"Girth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... parched, and foam boiled from his bit. "Allah bereket!" exclaimed Ammalat, as he reached the crest from which there opened before him a view of Avar: but at the very moment his exhausted horse fell under him; the blood spouted from his open mouth, and his last breath burst the saddle-girth. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... word, Miles turned and began to saddle. Then suddenly, as he pulled at the girth, he stopped. "It's no use," he said. "We can't get away except over the rise, and they'll see us there;" he nodded at the hill which rose beyond the camping ground three hundred yards away, and stretched in a long, level sweep into other hills and ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... number in postures of agony that told of the tormenting flame. Their clothing was half burnt away—their hair and beard entirely; the rain had come too late to save their nails. Some were swollen to double girth; others shriveled to manikins. According to degree of exposure, their faces were bloated and black or yellow and shrunken. The contraction of muscles which had given them claws for hands had cursed each countenance with a hideous grin. Faugh! I cannot catalogue the charms of these gallant gentlemen ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... experimental nursery in which new plants and trees can be brought up on trial and their adaptability to the soil and climate ascertained. For instance, the first thing that caught my eye was the gigantic trunk of an Australian blue-gum tree, which had attained to a girth and height not often seen in its own land. The flora of the Cape Colony is exceptionally varied and beautiful, but one peculiarity incidentally alluded to by my charming guide struck me as very noticeable. It is that in this dry climate and porous soil all the efforts ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... Christine laughing: "It's lucky it happened, because I was just going to take a bath!" But it pleased her to have her husband's companionship, and she did not approach her horse until he had examined the saddle-girth and the bridle with the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... circumference. The age of this prodigy of the forest cannot be ascertained with any degree of precision. The oak viewed by the present King, in Oxfordshire, and some years ago felled in the domains of one of the Colleges, though only twenty-five feet in girth, is said to have been six hundred years old. Fairlop oak having been nearly thrice as large, is supposed to be at least twice ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... confoundedly corpulent by degrees, and suffered plaguily from gout; but was always well dressed, and courageously buckled in, and, I dare say, two inches less in girth, thanks to the application of mechanics, than nature ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... he sold the saddle—said he wasn't going to risk HIS life with any perishable saddle-girth that ever was made, over a rainy, miry April road, while he could ride bareback and know and feel he was safe—always HAD despised to ride on a ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... recent realistic verse may point to the Canterbury Tales, and show us Chaucer ambling along with the other pilgrims. His presence, they remind us, instead of distorting his picture of fourteenth-century life, lends intimacy to our view of it. We can only feebly retort that, despite his girth, the poet is the least conspicuous figure in that procession, whereas a modern poet would shoulder himself ahead of the knight, steal the hearts of all the ladies, from Madame Eglantine to the Wife of Bath, and change the destinies of each ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... headstall adorned with tresses, tufts of silk and wool, sometimes coral beads or copper plates, and of a morocco saddle, usually red, rising up in front to prevent falls, but without any cantle. The saddle is placed upon a piece of carpet or striped stuff, and is fastened by a broad girth which passes diagonally under the animal's tail like a crupper-strap; another girth fastens the saddle-cloth, and two short stirrups flap against the animal's sides. The harness is more or less rich according to the ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... his horse, he unfastened the saddle girth, and, hurrying back to where Manuel was floundering in the mud, he threw the saddle outwards, holding the end of the girth. It was just long enough to reach. With the help of the flat surface given by the saddle and a gradual ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... fowling, and I was more for horses—before I increased so much in girth. Is it for horses ...
— Three Wonder Plays • Lady I. A. Gregory
... press had a habit of estimating in rotund millions. He regarded them knowingly, thinking he could tell them something that might surprise them. But they passed him, all unheeding, moneyed-looking men of good round girth, who seemed to have found ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... he quitted the tree, and shaped his course along the side of a hill on the right. Keeping under the shelter of the thicket on the top of the same hill, Surrey and Richmond followed, and saw him direct his steps towards another beech-tree of almost double the girth of that he had just visited. Arrived at this mighty tree, he struck it with his spear, while a large owl, seated on a leafless branch, began to hoot; a bat circled the tree; and two large snakes, glistening in the moonlight, glided from its roots. As the tree was stricken for the third time, the ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... and freed Of rein, they dash.—The warriors all their might And skill unite to strike the surest blow. Bucklers beneath the shock are torn and crushed, White hauberks rent in shreds, asunder bursts Each courser's girth, the saddles, turning, fall. One hundred thousand ...
— La Chanson de Roland • Lon Gautier
... struggle for existence was published here in plain figures, but it was not, as in our climate, a struggle against climate mainly, but an internecine war from over population. Now and again we passed among vast stems of buttressed trees, sometimes enormous in girth; and from their far-away summits hung great bush- ropes, some as straight as plumb lines, others coiled round, and intertwined among each other, until one could fancy one was looking on some mighty battle between armies ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... health. This does not mean the maximum of nourishment, combined with stimulants to compel a jaded appetite: on the contrary, artistic efficiency demands super-cleanliness and a tolerably rigid self-denial. Girth is no measure of artistic ability. But the body, sound or otherwise, is the instrument through which we play life's little tune, just as the pianist plays through his pianoforte. But when we have closed the pianoforte nobody supposes that we have extinguished the artist, or annihilated the music: ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... a brief struggle, but he was no match in size or strength for his opponent, who was thick-set and of considerable girth. He fell backwards, overborne by the man's weight. His head struck on the road; dazed by the blow he loosened his clutch, and lay for a moment in semi-consciousness while the man ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... Camel may be likened to A desert ship. (This is not new.) He is a most ungainly craft, With frowning turrets fore and aft We little realize on earth, How much we owe to his great girth, For should he ever shrink so small As through the needle's eye to crawl, Rich men might climb the golden stairs And so leave nothing to ...
— This Giddy Globe • Oliver Herford
... it is supported by inflated skins: thus the passage of the broad river Atbara (at this spot about 300 yards wide) is an affair of great difficulty. Two water-skins are inflated, and attached to the camel by a band passed like a girth beneath the belly. Thus arranged, a man sits upon its back, while one or two swim by the side as guides. The current of the Atbara runs at a rapid rate; thus the camel is generally carried at least half a mile down the river before it can gain the ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... becomes regular and cylindrical, while decreasing slightly in girth in the last two or three segments. Close to the line of separation of the last two rings, I am able to distinguish, not without difficulty, two very small stigmata, just a little darker in color. They belong to the last segment. In all, four respiratory ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... were changing to roads. The local freight intermittently disgorged tons of harvesting machinery. The sound of the Klaxton was heard in the land. Despite the times and the manners, Bud's girth increased insidiously. His hard-riding days were past. Progress marched steadily onward, leaving an after-guard of homesteaders intrenched behind miles of barbed-wire fence and mazes of irrigating-ditches. ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... she was telling him that he was her donkey, for she thought Grandpapa would say "Yes." So what else could he do, pray tell, but say "Yes"? And she mounted the steps, and was seated, her little brown gown pulled out straight, and the saddle girth tightened, and all the other delightful and important details attended to, and then the reins were put in her ...
— Five Little Peppers Abroad • Margaret Sidney
... I went to work at the canoe, and waited till he should turn to me. When he did it was with a child's plea for pity, and the abjectness of his tone was horrible, coming from a man of his girth and power. ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... results. M——, an oil-broker in New York, says that at thirty-six he had a weak voice, stood slouched over and inerect, was troubled with catarrh, and knew too well what it was to have the stomach and bowels work imperfectly. Most people can not inflate the chest so as to increase its girth over two inches. By steady practice at his little pipe, he in about a year got so that he could inflate five whole inches. But now his chest is noticeably round and full, and he is as straight a man as any in a dozen. His weak voice has gone; indeed, he says he has the strongest ...
— Harper's Young People, December 16, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... earle Goodwine, and that he perceiued how his force began to decline, so as he [Sidenote: Earle Goodwine fled the realme.] should not be able to match the kings power, he fled the realme, and so likewise did his sonnes. He himselfe with his sonnes Swanus, Tostie, and Girth, sailed into Flanders: and Harold with his brother Leofwine gat ships at Bristow, and passed into Ireland. Githa the wife of Goodwine, and Judith the wife of Tostie, the daughter of Baldwine earle of Flanders went ouer also ...
— Chronicles (1 of 6): The Historie of England (8 of 8) - The Eight Booke of the Historie of England • Raphael Holinshed
... were, sure enough, three of them as large as life, and one much larger of girth than any living man has a right to be, just landed with a good breakfast inside of them from an outward-bound Dale Line steamer that had come in about an hour after sunrise. There could be no mistake; I spotted the jolly skipper of the ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... that he has conformed in some respects to unmeaning traditions inherited from an earlier period, and further that his work incorporates the remnants of an older, simpler structure. Here are pillars of massive girth altogether disproportionate to the delicate arches which they carry; there an old tower has been buttressed to make it capable of supporting a new spire. For all the builder's cunning, we can yet distinguish between the new ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... women; the young men scarcely ever use anything more than a small pad of dressed leather stuffed with hair, which is confined with a leather thong passing arond the body of the horse in the manner of a girth. they frequently paint their favorite horses, and cut their ears in various shapes. they also decorate their mains and tails, which they never draw or trim, with the feathers of birds, and sometimes suspend at the breast of the horse the finest ornaments they possess. ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... corridor that did not display the evidence of her appreciation in loving care. The garden was handed over to Mrs. Ogilvie, who as soon as May warmed its high enclosures bloomed there like one of her own favourite peonies, rosy of face and fragrant, ample of girth, golden-hearted. ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... us; we got over, however, without accident. Having allowed our animals to drink their full of water, and replenished our bottles, we encamped for the night under a magnificent baobab tree with a trunk seventy feet in girth as high as we could reach, while our animals found an abundance of rich grass on which ...
— Adventures in Africa - By an African Trader • W.H.G. Kingston
... splendour of the inexhaustible play of life of which they were part. I asked no questions of myself about the great trees that wove the garments of the magical forest about me; I felt the stir of their ancient life, rooted in the centuries that had left no record in that place save the added girth and the discarded leaf; I had no thought about the bird whose note thrilled the forest save the rapture of pouring out without measure or thought the joy that was in me; I felt the vast irresistible movement of life rolling, wave after wave, out ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... race, which was now at the most exciting part, and the tumult at its height. The brown jacket with the blue sleeves held the lead as they came up the rise, but the black and orange hoops were close on to them, and Rainstorm's head was at Bandmaster's girth. ...
— The Rider in Khaki - A Novel • Nat Gould
... the man in a half-apologetic tone. Then in brisker accents, "The very thing I want! I say, can you give me a bit of it? The ring of my saddle girth has fetched loose. I can ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... there slender plants had sprung up through the ashes, and the omnipresent small-leaved creepers were beginning to throw their pale green embroidery over the blackened trunks. I looked long at the vast funeral tree that had a buttressed girth of not less than fifty feet, and rose straight as a ship's mast, with its top about a hundred and fifty feet from the earth. What a distance to fall, through burning leaves and smoke, like a white bird shot dead with a poisoned arrow, swift and straight ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... the other two. At the end of that time she and the mother began, as with a common impulse, to talk. And at the end of five minutes more they had told each other where they were going, where they had been, what their husbands were, the number, age, and girth of their children, and all the adjectives that might most conveniently be used to describe their servants. The adjectives, very lurid ones, took some time. Priscilla shut her eyes while they were going on, thankful to be left quiet, feeling unstrung ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... name and live; but on the earth. With strange melodious stories of my birth, Phoebus men call me, and Latona's son. "And now my servitude with thee is done, And I shall leave thee toiling on thine earth, This handful, that within its little girth Holds that which moves you so, O men that die; Behold, to-day thou hast felicity, But the times change, and I can see a day When all thine happiness shall fade away; And yet be merry, strive not with the end, Thou ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... day, in the middle of the morning, Ellen, to her great surprise, saw Sharp brought before the door, with the side-saddle on, and Mr. John carefully looking to the girth, and shortening the stirrup. ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... don't come back in less than that time, what's left o' us won't be worth seekin' for," said Joe, tightening the girth of his saddle. ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... steering the unwieldy conveyance, while the front horse or horses do most of the pulling. The harness is heavy and the rear horse is protected from sores that might be caused by rubbing, by a heavy and well padded saddle and a heavy girth. It was a common sight to see a woman driving one of these carts and guiding the wheel horse and handling the brakes, while boys were either driving or leading the leaders. These strange and cumbersome rigs, so different from any that we ...
— In the Flash Ranging Service - Observations of an American Soldier During His Service - With the A.E.F. in France • Edward Alva Trueblood
... ancient dearth, Before the briny fountains of the deep Brimm'd up the hollow cavities of earth;— I saw each trickling Sea-God at his birth, Each pearly Naiad with her oozy locks, And infant Titans of enormous girth, Whose huge young feet yet stumbled on the rocks, Stunning the early world with ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... have ceased, and the Kaiser had languished but for him. Cologne counted its illustrious citizen something more than man. The burghers doffed when he passed; and scampish leather-draggled urchins gazed after him with praeternatural respect on their hanging chins, as if a gold-mine of great girth had walked ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... While his feet the earth were stamping, To the clouds his head he lifted, To his knees his beard was flowing, To his spurs his locks descended. Fathom-wide his eyes were parted, Fathom-wide his trousers measured; Round his knee the girth was greater, And around his hip 'twas doubled. 160 Then he sharpened keen the axe-blade, Brought the polished blade to sharpness; Six the stones on which he ground it, Seven the stones on which he ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY:—I am very much in the condition of the gentleman who, being about to be married and having had his wedding suit brought home a day before the event, returned it to the tailor with instructions to increase the girth just two inches. His explanation was that not enough room had been left to accommodate the wedding breakfast he had to eat or for the emotion that ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... "My wut?" sez I.—your gret-gret-gret," sez he: "You wouldn't ha' never ben here but for me. Two hundred an' three year ago this May, The ship I come in sailed up Boston Bay; I'd been a cunnle in our Civil War,— But wut on girth hev ,you gut up one for? Coz we du things in England, 'tain't for you To git a notion you can du 'em tu: I'm told you write in public prints: ef true, It's nateral you should know a thing or two."— "Thet air's an argymunt I can't ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... at this juncture that a slight accident occurred to Frau von Wallmoden; her saddle girth broke, and she would have had a disagreeable fall had she not had the presence of mind to slip at once from her saddle to the ground. To follow the riders was now an impossibility, for her groom could not have obtained another saddle for her, so she decided ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... problem. One just did nothing. During all this time everyone became thin. Any sickness, even a slight attack of diarrhoea, brought down weight rapidly. There was the case of a certain sergeant, whose immense girth was much revered by the Arabs. One can understand, perhaps, how it comes about that fatness is admired in the East. It is so rare. It is much easier to be thin. The sergeant went into hospital for a ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... the brown grass, laid his burden down, threw on the saddle, drew the girth with sudden strength and energy, as if for a long and desperate ride. Then resuming his load, tenderly, as if it were a sleeping infant, he vaulted into the saddle and dashed away for the Sierras, that lay before him, and lifted like ...
— Shadows of Shasta • Joaquin Miller
... of the Earth. Old England proudly stands. Like arteries her Colonies Reach out from sea to sea. She clasps all races in her girth; Her gaze the world commands; And far and wide where strong ships ride, The ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... away, the General himself—the host-in-chief of the evening—condemned, despite increasing years and girth, to the Eton jacket of boyhood, pranced and glided with elaborate precision, and took every opportunity of twirling plump little Mrs Mayhew almost off her feet. Both laughed inordinately at each repetition of the mild joke: and if the C.B. blazing on the General's mess-jacket, ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... Here," and he put back the pistol, crying, as the men laughed, "sergeant, strap this on your back. Quick! fetch out the horses; we will look him over later. Up with him behind Joe! Quick—a girth! We have no time to waste. A darned rebel spy! No doubt Sir William may like to ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... a hog and, as with the carabao, an estimate of its value is shown by representing the size of the girth of the animal by clasping the hands around one's leg. For instance, a small pig is represented by the size of the speaker's ankle, as he clasps both hands around it; a larger one is the size of his calf; a still larger one is the size of a man's thigh; and one still larger is represented ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... a smallish, mouse-coloured mule that emerged at length to view and it looked even smaller than it was because the man who straddled it dwarfed it with his own ponderous stature and a girth which was almost an anomaly in a country of ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... breakfast with him, he urges the syrup on you with pleasant and insistent hospitality. With satisfaction he drains a can. By June he has a dozen of these empty cabins on the shelf alongside his country boots. Time was when he was lean of girth—as becomes an accountant, who is hinged dyspeptically all day across his desk—but by this agreeable stowage he has now grown to plumpness. When in the country Colum rises early in order to stretch the pleasures ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... manoeuvred, and taking care always to have the animal on the opposite side. To have got into a safer situation he would have climbed the tree; but it happened to be a poplar, without a branch for many feet from the ground, and of too great a girth to be "embraced." He could do nothing, therefore, but remain upon the ground, and keep the tree-trunk ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... from the accurate Maitland, once marked the Girth, or Asylum, belonging to the Abbey of Holyrood, and which, being still an appendage to the royal palace, has retained the privilege of an asylum for civil debt. One would think the space sufficiently extensive for a man to stretch his limbs in, as, besides a reasonable proportion ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... mine, and possibly may have been again broken, with the hope of finding copper in them. In the midst of the pile I noticed several stone hammers, or mauls, some of them measuring twenty inches in girth around their grooves, and one I brought away weighing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... nearly gained the summit of the hill when he felt the saddle slipping; the girth had unbuckled or broken. As he dismounted, the saddle came off with him, his foot still in the stirrup. The mare shied, and the rein slipped from his fingers; he clutched at it, but Mary gave a vicious toss of the head, wheeled about, and began trotting down the declivity. Her trot at once ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... of intellect alone. O slayer of hostile heroes, all the kings of the earth now living in subjection to thee, await thy commands, as they did before under Yudhishthira, awaiting his. O monarch, the goddess Earth with her boundless extent with girth of seas, with her mountains and forests, and towns and cities and mines, and decked with woodlands and hills is now thine! Adored by the Brahmanas and worshipped by the kings, thou blazest forth, O king, in consequence ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... modern times, sometimes carrying four hundred or four thousand travelers from Bagdad to Aleppo, or from Bassora to Damascus! In my text comes a caravan. We notice the noiseless step of the broad foot, the velocity of motion, the gay caparison of saddle, and girth, and awning, sheltering the riders from the sun, and the hilarity of the mounted passengers, and we cry out: "Who are they?" Well, Isaac has been praying for a wife, and it is time he had one, for he is forty years of age; and his ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... discovered a few years back in the southern parts of California. They are found in small groves together—in some places only three or four of the more gigantic in size; in others, as many as thirty or forty, one vying with the other in height and girth. In one grove, upwards of one hundred trees were found, of great size, twenty of which were about seventy-five feet in circumference. One of these trees, of greater size than its companions, was sacrilegiously ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... the kitchen which penetrated the room seemed especially grateful to the manager who smiled with satisfaction as he conjured up visions of the forthcoming repast. By his Falstaffian girth, he appeared a man not averse to good living, nor one to deny himself plentiful libations ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... word to each other; we kept the great pace Neck by neck, stride by stride, never changing our place; I turned in my saddle and made its girth tight, Then shortened each stirrup, and set the pique right, Rebuckled the cheek-strap, chained slacker the bit, Nor galloped ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... black horse, uttering low words such as cowboys make use of to soothe a restive steed when they mean to throw a saddle across his back, and cinch the girth. ...
— The Saddle Boys of the Rockies - Lost on Thunder Mountain • James Carson
... be to the books themselves. Exclusive of short story, sketch and tale, they include a dozen novels of generous girth—for Meredith is old-fashioned in his demand for elbow-room. They are preeminently novels of character and more than any novelist of the day the view of the world embodied in them is that of the intellect. This does not ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... drew himself up. It seemed to his crew that he actually gained in girth and height. The soul, in certain great moments, seems to have power to expand the body and inform it with the quality of immortality; Ajax, in his magnificent gesture of defiance, is all spirit. Cleggett, with his hand on his hip, uttered these ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... on and on, with the trees seeming to get taller and taller, and of mightier girth. Now and then we caught a glimpse of the blue sky, but only seldom, the dense ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... observation for several years, she submitted to a thorough examination, although entirely free from any abnormal symptoms. The examination revealed the following physical condition: Weight, 105 pounds (her weight before leaving Ireland was 130); girth of chest, twenty-nine and a half inches; girth of abdomen, twenty-five inches; girth of pelvis, thirty-four and a half inches; girth of thigh, upper third, twenty inches; heart healthy, sounds and rhythm perfectly normal; pulse, 76; lungs healthy; respiratory murmur clear and distinct ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... set on her matchless throttle, might well "haunt the imagination for years." Her straight superbly proportioned neck, her shoulder and girth, might have fascinated the eye for ever!—but for her beautiful hind quarters and the speed and power they indicated! The arch of her back rib, her flank, her clean legs, with firm, dry muscle, and tendons like steel wires, her hoofs, almost ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... impaired within the ward of the Myne[r] the debtor shall not have right to implead the Miner neither noe right to grieve him for the Trespasse done But at all tymes the Myner have [hath] right to take other distresse till gree be made Also for the Myne of an horse as is aforesayd the Miner Horse girth and halter.shall take the foregirth for three half-pence and for one penny the halter Also the Myner hath such franchises to enquire the Myne {74c} in every soyle of the Kings of which it may be ...
— Iron Making in the Olden Times - as instanced in the Ancient Mines, Forges, and Furnaces of The Forest of Dean • H. G. Nicholls
... canal-lock, and sucking up the water of the canal through a hose-pipe; and this astoundingly thirsty man drank with such rapidity that the water, with huge boats floating on it, subsided at the rate of about a foot a second, and the drinker waxed enormously in girth. The laughter grew uproarious. Rachel herself gave a quick, uncontrolled, joyous laugh, and it was as if the laugh had been drawn out of her violently unawares. Louis Fores also laughed ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... went measuring of the earth, And forty million metres they took to be its girth; Five hundred million inches now go through from pole to pole, So we'll stick to inches, feet, and yards, and ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... glove," he answered. "I was only figuring that it's a bit too ornamental for its present purpose. I see the girth has been broken and mended—mended with a doubtful piece of string. Why wasn't it sent to the saddler t' be properly fixed up? I've half a notion ter chuck it right away and ride bare-backed. But there ain't time to fool ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... 'that though the baker's son from Prague, or the Amtmann's nephew from a Bavarian Dorf, may manage to "come through" with his pay, the young Englishman cannot. I can neither piece my own overalls, nor forswear stockings, nor can I persuade my stomach that it has had a full meal by tightening my girth-strap three or four holes. ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... six feet four inches in his office slippers, and measured fifty-two inches in girth of chest. He habitually smoked the strongest shag tobacco, and imbibed cold rum and water at short intervals from morning to night; but these excesses had neither impaired his complexion, which was ruddy, ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... nearer to Normandy; and what recked he of weariness? On—on; the stars grew pale again, and the first pink light of dawn showed in the eastern sky; the sun rose, mounted higher and higher, and the day grew hotter; the horse went more slowly, stumbled, and though Osmond halted and loosed the girth, he only mended his pace for a ...
— The Little Duke - Richard the Fearless • Charlotte M. Yonge
... southwest of Penrhyn Castle. It shows off to advantage the peculiar outline of this pine, which is so marked a characteristic of those grown in the Mediterranean region. The trunk, which is about 4 1/2 feet in girth at a yard up, rises for three-fourths its height without branches, after which it divides into a number of limbs, the extremities of which are well covered with foliage, thus giving to the tree a bushy, well-formed, and, I might almost add, rounded appearance. At a casual ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... sound of the bolts and chains again Rodriguez ceased to beat upon the door: once more it opened swiftly, and he saw mine host before him, eyeing him with those bad eyes; of too much girth, you might have said, to be nimble, yet somehow suggesting to the swift intuition of youth, as Rodriguez looked at him standing upon his door-step, the spirit and shape of a spider, who despite her ungainly build is agile ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... his very self he knew; The Eastland hosts he saw, and arms of Memnon black of hue. There mad Penthesilea leads the maids of moony shield, 490 The Amazons, and burns amidst the thousands of the field, And with her naked breast thrust out above the golden girth, The warrior maid hath heart to meet ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... about himself, and the whole earth, Of man the wonderful, and of the stars, And how the deuce they ever could have birth: And then he thought of earthquakes, and of wars, How many miles the moon might have in girth, Of air-balloons, and of the many bars To perfect knowledge of the boundless skies;— And then he ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... resolved at once to train, And walked and walked with all his main; For years he paced this mortal earth, To bring himself to decent girth. ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... anon, a yellow group Was creeping on her bosom, like a troop Of stars, far up amid the galaxy, Pale, pale, as snowy showers; and two or three Were mocking the cold finger, round and round, With likeness of a ring; and, as they wound About its bony girth, they had the hue Of pearly jewels glistering in dew. That deathly stare! it is an awful thing To gaze upon; and sickly thoughts will spring Before it to the heart: it telleth how There must be waste where there is ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... with a longer femur. Women and young people have longer legs than men. The Punans have the fattest calves approximating to the Tenggerese, the other Bornean tribes are more like the Gorontalese. The chest girth of Ulu Ayars and Tenggerese is almost the same, despite the difference in the breadth of the chest, in which the Ulu Ayars resemble the inhabitants of Atchin measured by Lubbers. The proportion of the length of the foot to the stature is 16 : 100 in Kayans of both sexes, 154 ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... no permanent cover. When stirrups are used, they consist of wood covered with leather; but stirrups and saddles are conveniences reserved for old men and women. The young warriors rarely use any thing except a small leather pad stuffed with hair, and secured by a girth made of a leathern thong. In this way they ride with great expertness, and they have a particular dexterity in catching the horse when he is running at large. If he will not immediately submit when they wish to take him, they ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... average man need stick. Poor Slightly, most wretched of all the children now, for he was in a panic about Peter, bitterly regretted what he had done. Madly addicted to the drinking of water when he was hot, he had swelled in consequence to his present girth, and instead of reducing himself to fit his tree he had, unknown to the others, whittled his tree to make ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... thing divine. If St. Michael had stepped down from a church window, leaving the dragon slain, he would have looked no otherwise than she, all gleaming with steel, and with grey eyes full of promise of victory: the holy sword girdled about her, and a little battle-axe hanging from her saddle-girth. She sprang on her steed, from the mounting-stone beside the door, and so, waving her hand, she cried farewell to Elliot, that stood gazing after her with shining eyes. The people went after the Maid some way, ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... its picturesque effect. A few noble stems—however poor their heads—have a fine effect when surrounded by others which have had elbow-room; but a forest of stems, with Lilliputian heads—great though the girth of the stem may be—conveys rather the idea of Brobdingnagian piles driven in by giants, and exhibiting the last flickerings of vitality in a few puny sprouts at their summit. The underwood was enlivened by shrubs of every shade and hue, the wild flowering ivy predominating. ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... horses with dismay. As Heller vainly tried to get his girth tight enough to keep the saddle from sliding over the animal's tail he exclaimed, "Is this a horse or a squirrel I'm trying to ride?" But it was not so bad when we finally climbed aboard and found that we did not crush the ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... taken root and grown; our father and our uncles and aunts had played in its shadow; and now it was a massive thing, with a huge girth of trunk and great spreading boughs, each of them as large as a ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... number of measurements made by Doctor Seaver showed that the boys who did not use tobacco gained in four years one twentieth more in weight and one fourth more in girth and height than the users of tobacco. These boys were between sixteen and twenty-two years of age. It is likely that tobacco will have a more harmful ...
— Health Lessons - Book 1 • Alvin Davison
... front and so bring them to. Being mounted on a young full-blooded charger, fresh and strong from the stable, I bid fair to gain my point too, for I was coming up with them hand over hand. — But, in that very juncture of time, as the Lord was pleased to order it, my girth gave way, my saddle turned, and my charger fetching a ground start, threw me, saddle, holsters, and all, full ten feet over his head, and then ran off. I received no harm, God be praised for it, but recovering my legs in an instant, ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... like iron in the land, With leafy rustling crest the morning sows with pearls, Huge as a minster, half in heaven men saw thee stand, Thy rugged girth the ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson, an Elegy; And Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... lacking in nothing save the wit and the patience possessed by the miserable two-legged things. And then, impatient and careless of the inanimate ropes, he paused, snarling at the men, with one hind foot resting inside a noose. The next moment, craftily lifted up about the girth of his leg by an iron fork, the noose tightened and the bite of it sank home into his flesh and pride. He leaped, he roared, he was a maniac of ferocity. Again and again, almost burning their palms, he tore the rope smoking through their hands. But ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... each tented roof, a charger's hoof Makes the frosty hill-side ring: Give the bugle breath, and a spirit of Death To each horse's girth will spring. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... he could," insisted John, with a humorous glance at his old friend, who was much too heavy and huge of girth for quick transit over rough ground. John York himself had grown lighter as ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... from Plymouth Sound, With Acland, Anstruther, impound Souls to six thousand strong. While those, the fourth fleet, that we see Far back, are lined with cavalry, And guns of girth, wheeled heavily ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... theologian who really believes that God made the physical universe. Let me, I pray you, appeal to your common sense for a moment. When any one chooses a horse or a dog, whether for strength, for speed, or for any other useful purpose, the first thing almost to be looked at is the girth round the ribs; the room for heart and lungs. Exactly in proportion to that will be the animal's general healthiness, power of endurance, and value in many other ways. If you will look at eminent lawyers and famous orators, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... the beach, and was composed chiefly of hibiscus, pandanus, and cocoa-nut trees, with here and there a large pisonia, close to the lagoon. One gigantic specimen of this last species, which we stopped a moment to admire, could not have been less than twenty feet in girth. Max, Morton, Arthur, and myself, could not quite span it, taking hold of hands, and Johnny had to join the ring, to make it complete. For several hours we continued our journey pretty steadily, encountering ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... With ease, though fed promiscuous, with like ease Their leaders them on every side reduced To martial order glorious;[19] among whom Stood Agamemnon "with an eye like Jove's, To threaten or command," like Mars in girth, 575 And with the port of Neptune. As the bull Conspicuous among all the herd appears, For he surpasses all, such Jove ordain'd That day the son of Atreus, in the midst Of Heroes, eminent above them all. 580 Tell me, (for ye are are heavenly, and beheld[20] A scene, ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... brought up in confinement since its early existence, when it was about 4 feet 6 inches high. That elephant was carefully weighed and measured before it left England, with the result, of height at shoulder, 11 feet; weight, six tons and a half. The girth of the fore-foot when the pressure of the animal's weight was exerted, was exactly half the perpendicular height of the elephant. I have seen very much larger animals in Africa, but there is nothing in India to ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... work of no slight difficulty, and even danger. Occasionally plunging to the knees in a deep bog, then wading to the girth in a hillock of sand and prickly bent grass (the Arundo arenaria, so plentiful on these coasts), the horses were scarcely able to keep their footing—yet were they still urged on. Every step was expected to bring them within ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... measured a cedar which was thirty-six feet six inches in girth, and one hundred and eleven feet in the spread of its boughs; the foliage is ever green, and it mounts ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... employer, whom he found an elderly man of the corpulent order, sitting in an elbow-chair by the fireside, toasting an oaten bannock on a pair of tormentors, with a blue puddock-stool bonnet on his head, and his grey hose undrawn up, whereby his hairy legs were bare, showing a power and girth such as my grandfather had seen few like before, testifying to what had been the deadly strength of their possessor in his younger years. He was thought to have been an off-gett ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... parts, but he had a sweet voice for singing of ditties, and could fetch a tear as readily as a laugh, and he was also exceeding nimble at a dance, which was the strangest thing in the world, considering his great girth. Wife he had none, but Moll Dawson was his daughter, who was a most sprightly, merry little wench, but no miracle for beauty, being neither child nor woman at this time; surprisingly thin, as if her frame had grown out of proportion with ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... son had judged all things rightly, and bade him first learn the use of arms, since he had been little accustomed to them. When they were offered to Uffe, he split the narrow links of the mail-coats by the mighty girth of his chest, nor could any be found large enough to hold him properly. For he was too hugely built to be able to use the arms of any other man. At last, when he was bursting even his father's coat of mail by the violent compression of his body, Wermund ordered ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... fortunately however, with but little success. James Owens, a youth of sixteen years of age, was the only one whom they succeeded in killing after the murder of Grundy. Going from Powers' fort on Simpson's creek, to Booth's creek, his saddle girth gave way, and while he was down mending it, a ball was discharged at him, which killed ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... vegetables at the back door, seemed hardly even sister to the Madame Loisel of Saturday afternoon on "the line" or Sunday morning at the French Church. By what process man may not imagine, this second Madame Loisel took six inches from her girth, fifty pounds from her weight, fifteen years from her age. Her step was like a dancer's; her figure was no more than comfortably plump; her Sunday complexion brought the best out of her alluring eyes and her black, ungrizzled hair; her hands, in their perfect gloves, ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... birth, Wastes underfoot, and above Storm out of heaven, and dearth Shaken down from the shining thereof, Wrecks from afar overseas And peril of shallow and firth, And tears that spring and increase In the barren places of mirth, That thou, having wings as a dove, Being girt with desire for a girth, That thou must come after these, That thou ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... times before had Tarzan been to this secluded spot, which was so densely surrounded by thorn bushes and tangled vines and creepers of huge girth that not even Sheeta, the leopard, could worm his sinuous way within, nor Tantor, with his giant strength, force the barriers which protected the council chamber of the great apes from all but the harmless denizens of ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... neath a silver vine. And round entwine Its purple girth All things of fragrance and ...
— Silverpoints • John Gray
... dwarf ash-trees and willows which were scattered along the strip, and might catch heedless collars and spoil sport, when, lying lazily almost on the surface where the backwater met the stream from the meadows, he beheld the great grandfather of all trout, a fellow two feet long and a foot in girth at the shoulders, just moving fin enough to keep him from turning over on to his back. He threw himself flat on the ground and crept away to the other side of the strip; the king fish had not seen him; ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... when he should be old enough to be an equerry, and gave the command of his men to an old cripple, with whom he had knocked about a great deal in Palestine and other places. Thus the good man believed he would avoid the horned trappings of cuckoldom, and would still be able to girth, bridle, and curb the factious innocence of his wife, which struggled like a mule held by ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... that this of all the men on earth Doth love me well enough to count me great— To think my soul and his of equal girth— O liberal estimate! ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... column a troop of fifty horse filed slowly from The Sorrels' big corral and headed straight for the Platte. Swift and unfordable in front of Frayne in the earlier summer, the river now went murmuring sleepily over its stony bed, and Ray led boldly down the bank and plunged girth deep into the foaming waters. Five minutes more and every man had lined up safely on the northward bank. In low tone the order was given, starting as Ray ever did, in solid column of fours. In dead silence the little command moved slowly away, followed by the eyes of half the garrison ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... I may do one good thing before I die. That fine fellow's life is worth a hundred of my wasted one! Here! some of you fellows help me with Hector. We must take him from the cart and get a girth on him instead of the saddle. We shall want something to hold on to without pulling his head down ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... as all the gleaming girth of stars That wreathe the Illimitable beauteously Quench not the vast of night, so do all joys Life strews along her passing to the grave Prevail not o'er the shadow of sure death. And O Humanity, long-suffering Harp Of ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... the dying and the dead, The cloven cuirass, and the helmless head; 1040 The war-horse masterless is on the earth,[kt][284] And that last gasp hath burst his bloody girth; And near, yet quivering with what life remained, The heel that urged him and the hand that reined; And some too near that rolling torrent lie,[ku] Whose waters mock the lip of those that die; That panting thirst which scorches in the breath Of those that ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... likely to forget that long and arduous night. It was impossible to force the horse out of a walk, for the drifts were in some places to the creature's girth. ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... two of the remaining lumbermen were forced out toward the middle of their fourth pie, leaving only Jimmy and a jolly man of large girth, who before the start had been picked by his companions ...
— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman
... to work; and as we had no axe, we were compelled to break off by main strength, having first deeply notched them with our knives, as many small palms of equal girth as we could collect. We then had to cut up a number into short lengths, to serve as crosspieces. Having collected our materials, we set to work to bind them together with thin sepos. The raft, though rather rough, was of sufficient ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride, On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere. Now he patted his horse's side, Now gazed on the landscape far and near, Then, impetuous, stamped the earth, And turned and tightened his saddle-girth; But mostly lie watched with eager search The belfry-tower of the old North Church, As it rose above the graves on the hill, Lonely and spectral and somber and still. And lo! as he looks, on the belfry's height A glimmer, and then a gleam of light. ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... many nor of quick recurrence. There "is" a something, an essential something, wanting in me. I feel it, I "know" it—though what it is, I can but guess. I have read somewhere, that in the tropical climates there are annuals as lofty and of as an ample girth as forest trees:—So by a very dim likeness I seem to myself to distinguish Power from Strength—and to have only the former. But of this I will speak again: for if it be no reality, if it be no more than a disease of my mind, it is ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... much, thank you. Bless my pen wiper! but I thought I was done for when I saw my horse bolt for your front stoop. He rushed up it, fell down, but, fortunately, I managed to get out of his way, though the saddle girth slipped. And all I could think of was that my wife would say: 'I told you so!' for she warned me not to ride ...
— Tom Swift and his Big Tunnel - or, The Hidden City of the Andes • Victor Appleton
... led forth; what a tremendous creature! I had frequently seen him before, and wondered at him; he was barely fifteen hands, but he had the girth of a metropolitan dray-horse; his head was small in comparison with his immense neck, which curved down nobly to his wide back: his chest was broad and fine, and his shoulders models of symmetry and strength; ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... old mare got up the last 'pinch'. She must have slackened pace, but I never noticed it: I just held Jim up to me and gripped the saddle with my knees—I remember the saddle jerked from the desperate jumps of her till I thought the girth would go. We topped the gap and were going down into a gully they called Dead Man's Hollow, and there, at the back of a ghostly clearing that opened from the road where there were some black-soil springs, was a long, low, oblong weatherboard-and-shingle building, with blind, ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... shaven upper lip, once; and smiled. The Murnan does not wear such. He looked at Martha more casually now, seeing that the husband was not disgraced by his wife's naked face; and remarked on the whiteness of her skin in the same tones he'd mentioned Wutzchen's remarkable girth. ...
— Blind Man's Lantern • Allen Kim Lang
... which took the villain under the left ear, levelled him with the earth, and made him bite the dust. The knife fell from his hand, and I instantly seized it, and before the two-legged brute, who lay stunned upon the ground, could rise, I cut the girth which bound the load upon the back of the ass, and relieved him from his burden. The cowardly ruffian still lay sprawling, fearing to rise, because he dreaded a repetition of my chastisement, which I was most anxious to have given him if he had stood upon his legs; ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... protest I have little but praise for the performance itself, though I think Sir HERBERT TREE'S own lethargy was not wholly to be excused by the hampering rotundity of his girth; and that all this deliberate sword-play, where you wait till your enemy has got his right guard before you arrange a concussion between your weapon and his, fails to impose itself as an image of War. But it was no fault of ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 25, 1914 • Various
... her weary head, as it were, in despair, that another day of shame and reproach is beginning; her long, lithe limbs and narrow hips contrast with the ample girth and muscular power of the Night. The modelling of the torso of this figure is, perhaps, the finest piece of workmanship in the chapel, and should be studied from every point of view, even from the back of the monument. The muscular forms and the disposition of the lines are so beautiful ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... Kentuckian; and the son answering, he continued, "Mount the roan Long-legs, you brute, and ride to St. Asaph's in no time. Tell Cunnel Logan what you h'ar; and add, that before he can draw girth, I shall be, with every fighting-man in my fort, on the north side of Kentucky. Ride, you brute, ride for your life; and do you take car' you come along with the Cunnel; for it's time you war trying your hand at an Injun top-knot. Ride, ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... now he slacked his speed, A moment breathed his panting steed; Drew saddle-girth and corslet-band, And loosen'd in the sheath his brand. On Minto-crags the moonbeams glint, Where Barnhills hew'd his bed of flint; Who flung his outlaw'd limbs to rest, Where falcons hang their giddy nest Mid cliffs, from whence his eagle eye For many a league his prey ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... years—a handful of drowned strangers, some chickens, and a dead bullock in muddy water with cross-currents. But the season I think of, the river was low, smooth, and even, and, as the Gavial had warned me, the dead English came down, touching each other. I got my girth in that season—my girth and my depth. From Agra, by Etawah and ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... my eyes about me, they were attracted by a great tree that grew near by, a tree of vast girth and bigness. And, as I looked, I saw that it was an oak-tree, near the root of which there was ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... causes us to run in under the lee of an island. We tie up at the base of some splendid timber. Spruce here will give three feet in diameter twenty feet from the ground. With an improvised tape-line I go ashore and measure the base-girth of three nearby big poplars (rough-backed). The first ran seven feet three inches, the second exactly eight feet, and the third eight feet four inches. Within view were fifty of these trees which would run the same average, and interspersed with them ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... and powerful. His long neck fitted into well-placed shoulders. He had great depth of girth, immense length from shoulder-points to hips, big cannon-bones, and elastic pasterns. There was neither amiability nor pride in his mien; rather a sullen sense of brute power, such as may have belonged to the knights of the Middle Ages. Now and again he curled his lips away from the bit and laid ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... cancellous spaces and medullary canal, or in all three situations. The new bone on the surface sometimes takes the form of a diffuse encrustation of porous or spongy bone as in secondary syphilis, sometimes as a uniform increase in the girth of the bone—hyperostosis, sometimes as a localised heaping up of bone or node, and sometimes in the form of spicules, spoken of as osteophytes. When the new bone is laid down in the Haversian canals, cancellous spaces and medulla, the bone becomes denser and heavier, ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... the throng in the court-room, jovial, lusty, bright of eye, loitered our easy-going chief of constabulary. His was no common girth at any time, but belted with a particularly large-sized and vicious-looking revolver, he seemed to be at least sixty inches around the waist. There was something casual about that revolver, and at the same time something very significant. But nothing could have been more blandly unconscious ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... done. This, at the moment, however, was irremediable. He knotted the hanging straps and laid them over the horse's neck. Then he folded a buffalo skin, and arranged it, as well as he could, above and behind the saddle, which he secured again by its girth. ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... switch off at the holler thet heads near the trail a few miles down," Nels was saying, as he tightened his saddle-girth. "Thet holler heads into a big canyon. Once in thet, it'll be every man fer hisself. I reckon there won't be anythin' wuss ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... a rag, as if the pain of death had withered them in their clothes; some swollen to the girth of horses; some bent backward, with arms outreaching like one trying an odd trick, some lay as if listening eagerly, an ear close to the ground; some like a sleeper, their heads upon their arms; one shrieked loudly, gesturing with bloody hands, ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... and the prowling bear;— Such were the deeds that helped his youth to train: Rough culture,—but such trees large fruit may bear, If but their stocks be of right girth and grain. ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... establishment of the country, which owed nothing to his honour or his honesty. Under the auspices of the Board of Erin "the shoneen"—the most contemptible of all our Irish types—began to flourish amain. It was a great thing to be a "Jay Pay" in the Irish country-side. It added inches to one's girth and one's stature, and to the importance of one's "lady." It was greatly coveted by the thousands who always pine to swagger in a little brief authority, and thus the Board of Erin drew its adherents from every low fellow who had an interest to serve, a dirty ambition to ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... standing height was the same as the others (4 feet 2 inches), the outstretched arms were 7 feet 9 inches, which was six inches more than the previous one, and the immense broad face was 13 1/2 inches wide, whereas the widest I had hitherto seen was only 11 1/2 inches. The girth of the body was 3 feet 7 1/2 inches. I am inclined to believe, therefore, that the length and strength of the arms, and the width of the face continues increasing to a very great age, while the standing height, from the sole of the foot to the crown ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... called out: "Master Brandon is wanted." So that gentleman rode forward, and I followed him. When we came up with the girls, Mary said: "I fear my girth is loose." ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... bespeaks it to be of great age; it seems to have seen several centuries and is probably co-eval with the church, and therefore may be deemed an antiquity; the body is squat, short and thick, and measures twenty-three feet in the girth, supporting a head of suitable extent to its bulk. This is a male tree, which in the spring sheds clouds of dust and fills the atmosphere around with its farina.... Antiquaries seem much at a loss to ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... francs, which she never laid aside, brutalizing herself by smoking, living as in a harem, admiring herself in the mirror, arraying herself in fine clothes, in company with several other Levantines, whose greatest joy consisted in measuring with their necklaces the girth of arms and legs which rivalled one another in corpulency, bringing forth children with whom she never concerned herself, whom she never saw, who had never even caused her suffering, for she was delivered under the influence of chloroform. A "bale" of white flesh perfumed with musk. And Jansoulet ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... of pitch and toss game, and they would frequently make bets on the strength of their horses. To settle the point their plan was to fasten the two horses stern to stern by a short lasso, secured to the saddle, or girth of either animal, at a short distance from each other. The gauchos having mounted their respective horses, one being placed on one side of a line, drawn on the ground, and the other on the other side, then set to work to lash and spur their steeds in opposite directions until the strongest ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... find a mount of size and strength sufficient to carry so heavy a burden. It was necessary that the poor animal should be progressively trained; and in order to accomplish this the king's equerry fastened round the horse a girth loaded with pieces of lead, increasing the weight daily till it equalled that of his Majesty. The king was despotic, hard, and even cruel, ever ready to sign the sentence of the condemned, and in ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... first through fear, she lifts a loftier head, Her forehead in the clouds, on earth her tread. Last sister of Enceladus, whom Earth Brought forth, in anger with the gods, 'tis said, Swift-winged, swift-footed, of enormous girth, Huge, horrible, deformed, ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... De Bracy, "nor did I think there had been within the four seas that girth Britain a champion that could bear down these five knights in one day's jousting. By my faith, I shall never forget the force with which he shocked De Vipont. The poor Hospitaller was hurled from his saddle like a ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... of the esplanade and little wall, there grows an enormous oak, not very tall, but with an immense girth of trunk, and such a spread of branches that it completely overshadows the summer-house, and overhangs the whole surface of the small pool in front of it. Thenceforth, the tall and tangled hedge runs on, as usual denying all access of the eye, and the deep, clear ditch all access of the foot, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... girth of the bride did not surprise the huge Giants who were in the wedding company. They stared at Thor and Loki, but they could see nothing of their faces and little of their ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... actual girth I have ever found at five feet from the ground is in the great elm lying a stone's throw or two north of the main road (if my points of compass are right) in Springfield. But this has much the appearance of having been ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... even for people who have read Hegel and Dr. M'Cosh, to decide intelligibly upon the issue raised. Then I fell into a long and abstruse calculation with my landlord; having for object to compare the distance driven by him during eight years' service on the box of the Wendover coach with the girth of the round world itself. We tackled the question most conscientiously, made all necessary allowance for Sundays and leap-years, and were just coming to a triumphant conclusion of our labours when we were stayed by a small lacuna ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... forced a smile. She had not ridden for weeks, she told him; she was tired. He was amused at that. She had been born in the saddle; he remembered her as a little girl on a Shetland pony and he did not believe she could ever tire. 'Must be something wrong somewhere,' he said, examining girth and pommels. ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... Comedy, her gray pony, with a creel and a couple of fishing rods strapped to his canvas girth. ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... burst, and the saddle and rider tumbled off together. I arrived without accident at my destination, although I had frequently been in danger of falling from my horse without its being necessary that the girth should break. ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... of Euboea accustom their horses to carry sacks which they can at pleasure fill with air, and which in case of need they carry instead of the girth of the saddle above and at the side, and they are well covered with plates of cuir bouilli, in order that they may not be perforated by flights of arrows. Thus they have not on their minds their security in flight, when the victory is uncertain; ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... any one to hide behind, the fat little priest evidently realized that his only hope of salvation lay in making an effort, truly heroic in one of his height and girth and woful shortness of wind, to clamber up the face of the wall; and to this wellnigh impossible task he most resolutely set himself. It was only by jumping that he was able to get a grip over the top of the wall; yet when this grip was gained he could get no farther ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... romance readers and minds of sensibility. Amongst other things which our conductor showed us was an immense onen or ash; it stood in one of the courts and measured, as she said, pedwar y haner o ladd yn ei gwmpas, or four yards and a half in girth. As I gazed on the mighty tree I thought of the Ash Yggdrasill mentioned in the Voluspa, or prophecy of Vola, that venerable poem which contains so much relating to the mythology of ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... infinitely stronger, and stupefying to a degree. Before fifty yards were traversed my head was spinning, and I was staggering like a drunken man. I remember Inyati half dragging me on to the horse again and feeling him lashing me to girth and saddle, remember his hoarse shouts to the horse and myself becoming fainter, remember dimly that the sjambok he flogged the horse with fell frequently across my back and legs, but nothing could keep me from the overwhelming desire to sleep And ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... obtained by the infantry. Phocion now expelled Plutarch from Eretria, and possessed himself of the very important fort of Zaretra, situated where the island is pinched in, as it were, by the seas on each side, and its breadth most reduced to a narrow girth. He released all the Greeks whom he took out of fear of the public speakers at Athens, thinking they might very likely persuade the people in their anger into committing some act ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... horses stood before the gate, The ruffians twain astride; And gay with scarlet girth and rein They started, side by side. O, blithe the babies' spirits were, That ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates
... thing, one how fair! One grace that grew to its full on earth: Smiles might be sparse on her cheek so spare, And her waist want half a girdle's girth, But she had her ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... naturally was very angry; and commenced lashing her sides with his riding whip to get her into the lane again. This made the fiery little creature perfectly desperate, and she reared up and backwards, until she came down plump into the water; so that, if the saddle girth had not broken, and the saddle come off, and the minister with it, she might have tumbled upon him and perhaps seriously hurt him. But, as it was, no great damage was done; and the bridle also breaking, the mare spit the bit out of her mouth, and went down the lane in a run to the road, and ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... sure befall thee, Danger, slaughterous fire— Thou shalt on a charger gallop, Curbing at desire; And a saddle girth all silken Sadly I will sew, Slumber now my ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi |
