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Sills   /sɪlz/   Listen
Sills

noun
1.
United States operatic soprano (born in 1929).  Synonyms: Belle Miriam Silverman, Beverly Sills.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Sills" Quotes from Famous Books



... thatched roof, and barns made of flat stone. There are three rooms, with earthen floors, crooked ceilings, and windows that lift up and down instead of opening outwards.... The walls are covered with rifles, pistols, sabres and whips. The chest of drawers and the window-sills are littered with cartridges, instruments for mending rifles, tins of gunpowder, and bags of shot. The furniture is lame and the veneer is coming off it. I have to sleep on a consumptive sofa, very hard, and not upholstered ... Ash-trays and ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov

... certain amount of annoying publicity was inevitable. Such was the famous Galligan case, which occurred some three or four years after my marriage. Aloysius Galligan was a brakeman, and his legs had become paralyzed as the result of an accident that was the result of defective sills on a freight car. He had sued, and been awarded damages of $15,000. To the amazement and indignation of Miller Gorse, the Supreme Court, to which the Railroad had appealed, affirmed the decision. It wasn't the single payment of $15,000 that the Railroad cared about, of course; a precedent might ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... pests, have usually managed to cope with them by adopting counter-measures. In mosquito-ridden countries people sleep under mosquito-nets, thus baffling those nocturnal blood-suckers; in parts of Ceylon infested with snakes, sharpened zig-zag snake-boards are fastened to the window-sills, which prove extremely painful to intruding reptiles. The Chinese, as a safeguard against their devils, have adopted the peculiar "cocked hat" corner to their roofs, which we see reproduced in so much of Chippendale's work. It is obvious that, with an ordinary roof, ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton

... for the passer-by as the dweller within. The most tasteful front-yard fence was never an agreeable object of study to me; the most elaborate ornaments, acorn-tops, or what not, soon wearied and disgusted me. Bring your sills up to the very edge of the swamp, then, (though it may not be the best place for a dry cellar,) so that there be no access on that side to citizens. Front-yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various

... transparent, and you ought to contract the habit in the evenings of walking outside so that madame may see you come right up to the window just out of absent-mindedness. In a word, with regard to windows, let the sills be so narrow that even a sack of flour cannot be set up ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac

... reached a little shop at the other end of the place, which stood nearly opposite to the churchyard, Bathsheba heard singing inside the church, and she knew that the singers were practising. She crossed the road, opened the gate, and entered the graveyard, the high sills of the church windows effectually screening her from the eyes of those gathered within. Her stealthy walk was to the nook wherein Troy had worked at planting flowers upon Fanny Robin's grave, and she came to the ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy

... shutters were not shut at this house, although each of the blinds was drawn exactly a quarter of the way down. Jimmy saw a large tortoise-shell cat lying on one of the window sills, whilst a black cat watched it ...
— The Little Clown • Thomas Cobb

... rooms on one floor and a single room above. Everything about it suggested straitened means, and yet the girls noticed that the small windows were clean and hung with fresh dimity curtains, and that there were little flower boxes on the sills inside. ...
— Nan Sherwood at Palm Beach - Or Strange Adventures Among The Orange Groves • Annie Roe Carr

... ridges trending north-west comprise porphyritic basalts, andesite, and, near Port Luchdach, brownish trachyte. Near the base of the volcanic series intrusive igneous rocks of Carboniferous age appear in the form of sills and bosses, as, for instance, the oval mass of olivine-basalt on Suidhe Hill. Remnants of raised beaches are conspicuous in Bute. One of the well-known localities for arctic shelly clays occurs at Kilchattan brick-works, where the dark red clay rests on tough boulder-clay and may ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... fellowship with everything that moved and lived; knew every bird and beast with a friendly acquaintanceship. The squirrels that inhabited the trees in the front yard were won in time by her blandishments to come and perch on her window-sills, and thence, by trains of nuts adroitly laid, to disport themselves on the shining cherry tea-table that stood between the windows; and we youngsters used to sit entranced with delight as they gamboled and waved their ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... again, and again the same hoard of books. There were so many books that even the window-sills were piled up with them, and a dim and dusty gleam of light barely penetrated. An ominous silence tormented her. Behind the counter at her side stood a student and two boys, strangely erect; they ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub

... there had been some sharp street fighting, as attested by shelled buildings and sandbag barricades yet resting on housetops and in window sills, we encountered in the first stage of our journey no considerable evidences of havoc until late in the afternoon, when we reached Dinant. I do not understand why the contemporary chronicles of events did not give ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb

... all sorts of places. Stuffed down in the cushions of chairs and sofas, on mantels and brackets, under rugs and footstools, on window sills, on the floor, on the chandeliers, they seemed to be everywhere. All over the house the children scampered, filling their baskets ...
— Marjorie's Busy Days • Carolyn Wells

... have said, it was early morning. Servant-maids, kneeling on the steps or standing on the window-sills, were going on with the Saturday scrubbing. Notwithstanding the keen air, they made a display of robust arms bare to the shoulder, tanned and sunburned, red with that astonishing vermilion that we see in some of Rubens' paintings, which is the joint result of the biting of the north ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various

... me, Polly did not forget the wild birds outside, which flew about in the big evergreen trees near the garden gate. She showed her thoughtfulness for the little creatures by strewing bread crumbs for them on the window sills on snowy days. She often gathered up the tablecloth after the housemaid had removed the breakfast dishes and, running out under the trees, would shake it vigorously that her wild pets might get all the little pieces of food that fell. Not a bird came ...
— Dickey Downy - The Autobiography of a Bird • Virginia Sharpe Patterson

... ground plan. The sills of the front or glass part rest on brick piers, to allow the roots of the vines to run out, the border being both in and outside the house. A wooden partition on the north side of the walk divides the house into two unequal parts, the north being used for a ...
— Woodward's Graperies and Horticultural Buildings • George E. Woodward

... with a garment. He was himself, more literally speaking, clothed in an old ulster, much frayed about the wrists and skirts, and polished across the middle of the back by rubbing against counters and window-sills. He was bearded like a patriarch, and he wore a rusty fur cap pulled down over his ears, though it was not very cold; its peak rested on the point of his nose, so that he had to throw his head ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells

... looked into the rooms and they were as they had been left—tables laid.... Here, too, I saw a table laid for the evening meal with a bedstead fallen from the upper floor astraddle across it. The insides of the houses were coughed into their windows, basket-chairs hanging to the sills, and fire-irons. ...
— A Diary Without Dates • Enid Bagnold

... as ground he tills— Decay and death lie 'neath his sills. The storm that beats, And solar heats, Have helped ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus

... red cotton; enough to cover a mattress for the high-backed settle, for long curtains at the windows, and for cushions to the rocking-chairs. She knotted white fringes for the table-covers and curtains, painted the inside of the fireplace red, put some pots of scarlet geraniums on the window-sills, filled a wall-pocket with ferns and tacked it over an ugly spot in the plastering, edged her work-basket with a tufted trimming of scarlet wool, and made an elaborate photograph case of white crash and red cotton that stretched the entire length of the old-fashioned mantelshelf, and held ...
— A Village Stradivarius • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... the centres of the ancient Quichua civilization was around Lake Titicaca. The buildings here, as throughout Peru, were all constructed of hewn stone, and had doors and windows with posts, sills, and ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly

... pleasant boat-shop, close on the shore of a little arm of the sea. The tide ebbs and flows before its wide double doors, and sometimes rises so high as to flow the sills; then you have to walk across in front of the shop on a plank, laid upon iron ballast. There is a little wharf or pier close at hand, the outer end of which is always going to be repaired. There are two or three other shops near by, and about them is the pleasant ...
— By The Sea - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin

... consisted of an old claw-footed sofa on which at least six people could sit comfortably at one time, a wardrobe, some book-shelves, and a hammock swung across one corner. There may have been a chair or two, but the wide window-sills made pleasanter resting-places. Here in the summer time you looked out into the soft greenness of the maple trees, getting glimpses of the quiet street, but when the branches were bare a fine outlook was to be had all over the neighborhood, and you saw how big houses ...
— The Story of the Big Front Door • Mary Finley Leonard

... been the first in Poitou to unfurl the white flag. It is true that they did not go back from their high resolves, or shrink from the bloody effects of their brave enterprise, but their talk now was of suffering and death; they whispered together in twos and threes, at their own door-sills, instead of shouting in the market-place. Cathelineau was dead, and Foret was dead, and they were the gallantest of their townsmen. They had now also heard that everything had been staked on a great battle, and that ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope

... the nurses had gone to their dinner again, Pet was leaning out of her nursery window, with her two elbows on the sills and her face between her hands, and she was gazing down on the charming gardens below, and away off over the fields and hills of her beautiful kingdom of Goldenlands. "Where do the poor live, I wonder?" she thought; ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various

... that it looked as if there had been a fire in the neighborhood, and this room the only shelter for miles around. Even Pawson's law books were completely hidden by the overflow and so were the tables, chairs, and shelves, together with the two wide window-sills. ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith

... spread its spotless snows o'er hills and dales; the wild winds wailed; the woodman's axe echoed amidst the woods; the song birds fled; the dauntless redbreast twittered on the window sills; the cawing rooks wended their weary way in solemn flight. The spring again, like a young bashful maid, came smiling upon old Winter's track; the field's looked gay again; and trees seemed vieing which could first be drest in verdant ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley

... was packed as it never was before. Every seat was crowded. The aisles were full of men who stood patiently for more than three hours; the window-sills had their occupants, every foot of standing room was taken, and in the rear of the galleries men seemed to hang in swarms like bees. Such was the view from the stage. The stage itself and the boxes were filled with ladies, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... could glimpse the dark outlines of the great stone house. It looked cold and formidable. It was set far back from the rising road, a long way back from the massive gate posts beside the tiny gate house where flickering lights burned on the sills of three little mullioned windows. They drove through the gates, across the flagstone-paved drive of the stable yard and came to a slow stop under the inky shadows of the wooden gallery that was built across the front of the house. A woman was hurrying down the ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke

... rail fence, partly concealed by jimson-weeds and briers, to the open space where a dwelling-house had once stood, evidently a spacious mansion, if we might judge from the ruined chimneys that were still standing, and the brick pillars on which the sills rested. The house itself, we had been informed, had fallen a victim to ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt

... peak in the Cheviot range. It has been described by Dr Teall as an augite-biotite-granite having strong affinities with the augite-bearing granitites of Laveline and Oberbruck in the Vosges. Both the granite and the surrounding lavas are traversed by dykes arid sills of intermediate and acid types ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various

... some one in the house was up, for Roberta heard a light footfall outside her door. There followed a soft sound which drew her eyes that way; she saw something white appear beneath the door—in the old house the sills were not tight. The white rectangle ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond

... river-boat by a towline, and a small boy, not much bigger than Jan, was driving her. On the deck of the boat there was a little cabin with white curtains in the tiny windows and two red geraniums in pots standing on the sills. From a clothesline hitched to the rigging there fluttered a row of little shirts, and seated on a box near by there was a fat, friendly looking woman with two small children playing by her side. The father of the family was busy with ...
— The Belgian Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins

... Foudland Hills towards the Tap o' Noth near Gartly. The metamorphic rocks have been invaded by igneous materials, some before, and by far the larger series after the folding of the strata. The basic types of the former are represented by the sills of epidiorite and hornblende gneiss in Glen Muick and Glen Callater, which have been permeated by granite and pegmatite in veins and lenticles, often foliated. The later granites subsequent to the plication of the schists have a wide distribution on the Ben Macdhui and Ben ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... time. Much the same obstacles confronted the pioneer in the pine forests of Mississippi as in the hard woods of the Northwest. Either as squatter or bona fide purchaser he had with the aid of his neighbors hewed out a clearing, or single-handed girdled the trees, and laid the sills of his log cabin. A "raising" or "frolic" was one of the few opportunities for social intercourse in the hard life of the frontiersman. Between the stumps of his clearing he planted his first crop of Indian corn; and what the soil did not yield for his sustenance, he supplied with his trusty ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson

... inches through on the back. Then the backs of the ties were hewed flat, making them about three square, when they were ready to be used on the road. They were placed back down across the bed pieces and spiked fast to them. They were laid about three feet apart the length of the road. Over those sills, in the upper edge of the ties, they cut out two gains. In those gains they laid two stringers running directly over the sleepers. These stringers were sawed out about four by six inches square. They were laid in the gains of the ties, spiked ...
— The Bark Covered House • William Nowlin

... slowly to his home. Already the Rue des Soeurs was crowded. The long street rang with music and laughter, and instead of blinds covering the windows merry women leaned upon the sills and laughed at ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various

... gunpowder. Pikes are fabricated; fifty thousand of them, in six-and-thirty hours: judge whether the Black-aproned have been idle. Dig trenches, unpave the streets, ye others, assiduous, man and maid; cram the earth in barrel-barricades, at each of them a volunteer sentry; pile the whinstones in window-sills and upper rooms. Have scalding pitch, at least boiling water ready, ye weak old women, to pour it and dash it on Royal-Allemand, with your old skinny arms: your shrill curses along with it will not be wanting!—Patrols ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... above the soil, and the house was entered up three outside steps. The door was crowned by a closed arch, of which the keystone bore a female head and some time-eaten arabesques. Three windows, their sills about five feet from the ground, belonged to a small set of rooms looking out on the Rue du Tourniquet, whence they derived their light. These windows were protected by strong iron bars, very wide apart, and ending below in an outward curve like the ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac

... in heavy, tangled swaths, The ripe June-grass is wanton blown; Snails slime the untrodden threshold-stone, Along the sills hang drowsy moths. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various

... house that charmed him. It was of whitewashed adobe, two stories in height. Entirely around the second story was a balcony of wood, ascended by an open stairway. Wooden shutters were opened at the windows, the sills of which ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson

... qualifications for human society, an absolute honesty of mind. "We select granite," he says, "for the underpinning of our houses and barns; we build fences of stone; but we do not ourselves rest on an underpinning of granite truth, the lowest primitive rock. Our sills are rotten.... In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the postoffice. You may depend upon it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry

... there is a frame with a very fine wire netting, which prevents pedestrians from looking into the rooms. Behind the wire netting, in the divisions between the netting and the framework of the window, there are tables ornamented with china, glass, flowers, statuettes and other trifles. On the stone sills of windows which open into the street there is a row of little flower-pots. In the middle or at one side of the window-sill there is a curved iron hook which supports two movable mirrors joined like the backs of a book, surmounted by ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis

... whose birds were singing gay, * Whose sills their wealth and pride were wont display! Till came the lover wailing for his love, * And found thy doors wide open to the way; Would Heaven I knew where is my soul that erst * Was homed in house, whose owners fared away! 'Twas stored with all things bright and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... like that, of course," said Marian feebly. "It will be your own room, and you are a grown-up lady who can do as you please. I suppose it is only children who don't dare to do things like moving pictures and putting flower-pots on the window-sills when they are ...
— Little Maid Marian • Amy E. Blanchard

... Court House the throng, slight at first, was rapidly increasing. The building was not large, and from end to end, and on the high window-sills beneath the long green blinds, the people pushed and shoved and stood a-tiptoe. It was yet early morning, and for some unexplained reason the Federalist ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston

... always with an apprehensive look at that long line of sleeping houses, whose shutters—with a hole in the centre of each—seemed to stare down upon the sand. No smoke, no flames, no sign of human occupance was there: the sea-gull and the pigeon pecked together upon the door-steps or the window-sills, or perched upon the ridges of the high-pitched roofs, and a heron stalked at the outlet of a gutter that ran down the street. The sea, quiet and dull, the east turned from crimson to grey; the mountains streaming ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro

... daughter of the Sauviats sitting at her open window, sewing, embroidering, or pricking the needle through the canvas of her worsted-work, with a look that was often dreamy. Her head was vividly defined among the flowers which poetized the brown and crumbling sills of her casement windows with their leaded panes. Sometimes the reflection of the red damask window-curtains added to the effect of that head, already so highly colored; like a crimson flower she glowed in the aerial garden so carefully trained upon ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac

... cold afternoon; and in fur tippet and muff, amidst the snow that lay everywhere on roofs and window-sills and pavements, and the wind that blew cold as it blows in few places besides, she looked, with her bright colour and shining eyes, like life itself laughing at death. But not many of those she met carried the like victory in their ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... or eight sickening minutes, we did. He was master, and Jarvis put down the helm and obeyed. Twice we were heaved, tilted and slid sideways down, like folks perched on the window-sills of a falling house. Then she came fair about and rode to it, every crest flinging more or less of spray over us, hour after ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... Deacon inquired of the village folk Where he could find the strongest oak, That couldn't be split nor bent nor broke,— That was for spokes and floor and sills; He sent for lancewood to make the thills; The crossbars were ash, from the straightest trees, The panels of white-wood, that cuts like cheese, But lasts like iron for things like these; The hubs of logs from the "Settler's ellum,"— Last of its timber,—they could n't sell 'em, ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... one big living-room with a veranda running around it and with big doors opening from three sides upon the veranda so that the room itself was just like out-of-doors. One end of the veranda was enclosed in glass and used as a dining-room. Flowers in boxes were on the sills of the windows and over them the sun streamed through chintz-curtained windows. Upstairs were two rooms over the living-rooms, and opening from these were screened sleeping porches, with rows of little cots. Peggy explained that the rooms were used as dressing-rooms and that each ...
— Keineth • Jane D. Abbott

... true, the domestic servant must of necessity cease to exist. Most persons, however, cannot yet see how "public utilities" will be able to do all of our work. We may send the washing out, but we cannot send out the beds to be made, the eggs to be boiled, or the pictures, chairs, and window sills to be dusted. The table must be set at home, and the dishes washed there, until we approach the day of communal eating places, which, as we all know, will be difficult to utilize for infants and the aged, for invalids, and for the vast army of those who are ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson

... Mills that morning he trundled himself along Elm Street to Neil's lodgings in the hope of finding that youth and telling him of his good fortune. But the windows of the first floor front study were wide open, the curtains were hanging out over the sills, and from within came the sound of the broom and clouds of dust. Sydney turned his tricycle about in disappointment and retraced his path, through Elm Lane, by the court-house with its tall white pillars and green shutters, across Washington Street, the wheels of his vehicle rustling through ...
— Behind the Line • Ralph Henry Barbour

... gotten cold. Colds were prevalent at this time of the year. "'These are the days when the Genius of the weather sits in mournful meditation on the threshold,' as Mr. Dickens tells us," he added. "I presume he sits on the sills of open windows, also." ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln

... since disappeared—and up the straight, sandy lane to the open space where a dwelling-house had once stood. But the house had fallen a victim to the fortunes of war, and nothing remained of it except the brick pillars upon which the sills had rested. We alighted, and walked about the place for a while; but on Annie's complaining of weariness I led the way back to the yard, where a pine log, lying under a spreading elm, formed a shady though somewhat hard seat. One end of ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various

... and motor boats, penetrating to the heart of the flood in boats even before the waters receded, and afterwards on foot. The upper floors of houses not torn from their foundations look all right, but it fairly makes you sick to see the waves of turbid water lapping at second floor sills, with tangled tree branches and broken furniture floating about. It seems horrible—it is horrible—to think of that yellow flood pouring into pleasant rooms where a few hours before the family sat in peace and fancied security—roaring over the threshold, ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall

... hills, when everything in nature seems drowsily awaiting the night. They thought there was an unusual hush in the manner of those they met. Men talked on the corners or in groups in the roadway with unaccustomed earnestness. Women leaned across window sills and chatted across intervening spaces with an air of anxiety; the very dogs in the street appeared to be subdued. At the trader's there was not the usual small gathering of loungers, squatted sociably around on cracker ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton

... children are, sure enough. They was dressed alike, then and always; fed alike, and reared alike, every human way of it. Doctored alike, too, poor young ones! One time when they was babies the wrong one got the medicine, and after that Ma Sills always dosed 'em both, whichever was sick. 'There's goin' to be no partiality!' she says; 'the Lord made them children off the same last, and they're goin' to stay the same!' Why, Miss Hands, she wouldn't so much as allow they could think ...
— The Wooing of Calvin Parks • Laura E. Richards

... open-mouthed, with his bowl. The room had lost its former barren aspect. There was now a carpet, while muslin shades softened the glare of the Colorado sun and the view of the sterile hills. Geraniums bloomed on the window-sills, and some young cottonwoods grew greenly at the door. The scarlet Navajo blanket, which had been Lola's inheritance from the prairie-schooner, was spread across a couch, and gave a final note of warmth and comfort to the low room, now plastered in adobe from ceiling to ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead

... a slight fall of snow was feathering the sills and frames of the schoolroom windows, he stood at his black board, crayon in hand, about to commence with a class; when, reading in the countenances of those boys that there was something wrong, and that they seemed in alarm for him, he turned his ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens

... Americana) (Larch, Black Larch, American Larch, Hacmatac). Heartwood light brown in color, sapwood nearly white, coarse conspicuous grain, compact structure, annual rings pronounced. Wood heavy, hard, very strong, durable in contact with the soil. Used for railway ties, fence posts, sills, ship timbers, telegraph poles, flagstaffs. Medium-sized tree, often covering swamps, in which case it is smaller and of poor quality. Maine to ...
— Seasoning of Wood • Joseph B. Wagner

... on the inspiration. The highest limbs capable of bearing weight were still some three feet below the window-sills. Still, the boys could hear plainly what was going on, and could see into the room ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White

... memory, some flippant Senator [Hammond] wished to taunt the people of this country by calling them 'the mudsills of society,' he paid them ignorantly a true praise; for good men are as the green plain of the earth is, as the rocks and the beds of the rivers are, the foundation and flooring and sills of the State."—R. W. EMERSON, Atlantic Monthly, January, ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve

... used is of heart sugar pine, one and a half to two inches thick, and 12 to 18 inches wide. Where the boards join, pine battens three inches wide by one and a half thick cover the seam. Sills, posts, and caps support and strengthen the flume every four feet. The posts are mortised into the caps and sills. The sills extend about 20 inches beyond the posts, and to them side braces are nailed to strengthen the structure. This extension of the sill timbers ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various

... passage along which we have to make our way. Over-head, an inextricable confusion of rugged shutters, and iron balconies and chimney flues, pushed out on brackets to save room, and arched windows with projecting sills of Istrian stone, and gleams of green leaves here and there where a fig-tree branch escapes over a lower wall from some inner cortile, leading the eye up to the narrow stream of blue sky high over all. On each ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin

... size of the cabin, twelve feet wide and twenty feet long, was marked out on the site on which it was to rise, and four logs were laid to define the foundation. These were the sills of the new house. At each end of every log two notches were cut, one on the under side and one on the upper, to fit into similar notches cut in the log below, and in that which was to be placed on top. So each corner was formed by these interlacing and overlapping ends. The logs were ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks

... thrown out on to another close-shaven piece of lawn, and by its suggestion of a distant sophisticated order of things disturbed the homely impression left by the untouched ivy-grown walls, the unpretending porch, and wide slate window-sills of the front. And evidently the line of sheds standing level with the dwelling-house no longer sheltered the animals, the carts, or the tools which make the small capital of a Westmoreland farmer. The windows in them were new, the doors fresh painted ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... it in hand; but when she had finished her work—when the carpet was down, and the neat, white shades were up at the windows; when the books which used to be on the floor and table, and chairs, and mantel, and window sills, and anywhere, were neatly arranged in the very respectable shelves which Andy made and James had painted; when the little sewing chair designed for Ethelyn was put before one window, and Richard's ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes

... do no harm to insert posts between lintels and sills where there are piers or antae; for where the lintels and beams have received the load of the walls, they may sag in the middle, and gradually undermine and destroy the walls. But when there are posts set up underneath and wedged ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius

... morning hour all was still, and the only sign of life was a knot of little barefoot girls gathered within its narrow shade, and each carrying an infant relative. Into this place the parson and M. St.-Ange entered, the little nurses jumping up from the sills ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)

... great afternoon arrived, the hall was crammed. The little girls were packed as tightly as sardines. A long line of them squatted on the floor in front of the first row, and others sat on the window sills, the latter positions having been scrambled ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil

... birds warbled for joyance whilere And whose sills were resplendent with glory and pride, Till the lover came to thee, bemooning himself For his passion, and found thy doors open and wide, Would I knew where my soul is, my soul that was late In a house, where its masters no longer abide! Therein were all things ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous

... led her into a large, low-ceiled, home-like room, whose broad window sills were abloom with fresh-cut flowers. Lucile thought that only the sun was needed to make it the cheeriest room ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield

... not done yet," said Ransom. "But at Bull Run rates - 'sixty pieces of splendid cannon' taken, as Mr. Davis says, and how many killed and prisoners? - the mud-sills will not be able to keep it up very long. Absurd! to think that those Northern shopkeepers could make head against a few ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell

... fresh supplies. All the bakeries of the town were commandeered by the new government for the benefit of the troops; but like the five loaves of the gospel story, "What were they among so many?" I saw the men, like swarms of bees, clustering around the doors and clambering on to the window-sills of these establishments, enjoying apparently the smell of the baking bread, and cherishing the vain hope of being able to purchase a loaf when at last the ovens ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry

... "Cad Sills is flesh and blood of the Old Roke, I'm agreed," said Deep-water Peter. "She's a seafaring woman, that's certain. Next door to ending in a fish's tail, too, sometimes I think, when I see her carrying on—Maybe you've seen her sporting with the horse-shoe ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... joint, Fig. 264, is made by joining together with flush surfaces the ends of two timbers in such a way as to enable them to resist compression, as in No. 4; tension, as in No. 5; both, as in No. 6, where the scarf is tabled; or cross strain as in No. 7. No. 4 is used in house sills and in splicing out short posts, Nos. 5 and 6 in open frame work. No. 7 with or without the fish-plate, is used in boats and canoes, and is sometimes called a boat-builder's joint, to distinguish it from No. 4, a carpenter's ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes

... very nice kitchen, with gas, hot water and cold, ranges and gas-stoves, and two great cupboards with glass doors through which all sorts of beautiful serving-dishes shone. Green ivies filled the window-cases, and geraniums lined the window-sills. A fine old parrot from the Andes inhabited a large cage with an open door, hanging over the main window, where the wire netting let in the ...
— Little Sky-High - The Surprising Doings of Washee-Washee-Wang • Hezekiah Butterworth

... ammonia, followed by much the same rubbing process employed in cleaning silver, with a final polishing with soft paper, tissue preferably, which gives the finest possible shine to any vitreous surface. If there are inside or outside blinds, they must be well brushed, and casings and sills which are much soiled washed, before the glass is cleaned. The requirements for successful window cleaning are a third of a pail of hot water containing a little ammonia or borax, plenty of clean, soft cloths free from ...
— The Complete Home • Various

... door swung to, closing hermetically on the stone sills, without any one seeing who had opened or shut it. It seemed as if the bolts re-entered their sockets of their own act. Some of these mechanisms, the inventions of ancient intimidation, still exist ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... to soak for mending his snowshoes. He ran the net he had set at the edge of the eddy for late silvers and took out two fish. Old Tom had pretty well cleaned up the mice in the cellar hole, but they were still burrowing around the sills of the lean-to. Ed took a shovel and opened up a hole so Tom could get under the lean-to floor. He got out his needles, palm, thread, and wax; and mended ...
— Cat and Mouse • Ralph Williams

... pretty walk. There were no birds twittering in the trees, or cuckoos. You could not hear the gentle roar of the ocean, and what flowers there were, were in pots on the window-sills. ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed

... fell on his ears and a company of Foot marched down into the moonlight patch facing him and grounded arms with a clatter. They were men of his own regiment, and they formed up in the moonlight like a company of ghosts. One or two shots were fired at them, low down, from the sills of a line of doorways to his right; but no citizen showed himself and no one appeared to be hit. And ever from the direction of the Trinidad came the low roar of combat and the high notes ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... the wall as if part of it, his arms widespread, his fingers feeling every inch for hold, and now he was mounting faster as if sure of himself, confident that he could cling. If he could keep hold until his hand touched the first row of window-sills, he had a chance. A long red arm reached up; groped painfully; the finger-tips touched the end of a blind. There was dead silence except for the roar of the wind-driven fire while the mason pawed along the window-sill for safe lodgment; ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick

... The window-sills were too high for a little dog to reach, and there was no chair near. He walked restlessly around the office, stopping at intervals to sit down and thoughtfully contemplate his feet, which were much too large for the rest of him. ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed

... minutes, Bobbie carried up her tea to the big bare room that they called Mother's workshop. It had hardly any furniture. Just a table and a chair and a rug. But always big pots of flowers on the window-sills and on the mantelpiece. The children saw to that. And from the three long uncurtained windows the beautiful stretch of meadow and moorland, the far violet of the hills, and the unchanging changefulness ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit

... was handsomely furnished with rich, carved, teak-wood furniture after the Manchu fashion, with one or two large, comfortable, leather-covered easy chairs of foreign make. Clocks sat upon the tables and window-sills, and fine Swiss watches hung on the walls. Beautiful jade and other rich Chinese ornaments were arranged in a tasteful way about the room. On the wall hung a picture painted by the Empress Dowager, a gift to the Prince ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland

... sous toward it; each one, in fact, was disposing according to his fancy of the money of his majesty Henri III. One might judge of the character of each man by the aspect of his little lodging. Some loved flowers, and displayed on their window-sills some fading rose or geranium; others had, like the king, a taste for pictures; others had introduced a niece or housekeeper; and M. d'Epernon had told M. de Loignac privately to shut his eyes on these things. At eight o'clock ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas

... enough for the full tensile strength to be brought into play before the fastenings shear off longitudinally. This is not the case with metals, and as a result they are used in almost all places where tensile strength is particularly needed, even though the remainder of the structure, such as sills, beams, joists, posts, and flooring, may be of wood. Thus in a wooden truss bridge the tension ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record

... three gilt chairs, over the new chintz-covered easy chair and the gray velure sofa—over everything everywhere, was the familiar coating of smoke grime. It had worked into every fibre of the lace curtains, dingying them to an unpleasant gray; it lay on the window-sills and it dimmed the glass panes; it covered the walls, covered the ceiling, and was smeared darker and thicker in all corners. Yet here was no fault of housewifery; the curse could not be lifted, as the ingrained smudges permanent on the once white woodwork proved. ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington

... arrangement of the floor framing is well shown in the photograph on page 132. The side sills are of 6-inch channels, which are reinforced inside and out by white oak timbers. The center sills are 5-inch I-beams, faced on both sides with Southern pine. The end sills are also of steel shapes, securely attached ...
— The New York Subway - Its Construction and Equipment • Anonymous

... arrow-slit from which I watched. Even then she must have slipped back if she had been left to herself, for the sill sloped, and the stone was finely smooth; but I shot out my hand and gripped hers by the wrist, and instantly she clambered up with both knees on the sills, and her fingers twined round to grip my wrist ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne

... could see the young ladies and gentlemen enjoying themselves; going out for drives in the evenings and quite late at nights, playing the piano or the violin, and singing and dancing. He saw the ladies sitting with the young students on the window sills, engaged in animated conversation, and then going in pairs to walk the dark avenue of lime trees, lit up only by streaks of moonlight. He saw the servants running about with food and drink, he saw ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy

... the spring for water. And when he filled his bucket the wind sloshed half of it out before he could reach the puny shelter of his station. If he had ever wondered why that station was banked solid to the window-sills with rocks, he wondered no more when he felt that gale pushing and tugging at it and shrieking as if it were enraged because it could not pick the station up bodily and fling it ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower

... Germans downstairs, and at the street entrance propelled them forth with a few hearty kicks. This pleasurable duty had hardly been performed when they were rejoined by Tom, who had smashed the German rifles over the window sills, putting them very effectively ...
— Army Boys on German Soil • Homer Randall

... man might walk ten miles by the light of the public lamps, while centuries afterwards there was not a single public lamp in London streets. Its avenues were solidly paved, while centuries afterwards the people of Paris, on rainy days, stepped from their door-sills into mud ankle-deep. The dwellings were marked by beauty and luxury, while the people of Europe, as a rule in that semi-barbaric period, dwelt in miserable huts, dressed in leather, and lived on the ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris

... PORT-SILLS. In ship-building, pieces of timber put horizontally between the framing to form the top and bottom of ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... searing wind; and the atmosphere was a brew of all the sour odours, the offensive breaths, given off by the two-score odd people crushed within its walls. In spite of precautions the dust had got in: it lay thick on sills, desks and papers, gritted between the teeth, made the ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson

... the fishing-village there is the same sort of furniture, on all the window-sills stand the same kinds of flowers, in all the corner-cupboards are the same collections of sea-shells and coral, on all the walls hang the same pictures. And it is a fixed old custom that all the inhabitants of the fishing-village live the same life. Since Mattsson, the pilot, had grown old, ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof

... folks, although they were very poor. The little house was white-washed, the paling neatly mended, the bit of a yard cleaned of all its rubbish. Muslin curtains appeared in the windows, and rows of cans, with blossoming plants, adorned the sills. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... dwelling was so changed that no one would have recognised it. Louhi had cast a magic spell over it, and all the beams and door and window-sills were made from bones that gleamed like ivory; the windows were adorned with trout-scales, and the fires were set in flowers; and the seats and tables and floors were of gold and silver and copper, with marble hearth-stones and silken carpets on the floors. Louhi bade Ilmarinen welcome when ...
— Finnish Legends for English Children • R. Eivind

... came, the town hall was crammed—men standing on all the window sills; and so many could not get in that Malcolm proposed they should occupy the square in front. A fisherman in garb and gesture, not the less a gentleman and a marquis, he stood on the steps of the town hall and spoke to his people. They received him ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald

... rights of a free people. There was only one other passenger in the car besides myself when this young man entered. He evidently expected to find nothing but sympathy when he got away from the "mud sills" engaged in compelling a "free people" to pull down a flag they adored. He turned to me saying: "Things have come to a —— pretty pass when a free people can't choose their own flag. Where I came from if a man dares to say a word in ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant

... to come; days in which windows stood open, and pots of plants were set out on the window-sills; days alternating as in the long, New England spring they always do, with bleak intervals of sharp winds and cold sea-storms; yet giving sweet anticipation tenderly, as a mother gives beforehand that which she cannot find in her heart to keep back till the birthday. That is the charm of Nature ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... always been rather fond of going over empty houses; there's a sort of fascination about the desolate empty rooms, with the nails sticking in the walls, and the dust thick upon the window-sills. But I didn't enjoy going over Number 20, Paul Street. I had hardly put my foot inside the passage before I noticed a queer, heavy feeling about the air of the house. Of course all empty houses are stuffy, ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen

... over and examined the windows. They were both locked inside; and there were no marks of any sort on the sills. ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle

... showroom gave forth an earthy, moldy odor like that of a disturbed grave. Its shutters, for the first time in perhaps a year, were open; the mud daubers that had built in the crevices between shutters and sills, fancying they would never be disturbed, were buzzing crossly about their ruined homes. The four men were seated, each with his legs crossed, and each wearing the funereal expression befitting a ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips

... good standing, I never realised that there were so many bees in the world. When they had woven a flashing haze from one end of the desert street to the other, there remained reserves enough to form knops and pendules on all window-sills and gutter-ends, without diminishing the multitudes in the three oozing bonnet-boxes, or drawing on the Fourth (Railway) Battalion in charge of the station below. The prisoners in the waiting-rooms and other places there cried out a great ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling

... citizens of different height, but same number of inches around the heart, was not yet as uncomfortable to his figure as those specimens of raiment, self-measured, that are railroaded to you by transcontinental tailors with a suit case, suspenders, sills handkerchief and pearl studs as a bonus. Without money—as a poet should be—but with the ardor of an astronomer discovering a new star in the chorus of the milky way, or a man who has seen ink suddenly flow from his fountain pen, Raggles ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry

... deep window recesses. It had evidently been partitioned off from the main hall; for the wall, ceiling and floor made an exact triangle. At one end of the place was a table. Round this was a group of men deeply engrossed in some sort of conference. Sitting on the window sills and lounging round the box stove behind the table were others of our rival's service. I saw at once it would be difficult to have access to Hamilton. He was lying on a stretcher within talking range of the table and had one arm in a sling. Now, I hold it is harder for the ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... Hintock House—still deserted, and still blankly confronting with its sightless shuttered windows the surrounding foliage and slopes. Grace was tired, and they approached the wall, and sat together on one of the stone sills—still warm with the sun that had been pouring its rays ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... cash, and she's offered me thirty hundred cash, which is all the place's worth, for it'll take another ten hundred to straighten out the house, with new winder frames, floorin' 'nd plaster 'nd shingles, beams and sills all bein' sound,—when the truth is I don't wish ter sell nohow, yet can't afford to hold! I don't see light noway 'nd I'm feelin' another turn comin' when I was nigh ready ter git about agin to Miss'ss Penrose flower poles. O lordy! lordy! I ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright

... now left aboard the Richard but her dead. To them I gave the good old ship for their coffin, and in her they found a sublime sepulcher. She rolled heavily in the long swell, her gun-deck awash to the port-sills, settled slowly by the head, and sank peacefully in about forty fathoms. The ensign-gaff, shot away in action, had been fished and put in place, soon after firing ceased, and our torn and tattered flag was left flying when we abandoned her. As she plunged down by ...
— The Little Book of the Flag • Eva March Tappan

... groaned, "what an ass I am!" And he got out of his cab in front of a very new limestone basement house with red geraniums blooming on the window-sills, and let ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers

... for considerable distances. They are foliated in places, the planes of schistosity being more or less parallel with the planes of bedding in the schists. The older acid rocks are represented by the sills of granite and augen-gneiss occurring west of Portsoy, south of Fordyce and near Keith, while the older basic rocks are illustrated by the belt of gabbro, epidiorite and hornblende-schist which stretches southwards ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... was immediately returned. Soon after I went on shore, accompanied by Captain Furneaux, the two Mr Forsters, and Mr Wales. At our landing, we were received by a gentleman from the vice-consul, Mr Sills, who conducted us to the house of Mr Loughnans, the most considerable English merchant in the place. This gentleman not only obtained leave for Mr Forster to search the island for plants, but procured us every other thing we wanted, and insisted on our ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook

... in earnest. Two carpenters appeared and laid the sills for an addition to the house, twenty feet long by eighteen feet wide, just behind the kitchen, which was in the L. The room that they built had a door opening directly into the kitchen. The floor, I remember, was of maple and the ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens

... in the town. He wondered much at this, for it was a good deal earlier than the smiths were wont to be up. Then the king recognised the man, and, lo! there was Thorkell Eyjolfson taking the measure of all the largest timber, crossbeams, sills, and pillars. The king turned at once thither, and said: "What now, Thorkell, do you mean after these measurements to shape the church timber which you are taking to Iceland?" "Yes, in truth, sire," said Thorkell. Then ...
— Laxdaela Saga - Translated from the Icelandic • Anonymous

... such a clean, shining little kitchen, with the scoured deal table, chairs and cupboard, and the firelight from the grate winked so on pewter mugs, copper kettle, willow-patterned plates and diamond panes, that Bobby blinked too. Flowers bloomed in pots on the casement sills, and a little brown skylark sang, fluttering as if it would soar, in a gilded cage. After the morning meal Mr. Brown lighted his pipe and put on his bonnet to go out again, when he bethought him that Bobby might be needing something ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson

... which was vast and imposing in size and appearance, had a floor of pure white marble. The mantels and window-sills were of white onyx, with delicate vinings of pink and green. The floor was strewn with richly colored mats and rugs. Luxurious sofas and chairs comprised the only furniture. Each corner contained a piece of fine statuary. From the centre of the ceiling depended a large gold basin of beautiful ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley

... halve these sills together. But I'm wantin' to make sure that the halves will be made reverse, so's they'll fit. An' I don't seem to be able to fix it clear in ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer

... clover in brown earthern jars filled the corners of the living-room, and in the bay window, where the ceremony took place, tall graceful sprays of Queen Anne's lace arranged with plenty of green, made an artistic background. Glass vases filled with it stood on the window sills and on the floor, the tops of the floor bouquets ...
— Entertaining Made Easy • Emily Rose Burt

... week before Christmas Edison's train jumped the track near Utica, a station on the line. Four old Michigan Central cars with rotten sills collapsed in the ditch and went all to pieces, distributing figs, raisins, dates, and candies all over the track and the vicinity. Hating to see so much waste, Edison tried to save all he could by eating it on the spot, but as a result "our family doctor had the time of his life with ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin

... May was here. And on the seventeenth of May the repairs on the "Cap'n Abner place" were completed. The last carpenter had gone, leaving his shavings and chips behind him. The last painter had spilled his last splash of paint on the sprouting grass beneath the spotless white window sills. The last paper-hanger had departed. Winnie S. was loading into what he called a "truck wagon" the excelsior and bagging in which the final consignment of new furniture had been wrapped during its journey ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln

... cases has arrived, is one which should appeal to a painter. Clouds of steam fill the air, and through the fog you perceive a fine melee of figures, some half dressed, some statuesquely nude, towelling themselves or preparing to wash, or shaving at bits of mirror propped on the window-sills. Pink bodies wallow voluptuously in the deep porcelain-ware tubs, which are of the shape and superb dimensions of Egyptian sarcophagi. Sometimes a patient with a wounded arm, unable to help himself, is being soaped and sponged by an ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir

... with the river by means of an entrance tide-lock, 180 feet long and 45 feet wide, with three pairs of gates, admitting either one very large or two small vessels at a time. The lock-entrance and the sills under the two middle lock-gates were fixed at the depth of ten feet under the level of low water of ordinary spring tides. The formation of these dock-entrances was a work of much difficulty, demanding great skill on the part of the engineer. It was necessary to ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles

... day. This was the first time he had come to it by night. In daylight it was a small and picturesque ruin washed by the laughing sea, lonely but scarcely sad. Leaping from its dark and crumbling walls the fisher-boys often plunged into the depths below; or they lay upon the broad sills of the gaping window-spaces to dry themselves in the sun. Men came with rods and lines to fish from its deserted apartments, through which, when rough weather was at hand, the screaming sea-birds flew. The waves played frivolously enough in its recesses. And their ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens

... barren except for abundant crinoids and smaller organisms. It is polished in large slabs at Ashford, where crinoidal, black and "rosewood" marbles are produced. Volcanic rocks, locally called "Toadstone," are represented in the limestones by intrusive sills and flows of dolerite and by necks of agglomerate, notably near Tideswell, Millersdale and Matlock. Beds and nodules of chert are abundant in the upper parts of the limestone; at Bakewell it is quarried for use in the Potteries. At ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various

... and about the city, one is impressed by the manifest love of flowers exhibited in the front yards of the dwelling-houses, and in the pleasant gardens attached to suburban villas, as well as by the blooming plants displayed on the window-sills of the homes of all classes. The admirably chosen spot for a cemetery, on the rising ground behind the city, is also finely ornamented with choice trees and flowering shrubs, among which are pines, cypresses, Australian gum trees (evergreen), mimosas, and many other blooming plants, well arranged ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou

... short time there was no longer any floor to the principal room of the hacienda, the joists being piled up on one side, and those who were in it stood now a couple of feet lower with the window-sills just on a level with ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn

... red letters across the road was a house with traces of a pleasant ornament below the sills of the windows, a design of grapes and vine. Someone had stuck up a wooden boot on ...
— Unhappy Far-Off Things • Lord Dunsany

... at him through the deep-splayed windows, and tapped a welcome on the diamond panes. He had, however, no ear for this salute. Nor did he eye with delight the flowering geraniums that clustered so thickly in the pots filling the sills. Nor did he even care for the great bars of sunlight that fell in golden splendour across his bed, causing the old dog to wink, and sneeze, and smile beneath their mellowing beams. No, these were nothing to him; indeed, they never had been—he had ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather

... and caps similar to those of the chancel arch. It is lighted by three plain window openings, the central one being enlarged. In the exterior a string-course runs round the building immediately below the windows, of which it forms the sills, and is enriched with a carved floral pattern. The chief feature is the main entrance door in a porch, projecting to the south, the archway of which is supported on two plain pillars with Norman capitals. There are over this door the remains of a line, concentric with the ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story

... runs into Grand Avenue like a small tributary, a pall of smoke descended thick as a veil; and every morning, from off her second-story window-sills, Mrs. Shongut swept tiny dancing balls of soot; and one day Miss Rena Shongut's neat rim of tenderly tended ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst

... hand. When she awoke one morning, she found the window-sills filled with potted geraniums, her favorite flowers, and a beautiful canary bird hanging above them in a pretty golden cage. The bird exactly resembled the one which she had had at home. She thanked her father in the ...
— After Long Years and Other Stories • Translated from the German by Sophie A. Miller and Agnes M. Dunne

... and cut places in them for the bridge timbers. It was a piece of excellent judgment, since the great stones could not be broken from the abutment, and they were mighty enough to bear the weight of a mountain. The bridge rests on three sills, each a log that, unhewn, must have taken a dozen oxen to drag it. I have often wondered at the magnitude of this labour; how these logs were thrown across the boiling water by any engines known to the early man. It was a work for Pharaoh. ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post

... a good house in a street too narrow for carriages. Visitors must come in sedan chairs and there must be some place, aside from the street, where the chairs and chairmen could wait for the guests. This old fashioned house had sitting-rooms on the ground floor, and on the sills of the windows were flower-pots, in which, on this occasion, some asters and other autumn ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau

... them come here?" muses Frank aloud. "Why, because it's so safe, Cousin Lucy. At home, you know, they'd have to be playing upon the sills of fourth-floor windows, and here they're out of the way and can't hurt themselves. Why, Cousin Lucy, this is their park,— their Public Garden, their Bois de Boulogne, their Cascine. And look at their gloomy little faces! ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells

... one-horse farmer's corn crib is about the size of the larger Filipino home. And it is made, of course, not of ordinary lumber, but of bamboo—the ever-serviceable bamboo—which, as my readers probably know, strongly resembles the fishing-pole reeds that grow on our river banks. The sills, sleepers, and scaffolding of the house are made of larger bamboo trunks, six inches or less in diameter; the split trunks form the floor; the sides are of split bamboo material somewhat like that of which we make our hamper ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe

... breakwater in consummate disrepair, much apparatus for drying nets, and a score or so of fishers' houses. Hard by, a few shards of ruined castle overhang the sea, a few vaults, and one tall gable honeycombed with windows. The snow lay on the beach to the tide-mark. It was daubed on to the sills of the ruin; it roosted in the crannies of the rock like white sea-birds; even on outlying reefs there would be a little cock of snow, like a toy lighthouse. Everything was grey and white in a cold and dolorous sort of shepherd's plaid. In the profound silence, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... was still open, the sister was still looking out. There was a glimpse of lofty houses, open windows, grapevines rich in purple clusters on the walls, and boxes of mignonette and gayer flowers upon the window-sills. Miss Foster asked Bessie if she would like to see what of the asylum was shown; and though Bessie's taste did not incline to painful studies, before she had the decision to refuse she found herself inside the gates and the sister was reciting her ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr

... of the piers that carry the eastern arch large marble frames of considerable beauty are inserted. The sills are carved and rest on two short columns; two slender pilasters of verd antique form the sides; and above them is a flat cornice enriched with overhanging leaves of acanthus and a small bust in the centre. Within the frames is a large marble slab. Dr. Freshfield thinks these ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen

... deferentially if he might see the library. 'It is open, and you can go up,' said a monk, pointing to the ladder that led to an open loft. The traveller describes the filthy and doorless chamber, the grass growing on the window-sills, and the books and benches white with dust. He took down book after book, and they all seemed to be ancient and valuable; but from some of them whole sheets had been taken out, and in others the margins of the vellum had been cut off. All in tears at this miserable ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton

... yard, a few chickens, and often a shed for the cow, that is off on her daily climb over the neighboring hills. Through the black pall of shale, a few vegetables struggle feebly to the light; in the corners of the palings, are hollyhocks and four-o'clocks; and, on window-sills, rows of battered tin cans, resplendent in blue and yellow labels, are the homes of verbenas and geraniums, in sickly bloom. Now and then, a back door in the dreary block is distinguished by an arbored ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites

... is made of what is known as two-by-fours, that is, pieces of lumber two inches thick by four inches wide. The plans used here are from my book "The Jack of All Trades," but the dimensions may be altered to suit your convenience. The sills, which are four inches by four inches, are also supposed to be made by nailing two two-by-fours together. First stake out your foundation and see that the corners are square, that is, at right angles, ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard



Words linked to "Sills" :   soprano, Beverly Sills, Belle Miriam Silverman



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