of change, is negative and barren. A mere procession of notes does not make music; it is only when we have in the heart of the march of sounds some musical idea that it creates song. Our faith in the ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... The aster salicifolius has a slender stem much branched above, long and narrow leaves, with violet, violet-purple or rarely white rays, and aster prenanthoides or crooked stem aster, may be told by its zigzag stem, its oblong, saw-toothed leaves and its violet rays. Two other beautiful species found hereabouts are the aster azureus, which blooms from August until after frost, with a slender but stiff and roughish stem, and many bright violet-blue flowers with short rays; and the aster Shortii, ...
— Some Summer Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... side of the arch. Maids and waiters are seen darting across the arched passage from door to door, and it requires a guide (in my case, at least) to show you the way to the coffee-room or the bar. I have never been up stairs in any of them, but can conceive of infinite bewilderment of zigzag corridors ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in surmounting a tremendous ridge of mountains. We climbed for hours, working our way up by zigzag and long slants through the pines, the rocky outcrops, the ledges, and the stiff brush that made up the slope. It was hard work; and it seemed to have no end. We arrived at last on a knife-edge summit. ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... ahead on a zigzag course. We were in the most deadly submarine infested zone of the ocean. Only yesterday the Susquehanna had been torpedoed in these very waters, and, no doubt, the same evil periscopes were watching us now from beyond yonder kopje ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy
... window of leaded glass Mistress Yordas and her widowed sister sat for an hour, without many words, watching the zigzag of shale and rock which formed their chief communication with the peopled world. They did not care to improve their access, or increase their traffic; not through cold morosity, or even proud indifference, but because ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... of the Bucoleon and the sea-wall the entire space was a garden. From the wall the ascent to the considerable plateau crowned by the famous buildings was made easy by four graceful terraces, irregular in width, and provided with zigzag roads ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... too remorsefully familiar, with the fact that romance is likely to run a certain course in the individual and then to disappear. Looking back upon it afterward, it resembles the upward and downward zigzag of a fever chart. It has in fact often been described as a measles, a disease of which no one can be particularly proud, although he may have no reason to blush for it. Southey said that he was no more ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... middle fingers, imparts the Easter kiss and doubleshuffles off comically, swaying his hat from side to side, shrinking quickly to the size of his trainbearers. The dwarf acolytes, giggling, peeping, nudging, ogling, Easterkissing, zigzag behind him. His voice is heard mellow from ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... only whole week-day holiday he received in six months. He had arranged to go home, as he always did, catching the 11 o'clock train that night, and travelling through the midnight to the highest point of the mountains, and into the early dawn down, down the Great Zigzag on the other side, till he came out on the plain to a little siding, where he scrambled out with his bundle, and shouldered it briskly, and trudged along eight miles, perhaps, to a wretched selection where his father, for his mother and six or seven children younger than ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... — the most comprehensive that we possess on this difficult branch of meteorology — the evolution of light (lightning) is of three kinds — zigzag, and sharply defined at the edges; in sheets of light, illuminating a whole cloud, which seems to open and refeal the light within it; and in the ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... promoted from the Excise to be the idol of all Scotland. The year that Gainsborough died, Napoleon, a slim slip of a youth seventeen years old, was serving as a sub-lieutenant of artillery; while Wellington had just received his first commission and was marching zigzag, by the right oblique, to meet him eighteen miles from Brussels on the night of a ball sung into immortality by Byron; Watt had invented the steam-engine, thanks to Humphrey Gainsborough; Arkwright had made his first spinning-frame; Humphrey Davy was working at problems ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... subject would have been the tree one-third from the left side, the white cow touching its line, one or two of those lying on the ground working toward the foreground in a zigzag, little or no diversion from the distance on the left of tree. The swing of the picture would then have been from the foreground to the focus, the white cow and tree, thence to the group under the ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... ascent, very similar to the first, till we reached a higher level of the same stream. I expected that we were going to continue along it; but instead of doing so Kanimapo led us by a zigzag path till we gained a broad terrace, from whence we could look down into the valley and over the summits of numerous heights beyond. Still the air, though pure and bracing from its dryness, caused no sensation of cold. High as we were, too, ...
— The Young Llanero - A Story of War and Wild Life in Venezuela • W.H.G. Kingston
... Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was born in the year Eighteen Hundred Nine, at Hamburg, and died at Leipzig in the year Eighteen Hundred Forty-seven. His career was a triumphal march. The road to success with him was no zigzag journey—from the first he went straight to the front. Whether as a baby he crowed in key, and cried to a one-two-three melody, as his old nurse used to aver, is a little doubtful, possibly. But all agree that ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... slipping from the hand; urns, oinochoai, and dishes of various sizes made of glass, are of frequent occurrence. Some of these are dark blue or green, others party-colored with stripes winding round them in zigzag or in spiral lines, reminding one of mosaic patterns. Pieces of glittering glass, being most likely fragments of so-called allassontes versicolores (not to be mistaken for originally white glass which has been discolored ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... may take the description of another object, a curious metal casket brought to Europe by a member of the Punitive Expedition. In design, according to Ling Roth, this casket "is bold and artistic; the high relief of the bizarre face and the zigzag conventionalized serpents and tadpoles being well thrown up by enchasing of the ground work. The proportions are all good, and this is especially the case with an enchasing of the enclosed lines." Ling Roth says that the relief portions ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... witnessed such a feat on the part of a wolf. He was taking his pack train down into a valley when he saw a horse grazing therein; it had been turned loose by another packing outfit, because it became exhausted. He lost sight of it as the trail went down a zigzag, and while it was thus out of sight he suddenly heard it utter the appalling scream, unlike and more dreadful than any other sound, which a horse only utters in extreme fright or agony. The scream was repeated, and as ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... school, while Tess was waiting with some of her classmates for the smaller girls, that Sammy Pinkney, Iky Goronofsky, and half a dozen other boys of Tess' age, came whooping around from the boys' entrance to the school, chasing a small, disreputable dog that ran zigzag along the street, ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... showed no inclination to depart from the cautious maxims of forest warfare. They made a terrific noise, but when they came within gunshot of the fort, it was by darting from stump to stump with a quick, zigzag movement that made them more difficult to hit than birds on the wing. The best moment for a shot was when they reached a stump, and stopped for an instant to duck and hide behind it. By seizing this fleeting opportunity, Hawks himself put a bullet into the breast of an Abenaki chief from ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... while the other applied the point of the shank of a file—previously rounded—and struck the file with a hammer. The other figures were made with the sharpened point of a file, pushed forward with a zigzag motion of the hand. When the chasing was done the silver was blanched by the process before referred to, being occasionally taken from the boiling solution of almogen to be rubbed with ashes and sand. For about five hours both of the smiths worked together on this ...
— Navajo Silversmiths • Washington Matthews
... was walking along the edge of the green mound on which the Montmartre telegraph stands. Below me, along one of the zigzag paths which wind up the hill, a man and a girl were coming up, and arrested my attention. The man wore a shaggy coat, which gave him some resemblance to a wild beast; and he held a thick stick in his hand, with ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... mounting, with great difficulty, a zigzag road which led up along the side of a hill, one of ...
— Common Sense - - Subtitle: How To Exercise It • Yoritomo-Tashi
... Sir Alfred rose from the chair in front of his desk and threw himself into the easy-chair which his guest had been occupying. A ray of city sunshine found its way through the tangle of tall buildings on the other side of the street, lay in a zigzag path across his carpet, and touched the firm lines of his thoughtful face. He sat there, slowly tapping the sides of the chair with his pudgy fingers. So a great soldier might have sat, following out the progress of his armies in different countries, listening to the roar of their guns, ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... adventurers, had passed here, each taking his own way, and the sum of their selections served only to make bad very much worse. In the level places the trail was a quagmire, on some of the steeper slopes simply a zigzag of scrambling ...
— The Young Alaskans in the Rockies • Emerson Hough
... more din there now, but great single cries of "Zuleika!"—leapt figures innumerable through rain to river. The arrested boats of the other crews drifted zigzag hither and thither. The dropped oars rocked and clashed, sank and rebounded, as the men plunged across ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... while there would be no timber upon the banks to obstruct its navigation in future; and being nearly straight, the timber which might float in at the head, would be apt to go clear through. There are also many places above this where the river, in its zigzag course, forms such complete peninsulas, as to be easier cut through at the necks than to remove the obstructions from the bends—which if done, would also ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln
... company penetrated inside, perceiving, as soon as they had entered the gate, a zigzag arcade, below the steps of which was a raised pathway, laid promiscuously with stones, and on the furthest part stood a diminutive cottage with three rooms, two with doors leading into them and one without. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... him; he discovered the place where the canoe was concealed. He had still long to look, however, before he could find the track leading through the forest; and when he did hit upon it, it was so intricate, and led in such a zigzag line, now up the slope and then down again, that darkness came on, and he had not yet reached the swamp. Hungry and fatigued, he returned to the Sabine, and, fully determined to try his luck again next morning, he trusted with better success, he loaded the canoe upon his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... sun. The shoot did not begin to revolve until nearly a yard in height; it then made a fine circle in 10 hrs. 45 m. During the next few days it continued to move, but irregularly. On August 15th the shoot followed, during a period of 10 hrs. 40 m., a long and deeply zigzag course and then made a broad ellipse. The figure apparently represented three ellipses, each of which averaged 3 hrs. 38 m. for ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... into view, its full battery of offensive weapons flaring forth. The paralyzing ray tingled again and again over the control room. Someone laughed at its uselessness. The violet heat ray leveled full at them, but the commander avoided it with "Port ten, starboard ten! Maintain zigzag course to the tunnel." He understood the enemy's weapons now; he was throbbing with the fierce thrill of action. This duel was to be the climax of their whole adventure. "And, by heaven," he promised, "it's going to be ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... has seemed to be inviolably barred by an almost vertical facade, the ramparts are found to overlap each other like loosely clasped fingers, between which a zigzag path may be followed—a cunning construction that puzzles the uninformed eye. But its cunning, even where not obscured by dilapidation, is now wasted on the solitary forms of a few wild badgers, rabbits, and hares. Men must ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... man's right hand As the galley spent on our decks... And amazed and bloodied we reared half up And fought askew with the left hand shackled... But a zigzag fire leapt in our sockets And knotted our thews like string... Our thews grown stiff as a crooked spine ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... shoulders, and replied: 'I'll try, but I don't believe they can spell it.' 'Draw a straight line, then,' said I. 'I'll be content with a single line an inch long.' She laughingly retorted: 'It's hard to draw a straight line.' 'Very well, draw a crooked line. Draw a zigzag—like a stroke of lightning. Draw it in yellow. Draw a circle.' She said no more, but became silent, and we waited without change of position. Remember that I was holding the slate during all this talk. It did ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... like a true mountain trail, had the passion for climbing developed into a mania, and could never rest content with the river's bed whenever it spied a chance to rise. It had just managed an ascent up a zigzag stairway of its own invention, and had stepped out in the dark upon a patch of tall mountain grass, as dry as straw, when Yejiro conceived the brilliant idea of torches. He had learned the trick in the Hakone hills, ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... of his finger, which in sign language means, "Who are you?" The stranger took Mika'pi's hand and made him feel of his own right hand. The thumb and fingers were closed except the forefinger, which was extended. When Mika'pi's hand was on the stranger's hand the person moved his hand forward with a zigzag ...
— Blackfeet Indian Stories • George Bird Grinnell
... have so much population to the square mile as some countries; but she has a population to some of her square miles that would astonish some parts of the earth's surface elsewhere. Farther on we saw a faint, zigzag footpath, that we conjectured led to Emd; but it might lead up to heaven. All day we had been solicited for charity by squalid little children, who kiss their nasty little paws at us, and ask for centimes. The children of Emd, however, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... African Light Horse, fell back with discretion, and the Boers following without their usual caution did not observe that eight troopers had been dropped behind among the rocks and ledges of a donga; so that when twelve of them attempted to make their way up this natural zigzag approach in order to fire upon the retiring picket they were themselves received at 400 yards by a well-directed sputter of musketry, and were glad to make off with five riderless horses, two men upon one horse, and leaving three lying quite still on the ground. ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... was vain: it wrapped me round like a cloak. It was a universal caustic, that would not endure to be touched; much less torn away. I groaned. I gnashed my teeth. I griped my hands. I struck myself violent blows. I ran with fury, in circles, in zigzag, with sudden turns and frantic bounds; and, finding myself on the banks of ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... than ever. It was now above me at some distance to the left, and I could see that it was an immense quantity of heated matter like lava, occupying the upper and middle parts of a hill, and descending here and there almost to the bottom in a zigzag and tortuous manner. Between me and the hill of the burning object lay a deep ravine. After a time I came to a house, against the door of which a man was leaning. "What is all that burning stuff ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... brilliant flash of lightning illumined the bay, Mount Baal-zephon, and every surrounding object. The thunder was somewhat long in following, but the storm soon came nearer, and at last the lightning no longer flashed through the darkness in zigzag lines, but in shapeless sheets of flame, and ere they faded the deafening crash of the thunder pealed forth, reverberating in wild uproar amid the hard, rocky precipices of the rugged mountain, and dying away in deep, muttering ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... would thus be predicable, though there were no definite direction, no actor, and no aim. Mere restless zigzag movement, or a wild ideenflucht, or rhapsodie der wahrnehmungen, as Kant would say, would constitute an active as distinguished ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... visited all the hospitals in that post, and on my second visit to the Jackson found Surgeon Powers filled to overflowing with affected politeness; but it did not brighten the bleared eye, or straighten the zigzag ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... faded from the sky, and a few stars were beginning to twinkle faintly; but the rising moon, herself invisible, threw a lovely silver brightness over the river and made a flitting sail glimmer out snowy white as it went silently with a zigzag course up the stream. Between the river and the cottage every object began to be visible with that cold distinctness of outline which belongs to clear moonlight,—every rail of the garden fence, every plant that grew beyond the shadow of the building. A tall acacia-tree which ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... This labor (O, Jupiter, thanks be for that!) fell upon Mr. Moran. And sometimes it would happen that the horses, which it had cost him three or four hours to find, could be spared only for four or five miles. Such a journey can rarely have been accomplished. Our zigzag course had prolonged it into from two hundred and thirty to two hundred and fifty miles; and it is literally true that, of this entire distance from Westport House to Sackville-street, Dublin, not one furlong had been performed under the spontaneous impulse of our own horses. ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... man (who is what Trim never is, both insolent and indecent)—is at least partially the same. But the most constant and the most unfortunate imitation is of Sterne's literally eccentric, or rather zigzag and pillar-to-post, fashion of narration. In the Englishman's own hands, by some prestidigitation of genius, this never becomes boring, though it probably would have become so if either book had been finished; ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... will weather any storm, and here in the water was a man who knew how to handle it. Prisoners are landed on the eastern side, and such advantage is taken of the natural conformation of this precipitous rock, that a man climbing the steep zigzag stairway which leads to the inhabited portion is hidden from sight of any craft upon the water even four or five hundred yards away. Nothing seen from the outside gives any token of habitation. The fishing-boat, I suppose, is kept for cases of emergency, that the Governor may communicate ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... Verbitzsky, still in the moonlight, slackened speed, half-turned as if in hesitation, then ran on more slowly, with zigzag steps, as if desperately looking for a way out. But he said to me in a ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... top of the road, through the gap was seen Down a zigzag road cut up by rills, The velvet valley cradled between Dark double ridges of 'elm' clad hills; And just beyond, on the sunniest slope, With its windows aglint in the sunset warm, In the spot where he first knew life ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... bristles along his spine rose stiff and menacing. Pelliter stared harder and harder, with his face pressed close against the cold glass of the window, and suddenly he gave a gasping cry of excitement. It was a man who was toiling toward the cabin! He was bent almost double, and he staggered in a zigzag fashion as he advanced. Pelliter made his way feebly to the door, unbarred it, and pushed it partly open. Overcome by weakness he fell back then on the edge of ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... rout Followed the zigzag calf about; And o'er his crooked journey went The traffic of a continent. A hundred thousand men were led By a calf near three centuries dead. They followed still his crooked way And lost one hundred years a day; For thus such reverence is ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... just passed. Nothing now was required to expedite our steps. The wind roared, the mighty trees rocked to and fro as if they had been reeds, the thunder rattled in deafening peals, and the lightning, in zigzag form, rushed down the stems of the trees, running like serpents along the ground, and flashed vividly in every direction. The storm I had witnessed in the Cordilleras was grander, but it was scarcely so terrific in its effects. We got under shelter in the cottage ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... addressing these sentences to me, we had crossed the rivulet that gurgled through the valley, and commenced our ascending zigzag way. The skins and bones of sheep destroyed by the wolves that infest these mountains were scattered on every hand, and the foot-marks of these furious brutes and bears were plainly distinguishable on those parts of ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... house the Pembroke woman partly drew rein again; the old horse meandered in a zigzag curve, with his head lopping. "That's where Charlotte Barnard lives," she said. Suddenly she lowered her voice. "There she is now, out in the ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... inhabited world, up in cloudland; there is nothing to do but descend as best we can; so we trust to our good driver and steady horses, obliged to follow the sharply-winding road at walking pace. And bit by bit—how we don't know—the horizontal zigzag is accomplished. ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... the Communist leaders have often practiced the tactics of retreat and zigzag. We know that Soviet and Chinese communism still poses a serious threat to the free world. And in the Middle East recent Soviet moves are hardly compatible with the reduction ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... of the new streets is the Via di Circonvallazione, composed of a series of lofty terraced "corsos" skirting the face of the hills, commencing at the E. end from the Piazza Manin, 330 ft. above the sea, and extending westward in a zigzag form to the railway station by the Albergo dei Poveri. They are reached from the upper ends of the Vias Palestro, Mameli, Caffaro, and Brignone di Ferrari, by ramps and long stairs. The palaces, another feature of Genoa, are large gaunt mansions, all similar in style—gates ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... light? To shorten the distance home, as the hour was late and the bright moon threw some light even among the thick trees, he determined to take a footpath among the hills. This course led him close to the cabin of Simon Wiles, Sam Wiles' father. He was walking in a zigzag path, now watching the moonlight as it lilted down through the leafy canopy, making a dim but peaceful light around him; now listening to the sounds which exist in Kentucky forests in winter, the flight of nocturnal birds and moving of animals; seeing the raccoon ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick
... laughter. Torches began to glisten among the trees, and there was a clatter of horses' hoofs on the echoing rock. A more magnificent sight was never before presented to the startled eyes of so unappreciative a crowd. Along the zigzag road, and among the trees, spluttered the torches, each with a trail of sparks like the tail of a comet. The bearers were rushing headlong down the slope, for woe to the man who did not arrive at the water's edge sooner ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... followed the high-road, but in a very strange manner, going from one side to the other and leaving a zigzag track, in the wake of the tires, that made those who saw it shudder. How was it that the car had not bumped against that tree? How had it been righted, instead of smashing into that bank? What novice, what madman, what drunkard, what frightened criminal was driving that motor-car ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... water jar, with ancient zigzag decoration, referring to the four wombs of earth and the darts with which they were broken open for the liberation and birth of mankind. K'i-wih na-k'ia ...
— Illustrated Catalogue of the Collections Obtained from the Pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona in 1881 • James Stevenson
... steered this way and that, sometimes backed, and then sent forward again. After about an hour of this zigzag work Mr. Gibbs ordered the ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... Mason introduced a sentimental love story—Alcander and Nerina—into his third book. He informs his readers (book II. 34-78) that, in the reaction against straight alleys, many gardeners had gone to an extreme in the use of zigzag meanders; and he recommends them to follow the natural curves of the footpaths which the milkmaid wears across the pastures "from stile to ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... after making a leisurely circuit of the two sides of the principal square, was now beginning the ascent of the steep zigzag road to the Palace, which stood on the terraced height of the plateau that commanded the city. The party in the coach caught glimpses of its massive but ornate towers with fantastic spires and turrets, and its great arched and columned wings of rose-tinted marble. As it was rather ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... carriages crawled slowly up the zigzag road, climbing the long and steep hill, the occupants of both gazed at the towers of the Castle whenever they came in sight at a turn of the road, or at an opening in the mighty horse-chestnuts and beeches, but they spoke little about them. Those in the first carriage were too familiar with ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward |
