"Puff" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... come flashing fast towards him, to feel the touch of the stock as it fits itself against his shoulder, and the kindly give of the trigger, and then, oh thrilling sight! to perceive the wonderful and yet awful change from life to death, the puff of feathers, and the hurtling passage of the dull mass borne onward by its own force to fall twenty yards from where the pellets struck it. Next session the politician will be hooted down, next year perhaps the reviewers will cut the happy writer to ribbons and decorate their journals with his fragments, ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... the door. "Well, come on," he said. Instantly a terrific wind caused the flame of the lamp to struggle at its wick, while a puff of black smoke sprang from the chimney-top. The stove was in mid-current of the blast, and its voice swelled to equal the roar of the storm. Some of the scarred and bedabbled cards were caught up from the floor and dashed helplessly against the farther ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... a block away, are railway-tracks. There noisy switch-engines that never keep Sabbath, puff back and forth, day and night, sending showers of soot and smoke when the wind is right (and it usually is) straight over Number 328, where, according to John Addington Symonds and William Michael Rossetti, lived the mightiest seer of the century—the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... kindly on my bewilderment during the space of time it takes to select a cigarette and light a match. Then, blowing a contented puff of smoke, he crossed ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... staying with the past. The Earth was becoming too small for its expanding population. It was a stifling, dangerous little world that, if the pressures were not relieved, might puff into fire and fragments at any moment during any year. And the era of prospecting and exploration in the Asteroid Belt seemed destined soon to come to an end, in ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... simply a blowing out, as of a candle in the wind; a puff—then darkness, without a trace. A sense of your own safety may suggest the method. I ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... Santa Fe, another very beautiful and curious little bird, the copper-bellied puff-leg, is found, at an elevation of about 9000 feet. (Unlike the greater number of birds, the female humming-birds are generally as richly ornamented as the male.) It is named from the curious white puffs or ruffs—looking as if formed of swan's-down—on ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... 'That was very good, but that does not seem so hard, after all. Now, the way for you to hide, it seems to me, would be to make yourself very small, so that you could slip into a crack in the rocks. You can puff yourself up like a dragon, of course, but can you make yourself small as easily? Oh, ...
— The Wagner Story Book • Henry Frost
... Betsy began to climb the hill to Putney Farm. It was a very warm night for May, and little Molly began to puff for breath. "Let's sit down on this rock awhile ...
— Understood Betsy • Dorothy Canfield
... the nine-branched candlestick, and a mystical sadness filled her. Would she had nine scions of her house like Miriam's mother, a true mother in Israel; but, lo! she had only one candle—one little candle. A puff and it was gone, and life ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... placed a close guard. All my questions were met with silence save by Madame Kanine who cried: 'Pity, pity for the children! They are innocent!' as she dropped on her knees and stretched out her hands in supplication to us. The short-haired girl laughed out of impudent eyes and blew a puff of smoke into my face. I was forced to ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... weekly paper published there, by an ambitious youth, called the "Clarion," which contained snappish editorials about its neighbors, aspiring criticisms upon the publications of different authors, always ending in an unmistakable "puff," if they were at all popular, or a feeble attempt at discriminating censure, if the unlucky scribe was unknown to fame, and had (poor wretch,) his way yet to make ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... steamer near enough to the ghat to enable the tourists to see the process of burning. An occasional puff of the horribly offensive odor came to the nostrils of the sightseers; but the captain sheered off, and they got very little ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... order came to break the Frontier, and his friends called him Georgie Porgie because of the singularly Burmese-like manner in which he sang a song whose first line is something like the words 'Georgie Porgie.' Most men who have been in Burma will know the song. It means: 'Puff, puff, puff, puff, great steamboat!' Georgie sang it to his banjo, and his friends shouted with delight, so that you could hear them far away ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... continued. "There wasn't a sign of war, not a sign. We heard that Russia was beginning to mobilize," (at this word be blew a puff from his cigarette and then repeated "beginning to mobilize") "but ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... give all honor to Immanuel and none to me, I will relate my experiences—a few at least. There are many giants in Canaan, very many of them. There is Giant Lust, who has slain thousands. Poor souls! Giant Puff-up, who causes pilgrims to act as foolish as did the toad that saw an elephant and burst itself trying to be as large; Giant Lethargy, who operates an opiate factory in a hollow that runs directly down into Egypt; Giant Covetousness, who decoys pilgrims to the silver-mine run by Balaam and Demas; ...
— Adventures in the Land of Canaan • Robert Lee Berry
... the battery, advancing against the Cumberland and Congress. The former opened fire upon her at a distance of a mile with the heavy pivot guns, but the Merrimac, without replying, continued her slow and steady course toward them. She first approached the Congress, and as she did so a puff of smoke burst, from the forward end of her pent-house, and the water round the Congress was churned up by a hail of grape-shot. As they passed each other both vessels fired a broadside. The officers in the fort, ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... other snatches of opera, to songs, wandering as the mood took her, coming finally to the street song that Vickers had woven into his composition for Rome, with its high, sad note. There her voice stopped, died in a cry half stifled in the throat, and leaving the piano she came to the window. A puff of wind blew out the candle. With the curtains swaying in the night wind, they stood side by side looking down into the dark city, dotted irregularly with points of light, and up above the Janiculum ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... bein' a contrast to Hiram an Lucy, 'n' I hope to-night as they lay there all puffed up as they 'll reflect on their folly 'n' think a little on how the rest of us as did n't care rhyme or reason for folly is got no choice but to puff up, too. Mrs. Jilkins is awful mad; she says Mr. Jilkins wanted to wear his straw hat anyhow, 'n' she says she always has hated his silk hat 'cause it reminds her o' when she was young 'n' foolish enough to be willin' to go 'n' marry into ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Neighbors' Affairs • Anne Warner
... by a strange commotion and a loud sound of hammering. She was trying to imagine the cause of all this uproar, when Madame de Fondege, already arrayed in a marvellous robe composed of three skirts and an enormous puff, entered the room. "I have come to take you away, my dear child," she exclaimed. "The owner of the house has decided to make some repairs, and the workmen have already invaded our apartments. The General has taken flight, let us follow his example—so make ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... This man never left the Tower, and was indefatigable in endeavouring to torment him. One time he would sing the 'Caramgnole,' and a thousand other horrors, before us; again, knowing that my mother disliked the smoke of tobacco, he would puff it in her face, as well as in that of my father, as they happened to pass him. He took care always to be in bed before we went to supper, because he knew that we must pass through his room. My father suffered it all with gentleness, forgiving the man from the bottom of his heart. My mother ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the autumn, he will find a place and a time to worship in his cathedral. He enters it with the seed in his hand in the spring, and as he rakes away the ripened plants in the autumn he finds something still of the mystery of life. A puff-ball is before him, and he muses on its forming. The little puff-ball stands at one end of the scale of life and he, man, at the other, "close to the realm where angels have their birth, just on the boundary of the spirit land." From the things visible in our garden we ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... resentment gathered like clouds about the sun. But he held her face now between his two hands and forced to meet his own her unresponsive eyes; and when with ardour he had kissed her grave lips, the flippancy of a fool ruined him, and his triumph was flattened into dust, as when one crushes a puff-ball. ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... (to the Bloated Youth). Might I ask you, Sir, not to puff your smoke in this lady's face—it's ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 30, 1892 • Various
... set out with me in order not to miss a peep of the great man. James Skene and his lady were with us, and we gave our carriages such additional dignity as a pair of leaders could add, and went to meet him in full puff. The Prince very civilly told me, that, though he could not see Melrose on this occasion, he wished to come to Abbotsford for an hour. New despair on the part of Mrs. Scott, who began to institute a domiciliary search for cold meat through ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... employer. So he was silent. Mary felt that Mr Pinch was not remarkable for presence of mind, and that he could not say too little under existing circumstances. So SHE was silent. The old man, disgusted by what in his suspicious nature he considered a shameless and fulsome puff of Mr Pecksniff, which was a part of Tom's hired service and in which he was determined to persevere, set him down at once for a deceitful, servile, miserable fawner. So HE was silent. And though they were all sufficiently uncomfortable, it is fair to say ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... poor creatures inside!" he was moved to utter out of the goodness of his heart. "She went in jest as easy," he recounted later to one of his cronies. "It warn't no more exertion for her than 't would be to you to stick your finger through a cream puff." ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... then put to it four Ounces of fine Sugar, and four Ounces of fresh Butter, and the Yolks of six Eggs, and a little Salt, beat it together in the Mortar till the Oven heats, and so butter a dish and bake it, but not too much; strew Sugar on it and serve it to the Table, Bake it in Puff-past. ...
— The Queen-like Closet or Rich Cabinet • Hannah Wolley
... you," said Lady Jane, in her very gravest tone, "not to puff up Caroline's imagination with a parcel of romantic notions.—I never yet knew any good done by it. Depend on it you will be disappointed, if you expect a genius to descend from the clouds express for your daughters. ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... a modest man, as well as an honest one. Censure cannot move me by one hair's breadth from the narrow path of rectitude; praise cannot unduly puff me up. Had I been other than I am, this last week would have gone fatally near to ruining that timid and shrinking diffidence which (I say it without egotism) marks me off from the poisonous, pestilential, hydrocephalous, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various
... south-easterly squall had come down on us, and the sea was very heavy. All at once, just as night fell, over a sky as black as ink and an angry-looking sea, the wind suddenly dropped. The Cassard, driven by the last puff of wind, and drawn too by capillary attraction, had got very near us, and soon this nearness became alarming. We could not get about, for there was not a breath stirring. We could not launch boats in such a sea to try and ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... clinging and struggling his utmost he forced his way on deck, as soon as the vessel righted herself enough to make it possible. "Hard down! Hard down! Let her come up! Ease her! Ease her!"—and whether the puff of wind slackened or the mate lost hold of the wheel, he never has been able to tell, but she righted enough for a moment to let him get on the deck and rush forward to slack up the fore-sheet, bawling meanwhile through the darkness to the mate to keep her head up, as he himself ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... horses, and rode off down the Arkansas Lane, to have a gallop and a peep at the gunboats from the levee. But mother's entreaties prevented us from going that near, as she cried that it was well known they fired at every horse or vehicle they saw in the road, seeing a thousand guerrillas in every puff of dust, and we were sure to be killed, murdered, and all sorts of bloody deaths awaited us; so to satisfy her, we took the road about a mile from the river, in full view, however. We had not gone very far before we met a Mr. Watson, a plain farmer of the neighborhood, who ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... Black, from a burning house, we suppose, by the Cavalleggieri; And we believe we discern some lines of men descending Down through the vineyard-slopes, and catch a bayonet gleaming. Every ten minutes, however,—in this there is no misconception,— Comes a great white puff from behind Michel Angelo's dome, and After a space the report of a real big gun,—not the Frenchman's?— That must be doing some work. And ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... a puff of his cigarette. "Maybe he just wants to be sure," he said. "Funny things are happening all over." The cigarette tasted terrible and he put it out in an ashtray ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Singleton's room. A dispirited expression characterized the countenance usually serene and happy, and between her brows a perpendicular line marked the advent of anxious foreboding. Her hopeful scheme had dissolved, vanished like a puff of steam on icy air, leaving only a teazing memory of mocking failure. Judge Dent's conference with the District Solicitor, had convinced him of the futility of any attempt to secure bail; moreover, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... in her new summer clothes, flexible and light as a bird, her little thumb stuck up by the stem of her white cotton sunshade, went along as if she hardly touched ground, and as if a moderately strong puff of wind would float her over the hedge into the next field. Jude, in his light grey holiday-suit, was really proud of her companionship, not more for her external attractiveness than for her sympathetic words and ways. That complete mutual understanding, in which every glance and movement ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... the water in the boat. There is a small hole in the bottom of the boat through which the water in it leaks away. This lowers the water until it has cleared from the bottom of the mast through which a puff of air goes up into the shell, allowing some of the water in the shell to pour out into the water in the boat. Now the water from the shell pours out in greater volume into the boat than the water that is leaking out of the boat. ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson
... but he made no answer. He only inhaled a long puff from his cigarette and looked across the ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... and Sancho withdrew to the knight's room, and there Don Quixote gave his squire advice about governing. He admonished him to be a champion of virtue always, to strive to know himself and not to puff himself up like a peacock, whose feathers, he bade him remember, were fine, but who had ugly feet. And the advice and instructions that master gave servant were such that no one would have thought it ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... or 6 potatoes, according to size. Cooked haricot beans. 1 onion. About one tablespoon of chopped mint or parsley. Puff or short paste. ...
— New Vegetarian Dishes • Mrs. Bowdich
... days," says the puff preliminary of The Coming (CHATTO AND WINDUS), "you and all your friends will be reading and discussing this most strange and prophetic novel." Perhaps. But what we shall be saying about it depends largely, I suppose, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... multiplied representations and editions are a proof of success, the legitimate issue of his Muse might well have been jealous of the fame and fortune of their spurious German relative. When the author of the Critic made Puff say, "Now for my magnificence,—my noise and my procession!" he little anticipated the illustration which, in twenty years afterwards, his own example would afford to that ridicule. Not that in pageantry, when tastefully and subordinately introduced, there ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... fuming in a rage compared to which nitric acid was a cream puff, was restored to its ...
— Lady Luck • Hugh Wiley
... a little puff of smoke arose from the machine, followed by a tongue of yellow flame. Barney had already started toward ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... as we were in these latitudes, we had but little rest in our watch on deck at night; for, as the winds were light and variable, and we could not lose a breath, we were all the watch bracing the yards, and taking in and making sail, and "humbugging'' with our flying kites. A little puff of wind on the larboard quarter, and then— "larboard fore braces!''— and studding-sail booms were rigged out, studding-sails set alow and aloft, the yards trimmed, and jibs and spanker in; when it would come as calm as a duck-pond, the man at the wheel standing with the ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... tangled mass of snakes of dozens of kinds, though the dirty, sickening-looking, stump-tailed moccasin predominated. There must have been thousands of serpents in the mass which covered a space twenty by thirty feet, from which came the sibilant hiss of puff adders, and a ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... "times up, cab at the door." A general rush was made in the direction indicated, Arthur jumped into the vehicle, and amid the shouts and cheers of his friends, was quickly rolled over the stones to the railway terminus. Ding, dong, ding, dong, waugh, waugh, puff, puff, and the train moved slowly out of the station, increasing its velocity until it was whirling along at something very like fifty miles an hour. On reaching Switchem, the station nearest to Vellenaux, Arthur found his horse waiting for him, and ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... A puff of white smoke drifted upward from the deck of the launch ahead and floated lazily above the rigging. Some fifty feet beyond the port bow of the Petrel the water leaped upward in a tiny spout. Dickie's rifle sounded in Gregory's ear and the report of his own ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... monstrous towering of the Great Redoubt; and afterwards make strong mine heart, and go forward again. And always I did go warily, and chiefly among the low moss-bush; but sometimes out upon stony ground, and oft across places where sulphur did puff somewhat from the ground in a low smoke, very strong in the ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... beaches, certainly, there were tents and stores and men moving. But the rolling countryside beyond seemed bleak and deserted. Only occasionally a high-explosive shell threw up a spout of brown earth, or a burst of shrapnel sent a puff of white smoke to float like a Cupid's cloud along the sky. And yet two armies were hidden here, with their rifles, machine-guns, and ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... how I'll learn to chaff barmaids in a bar; Scotches daily, gayly quaff, puff a fierce cigar. I will haunt the Tango teas, at the stage-door stand; Wait for Dolly Dimpleknees, bouquet ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... excellent—she needed a rest, her sister was sick, she might not do any more work for six months. He was uncomfortable with her successor, Miss Havstad. What Miss Havstad's given name was, no one in the office ever knew. It seemed improbable that she had a given name, a lover, a powder-puff, or a digestion. She was so impersonal, this slight, pale, industrious Swede, that it was vulgar to think of her as going to an ordinary home to eat hash. She was a perfectly oiled and enameled machine, and she ought, each evening, to have been dusted off ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... this cry was uttered the terrified boy saw a puff of smoke issue from the Indian rifle, and simultaneous with the sharp crack Tim O'Rooney was seen to fall flat ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... cribs and cots all together into a "special" with observation-cars; then, changing into an engineer, and with a call to Toby to jump aboard, she swung herself into the caboose-rocker and opened the throttle. The bell rang; the whistle tooted; and the engine gave a final snort and puff, bounding away countryward ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... own most intense gratification. It is not possible to disentangle the different emotions, the pride, humility, pity, and passion, which are excited by a look of happy love or an unexpected caress. To make one's self beautiful, to dress the hair, to excel in talk, to do anything and all things that puff out the character and attributes and make them imposing in the eyes of others, is not only to magnify one's self, but to offer the most delicate homage at the same time. And it is in this latter intention that they are done by lovers, for the essence of ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... more and more wood had to be collected; and as a great deal of this was green, a great smoke arose, and, whenever a puff of wind came, this was ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... by the spring-house where the boys had left the tramp and Jonesy, a puff of smoke went curling around the roof. Then a tongue of flame shot up through the cedars, and another and another until the sky was red with an angry glare. It lighted up the eastern window-panes of the ...
— Two Little Knights of Kentucky • Annie Fellows Johnston
... the world goes to sleep. It awakes at about four o'clock, when the white sails come gliding out of the green bays like swans. They greet, or avoid. They run side by side for the length of a puff of breeze. They coquet with one another like butterflies; or they head for one of those hidden beaches which are the principal charm of the lake, where baskets are unpacked and cakes and sandwiches appear, where dry sticks are gathered for a rustic fire, and after an hour or more of anxious stoking ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... the one she was to wear the first night—a dress flounced and furbelowed and of a creamy white (she still wore mourning—delicate purples shading to white—the exact tone for a husband six months dead). And the filmy dressing-gowns, and, more wonderful than all, the puff of smoke she was to sleep in, held together by a band of violet ribbon; to say nothing of the dainty slippers bound about with swan's-down, and the marvellous hats, endless silk stockings of mauve, white, and black, and long and short gloves. ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... leather before me. It was of most unusual workmanship, apparently Indian, being made of some kind of dark brown, mottled wood, bearing a marked resemblance to a snake's skin; and the top of the cane was carved in conformity, to represent the head of what I took to be a puff-adder, fragments of stone, or beads, being inserted to represent the eyes, and the whole thing being finished with an artistic realism ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... Vendor in gangway) ... history and life of the ... ("'Buffalo Bill Puzzle,' one penny!" from another vendor behind) ... impress one fact upon your minds; this is not ... (roar and rattle of passing train) ... in the ordinary or common acceptation of ... ("Puff-puff-puff!" from engine shunting trucks) ... Many unthinking persons have said ... (Piercing and prolonged scream from same engine.) This is not so. On the contrary ... (Metallic bangs from trucks.) Men and animals are ... ("Programmes! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 9, 1892 • Various
... that?" asked Joyce. And Martin looked about for a Dandelion Clock, and having found one blew it all away with a single puff and ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... fortune had not again particularly favored me, I should have had to abandon my design. But the light airs which had begun blowing from the southeast and south had hauled round after nightfall into the southwest. Just while I was meditating, a puff came, caught the Hispaniola, and forced her up into the current; and, to my great joy, I felt the hawser slacken in my grasp, and the hand by which I held it dip ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not as a rule much more than rough-and-ready imitations; and, like so much of the humour of their day, and of Scotch humour in particular, they generally depend for their point upon drinking and drunkenness. Some of the different forms of the Puff Poetical are amusing, especially the advertisement of Doudney Brothers' Waistcoats, and the Puff Direct in which Parr's Life-pills are glorified after the manner of a German ballad. The Laureate is a fair hit at ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... of Tyler's division. At six o'clock they reached the stone bridge which crossed Bull Run. On the hills beyond stretched a straggling line of grey figures. It couldn't be an army. Only a few skirmishers thrown out to warn off an attempt to cross the bridge. A white puff of smoke flashed on a hill toward the South, and the deep boom of a Confederate cannon echoed over the valley. Tyler's guns answered in grim chorus. The men gripped their muskets and waited the word of command. John's brigade was deployed along the edge of a piece of woods on the ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... all right," answered Everett quickly, as he blew a puff of smoke at her. "And you, Rose Mary, are the bloom of every rose-bush that I ever saw anywhere. You are, I verily believe, the only and original Rose ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... flickering of the yellow flames, these forced cripples and the yellow faces above them reeled to and fro fantastically all together. As the light steadied they would return to the pretence of being green things till a puff of the warm night wind among the flares set the whole line off again in a crazy dance of dwergs, their shadows capering on the house fronts ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... Connecticut Secretary of the Navy. South Carolina had seceded from the Union. Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana had followed South Carolina. Anderson, with a handful of United States troops, was holding Fort Sumter, expecting every minute to see the puff of smoke from the distant casement of Fort Moultrie, and hear the shriek of the shell that should announce the opening of the attack. At Washington, politicians were intriguing. The loyalty of no man ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... allowed to bring home from the rubbish-heap of his employer's garden. I remember that when he showed them to me, gloating over them, he tried to excuse himself to me for neglecting his potatoes in their favour, and I did my best to encourage him and puff him up with pride. But it was of no use. This summer he is neglecting his roses, and is wondering if his potatoes will be ripe enough for digging before he is obliged ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... Nature's worst vermin scare her godlike sons; Echoes, the very leavings of a voice, Grow babbling ghosts, and call us to our graves; Each mole-hill thought swells to a huge Olympus; While we fantastic dreamers heave and puff, And sweat with an imagination's weight; As if, like Atlas, with these mortal shoulders We could sustain the burden of the world. [CREON ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... evangelists think you?—He might as well swear them on Payn's age of reason, or his own vile book itself. Where they "believe that their miserable bodies must take eternal refuge in the grave, and the last puff of their nostrils will send their souls to annihilation, they laugh at the solemnity of an oath and tell you that the grave into which they sink as a log, forms an intrenchment against the throne of God, and the vengeance of exasperated justice!" Such is the character which the ...
— A Review and Exposition, of the Falsehoods and Misrepresentations, of a Pamphlet Addressed to the Republicans of the County of Saratoga, Signed, "A Citizen" • An Elector
... out. It is wiser to put a wild bird in a cage, and expect him to sit and look at you, and chirp without a feather rumpled, than it is to expect a woman to answer reason reasonably." Saying this, he looked at his puff of smoke as if it ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... and set to work. Occasionally a puff of wind gave them a little assistance, but it was one o'clock before they arrived alongside ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... doubtless there as far back as history goes and probably still farther back in time. For at that point, just where the winterbourne gushes out from the low hills, is the spot man would naturally select to make his home. And he would see no mansion or big building, no puff of white steam and sight of a long, black train creeping over the earth, nor any other strange thing. It would appear to him even as he knew it before he fell asleep—the same familiar scene, with furze and bramble and bracken on the slope, the wide expanse with sheep and cattle ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... the state of the sky had foretold, was enveloped in complete darkness. The moon being new had not yet risen. From the middle of the river the banks were invisible. The cliffs were confounded with the heavy, low-hanging clouds. At intervals a puff of wind came from the east, but it soon died away in the narrow ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... dung; A maggot in a cake of fat, The offspring of a beggar's brat. As eels delight to creep in mud, To eels we may compare his blood; His blood in mud delights to run; Witness his lazy, lousy son! Puff'd up with pride and insolence, Without a grain of common sense, See with what consequence he stalks, With what pomposity he talks; See how the gaping crowd admire The stupid blockhead and the liar. How long shall vice triumphant reign? How long shall mortals bend to gain? How long ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... make no dereliction From the straight path to this side or to that; I know the story I relate's no fiction, And that the moment that I quit some flat, Folks are all puff, and blame, and contradiction, And swear I never know what I'd be at; In short, such crowds, I find, can mend one's poem, I live retired, on purpose not to ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... his name tells us, is one of these. He is a small fish, living in warm seas. No doubt he has many enemies, eager to meet him and eat him. But, when they see this little fish puff out his sides like a balloon, and when pointed spines rise up all over the balloon, they think better of it! They leave him alone; and the Porcupine-fish goes back to his usual shape, the spines lying flat until wanted again. He is sometimes called the Sea-hedgehog or Urchin-fish, and well deserves ...
— Within the Deep - Cassell's "Eyes And No Eyes" Series, Book VIII. • R. Cadwallader Smith
... of little air, and that little as hot and dry in the nostrils as the atmosphere of a laundry on ironing day. Beyond and above the trees a fiery blast blew from the north; but it was seldom a wandering puff stooped to flutter the edges of the tents in the little hollow among the trees. And into this empty basin poured a vertical sun, as if through some giant lens which had burnt a hole in the heart of the scrub. Lulled by the faint perpetual murmur of ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... chap, draw. Lord, how funny you look, with your plug over your nose and your cutty in your mouth. Come, puff away. By Jove, I forgot to fill your pipe! Where's your tobacco, your favourite Maryland? ... Oh, here ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... a powder-puff. I did not know whether Aunt Caroline permitted it. Rub it on your nose," I advised, passing the bit ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... in it that offend them, and because they want to find matter in it for abusing you. Let them: the more it is discussed, the more strongly Will your fame be established. I commend you for scorning any artifice to puff your book; but you must allow me to hope it ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... feast your eyes on his slow agonies? That is true revenge; and you are but a novice in the art of vengeance if you think your plan equal to mine. It is for this—and this only—that I have spared him so long. I have suffered him to puff himself up with pride and insolence, till he is ready to burst. But his day of reckoning is at hand, and then he shall pay off the ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 2 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... back his head, blew a delicate puff of smoke toward the ceiling and looked across at his unsympathetic hostess. Then he brought his fist down on the table; "Marry me, Belle, and sleep in a ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... between life and death. The powers of darkness, perhaps, had never grappled for him so greedily. For a week his whole body was like something about which tongues of fire lick and roar, ready to consume it and send it up into the air, like a puff ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... tall, heavily built, fresh-colored, with a way of seeming to reflect deeply before he replied to anything. By and by he said: "Oh, aye!" and lit his cigarette, but had not taken the second puff when the doorkeeper's feet sounded outside, at which sound he pinched the cigarette hurriedly by the neck, and looked around for somewhere to dump it. There was no ash-tray, and the table being bare mahogany, the floor all polished wood, the fireplace with no ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... to my instructions, kept on playing Dixie so long that the fellow who blew the clarionet began to skip notes and puff. I went out and told them that that was enough of that tune and switched them onto S'wanee River. To the tune of this old air, the Colonel marched me up to ...
— Tales of the Road • Charles N. Crewdson
... Box Street tenement looked out upon the river. It was lifted high: the activities of the broad stream and of the motley world of the other shore went silently; the petty noises of life—the creak and puff and rumble of its labouring machinery,—straying upward from the fussy places below, were ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... As Code spoke a puff of white smoke thrust out from the blunt bows of the cutter, and the ball ricochetted from wave-top to wave-top to fall half a mile astern ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... strolling by and stopped to ask if we would join them. Hawberk looked at his watch. At the same moment a puff of smoke shot from the casemates of Castle William, and the boom of the sunset gun rolled across the water and was re-echoed from the Highlands opposite. The flag came running down from the flag-pole, the bugles sounded on the ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... assured confidence that might mark them, for no other reason than because they seek to keep their morsel to themselves. Like that mist that lies white and dull over the ground on a winter's morning, which will be blown away with the least puff of fresh air, there lie doleful dampnesses, in their sooty folds, over many a Christian heart, shutting out the sun from the earth, and a little whiff of wholesome activity in Christ's cause would clear them all away, and the sun would shine down upon men again. If you want to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... hard-palate, and the root of the tongue with the soft-palate. The interruption may be complete, as in p or t, or only partial, as in th. The sound of the consonant results from the slight explosion or puff which follows the recoil of the movable parts from ...
— The Child-Voice in Singing • Francis E. Howard
... meditative puff or two, Dyce launched into his familiar demonstration. He would very much rather have left it aside; he felt that he was not speaking as one genuinely convinced, and that his father listened without serious interest. But the theory had all to ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... five cents, and when mother went out the gate on her visit, I started for the barn. In a shed back of the barn I took out my cigars, determined to learn that day if it required the six cigars for my graduation. The first cigar was lighted and with every puff I felt the manhood coming; but in about five minutes I felt the manhood going. Just then my uncle called: "George, where are you?" When I answered he said: "Come here and hold this colt while I knock out ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... Great reproving his courtiers—the rest are Giants and Giantesses. Suffice it, to save our taste and damn our folly, that we left it all to a friend W.G. who in the first place cheated me into putting a name to them, which I did not mean, but do not repent, and then wrote a puff about their simplicity, &c., to go with the advertisement as in my name! Enough of this egregious dupery. I will try to abstract the load of teazing circumstances from the Stories and tell you that I am answerable for Lear, Macbeth, ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... battery: it seemed to move when we moved and to halt when we halted. Sometimes in the dun smoke I caught a glimpse of something blacker, raised high in the air like the threatening head of some great gliding serpent. Suddenly there came a sharp puff of lighter smoke that seemed like a forked tongue, and then a hollow report, and we could see a great black projectile hurled into the air, and falling a quarter of a mile away from us, in the woods. I did not at once learn that this first shot killed two of the Maine men, and wounded two more. ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... a flash Kringle's rifle leaped to his shoulder, and he fired. He had taken quick aim at a puff of smoke off toward ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in New Mexico • Frank Gee Patchin
... de rope an' he puff an' he blow; But he cain't git de Tearpin out'n de water from below. Dat big clay root is a-holdin' dat rope, Br'er Tearpin's got 'im fooled, ...
— Negro Folk Rhymes - Wise and Otherwise: With a Study • Thomas W. Talley
... not be so bad if his hair were dressed properly," continued the duenna; "but, so far, no one had been able to persuade him to have it powdered. Saint-Jean told me that just as he was about to put the powder puff to his head he got up in a rage and said, 'Anything you like except that confounded flour. I want to be able to move my head about without coughing and ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... there about ten minutes trying to mend the escape-valve, so that we could control it from the car, a puff of wind came and overturned the balloon completely. In a moment the aspect of the monster was transformed into a crude resemblance to the badge of the Golden Fleece—the car with Kenneth and me in it at one end, and Phillip Rutley hanging from the ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... haste slowly? For this very reason he had been accounted one of the laziest of his kind; his indolence was a byword merely because he did not throw himself into an easy chair at the Club, of an evening, and bewail his fate; because he did not puff and blow and talk often of the work he had accomplished, was accomplishing, or hastening forward to accomplishment. With all his faults, thank heaven, that sin ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... thought of before. "They have given out," said Alfred Bunn in his vituperative "Word with Punch," "in distinct terms that none but themselves can write a pantomime, and modestly entitled the one they did write 'Punch's Pantomime' ... which they laboured so lustily, but so vainly, to puff into notoriety." It was written in 1842, by Lemon, Jerrold, and Henry Mayhew; but when it was read by the first-named to the Covent Garden Company, by whom it was produced, it was found to contain a great deal of wit, but very little fun. It was extensively ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... should have not to distrain From several that vast beauty ne'er yet shown, To one exalted dame alone The total sum was lent in her pure self:— Heaven had made sorry gain, Recovering from the crowd its scattered pelf. Now in a puff of breath, Nay, in one second, God Hath ta'en her back through death, Back from the senseless folk and from our eyes. Yet earth's oblivious sod, Albeit her body dies, Will bury not her live words fair and holy. Ah, cruel mercy! Here thou showest solely ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... answered. No motion revealed her. Only the candle flames danced drunkenly in a puff of air, flaunting their secret knowledge of the tenant they ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... served under Buller seemed to have liked and trusted him. Curiously enough, he says that Ladysmith was in far worse case than Mafeking when relieved. The latter could have held out months longer, he thinks, and they all looked well. In Ladysmith you could have blown any of them over with a puff of air, and the defence was ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... had arrived, accompanied by two sea-biscuits, which looked so hard and hopeless that they would have made the nerves thrill within the teeth of him that meditated attempting to masticate them, the candle was lit; Huckaback handed a cigar to his friend; and both began to puff away, and chatter pleasantly concerning the many events and ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... Antoinette satin; two other flounces of blond are placed behind at intervals above; on each side from the waist up are facings composed of little alternating flounces of blond, looped up with satin; the big puff behind is bound by a flounce of white blond. A little white waist, the front and shoulder-straps of which are of satin trimmed with blond. Belt of red ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... said loudly. He shut his eyes and a little puff of smoke seemed to spring from the end of his fingers, followed ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... hill-side, picked off the men with unerring accuracy. Shot after shot was sent at him. At last he was quiet for so long that it seemed he must have been silenced, and they began to hope; Ad Mills rose to his knees and in sheer bravado waved his hat in triumph. Just as he did so a puff of white came from the rock, and Ad Mills threw up his hands and fell on his back, like a log, stone dead. A groan of mingled rage and dismay went along the line. Poor old Cove crept over and fell on the boy's body ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... strong symptoms of astonishment and admiration. He is said to have turned to master Juet, and uttered these remarkable words, while he pointed towards this paradise of the new world—"See! there!"—and thereupon, as was always his way when he was uncommonly pleased, he did puff out such clouds of dense tobacco smoke that in one minute the vessel was out of sight of land, and Master Juet was fain to wait until the winds ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... watch, you can see the air shimmering and rising from an open field on a broiling summer day, or wavering and rushing upward from a hot stove or an open register in winter. Hold a little feather fluff or blow a puff of flour above a hot stove, and it will go sailing up toward the ceiling. As the heated air rises, the cooler air around rushes in to fill the place that it has left, and the outdoor "drafts" are made ...
— The Child's Day • Woods Hutchinson
... single natural hair to build upon. But it pleased her generation to regard these facts as sacred, and to assume that the secrets of the boudoir were unsuspected. Even Nina never saw so much as a powder puff in her grandmother's dressing room, and any compliment upon her hair or complexion Madame Carter received ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... whence they unearthed a solitary match; instinctively he flourished this on the leg of his baggy trousers, and applied the flame to the empty briar-root, that protruded on its short stem from his substantial mouth; but after a vain puff or two, he flung it impatiently away and replaced the time worn pipe within the flavored ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... again have borrowed largely from me, and have neither had the good manners nor the common honesty to say from whence they got their information. Societies have been formed at the eleventh hour, after the infant system had been twenty years in practice, who puff off books written by some of their own members, which do not contain the original idea, whilst my books, for some cause best known to themselves, have never been recommended, or indeed ever mentioned, though I ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... design. A puff of air from the door, which Mrs. Fox had left wide open, extinguished the candle, and left the room, as there was ...
— Facing the World • Horatio Alger
... I hither but to that intent? Think you a little din can daunt mine ears? Have I not in my time heard lions roar? Have I not heard the sea, puff'd up with winds, Rage like an angry boar chafed with sweat? Have I not heard great ordnance in the field, And heaven's artillery thunder in the skies? Have I not in a pitched battle heard Loud 'larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets' ...
— The Taming of the Shrew • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... jabbered the nonsense that God permitted the sin of slaveholding among the Jews, but that he don't do it now! Sir, God sanctioned slavery then, and sanctions it now. He made it right, they know, then and now. Having thus taken the last puff of wind out of the sails of the anti-slavery phantom ship, turn to the twenty-first chapter of Exodus, vs. 2-5. God, in these verses, gave the Israelites his command how they should buy and hold the Hebrew servant,—how, under certain conditions, he went free,—how, under other circumstances, he ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... little terrace on which the house stood, pushed round either corner, rose again and stretched, as it were, yawning beneath the moonlight, joined other sheets waiting for them in unsuspected hollows, and lay out all in one. A puff of ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling |
