"Slate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... They are all of the same era, and possibly the work of the same hand, being among the most interesting of our Norman fonts. The material of which they are made has never been settled, some authorities defining it as Tournai marble, others as basalt, and yet others as nothing more than slate. ...
— Winchester • Sidney Heath
... Rain drummed against the slate roof of Peter's house and reverberated through the rooms to where Mirestone and the Dutchman sat by the fire in silence. Mirestone broke the still atmosphere by putting forth a question that Peter somehow knew would be coming ...
— The White Feather Hex • Don Peterson
... the manuscript, or substituted a wrong one, were alike worthy of remark. And when at last, endeavouring to communicate with the deaf gentleman by means of the finger alphabet, with which he constructed such words as are unknown in any civilised or savage language, he took up a slate and wrote in large text, one word in a line, the question, 'How - do - you - like - it?' - when he did this, and handing it over the table awaited the reply, with a countenance only brightened and improved by his great excitement, even Mr. Miles relaxed, and could not forbear looking ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... despite its tiny size, had no uniform system of roofing; in some spots tiles were substituted by strips of tin with heavy rocks holding them in place and the interstices chinked with straw; in others, the slate was mortared together with mud; in still others, sheets of zinc ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... unmarked byways running through a distressingly poor-looking and apparently quite thinly inhabited country. After a deal of studying the map and the infrequent sign-boards we brought up in a desolate-looking little village, merely a row of gray stone, slate-roofed houses on either side of the way, and devoid of a single touch of the picturesque which so often atones for the poverty of the English cottages. No plot of shrubbery or flower-garden broke the gray monotony ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... crammed down its throat. He thought he was doing his duty, but he nearly killed the boy, for a fever gave the poor child a sad holiday, and when he recovered, the overtasked brain gave out, and Billy's mind was like a slate over which a sponge ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... river are very high, so that the enormous accession which the volume of water receives during inundation scarcely affects the breadth, but merely increases the depth. The rock forming the banks is of a dark-coloured slate, polished by the force of the stream, so as to shine like black marble. Between these, "one clear blue stream shot past." The depth of the Indus here is thirty feet in the lowest state, and between sixty and seventy in the highest, and runs at the rate of six miles an hour. There is a ford at some ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... routine, scratching slate pencils, gum under desks, smells—all the set up palette of the schoolroom was not to her a ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells
... charm of the strong river in pool and stream, of the steep rich bank that it rushes or lingers by, of the green and heathery hills beyond, or the bare slopes where the blue slate breaks through among the dark old thorn-trees, remnants of the forest. It is all homely and all haunted, and, if a Tweedside fisher might have his desire, he would sleep the long sleep in the little churchyard that lies lonely ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... when all was quiet under the Dullarg stars, Jamie Wardhaugh and three brave spirits climbed to the rigging of the Old Tory's house, tore down his yellow flag, thrust the staff down the chimney, and set a slate across the aperture. ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... prime of life. His son Otto, a great boy, fourteen years old, who bore a strong resemblance to him, and who was destined to also become famous as a fisherman, sat near him. At present he was occupied in solving the mysteries of the rule of three, covering a little slate with figures, although his large hands looked as if they would be much more at ...
— The Waif of the "Cynthia" • Andre Laurie and Jules Verne
... reflected a little, with an apparent consciousness that he meant more than he asked. "Well, she's losing flesh," she presently replied; and Ransom turned away, not encouraged, and feeling that, no doubt, the little doctress had better go back to her office-slate. ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... or common cards, might be still more convenient. The difficulty is, how to reconcile figures which must have a very sensible breadth to our ideas of a mathematical line, which, as it has neither breadth nor thickness, will revolt more at these than at simple lines drawn on paper or slate. If, after reflecting on this proposition, you would prefer having them made here, lay your commands on me, ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... into the oratorical, Burlman Reynolds proceeded to give his opinions upon the subject, having already expressed his feelings. "Miss Jemimy," with an impressive gesture, "dare's reason in all things. Now, ef I had l'arnin', could read in a book, write on paper, figger on a slate, count up money, tel de names of de mont's, an' alwus say how ol' I is when axed, an' all sich things like white folks, w'y den, dare'd be some sense in a great he-nigger like me doin' what I please, gwine whar I please—free-papers in ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... table, at which he was playing with some dirty cards, making card houses and the like,—the materials having been furnished him, probably, that they might figure in the report as evidences of indulgence. He did not look up from the table as the commissioners entered. He was in a slate-coloured dress, bareheaded; the room was reported as clean, the bed in good condition, the linen fresh; his clothes were also reported as new; but, in spite of all these assertions, it is well known that his bed had not been made for months, that ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... world was a vast parallelogram; that on the outside was a strip of land, like the frame of a common slate; that then there was a strip of water, and in the middle a great piece of land; that Adam and Eve lived on the outer strip; that their descendants, with the exception of the Noah family, were drowned by a flood on this outer strip; that the ark finally rested on the middle ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... pate Is blue, is heavenly blue with slate; She "wings the midway air" elate, As magpie, crow, or chough; White paint her modish visage smears, Yellow and pointed are her ears, No pendent portico appears Dangling beneath, for Whitbread's shears {51} ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... motioned her to follow him, casting a curious glance back at her. They passed up into the long stone corridors, tier over tier, with the lines of square iron doors, each with its slate dangling outside, with a name scrawled on it. He stopped at one, opened it and drew back, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... may be described as a broad area of igneous rocks bordered by two lines of Lower Cambrian sandstones and slates. Over the surface of the igneous rocks are scattered occasional outliers of the Lower Cambrian slate; but far the greater part of the surface of the belt is covered by the igneous rocks. The belt as a whole may be regarded as an anticline, the igneous rocks constituting the core, the Lower Cambrian the flanks, and the Silurian and Newark the adjoining zones. The ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... adjacent to a small brick Gothic church. This is the church of St. Francis, a Roman Catholic Mission Church, in connection with St. Mary of the Angels, in Westmoreland Road. It was built about thirty-three years ago by Rev. D. Rawes at his own cost, and contains some very beautiful panels on slate by Westlake representing the Stations of the Cross, which were the first done on that material in England. There is also a painting by the same artist on the pulpit. The baptistery, added later, was designed by Bentley, the late architect of the new cathedral at Westminster. The schools adjacent ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... table nearest to the window, with a little knitting-basket on her lap, and a wheezing, blear-eyed old spaniel crouched at her feet, there sat an elderly woman, wearing a black net cap and a black silk gown, and having slate-coloured mittens on her hands. Her iron-grey hair hung in heavy bands on either side of her face—her dark eyes looked straight forward, with a hard, defiant, implacable stare. She had full square cheeks, a long, firm chin, and thick, sensual, colourless lips. Her figure was stout ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... I had fallen on the trees in full blossom, and filled my arms with the sweet, resplendent flowers. I could not believe I was in our cold, northern Essex, which, in the dreary season when I pass its slate-colored, unpainted farm-houses, and huge, square, windy, 'squire-built "mansions," looks as brown and unvegetating as an old rug with its patterns all trodden out and the colored fringe worn ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... sets in between seven and eight a.m., when the stony, sandy world has been thoroughly sunned. The short divide beyond the far bank of the Sirr is strewn with glittering mica-schist that takes the forms of tree-trunks and rotten wood; and with dark purple-blue fragments of clay-slate looking as if they had been worked. A counterslope of the same material, which makes excellent path-metal placed us in the Wady Rubayyigh ("the Little Rbigh" or "Green-grown Spring"), a short and proportionally very broad branch draining to the Sirr. Here large ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... tassels. On her person, she wore a tight-sleeved jacket, of dark red flowered satin, covered with hundreds of butterflies, embroidered in gold, interspersed with flowers. Over all, she had a variegated stiff-silk pelisse, lined with slate-blue ermine; while her nether garments consisted of a jupe of kingfisher-colour foreign ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... afterwards this horror. She shook away from her last vision of him but it returned again and again, hanging about her over her shoulder like an ill-omened messenger. And all the life between seemed to be suddenly wiped away as a sponge wipes figures off a slate. After the death of her mother she had made the best of her circumstances. There had been many days when life had been unpleasant, and in the last year, as his miserliness had grown upon him, his ill-temper at ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... shut off. To do this, it was necessary to find strips of wire for making short-circuiting chains. A few of these strips they cut from the fencing back of the tennis courts. Most of them, however, were taken from the steep prison roof where they were used to hold the slate tiles in place. Nearly all of these wires were drawn out, so that if a whirlwind had suddenly swept across the country, that roof would have ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... on." Presently my sister with angelic patience would show him a mistake. "Oh, don't interfere—you make it all mixed up in my head." Then he would be let alone for a little. Then he would put the slate down with an expression of despair and resignation; if my sister took no notice he would say: "I thought Mamma told you to help me in my sums? How can I understand without having it explained to me?" It was impossible to get the last word; indeed he used to give my sister ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... ancient, grass-grown burying ground, with slate gravestones and weather-worn tombs. There were a few new stones, gleaming white and conspicuous, but only a few. Galusha's trained eye, trained by his unusual pastime of college days, saw at once ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... strange forms, he found an old and familiar acquaintance. Before breakfast he brought in several birds; a dark colored flycatcher, with white forehead and rump and two very long tail-feathers; a black and slate-blue tanager; a black ant-thrush with a concealed white spot on its back, at the base of the neck, and its dull-colored mate; and other birds which he believed to be new to science, but whose relationships with any of our birds are so remote that it ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... roll of the sea Was shattered, resonant, beneath a moon That, silent, seemed to hearken. And every hour In autumn, night or day, large apples fell Without rebound to earth, upon the sod There mounded greenly by the large slate slab In the old orchard-lot near Reuben's door. But there were changes: after some long years Reuben and Grace beheld a brave young boy Bearing their double life abroad in one— Beginning new the world, and bringing hopes That ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... reprehensible for the Hebrew magicians to play the same trick? It was prestidigitation for all concerned—only the side of the children of Israel was espoused in the recital. Therefore, do not talk of black or white magic. There is only one true magic. And it is not slate-writing, toe-joint snapping, fortune-telling, or the vending of charms. Magic, too, is an art—like other arts. This is forgotten by the majority of its practitioners. Hence the sordid vulgarity of the average mind-reader and humbugging ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... and slate quarries, and there was word o' coal in Benbecula. And there's the iron ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... the birthplace of Huw Morris, the great Royalist poet, whose pungent satires of King Charles's foes ran like wild fire through Wales. Through a maze of tangled shrubs, in pouring rain, I was led to his chair—a mouldering stone slab forming the seat, and a large slate stone the back, with the poet's initials cut in it. I uncovered, and said in the best Welsh I could command, "Shade of Huw Morris, a Saxon has come to this place to pay that respect to true genius which he is ever ready to pay." I then sat down in the chair, and commenced repeating the verses ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... going to slate me for bringing in people to bewitch the child, and I had to turn the lot of them out to finish the ...
— In Wicklow and West Kerry • John M. Synge
... himself, and among these was a rural beauty, by name Almira Quimby. She was only sixteen, a romantic child with an exquisite complexion, big melting blue eyes, and curling ringlets. She lived, said other village maids, "on Sylvanus Cobb and slate-pencils." She devoured with avidity every bit of sensational trash procurable in the public or post-office libraries, and made eyes at the tall, strong school-master,—the best rider, reaper, thresher in the field, and best reader and ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... cheerless prospect he saw through the haze of rain. Back into the distance ran a stretch of slate-gray water, flecked and seamed by the white tops of little splashing waves, for a nipping wind blew down the lake. On either side rose low hills, dotted here and there with somber and curiously rigid trees. They were not large, and though from a distance they looked much the ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... knew that Enid Henson and myself were engaged; he could see what a danger to his schemes it would be to have a man like myself in the family. Then the second Rembrandt turned up, and there was his chance for wiping me off the slate. After that came the terrible family scandal between Lord Littimer and his wife. I cannot tell you anything of that, because I cannot speak with definite authority. But you could judge of the effect of it on ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... feeding out from the mouth of a wide gulch. He knew they were Indian ponies by their size, their variegated colors, and their general unkemptness. They presently spied him and went galloping off up the gulch, and Casey followed until he spied a thin bluish ribbon of smoke wavering up toward the slate-black clouds. ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... had suspected in his own mind that there existed a creature, somewhat like a mouse, somewhat like a red flower-pot, which glided around during the night-watches to sharpen slate-pencils, smooth out dog-ears from school-books, erase lead-pencil marks, polish up marbles, straighten kite strings, put the "suck" into brick-suckers, and otherwise make itself useful. If there were not such a creature, there ought to be, and Elias became ...
— Harper's Young People, March 23, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... down, and the two soldiers continued their game, while Concepcion sat beside them and slowly, lovingly sharpened his knife on a piece of slate which he carried in ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... who had braved hitherto the severities of their lot for his sake. He parted with all his followers except O'Neil. Donald Macleod shed tears on bidding him farewell. Macleod was taken prisoner a few days afterwards in Benbecula, by Lieutenant Allan Macdonald, of Knock, in Slate, in the island of Skye. He was put on board the Furnace,[279] and brought down to the cabin before General Campbell, who examined him minutely. The General asked him "if he had been along with the Pretender?" "Yes," said Donald, "I was along with that young gentleman, and I winna deny ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... exclamation was a very broad-faced and rosy-cheeked little girl, coarsely clad, with a pile of books and a slate under her arm, who had suddenly entered ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... my belief in educational matters "that the slate should be put into the child's hands as soon as the book is," you of course had your slate, and commenced making figures and ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... England might have notice of what had happened though a proper channel, Governor Johnson drew up a slate of the whole proceedings, and transmitted it them. He told them that the colonists had long laboured under difficulties and hardships, by debts contracted in the Indian war, and in protecting their trade against pirates; that an unhappy difference ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... nation madly devoted to the arts. When Orpheus Crisodd's Devilgrass Symphony was first played in Carnegie Hall an audience three times as great as that admitted had to be accommodated outside with loudspeakers and when the awesome crescendo of horns, drums, and broken crockery rubbed over slate surfaces announced the climax of the sixth movement, the crowds wept. Even for Mozart the hall was ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... count. They learn by using balls set in a frame. The frame is like the frame of a slate. The balls slide on wires. With the balls they ...
— Big People and Little People of Other Lands • Edward R. Shaw
... is a vice not so frequent."—Id. "The cutting of evergreens in the shape of animals, is very ancient."—Id. "The keeping of juries without meat, drink, or fire, can be accounted for only on the same idea."—Webster cor. "The writing of the verbs at length on his slate, will be a very useful exercise."—Beck cor. "The avoiding of them is not an object of any moment."—Sheridan cor. "Comparison is the increasing or decreasing of the signification of a word by degrees."—Brit. Gram. cor. "Comparison is ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... little boy's legs in front of him with a rooster foot tell he squalled out loud, an' he th'owed spitballs, an' he make him some watermelon teeth, an' he paint a chicken light red an' tuck it to the teacher fer a dodo, an' he put cotton in his pants 'fore he got licked, an' he drawed the teacher on a slate. That's what you go to school fer is to have fun, an' I sho' is goin' to have fun when I goes, an' I ain't goin' to take no bulldozin' offer ...
— Miss Minerva and William Green Hill • Frances Boyd Calhoun
... order, on the grass, under a rotunda of this magnificent foliage. Some were cross-legged, bawling Ba, Be, Bi; others, with their knees for a table, seemed engraving rather than writing, upon a wooden tablet, the size of a common slate. One or two, who appeared to be more advanced in their studies, were furnished with a copy-book, an expensive article in that place. Some were busy at arithmetic, while, every moment, whack went the rod upon the crown of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 272, Saturday, September 8, 1827 • Various
... a crisp, cold night outside; starry, wintry, but open weather, and clear; the ground would be just right on the morrow, neither hard as the slate of a billiard-table, nor wet as the slush of a quagmire. Forest King slept steadily on in his warm and spacious box, dreaming doubtless of days of victory, cub-hunting in the reedy October woods and pastures, of the ringing notes of the horn, and the sweet music of the pack, and the glorious ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... multertude of the grate unwashed, and ther was quietness in the Hall, wile vishuns of wiskey baths, free lunch stands, and clene paper collars, past befor thir eyes. Then ther was a loud cheir, and Joe Gilley wos nommernated by acclamashun. The rest of the ticket was put on the slate, by order of John Kelley, and the delergates adjourned to the Buster offis, were the temperance edittur regaled em, with a demmyjohn of Appel Jack, wot the committee giv him sted of cash, last time he lectured, ...
— The Bad Boy At Home - And His Experiences In Trying To Become An Editor - 1885 • Walter T. Gray
... themselves high in air near the rocks. The Cove lay in sunshine, its rough stone chimneys and rude slate roofs overgrown with moss and fern, rising rapidly, one above the other, in the fast descending hollow, through which a little stream rushed to the sea,—more quietly than its brother, which, at some space distant, fell sheer down over ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... tunnel where Clery's Division is encamped. The Boer scoundrels have blown down both ends of the tunnel, blocking up the egress, and putting a dead horse at each end! We found also a deep boring they had made over the top of the nek through the slate with the object of reaching the roof of the tunnel and exploding it; but this having failed, from our friends not getting deep enough, the damage is insignificant and the rail will be cleared by the Engineers within a few days. We rode along the top of Laing's Nek and looked at the ...
— With the Naval Brigade in Natal (1899-1900) - Journal of Active Service • Charles Richard Newdigate Burne
... working out those angular puzzles invented by Euclid, whose problems would only stop in my brain one at a time—that is to say, when I had mastered one perfectly, and could repeat and illustrate it throughout upon slate with pencil, upon paper with pen, upon blackboard with chalk, the process of acquiring another made a clean sweep of the first, which was utterly demolished and had to be relearned, only in its turn to ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... and purposes, they went up into the air!" answered the caretaker. "One moment they were on the breaker sorting slate and stuff of that kind out of the stream of coal which was pouring down upon them, and the next moment ...
— The Call of the Beaver Patrol - or, A Break in the Glacier • V. T. Sherman
... the lungs of Aeolus. The sun went down like a globe of fire; but just as it touched the horizon it flattened out into an oval disk, and, sinking behind a dead, slate-colored cloud, shot up half a dozen broad rose and purple bands, expanding as they mounted heavenward, and then fading away in pearly-tinted hues in the softening twilight until it mingled in the light of the half moon nearly at the zenith. There lay the island, too, now ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... not occurred to Ruby before that she could please any of the teachers by showing them little kindnesses and being thoughtful of them, and she remembered remorsefully how she had laughed during recess when one of the girls had drawn on her slate a funny caricature of Miss Ketchum, with the two little curls that she wore on each side of her forehead standing up like ears, and her glasses on crookedly. She made up her mind that she would never laugh at her teacher again, but try to help her in ...
— Ruby at School • Minnie E. Paull
... Serpentine, stretching like a phantom lake, rose and slate-colored, through the Peter Pan haunted glades of Kensington Gardens. Then he emerged from the Victoria Gate and found himself ringing a bell and being admitted by a butler, who relieved him of his coat and hat with the velvet-plush manner of a fashionable surgeon ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... early next spring we are going to be bombarded with thousands of aeroplanes, and with new kinds of bombs and gases in a well-organized effort to try actually to destroy London. Possibly that will come; we must simply take our chance, every man sticking to his job. Already the slate shingles on my roof have been broken, and bricks have been knocked down my chimney; the sky-light was hit and glass fell down all through the halls, and the nose of a shrapnel shell, weighing eight pounds, fell just in front of my ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... how much depends on slates in a kindergarten you know, madam, better than I do. Here is all that is left of one of them"—and he showed Hart's aunt a bit of burnt wood that looked like it had been part of a slate-frame afore it got afire. ...
— Santa Fe's Partner - Being Some Memorials of Events in a New-Mexican Track-end Town • Thomas A. Janvier
... wind-swept is the little town of Kirkby-Malhouse, harsh and forbidding are the fells upon which it stands. It stretches in a single line of grey-stone, slate-roofed houses, dotted down the furze-clad slope of the ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the selling price in New York, which the railway slides to suit itself; and most extraordinary of all, refuse to let the miners know the prices on which their living slides, a 'fraud,'" says the report of Congress, "on its face" (pp. 71 and 72). The companies dock the miners' output arbitrarily for slate and other impurities, and so can take from their men 5 to 50 tons more in every 100 than they pay for (p. 76). In order to keep the miners disciplined and the coal market under supplied, the railroads restrict work, so that the miners often ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... the exception of one, who looked like a faded kid glove, the men discarded the grease paint, but the women under their make-ups ranged from pure white, pale yellow, and sickly greens to brick reds and slate grays. They were dressed in costumes that were not primarily intended for picnic going. But they could sing, and they did sing, with their voices, their bodies, their souls. They threw themselves into it because they enjoyed and felt what they were doing, and they gave almost a semblance of ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... gradually usurped the psalmody as their particular and special portion of the service; they left the clerk and the school children, aided by such of the aristocracy below as cared to join, to do the responses; but, when singing time came, they reigned supreme. The slate on which the Psalms were announced was hung out from before the centre of the gallery, and the clerk, leaving his place under the reading-desk, marched up there to give them out. He took this method of preserving ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... off the ear of two boys, one in his presence, and one in mine. John Butcher, whose father then lived at Westcombe, was one of them, and he[11] has reminded me also of Griffiths having taken a very thick heavy slate, and with both hands broken it over the head of Dr. now Sir —— Gibbs, of Bath, physician to the late Queen, who very fortunately had a thicker scull than boys in general, or he would in all probability ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... motionless, different every night. Last night each stood clear, tall, apart; to-night they huddle together in the mist, and seem to shudder. The sunset was brief, and the water has grown dull, like slate. Stamboul fades to a level mass of smoky purple, out of which a few minarets rise black against a gray sky with bands of orange fire. Last night, after a golden sunset, a fog of rusty iron came down, and hung poised over the jagged level of the ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... way, composed of argillaceous clay and black pebbles, I observed fragments of quartz and granite. Several specimens containing iron pyrites were also found. The cliffs in the vicinity of our landing are composed of slate, and the land over which I travelled seemed almost as barren as a macadamized road; but on searching closely several species of hyperborean plants were found, such as saxifrages, anemones, grasses, lichens and mushrooms. The mosses and ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... clear deep lagoon, about two miles in from the river, of which it is the overflow. A chain of small waterholes occurs at 12 miles, which were covered with ducks and other water-fowl, whilst immense flocks of a slate-colored pigeon were seen at intervals. They are about the same size as the Bronzewing, and excessively wild.* The river, when again struck, had resumed running. It was still sandy and full of the graceful weeping melaleuca in the bed, where traces of alligators were ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... T'observe his vain attempts to keep the peace, Till tolls the bell, and strife and troubles cease, - Calls for our praise; his labour praise deserves, But not our pity; Reuben has no nerves: 'Mid noise and dirt, and stench, and play, and prate, He calmly cuts the pen or views the slate. But Leonard!—yes, for Leonard's fate I grieve, Who loaths the station which he dares not leave: He cannot dig, he will not beg his bread, All his dependence rests upon his head; And deeply skill'd in sciences and arts, On vulgar lads he wastes superior ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... idea!" exclaimed the blacksmith, evidently pleased. "All Cheyenne's friends have been waitin' for years for him to clean that slate and start fresh again. He used to be a right-smart ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... stinging degradation to me, almost an officer on the quarter-deck of one of his Majesty's frigates! However, without taking time to weigh exactly my own dignity, I seized a large slate, and, turning sharply round, sent it hissing into his very teeth. I wish I had knocked one or two of them out. I wished it then fervently, and of that wish, wicked though it be, I have never repented. He was for some time occupied with holding his hand to his mouth, and in a rapid and ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... one morning at about four bells to find the entire ship's company afoot. Even the doctor was there. Everybody was gazing eagerly at a narrow, mountainous island lying slate-coloured ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Puritan marrow of my bones There's something in this richness that I hate. I love the look, austere, immaculate, Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones. There's something in my very blood that owns Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate, A thread of water, churned to milky spate Streaming through slanted pastures ...
— Nets to Catch the Wind • Elinor Wylie
... a virgin continent, a clean slate upon which to write what we will. And what are we writing? What is our intellectual life? I came to the far West, which I had been taught by novelists and poets to think of as a place of freedom. I came, because I like freedom; I am staying because I like the climate. I find that what freedom means ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... tablet on which a number of safety fuses are mounted. Slate is excellent material for the tablet, as it is incombustible, and ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... firing of cannon began, all the people ran into the streets, and the street-cleaners, who were sweeping up the tiles and broken bits of slate that the storm had torn from the roofs, leaned on their brooms and listened. The Constable was using a great deal of powder; the time seemed long to the men and women who were counting the number of reports, and there seemed no end to the noise. Sixty guns meant ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... apart from the horses was another animal, of a dirty slate colour, with some white marks along the back and shoulders. That was a true-bred Mexican mule, wiry and wicked as any of its race. It was a she-mule, and was called Jeanette. Jeanette was tethered beyond kicking distance of the horses; for between her and the mustang ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... Greswold talked to Octavia, and asked her if she thought it would look better perhaps to begin gold with the soup, and have the hors d'oeuvres on specimen Sevres just to make a point. I hate gold plate myself, one's knife does make such slate-pencilish noises on it. ...
— The Visits of Elizabeth • Elinor Glyn
... overlooking the entrance to the harbor and the wide sweep of the sea beyond, the first dead of the colony had been buried; here lay the forefathers of the town. Many of the stones had fallen; others stood sturdily where they had stood for centuries. Strange old stones they were, of gray slate, etched with forbidding symbols of skulls ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... heathen Czechs used to drop honey upon the child's lips, and in the Eastern Church it was formerly the custom to give the baptized child milk and honey to taste (392. II. 35). When the Jewish child, in the Middle Ages, first went to school, one of the ceremonial observances was to have him lick a slate which had been smeared with honey, and upon which the alphabet, two Bible verses, and the words "The Tora shall be my calling" were written; this custom is interestingly explanative of the passage in Ezekiel (iii. 3) where we read "Then I did eat it [the roll of a book given ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... mother's neck and every one cried a while; then we wiped up, Leon gave Sally his slate, and she came and sat beside the table and began to make out a list of those she really wanted to invite. First she put down all of our family, even many away in Ohio, and all of Peter's, and then his friends, and hers. Once ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... as a personal affront, in a way of which the Captain had not dreamed. Epistolary writing she and her friends considered as her forte. Many a copy of many a letter have I seen written and corrected on the slate, before she "seized the half- hour just previous to post-time to assure" her friends of this or of that; and Dr Johnson was, as she said, her model in these compositions. She drew herself up with dignity, and only replied to Captain Brown's last ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... events from that date until modern times, when, in the first half of the next century, the Manor became the property of an ancestor of the present owner. There is a tradition that the Manor House was a small but beautiful old building, with a high-pitched stone-slate roof and three gables in line at the front; but these disappeared, the pitch of the roof was reduced, and about 1850 the modern part of the house was added at the southern extremity of the ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... we don't throw them as hard as it looks, onless it's an ornery critter that wants to make trouble. And the hot iron doesn't go in deep. It just sort of crimples up the hair, same as you ladies frizzes your curls with a hot slate pencil—at least my second wife—no, it was my third—she used ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Rocky Ranch - Or, Great Days Among the Cowboys • Laura Lee Hope
... pass to her lawful issue.' Did you ever hear anything to equal it?" demanded Edith. "Don't you see the old lady recognizes Ruth before the world? Don't you see, however humiliated I was at that distressing affair three or four summers ago, it's all wiped off the slate now, by this? She makes Ruth her heir, Lucy. Don't you see that? And she does it affectionately, too. I can't get over it! I don't know what made the old veteran do such a thing. I don't care much either. All I know is, that ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... of the fine views of the sea, the mountain-heights, and the valley-reaches, obtainable from Morne Rouge, the place has a somewhat bleak look. Perhaps this is largely owing to the universal slate-gray tint of the buildings,—very melancholy by comparison with the apricot and banana yellows tinting the walls of St. Pierre. But this cheerless gray is the only color which can resist the climate of Morne Rouge, where people are ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... wont, to David's cottage. It was Saturday, and he would stay to supper. After they had given the usual time to their studies, Hugh, setting Margaret some exercises in English to write on her slate, while he helped David with some of the elements of Trigonometry, and again going over those elements with her, while David worked out a calculation—after these were over, and while Janet was putting the supper on the table, Hugh pulled out his volume, ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... record. Waters all out, bridges down, the Country one wild lake of eddying mud. Up to the knee for many miles together; up to the middle for long spaces; sometimes even up to the chin or deeper, where your bridge was washed away. The Prussians marched through it, as if they had been slate or iron. Rank and file, nobody quitted his rank, nobody looked sour in the face; they took the pouring of the skies, and the red seas of terrestrial liquid, as matters that must be; cheered one another with jocosities, with choral snatches (tobacco, I consider, would not burn); ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Nashaway from Showanon, Prescott alone, tenax propositi, held to his purpose, and death found him at his post. His grave is in the old "burial field" at Lancaster, yet not ten citizens can point it out. Over it stands a rude fragment from some ledge of slate rock, faintly incised with characters which few eyes ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... Southern countries. It was a broad valley, at the lowest point of which lay West Dean. The hamlet consists of very few houses, all so compactly grouped about the old church that from this distance it seemed as if the hand could cover them. The roofs were overgrown with lichen, yellow on slate, red on tiles. In the farmyards were haystacks with yellow conical coverings of thatch. And around all closed dense masses of chestnut foliage, the green just touched with gold. The little group of houses had mellowed with age; their guarded peacefulness ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... crabbed hand, illegible hand; scribble &c v.; pattes de mouche [Fr.]; ill-formed letters; pothooks and hangers. stationery; pen, quill, goose quill; pencil, style; paper, foolscap, parchment, vellum, papyrus, tablet, slate, marble, pillar, table; blackboard; ink bottle, ink horn, ink pot, ink stand, ink well; typewriter. transcription &c (copy) 21; inscription &c (record) 551; superscription &c (indication) 550; graphology. composition, authorship; cacoethes scribendi [Lat.]; graphoidea^, graphomania^; phrenoia^. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Zealand shieldrake (Tadorna variegata) offers a quite anomalous case; the head of the female is pure white, and her back is redder than that of the male; the head of the male is of a rich dark bronzed colour, and his back is clothed with finely pencilled slate- coloured feathers, so that altogether he may be considered as the more beautiful of the two. He is larger and more pugnacious than the female, and does not sit on the eggs. So that in all these respects ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... against her husband's shoulder, roundly tired out after a day all cluttered up with matching the blue upholstery of their bedroom with taffeta bed hangings. Shopping for a strip of pantry linoleum that was just the desired slate color. Calculating with electricians over the plugs for floor lamps. Herself edging pantry shelves in ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... of Merida, the different bands or zones of formations (4) are sensibly parallel with the longitudinal axis (1) of the chains of mountains, basins or interposed plains. It may be said in general that the granitic zone (including under that denomination the rocks of granite, gneiss and mica-slate) follows the direction of the Cordillera of the shore of Venezuela, and belongs exclusively to that Cordillera and the group of the Parime mountains; since it nowhere pierces the secondary and tertiary strata in the Llanos or basin of the Lower ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... identified by one of the K Division men. He is an American crook with a clean slate, so far as this side is concerned. Cohen is his name. And the idea seems to be that he went in at some point between where he was found by the river police and the point at ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... everlastynge miscellayneous scatteratioun. For shee doth greately go inn for subdued ratt-color, milde mouse-tints, temperate tea-caddy tones, moderate mode—dyes, gentyll gray—shades, tranquill drabb—tinges, temperate tawny, calm graye, sober ashie, pacifyed slate, mitigated dun, lenientlie dingie, and blandlie cinereous chromattics, since shee hadd a Quakir grandmother on the one syde, ande is too superblie proude on the other, 'to make a pecocke of hirselfe,' as shee wyll telle you whann thatt yee be spattered with the water whych is jetted from hose over ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... have had an exquisite absurdity about it, that might even have savored of imposition. The mass of trivial details essential to the accurate and consecutive account of an entire life could never have gained his serious attention: his modesty would have made as little of them as of boyish slate-scribblings, full of significance, fun, and character to observers, but subjected to the sponge without a pang by their producer. There is something natural and fine in this. I confess that to me the spectacle presented by Goethe when dwelling on the minutest incidents of his childhood with ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... Higher yet, dark plowed fields, with hedges whereon grow straight elms, cover the undulations of a great hill even to its windy crest, and below, at the water line, lies Newlyn—a village of gray stone and blue, with slate roofs now shining silver-bright under morning sunlight and easterly wind. Smoke softens every outline; red-brick walls and tanned sails bring warmth and color through the blue vapor of many chimneys; ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... they have been so unaccustomed to it over here that they have made no preparations to cope with it," Deane answered. "Then think of the size of the place! What miles of pavements, and wildernesses of slate roofs, to attract the sun and keep out the fresh air. Vine, who are these men?" he ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the political horizon for some little distance back. Although George W. Stener was in a way a political henchman and appointee of Mollenhauer's, the latter was only vaguely acquainted with him. He had seen him before; knew of him; had agreed that his name should be put on the local slate largely because he had been assured by those who were closest to him and who did his bidding that Stener was "all right," that he would do as he was told, that he would cause no one any trouble, etc. In fact, during ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... come to Puysange, Adhelmar climbed the stairs of the White Turret,—slowly, for he was growing very feeble now,—and so came again to Melite crouching among the burned-out candles in the slate-colored twilight ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... we round the Hangman, what a change of scene—the square-blocked sandstone cliffs dip suddenly under dark slate-beds, fantastically bent and broken by primeval earthquakes. Wooded combes, and craggy ridges of rich pasture-land, wander and slope towards a labyrinth of bush-fringed coves, black isolated tide-rocks, and land-locked ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley |
