"Balloon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Seen from a balloon, Moonstone would have looked like a Noah's ark town set out in the sand and lightly shaded by gray-green tamarisks and cottonwoods. A few people were trying to make soft maples grow in their turfed lawns, ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... assuming alarming proportions, and still on-coming troops were pouring into that Bloody Bend, where they must accept, with what fortitude they could command, their awful baptism of fire. Fifty feet above their heads floated the observation balloon of the engineers, betraying their exact position and forming an admirable focus for the enemy's fire, which, after awhile, to the vast relief of every one, shot the balloon to pieces so that it dropped from sight ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... perhaps ten times as great as that which a carrier-pigeon or a swallow could have traversed in the same time. Some vague delusion of this description seems even still to crop up occasionally. I remember hearing of a proposition for balloon travelling of a very remarkable kind. The voyager who wanted to reach any other place in the same latitude was simply to ascend in a balloon, and wait there till the rotation of the earth conveyed the locality which happened to be his destination directly beneath him, whereupon he was ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... doubting poet and the believing preacher, as well as the mobile dreamer, who, in the midst of all these various existences, allows himself to be swayed by every passing breath, and delights, stretched along the car of his balloon, in floating aimlessly through all the sounds and shallows of the ether, and in realizing within himself all the harmonies and dissonances of the soul, of feeling, and of thought. Idleness and contemplation! Slumber of the will, lapses of the vital force, indolence ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Emma called in from the hall. "Remember the temperamental family on the floor below!" A silence—then: "I'm coming. Shut your eyes and prepare to be jarred by the Buck balloon-petticoat!" ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... females, and they glory in exercising this power. If a bird will not, to use the technical expression, "play," the fancier, as I have witnessed, by taking the beak into his mouth, blows him up like a balloon; and the bird, then puffed up with wind and pride, struts about, retaining his magnificent size as long as he can. Pouters often take flight with their crops inflated. After one of my birds had swallowed a good meal of peas and water, as he flew up in order to disgorge them and ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... I want a red balloon, or maybe a blue one. Which goes up the highest, Bunny?" For, just then a man walked past, with many balloons, blue, red, green and yellow, floating ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue on Grandpa's Farm • Laura Lee Hope
... Misery, but scarcely humiliation. And yet 'tis a bitter pang under any circumstances to find another preferred to yourself. It is about the same blow as one would probably feel if falling from a balloon. Your Icarian flight melts into a grovelling existence, scarcely superior to that of a sponge or a coral, or redeemed only from utter insensibility by your frank detestation of your rival. It is quite impossible to conceal ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... always appeared to me inhospitable, I told the man that if delivered in Paris, they should be received, and paid for. The bargain was made, and the jewels have already reached us. Of course I have asked no questions, and am ignorant whether they came by a balloon, in the luggage of an ambassador, or by the means ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... viz. Those that ascend or mount in the Air. Those that consume on the Earth: And such as burn on the Water. And these are again divided into three Particulars, viz. For the Air, the Sky-Rocket, the flying Saucisson, and Balloon: For the Earth, the Ground-Rocket, the fiery Lances, and the Saucissons descendent. For the Water-Globes or Balls, double Rockets, and single Rockets; and of these in their particular Orders, to make them, and such other Matters as may ...
— The School of Recreation (1696 edition) • Robert Howlett
... the matter with the dog?" growled Holmes. "They surely would not take a cab, or go off in a balloon." ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... who had come upon him carried him to some point in the interior down "a great shaft" by means of what he describes as "a sort of balloon." We gather from the rather confused passage in which he describes this, and from a number of chance allusions and hints in other and subsequent messages, that this "great shaft" is one of an enormous system of artificial shafts that run, each from ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... drive him out of the balloon business I made up my mind one day I'd run down to the Flatfish Factory and drag a few honest dollars away from ...
— Back to the Woods • Hugh McHugh
... town is all astir. Fishermen shake themselves up out of their mid-day snooze, to admire the beauty, as she slips on and on through water smooth as glass, her hull hidden by the vast curve of the balloon-jib, and her broad wings boomed out alow and aloft, till it seems marvellous how that vast screen does not topple headlong, instead of floating (as it seems) self-supporting above its image in the mirror. Women hurry to put on their best bonnets; the sexton toddles up with the church key in ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... believed. The Past doesn't seem to be in the past, but in the present. There is an air of contemporaneousness about everything. Do you remember that story of Jules Verne about a voyage to the moon? When the voyagers got a certain distance from the earth they couldn't any longer drop things out of the balloon. The articles they threw out didn't fall down. There wasn't any down; everything was round about. Everything they had cast out followed them. That's the way Rome makes you feel about history. That which happened a thousand years ago is going on still. You can't ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... Old Man of the Hague, Whose ideas were excessively vague; He built a balloon, To examine the moon, That deluded Old Man of ...
— Book of Nonsense • Edward Lear
... wouldna let me bide the night over. And my foot's blistered in a balloon and blood on my dress.' ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... On the contrary." "Are we descending?" "Worse than that, captain! we are falling!" "For Heaven's sake heave out the ballast!" "There! the last sack is empty!" "Does the balloon rise?" "No!" "I hear a noise like the dashing of waves. The sea is below the car! It cannot be more than 500 feet from us!" "Overboard with every ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... and I should escape in a balloon together. I fear that the reader will disbelieve this part of my story, yet in no other have I endeavoured to adhere more conscientiously to facts, and can only throw myself upon ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... am rather afraid to swim under there. The balloon may sink and carry me under. But if I were certain in exactly what spot the man is imprisoned, I'd have a try ...
— The Boy Allies at Jutland • Robert L. Drake
... I had not attempted to get a ticket for the Abbey or the Hall, so I determined after breakfast to sally forth and see the Balloon ascend, and then to walk down Palace Yard and try whether there was not a place to be got. Nothing could be more animating than the scene, the St James's Park and the Green Park were entirely covered with Spectators. The Balloon ascended to a considerable height before it ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... trousers; Belgians in fresh khaki uniform; and Red Cross British Quakers. But the mass of the men were middle-aged—territorials, with the light-blue long-coat, good for all weathers and the sharp night, and the peaked cap. Over the top of the dune where the soldiers sat an observation balloon was suspended in a cloudless blue sky, like a huge yellow caterpillar. Beyond the pasteboard stage, high on a western dune, two sentries stood with their bayonets touched by sunlight. To the south rose a monument to the territorial dead. ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... the first record which we have of the restoration of the dead to life in the Bible; and it is the first also of any one ascending into heaven "in a chariot of fire with horses of fire." Probably Elijah knew how to construct a balloon. Much of the ascending and the descending of seers, of angels and of prophets which astonished the ignorant was accomplished in balloons—a lost art for many centuries. No doubt that the poor widow, when she saw Elijah ascend, thought that he went straight to ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... water of the harbour lay smooth as a sheet of tightly stretched gray silk. Overhead the sea-fog drifted gradually landward, descending, as it drifted, till the outlines of the City grew blurred and indistinct, resolving to a dim, vast mass, rugged with high-shouldered office buildings and bulging, balloon-like domes, confused and mysterious under the cloak of the fog. In the nearer foreground, along the lines of the wharves and docks, a wilderness of masts and spars of a tone just darker than the gray ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... to the Navigator. "Will you take on now?" he asked in a low voice. "If the balloon's really going up this time I'd better get along ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... was twisted by the violence of each terrible blast; but undaunted by this impending calamity Paul's only desire was to reach the side of poor Nuthin before worse things happened to him than being carried away with the balloon-like tent. ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... had been good originally, and age had improved it. Used as he was to the appalling balloon juice sold in the drinking dens of the "Barbary coast" at San Francisco, or the public-houses of the ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... lying in line from the entrance up the strait. The ship furthest up appeared to be the Queen Elizabeth, and I think it was she that fired the shot which exploded the powder magazine at Chanak. A great balloon of white smoke sprang up in the midst of the magazine which leaped out from a fierce, red flame, and reached a great height. When the flame had disappeared the dense smoke continued to grow till it must have been a ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... a black hat with a great flare to the brim on one side. It was trimmed very dashingly with black feathers, imitation jet, and a little puff of plush—robin's-egg blue. Her dress was of rough, black camel's hair, tailor-made, and but for the immense balloon sleeves, absolutely plain. It was cut in such a way that from neck to waist there was no break, the buttons being on the shoulder and under the arm. The skirt was full and stiff, and without the least trimming. Everything was black—hat, dress, gloves—and the effect ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... face; each voice was a windy whisper, a bellow blown down into silence. As the ship ran, and lifted, and pitched and trembled, her narrow wedge shape was a blot beneath us: on each side of her white foam marked the hissing, hungry sea. But, with the sail surging before us in its gear like a mad balloon, who noted aught but the sail? I leant out upon my taut bulge of living canvas, beat it with the flat of my hand, and being the youngest waited for the word to "leech" it or "skin" it up. Being tall I was not at the extremity of the yard arm; my fellow fore-topman ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... work, and by sundown had the well in order. Tying the others down we proceeded to water each camel in turn. Picture our surprise and joy when each turned from the bucket without drinking more than two gallons. Billy rolled up like a great balloon, and one would have sworn that he had just had a long drink. What was this miracle? Here were camels, after an eight days' drought, travelling eight to ten hours daily in hot weather, over rough stones and gravel, actually turning away ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... a balloon," was Edmund's reply, and as he spoke he touched another knob, and we felt the car, as I must now call it, come to rest. Then Edmund opened a shutter at one side, and we all sprang up to look out. Below us we saw roofs and the tops of two ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... are described; the relations between heat and electricity, between heat and cold, and the comparative effects of each, are discussed; and incidentally, interesting accounts are given of the mode of formation of glaciers, of Montgolfier's balloon, of Davy's safety-lamp, of the methods of glass-blowing, and of numerous other facts in nature and processes in art dependent upon the influence of heat. Like the other volumes of the Library of Wonders, this is illustrated wherever the text gives ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... the other end being in a man's hand. One of these, a big bull terrier, sleeps in the canteen. The beer is quite safe with him there, but two nights ago the canteen tent, after a great struggle, tore itself off the tent-poles and went fifteen feet up in the air like a balloon, then collapsed. The dog, I regret to say, did not stay at his post, so a quantity of beer will have to be marked down as lost. This same bull has a pal, a white bull terrier, who came out with the officers' class the other morning. We had not been drilling more than fifteen minutes when he came ...
— "Crumps", The Plain Story of a Canadian Who Went • Louis Keene
... however poor woman aspires, She's always bound down to the earth by these wires. Are you listening? Nonsense! don't stare like a spoon, Idiotic; some light thing, and spacious, and soon— Something like—well, in fact—something like a balloon!" ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... was equal to that employed by an Attorney-General, who at a certain time in the history of the Home Rule agitation, addressing his constituents, told them that Mr. Gladstone had sent up a balloon to see which way the cat jumped with regard to Ireland! He was soon appointed a Judge of ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... his erring daughter out into the snow. The red-haired young man, outwardly stolid, was gazing before him down the beach at a fat bather in an orange suit who, after six false starts, was now actually in the water, floating with the dignity of a wrecked balloon. ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... correspondents bring very pleasing accounts of a balloon ascension, which took place in London on the 9th of October. This adventure is the more interesting to us, from the fact that the well-known and experienced aeronauts, Messrs. Coxwell and Glaisher, were accompanied ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... is the child of her grandmother! Even when you shall make saddle thees old Castilian stock, it will make large—it will become a balloon! Eet is a trick—eet is a ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... from Kaiser Joseph himself, who is personally running about in these parts, over in Bohemia, endeavoring to bring Army matters to a footing; and is no doubt shocked to find them still in such backwardness, with a Friedrich at hand. The Kaiser's Letter, we perceive, is pilot-balloon to the Kaunitz episcopal Document, and to an actual meeting of Prussian and Austrian Ministers on the Bavarian point; and had been seen to be a salutary measure by an Austria in alarm. It asks, as the Kaunitz Memorial will, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... creature from the inside—funk and something worse, a kind of deep, complex cunning. Well anyhow you take the superficial merit with infinite charity—and it has inflated me and just for a time I am an air balloon over the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... out of his fingers, like the historic Bob Acres's; it vanished like gas from a rent balloon. He clasped his hands and tried to ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... real landscape: it has, if you will, actual, chemically defined colours in this and that, if you consider this and that separate and unaffected by any kind of visual medium; and measurable distances also between this point and the other, if you look down upon it as from a balloon. But, like a real landscape, it may also be seen from different points of view, and under different lights; then, according as you stand, the features of the scene will group themselves—this ridge will disappear behind that, this valley ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... passed through a vast camp of armed men; brown battalions marching up to the front singing as they marched, brigades under canvas to right and left of them, miles of supply columns, some cavalry eating their hearts out, kite balloon sections 'phoning results to hidden batteries, all the seething mass of military activities to be found behind the ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... like that." Sophia Antonovna was obviously vexed. But she dropped the information, "Necator," from her lips just loud enough to be heard by Razumov. The abrupt squeaks of the fat man seemed to proceed from that thing like a balloon he carried under his overcoat. The stolidity of his attitude, the big feet, the lifeless, hanging hands, the enormous bloodless cheek, the thin wisps of hair straggling down the fat nape of the neck, fascinated Razumov into a stare on the verge ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... the child, the sightless Boy, It is the triumph of his joy! The bravest traveller in balloon, Mounting as if to reach the moon, ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... soar away from the contemplation of these sad scenes and fly in the balloon which carried Messrs. King and Black in their aerial photographic excursion. Our townsman, Dr. John Jeffries, as is well recollected, was one of the first to tempt the perilous heights of the atmosphere, and the first who ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... improved aesthetically by the shells knocking the ugly points of the towers off. Here is a picture of Rheims Cathedral looming through the fog, as seen from the German lines. I painted this picture of the battle of the Aisne from a captive balloon. Here is a picture of the surrender of Maubeuge, showing two of the 40,000 French prisoners. I can usually paint better during a battle because there's nobody looking on over my shoulder to distract my attention. I have about 140 sketches done in all. His ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... self-contained and independent age; and the muff inevitably develops into the bore. There are not many Doctor Johnsons, to set forth upon their first romantic voyage at sixty-four. If we wish to scale Mont Blanc or visit a thieves' kitchen in the East End, to go down in a diving dress or up in a balloon, we must be about it while we are still young. It will not do to delay until we are clogged with prudence and limping with rheumatism, and people begin to ask us: "What does Gravity out of bed?" Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other both in mind and body; to ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... while he displayed some picture or some prospect.' In that humourous piece, Probationary Odes for the Laureateship (p. xliii), Dr. Joseph is made to hug his brother in his arms, when he sees him descend safely from the balloon in which he had composed his Ode. Thomas Warton is described in the same piece (p. 116) as 'a little, thick, squat, red-faced man.' There was for some time a coolness between Johnson and Dr. Warton. Warton, writing on Jan. 22, 1766, says:—'I ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... talk as they will Of their steam-engine skill, But, as sure as the sun shines at noon, Straps, boilers, and springs Are a wagon to wings, Compared with the air-balloon. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XIII, No. 369, Saturday, May 9, 1829. • Various
... freedom, An' your fact'ry gals (soon ez we split) 'll make head, An' gittin' some Miss chief or other to lead 'em, 'll go to work raisin' permiscoous Ned,' Sez John C. Calhoun, sez he;— 'Yes, the North,' sez Colquitt, 70 'Ef we Southeners all quit, Would go down like a busted balloon,' sez he. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... spread over the great Western plains nor to the Pacific coast. Tremendous changes in art and industries, in inventions and discoveries have been going on in this generation. The flying-machine, the radio, the automobile, the dirigible balloon, and, more than all, the tremendous business organization of the factories and industries of the age have given us altogether ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... had been a professor in one of the colleges, who, having taken up aeronautics, had made many balloon voyages in quest of scientific information, so that his name had become quite famous. Then, about a year before, he had been lost when attempting to solve the air currents on the Panama Isthmus, where the government had thirty thousand ...
— The Aeroplane Boys on the Wing - Aeroplane Chums in the Tropics • John Luther Langworthy
... "A balloon! What fun!" exclaimed Patty, her reportorial instinct waking to the scent. "They use balloons a lot more in Europe ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... a purgative life after death is so natural, so certain, that all religions assume it. All consider the soul is a sort of air balloon, which cannot mount and attain its last end in space except by throwing away its ballast. In the religions of the East, the soul is re-incarnistic; in order to purify itself it rubs itself against a new body, ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... was shouted. The whole regiment rushed for cover to a hedge which ran by the roadside. I naturally followed. My friend told me that the Germans had sent up an observation balloon, so we dare not advance until nightfall, or they would be sure to see us and begin shelling our column before we arrived at the trenches. In the rain we sat huddled close together. Notwithstanding the ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... that we should first shoot the lion at long range with the .256, then at a shorter range with the nine-millimeter, then at close range with the .475 cordite, and then perhaps fervently wish that we had the paradox or a balloon. ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... and soundless, would pick up the baloon-car at some point in its descent. The gold would be there, in a black casket. De Boer would take the gold, deposit Jetta and me in the car, and release it again. And when the balloon finally settled to the rocks beneath, Hanley could pick it up. No men would be hidden by Hanley in that basket. De Boer had stipulated that when casting loose the balloon, its car must be swept by Hanley with a visible electronic ray. No hidden men ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... supper was served in the garden, under military tents, draped with flags, and ornamented with groupings of arms and trophies, each lady being accompanied and served at table by an officer in uniform. When the King and Queen of Etruria came out of their tent, a balloon was released which carried into the heavens the name of Marengo ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... permit no more of his head than was indispensable to appear above the surface. The six redskins were lounging in as many different lazy attitudes. One seemed sound asleep, with his face turned to the ground, and looking like a warrior that had fallen from some balloon, and, striking on his stomach, lay just as he was flattened out. Another was half-sitting and half-reclining, smoking a pipe with a very long stem. His face was directly toward Fred, who noticed that his eyes ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... the primrose path of dalliance"—it shrinks back from it as from a precipice, and keeps in the iron rail-way of the understanding. Irish oratory, on the contrary, is a sort of aeronaut: it is always going up in a balloon, and breaking its neck, or coming down in the parachute. It is filled full with gaseous matter, with whim and fancy, with alliteration and antithesis, with heated passion and bloated metaphors, that burst the slender, silken covering of sense; ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... like cubical slabs sunk deeply in between the roofs of houses; towers like toothpicks, like three-pronged forks, like pepper-casters, like factory chimneys, like limekilns, like a sailor's trousers hung up to dry, like bottles of fish-sauce, and like St. Paul's—a balloon turned topsy-turvy. There they stand, like giant spectral watchmen guarding the silent city, whose beating heart still murmurs in its sleep. At the hour of midnight they proclaim, with iron tongue, the advent of a New Year, mingling ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... of time," said I to Captain Tolliver, who sat by me in the car as I read this editorial, "prevents the hot-air balloon from carrying its ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... Reflect that some day you will suddenly have to leave everything in this world-so make the acquaintanceship of God now," the great guru told his disciples. "Prepare yourself for the coming astral journey of death by daily riding in the balloon of God-perception. Through delusion you are perceiving yourself as a bundle of flesh and bones, which at best is a nest of troubles. {FN35-12} Meditate unceasingly, that you may quickly behold yourself as the Infinite Essence, free from every form of misery. ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... go overboard as I did," grumbled the man who was wet. "Talk about the strenuous life, this takes the cake! Why, in the past ten days, I have gone over a cliff, rescued two women from a burning tenement house, climbed a rope hanging from a burning balloon, and fallen off a moving freight car. Can you beat that ...
— The Rover Boys in Business • Arthur M. Winfield
... disappoint the child; he would not, yet,—he could not—admit that he, himself, was to meet with such a bitter disappointment. "You'll see, all right," he told her, "and so will I." But, after a second's thought he added: "I will if I can hire a balloon!" ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... go up rapidly in a balloon or climb very high mountains, they are troubled by a ringing noise and a feeling of great pressure in the ears and head, and by palpitation of the heart, bleeding at the nose, and fainting. These unpleasant and often dangerous symptoms are caused by the expansion of ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... thrust him from her so violently that he tumbled backward down the steps to the very bottom, where, unnerved by the ferocity of the attack and his head bruised by the fall, he felt his consciousness escape like gas from a punctured balloon. When found the next morning, he was barely covered by the old sin-eater's rags, while near by was scattered the entire orchestra of that eloquent wizard. Shudderingly he realized that it had been no dream; shudderingly he wondered if upon his soul had been shifted the unknown crime ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... shirt front, his white, pointed beard, and his grandiloquent flow of talk; at Sue's side sat Jack Prince, pausing in his open admiration of Sue to cast an eye on the handsome New York girl at Sam's end of the table or to puncture, with a flash of his terse common sense, some balloon of theory launched by Williams of the University, who sat on the other side of Sue; the artist, who hoped for a commission to paint Colonel Tom, sat opposite him bewailing the dying out of fine old American families; and a serious-faced little German scientist sat beside Colonel Tom smiling ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... it is lighter than water; iron sinks because it is heavier; but a substance which possessed exactly the specific gravity of water would neither float nor sink, but would remain suspended in the water like a balloon in midair. Taken, then, a liquid which is heavy—the most convenient is methylene iodide, whose specific gravity is 3.3—a fragment of zircon will sink in this, and a fragment of tourmaline will float, but a fragment of the mineral augite, whose specific ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various
... and the stage coaches, and the railroads; the forts, and the ships-of-many-big-guns, and the tremendous "council-house" at Washington; and the patent office (great-medicine-place, filled with curious machines); and the war parade of American soldiers, and the balloon—a huge ball which carried a man to the Great Spirit in the sky; and the beautiful ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... managing editor of The Evening Balloon, sat at his desk in the center of the local-room, under a furious cone of electric light. It was six o'clock of a warm summer afternoon: he was filling his pipe and turning over the pages of the Final edition of the paper, which had just come up from the ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... carefully drawn hills studded with small villages—a plain with a road and a river in the foreground, and an all-revealing afternoon light upon everything. The hills smoked and shook and bellowed. An observation-balloon climbed up to see; while an aeroplane which had nothing to do with the strife, but was merely training a beginner, ducked and swooped on the edge of the plain. Two rose-pink pillars of crumbled masonry, guarding some carefully trimmed ...
— France At War - On the Frontier of Civilization • Rudyard Kipling
... out from the underbrush and grasped her wrist. Carr wheeled and his ray pistol spat crackling flame. The savage, an undersized red man with an enormous head, rose unsteadily from his hiding place, a look of terrible hate in his contorted features. Then, like a punctured balloon, his body collapsed into the ...
— Creatures of Vibration • Harl Vincent
... a fellow with a head like a balloon, not in size, but in contents, yes. Have you ever had a real jag on you, not the big dinner, big bottle, big cigar sort of imitation, but ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... another Frenchman, in 1782 projected a method of conveying parcels and merchandise by subterraneous tubes,[6] after the method recently patented and brought into operation by the London Pneumatic Despatch Company. The balloon was an ancient Italian invention, revived by Mongolfier long after the original had been forgotten. Even the reaping machine is an old invention revived. Thus Barnabe Googe, the translator of a book from the German entitled 'The whole Arte and Trade of Husbandrie,' published in 1577, in the ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... series of bottles labelled: cholera, yellow fever, typhus fever, smallpox, etc., and proposed as a very simple thing to go and spread these epidemics in all the German camps, by the aid of a navigable balloon, which he had just invented the night before upon going to bed. Amedee soon became tired of these braggarts and lunatics, and no longer went to the Cafe de Seville. He lived alone and shut himself up in his discouragement, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... "We must depend upon our own legs and such means of conveyance as present themselves. With the help of the railways, steamboats, trackboats, and horse carriages, we may still manage to get along. By-the-by, could we not manage to engage a balloon? We might get over the country at greater speed than even ...
— Voyages and Travels of Count Funnibos and Baron Stilkin • William H. G. Kingston
... they have no word for balloon or flying machine, and I found it difficult to describe the shape and explain the philosophy of these things. I did the best I could in her language, and after I had finished my description she for the first time ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... the air, right to the kite, and, with his strong beak, he tore a hole in the paper to let the air through. Then the kite came gently down, just like a red balloon, or maybe a blue one, that you get at the circus, and some one sticks a pin in it. Yes, the kite came gently down, and Jimmie came with it, and ...
— Lulu, Alice and Jimmie Wibblewobble • Howard R. Garis
... from an observation balloon anchored in the darkness over the trenches to guard the troops from ...
— Soldier Silhouettes on our Front • William L. Stidger
... in despair. She was so overwhelmed by this time, that, if Adolphus had told of going with Captain Lally to the moon in a balloon, she would not ...
— Dotty Dimple Out West • Sophie May
... away from there. I was in a large gas balloon, soaring up into the clouds. How pleasant!... No, by Jove! I was not in a balloon—I myself was the balloon, which was not quite so pleasant. Besides, Doctor Z was going along as a passenger; and as we traveled up and up he kept jabbing me in the midriff with ...
— "Speaking of Operations—" • Irvin S. Cobb
... and commerce. "It is an interesting instrument, of course, for professors of electricity and acoustics; but it can never be a practical necessity. As well might you propose to put a telescope into a steel-mill or to hitch a balloon ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... see a man who struts around altogether too large to notice an ordinary working mechanic? Do you think he is great? He is nothing but a puffed-up balloon, held down by his big feet. There ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... convenience. The practicability of this plan does not seem to be doubtful. Its advantages are obvious. Instead of having to purchase, as for a railway, the whole line of track passed over, the company for a balloon-way would only have to procure those spots of ground on which they proposed to erect stationary engines; and these need in no case be of peculiar value, since their being a hundred yards one way or the other would make little difference. Viaducts of course ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... corresponding with these numbers have been made by Humboldt, Gay-Lussac, and Dumas at Paris, by Saussure at Geneva, and by Lewy at Copenhagen; and similar results have also been obtained from air collected by Gay-Lussac during his ascent in a balloon at the height of 21,430 feet, and by Humboldt on the mountain of Antisano in South America at a height of 16,640 feet. In short, under all circumstances, and in all places, the relation subsisting between the oxygen and nitrogen is ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... covered. And a factor of primary importance in this warfare, because of the importance of seeing the board, a factor which will be enormously stimulated to develop in the future, will be the aerial factor. Already we have seen the captive balloon as an incidental accessory of considerable importance even in the wild country warfare of South Africa. In the warfare that will go on in the highly-organized European States of the opening century, the special military balloon used in conjunction with guns, conceivably ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... a few of the peculiarities of the London multitude, when no riot, no execution, no murder, no balloon, disturbs the even current of their thoughts. These are the whimseys of the mass - the harmless follies by which they unconsciously endeavour to lighten the load of care which presses upon their existence. The wise man, even though he smile at them, will not altogether withhold his ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... mountain scenery has many features in common," Mrs. Denham said; "but if I were dropped down on the White Hills, softly from a balloon, let us say, I should know in a second I was not ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Frank felt as if his heart had turned suddenly from a round-shot to an air-balloon. ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... was traced; thenceforth Fabre never ceased to multiply his pin-pricks in "the vast and luminous balloon of transformism (evolution), in order to empty it and expose it in all its inanity." (9/12.) By no means the least original feature of his work is this passionate and incisive argument, in which, with ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... copy of Shelley, whose verse did much for the music of Donal's, while yet he could not quite appreciate the truth for the iridescence of it: he said it seemed to him to have been all composed in a balloon. I have mentioned only works of imagination, but it must not be supposed they had not a relish for stronger food: the books more severe came afterwards, when they had liberty to choose their own labours; now they had plenty of the ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... last, ready to tell you the adventures of our young lives. Right away I have trouble with Pee-wee Harris. He's about as easy to keep down as a balloon full of gas. We call him the young dirigible because he's always going up in the air. Even at the start he must stick in his ...
— Roy Blakeley • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... Swift, but I looked up jest now, an' dere he be, in dat air-contraption ob his'n he calls de Hummin' Burd. He's ketched up fast on de balloon shed roof, an' dere he's hangin' wif sparks an' flames a-shootin' outer de airship suffin' scandalous! It's jest spittin' fire, dat's what it's a-doin', an' ef somebody don't do suffin' fo' Massa Tom mighty quick, dere ain't gwin t' be any Massa Tom; ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton
... what appeared to be a balloon (and we soon discovered that it was nothing else) excited tremendous interest. It ascended and descended repeatedly during the battle, apparently for the purpose of locating the enemy and directing the fire of Methuen's guns. We had been ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... and living-room combined. A porch might be placed over the rear door, or better still, at a small additional expense, a summer-kitchen and wood-house might be added. A house of this accommodation is usually the first one put up by settlers on the western prairies. They are built of wood, balloon frame, with a plain pitch roof, ...
— Woodward's Country Homes • George E. Woodward
... his guardian for some time, until the return of his own father, Professor Bird, who had been lost while attempting a difficult balloon trip in Central America, and found in a most miraculous way by the two boys as ...
— The Aeroplane Boys Flight - A Hydroplane Roundup • John Luther Langworthy
... certain no one saw her, gave place to another manoeuvre. She stretched as though her bones were of the very best elastic. Gathering herself together, she arched her round body till it resembled a toy balloon straining to rise against the pull of four thin ropes that held it tightly to the ground. Then, unable to float off through the air, as she had expected, she slowly again subsided. The balloon deflated. She licked her chops, twitched her whiskers, curled her tail ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood |
