"Tapering" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... watering-place itself has been left somewhat high and dry by the tide of years. Concerned as we are for its honour, we must reluctantly admit that the time when this pretty little semi-circular sweep of houses tapering off at the end of the wooden pier into a point in the sea, was a gay place, and when the lighthouse overlooking it shone at daybreak on company dispersing from public balls, is but dimly traditional now. There is a 'bleak chamber' in our watering-place ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... show him as possessing heart. His handling of his medium though heavy is never timid, and at times is masterly. Delacroix inspired many of his landscape backgrounds, as Ingres gave him the proportions of his female figures. You continually encounter variations of Ingres, the sweet, serene line, the tapering feet and hands. Some critics have discerned the toe forms of Perugino; but such mechanical measurements strain our notion of eclecticism. Certainly Moreau studied Bellini, Mantegna, and Da Vinci without ever attaining the freedom and distinction of any of them. His colour, too, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... taking in the full length of her—her trim brown shoes, her scant, tapering, rough skirt, and her coat of brown and green, her long green tippet and her mad little rough hat in the mad mode—all suited to ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... tastefully arranged over the mantel-piece; some, from their form, indicating their use, and others only affording matter of ingenious speculation to the antiquary, but all bearing evidence of early civilisation. The frontlet of gold indicated noble estate, and the long and tapering bodkin of the same metal, with its richly enchased knob or pendent crescent, implied the robe it once fastened could have been of no mean texture, and the wearer of no mean rank. Weapons were there, ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... the small arches intended for the roadways were constructed, each being 15 feet to the springing of the arch, and 9 feet wide. Upon these arches the masonry was carried upwards, in a tapering form, to a height of 53 feet above the level of the road. As these piers were to carry the immense weight of the suspension chains, great pains were taken with their construction, and all the stones, from top to bottom, were firmly bound together ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... whole thing had happened in seconds only. He was submerged in slimy, sticky ooze which was the crushed fungus that had tripped him. But he cleared the gun. The flashlight limned a ghastly, obscenely fat body and a long tapering tail. Tommy aimed at the base of that tail and pulled the trigger, ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... midst of this wild tumult of the elements, they beheld a new object of alarm. The ocean, in one place, became strangely agitated; the water was whirled up into a kind of pyramid or cone; while a livid cloud, tapering to a point, bent down to meet it; joining together, they formed a column, which rapidly approached the ship, spinning along the surface of the deep, and drawing up the water with a rushing sound, it passed ...
— Peter Parley's Tales About America and Australia • Samuel Griswold Goodrich
... to each other. Now, what could two idle hands do, when one belonged to a man deeply in love, the other to a young woman who for some time had ill-treated her lover and exhausted her severity? Before the end of the first part, the long unoccupied, tapering fingers of the treble were imprisoned by those of the bass, without the least disturbance in the musical effect—and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... are round, many oval, others elongated, others thin and pointed, like a pencil; others oblong—while on Clyde, some are round, one is coffin-shaped, others are palette-shaped, others are pear- shaped (the oval tapering to one extremity), one is triangular, one is oblong. {77} In Australia, as on Clyde, the stones bear some of the archaic markings common on the rock faces both in Scotland and in Central Australia: on large ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang
... made was furnished by Dr. Palmer, and is shown full size. Instruments for use on posterior teeth were short and strong, with as few curves as possible; no right and left cutters or pluggers were used, and none of the latter were serrated, but had straight, tapering round points, flat on the ends, and of suitable size to fill a good portion of the cavity. He used what was termed Abbey's chemically pure tin foil, forcing it in hard, layer upon layer,—as he expressed it, "smacked it up." In this ...
— Tin Foil and Its Combinations for Filling Teeth • Henry L. Ambler
... to weave all parts of the mat equally close and keep the edges perfectly straight; otherwise the mat when finished will be lop-sided, and consequently of no value. In weaving tapering grasses like tikug, which have ends of slightly different sizes, the opposite ends of the straws should be alternated. This prevents one edge of a mat from ...
— Philippine Mats - Philippine Craftsman Reprint Series No. 1 • Hugo H. Miller
... for holding the cylindrical wax records is 4-1/2 in. long and made of wood, turned a little tapering, the diameter at the small or outer end being 1-5/8 in., and at the larger end, 1-7/8 in. A wood wheel with a V-shaped groove on its edge is nailed to the larger end of the cylinder. The hole in the core is fitted with a brass tube, driven in tightly ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... green-shaded lamp sent a bright, downward gush of light over his legs, its mellowed upper glow shining on his forehead, high and bare to his crown. He had the curious, sexless appearance of elderly Chinamen; might have been, with his tapering hands, flowing coat, and hairless face, an ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... sixty yards of the darkness, and found fewer of the badly shaken Orconites in our path. Now, in that thick obscurity, I sensed that we were nearing the magnificent, tapering hull with ...
— The Winged Men of Orcon - A Complete Novelette • David R. Sparks
... one veil, and then another, until she discovered a face even more beautiful than that of the portrait I had just replaced on the wall. I must also mention that she seemed conscious of her charms, for with an air of much grace and dignity, she raised her jeweled fingers, so tapering, and smoothed the glossy black hair over her polished brow, while the diamonds of her bracelets sparkled through the white ruffles ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... each, and tiled over each other—'imbricated,' as the botanists would say, in that fashion, which gives its peculiar solidity and richness of light and shade to the foliage of an old sycamore; and among these noble shoots and noble leaves, pendent everywhere, long tapering spires of green grapes. This shore-grape, which the West Indians esteem as we might a bramble, we found to be, without exception, the most beautiful broad-leafed plant which we had ever seen. Then we admired the Frangipani, {15b} a tall and ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... often some 8 in. or 10 in. in depth. These fenders standing on claw feet were afterwards fitted with bottom plates of iron, on which was a ridge or rest against which the fire brasses were prevented from slipping. Then came iron or steel scroll-shaped fenders, tapering down from a few inches in height at the ends to centres almost level with the ground. To obviate the inconvenience of there being no resting-place for the fireirons loose supports were fitted into sockets at the ends, and these afterwards were cast as ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... animal, and of a quite different species or genus—the lagostoinus trichodactylus. In shape of head, body, and other respects, it more resembles a gigantic rat; and, like the latter, it has a long tapering tail, which strengthens the resemblance. But, unlike either rabbit or rat, its hind feet are furnished with but three toes; hence its specific name, trichodactylus. The same scarcity of toes is a characteristic of the agoutis, capivaras, and so called "Guinea pigs," all of which are cousins-german ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... (sepals) (F), small, green, pointed leaves traversed by three simple veins, and together forming the calyx; II. four larger, white, inner perigone leaves (petals) (G), broad and slightly notched at the end, and tapering to the point of attachment. The petals collectively are known as the "corolla." The veins of the petals fork once; III. and IV. two sets of stamens (E), the outer containing two short, and the inner, four longer ones arranged in pairs. Each stamen has a slender ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... and Clouet's paintings are like these. It is the higher touch making itself felt here and there, betraying itself, like nobler blood in a lower stock, by a fine line or gesture or expression, the turn of a wrist, the tapering of a finger. In Ronsard's time that rougher element seemed likely to predominate. No one can turn over the pages of Rabelais without feeling how much need there was of softening, of castigation. To effect this softening is the object of the revolution ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... made herself by tight-lacing into a notable specimen of the peg-top figure, bulgy at the bust and shoulders, and tapering off at the waist. She had also squeezed her feet into boots that were much too small for them, and fluffed her hair out till her head seemed preposterously large—by which means she had achieved the appearance known to her set ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... beasts from Pachuca could hardly have gone so far. The first place we visited was Penas Cargadas, the "loaded rocks." Riding through a thick wood of oaks and pines, we came suddenly in view of several sugar-loaf peaks, some three hundred feet high, tapering almost to a point at the top, and each one crowned with a mass of rocks which seem to have been balanced in unstable equilibrium on its point,—looking as though the first puff of wind would bring them down. The pillars were of porphyritic conglomerate, which had been disintegrated ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... parts, namely, the island, the lagoon, and the encircling reef. The island, which, being dry, was of course the highest part of the atoll, measured about three and a quarter miles long, and was crescent-shaped, being about three-eighths of a mile wide in the middle, tapering off north and south in the form of the cusps of the crescent moon; and from the extremities of the two cusps there swept away the encircling reef which enclosed the lagoon in a very perfect natural breakwater, ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... huge earthworks crowned with plastered fortifications, and a gate, with a curious roof to it, running out at each end into horns carved of wood. At some distance, out of a grove to the right, rose a round tapering tower of mouldering brickwork. The rest of the nearer country seemed laid out in low plantations of some green-leaved shrub, with rice-fields interspersed in the more ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... long, low rustic couches in the big, cleared half-oval that was the Playground for their children. It began—this half-oval—in high land among the trees and spread down over a beach to the waters of a tiny cove. Between the high tapering boles of the pines at their back the sky dropped a curtain of purple. Between the long ledges of tawny rock in front the sea stretched a carpet of turquoise. And between pines and sea lay first a rusty mat ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... 430 of this Journal, page 207, there is some mention of the patented rolling process for tapering bar-iron by machinery. This important invention is not of American origin, as persons unacquainted with the facts might imagine: it was first practised at the Mersey Steel and Iron Company's works at Liverpool, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... stillness of the summer night was deliciously soothing and restful. Our captain and one or two of the sailors were about on duty, and I sat in the stern of the vessel looking up into the glorious heavens. The tapering bow-sprit of the 'Diana' pointed aloft as it were into a woven web of stars, and I lost myself in imaginary flight among those glittering unknown worlds, oblivious of my material surroundings, and forgetting that despite the splendid ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... grasses of the hedgerows were sweet with the fragrance of their new growth. The foliage of the oaks was complete, so that every bough and twig was clothed; but the leaves did not yet hang heavy in masses, and the bend of every bough and the tapering curve of every twig were visible through their light green covering. There is no time of the year equal in beauty to the first week in summer: and no colour which nature gives, not even the gorgeous hues of autumn, which can equal the verdure produced by the ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... to the west parish of Dunstable, lying north of the territory of Groton and contiguous to it. It formed a narrow strip, perhaps three hundred rods in width at the western end, running easterly for three miles and tapering off to a point at the Nashua River, by which stream it was entirely separated from Dunstable. Shaped like a thin wedge, it lay along the border of the province, and belonged geographically to the west precinct or parish of Groton. Under these circumstances the second parish petitioned ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... day to be reproduced in the numerous, thickly-set columns of smoke that shot upward and spread out into over-arching canopies above, while, with the gathering darkness of the night, that forest seemed gradually to take the form of a distant burning city in the manifold tapering pillars of fire which everywhere rose from the field, fiercely illuminating the dark and sombre wood-wall of the surrounding forest, and dimly glimmering over the sleeping waters ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... stature of an Indian maid, though the proportions of her person were as light and buoyant as at all comported with the fullness that properly belonged to her years. The limbs, seen below the folds of a short kirtle of bright scarlet cloth, were just and tapering, even to the nicest proportions of classic beauty; and never did foot of higher instep, and softer roundness, grace a feathered moccason. Though the person, from the neck to the knees, was hid by a tightly-fitting vest of calico and the short kirtle named, ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... every winding coil; The shuddering wretch took hold, Till like an icicle it seemed, So tapering and so cold. ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... along upper side of branches. Calyx 5-toothed, tubular, plaited; corolla of 5 petals opposite as many stamens; 1 pistil with 5 thread-like styles. Scape: 1 to 2 ft. high, slender, leafless, much branched above. Leaves: All from thick, fleshy rootstock, narrowly oblong, tapering into margined petioles, thick, the edges slightly waved, not toothed; midrib prominent. Preferred Habitat - Salt meadows and marshes. Flowering Season - July-October. Distribution - Atlantic coast from Labrador to Florida, westward along the Gulf to ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... base about thirty inches high, with well-rounded corners of molded brick work. The pedestal proper is five feet six inches in diameter, ten feet in height, and a cornice, ornamental in style, about three feet in height. From this rises a tapering shaft of about twenty-eight feet. The whole is surmounted by a capstone eighteen inches high. Three stories are told about ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... suspended by a thin brass chain around his neck was a cheap enamelled cross. He was unkempt, unwashed, his face sallow and drawn, yet those wonderful brilliant eyes stared forth with uncanny intensity of expression. His hands were grimy, and his long tapering finger-nails had not been cleaned for weeks. Such was the man whom Alexandra Feodorovna, fascinated by his glance, had called to ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... white as a gull, new painted, new washed, cargoed and stoked, the Roumania reared three red smoke-stacks, and sat proudly with the gang-plank flung out from her mighty hip and her nose tapering toward the blue harbor and ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... rests on the coverlid, And one beneath the crumpled sheet is hid, (Ah happy sheets! to hide an arm so sweet!) Nor all concealed amid their folds of snow, The soft perfection of her shape below, Rounded and tapering to her little feet! Oh Love! if Beauty ever left her sphere, And sovereign sisters, Art and Poesy, Moulded in loveliness she slumbers here, Slumbers, dear love, in thee! It is thy smile that makes the chamber still; ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... behind a hill in face of the camp. He mounted a horse and rode up the slope, to find the company firing on a line of Zulus eight hundred paces away to their front. This line was about a thousand yards long, and shaped like a horn, tapering towards the point. It advanced slowly, taking shelter with great skill behind rocks, and opened a quite ineffective fire on the soldiers. Meanwhile the two guns were shelling the Zulu centre with great effect, the shells cutting lanes ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... placed a chair in its proper place; there she smoothed with tapering fingers one or the other of the tidies, products of her own skilful needle, which, in every hue and size, adorned the furniture. She tested the various lamps; opened and shut piano and parlor organ to convince herself of the absence of dust; and finally minutely inspected sundry vases, ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... Monterey. What a situation! What exquisite proportions! That wide curve of snow-white sand about the dark blue bay is as exact a crescent as if cut with a knife. And that semicircle of hills behind the town, with its pine and brush forest tapering down to the crescent's points! Nor could anything be more picturesque than this scattered little town with its bright red tiles above the white walls of the houses and the gray walls of the yards; its ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... top of the pouch, on one side, is contrived a narrow orifice, tapering into a short neck. This is the kitchen-door. In order to pass through it, the Penduline, small though he be, has to force the elastic partition, which yields slightly and then contracts. Lastly, the house is furnished with a mattress of first-quality cotton. Here lie from six to eight white eggs, ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... by vacuum, on account of the difficulty of holding the closing disk in place if it be of very large dimensions. The same is the case with large vases of wood form. On the contrary, an elongated piece tapering from above is more easily moulded by pressure of the air, as are also ovoid vessels 16 to 20 inches in height. In any case it must not be forgotten that the operation by vacuum should be preferred every time the form of the objects is adapted to it, because this process permits of following ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 484, April 11, 1885 • Various
... out. His canvas, with its superbly vigorous drawing, at once became the sensation of the exhibition. Sunday supplements reproduced it with a photograph of Querida looking amiably at a statuette of Venus which he held in his long, tapering fingers; magazines tried to print it in two colours, in three, in dozens, and made fireworks of it to Querida's inwardly suppressed agony, and their own satisfaction. Serious young men wrote "appreciations" about it; serious young women published instructive discourses concerning ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... look at his lithe, powerful frame and the firm gravity of his face would have been enough for an experienced guess that he had no rare and ravishing tenor such as nature reluctantly makes at some sacrifice. Look at his hands: they are not small and dimpled, with tapering fingers that seem to have only a deprecating touch: they are long, flexible, firmly-grasping hands, such as Titian has painted in a picture where he wanted to show the combination of refinement with force. And there is something of a likeness, too, between the faces belonging to the hands—in both ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... pride in being well shod and in having her stockings tightly drawn up without wrinkles. Besides all this she possessed the most beautiful hand that was ever seen, as I believe. The poets once praised Aurora for her fine hands and tapering fingers; but I think our Queen would surpass her in that; and she carefully guarded and maintained this ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... moment he had fancied that it might be true. The likeness was uncanny! The burnished-copper hair, the silk-fringed eyes, the poise of her head, the tapering fingers—even in the scarlet of her rouged cheeks, there was a similarity to the high colouring of the English girl. What a jest of the Fates—that they should cast this poor creature of New York's ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... up an entire floor near the tapering top of the building, and as we walked slowly around the narrow steel balcony outside, a tremendous panorama unrolled down there before our eyes. We could see every part of the port below stretching away to the horizon, and through ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... coping saw to cut out the base. The tapering sides may be cut to lines by saw, plane or chisel. The curve at the base may be bored by 1/2-inch auger, and in this way a better curve ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... known tapering needle bars of former years have been superseded by cylindrical needle bars. The Wheeler & Wilson Company appear to be the first who utilized the engineer's shifting box as an antifriction device for round needle bars. They packed their bars round with felt rings, and compressed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various
... days they saw large herds of buffalo, and the copses of timber appeared to contain elk and deer, "just below Cedar Island," adds the journal, "on a hill to the south, is the backbone of a fish, forty-five feet long, tapering towards the tail, and in a perfect state of petrifaction, fragments of which were collected and sent to Washington." This was not a fish, but the fossil remains of a reptile of one of the earliest geological periods. Here, too, the party saw immense herds of buffalo, ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... light a German officer, a tall young man, fair and slender, tightly encased in his uniform like a woman in her corset, his flat shiny cap, tilted to one side of his head, making him look like an English hotel runner. His exaggerated mustache, long and straight and tapering to a point at either end in a single blond hair that could hardly be seen, seemed to weigh down the corners of his mouth and give a ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... whilst other beds were filled by gay patches of verbenas of every hue and shade. The sweet-scented verbena is one of the commonest and most successful shrubs in a Natal garden, and just now the large bushes of it which one sees in every direction are covered by tapering spikes of its tiny white blossoms. But the feature of this garden was roses—roses on each side whichever way you turned, and I should think of at least a hundred different sorts. Not the stiff standard rose tree of an English garden, with its few precious blossoms, to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... doorway, A sea-shell glory, pink and white to hair Sun-lit, a lily crowned with powdered gold. She turned toward her dresser then and shook White dust of talcum on her arms, and looked So lovingly upon her tense straight breasts, Touching them under with soft tapering hands To blue eyes deepening like a brazier flame Turned by a sudden gust. Who gives her these, The thought ran through me, for her joy alone And not ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... dug huge hooked claws, and from its tapering muzzle a wormlike tongue licked about, gathering the outrushing white ants into its gullet. For minutes Tim lay blinking at it, wondering ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... and very effective. Large baskets tapering to a point and open at the broad end are fixed by ropes, or rather by the strong vines which function as ropes here, just at the top of the rapids and the water rushes through with great force. The fish ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... giantess, it may be as well to state that her height was five feet six, her waist twenty-two inches at most, her shoulders broad but finely sloping, her arms full and somewhat muscular, her hands not small, but exquisitely tapering, her foot long and narrow, her instep arched like an Arab's, and all her movements instinct with an untutored grace and dignity. She held her head higher than is common to women, and on that score was ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... a few acres in extent—not more than six, I fancy, and four-fifths of it are walled about with walls that stand knee-deep in sea-grasses. Along, and above it, are thrust the tapering tops of those highly decorative cypresses without which Italy would not be herself at all. There is such a monastery there—an ideal one, with cloister, and sundial, and marble-curbed well, and all that; at least so I am told; we poor feminine creatures are ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... Admiral had said, the Yakumo was a very fine ship; she was indeed one of the finest armoured cruisers which Japan at that time possessed. Her waterline was protected by a belt of Krupp steel seven inches thick amidships, tapering off to five inches thickness at bow and stern; she mounted four 8-inch quick-fire guns in her two turrets, and fourteen 6-inch guns on her broadsides; she could steam twenty-one knots, when clean; and she carried a crew ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... countenance he has led the march to the grave. As I recollect Uncle Guy, he was the embodiment of neatness, feminine in build—it seemed that nature intended to form a woman instead of a man. Like a woman, he plaited his hair and drew it down behind his ears. His hands and feet were small, his fingers tapering; his face was black, his eyes small, his lips and nose thin, his voice fine, but harsh, and he slightly stooped or bent forward as he walked. There is poetry in every move of his bent figure as he slowly walks down the street on this autumn morning. ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... the tree. It was an old oak. Well up its trunk a limb had broken or rotted away, and the resulting decay of the stub had made a hole in the tree itself. What instantly riveted the attention of the two boys was something black and tapering that projected from the hole and that slowly ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... Treasury of Atreus (or Tomb of Agamemnon) was excavated in a hill, and consists of a long passage about 120 ft. by 21 ft. wide, with retaining walls of megalithic masonry on either side, terminating in a great entrance doorway. This doorway is flanked on either side by columns tapering downwards, and decorated with chevrons in a manner very similar to Norman work of the eleventh century, and apparently intended solely for ornament.[130] The entrance opened into a circular domed chamber about ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... devoid of the elaborate lobation which they exhibit in the Ammonites; whilst the siphuncle pierces the septa either in the centre or near it. In the Nautilus, however, the shell is coiled into a flat spiral; whereas in Orthoceras the shell is a straight, longer or shorter cone, tapering behind, and gradually expanding towards its mouth in front. The chief objections to the belief that the animal of the Orthoceras was essentially like that of the Pearly Nautilus are—the comparatively small size of the body-chamber, ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... mandibles ferruginous; the antennae reddish-yellow. Thorax: fulvo-hyaline, with a dark fuscous border at the apex; the knees, tibiae and tarsi reddish-yellow; the two latter spinose. Abdomen: gradually tapering to an acute point at the apex, the sixth segment with ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... elongated secondaries; and its tail is not formed of normal rectrices, from the middle of which spring two very long feathers, a little curved and arranged like a roof; but it consists of twelve wide plane feathers, regularly tapering, and ornamented with ocellated spots, arranged along the shaft. Its head is not bare, but is adorned behind with a tuft of thread-like feathers; and, finally, its system of coloration and the proportions ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... top compartment, a room scarcely fifteen feet in diameter, tapering sharply upward to a hollow point some twenty feet above them. The true shape of the room, however, was not immediately apparent, because of the enormous latticed beams and girders which braced the walls in every direction. The air glowed with the violet light of the ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... trees and covered with snow, over which the setting sun threw a crimson tinge. Below was the river, hoarsely murmuring, and immediately upon the other side, the clustering Maryland village, with a church spire tall and tapering against the northern sky. About the village was another village of tents, and upon a hilltop frowned a line of guns. Dusk as it was, the Confederate batteries unlimbered, and there opened an artillery duel, shells screaming from north to south and south to north ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... showed in working and manoeuvring the trireme. A few hoplites were still carried, to serve in cases of emergency; but by far the most important part in the encounter was played by the trireme itself, with its long, tapering, sharp-pointed prow. To use this deadly but delicate instrument with effect required great coolness, dexterity, and judgment, on the part of the steersman, and a crew under perfect command. The tactics usually employed were as follows: watching his opportunity, the captain gave the order ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... the shipping, Wagner's eyes were suddenly attracted by a large galley, with three masts—looking most rakish with its snow-white sail, its tapering spars, its large red streamer, and its low, long, and gracefully sweeping hull, which was painted jet black. On its deck were six pieces of brass ordnance; and stands of fire-arms were ranged round the lower parts of ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... pleasure, and everywhere making his way through the crowd, to observe, as you often may, people pushing one against another, only perhaps to see a funeral pass. The English coffins are made very economically, according to the exact form of the body; they are flat, and broad at top; tapering gradually from the middle, and drawing to a point at the feet, not very unlike ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... very long in getting our preventers rigged, after which we not only set our royal and flying-jib, but also shifted our gaff-topsail, hauling down Number 3, a jib-headed affair, and setting Number 2 in its place, a sail nearly twice as big as the other, with its lofty, tapering head laced to a yard very nearly as long as the topmast. Then, with her lee rail awash—and, in fact, dipping deeply sometimes, on a lee roll—and the lee scuppers breast-deep in water, the Dolphin began ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... to be changed into a green colour, and the hair, which but lately hung from his snow-white forehead, to become a rough bush, and, a stiffness being assumed, to point to the starry heavens with a tapering top. The God {Phoebus} lamented deeply, and in his sorrow he said, "Thou shalt be mourned by me, and shalt mourn for others, and shalt {ever} attend upon those who are ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... of objects, will long ere this have attracted your attention. You will see standing, at certain intervals apart, and about thirty yards in front of the trees, a row of tall tapering sticks—so tall that their tops are fifty yards from the ground! They might remind you of the masts of a ship; but that there are in each case two of them together,—the one standing vertically, ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... forward and secure my prize, when I observed the doe, instead of running off as I had expected, go up to her fallen partner and press her tapering nose to his body. She was not more than twenty yards from me; and I could plainly see that her look was one of inquiry and bewilderment. All at once she seemed to comprehend the fatal truth; and throwing back her head, commenced uttering the most piteous cries, at the ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... now Hillsborough, two of the most picturesque of headlands; see how their round foreheads of glistening grey shale sink down into two dark, jagged moles, running far out to seaward, and tapering off, each into a long black horizontal line, vanishing at last beneath its lace-fringe of restless hissing foam. How grand the contrast of the lightness of those sea-lines, with the solid mass which ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... the proud, patrician face was pure as some bending lily frozen on its graceful, rounded stem: and the tapering fingers with daintily curved, polished nails would have suited better the lace and velvet of royal robes than the rough home-spun sleeves folded ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... are good points," says Roth, "such as the blending of the two bell forms into the common handle, the happy tapering of the ornamentation into the Normian bird's beak; the increasing size of the side cups as they rise to correspond to the enlarged opening of the bell form; the truthfulness to nature in an essential like the bust of the Negro, all of which betoken a fair amount of artistic feeling. The craftsman ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... of the entrails; its body was ——* (* Blank in manuscript.) long; the head, neck, and Shoulders very Small in proportion to the other parts. It was hair lipt, and the Head and Ears were most like a Hare's of any Animal I know; the Tail was nearly as long as the body, thick next the Rump, and Tapering towards the End; the fore Legs were 8 Inches long, and the Hind 22. Its progression is by Hopping or Jumping 7 or 8 feet at each hop upon its hind Legs only, for in this it makes no use of the Fore, which seem to be only design'd for Scratching in the ground, ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... deeds of the most desperate valor. There is much of romance about service on the blue ocean which is not to be found in routine duty along the yellow muddy streams that flowed through the territory claimed by King Cotton. The high, tapering masts, the yards squared and gracefully proportioned, the rigging taut, and with each rope in its place, of an ocean-frigate, are not seen in the squat, box-like gunboats that dashed by the batteries at Vicksburg, or hurled shot and shell at each other in the affair at Memphis. But ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... skirting the harbour beneath the great rocky escarpments of Wellington's hills, and from here Mac espied a sight which gladdened his soul and he lost no time in communicating his discovery to Bill and the others. Across a distant neck of land at the far side of the harbour, he had seen the tall tapering masts of two men-of-war, moving rapidly, and two murky streaks of smoke. This ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... wrong?" I asked, and for an answer he pointed with his arm to where against the sky were outlined the tapering masts of a large vessel lying between ...
— The Tory Maid • Herbert Baird Stimpson
... and settled myself as comfortably as I could, sitting with an arm well round a stay, and one leg twisted in another for safety; but the wood did not feel at all soft, and there was a peculiar rap, rap, rap against the tapering spar which ran up above my head to the round big wooden bun on the top of all, which we ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... she asked, unconsciously keeping the whole company of the ladies' table on their feet. At the gentlemen's table, just forward of them and tapering slenderly away in the long cabin's white-and-gilt perspective, that grosser majority who had come only to feed were mutely and with stooped shoulders feeding like pigeons from a trough, and far down at its end the white-haired commodore had taken his seat, with senator, judge, squire, ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... cat with a pink nose and pink lips and pink pads under her paws. Her tabby hood came down in a peak between her green eyes. Her tabby cape went on along the back of her tail, tapering to the tip. Sarah crouched against the fireguard, her haunches raised, her head sunk back on her shoulders, and her paws tucked in ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... the face, broke against his cheek-bone, and provided him with a new scar and a serviceable weapon, a dagger, convenient to handle and deadly to slay. The bottle-neck was a perfect hilt and the long tapering needle-pointed spire of glass projecting from it was a perfect blade—rightly used, of course. Only a fool would attempt a heart-stab with such a dagger, as it would shatter on the ribs, leaving the fool to pay for his folly. ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... bridegroom's letters stand in row above, Tapering, yet straight, like pine-trees in his grove; While free and fine the bride's appear below, As light and slender ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... place where Marat was standing and reached him her hand. No one in the crowd noticed that this hand of unwonted delicacy and whiteness did not seem to comport well with the dress of a vender of vegetables from the market; no one noticed that on one of the tapering fingers a jewel of ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... in which I and two Indians were to travel from York Factory to Norway House, a distance of nearly three hundred miles, measured between five and six yards long, by two feet and a half broad in the middle, tapering from thence to nothing at each end. It was made of birch bark, and could with great ease be carried by one man. In this we were to embark, with ten days' provisions for three men, three blankets, three small ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... from the tree were six or eight inches long, fat in the middle, and tapering at both ends. The skin was a pale chartreuse ...
— Cum Grano Salis • Gordon Randall Garrett
... by the hand, but on the way he saw at the edge of her upper veil the thick, dark eyebrows which met each other, and her fingers seemed to him so strangely cold and tapering that a shudder ran through his ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... one on each of the faces which looked into the enclosure, offered ingress. They were similar in size and shape, seven feet and a half in height by four in breadth, and tapering toward the summit like the portals of the temple-builders of Central America. Inside were solid mud floors, strewn with gray dust and showing here and there a gleam of broken pottery, the whole brooded over by obscurity. It was discoverable, however, that ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... redwood tree! And the redwood is more beautiful even than the stone-pine of Italy. Gray lavender in color, hard as though cut from stone, swelling at the base to an incredible bulk, shooting straight to an incredible height and tapering exquisitely as it soars, it drops not foliage but plumage. To walk in a redwood forest at night and to look up at the stars tangled in the tree-tops, to watch the moonlight sift through the masses of soft black-green feathers, down, down, until strained to a diaphanous tenuity it lies a ...
— The Californiacs • Inez Haynes Irwin
... Chinaman, with a wave of his tapering hand toward the roofs. "It reminds you of a ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... of the country is not particularly interesting. Dom and date palms are the principal trees, the latter having a single tapering stem, the former dividing into branches. The sycamore (Ficus sycamorus) is also tolerably common, as are several species of acacia. The acacia seyal, which furnishes the gum arable of commerce, is "a gnarled and thorny tree, somewhat like a solitary hawthorn in its habit and manner of growth, ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... sweet-lipped mouths set with the carriage of decades of assured and accomplished pride, and of their lovely slender eye-rows arched over equally lovely long brown eyes. The hands of both of them, little altered or defaced by age, were wonderful in their slender, tapering finger-tips, love-lomied and love-formed while they were babies by old Hawaiian women like to the one even then eating poi and iamaka and limu in ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... four-sided pillar, generally monolithic, tapering to a pyramidal pointed top, erected in connection with temples in Egypt, and inscribed all over with hieroglyphs, and in memorial, as is likely, of some historical personage or event; they ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... desert, many-hued, like an opal with the setting of the sun. I see the flickering of camp-fires and the palm-fringe of an oasis. I see the tapering minarets of a mosque, and the long booths of the bazaars. I smell the scent of the perfume-seller's stall, the heavy sweetness of attar of roses.... I hear the tinkle of camel bells.... There comes a change.... I see a mountain-pass ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... he was seated, disconsolate, gluing garnets and carbuncles on to a broad tapering bit of lambskin, when Ucatella came to him and said, ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... story had excited our interest ever since the ship came into the port. He was a delicate, slender little fellow, with a beautiful pearly complexion, regular features, forehead as white as marble, black haired, curling beautifully, rounded, tapering, delicate fingers, small feet, soft voice, gentle manners, and, in fact, every sign of having been well born and bred. At the same time there was something in his expression which showed a slight deficiency ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... all respects, the form should approach closely to that of a thorough-bred animal. The head should be small, neat, "well-set" on the neck, and gracefully "carried." The nostrils should be wide; the eyes large, rather protruding, dark, yet brilliant; the ears erect, and delicately tapering towards their tips. The expression of the countenance should be lively, animated, noble, and most highly intelligent; the neck rather arched and muscular; the ridge of the shoulders narrow and elevated; the chest full and fleshy; the back broad; the body, round or barrel-like; the space between ...
— The Young Lady's Equestrian Manual • Anonymous
... landing-stage. Beneath them the Pool slept, a sheet of polished ebony, whispering to itself, lapping with small stealthy gurgles angles of masonry and ancient piles. On the farther bank tall warehouses reared square old-time heads, their uncompromising, rugged profile relieved here and there by tapering mastheads. A few, scattering, feeble lights were visible. Nothing moved save the ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... one of the young women who had sufficient good taste to wear an exquisite gown of silk and silver gauze, showing a pale magenta ground with silver roses, continued the colour scheme of her designer with silver slippers, tapering as Cinderella's, but spoiled the picture she might have made by breaking her line and enlarging her ankles and instep with magenta stockings. This could have been avoided by the use of silver stockings or magenta ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank |
