"Attenuated" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... spot somewhat transverse, near the middle, beneath this a broadish band extends from the anal margin nearly to the outer side of wing, which is divided by a brown line, leaving an irregular squareish spot, attenuated towards the outer margin; on the margin are three differently-shaped dots beginning from the internal margin, and in one of the specimens are four slight lunules, growing fainter as they approach the outer margin. Beneath, upper wings with two transverse fulvescent orange bands, one near the ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... dilated with terror. From around the curve of the road came the quick beat of hastening footsteps, the sobbing sound of panting breath, and between her and the sinking moon there passed an attenuated one-armed figure, with a pallid sharpened face, outlined for a moment on its brilliant disk, and dreadful starting eyes, and quivering open mouth. It disappeared in an instant among the shadows of the laurel, ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... which gave it strength to stay? Whence came the reproductive power which was able to carry on the species under such terrible antagonism as the fact of death? If in the body, where was the common element between that attenuated invalid and my robust organization? If in the soul, between the suffering saint and the joyous man of the world, where again ...
— The Gates Between • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... much hair about Mr. Gray, counting mustache and all, that his face and body seemed drained and attenuated by the contribution of sustenance to keep the adornment flourishing in its brown abundance. For Gray was a tall, thin, bony-kneed man, with long flat feet like wedges of cheese. His eyes were hollow and melancholy, as if he bore ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... caballeros, and looked in. On the bed, which was drawn to the middle of the chamber to get the air through the narrow loopholed windows, with the gauze curtains falling square on all sides, lay Lucia. Her attenuated frame scarcely presented an uneven surface beneath the snowy sheet which covered it. Her superb hair was spread in great black masses on the pillow, and her pale marble face reposed there like an ivory picture in an ebony setting. ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... together in a sort of changeless glaze. In the haggard, bloodless face, eyes shone with black brilliance. The teeth were whole and prominent, as was the entire bony structure of the face and skull. Senor Rey had a tall, attenuated figure, with military shoulders. He moved with great difficulty, as if lacking control of his lower limbs, but in his hands was the contrast—long, white, swift and perfectly preserved. The scarred face and ruffled throat united to form in Bedient's mind the hideous suggestion that the ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... Appleman as a soldier did not drink. As a half idler in Guaymas he tried, casually, mescal and aguardiente and all Mexican intoxicants, but cast them aside as things unnecessary. More years passed, and finally fear of Mrs. Appleman became to an extent attenuated, while the scent of the clover-blossoms gained intensity. And one morning in April, of the good year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and ninety-four, John Appleman said to himself: "I am going home to take the consequences. The old lady"—thus honestly he spoke to himself—"can't be ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... done her best to court the violence she undergoes. In Middleton's Spanish Gypsy we find exactly the same episode, and the unhappy Portuguese nun wrote: "Love me for ever and make me suffer still more." To find in literature more attenuated examples of the same tendency is easy. Shakespeare, whose observation so little escaped, has seldom depicted the adult passion of a grown woman, but in the play which he has mainly devoted to this subject he makes Cleopatra refer to "amorous ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... took us into one of the opium dens, to be found in nearly every street of Canton, and where we saw the victims of the terrible indulgence in the several stages of debasement. A number of the smokers appeared to be men of average health and strength, but all had the dull, vacant eye and attenuated forms of the victims of this insidious habit. It was curious to hear the guide stoutly defend the use of the opium pipe. He declared that it lengthened, not shortened, life; besides which he insisted that with opium one lived a double life, and therefore he lived ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... of impatience the secretary made a sign. From behind a stone pillar there stepped forth a man at whose appearance Francis could not forbear a scream. He was tall and very attenuated, clothed wholly in black. His face thin and sinister was of a pale sickly color while his eyes, black and glittering, held the gaze with a basilisk glare. He was the sworn tormentor of ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... of human nature, and human nature of the best sort—warm blooded, natural, sensible. There was nothing pale and attenuated about him. He was full of spirits, was manly, kind and generous, and yet he could appreciate heartily a point honorably gained on the enemy. Thus instead of giving himself up to despair and grief, he tried to derive all the comfort possible out ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey
... Fat Man's Misery, where the small and attenuated have greatly the advantage. We emerged from this narrow and difficult passage into the Museum, half a mile long, and so called from the number and variety of its formations. We did not linger to examine its curiosities, but pushed on over the Alps, which we surmounted, aided partly by ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the place. It marched across from end to end and seemed—with its bright colours, its high panelled windows, its faded flowered chintzes, its quickly-recognised portraits and pictures, the blue-and-white china of its cabinets and the attenuated festoons and rosettes of its ceiling—a cheerful upholstered avenue ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... part of her statement, combined with the still unexplained secrecy of my call, surprised me, and defied my powers of penetration. This lady had been dangerously ill for a month, during all which time no medical man had been called to her aid; and even now, when her body was attenuated, and her strength exhausted to the uttermost, professional assistance had been introduced into the house by stealth, as if it were against the laws to ameliorate human sufferings by curing diseases. This apparent anomaly in human conduct struck me so forcibly ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... of these dark, shining, little evergreen leaves, spread at the foot of forest trees, whether sprinkled over in June with pairs of waxy, cream-white, pink-tipped, velvety, lilac-scented flowers that suggest attenuated arbutus blossoms, or with coral-red "berries" in autumn and winter, is surely one of the loveliest sights in the woods. Transplanted to the home garden in closely packed, generous clumps, with plenty of leaf mould, or, better still, chopped ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... old State is good enough for me. I have been to England, and I saw some of your redeemed, regenerated, disenthralled people—I saw features on women's faces that haunted me afterward in my dreams. I saw children with shrivelled, attenuated limbs, and countenances that were old in misery and vice—such men, women, and children as Dickens and Charlotte Elizabeth tell about. My little grand-daughter was recovering from a severe illness, not long ago, ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... differs from pyriform in being shorter and more suddenly attenuated at base: applied to an ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith
... accession of them is necessary. It has been observed those are the most robust whose serum resembles most the white of an egg. It has therefore been most rationally concluded, that the origin of the animal spirits is from aliments capable of being changed into a similar substance, but so attenuated by incalation as to concrete by fire. For this reason the greatest support of the spirits is afforded by light and nourishing meats and drinks, which in taste and smell are even agreeable to infants. All cordials and aromatics ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... of sad aspect, the country of the raftsman lies remote and uncommended. The scented sandalwood is there, dwarfed, attenuated, worthless. The most fragrant of the Pandanus palms is plentiful, the fruit forming the chief part of the vegetable diet of the lean and stunted inhabitants, who find difficulty in fashioning weapons with which to obtain fish and turtle, the land ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... guns and two machine guns, and dispatched it at express speed to my assistance, with a second similar train following behind, the whole being under the command of Captain Bath, R.M.L.I. It is scarcely possible to describe the feeling of relief with which our exhausted and attenuated forces welcomed this timely aid from our ever-ready Navy. It enabled us to bring the two Czech guns into position to keep down the fire of the enemy, and gave us a sense of security in that our rear ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... traveller will at once take his place. It should be explained that a herd on the trail travels naturally best in an extended form, two deep, seldom more than three or six, except towards the tail end, called the "drag": so that a herd of 2000 steers will form a much-attenuated line a mile in length from one end to ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... channel, between rising thickets where rabbits come out to gape, you feel as though walking into a poem by Walter de la Mare. This road, if pursued, passes by a pleasing spot where four ways cross in an attenuated X. Off to one side is a field that is very theatrical in effect: it always reminds us of a stage set for "As You Like It," the Forest of Arden. There are some gigantic oak trees and even some very papier-mache-looking stumps, all ready for the duke, "and other Lords, like Foresters," to ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... first instance before the sun was called forth." Dr Siemens read a paper before the Royal Society in March 1882, on "A New Theory of the Sun". His views in many respects coincided with mine.* [footnote... Interstellar space, according to Dr. Siemens, is filled with attenuated matter, consisting of highly rarefied gaseous bodies— including hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and aqueous vapour; that these gaseous compounds are capable of being dissociated by radiant solar energy while in a state of extreme attenuation; and that the vapours so dissociated are drawn ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... rather attenuated, but the subject is an ungrateful one. Mme. de Sevigne finds Voiture "libre, badin, charmant," and disposes of his critics by saying, "So much the worse for those who do not understand him." One is often puzzled to detect this rare spirituelle quality; ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... Egyptian monuments the sphinx never appears standing as in this fresco, but crouching in the attitude of reposeful observation. Its form also was always fuller and more rounded than the long-legged, attenuated spectre before us, and it was invariably wingless; whereas the Etruscan sphinx had short wings with curling points, spotted and barred with stripes of black, red, and yellow. This strange mixture of the human and the brutal might be regarded ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... indifferent, it could not have lasted, for indifference is always tolerant; but the struggle was really between two different beliefs. The lay Church very soon assumed a religious aspect, and its pretended rationalism has become, especially in recent years, a barely attenuated form of the narrowest clerical spirit. Now, we have shown that no conciliation is possible between dissimilar religious beliefs. The clericals when in power could not therefore show themselves more tolerant towards freethinkers than these ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... and Ascension drew near, but the sweet month of May had done little to restore health to poor Elfric. He had scarcely ever had a day free from pain. His eye was brighter than ever, but his attenuated face told a sad tale of the decay of ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... strong incisor teeth; but it is said also to devour certain species of wood-boring caterpillars, which it obtains by first cutting down with its teeth upon their burrows, and then picking them out of their retreat with the claw of its attenuated middle finger. It constructs large ball-like nests of dried leaves, lodged in a fork of the branches of a large tree, and with the opening ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... on deck bareheaded. The light chestnut hair curled close about his well-shaped head, and the clipped beard glinted vividly when he passed across a narrow strip of sunlight, as if every hair in it had been a wavy and attenuated gold wire. His mouth was lost in the heavy moustache; his nose was straight, short, slightly blunted at the end; a broad band of deeper red stretched under the eyes, clung to the cheek bones. The eyes gave the face ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... and fruition, but how attenuated are our demonstration and realization of this Science! Truth, in divine Science, is the stepping-stone to the understanding of God; but the broken and contrite heart soonest discerns this truth, even as the helpless sick are soonest healed by it. Invalids say, "I have recovered from sickness;" ...
— Unity of Good • Mary Baker Eddy
... the north, east, and west points, and directed towards the zenith; in a few seconds these disappeared and a complete circle was displayed, bounding the horizon at an elevation of fifteen degrees. There was a quick lateral motion in the attenuated beams of which this zone was composed. Its colour was a pale yellow with an occasional ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... showed by their death-darkened tracery of inflamed veins how much the lone wanderer had suffered. The hands, with their strong bronze now paled to tarnished ochre, were heavily callused by manual labour, and sharply attenuated by recent hardship. The skin was cold, but the rigidity of death was yet scarcely apparent. Evidently he had not died of thirst alone, but of mere physical exhaustion, sealed by the final collapse of hope. And it ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... trees, with attenuated leaves and gracefully drooping pods, adorn all the parks of the city, the beans forming a delicious dish either cooked ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... mangrove seed lights on it, and the thing's done. Well! not done, perhaps, but begun; for if the bank is high enough to get exposed at low water, this pioneer mangrove grows. He has a wretched existence though. You have only got to look at his dwarfed attenuated form to see this. He gets joined by a few more bold spirits and they struggle on together, their network of roots stopping abundance of mud, and by good chance now and then a consignment of miscellaneous ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... say that furniture has no expression; the small couch, the faded work-table, the straight chairs, with their twisted attenuated legs, had an unspeakable air of sadness. One day she cautiously touched the notes of the instrument. How weak and thin and hollow they were! And yet they blended perfectly with something in her own heart. She played till the tears were on her cheeks, ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... determined than Westmoreland he must have gone out. But Westmoreland, with his jaw set, followed his code and fenced with death for this apparently worthless and forfeited life, using all his skill and finesse to outwit the great Enemy; in spite of which, so attenuated was the man's chance that we were astonished when he turned the corner—very, very feebly—and we didn't have to place another pine box in the potter's field, alongside other unmarked mounds whose occupants were other unknown men, grim causes of Dead Man's Crossin's ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... Johnston. Sheridan prevented this by defeating the Confederates at Five Forks, April 1, and turning Lee's right and threatening his rear. Five Forks was the beginning of the end. Thirty-five thousand muskets were guarding thirty-seven miles of intrenchments, and on these attenuated lines General Grant ordered an immediate assault. The defences were found to be almost denuded of men. Petersburg and Richmond fell, and Lee, driven westward, surrendered at Appomattox, on April 9, the remains of the once proud Army of Northern Virginia, now numbering 26,000 ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... well the voice she had expected at the other end of the wire that the husky, boyish note which reached her, attenuated by distance, struck ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... upon argosy. Masts to the right, masts to the left, masts in front, masts yonder above the warehouses; masts in among the streets as steeples appear amid roofs; masts across the river hung with drooping half-furled sails; masts afar down thin and attenuated, mere dark straight lines in the distance. They await in stillness the rising of ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... and afterwards the thought of the remaining negroes came very faintly back. We read what Napoleon said of his own conduct in the matter; but with the abolitionist Miss Martineau on one side, and the doubtful Man of Destiny on the other, the pure fact grew very attenuated, and I am not now sure that I have seen it. The moment your curiosity is really aroused about an historical circumstance, the glasses through which you have been viewing so varied and wide a landscape become suddenly very opaque. History is a gallery of pictures so individually unexpressive ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... I lied with some haughtiness. "And so does Poopendyke," I added as an afterthought. My blush deepened as I recalled the attenuated blazer in which my secretary breakfasted, lunched ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... the medium of prose is attenuated almost to the vanishing point, where it may seem to be lost, it may nevertheless borrow from its content a beauty of rhythm, imagery, and form that will seem to be its very own. For in language, as we observed in our discussion ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... black and lowering. It was cold almost to chilliness after the warmth of the preceding days, so there was no haste, no hurry, in the dispersion of the cloud blankets that covered the rocky walls and plateaus below. Slowly they began to rise, then to stretch out and become attenuated. Tiny gusts of wind played with them, and tossed them hither and thither. Banks of smoky gray lay over certain portions, but there was no regularity, no evenness, either in the clouds themselves, or in their disposition. East and west thick masses ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... knees, his eyes moodily measuring the rise and fall of the glaringly white stanchions above and below the sky-line. At frequent intervals they swept back to the other man, who still lay motionless. It was late afternoon and the smoke-stack shadows pointed off in attenuated lines to the bow while the sky, off behind the wake, brightened into the colors of sunset. Finally Benton rose. The unexpected sight of Blanco brought a start and an immediate masking of his face, but in the first momentary glimpse ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... another "Divine Spouse," though mutilated and unfinished, is pleasing from its greater breadth of style, although such breadth is rarely found in the works of this school, which toned down, elongated, and attenuated the figure till it often lost in vigour what it gained in distinction. The one point in which the Saite artists made a real advance, was in the treatment of the heads ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... care as by age; his pointed beard and moustaches were almost white, contrasting strikingly with his dark, jaundiced complexion, the result of an atrabilarious temperament; his person was extremely attenuated, and his hands thin and bony. He had once been tall, but latterly had lost much of his height, in consequence of a curvature of the spine, which bowed down his head almost upon his breast, and fixed it immoveably in that position. His features were good, but, as we have stated, were ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... already worn threadbare. I now know all about the mysterious complaint, the impress of which on the face of the school-ma'am has so dazed you. It's a New England female college—a place where they give a razor-like edge to the wits of Yankee women, already too sharp, and develop in attenuated maidens the hatchet faces of their sires. You may as well set about that picture at once, whenever you feel in the ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... the good gentleman's having gone down in the world of late: for a great scarcity of furniture, and total absence of comfort, together with the disappearance of all such small moveables as spare clothes and linen, bespoke a state of extreme poverty; while the meagre and attenuated condition of Mr. Sikes himself would have fully confirmed these symptoms, if they had stood in ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... refine an edge that has already been given. I judge that a razor fresh from the hone is this shape V—the long point being the continuation of the edge—and that after much use the shape is this V—the attenuated edge all worn off and gone. By George I knew that was the explanation. And I knew that a freshly honed and freshly strapped razor won't cut, but after strapping on the hand as a final operation, it will cut.—So ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... he thought. There was none worse, those days, in the eyes of the people. He craved and got the little man's release on parole. A fortnight later, as Dr. Sevier was sitting at the breakfast table, with the little rector at its opposite end, he all at once rose to his full attenuated height, with a frown and then a smile, and, tumbling the ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... bedrooms were four-posters and the things of four-poster days. Wing-cheek chairs of cozy depths told of old-time fireside dreams; a work-table with attenuated legs called to mind the wearisome needlework of our foremothers; and a brass warming-pan carried us back to the times when only such devices could make tolerable the frigid winter beds ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... splendours not continuously, but like the intermitted flashes of the firefly—this forms a picture of airy grace and loveliness that baffles description. All this glory disappears when the bird is dead, and even when it alights to rest on a bough. Sitting still, it looks like an exceedingly attenuated kingfisher, without the pretty plumage of that bird, but retaining its stiff artificial manner. No artist has been so bold as to attempt to depict the bird as it actually appears, when balanced before a flower the swift motion of the wings obliterates their form, ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... conceive a body occupying the position of the earth with reference to the sun which would cast a shadow having such a tenuous form as the Milky Way presents. Such a body obviously would not be a globe, but a long-drawn-out, attenuated figure. There is, to be sure, no direct evidence preserved to show that Anaxagoras conceived the world to present such a figure as this, but what we know of that philosopher's close-reasoning, logical mind gives some warrant to the assumption—gratuitous though in a sense it be—that the author of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... put on our guard against this species of deceit in the highest matters, by observing how readily we glide into it, in things of smaller moment. Deceits of every shade, from the lie direct to the most attenuated equivocation, spring in the complicated intercourse of modern society, like weeds in a moist summer on a fallow field. Assuredly, unless our hand be diligent in digging out these bitter roots, we shall not grow rich in the graces of the Spirit. You are invited to a neighbour's ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... a little, pale-faced, woe-begone, and attenuated man, with short indescribables, no coat, check shirt, and a neck-cloth twisted like a wisp of straw, opening his door, and advancing toward you with hurried movement and half-recognizing glance, saluting you in low and hesitating tones, and ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... breeze and its communal contemporaries. At Passover there had been an illusive augmentation of advertisements proclaiming the virtues of unleavened everything. With the end of the Festival, most of these fell out, staying as short a time as the daffodils. Raphael was in despair at the meagre attenuated appearance of the erst prosperous-looking pages. The weekly loss on the paper ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... lately,' said the landlord, in the tone of having had twenty at least—not caring to acknowledge the attenuated state of business that afflicted ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... guardianship of my uncle, Counsellor D'Arcy, the great Dublin barrister, and of Doctor Driscoll. I was removed to the house of the latter, with poor Larry, who threatened to do all sorts of dreadful deeds, if he were not allowed to accompany me. My patrimony, which had become somewhat attenuated, was in the meantime put out to nurse. I was rather surprised at not being sent back to school, when one day the Doctor, as he sat cross-legged before the fire after dinner, rubbing his ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... The attenuated neck of land between the Mersey and the Dee had an evil reputation for affairs of this description. Men pressed at Chester, and sent across the neck to the tenders or ships of war in the Mersey, seldom reached their destination unless attended by an exceptionally strong escort. The reason is briefly ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... quite ordinary pity and devotion. She inspires bewilderment, but terror and fascination never; and never the glamour, the magic evoked by the very name of Catherine Earnshaw. Her escapades and fantasies, recalling Catherine Earnshaw, are all on an attenuated scale. ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... serious!" cried the earl; "and as a proof of it, I hope you will let me pay my respects to your niece to-day,—not with my offer in my hand yet, for it must be a love match on both sides." And the earl, glancing towards an opposite glass, which reflected his attenuated but comely features beneath his velvet nightcap trimmed with Mechlin, laughed ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... it seemed like paradise, and Annie walked on air, so delighted was she to have him with her again. Yet there were still anxieties to cloud their happiness. The close confinement, with its attendant worry, had seriously undermined Howard's health. He was pale and attenuated, and so weak that he had several fainting spells. Much alarmed, Annie summoned Dr. Bernstein, who administered a tonic. There was nothing to cause anxiety, he said reassuringly. It was a natural reaction after what her husband had undergone. But it was worry as much as anything else. Howard ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... Herbert like a sort of natural curiosity, exclaiming that he only wanted a black cap and a pair of bands to be exactly like Bishop Bowater, a Caroline divine, with a meek, oval, spiritual face, and a great display of delicate attenuated fingers, the length of which had always been a doubt and marvel to ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... remaining boats now reached the landing. Many were stove among the rocks, and others were overset; some of the men were dragged back by the surf and drowned; some lost their muskets, and were drenched to the skin: but the greater part got safe ashore. Among the foremost was seen the tall, attenuated form of Brigadier Wolfe, armed with nothing but a cane, as he leaped into the surf and climbed the crags with his soldiers. As they reached the top they formed in compact order, and attacked and carried with the bayonet the nearest ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... a hen that was dying of chicken cholera. The first died, the second was affected. In other words, Pasteur had made the greatest discovery in physiology of this century. He had found it is possible to attenuate the virus of a virulent disease, and to use that virus so attenuated as a vaccine matter which will guard the animal vaccinated against the disease. He had taken Jenner's discovery, and proved it applied ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... and, as I judged from his appearance, a mechanic; but the mark of the destroyer was on his bloated countenance and in his heavy, stupid eyes. Intemperance had marked him for his own. The pawn-broker was yet examining the offered pledge, when a woman, whose pale face and attenuated form bespoke long and intimate acquaintance with sorrow, came hastily into the shop, and with the single exclamation, "O Robert!" darted, rather than ran, to that part of the counter where the man was standing. Words were not wanted to explain her story. Her miserable ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... reason for early retirement. The others demurred, though meekly. If their sun set so early, how could they be expected to pass the night with any degree of pleasure? The composer saw all this; but he was sensibly selfish, and buttoning the long frock-coat which hung loosely on his attenuated frame shook hands with his disciples, called a carriage and drove away. Lenyard and Scheff stared after him and then faced the situation. There were many tell-tale porcelain tallies on the table to be settled, and neither had much money; so the manoeuvring was an agreeable sight ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... gestures wonderfully distinct, drawn upon the sea of mist that filled the valley below and the air above. It revealed naught of the earth, save here and there a headland, as it were, thrusting out its dark, narrow, attenuated demesne into the impalpable main. Further and further one might mark this semblance of a coast-line as the vapor grew more tenuous, till far away the series of shadowy gray promontories alternating with the colorless inlets ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... should turn his thoughts back to earth and wish for her there among his houris. But this poor sweet flower had not even this faint expectation, for she was no wife nor could be, slave of a Mohammedan harem. No rights in this world nor the next. Not even the attenuated rights which law and custom gave the free woman. No sustaining dream of a divine recompense for the unmerited unhappiness of this existence. A slave, a harem slave, wanted only when she smiled, was gay, and beautiful; who must weep alone and in silence, in silence, with ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... was wiser than we are. He knew that he was a bear or an emu, or any other such animal as his totem-creed led him to fix his mind upon. Hence we find that a familiarity and common consent existed between primitive man and many of his companion animals such as has been lost or much attenuated in modern times. Elisee Reclus in his very interesting paper La Grande Famille (1) gives support to the idea that the so-called domestication of animals did not originally arise from any forcible subjugation of them by ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... twitch of her fierce features she ranged up her attenuated class, distributed the well-thumbed books—with a horn-book for little Luke Toy—and for two hours taught them with the same joyless severity under which their fathers and mothers had suffered. For spelling ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... name of Labiate flower is given to a single-petaled flower which, beneath, is attenuated into a tube, and above is expanded into a lip, which is either single or double. It is proper to a labiate flower,—first, that it has a one-leaved calyx (ut calycem habeat unifolium), for the most part tubulated, ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... little Lizzy. From the coarse food that was daily set before her, her weak stomach turned, and she hardly took sufficient nourishment to keep life in her attenuated frame. ...
— The Last Penny and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... in our atmosphere at which these delicate clouds are formed the temperature is too low, even in midsummer, for water to exist in the liquid state; and accordingly, the attenuated vapor from which they were condensed passed at once into a solid form. They consist, in fact, of tiny crystals of ice, not of little drops of water. If the precipitation has been hasty, the crystals will, though all small, be of many ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... that gushed from the Lake of Leman, unsullied by a particle of earth, is now a river of brown mud—thick as pea-soup, and as nutritious. The stones that would have killed all vegetation have been pounded into a condition so attenuated, that they form rich alluvial matter. The river now seeks to deposit all this mud. On reaching the sea, the difference in gravity between the meeting waters, and their variation in temperature, produces rapid ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... be admitted, and in a short time the stout, well-knit figure of Pedro Alvarez was seen entering the hall, while by his side glided the attenuated form of the priest, ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... entanglement. The mere sight of his excellent appetite was an assurance of success; for I had very clear recollections of days and nights without a thought of food, when his baffled mind had chafed before some problem while his thin, eager features became more attenuated with the asceticism of complete mental concentration. Finally he lit his pipe, and sitting in the inglenook of the old village inn he talked slowly and at random about his case, rather as one who thinks aloud than as one ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... into the murky night; for a day was coming when the youths of the neck-ties would not agree to mourir on any account; when the flute-player would cease to be contemplative; when the danseuse would forget her attenuated extremities; when the whole world, where the grace of the Redeemer is known, would believe that the chief end of the hour, at least, consisted in "dancing continually ta ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... grossly rich, you went to the big Hotel Metropole, opposite. If you were a person of fastidious tastes and an attenuated income, you felt the superior charm of the Cliff Hotel. The little house, the joy of its proprietor, was hidden in the privacy of its own beautiful grounds, having its back to the high road and its face to the open sea. They had taken stock of it ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... matinees at the houses of Adelaide Kemble and Lord Falmouth—June 23 and July 7. They were very recherche, so it appears. Viardot-Garcia sang. The composer's face and frame were wasted by illness and Mr. Solomon spoke of his "long attenuated fingers." He made money and that was useful to him, for doctors' bills and living had taken up his savings. There was talk of his settling in London, but the climate, not to speak of the unmusical atmosphere, ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... in the morning, however, utterly unrefreshed, for he had slept badly. A vague feeling of foreboding and a strong presentiment of disaster had oppressed him throughout the night, and his dreams had been haunted by a thin, yellow face, with long, attenuated, drooping moustache—a face out of which peered a pair of eyes, glowing like flame and with hideous possibilities of evil shining in their black depths. The face was the face of Prince Hsi, the youngest member of ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... followed them. They were seasons of refreshing to this strange woman's soul—seasons during which the connecting thread between spirit and body was strained to the utmost, when a rude awakening might easily sever that attenuated thread, when Morva knew that tender handling and shielding care were required of her. In the evening when she returned from the farm she came singing into the little court, where the gilly flowers and daffodils were once more ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... gaunt, macilent^; lank, lanky; weedy, skinny; scrawny slinky [U.S.]; starved, starveling; herring gutted; worn to a shadow, lean as a rake [Chaucer]; thin as a lath, thin as a whipping post, thin as a wafer; hatchet-faced; lantern-jawed. attenuated, shriveled, extenuated, tabid^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... calamity old Jarvis appeared an altered man. His sinewy frame became bent and attenuated, his step fell feebler, his hair was bleached to snowy whiteness, and his homely, tanned features assumed an expression of stern and patient endurance. It was evident to Flora that his heart was breaking for the ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... which renders most speeches of this class diluted and commonplace was exactly what he needed. He required abundant intellectual room for a proper display of his powers, and he had the rare quality of being able to range over vast spaces of time and thought without becoming attenuated in what he said. Soaring easily, with a powerful sweep he returned again to earth without jar or shock. He had dignity and grandeur of thought, expression, and manner, and a great subject never became small by his treatment of it. He ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... overlooking Alexandra Square. I have lived (rebelliously) in suburban streets where only clattering feet, tradesmen's carts and pitiful street singers broke the monotony; in a Paris chambre a garcon, au sixieme, where the view was roofs and the noise of the city was attenuated to a murmur; in country houses which looked out on sweeps of hill, down, vale and sea, so changeable and lovely that they were dreamlike and as a dream abide in the memory.... Here I have quick human life just below my window, and—up the Gut—a ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... third, as an undulation of the air, glass, or other matter, placed between the luminous body and the object. The last would regard the ether in the planetary spaces, not as a specific imponderable fluid, but as a highly attenuated expansion of air, gas, or other matter, having all the functions of ordinary matter. Whewell has, indeed, published a demonstration that all matter is ponderable, and that imponderable matter is not a conceivable idea. Be this as it may, the diversity of opinion ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... and leaps over his head, we are obviously in a world of pantomime. Dickens' comic effects are generally quite forced enough, and should never be further forced when translated into the sister art of drawing. Rather, if anything, should they be attenuated. But unfortunately exaggeration happened to be inherent in the draftsmanship of both Cruikshank and Browne. And, having said this, I may as well finish with the subject of the illustrations to Dickens' books. "Our Mutual Friend" was illustrated by Mr. Marcus Stone, ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... Majesties were reluctant to show themselves just then to the populace, the populace on the other hand were determined to be both seen and heard. The proclamation of Clarence's betrothal had served as the breaking strain to the attenuated links that still attached them to the Throne. They had murmured against the enfranchisement of the Yellow Gnomes; their deception in the matter of the self-supplying tables had weakened their loyalty seriously for a time; the projected alliance of the Princess Edna with the surviving member ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... we now. Ah! may our hope forecast Indeed one hour again, when on this stream Of darkened love once more the light shall gleam? An hour how slow to come, how quickly past, Which blooms and fades, and only leaves at last, Faint as shed flowers, the attenuated dream. ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... and asked her name. Gathering his remaining strength he murmured, "Krombach" [Krombach was merely the name of his native village in Bavaria.] . . . "Es bleibt nur zu sterben." "Ich bin sehr dankbar." These were the last words he spoke, "I am very grateful." I gazed sorrowfully at his attenuated figure, and at the now powerless hand that had laid low many an elephant and lion, in its day of strength; and the cold sweat of death lay thick upon his forehead. Although the pulse was not ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... compound is quite equal to that of the mixture prior to combination. No change is perceptible to the eye, but the keen vision of experiment soon detects the fact that the perfectly transparent and highly attenuated ammonia resembles pitch or lampblack in its behavior to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... Mountains seem to crush me, and forests to stifle me." Strange that the high priestess of expression, the interpreter of every phase of human passion and sorrow, she who dies terribly twice a day, and mercilessly conducts us to the attenuated air and dizzy heights of intense emotion, should feel no kinship with the mountains. It may be that they are antagonistic to the fine arts of simulation and will brook no companionship of feeling that is not real. And her stage-worn heart is certainly not in alliance ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... are usually larger than the basidia, varying in size and form in different species. They present the appearance of large sterile cells, attenuated upwards, sometimes into a slender neck. Corda was of opinion that these were male organs, and gave them the name of pollinaires. Hoffmann has also described[F] both these organs under the names of pollinaria and spermatia, but does not appear to recognize in them the sexual ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... Five attenuated shapes rode high above the bombardment, now sharp against the blue, now lost in a film of vapour. They were coming back, serenely, contemptuously, ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... ancient negress selected that occasion, out of sheer excitement, to revert to her unfortunate habits, Philip himself cooked the meal, serving it without apology or explanation upon a cloth of fine yellowed damask, with his mother's egg-shell china, and certain spoons and forks that bore upon their attenuated tips the worn outlines of a crest. The table was drawn into a window, through which the scent of Philip's little garden floated in. There were flowers upon the table, too; garden roses in a low pewter bowl, and wax tapers ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... them to appreciate the contrast it presents to the bulging vulgarities made manifest by Keene; and showed them also that while Du Maurier depicted with admirable artistic interpretation the refined surroundings and attenuated forms of women as they are, Linley Sambourne, that master of lovely line, pointed the moral by drawing women as they should be. There was nothing conventional about the Heavenly Twins, and it was ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... to do a great feat—and above all, of course, of the physical condition of the faster. Without food the body absorbs its own tissues. Mr. Rathbun, I am told, was a very heavy man with a superabundance of tissue. Naturally he could go longer without nourishment than a weak, attenuated, ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... sat in her long flannel night-dress, by the side of Miss Thusa, watching the rapid turning of her wheel, and the formation of the flaxen thread, as it glided out, a more and more attenuated filament, betwixt the dexterous ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... This is where Hans Christian Andersen reigns supreme. Horace Scudder says of him: "By some transmigration, souls have passed into tin soldiers, balls, tops, money-pigs, coins, shoes and even such attenuated things as darning-needles, and when, informing these apparent dead and stupid bodies, they begin to make manifestations, it is always in perfect consistency with the ordinary conditions of the bodies they occupy, though the several objects become, by the endowment of souls, suddenly expanded ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... demonstrate the collapsibility of a froth, stick a pin in the largest bubble of it. Astronomy and inflation: and by inflation we mean expansion of the attenuated. Or that the science of Astronomy is a phantom-film distended with myth-stuff—but always our acceptance that it approximates higher to substantiality than did the ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... the new tunnel, followed by Captain Spade. If I could but follow them! If I could but breathe for awhile the bracing air of the Atlantic, of which the interior of Back Cup only receives attenuated puffs, so to speak. ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... us to be very much together. We were very free that summer and life was all leisure. Lady Ladislaw was busied with her own concerns; she sometimes went away for two or three days leaving no one but an attenuated governess with even the shadow of a claim to interfere with Mary. Moreover she was used to seeing me with her children at Burnmore; we were still in her eyes no more than children.... And also perhaps she did not greatly mind if indeed we did a little ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... wonder, then, that, after all these difficulties, no complaint is made against the rickety, slat-seated carts, with wheels that seem to bar the entrance of the passenger; against the sorry-looking quilez,—that attenuated two-wheeled 'bus, where the four passengers must sit with interwoven legs, getting the more implicated as the cart goes bounding on? No; the Americans are glad enough to ride in almost any kind of vehicle. But you must be good-natured, even though the cab is tilted at an angle of some thirty-odd ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... was constantly seen anxiously examining the buckle of his belt, to make sure that he had not increased in girth since his last meal. Voluntary Tantalus, he scarcely allowed himself enough to keep life in his attenuated frame, and if he had but fasted as carefully from motives of piety he would ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... highly attenuated, so etherial, and penetrable in quality, and multiple in atoms; and a breath of air two quarts or more taken into the lungs fully charged with contagion, how many thousand air cells could be impregnated ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... there is but one course to be pursued. Abandon all thought of peace! Reject the overtures of Carthage! Reject them wholly and unconditionally! What? What? Give back to her a thousand able-bodied men, and receive in return this one, attenuated, war-worn, fever-wasted frame,—this weed, whitened in a dungeon's darkness, pale and sapless, which no kindness of the sun, no softness of the summer breeze, can ever restore to life and vigor? It must not, shall not be! Oh, were ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... judicious repression. Instead, they were unduly forced by the paternal pride of Chatham. At Cambridge, at Lincoln's Inn, and in Parliament the intellectual pressure was maintained, with the result that his weakly frame was constantly overwrought and attenuated by a too active mind. Further, the pressure at Westminster was so continuous as to preclude all chance of widening his nature by foreign travel. He caught but a glimpse of the life of France in 1783; and his knowledge of other peoples and politics was therefore perforce derived from ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... his guards were discerned advancing to the place assigned. He was still heavily fettered, and his dress, which he had not been permitted to change, covered with dark, lurid stains, hung so loosely upon him, that his attenuated form bore witness, even as the white cheek and haggard eye, to the intense mental torture of the last fortnight. His fair hair lay damp and matted on his pale forehead; but still there was that in his whole bearing which, while it breathed of suffering, contradicted ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... the one, royally the other. We meet in books many single-women, but they are usually embittered by disappointment or by hope deferred,—angular, envious, busybodies in other women's matters; or they are comically odd, self-ridiculing, and unrestful; or, worst of all, they have become morally attenuated by a thwarted love or a long course of dismal and absurd self-sacrifice and are so resigned, colorless, and impassive, that, like Naaman, we are tempted to go away in a rage. But where shall we find another Clara,—beautiful, attractive, radiant, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... gaunt attenuated figures of the penitents, Forese Donati, his intimate friend and kinsman of his wife Gemma. Our poet was surprised to find him so soon after his death on one of the terraces of Purgatory, the assumption being that because of his delay of conversion to the end of his life ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... the offering with broken thanks; But day succeeded day, and still revealed Those sombre and attenuated shanks Intensely unconcealed; ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... mercilessly lashed with a heavy slave-whip, by a tall, athletic negro, who acted as overseer, and who, with refined cruelty, dispensed the punishment alike on stout men, slender youths, and thin attenuated females. Our arrival having attracted the notice of the gang, and induced a momentary halt in their work, the unfeeling wretch commenced a furious onslaught with the whip, each crack of which, followed, as it was, by the groans or cries of the sufferer, roused the indignant feelings of the ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... discovered the day before and as he passed the colonel's fire a keen-eyed old veteran of the cavalry service, who had stopped to have a chat with our chief, dropped the stick on which he was whittling and stared hard at our attenuated racer. ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... style alone can keep literature alive is shown by literary history after Shakespeare. Just after him you have the "mellifluous poets" of the next period on the one hand, with style enough, but with such attenuated ideas that their work has died. Who knows Drayton or Brown or Wither? On the other hand, there came the metaphysicians with ideas in abundance, but not style, and their works ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... the extraordinary mixture of garments which formed his dress. Although he could not have been less than eighteen or nineteen years old, and was tall for that age, he wore a skeleton suit, which, though most absurdly short in the arms and legs, was quite wide enough for his attenuated frame. In order that the lower part of his legs might be in keeping with this singular dress, he had a very large pair of boots, originally made for tops, but now too patched and tattered for a beggar. He was lame, and as he feigned to be busy arranging the table, ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... the spectre became more and more constant; and wherever the poor lawyer went, there was the aged man at his side. From being one of the finest men in the county, he became a miserably attenuated and bowed old man. Misery was stamped on every feature—terror was indicated in every movement. At length he appears to have besought his ghostly attendant to free him of his presence. It was long before the ghost would listen to any terms; but when ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... groans, for the conversion of sinners. But one night—it was in October, 1221—Francis being inspired with a greater love and a deeper pity for men who were offending their God and Saviour, shedding torrents of tears, macerating his body, already attenuated by excessive mortifications, hears, all at once, the voice of an Angel commanding him to repair to the chapel of the Portiuncula. Ravished with joy, he rises immediately, and entering with profound respect into the chapel, ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... Allusions to Democracy are so abundant, deductions from its influence so confident and universal, that it is worth while to point out what a very hollow thing the word in most cases really is, a large empty object in thought, of the most vague and faded associations and the most attenuated content, and to inquire just exactly what the original implications and present realities of "Democracy" may be. The inquiry will leave us with a very different conception of the nature and future of this sort of political arrangement from that ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... above these arches, and from it to the main cornice, the walls, covered with blue and white tiles, are perfectly blank, broken only by square-headed windows. Only at the crossing do pilasters run up to the vault, and they are of the usual attenuated Doric form. As usual the roof is covered with plain coffers, as is ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... I have calculated upon nineteen pounds only of twenty-five pounds per barrel of fermentable matter being attenuated, and have even in that quantity included five pounds eight ounces of lees and yest, (the least quantity produced,) such calculation must not be admitted to preclude the practicability of attenuating almost every particle of fermentable matter, and replacing it ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger
... in the streets like a silent rebellion; like a still and statuesque riot. In modern constitutional countries there are practically no political institutions thus given by the people; all are received by the people. There is only one thing that stands in our midst, attenuated and threatened, but enthroned in some power like a ghost of the Middle ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... civilization through the world, which is under the influence of the European mind! Especially, for it most concerns us, how sorrowful, in the view of religion, even taken in its most elementary, most attenuated form, is the spectacle presented to us by the educated intellect of England, France, and Germany! Lovers of their country and of their race, religious men, external to the Catholic Church, have attempted various expedients to arrest ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... of the attenuated person was unusual; not from any peculiarity of feature, but from its invincible cheerfulness. This cheerfulness was constitutional, and contagious. His face seemed nearly ten years younger than it was; for the unquenchable good-humor having settled there in infancy had ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... lying down, it seemed to him, but a few moments, when a tap at the door, to which he responded with a loud "come in," was followed by the entrance of a thin, pale, haggard-looking creature, her clothes soiled, and hanging loosely, and in tatters about her attenuated body. By the hand she held a little girl, from whose young face had faded every trace of childhood's happy expression. She, too, was thin and pale, and had a fixed, stony look, of hopeless suffering. They came up to where he still lay ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... thrush of Baird, or the olive-backed thrush, but its song is totally different. The moment I heard it I said, "There is a new bird, a new thrush," for the quality of all thrush songs is the same. A moment more, and I knew it was Bicknell's thrush. The song is in a minor key, finer, more attenuated, and more under the breath than that of any other thrush. It seemed as if the bird was blowing in a delicate, slender, golden tube, so fine and yet so flute-like and resonant the song appeared. At times it was like a musical whisper ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... in a country infested with lawless soldiery. The stranger came steadily on, and as he drew near, Helmar noticed that, although dressed in flowing Eastern garb, he was a white man, and of patriarchal age. He had a snow-white beard, that reached to his waist, and his figure was tall, lean, attenuated, and tottering. Altogether his appearance was so fascinating that George drew ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... the guests began to arrive. First and foremost appeared the Bishop and his Vicar-General, dignified and reverend figures both, though no two men could well be more unlike, his lordship being tall and attenuated, and his acolyte short and fat. Both churchmen's eyes were bright; but while the Bishop was pallid, his Vicar-General's countenance glowed with high health. Both were impassive, and gesticulated but little; both appeared to be prudent men, and ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... For aught 'Bias knew then—as indeed 'Bias had reason to suspect—this husk of a man, helpless on the bed, had robbed him of his all, ruined him, left him no prospect but to begin life over again when late middle-age had sapped his vigour, attenuated the springs of action, left sad experience in the room of hope. And 'Bias's thought, ignoring it all, had been to sit beside this man's calamity, on the merest chance of piercing it with one ray ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... notary's house. Extended on a bed in his sleeping apartment, feebly lighted by a lamp, Jacques Ferrand was dressed in black trousers and vest; one of the sleeves of his shirt was turned back, and a ligature around his attenuated arm announced that he had just been bled. Polidori was standing near the bed, with one hand on the bolster, and appeared to regard the features of his accomplice ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue |
