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Cotton wool   /kˈɑtən wʊl/   Listen
Cotton wool

noun
1.
Soft silky fibers from cotton plants in their raw state.  Synonyms: cotton, cotton fiber.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Cotton wool" Quotes from Famous Books



... from Aleppo, and the fifth of March imbarked my selfe at Alexandretta in a great ship of Venice called the Nana Ferra, to come to England. The 14 we put into Salino in Cyprus, where the ship staying many dayes to lade cotton wool, and other commodities, in the meane time accompanied with M. William Barret my countrey man, the master of the ship a Greeke, and others wee tooke occasion to see Nicosia, the chiefe city of this Iland, which was some twenty miles from this place, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 9 - Asia, Part 2 • Richard Hakluyt

... better carry a blue-light outfit with you as a "town dressing," in the same way as you would carry a "field dressing." If you cannot get an outfit, carry a tiny bottle of pot. permang. lotion and a scrap of cotton wool. If you swob yourself carefully with this, you will not become diseased. Remember always it is delay that is dangerous. If there has been delay, use a syringe sufficiently large for the contents to flood the urethra and slightly distend it, so that ...
— Safe Marriage - A Return to Sanity • Ettie A. Rout

... ladies in attendance (having first dried the place anointed with fine cotton wool) then closes the queen's robes at her breast, and after puts a linen coif upon her head; which being done, the archbishop puts the ring (which he receives from the master of the jewel-house) on the fourth finger ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip

... was busy heating the water, he was busier preparing a bottle for baby—making a hole through the cork of a phial, putting the broken stem of a clean tobacco pipe he had found in the street through the hole, tying a small lump of cotton wool over the end of the pipe- stem, and covering that with a piece of his pocket-handkerchief, carefully washed with the brown Windsor soap, his mother's last present. For the day held yet another gladness: in looking for a kettle he had found the soap—which probably ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald

... after the accident, firm pressure should be applied by means of an elastic bandage over a thick layer of cotton wool, to prevent bleeding and effusion of synovia. Later the best treatment is by massage and movement. In the ankle, for example, massage should be commenced at once, the part being gently stroked upwards. If the massage is light enough there is no pain, it is actually soothing. The rubbing is continued ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles

... ghosts could really hurt one. (GEORGE lights candle at table.) In fact, my father used to say that it was only the unpleasantness of the thing that upset him, and that, for all practical purposes, Jerry's fingers might have been made of cotton wool for all the harm ...
— The Ghost of Jerry Bundler • W. W. Jacobs and Charles Rock

... she got out of this sport, however, soon changed to dismay when she tried to get down again. It had taken some squeezing to get her head into the upper space, and now she found that she was wedged securely in. She could not move her head one particle. What was worse, a quantity of cotton wool, which had been put inside the upper part of the body for some reason or other, was dislodged by her squeezing in and pressed against her mouth, forming an effective silencer. Thus, while she could ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey

... little on the subject of night shooting. Every one who has tried it knows the extreme difficulty in seeing the sights of the rifle in a dark night. The common native method is to attach a fluff of cotton wool. On a moonlight night a bit of wax, with powdered mica scattered on it, will sometimes answer. I have seen diamond sights suggested, but all are practically useless. My plan was to carry a small phial of phosphorescent oil, about one grain to a drachm of oil dissolved in a bath ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale

... to Lord Kitchener's dramatic appeal to the women of England and France, masks were sent to France in sufficient quantity within a few days. They were of a very primitive type, and consisted of a pad of cotton wool impregnated with certain chemicals, to be held in place over the mouth, which was superseded, in May, by a very similar contrivance, slightly more efficient with regard to the length of time of protection. Dr. Haldane and certain other prominent ...
— by Victor LeFebure • J. Walker McSpadden

... hold up, to hold on, at least. He glared with his bulging eyes, mute as a fish, and with all the stiffening knocked out of him. He wouldn't stand; he wouldn't even as much as clutch at our necks; he was only a cold black skin loosely stuffed with soft cotton wool; his arms and legs swung jointless and pliable; his head rolled about; the lower lip hung down, enormous and heavy. We pressed round him, bothered and dismayed; sheltering him we swung here and there in a body; and on the very brink of eternity we tottered all together with concealing ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad

... glow; and about each lantern there was a little cloud of absolute blackness, where the phenomenon that is light to our natural eyes, came through the fittings; and in this complete darkness, the metal of each lantern showed plain, as might a cat's-eye in a nest of black cotton wool. ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson

... had been proved that in the hypnotic sleep, when the pulse of life was weakest, almost at pause, there was a heightening of the powers of vision and hearing. A patient whose eyes had been covered with layers of cotton wool had been able to read the newspaper. Another patient had been able to tell what was passing in another mind, and at a distance of a mile. The only explanation that Charcot could give of this second experiment was that the ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore

... they exported the finished goods to the four corners of the world. During the seventeenth century, the people of Georgia and the Carolinas had begun to grow a new shrub which gave a strange sort of woolly substance, the so-called "cotton wool." After this had been plucked, it was sent to England and there the people of Lancastershire wove it into cloth. This weaving was done by hand and in the homes of the workmen. Very soon a number of improvements were made in the process of weaving. In the year 1730, ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon

... to live on herrings. I wanted to be rid of princes who pestered me to marry them, of royal dukes who ran away with me, of kind uncles and princesses who thought to make my bed all eider down and cotton wool, my food all rose-leaves ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett

... childhood in her as long as possible, to keep away from her all knowledge of sin, sorrow, the things that distract and torture the world. But I mustn't be selfish about Vere. I mustn't keep her wrapped in cotton wool. That is unwholesome. And, after all, Vere must have her life apart from me. Last night I ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens

... Marian indignantly. "I have always been swaddled in cotton wool. I have never been allowed really to feel. I think it is the spirit of revolt in me. Yes, I ought to have been a man. I'm sure that then I could have made ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)

... turned back the lid of the box. The contents remained as Sir Godfrey's dead son had left them; a limp leather diary, an automatic pistol of some American make, a few glass tubes of quinine, packed in cotton wool. ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post

... see nothing save the beautiful blue sky above, for over the water was a thick layer of mist exactly as though the whole surface had been covered with billows of cotton wool. By degrees, however, the sun sucked up the mists, and then I saw that we were afloat upon a glorious sheet of blue water of which I could not make out the shore. Some eight or ten miles behind us, however, there stretched as far as the eye could reach a range of precipitous ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard

... was my wife. I found these and come other things in a little box. At the bottom were these notes—there are more of them—and some cotton wool on the top of them. On the top of that lay some earrings and things that had been her mother's. And also (producing some bracelets) these bracelets. They are certainly much too costly to ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson

... nothing until now. Its cruelty, its deceit, and its treachery are terrible. London is the Judas that is forever betraying with a kiss the young, the hopeful, the innocent. However, it helps one to know one's self, and that is better than lying wrapped in cotton wool. Give my kindest greetings to everybody at Glenfaba—my love to my father, too, if there are any means of ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine

... precaution. He chose his most vicious instrument. He applied to the vicinity of the tooth the very latest substitute for cocaine; he prepared cotton wool and warm water in a glass. And at length, when he could delay the fatal essay ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett

... the throne, when reform menaced both king and barons, and the people, between the hierarchy and the empire, were forgotten? According to a saying of Madame Necker, women, amid these great movements, were like the cotton wool put into a case of porcelain. They were counted for nothing, but without them everything ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac

... solution of boric acid, used. Separate squares of soft linen being used for this purpose. If the baby is born too soon or is very small, weak and undeveloped, it should be given an oil bath, only, and then wrapped in cotton wool and kept at a temperature of not less than 80 degrees F., for ten days or ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... candle down. I had been looking in the glass, and I found a new wrinkle, a horrible one. I threw the candle down, and it fell on a roll of cotton wool. How it went! I can hear the sound now, ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards

... slaves of the three kings. Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale; legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches. Grandmother said it reminded her of the Tree of Knowledge. We put sheets of cotton wool under it for a snow-field, and Jake's pocket-mirror for ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather

... back from his seat into the wagon and took out a little box without any cover from under the oilcloth. "I may as well show you this," said he. In the box lay an object carefully wrapped in cloth and cotton wool. Hallheimer unpacked it and handed it to the smith. "A Roman bronze," said he, "I got it in Milan from an ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... came down, she was led to the box. It was opened with some difficulty. Inside was a quantity of cotton wool, and scattered about in the wool were little packages of soft paper, and inside of each was a little china cat. When all were taken out, the young lady found herself the possessor of a white china cat with gold ears and ...
— Who Spoke Next • Eliza Lee Follen

... the formula published by Mr. Hadow, in the March Number of the Photographic Journal, thus: "Take of nit. potash, five parts; sulphuric acid, ten parts; water, one part; all by weight. Add the water to the nitrate of potash, and then the acid, and immediately immerse as much cotton wool as can be thoroughly saturated by the mixture, leaving it in for at least ten minutes, and wash with a great abundance of water. The object of adding the cotton immediately that the acid has been mixed with the nitrate of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 235, April 29, 1854 • Various

... twinkling from the windows on the snow; the warmth and comfort within; the great fire roaring on the hearth; the merry guests grouped about its blaze and the little children with their eyes dancing in the Christmas fire-light, waiting for Father Christmas in his fine mummery of red and white and cotton wool to hand the presents from the yule-tide tree. I can see it," I added, "as if ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock

... sterile test-tubes 16 x 3 or 4 cm., plugged with cotton wool, and into each insert a 2 cm. length of stout glass tubing (about 1 cm. diameter); fill in glycerine (6 per cent.) bouillon to the upper level of the piece of glass tubing. Sterilise in the steamer at 100 deg. C. for twenty minutes on each ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre

... more thoroughly worked out by Mr. John Aitken in 1880. He found that if a jet of steam is admitted into two large glass receivers,—one filled with ordinary air, the other with air which has been filtered through cotton wool so as to keep back all particles of solid matter,—the first will be instantly filled with condensed vapour in the usual cloudy form, while the other vessel will remain quite transparent. Another experiment ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)

... or when little heaps of dust are found on the shelf on which an old book has been standing, it may be considered likely that there are bookworms present. It is easy to kill any that may be hatched, by putting the book in an air-tight box surrounded with cotton wool soaked in ether; but that will not kill the eggs, and the treatment must be repeated from time to time at intervals ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell

... gave me the impression that we might catch fever there. See the mist that lies over it," and turning in my saddle I pointed with the rifle in my hand to what looked like a mass of cotton wool over which, without permeating it, hung the last red glow of sunset, producing a curious and indeed rather unearthly effect. "I expect that thousands of years ago there was a lake yonder, which is why trees grow so big ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard

... mist was thinner, showing first nearer, then remoter objects; the coarse slates of the roofs opposite emerged polished and dripping, and the cloud finally took its leave, some heavy flakes, like cotton wool, hanging on the hill-side, and every rock shining, every leaf glistening. Verdure and rosy cheeks both resulted ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... are to be carved from potatoes with the aid of little kitchen vegetable knives, and the lambs are to be fashioned from cotton wool, matches, and mucilage. ...
— Entertaining Made Easy • Emily Rose Burt

... was breaking over the country-side, and the fields and roads were full of white mist—the kind of white mist that clings in corners like cotton wool. The empty road, along which the chase had taken its turn, was overshadowed on one side by a very high discoloured wall, stained, and streaked green, as with seaweed—evidently the high-shouldered sentinel of some great gentleman's estate. A yard or two from the wall ran parallel to it a linked ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton

... they made? Did a great artist draw the designs for them—a man of cultivation, highly paid, daintily fed, carefully housed, wrapped up in cotton wool, in short, when he was not at work? By no means. Wonderful as these works are, they were made by 'common fellows,' as the phrase goes, in the common course of their daily labour. Such were the men we honour in honouring ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris

... not know what to do,—Flyaway's conscience was so little and folded away in so many thicknesses, like a tiny pearl in a whole box of cotton wool. How could anybody get ...
— Dotty Dimple's Flyaway • Sophie May

... past her at close quarters seemed to make our boat of 6600 tons sink some way in the water at every broadside. I was surprised to find that the heavy gunfire gave me no trouble, although like most of the others I began with cotton wool in my ears, but half an hour of this was enough, it interfered with sounds it ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson

... shadow lay the man "who could turn his hand to anything," on his back with hammer and chisel in hand. He was rivetting a plate of copper on the hull of the Daisy. Already he had nailed sheets of zinc and lead on stern and bow, and had driven cotton wool picked from the bushes by the lake into the seams to caulk some of the leaks. Around the boat stood crowds of Africans, their dark faces full of astonishment at the white man mending ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews

... nigger!" exclaimed Aunt Em'ly in disgust. "Settin' up there lookin' mo' like a monkey than a man in that long-tail blue coat with brass buttons an' his ha'r like cotton wool an' whiskers so long he haster wrop 'em. The onlies wuck that nigger ever ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson

... The hot mist which the scouts had seen was now lying like a tranquil sea between him and the pickets of the enemy's rear-guard, which it seemed to submerge, and was clinging in moist tenuous swathes—like drawn-out cotton wool—along the ridge, half obliterating its face. From the valley in the rear it was already stealing in a thin white line up the slope like the advance of a ghostly column, with a stealthiness that, in spite of himself, touched him with superstitious significance. A warm perfume, languid and treacherous—as ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte

... a cause of great anxiety to his grandmother, and if it had not been for Miss Bertram's wise tact and judgment, he would have been imprisoned in one room and swathed in cotton wool most of the year round. He had the advantage of having an old nurse who had brought him up from his birth, and had come from Canada with him; and she was as vigilant and experienced in managing his ailments as could be desired. Poor little Roy, with his uncertain health, was heir ...
— His Big Opportunity • Amy Le Feuvre

... Brown's acquaintance a few days later. She was lying on a bed made up on two chairs, and was covered with cotton wool. She had scarcely any pain, and could not move at all; and the small face that peered out of what she called her "pitty warm snow" was wan and drawn and had a far-away ...
— The Grey Brethren and Other Fragments in Prose and Verse • Michael Fairless

... particularly those of wool (cotton wool included), and of silk, are the greatest, and amount to the greatest value of any single manufacture in Europe,[39] so they not only employ more people, but those people gain the most money, that is to say, have the best wages for their work of any people in the world; and yet, ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe

... too bad he's got a glass jaw. He's quicker'n I thought, an' he's got a wallop that made me mighty respectful from the second round—an' the prettiest little chop an' come-again I ever saw. But that glass jaw! He kept it in cotton wool till the ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London

... bad, he was radically good, but he had never known discipline or real sorrow or hardship. Wrapped in cotton wool all his life, spoilt, indulged, treated by the world as men treat women. His effeminacy was the result of his training because he had always been sheltered. Now his contact with Maggie was presenting him for the first ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole

... up in cotton wool and kept in their cases; but they tarnish from exposure to the air and require cleaning. This is done by preparing clean soap-suds from fine toilet-soap. Dip any article of gold, silver, gilt or precious stones into this lye, and dry by brushing with a brush of ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller

... few hours ago under the stars with Maddalena? He could scarcely believe that it was the same. Sirocco had him fast, sirocco that leaves many Sicilians unchanged, unaffected, but that binds the stranger with cords of cotton wool which keep him like a ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens

... by the dogged determination to do something for Julian. Were Julian dead Cuckoo would have gone out into Piccadilly again as of old, and earned the rent for Mrs. Brigg, and food for herself, and a sovereign or two to buy back Jessie. The circumstances of her life had stuffed cotton wool into the ears of her soul and rendered it deaf to the voices that govern good women. Cuckoo was pathetically incomprehensible to most people, because she was pathetically twisted in mind. But her heart grew straight and ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens

... which distinguished American inventors at that early period of our country's struggles. The cotton-gin, invented by Eli Whitney, was the first; an implement that could do the work of a thousand persons in cleaning cotton wool of the seeds. That machine has been one of the most important aids in the accumulation ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,

... Shakespeare, only to be forced out of our course by a sputter of rain, an Irish mist, and half a squall from George Bernard Shaw; but the greater part of the time the ship of the stage is careering wildly under bare poles, with a man lashed to the helm (and let us hope that, like Ulysses, he has cotton wool in his ears), before a hurricane of comic opera. We need a recognised stage and a recognised school. America has become too great, and its influence abroad too large, for us to afford to have recourse to that ancient ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles

... pint best spirits of wine, 1 pint raw linseed oil, 1 pint spirits of turpentine; mix all three together, and shake well before use. Apply with a rubber of cotton wool covered with a piece of clean old white cotton cloth. Apply slightly and you will be astonished at the effect. Old furniture that is scratched, soiled, or stained, if the wood is not torn up, being polished with this, has ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young

... hours. After poultices have been applied over the chest or stomach for two or three days the skin is apt to become tender, and then it is well to substitute for them what may be termed a dry poultice, which is nothing else than a layer of dry cotton wool an inch or an inch and a half thick, tacked inside a piece ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.

... stretched over a four-cornered wooden frame. The spaces of the net are about one-quarter of an inch square, and through these any particles of dust that may still have adhered to the cotton fall to the floor, leaving piled on top of the net the pure cotton wool in its finished state. This work is always performed by a man, and by assiduous toil throughout a long day, one man can card from ten to twenty pounds weight of raw cotton. Payment is made in proportion to the work done, and in the less ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various

... biology and a little treatise in English about "Advanced Methods of Imbedding, Sectioning and Staining." The window ledge held a vase of willow and alder twigs, whose buds appeared to be swelling. Beside it was a glass of water in which seeds were sprouting on a floating island of cotton wool. ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark

... changing picture,—budding birch trees along the river-bank; men ploughing in the valley; shepherds tending flocks that looked like dots of cotton wool on the green hillsides. Sometimes bands of gay folk from the King's house rode by to the hunt, spurs jingling, horns braying, falcons at their wrists. Sometimes brawny followers of the visiting ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz

... under her, and a new French pamphlet in her hand; at the window behind a tambour frame, sat on one side the daughter of Darya Mihailovna, on the other, Mlle. Boncourt, the governess, a dry old maiden lady of sixty, with a false front of black curls under a parti-coloured cap and cotton wool in her ears; in the corner near the door was huddled Bassistoff reading a paper, near him were Petya and Vanya playing draughts, and leaning by the stove, his hands clasped behind his back, was a gentleman of low stature, with a swarthy ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev

... seeds is important, as it may save loss and disappointment, from sowing seeds that will not vegetate. A little cotton wool or moss in a tumbler containing a little water, and placed in a warm room, will afford a good means of testing seeds. Seeds placed on that wool, will vegetate sooner than they would do in the soil. ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden

... so far from being admirable in the eyes of these distant connections, had happened to say this very morning (not at all with a defiant air, but in a low, muffled, neutral tone, as of a voice heard through cotton wool) that she did not wish "to enjoy their good opinion." She was seated, as she observed, on her own brother's hearth, and had been Jane Featherstone five-and-twenty years before she had been Jane Waule, which entitled her to speak when her own ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... my joy, for I was thunderstruck the next instant by my mother's catching my arm and stopping my hand with the vehement exclamation, "Stop, stop, child, you don't know what you are doing."—"No, indeed, ma'am, I don't—what am I doing?" She took the wreath of cotton wool from my passive hand and showed me, wrapped up in it, a humming-bird, luckily unhurt, unsquelched. The humming-bird's nest is more beautiful than the creature itself. Poor Lord Liverpool—no one ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth

... believe, been sent to me by our mutual friend," he said. "You wish for something? Here it is," and he produced a small oblong cardboard box such as jewellers use for men's scarf-pins. Opening it, he showed her the tiny tube reposing in pink cotton wool. "It is a little present for somebody, eh?" he ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux

... the paper dried in the dark. Printing is carried rather far. The print is washed, then surface dried or blotted off on a pad and laid film upwards on a sheet of glass, and the following developer is applied with a wad of cotton wool wrung out: ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics

... ready with help and sympathy, in spite of the numerous maternal cares to which she had to attend, immediately exclaimed, "Poor old creature! I am sure that she much wants comforts. Shall I not at once send up some sheets and cotton wool? and is there anything else you ...
— Mountain Moggy - The Stoning of the Witch • William H. G. Kingston

... could be laid for the burning, nor did it have a generous iron basket where honest anthracite could glow away into the nights. Not a bit of it. It held a vertical plate of stuff that looked like dirty cotton wool, on which a tiny blue flame leaped when the gas was ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various

... Anna had had time to recover from their tears and vows, sundry small blisters on the back of Letty's neck had been treated with cotton wool, and they had emerged from their agitation to a calmer state in which the helping of the princess in the middle of the night to make somebody else's house comfortable was not without its joys. The Mamsell, no more able than the Kleinwalde ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp

... he had of it for the next few hours. To stand at the carriage door and receive the most laconic of orders; to see her pass from carriage to store and from store to carriage, erect and tall and stately, and with no more apparent notice of the icy sidewalks than if they had been strewn with cotton wool. If he followed close to pick her up, Wych Hazel took no notice and gave him no chance. In like manner she did her work with an executive force and gravity which made the clerks into quicksilver and drove one or two old admirers whom she met ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner

... squirrel, pretty creature! I know now what makes you sad. You long to be abroad among your own green woods, and sleeping on the soft green moss, which is far prettier than this ugly cotton wool. But you shall stay with me, my sweet one, till the cold winter is passed and gone, and the spring flowers have come again; and then, my pretty squirrel, I will take you out of your dull cage, and we will go to St. ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill

... bachelor days, to meet the needs of two, or three, or however many it may ultimately have to meet. He can't help a yelp now and then. It's a horrid sound, but it relieves him. The only remedy I can suggest for the existing state of affairs is that all wives of over a year's standing should pack cotton wool in their ears. Eh? That's brains, ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton

... every so often, despite the horror, he had to take them out and gaze at them. He sat down upon the stool, spread a towel across his knees, and opened the pouch. He drew out a roll of cotton wool, which he unrolled across the towel. Flames! Blue flames, red, yellow, violet, and green—precious stones, many of them with histories that reached back into the dim centuries, histories of murder and loot and envy. The young man had imagination—perhaps too much of it. He ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath

... they began by examining the grass. The grass under the window was crushed and trampled. A bushy burdock growing under the window close to the wall was also trampled. Dukovski succeeded in finding on it some broken twigs and a piece of cotton wool. On the upper branches were found some fine hairs ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne

... her that we were at least presentable, she inaugurated an acquaintance with us by sending a little box to myself, which proved to contain, on being opened, something in the nature of a valentine. It contained a spray of mimosa packed in cotton wool, and lying like an elf among the petals was a little sleeping bat. Lady Wilton a week before had appeared as the Evening Star at a fancy ball at Nice. In return for her valentine I bought a microscopic puppy, which, packed in cotton ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock



Words linked to "Cotton wool" :   padding, plant fiber, cotton fiber, cushioning, plant fibre, absorbent cotton, long-staple cotton, short-staple cotton, cotton



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