"Quicksilver" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wake Dolly if he went on like that, Uncle Mo he pulled himself together and smoked quiet. Whereupon Aunt M'riar dwelt upon the depressing effect a high wind in autumn has on the spirits, with the singular result referred to above, of their retractation into their owner's boots, like quicksilver in a thermometer discouraged by the cold. After which professional experience was allowed some ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... in the shaft of light looked like quicksilver. The smoke from the funnel mixed in the heavy air with the mist and the light, and formed a fantastic beam of vapor from the ship to the shore. Up this stream of quivering, scintillating irradiation, as brilliant as flashing water in the ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... population will be counting its gains while another sits by a cold hearth. But in the sovereign commune all will be centralised and sensitive. When jealousy springs up, when (let us say) the commune of Poole has overreached the commune of Dorchester, irritation will run like quicksilver throughout the body politic; each man in Dorchester will have to suffer directly in his diet and his dress; even the secretary, who drafts the official correspondence, will sit down to his task embittered, as a man ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... almost as much valued in certain countries of Asia as Eastern cotton and silk goods were in Italy, France, Germany, and England. Certain Western metals and minerals were highly valued in the East, especially arsenic, antimony, quicksilver, tin, copper, and lead. [Footnote: Birdwood, Hand-book to the Indian Collection (Paris Universal Exhibition, 1878), Appendix to catalogue of the British Colonies, pp. 1-110.] The coral of the Mediterranean was much admired and sought after in Persia and India, and even in countries still ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... thermometer fell to 11 deg., 7 deg., 0 deg., 6 deg.; and at Selborne to 7 deg., 6 deg., 10 deg.; and on the 31st of January, just before sunrise, with rime on the trees, and on the tube of the glass, the quicksilver sunk exactly to zero, being 32 deg. below freezing point; but by eleven in the morning, though in the shade, it sprung up to 16-1/2 deg.—a most unusual degree of cold this for the south of England. During these four nights the cold was so ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... quicksilver one ounce, one ounce nitric acid, one ten cent piece, rain water 1/2 pint to a pint, put the three first articles into a tumbler together; let them stand until dissolved, occasionally stirring, then add the water, and it is ready for use. This is used in ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... Dairying is a profitable industry. Poultry farming a little uncertain. If interested in mining there is much to explore. Just in this county are found gold, silver, copper, asphaltum, bituminous rock, gypsum, quicksilver, natural gas, ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... 11th, the sabandar, his father-in-law Medigoffar, and several others, came to Swally, and delivered the Firmaun to me in form, making great professions of respect for our nation in the name of their king. The 14th we landed all our cloth, with 310 elephants teeth, and all our quicksilver. This day likewise the Portuguese galleons came within three or four miles of us. The 16th, I landed Anthony Starkey, with orders to travel over land for England, carrying letters to give notice ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... a Trap Washington's Last Battle Marion's Tower Clark and his Men Daniel Boone and his Grapevine Swing Daniel Boone's Daughter and her Friends Decatur and the Pirates Stories about Jefferson A Long Journey Captain Clark's Burning Glass Quicksilver Bob The First Steamboat Washington Irving as a Boy Don't give up the Ship Grandfather's Rhyme The Star-spangled Banner How Audubon came to know about Birds Audubon in the Wild Woods Hunting a Panther Some ...
— Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans • Edward Eggleston
... difference, that the atmosphere formed in the receiver by alkohol only supports the attached barometer about one inch in winter, and about four or five inches in summer; that formed by water, in the same situation, raises the mercury only a few lines, and that by quicksilver but a few fractions of a line. There is therefore less fluid evaporated from alkohol than from ether, less from water than from alkohol, and still less from mercury than from either; consequently there is less caloric employed, and less cold produced, which ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... father could properly help and advise in regard to many aspects of the life ahead; already he was looking forward to the time when he could take a hand in the training of Robin. It would be very hard to go away from that little bit of quicksilver, very ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... a second it stood, then began swiftly to change, melting with quicksilver quickness from one outline into another as square and triangle and spheres changed places. Their shiftings were like the transformations one sees within a kaleidoscope. And in each vanishing form was the suggestion of unfamiliar ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... one, and of an overwhelming grandeur. Below me lay the mighty Yukon, here like a silken ribbon, there broadening out to a pool of quicksilver. It seemed motionless, dead, like a piece of tinfoil lying on ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... according to a method pointed out by Driessen, the water is to be boiled for two hours in a flask filled with it, and immersed in a vessel of water kept boiling, with the mouth of the flask under the surface of the water: it is to be inverted in quicksilver, taking care that no air-bubble adheres to the side of the flask, and being tinged with infusion of litmus, a little nitrous gas is to be introduced: if the oxygen gas has been sufficiently expelled from the water, the purple colour of the litmus does not change; ...
— A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons • Fredrick Accum
... a dirty people. They never use soap, and their skins are enamelled with dirt. When water is thrown on them, it rolls off their backs like globules of quicksilver on a marble slab. To them bathing has a cooling, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... they use to eat rice and milk more than anything else. And again I tell you that these Chughi who live such a long time as I have told you, do also eat what I am going to tell you, and you will think it a great matter. For I tell you that they take quicksilver and sulphur, and mix them together, and make a drink of them, and then they drink this, and they say that it adds to their life; and in fact they do live much longer for it; and I tell you that they do this twice every month. And let me ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... still stands charred and ruined against the sky, an object lesson for Belleville. I walked up to the Arc de l'Etoile, and coming back I strolled into a little leafy open-air restaurant for a cup of coffee. Suddenly I recognised the place—the fountain—a largo quicksilver ball—a little wooden pavilion festooned with coloured lamps. It was as though eight years ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the ancient inferior planets, and the nearest to the sun, as far as we yet know. (See TRANSIT OF.) Also, a name for quicksilver; the fluid metal so useful in the construction of the marine barometer, thermometer, ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... cavity or pocket at the corner of the blocks. After passing the first sluice box the water and gravel would be run in a bed rock sluice again, and then into another sluice box and so on for a mile, passing through several sluice boxes on the way. Quicksilver was placed in the upper sluice boxes, and when the particles of gold were polished up by tumbling about in the gravel, they combined with the quicksilver ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... The wrestler dropped at last; and Alan, leaping back to get his distance, ran upon the others like a bull, roaring as he went. They broke before him like water, turning, and running, and falling one against another in their haste. The sword in his hands flashed like quicksilver into the huddle of our fleeing enemies; and at every flash there came the scream of a man hurt. I was still thinking we were lost, when lo! they were all gone, and Alan was driving them along the deck as ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... parliament that might look like contrition, but was willing to submit the points to the decision of colleagues; that Lord John would submit no point to colleagues 'affecting his personal honour'—to such degrees of heat can the quicksilver mount even in a cabinet thermometer. If such quarrels of the great are painful, there is some compensation in the firmness, patience, and benignity with which a man like Lord Aberdeen strove to appease them. Some of his colleagues actually thought that Lord John would make ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... Gros!" he exclaimed, waving his hand. "We meet to-night, I trust. I will show you a new dance—the Dance of Death, I shall call it. I seem calm, but I am on fire with excitement. To-night I shall dance as though quicksilver were in my feet. You must not miss it. You must ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that of a beautiful woman, queenly of manner, fair of figure as a fullblown lily, and with those dark eyes that seem to shine out from soul-depths, deep as the distant heaven, and yet may mean no more than the shallow facing of quicksilver ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... you one chance more, and only one. It's quicksilver, kill or cure, and a stiff dose at that. I've just been talking with Spurling and his two friends. They're to spend the summer fishing from an island off the Maine coast, to earn money to start their college course. And you're ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... had been brightened with a coat of blue enamel paint, and a strip of Brusa silk which Martin had brought back from one of his wanderings was festooned at the side, so as to hide a patch where the quicksilver showed signs of peeling off. Miss Joliffe pulled the festoon a little forward, and adjusted in one of the side niches a present-for-a-good-girl cup and saucer which had been bought for herself at ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... rare. No longer conscious of the technical side of the playing, so spiritualized was it, so crystalline the touch, Davos forgot his manners and slipped through the gateway, through the dark garden, toward an open window in which burned a solitary candle. The mystery of this window and the quicksilver dartings of the music—gods, what a touch, what gossamer delicacy!—set his heart throbbing. He forgot his sick nerves. When the trumpet blows, the war-horse lusts for action—and this was not a trumpet, but a horn of elf-land. He moved as closely as he dared to the window, and the music ceased—naturally ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... knewe if the Shipp did belong unto the Jewes, hee answered that hee heard Isaac Cardozo a Jewe tell him privately that the Shipp did belong unto his father in Amsterdam, and that shee was Assigned unto him by his father from Amsterdam, and that the said Bartholomewe Martin did see the Jewes bring Quicksilver, and that hee knowes it is the same which was taken in the Blew Dove: as witness my hand this ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... California, copper mining is rapidly becoming of great importance. A continuous copper belt, the largest yet discovered in the world, exists under her soil, and while a comparatively small depth has been so far attained, the profit has been considerable. One of the largest quicksilver mines in the world is at New Almaden. The value of the output of the borax mines is over a million dollars a year. There were mined in California in 1907 over fifty different materials, most of them at a value of several thousand dollars a year, with ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... say, let us understand our terms. I suppose, there are few of the keywords of the New Testament which have lost more of their radiance, like quicksilver, by exposure in the air during the centuries than that great word Grace, which is always on the lips of this Apostle, and to him had music in its sound, and which to us is a piece of dead doctrine, associated with certain ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... she said, going to a mirror, from which the quicksilver was peeling, and which presented her features to ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... dust, and having the end plugged either with wax or soft metal that was easily melted. Again, pieces of lead were used which had been plugged with lumps of gold carefully covered over; and a very simple and impressive demonstration was making use of a nugget of gold that had been coated over with quicksilver and tarnished so as to resemble lead or some base metal. When this was thrown into acid the coating was removed by chemical action, leaving the shining metal in the bottom of the vessel. In order to perform some of these tricks, it is obvious that the alchemist ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... to turn their prepared water to good account when there are no fires to put out. It is said that the proportions of the mixture can be so varied that, with one kind, the pump may be used for the clarification of beer, oils, treacle, quicksilver, and such like, and for the preservation of fruit, meat, milk, etcetera, and with another mixture they propose to ventilate mines and tunnels; water gardens; kill insects on trees and flowers; soften water for domestic uses, and breweries, and manufacture ...
— Life in the Red Brigade - London Fire Brigade • R.M. Ballantyne
... But there's St. John Long—that's the kind of fellow we call a charlatan, advertising cures in ways nobody knows anything about: a fellow who wants to make a noise by pretending to go deeper than other people. The other day he was pretending to tap a man's brain and get quicksilver out ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... changed my motif a little," he said. "I simply want to portray the quicksilver of after-war conditions—England in transition." At this time Delancey seemed to me the least little tiny bit depressed. The income he was sacrificing rose (in his conversation) from 5,000 to 7,000 pounds. He dined out less, avoided his club and Christie's. ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... a long step, and quite thought he had the tail under his foot, but the cat turned round so sharply that he only trod on air. And so it went on for eight days, till the King began to think that this fatal tail must be full of quicksilver—it was never still ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... do!" said Mr. Merryweather. "You all have quicksilver in your heels, I believe. Seven and Twelve! ...
— The Merryweathers • Laura E. Richards
... at Tanci, near Yasica, in the commune of Puerto Plata. The old chronicles refer to silver mines at Jarabacoa and Cotui in La Vega province, also to others near Santiago, near Higuey and on the Jaina River. Platinum occurs at Jarabacoa, traces of quicksilver have been found near Santiago, Banica and San Cristobal, and tin ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... refuse to dig deeper than the chin, for fear of the earth 'caving in;' and, quartz-crushing and the use of quicksilver being unknown, they will not wash unless the gold 'show colour' to ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... make me hot!" Anstice threw himself back into his corner and drew a long breath. "It's always a mystery to me how people who live in hot climates are so beastly energetic! They seem to have quicksilver ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... Rain-water upon a lotus-leaf is a favourite subject with Japanese metal-workers, and metalwork only can reproduce the effect, for the motion and colour of water moving upon the green oleaginous surface are exactly those of quicksilver. ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... to be a general law, and not an isolated fact. If bismuth turned into mercury, what would mercury turn into? There would be no rest for me until I had solved the question. I renewed the exhausted batteries and passed the current through the bowl of quicksilver. For sixteen hours I sat watching the metal, marking how it slowly seemed to curdle, to grow firmer, to lose its silvery glitter and to take a dull yellow hue. When I at last picked it up in a forceps, and threw it upon the table, it had lost every characteristic of mercury, and ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... not,' said he, 'for the Chassediane—you are aware, Richie, poor Jorian is lost to her?—he has fallen at her quicksilver feet. She is now in London. Half the poor fellow's income expended in bouquets! Her portrait, in the character of the widow Lefourbe, has become a part of his dressing apparatus; he shaves fronting her playbill. His first real affaire de coeur, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... full stretch; and I have seen them jump upon the back of the wildest bull, and all the efforts of the beast could not throw them. This country produces all sorts of metals; it is famous for gold, silver, iron, tin, lead, and quicksilver; but some of these they do not understand working, especially quicksilver. With copper they supply all Peru, and send likewise a great ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... bore it is to lose the one bit of quicksilver in the house!' said he, yawning. 'I shall only drag on my existence till you ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is crushed by heavy stamps, or hammers, and then mixed with water and quicksilver. This curious metal, quicksilver, or mercury, is fond of gold and hunts out every little bit, the two metals mixing together and making what is called an amalgam. This is heated in an iron vessel, ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... as if by magic, the enthusiasm of the English; how one fortune after another has been swallowed up in the dark, deep gulf of speculation; how expectations have been disappointed; and how the great cause of this is the scarcity of quicksilver, which has been paid at the rate of one hundred and fifty dollars per quintal in real cash, when the same quantity was given at credit by the Spanish government for fifty dollars; how heaps of silver lie abandoned, because the expense of acquiring quicksilver ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... were slow to realize their real feelings. They had at first looked at each other mockingly. They were hardly at all alike. He was quicksilver, she was still water. But it was not long before quicksilver tried to appear more at rest, and sleeping water awoke. Georges would criticise Aurora's clothes, and her Italian taste—a slight want of feeling for modulation and a certain preference for crude colors. Aurora used ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... tongue of mine for making such a hollo-ballo, that I do—five gallons of cold water has my poor belly been drenched with since night fell, so as my reins and my liver are all one as if they were turned into ice, and my whole harslet shakes and shivers like a vial of quicksilver. I have been dragged, half-drowned like a rotten ewe, from the bottom of a river; and who knows but I may be next dragged quite dead from the bottom of a coal-pit—if so be as I am, I shall go to hell to be sure, for being consarned like in my own moorder, that I will, so ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... of "seeing people," quite as a matter of course. It used to give me a sharp pain at my heart; but I begin to take his way for granted now. "There's something about O'Farrell that eludes me—slips away like quicksilver. One is charmed with his voice and ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... but the gold seemed to slip away from us. Finally I took a carload and went with it to see what was the matter. I followed it till it came out on the plates—that is where they catch the gold by the use of quicksilver spread on copper plates—and it seemed all right. I scraped some of it up and put it into a small vial to take home with me. When I got home the company assembled to hear my report, and when I took out the amalgam to show it to ...
— The Spirit of Sweetwater • Hamlin Garland
... forced to recognize them. And then I felt altogether the force of the maxim of St. Ambrose, "Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum;"—I had a great dislike of paper logic. For myself, it was not logic that carried me on; as well might one say that the quicksilver in the barometer changes the weather. It is the concrete being that reasons; pass a number of years, and I find my mind in a new place; how? the whole man moves; paper logic is but the record of it. All the logic in the world would ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... industriously stretching their peacock necks to crop the tiny leaves that fluttered above their heads, in a flowering mimosa grove which beautified the scenery. My heart leapt within me, and my blood coursed like quicksilver through my veins, for, with a firm wooded plain before me, I knew they were mine; but, although they stood within a hundred yards of me, having previously determined to try the boarding system, I reserved ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... and rode or walked 250 miles. And so, brother David, commend me for a traveller. HERE ends my Cornish expedition. Does it recall to thee, O sire, thine own of old time, undertaken (if I remember rightly) with Dr. Kidd?—Mails then did not travel like the Quicksilver, averaging 12 miles an hour, and few people go 40 miles before breakfast. Now, I feel able to get nearer my Albury destination, and in a week or so, shall hope to be residing at Dorchester, near the Blandford of paternal recollections. Did you, dear mother, get ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... by Oriente, S. by Loja, and W. by El Oro. It was formerly called Cuenca, and formed part of the department of Azuay, which also included the province of Loja. Azuay is an elevated mountainous district with a great variety of climates and products; among the latter are silver, quicksilver, wheat, Indian corn, barley, cattle, wool, cinchona and straw hats. The capital ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... Quicksilver is abundant from extensive veins of cinnabar in the province of Mancha. In Galicia tin has been produced from very early times. Iron ore is very abundant, and silver mines, for many centuries abandoned, are now again being reworked. Gold ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... master. The duller of those who were the life-seekers of old would have told you how some chance, trivial, unlooked-for, foiled their grand hope at the very point of fruition,—some doltish mistake, some improvident oversight, a defect in the sulphur, a wild overflow in the quicksilver, or a flaw in the bellows, or a pupil who failed to replenish the fuel, by falling asleep by the furnace. The invisible foes seldom vouchsafe to make themselves visible where they can frustrate the bungler, as they mock at his toils from their ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... what happened to Joe?"—"No, I didn't."—"Well, the doctors had ben givin' him one thing another with merc'ry in't, and he walked out down to the Post-Office and back, and when he come home he kind o' felt somethin' hard in his boots. Come to pull 'em off, they found a lump o' quicksilver in both on 'em."—"Sho!"—"Fact; it had shrunk clean down through him with the cold." This rapid power of dramatizing a dry fact, of putting it into flesh and blood, and the instantaneous conception of Joe as a human thermometer, seem to us more like the poetical faculty than anything else. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... secret Presence, through Creation's veins Running Quicksilver-like eludes your pains; Taking all shapes from Mah to Mahi; and They change and perish all—but ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... intensity to the delineation even while exciting doubts of its fidelity. Similar qualities had characterized her acting, and they spring from a nature which a close observer has described as clear in perception yet swayed by fantasy; strong of will yet impulsive as quicksilver; finding enjoyment now in animated discussion, now in impetuous riding, now in absolute repose; full of maternal tenderness, yet fond of splendor and the excitements of society; a nature, in short, abounding in contrasts, but substantially that of a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... feet. To enable him to walk still better (for he was always on one journey or another) he carried a winged staff, around which two serpents were wriggling and twisting. In short, I have said enough to make you guess that it was Quicksilver; and Ulysses (who knew him of old, and had learned a great deal of his wisdom from him) recognized him ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Superior. It rolls over the tall grass of the prairie, which bends beneath its weight, sighs by me, and seems to cling to me as it passes, and moves on toward the arid plains of the South. The Ohio sweeps down in calmness and majesty. With its surface of quicksilver, and the little waves dancing up in gladness, and its heavy dull wash, it rolls along its mighty mass of waters, hastening to pour itself into the mightier mass of the Mississippi. Occasionally a giant tree, torn from its place, and cast root and branch into the flood, comes booming down, and glides ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... the Cacique. The woman for some cause is bitter with hate against him.—Juan Gonzalvo is eager to listen—he is restless as quicksilver already with suspicion of strange things. In the far south he and his comrades made little odds of riding rough shod over the natives—here he would do the same at ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... it for me perhaps," he exclaims, "had I never relapsed into the same mental disease; if I had continued to pluck the flowers and reap the harvest from the cultivated surface instead of delving in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic depths." And he goes on to add, in a passage full of the peculiar melancholy beauty of his prose, and full too of instruction for the biographer, "But if, in after-time, I have sought a refuge from bodily pain and mismanaged ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... wandering about among the stars, and to one of these the witch and her faithful Harold repaired. A cloud gives quite reasonable support to magic people, and most witches and wizards have discovered the delight of paddling knee-deep about those quicksilver continents. They wander along shining and changing valleys under a most ardent sky; they climb the purple thunderclouds, or launch the first snowflake of a blizzard; they spring from pink stepping-stone to pink stepping-stone of clouds each no bigger than ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... Lutchester continued, still studying the notice, "news does run over London like quicksilver. If you step down to the American bar here, for instance, you'll find that Charles is one of the best-informed men about the war in London. He has patrons in the Army, in the Navy, and in the Flying Corps, ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... portion of a large shoal of mackerel, and the weight seemed more than they could get into the boat. But even the strength of the younger ones seemed to grow into the strength of giants when they saw through the clear water a great moving mass like quicksilver. And then the wild excitement of hauling in; the difficulty of it; the danger of the fish escaping; the warning cries of Rob; the clatter made by the mackerel; the possibility of swamping the boat altogether, as all the four were straining their utmost at one side. Indeed, by an awkward tilt ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... that I was ever to see of Cousin Edie. She stood in the sunlight with the old challenge in her eyes, and flash of her teeth; and so I shall always remember her, shining and unstable, like a drop of quicksilver. As I joined my comrade in the street below, I saw a grand carriage and pair at the door, and I knew that she had asked me to slip out so that her grand new friends might never know what common people she had been associated with in her ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... There is a great deal of quicksilver in this glass ball, and we can play with it. I'll show you how." And away they went downstairs ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... I know all about lodes, ledges, outcroppings, dips, spurs, angles, shafts, drifts, inclines, levels, tunnels, air-shafts, "horses," clay casings, granite casings; quartz mills and their batteries; arastras, and how to charge them with quicksilver and sulphate of copper; and how to clean them up, and how to reduce the resulting amalgam in the retorts, and how to cast the bullion into pigs; and finally I know how to screen tailings, and also how to hunt for something less robust to do, and find it. I know the argot of the ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... thousand miles effectually divide us; and whilst I sit silently wishing you ages of health and mortal happiness, the mercury of my thermometer stands lazily at freezing point, whereas your own sprightly quicksilver rushes up to 92. All things tell me of our separation. We sailed, as you will find by referring to your pocket-book—for you made a memorandum at the time—on the 14th day of November last from Cork; sighted Madeira—about thirty miles abreast—in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... Properties of Things," defines gold and silver in an original way, according to the beliefs of this writer's day. He says of gold, that "in the composition there is more sadness of brimstone than of air and moisture of quicksilver, and therefore gold is more sad and heavy than silver." Of silver he remarks, "Though silver be white yet it maketh black lines and strakes in the ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... and dry bread for tea. She was a slight, slim little figure, with big blue eyes, and long, black curved lashes and eyebrows, which made her eyes the most beautiful feature in her face. Very soft, fine curly hair surrounded a rather pathetic-looking little face; but her movements were like quicksilver, and though all the little Stuarts were noted for their mischievous ways and daring escapades, Betty eclipsed ...
— Odd • Amy Le Feuvre
... understanding. These two kinds of authors—thought-creditors and borrowing expressionists—are as mutually necessary to each other to bring out idea in its most perfect shape, as glass and mercury to mirror objects. Dim, indeed, is the reflection of the glass without its coating of quicksilver; and amalgam, without a plate on which to spread it, can never form a mirror. The metal and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Gluck at length, after watching the water spreading in long quicksilver-like streams over the floor for a quarter of an hour; ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... good doctor came bustling in from his laboratory a few minutes later, half frozen, but burning with enthusiasm over some experiments he was making with quicksilver, he brought his coffee to my warm corner, and I at once simulated the deepest interest in his account of his morning's work—though I confess I have never taken any great interest in science, and from what he seemed to expect the quicksilver to ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... o'clock she went out into the garden. Her head was throbbing painfully, her cheeks burnt with a scarlet flush, and it was surely quicksilver and not blood which ran so ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... nothing-original about him, save so much of sin as he may have inherited from our first parents; there is no more at the back of him than at the back of a looking-glass—indeed less, for he has not a grain of quicksilver; but, like the looking-glass, he reflects. Having nothing else to do, he hangs, as it were, on the wall of the world, and mirrors it for me as it unconsciously passes by him—not, however, as in a glass darkly, but with singular clearness. ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... sweepstakes then?" Chuck asked eagerly. "I ain't caring what Kiowa horse gets the money just so that Y-Bar outfit is taken down a notch or two. Ever since they got that Thunderbolt horse and beat Old Heck's Quicksilver with him they've been crowing over the Quarter Circle KT and I'm ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... morning of the journey, they welcomed the light of an opening, and the sweet Skaneateles glowed upon their eyes. They were moving along its foot, and it glimmered and waved like a lake of quicksilver, in reply to the ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... called Shpack, also known in his time as the Big Fat. Shpack is herein classed Russian for lack of a more adequate term; for Shpack's father, a Slavonic convict from the Lower Provinces, had escaped from the quicksilver mines into Northern Siberia, where he knew Zimba, who was a woman of the Deer People and who became the mother of Shpack, who became the ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... lake—lay like a sheet of quicksilver before me, with a reflected moon shining brightly in the center of it. It was shallow, for in many places I saw low sandbanks protruding above the water. Everywhere upon the still surface I could see signs of life, sometimes mere rings and ripples in the ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... fire-red cherubinnes face, For sausefleme* he was, with eyen narrow. *red or pimply As hot he was and lecherous as a sparrow, With scalled browes black, and pilled* beard: *scanty Of his visage children were sore afeard. There n'as quicksilver, litharge, nor brimstone, Boras, ceruse, nor oil of tartar none, Nor ointement that woulde cleanse or bite, That him might helpen of his whelkes* white, *pustules Nor of the knobbes* sitting on his cheeks. *buttons Well ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... states. They add that Lulli gladly accepted the invitation, and had apartments assigned for his use in the Tower of London, where he refined much gold; superintended the coinage of "rose-nobles," and made gold out of iron, quicksilver, lead, and pewter, to the amount of six millions. The writers in the Biographie Universelle, an excellent authority in general, deny that Raymond was ever in England, and say, that in all these stories of his wondrous ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... Maubeuge in the dusk, the company which had sung O Strassburg in the Franco-German beer shop at the prow of the corner where the three streets met were just marching away. I thought I caught, in the weaving gray line that flowed along like quicksilver, a glimpse of the boy who was so glad because he was about ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... about it and possibly I may be of service to you. I have helped a good many young men through adventures that looked difficult enough beforehand. Perhaps you may have heard of me. I have more names than one, but the name of Quicksilver suits me as well as any other. Tell me what the trouble is and we will talk the matter over and see what can ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... five hundred Most Prominent had paid something substantial "to defray the cost of steel engraving, etc."—the Five Hundred had heaved the final shovelful of soot upon that heap of obscurity wherein the Ambersons were lost forever from sight and history. "Quicksilver ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... landscape I turned to look at the army. Never had I seen them so joyous. It would be impossible to convey any idea of the afflatus which buoyed them up. Every man's veins seemed to run with quicksilver, instead of blood. Every cheek was glowing. Every eye flashed with superb joy and defiance. You would have supposed, indeed, that the troops were under the effect of champagne or laughing gas. "I never even imagined such courage," said a Federal officer afterward; ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... Jingleberry's words were distasteful to her, and that the proposition he was making was not one she could entertain under any circumstances. She kept shaking her head, and the more she shook it, the more the glazed Jingleberry seemed to implore her to be his. Finally, Jingleberry saw his quicksilver counterpart fall upon his knees before Marian of the glass, and hold out his arms and hands towards her in an attitude of prayerful despair, whereupon the girl sprang to her feet, stamped her left foot furiously upon the floor, and pointed the unwelcome ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... jacket, stood at the windows of his sitting room at Devenham Castle, looking across the park. In the somewhat fitful moonlight the trees had taken to themselves grotesque shapes. Away in the distance the glimmer of the sea shone like a thin belt of quicksilver. The stable clock had struck two. The whole place seemed at rest. Only one light was gleaming from a long low building which had been added to the coach houses of recent years for a motor garage. That one light, the Prince knew, was on his account. There his chauffeur waited, ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... send the blood of an ardent lover throbbing through his veins like quicksilver, are they not? Yet they excited not one atom of jubilation in me, for they were uttered in a tone of such coldness and indifference that I felt as certain as I could be of anything that it was wholly of herself, and not at all of me, that ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... gloves. He was a grotesque-looking personage, and might have passed for a gentleman of the old school, reduced by adversity to playing cicerone to foreigners of distinction. He had a little black eye which glittered like a diamond and rolled about like a ball of quicksilver, and a white moustache, cut short and stiff, like a worn-out brush. He was smiling with extreme urbanity, and talking in a low, mellifluous voice to the lady, who evidently was not listening to him. At a considerable distance behind this couple ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... ounce of samphire, dissolve it in two ounces of aquaevitae, add to it one ounce of quicksilver, one ounce of liquid storax, which is the droppings of Myrrh and hinders the camphire from firing; take also two ounces of hematitus, a red stone to be had at the druggist's, and when you buy it let them beat it to ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... she said apart to Anne. "I haven't danced since I was sixteen—but I love it. The music seems to run through my veins like quicksilver and I forget everything—everything—except the delight of keeping time to it. There isn't any floor beneath me, or walls about me, or roof over me—I'm ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... cry of terror from the women: they would fly but for the spears.) Not even the descendants of the gods can resist them; for they have each man seven arms, each carrying seven spears. The blood in their veins is boiling quicksilver; and their wives become mothers in three hours, and are slain and eaten the ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... to me one day, and showed me a little gold ring which had been discoloured by quicksilver, saying at the same time: "Polish up this ring for me, and be quick about it." I was engaged at the moment upon jewel-work of gold and gems of great importance: besides, I did not care to be ordered about so haughtily ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... rice are raised abundantly. There are mines of gold, silver, quicksilver, copper, lead, tin, ...
— The Philippine Islands 1493-1898, Vol. 4 of 55 - 1576-1582 • Edited by E. H. Blair and J. A. Robertson
... broadly over a pool of purplish quicksilver. A ragged fringe of trees bordered it like a wreath. The waters were quiet—very, very quiet. They scarcely rippled the myriad stars which glittered back mockingly at those above. The air over and above it all was the thin air of the skies, not of the earth. It was as silent ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... That like a feasted Mammoth, leisured and slow, Turned its back on their warped bones. Even thus, Momentous with reproach, her grave regard Made me feel mean, cashiered of rank and right, My limbs that twelve good years had nursed were numbed And all their fidgety quicksilver grew stiff, Novel and fevering hallucinations Invaded my attention. So daylight When shutters are thrown back spreads through a house; As then the dreams and terrors of the night Decamp, so from my mind ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... (which need not be above two or three and thirty inches distant from the line XY) I subdivide into Decimals; then stopping the end F with soft Cement, or soft Wax, I invert the Frame, placing the head downwards, and the Orifice E upwards; and by it, with a small Funnel, I fill the whole Glass with Quicksilver; then by stopping the small Orifice E with my finger, I oftentimes erect and invert the whole Glass and Frame, and thereby free the Quicksilver and Glass from all the bubbles or parcels of lurking Air; then inverting it as before, I fill it top full with clear ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... primarily affected, small doses of quicksilver act in a wonderful and a prodigious manner. How the stomach, when wrong, disturbs the head, is apparent to every one. How a faulty action of the liver disturbs the head is also well known; but the liver, in an especial manner, disturbs ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 274, Saturday, September 22, 1827 • Various
... tried to pierce the intense darkness that was only dispelled by the phosphorescence caused by our movements. I watched the luminous waves that broke over my hand, whose mirror-like surface was spotted with silvery rings. One might have said that we were in a bath of quicksilver. ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... the Savannas of which he had heard so much, and these foreign-looking bungalows were the country homes of the rich Panamanians. Beyond, the bay stretched, in unruffled calm, like a sheet of quicksilver, its bosom dotted with rocky islets, while hidden in the haze to the southward, as he knew, were the historic Pearl Islands, where the early ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... Mr. Boythorn firmly. "Not on any consideration! Eight and forty hours! As to corporations, parishes, vestry-boards, and similar gatherings of jolter-headed clods who assemble to exchange such speeches that, by heaven, they ought to be worked in quicksilver mines for the short remainder of their miserable existence, if it were only to prevent their detestable English from contaminating a language spoken in the presence of the sun—as to those fellows, who meanly take advantage ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... having any distinct perception at all can I have any idea of its essence: which is the cause that it has that particular shining yellowness; a greater weight than anything I know of the same bulk; and a fitness to have its colour changed by the touch of quicksilver. If any one will say, that the real essence and internal constitution, on which these properties depend, is not the figure, size, and arrangement or connexion of its solid parts, but something else, ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... coast-lines are well watered, with tropical vegetation, tropical and sub-tropical fruits; the higher ground has a varied climate; in the N. are great cattle ranches; all over the country the mineral wealth is enormous, gold, silver, copper, iron, sulphur, zinc, quicksilver, and platinum are wrought; coal also exists; the bulk of Mexican exports is of precious metals and ores; there are cotton, paper, glass, and pottery manufactures; trade is chiefly with the United States and Britain; imports being textile fabrics, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... shining metal the waves hardly enter at all, but are thrown back from the surface; and so a steel knife or a silver spoon are very bright, and are clearly seen. Quicksilver is put at the back of looking-glasses because it reflects so many waves. It not only sends back those which come from the sun, but those, too, which come from your face. So, when you see yourself in a looking-glass, the sun-waves have first ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... worship of lovely forms, which seems to rise through contemplation of beauty to adoration of God. One man, brought into intimate relation with an attractive and gifted woman, feels as if he were a vase of fiery quicksilver; another feels as if he were a mirror of divine ideas. The latter is capable of a friendship with her as fervent as love, but without its alloy; the former is not. St. Beuve says of Maurice de Guerin, "The sympathetic friendship of a beautiful woman ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... of gold in California, in 1848, with its other mineral resources, including the Alamada quicksilver mine at San Jose, which is an article of first necessity in working gold or silver ore; and the great silver mines of Nevada, in 1860, the Comstock lode, in which, in ten years, from five to eight hundred millions ...
— The Adventures of a Forty-niner • Daniel Knower
... creeps in to a community. You cannot embody an idea in a form or in an external association without immediately dragging it down, and running the risk of degradation. It is just like a drop of quicksilver which you cannot expose to the air but instantaneously its brightness is dimmed by the scum that forms on its surface. A church as an outward institution is exposed to all the dangers to which other institutions are exposed. And these creep ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... they, shy yet proprietary, clung to his arm and eyed the price ticket. Now $98.50. You couldn't see Nick interested in bedroom sets, in price tickets, in any of those settled, fixed, everyday things. He was fluid, evasive, like quicksilver, though they ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... announcement was running like quicksilver through the school the souvenir toilet set was encased in cotton, packed in the smallest compass, stowed in a wooden box, which was then sewed up in a gunny sacking. This in turn was wrapped in colored paper, tied with bows of pink ribbon and sealed with blue sealing wax stamped ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... head of the sluice-box and gave directions how they should turn off the most of the water, wash down the "toilings" very low, lift up the "riffle," brush down the "apron," and finally set the pan in the lower end of the "sluice-toil" and pour in the quicksilver to gather up and ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various
... was Jack learned to his great surprise. The arms he seized were whipped out of his clutch as if he was trying to lay hold of quicksilver. He grabbed something which proved to be a leg. A swift jerk, and his fingers slipped off the greasy limb. Finally he settled the matter by throwing both arms round the slim, bare waist, and closing upon the rogue with a bear's hug which drove ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... much sulphur, which can be either obtained pure from them, or be recognised by its smell when burning. This gave rise to the sulphur theory, while the presence of mercury was inferred doubtless from the resemblance of the more commonly molten metals, silver, tin, and lead, to quicksilver. The properties of each metal were then put down to the presence of these substances. The list of seven metals is that of the most ancient times—gold, electrum, silver, copper, tin, lead, iron; but it is clearly recognised that electrum is an ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... their discourse. While they were talking, the merry hostess entered; and the last words the captain uttered fell upon her ear, and then followed a reply from Growling, saying that Irishmen were as hard to catch as quicksilver. "Ay, and as hard to keep as any other silver," said the widow; "don't believe what these wild Irish fellows tell you of themselves, they are all mad divils alike—you steady Englishmen are the safe men—and the girls know it. And 'faith, if you try them," ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... him made Court-Jeweller!' [Voltaire,—OEuvres,—lxxiv. 314 ("Letter to Friedrich, February, 1751,"—AFTER Catastrophe).], So; within a week, and before Hirsch is even gone! For men are very porous; weighty secrets oozing out of them, like quicksilver through clay jars. I could guess, Hirsch, by way of galling insolent Ephraim, had blabbed something: and in the course of five days, it has got to the very King,—this Kammerherr Voltaire being such a favorite and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... out toward him. He seemed to be drawing her soul to his unconsciously. Tingling in every nerve, athrob with an emotion new and inexplicable, she drew a long slow breath and turned her head away. A hot shame ran like quicksilver through her veins. She whipped herself with her own scorn. Was she the kind of girl that gave her love to a man who ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... Siberia," one of the boat-pullers said. "They put you into the salt-mines and work you till you die. Never see daylight again. Why, I've heard tell of one fellow that was chained to his mate, and that mate died. And they were both chained together! And if they send you to the quicksilver mines you get salivated. I'd rather ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... sun sank behind the neighboring firs, his reddening light fell on a bright blue streak, which seemed to glow like a stream of quicksilver between two heavy bodies of "piled ice." With the ebb, the narrow, glittering canal began to widen, piercing nearer to the islet, until, heading towards the westward, it lay little more than four miles from the interested spectators. The shadowy pinions of many flocks of water-fowl ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... land, the religion of the natives, their policy, wars, rivers, vessels, or fisheries; what commodities they have, what manufactures, what minerals whether gold, silver, tin, iron, lead, copper or quicksilver. In the first place, in making further landings we should have been troubled by the rainy season, which might have seriously interfered with the use of our muskets, whereas it does no harm to the weapons of the savages; ...
— The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606-1765 • J. E. Heeres
... informed the amazed school that he was there to prevent them playing on the Terrace. No doubt he did his duty according to his light, but neither he nor six constables could have quelled the Seminary any more than you can hold quicksilver in your hand. When he walked with stately step up and down the broad pavement before Bulldog's windows, the Seminary went up and played opposite the Bailie's house, introducing his name into conversation, with opprobrious remarks regarding the stoutness of ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... That gold was the first discovered in the Sierra Nevada, which soon revolutionized the whole country, and actually moved the whole civilized world. About this time (May and June, 1848), far more importance was attached to quicksilver. One mine, the New Almaden, twelve miles south of San Jose, was well known, and was in possession of the agent of a Scotch gentleman named Forties, who at the time was British consul at Tepic, Mexico. Mr. Forties ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... trade there. They take all kinds of merchandise there from China, namely, silks, cottons, china-ware, gunpowder, sulphur, iron, steel, quicksilver, copper, flour, walnuts, chestnuts, biscuits, dates, all sorts of ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... world into which she was going. Next morning the air was cooler, the skies lower and grayer—the big city was close at hand. Then came the water, shaking and sparkling in the early light like a great cauldron of quicksilver, and the wonderful Brooklyn Bridge—a ribbon of twinkling lights tossed out through the mist from the mighty city that rose from that mist as from a fantastic dream; then the picking of a way through screeching little boats and noiseless big ones and ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... agents in China and India, enter into perfidious contracts which commit them to hopeless slavery and send them to wear out their lives in despairing toil amid the pungent and murderous ammoniacal fumes of the guano islands of Chili and Peru. The Rothschilds, too, own the Almaden quicksilver mine and others. ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... dilute and temper the blood, rendering it more fit to answer the great purpose of sustaining life and health. Now, there is nothing that can do this but water. Alcohol cannot do it, nor can turpentine, oil, quicksilver, melted ...
— The Young Mother - Management of Children in Regard to Health • William A. Alcott
... in the fortress, and others were allowed to take their departure. Besides two richly-laden galleons and a dhow with dry goods in the harbour, we found in the fort twenty thousand dollars, a vast quantity of quicksilver, three or four hundred slaves who had been lately landed, and were to have been sent into the interior, and sixty thousand pounds' worth of silk, cables, anchors, and other naval stores,—the whole not being of less value than a ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... commonly believed. Water is nineteen times lighter, and by consequence nineteen times rarer, than gold; and gold is so rare, as very readily, and without the least opposition, to transmit the magnetic effluvia, and easily to admit quicksilver into its pores, and to let water pass through it. From all which we may conclude, that gold has more pores than solid parts, and by consequence that water has above forty times more pores than parts. And he that shall find out an hypothesis, by which water may ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... they passed; moreover, Rand and Gaudylock were not entirely unknown. The giant figure of the one had been seen before upon that road; the other was recognized as a very able scout, hunter, and Indian trader, restless as quicksilver and daring beyond all reason. Men hailed the two cheerily, and asked for the news from Albemarle, and from Kentucky ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... no new form, but rather a consistence or determination of its defluency, and amitteth not its essence, but condition of fluidity. Neither doth there any thing properly conglaciate but water, or watery humidity, for the determination of quicksilver is properly fixation, that of milk coagulation, and that of oil and unctuous bodies only incrassation."—Is this written by Brown ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... man waxeth lean with the fatness of his neighbors. Envy is the daughter of pride, the author of murder and revenge, the beginner of secret sedition and the perpetual tormentor of virtue. Envy is the filthy slime of the soul; a venom, a poison, or quicksilver which consumeth the flesh and drieth up ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... represent the ingenuity, and deceptive or imitative Arts of men, under the type of a Master who builds labyrinths, and makes images of living creatures, for evil purposes, or for none; and pleases himself and the people with idle jointing of toys, and filling of them with quicksilver motion; and brings his child to foolish, remediless catastrophe, in fancying his father's work as good, and strong, and fit to bear sunlight, as if it had been God's work. So, again, they represent the foresight ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... great skill in the art of working metals, especially gold and silver. Besides these precious metals, they had copper, tin, lead, and quicksilver. Figures 65 and 66 show some of the implements used by the Peruvians. Iron was unknown to them in the time of the Incas, although some maintain that they had it in the previous ages, to which belong the ruins at Lake Titicaca. Iron ore was and still ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... to the bosom of the Bocardon family and remained there, its Cousin Quicksilver and its entirely happy and idolized hero, until the indignation of the eminent M. ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... officers of the Navy and other sources, though not so full and minute, confirms the accounts of the commander of our military force in California. It appears also from these reports that mines of quicksilver are found in the vicinity of the gold region. One of them is now being worked, and is believed to be among the most ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... through a valley which divided two of the mountains, and running through the vein of a rock, made a most agreeable murmur with its fall, appealing, as it was dashed and sprinkled into drops, like so much quicksilver.' ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... quantity and intensity during the process to decompose metallic solutions. Sulphur in certain forms had long been known to exercise a prejudicial effect upon the amalgamation of gold, but this had always been attributed to the combination of the sulphur with the quicksilver used. Now, however, it is certain that the sulphurising of the gold must be taken into account. We must remember that the particles of gold in the stone may be enveloped with a film of auriferous sulphide, by which they are protected from the solvent actions ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... sure enough! How in the world did ever she get here? I knew she'd left the Turon, and that old Mullockson had dropped a lot of his money in a big mining company he'd helped to float, and that never turned out gold enough to pay for the quicksilver in the first crushing. We'd heard afterwards that he'd died and she'd married again; but I never expected to see her brought down so low as this—not but what we'd known many a woman that started on the diggings with silks and satins and a big house and plate-glass windows brought down to a cotton ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... really mine. I do not own it if it is possible that I shall lose it. And so with profound meaning our Lord speaks about 'that which is another's' in comparison with 'that which is your own.' It is another's because it passes, like quicksilver under pressure, from hand to hand, and no man really holds it, but it leaps away from his grasp. And if a man retains it all his days, still, according to the grim old proverb, 'shrouds have no pockets,' and when he dies his hands open, or sometimes they clutch together, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... little sunshine through, to close again before the dim evening thickened over the waters. Sometimes the moon looked through the ragged curtain of vapors; one night it seemed to shine till morning, and shook a path of quicksilver from the horizon to the ship. Through every change, after she had left the fog behind, the steamer drove on with the pulse of her engines (that stopped no more than a man's heart stops) in a course which had nothing to mark it but the spread ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... malkontenta. Query demando. Query cxu? Quest sercxo. Quest informigxo. Question demando. Question demandi. Question (doubt) dubi. Questionable duba. Quibble cxikani. Quick (adj.) rapida. Quick (adv.) rapide. Quick (living) viva. Quicken vivigi. Quicken rapidigi. Quicksilver hidrargo. Quiescence ripozo, kvieteco. Quiet kvieta. Quiet kvietigi. Quietude trankvileco. Quill plumo. Quilt litkovrilo. Quintal centfunto. Quip sarkasmo. Quit lasi. Quit kvita. Quite tute. Quittance ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... acid with which it is charged has no effect. The jar is charged with sulphuric acid, (common oil of vitriol) diluted in eight parts its bulk of water. The zinc plates of the battery have been amalgamated with quicksilver, and when the battery is set into the jar of acid there should be no action percieved upon them when the poles F, G, are not in contact. Should any action be percieved, it indicates imperfect amalgamation; this ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... fight, one of the young painters observed distinctly how one of the fellows, taking Marianna in his arms (for she had fainted), made off to the gate, whilst Signor Pasquale ran after him with incredible swiftness, as if he had got quicksilver in his legs. At the same time, by the light of the torches, he caught a glimpse of something gleaming, clinging to his mantle and whimpering; ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... Sickness: the title would be Ahmad the Calamity. Al-Zaybak (the Quicksilver)Mercury Ali Hasan "Shuuman"a pestilent fellow. We shall meet all these worthies again and again: see the Adventures of Mercury Ali of Cairo, Night dccviii., a sequel to The Rogueries of Dalilah, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... the tail of a raging lion on the mantel-piece, has reduced the noble beast to the short-cut condition of a Scotch colley. A broken candle has perversely fallen the only way in which it could have done any damage, and has thrown the quicksilver on the back of a large looking-glass into an alarming state of eruption. The return of "cracked and broken" presents a fearful list of smashage and fracture: the best tea-set is rendered unfit for active service, being minus two saucers, a cup-handle, and a milk-jug; the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 6, 1841, • Various
... and the duties upon exports should be annulled, and especially the heavy export duty on coin and bullion, so as to cheapen and facilitate the purchase of imports and permit the precious metals, untaxed, to flow out freely from Mexico into general circulation. Quicksilver and machinery for working the mines of precious metals in Mexico, for the same reasons, should also be admitted duty free, which, with the measures above indicated, would largely increase the production and circulation of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... door, outside of which hung an instrument called a thermometer. I guess you have seen them often enough. A thermometer is a glass tube, fastened to a piece of wood or perhaps tin, and inside is a thin, shiny column. This column is mercury, or quicksilver. Some thermometers have, instead of mercury, alcohol, colored red, so it can easily ...
— Daddy Takes Us Skating • Howard R. Garis
... aloft to the empty canvas and quested on over the sea in the hope of wind-ruffles on the water. But all was glassy calm, each great sea, of all the orderly procession of great seas, heaving up, round-topped and mountainous, like so much quicksilver. ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... threatening sky lay the glittering lake. Its surface of quicksilver was streaked here and there with black shadows—the track of the wind-gusts racing across it. The trees were rustling in the wind, making a sound like a ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... drift-deposits. To the right, in the foreground, three men are working a long-tom, which, in point of time, followed the rocker. One of the miners is keeping the dirt stirred up in the tom, under which is set a riffle-box with quicksilver to catch the gold. In the background miners are hand or shovel sluicing, in which the riffle-box of the long-tom is ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... saying, she changed her shape into that of a lion, and throwing the queen across her back, she went down the ten thousand steps that led to her palace. The lion had reached the centre of the earth before she stopped in front of a house, lighted with lamps, and built on the edge of a lake of quicksilver. In this lake various huge monsters might be seen playing or fighting—the queen did not know which—and around flew rooks and ravens, uttering dismal croaks. In the distance was a mountain down whose sides waters slowly coursed—these were the tears of unhappy ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Various
... else. I reckon perhaps he likely was, for he was splendidly educated, with rows on rows of books in his cabin, and a cyclopediar six feet long. The mate said he knew everything in it up to R, not to speak of working lunars in a saucer of quicksilver, and reckonizing squid by ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... of the ocean. He has established its equilibrium, but upon the express condition (which, however, has been amply proved to exist) that the mean density of the fluid mass is less than the mean density of the earth. Everything else remaining the same, if we substituted an ocean of quicksilver for the actual ocean, this stability would disappear. The fluid would frequently overflow its boundaries, to ravage continents even to the height of the snowy peaks which lose ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... him a piece of comb, and he smoothed his hair by guess, a desperate character, such as he was accounted by the officer, not being allowed the luxury of a mirror. One might lick the quicksilver from the back of a mirror, or open an artery with a fragment of it, or even pound the glass and swallow it. Almost anything was nicer than hanging, ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... been the defence of a fortalice, of which no vestiges now remained, but which was said to have been inhabited by the same doughty hero we have now alluded to. Brown endeavoured to make some acquaintance with the children, but "the rogues fled from him like quicksilver"—though the two eldest stood peeping when they had got to some distance. The traveller then turned his course towards the hill, crossing the foresaid swamp by a range of stepping-stones, neither the broadest nor steadiest ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... this course be not adopted, gold to the amount of many millions of dollars will pass yearly to other countries, to enrich their merchants and capitalists. Before leaving the subject of mines, I will mention that on my return from the Sacramento, I touched at New Almoder, the quicksilver mine of Mr. Alexander Forbes, Consul of Her Britannic Majesty at Tepic. This mine is in a spur of the mountains, 1000 feet above the level of the Bay of San Francisco, and is distant in a southern direction from the Puebla ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... the rain came down as if determined to drive the quicksilver entirely out of my poor friend. Mr. Jaffrey sat bolt upright at the breakfast-table, looking as woe-begone as a bust of Dante, and retired to his chamber the moment the meal was finished. As the day advanced, the wind veered round to the northeast, and settled itself down to work. It ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... minutest particles were driven through a fine wire screen which fitted close around the battery, and were washed into great tubs warmed by super-heated steam—amalgamating pans, they are called. The mass of pulp in the pans was kept constantly stirred up by revolving "mullers." A quantity of quicksilver was kept always in the battery, and this seized some of the liberated gold and silver particles and held on to them; quicksilver was shaken in a fine shower into the pans, also, about every half hour, through a buckskin sack. Quantities of coarse ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... quicksilver mines of the world are those of Almaden in central Spain, which are owned and operated by the Spanish government. This government, after reserving a small amount for domestic use, sells all the ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... instability, unstable equilibrium; vacillation &c. (irresolution) 605; fluctuation, vicissitude; alternation &c. (oscillation) 314. restlessness &c. adj. fidgets, disquiet; disquietude, inquietude; unrest; agitation &c. 315. moon, Proteus, chameleon, quicksilver, shifting sands, weathercock, harlequin, Cynthia of the minute, April showers[obs3]; wheel of Fortune; transientness &c. 111[obs3]. V. fluctuate, vary, waver, flounder, flicker, flitter, flit, flutter, shift, shuffle, shake, totter, tremble, vacillate, wamble[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... been strewn with cotton wool. If he followed close to pick her up, Wych Hazel took no notice and gave him no chance. In like manner she did her work with an executive force and gravity which made the clerks into quicksilver and drove one or two old admirers whom she met nearly frantic. They hailed her by her old name; and Hazel got rid of them she hardly knew how, except that it was in a blaze of discomfort for herself. And after that she kept ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... with terror, not daring to make the slightest movement, gazing down upon it. Although so long it was not a thick snake, and as it moved on over the white ground it had the appearance of a coal-black current flowing past me—a current not of water or other liquid but of some such element as quicksilver moving on in a rope-like stream. At last it vanished, and turning I fled from the ground, thinking that never again would I venture into or near that frightfully dangerous spot in ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... allowed of Young's poetry, that it abounds in thought, but without much accuracy or selection. When he lays hold of an illustration, he pursues it beyond expectation, sometimes happily, as in his parallel of Quicksilver with Pleasure[192] which I have heard repeated at the approbation by a lady, of whose praise he would have been justly proud, and which is very ingenious, very subtile, and almost exact: but sometimes he is less lucky, as when, in his Night Thoughts, having it dropped into ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... began again in a little while, whitening the water; the depth of it blackened to the cloud but the surface frothed like quicksilver under the steady patter. The awning was up and they were safe against a wetting, but Peter saw the girl shiver in the slight chill, and looking at her more attentively he perceived that she might recently have been ill. The likeness to her mother ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... worship had been gathered, smoothed down the swollen arches of veinery that fretted across either temple's dome, looked one moment into the censers of incense that burned always with emotionary fires, flashed out a little superabundant flame into the cold quicksilver, turned the key, fastening our two selves in, examined the integrity of the latch leading into the dressing-room beyond, threw up the window-sash,—the same one that Mr. Axtell had lifted to look out into the night for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... plate; watching while the insensately vicious intelligences within the sphere brought its every force to bear upon another and larger sphere which was now so close as to be plainly visible. Like a gigantic drop of quicksilver this second globe appeared—its smooth and highly-polished surface one enormous, perfect, spherical mirror. Watching tensely, they saw flash out that frightful plane of seething energy, with the effects of which they were all too familiar, ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith |
