"Thinning" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Darkness is thinning; shadows are retreating; Morning and light are coming in their beauty; Suppliant seek we, with an earnest outcry. ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... among the tolerant Hindoos, on the western coast of India and in the peninsula of Guzerat. There they throve and there they live still, while the ranks of their co-religionists in Persia are daily thinning and dwindling away.[9] ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... rattled down into the square; a thick cloud of dirty black smoke, gray and red tinged with mortar and brick-dust, appeared up above the roofs on the other side of the square, spread slowly and thickly, and hung long, dissolving very gradually and thinning ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... mile or more beyond the bare divide there rose against the southern sky a bold, oblong height or butte, studded with bowlders and stunted pine, and watchers at the fort became aware as the sun climbed higher that the smoke cloud, thinning gradually but perceptibly, was slowly drifting thither. The fire, too, grew faint and scattering. The war-whoops rang and re-echoed among the rocks, but all sound of cheering had long since died away. At last, an hour after the fury of the fight began, the colonel, gazing in speechless ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... 'Facts are facts, and as men of the world, we must look them in the face. Are we to stand against the will of the nation? Are we to have civil war on the top of all our misfortunes? And, besides, we are thinning away. Every hour comes the news of fresh desertions. We have still time to make our peace, and, indeed, to earn the highest regard, by ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the little mule out in the hills near by, and began my work. It was not hard, for the boarders were thinning out. The natives did not patronize this hotel very much, but grub disappeared pretty fast at my corner of the table, for my appetite began to be ravenous. There was not much variety to the food and ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... expression that filled him with disgust and loathing. Good heavens! it was Dorian Gray's own face that he was looking at! The horror, whatever it was, had not yet entirely spoiled that marvellous beauty. There was still some gold in the thinning hair and some scarlet on the sensual mouth. The sodden eyes had kept something of the loveliness of their blue, the noble curves had not yet completely passed away from chiselled nostrils and from plastic throat. Yes, it was Dorian ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... inquiring smile. Above her head the electric light, with which Oliver and the girls had insisted on replacing the gas-jets that she preferred, cast a hard glitter over the hollowed lines of her face and over the thinning curls which she had striven to brush back from her temples. Her figure, unassisted as yet by Miss Willy's ruffles, looked so fragile in the pitiless glare that his heart melted in one of those waves ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... grits in a quart of boiling water, as directed in the chapter on Grains, for three hours. Turn through a soup strainer to remove any lumps, season with half a cup of cream, and salt if desired. Well cooked Graham grits may be made into gruel by thinning with water or milk, straining ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... crop trees space, give them plenty of room to grow. In the woods they start to grow in a dense undergrowth. The young trees soon reach a height where they begin to dominate their neighbors. There you pick the straight, thrifty-growing trees for crop trees and favor them in your thinning and pruning operations. Tree density influences diameter growth of the trees. In thick stands, trees are usually small and spindly. So plant a large number to give the crop trees good form, then thin the plantation carefully to ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... of September these schools of tuna, thousands of them, ranted up and down the coast of Catalina, thinning out the amber patches of anchovies, and affording the most magnificent ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... forty years old, to strike a balance between the youth of eyes, mouth, and contour, and the age of deep lines and grayish, thinning hair. He had large, frank, blue eyes, a large nose, a strong forehead and chin, a grossly self-indulgent mouth,—there was the weakness, there, as usual! Evidently, the strength his mind and character ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... must knit Louis some neckties. The silk-sweater stitch would do. Married in a traveling suit. One of those smart dark-blue twills like Mrs. Gronauer, junior's. Topcoat—sable. Louis' hair thinning. Tonic. O God! let me sleep! Please, God! The wheeze rising in her closed throat. That little threatening desire that must not shape itself! It darted with the hither and thither of a bee bumbling against a garden wall. No! No! Ugh! the vast chills of nervousness. The flaming, ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... outstrips that of Scotland, and no wonder, there is no such heat there. In thinning turnips and the like Ailie kept what is pulled for boiling; they make good greens. We had a long talk about buying a yoke of oxen at once, and Brodie and Auld agreed to help me ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... early and middle adult life is not uncommon, and may consist of a simple thinning or of more or less complete baldness of the whole or greater part of the scalp. It usually develops slowly, some months or several years passing before the condition is well established. It is often idiopathic, and without apparent cause further than probably ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... warlike ditty in French, with a chorus of "Marchons! Marchons!" and at every word grapeshot fell to the ground, for the Colonel, in spite of the suggestions of war, was peacefully engaged, being seated on the top of a pair of steps thinning out the grapes which hung ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... grand scale are, as already stated, not uncommon in some parts of the United States. They have another object besides the sport—that of thinning off the squirrels for the protection of the planter's corn-field. So destructive are these little animals to the corn and other grains, that in some States there has been at times a bounty granted, for killing ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... of a sudden smack, as if some one's ears had been boxed when he least expected it, and this was followed by a loud angry squawk. Now the flakes, which had been gradually thinning, died away entirely, and the children suddenly discovered that they had not been snowflakes at all but only a cloud of white feathers sent whirling through the house, out of the windows, and up the chimney by some disturbance in the midst of a great heap in one ...
— The Wonderful Bed • Gertrude Knevels
... ever lurking a wrinkling smile and its break—the laugh—is hearty and contagious with a timbre of peculiar huskiness. His face is a trifle thin through the cheeks, which accentuates a breadth of head, now crowning with silvery—and let me whisper this—slowly thinning hair. Stubby white mustaches for facial adornment, and cloth of varying brown shades to encompass the ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... the forest is not only sustained, but actually increased, by removing the oldest trees at just the proper time; and is decreased by taking out young trees either not yet at the natural age of greatest mean annual increment or capable of artificial stimulation by thinning. ...
— Practical Forestry in the Pacific Northwest • Edward Tyson Allen
... Guild service he would never have made that find on Jumala. That lucky, lucky find! Hume's plasta-flesh fingers curved, their nails drew across the red surface of the table. And where was Wass? He was about to rise and go when the golden oval on the wall smoked, its substance thinning to a mist as a man stepped through to ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... was now well-nigh over, as the necessity for it seemed nearly ended. Patients were in May being mustered out of the service, and the hospitals thinning. Miss Dada and Miss Hall thought they could be spared, and started eastward. But when in Illinois, word reached them that all the ladies but one had left, and help was needed, and Miss Dada returned to Chattanooga. Here she was soon busy, for, though the war was over, there were still many ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... had of course heard all about this, and knew exactly where to find the house. It was marked with the red cross, for, as was inevitable, many of the little inmates were carried off by the fell disease after admission, and the numbers were constantly thinning and being replaced by fresh ones. But hitherto the nurses themselves had been spared, and toiled on unremittingly ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... the Criminal classes to the service of Education, waxed daily more numerous and more insolent on the strength of their immunity from the old burden which had formerly exercised the twofold wholesome effect of at once taming their brutal nature and thinning ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... Belcher's kennels, and fetch along a couple of men—any one you can pick up—to help. And don't make a noise as you go past the cottage; the women there are frightened enough already. Come to think of it, I heard some fellows at work as I drove by just now, thinning timber in the plantation under the kennels. Off with you, man, and don't stand gaping ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... distinguished when germinating, their young axes being of a pure instead of a purplish green. It is a test ordinarily used by gardeners, to purify their flower beds long before the blooming time, when thinning or weeding them. Even in wild plants, as in Erodium, Calluna, Brunella and others, a botanist may recognize the rare white-flowered [147] variety by the pure green color of the leaves, at times when it is not in flower. Some sorts of peas bear colored flowers and a red mark on the ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... turned into a velvet dusk. The great Change was drawing near. The silence lay like a thinning veil of mist upon the mountain-top. The clouds were parting in the East, all tinged with gold, like burnished gates flung back for the royal coming of the sun-god. The stillness that lay upon all the waiting earth was sacred as the hush ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... but a few of the tens of thousands of eggs ever really have a chance to become young oysters. You can help that in two ways, one by preparing the ground so that everything is made easy for the young oysters to have a chance, the other by thinning them out or transplanting the young oysters or 'spat' as they are called, improving ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... the residence of the storekeeper. Next to the store, in a sort of lean-to, whitewashed shed with green shutters, was a bar-room. Farther on in this row, opposite the jail of the place, and partially hidden by the thinning foliage of sycamore, chestnut, and mulberry trees, was the hotel. It was the only two-storied building in the village. It had dormer windows in the roof and ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... days, and saw the works of Boulton, Watt's partner, who said to him, "I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have—power." Thence they went to Lichfield, and met more of the rapidly thinning circle of Johnson's oldest friends. Here Boswell was a little scandalized by Johnson's warm exclamation on opening a letter—"One of the most dreadful things that has happened in my time!" This turned out to be the death of Thrale's ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... is the wonder. You would like him for his love of trees; a great part of his time out of doors is taken up in pruning his trees. I have within this hour heard a gentleman say to him, "You have had a good deal of experience in planting, Sir Walter; do you advise much thinning, or not?"—"I should advise much thinning, but little at a time. If you thin much at a time, you let in the ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... Then, by further thinning out Thomas's line, which was well entrenched, I drew another division of Palmer's corps (Baird's) around to the right, to further strengthen that flank. I was impatient to hear from the cavalry raid, then four days out, and was ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... appealing music. It was late, or rather early, for morning was looking in with cold, dispassionate eyes through the long windows. The gallery was comparatively empty for a London gathering, for the balconies and hall were crowded, and the rooms were thinning. To all intents and purposes they were alone. How nearly—how nearly he had asked for what he knew would not have been refused! How nearly he had decided to do at once what might still be put off ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... or he would not have chosen him out of many for this fateful work. He had asked of him the ultimate service, as a friend should. Aimery reconstructed in his inner vision all his memories of the King: the close fair hair now thinning about the temples; the small face still contoured like a boy's; the figure strung like a bow; the quick, eager gestures; the blue dove's eyes, kindly and humble, as became one whose proudest title was to be a "sergeant of the Crucified." ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... lighter that the bulk of each horseman could be seen as they moved forward together. But there was no thinning of the obscurity on either side of them. Nevertheless the profile of the horseman with the pleasant voice seemed to be occasionally turned backward, and he suddenly checked ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... the land surface of the planet; and feeding them and distributing from them, innumerable minor systems, clean little electric tramways I picture them, will spread out over the land in finer reticulations, growing close and dense in the urban regions and thinning as the population thins. And running beside these lighter railways, and spreading beyond their range, will be the smooth minor high roads such as this one we now approach, upon which independent vehicles, motor cars, cycles, and what not, will go. I doubt if we shall see any horses ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... set and darkness closed in, Bill noticed, to his gratification, that the weed seemed to be thinning out and that the water-lanes grew more and ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... stone house. Aunt Twylee washed the blood from the knife and wiped it dry on her apron. She opened the oven and took out the browned cobbler. Sweet apple juice bubbled to the surface through the half moons and burst in delights of sugary aroma. The sun broke through the thinning edge of the thunderhead. ...
— One Martian Afternoon • Tom Leahy
... thinning off by degrees as Charlotte and Eleanor walked about in quest of Bertie. Their search might have been long had they not happened to hear his voice. He was comfortably ensconced in the ha-ha, with his back to the sloping side, smoking a cigar, ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... said Mark, easily, 'but, at all events, no harm has come of it to anybody. How they are thinning the trees along here, aren't they? Just look ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... leads the way that they do not stray? What unimagined arm keeps their bodies from harm? What presence concealed lifts their little feet that yield Over dry ground and wet till their straining eyes are met With a thinning of the darkness? ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... power of the Shogun. His minister—the same who was afterwards assassinated in the snow in the very midst of his bodyguard—not only held back pupils from going to the Dutchmen, but by spies and detectives, by imprisonment and death, kept thinning out of Japan the most intelligent and active spirits. It is the old story of a power upon its last legs—learning to the bastille, and courage to the block; when there are none left but sheep and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... woodcutters, Barbara Vane was quite unable to guess. He removed his hat, still with his unaltered and rather sinister smile, and said civilly: "Excuse me. The Squire asked me to call." Here he caught sight of Martin, the woodman, who was shifting along the path, thinning the thin trees; and the stranger made a familiar ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... He left those Cossacks there, and plunged with his own into another mass of the foe, making a lane through it. Where the Nezamaikovtzi passed there was a street; where they turned about there was a square as where streets meet. The foemen's ranks were visibly thinning, and the Lyakhs falling in sheaves. Beside the waggons stood Vovtuzenko, and in front Tcherevitchenko, and by the more distant ones Degtyarenko; and behind them the kuren hetman, Vertikhvist. Degtyarenko ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... a cigarette. He rolled it carefully, the delicate rice paper crisping in his hand without a tremor; but all the while a red tide mounting up from beneath the collar of his shirt, deepening in the hollows of the cheeks and thinning against the cheekbones above, creeping, spreading, till ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... anywhere, but is best in a soil of loam and peat, a moderate supply of water being given daily during the hot weather. They will require frequent thinning out of the branches, and are propagated by cuttings, which ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... as Levin had seen driving past, were already past flowering and beginning to die down, while Levin's were only just coming into flower. He earthed up his potatoes with a modern plough borrowed from a neighboring landowner. He sowed wheat. The trifling fact that, thinning out his rye, the old man used the rye he thinned out for his horses, specially struck Levin. How many times had Levin seen this splendid fodder wasted, and tried to get it saved; but always it had turned out to be impossible. The peasant got ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... or more, as we ran on, we thus continued exchanging broadsides, considerably thinning their crowded decks; but as some of our spars were wounded, our captain, fearing lest any being carried away, the enemy might escape, determined without delay to lay him on board, and to try the mettle of true men against ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... hot so early," thought Wayland. Fir trees stood out from the shifting gray haze. Among them, did he see shadows moving? They might be deer coming down to water. Involuntarily, he stepped behind some alder brush off the trail. Another flutter of wind thinning the turbid mist. There was a whiff of camp smoke. Through the mist, he could make out figures not a hundred yards away—five horses ready for travel, four men clumsily lifting a fellow in cow-boy slicker into his saddle. The man fell forward over the pummel. The group seemed undecided what ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... German hands. But the depleted lines of the marines held; the men who had fought on their nerve alone for days once more showed the mettle of which they were made. With their backs to the trees and boulders of the Bois de Belleau, with their sole shelter the scattered ruins of Bouresches, the thinning lines of the marines repelled the attack and crashed back the new division which had sought to wrest the ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... heavy, frogged overcoat; all but two, juniors of the staff, men who stood on the shady side of forty, four of the number wearing on their shoulders the silver stars of generals of division or brigade, and among their thinning crops of hair the silver strands that told of years of service. One man alone, the commanding general, was speaking; all the others listened in respectful silence. In the gloom of that late, fog-shrouded ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... while we rode without talking, Anthony scowling out of his window, I staring out of mine at an eddying haze which, thinning out ever and anon, showed vague shapes that peeped forth only to be lost again, spectral trees, barns and ricks, looming unearthly ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... Fluel, Movaine's personal gun. Going by Heraga's descriptions, the big, florid-faced man with white hair and flowing white mustaches who was doing the talking was Velladon, the commodore; while the fourth man, younger, wiry, with thinning black hair plastered back across his skull, would be Ryter, chief of ...
— Lion Loose • James H. Schmitz
... were thinning out rapidly; one side of the road was already only a succession of fields, and along a tiny worn path through one of these Caroline was hurrying nervously. She crossed the widening brook, almost a little river now, and kept along its farther bank for half an ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... their sleep they go; And all night long the snowdrop glimmers white Thinning the ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... but the other, or under fur, is beautifully soft and close, and is the ordinary sealskin of commerce. The roots of the coarse hair go deeper into the skin than those of the under fur, so the furrier takes advantage of this by thinning the skin down to the coarse roots, cutting them free, and then the hairs are easily removed, leaving the soft ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... leaped off Nagger, and, a lasso in each hand, he ran down the long bank. The fire was perhaps a quarter of a mile distant, and, since the grass was thinning out, it was not coming so fast as it had been. The position of the stallion was halfway between the fire and Slone, and a hundred yards ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... pregnant and blessed words of my text, in which metaphors are blended with much disregard to oratorical propriety, in order to bring out the whole fulness of the prophet's meaning. 'I have blotted out'—that suggests a book. 'I have blotted out as a cloud'—that suggests the thinning away of morning mists. The prophet blends the two thoughts together, and on that great revelation of a forgiveness granted before it has been asked, and given, not only to one penitent soul wailing out like the abased king of Israel in his deep ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... watch their careless disregard of danger, that they were born of the waters, and considered death by drowning an impossible casualty in their case. Yet never a season passes without fatal accidents thinning ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... "fatter," than leaf-buds, and often fuzzy. Heading-back the tree of course tends to concentrate the fruit-buds and to keep them nearer the center of the tree-top; but heading-back must be combined with intelligent saving and thinning of the interior shoots. Heading-back of pears and peaches and plums is usually a ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... except that the seat by his side had come to be mine; it made none now. He turned his old bright fatherly look upon me, laid his hand on my hand in his old way, and said again, "She will succeed, my dear. Nevertheless, Bleak House is thinning fast, ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... May, the little Victoria, with starvation and scurvy already thinning the ranks, with foretopmast gone by the board and fore-yard badly sprung, cleared the Cape of Good Hope, and thence was borne on the strong and friendly current up to the equator, which she crossed on the ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... last night we camped at the dam was exceedingly cold, the thermometer falling to 26 degrees on the morning of the 16th of August, the day we left. I steered south-east, and we came out of the scrubs, which had been thinning, on to the great plain, in forty-nine or fifty miles. Changing my course here to east, we skirted along the edge of the plain for twenty-five miles. It was beautifully grassed, and had cotton and ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... marching men could now see that the trees were thinning out. Still further ahead they knew that there must lie either plantation fields or ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Philippines - or, Following the Flag against the Moros • H. Irving Hancock
... directly it passes on to the white of the acided parts. This is the last process I need describe; the many little special refinements to be got by playing games with the lead lines; by thickening and thinning them; by doubling glass, to get depth and intensity, or to blend new tints;—these and such like are the things that any artist who does his own work and practises his own craft can find out, and ought to find ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... third room, where a shower-bath was ready. Here he received a cold-water douche, and after rubbing his white and muscular body with coarse towels and donning his white linen, he seated himself before the mirror and began to brush his short, curly beard and the thinning curls of ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... farmers all shot the rabbits on their own land. Rents were paid to the day. There was never any mistake about that. Of course the land would require to be re-valued, but "My Lord" wouldn't hear of such a thing being done in his time. The Manor wood wanted thinning very badly. The wood had been a good deal neglected. "My Lord" had never liked to hear the axe going. That was Grumby Green and the boundary of the estate in that direction. The next farm was college property, and was rented five shillings an acre ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... home is to stay at home. Finally his own fireside had become a summary of his habits. Why should he ever have left it?—since this would have been leaving what was notoriously pleasantest in London, the compact charmed cluster (thinning away indeed into casual couples) round the fine old last- century chimney-piece which, with the exception of the remarkable collection of miniatures, was the best thing the place contained. Mr. Offord wasn't rich; he had nothing but his pension and the ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... impossible. The Church of England was the only Protestant body which originally objected to the secular system, because none of the other Protestant denominations had schools of their own. Now these are beginning to awake to the fact that the secular schools are thinning their flocks, and producing a large number of freethinkers in fact, if not in profession. They are therefore openly becoming more inclined to joint action with the Anglicans, not for the establishment of denominational schools, but for the introduction of broad Christian teaching ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... yet decided. But the fact remains that the Indians of our generation are not as familiar with Bonaparte's name as were their fathers and grandfathers, so either the predominance of English-speaking settlers or the thinning of their ancient war-loving blood by modern civilization and peaceful times, must one or the other account for the younger Indian's ignorance of the ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... you what," said Tom to himself, "it's much pleasanter sitting here in the shade, than broiling over celery trenches, and thinning wall fruit, with a baking sun at one's back, and a hot wall before one's eyes. But I'm a miserable slave. I must either work or see my family starve; a very hard lot it ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... The fog was fast thinning, for across the road she could see a spiral of blue smoke, mounting through it from the chimney of a neighbor. The kitchen fire ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... into the same blank and unlovely opinions. One thing, indeed, is not to be learned in Scotland, and that is, the way to be happy. Yet that is the whole of culture, and perhaps two-thirds of morality. Can it be that the Puritan school, by divorcing a man from nature, by thinning out his instincts, and setting a stamp of its disapproval on whole fields of human activity and interest, leads at last directly to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... face might have had as many sweethearts; but I think it was my managing ways that took Powell's fancy. If a fairy could only move a lot of the women from the places where they are not wanted, and put them where they are, there would be a wonderful thinning taken out of Scotland and planted in Australia. But ye see there are no fairies; and at such a distance, it costs a lot of money to move such commodities as single women. I have puzzled my brains whiles about the matter, Miss ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... that they are thinned out and transplanted; and such should be the case in communicating knowledge to children. To attempt to teach the whole history at once, is like sowing the whole acre with acorns, and thinning them out during a quarter of a century. The loss of seed in this case is the least of the evils; for the ground would be robbed of its strength, nine-tenths of it would be rendered unnecessarily useless during a large portion of ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... put the fear of death into the enemy and for an hour the thinning line of Normans had ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... obey the summons of friendship! Convenient, in some respects, for all that. If all loungers, of slender revenues, like mine, could command a constant succession of invitations, from men of estates in the country, how amazingly it would tend to the thinning of Bond Street! [Throws himself into a Chair near the Writing Table.] Let me see—what has Sir Simon been reading?—"Burn's Justice"—true; the old man's reckoned the ablest magistrate in the county. he hasn't cut ...
— John Bull - The Englishman's Fireside: A Comedy, in Five Acts • George Colman
... begin, no longer as now with the offices of aspirant engineer, sub-lieutenant of artillery, second lieutenant, deputy, comptroller, general guardian, etc., but with the ignoble positions of pioneer, train-soldier, dredger, cabin-boy, fagot- maker, and exciseman. There he will wait, until death, thinning the ranks, enables him to advance a step. Under such circumstances a man, a graduate of the polytechnic school and capable of becoming a Vauban, may die a laborer on a second class road, or ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... He read it through absently. The houses were thinning along the road. The prairie stretched ahead of them in solitary sweeps of tender green, dappled with flowers. ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... shell; x the cavity, converted, as I believe, into a pouch by, firstly, the delicate tunic (c) lining the sack of the female; secondly, a double layer (d) of corium; and, thirdly, by a special, rather thick membranous layer (b), which thinning out round the cavity coats only part of the under surface of the scutum. This latter membrane I have not seen in any other Cirripede, and I believe it is nothing but the tissue, here not calcified, which, in a calcified condition, ordinarily forms the valves. On ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... to the vestibule and hall, where the crowd is by this time perceptibly thinning. Chaperons are sailing off to the cloak-room, each followed by her brood; and the hoarse voices of the servants and policemen outside—"Call Mrs. Thingummy's carriage," "Mrs. Whatshername's carriage stops the way"—penetrate almost to the dancers' ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... enemy, who would see the apparent possibility of taking Telnitz easily, and then crossing the Goldbach and going on to Gross-Raigern in order to control the road from Brunn to Vienna and so cut off our line of retreat. The Austro-Russians fell headlong into the trap, and, thinning out the rest of their line, they clumsily piled up a considerable force in the lower part of Telnitz, and in the narrow, marshy defiles around the meres of Satschan and Menitz. They thought, for some unknown reason, that ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... for the sneer, for the venom that they carry; I will shake their hearts with fear as the land around I harry: They shall find the midnight raid waking them from fitful slumbers; They shall find the ball and blade daily thinning out their numbers: Barn in ashes, cattle slain, hearth on which there glows no ember, Neatless plough and horseless wain; thus the rebels shall remember ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... others who, hearing, did not laugh, or if they did, it was with a mere strained thinning of the lips that had no element of mirth in it. Temper and tolerance were short ten years ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... constitute a special and limited market. Of the ninety-five perhaps ten or fifteen will pay a price for quality. Of those remaining, a number will buy solely on price and without regard to quality. Their numbers are thinning with each day. Buyers are learning how to buy. The majority will consider quality and buy the biggest dollar's worth of quality. If, therefore, you discover what will give this 95 per cent. of people the best all-round service ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... flat on our stomachs while a group of warriors passed within a dozen feet of us, driving to their camp some strayed beeves from the high rolling bottom-lands to the east. When the last of them had passed I observed with great alarm a thinning out of the darkness along the ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... Middlesex Hospital, but three months after the reception of the injury he was taken ill and died. A postmortem examination showed that the right ventricle had been penetrated in a slanting direction; the cause of death was apoplexy, produced by the weakening and thinning of the heart's walls, the effect of the wound. Tillaux reports the case of a man of sixty-five, the victim of general paralysis, who passed into his chest a blade 16 cm. long and 2 mm. broad. The wound of puncture was 5 cm. below the nipple and 2 cm. to the outside. The left side of the chest ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... tolerate. And remembering the ghastly sawdust-eating waiting-rooms of the North English railways, he wrote that rich chapter in Mugby Junction. Matthew Arnold could have told him that this was but a part of the general thinning down of European civilisation in these islands at the edge of it; that for two or three thousand years the Latin society has learnt how to drink wine, and how not to drink too much of it. Dickens did not in the least understand the Latin society: but he did understand ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... had slowly approached Lord Claud. Now that the hour for the play had all but come, the room was thinning of its guests. He felt more courage to speak to this strange being, who seemed ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... home now reduced to the rank of a village, ordinarily exchanged its native burgess-rights for those of a Roman —metoikos—. Moreover the burdens of war fell exclusively on the old burgesses and were constantly thinning the ranks of their patrician descendants, while the —metoeci— shared in the results of victory without having to pay ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... pleasant also to note the increasing number of bright, sensible, earnest young women coming from all parts of the country to aid the older workers and to close up their thinning ranks. The sight would be a revelation to that Massachusetts legislator who was lately reported as saying that the petitioners who had been asking for suffrage for so many years were fast dying off, and soon there would be none left. He would have seen how greatly he was reckoning ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... our Marylanders the wild, thrilling yell of the southern provinces, and we leaped to the charge up the long hill, straight into the face of Cornwallis's army, a handful against thousands. Up, up the hill we dashed. A fire as of hell broke upon us and rattled and roared about our ears, thinning our ranks and strewing our pathway with the dead. Men fell to the right and to the left of me, and I strode across the bodies of the slain in my path; but still, over the roar of the cannon and the rattle ...
— The Tory Maid • Herbert Baird Stimpson
... like his father, but he still walked erect. His hair was already thinning and growing grey over the temples, but his face was clean-shaven, like a youth's. His lips were wrinkled and he had large, grey, ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... refreshing waters without endangering their precious limbs. As the district which these animals frequented was in the present case a very circumscribed one—fresh individuals could come neither down from the Kenia nor over the waterfall at the end of the great plateau—we soon succeeded in so thinning their numbers that only a few examples were left, the destruction of which we handed over to our Andorobbo huntsmen, whom we furnished with weapons for this Purpose, and to whom we offered a large premium for every crocodile slain in the Eden lake or in the Dana above the waterfall. As a ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... the back of the house (the Cape Flora of Martin Conrad), so I took him into that, not without an increasing sense of embarrassment. It was a clear October day, the glen was dry, and the air under the shadow of the thinning trees was full of the soft light of the ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... Heracles, who, as usual, had remained behind to guard the ship, observed that these Giants were busy blocking up the harbour with huge rocks. He at once realized the danger, and, attacking them with his arrows, succeeded in considerably thinning their numbers; then, assisted by the heroes, who at length came to his aid, he effectually destroyed ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... of being an instrument for saving souls, I was made the innocent means of destroying them. Oh, gentlemen, it was a shocking thing to tug away at the rope till the sweat ran down one, for four shillings a week; and to see all the time that one was thinning one's own congregation ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... contracted, leaving at each of the several intervals a severed ring. Most of these rings broke up, their fragments conglomerated and forming a sphere; one in particular separating into a multitude of minuter spheres, others assuming a highly elliptical form, condensing here and thinning out there; while the central mass grew brighter and denser as it contracted; till there lay before me a perfect miniature of the solar system, with planets, satellites, asteroids, and ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... unwinking stare of an owl. Between them jutted a large, bony beak of a nose, with finely-cut nostrils. The pitiless set of the powerful jaw was only partially concealed by an enormous drooping moustache, the latter reddish in colour and streaked with gray, like his thinning, carefully brushed hair. His age was hard to determine. Somewhere around forty-five, George decided, as he regarded with covert interest Ruthven Gully, Esq., gentleman-rancher and Justice of the ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... boats returned for their second loads there was another hurly-burly, but the decks were thinning out, and pushing to the nearest ladder Charley and the Fremonter managed to climb down, lowering their baggage, into the boat there. The boat was loaded full almost instantly, and away it pulled, for ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... the pursuit of such runners, to say nothing of the hounds. The "tally-ho" comes cheerly up to us from the valley through the crisp October air, and we see puss scudding along up the hedgerow, the hounds and the foremost runners in the next field, the rest thinning out and straggling behind them. Among these we recognise with glee a friend or two, who years ago were in the first flight of every Uppingham paper-chase (si nunc foret illa uventus), labouring across a turnip-field, or held by the leg in a gorse- cover. A check gives them a chance ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... my tonic regularly but apparently without deriving beneficial results. Its especial purpose is for the thinning of the blood. Assuredly though, if my blood has been appreciably thinned my mental attitude remains unchanged. Perversely I continue to be the subject of contradictory and conflicting moods impossible to understand and ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... sight, and it once chanced that some projecting branches by degrees stretched out across his field of view. This circumstance caused him much mental trouble; for, having all his life consistently opposed any thinning out or trimming of trees, he did not care to issue an order which would almost confess a mistake. Besides which, why only these particular branches?—the object would be so apparent. The squire, while conversing with Ettles, twice, as if unconsciously, directed ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... we followed the road behind Hill 123, up a glorious valley, whose sides were thickly wooded with pines, gradually thinning under the destruction wrought by Austrian shell fire and the Italian military need for timber. The only other vegetation here was a little coarse grass. On the lee side of Hill 123, sheltered from Austrian fire, was ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... cut was full twelve feet long, being a very strong but light and tough young tree, which merely required thinning at the butt ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... he forced his failing strength to carry them up the slope. The air was chilling fast and the mist thinning. He broke into clear air as the fog behind them filled with the rattle of racing claws on the barren granite and the grating roar of the baffled monsters, seeking frantically for their ...
— Loot of the Void • Edwin K. Sloat
... suddenly seemed a stranger to me. So cold. So vibrationless. Broken lights. These slanting, wrecked corridors. With the ventilating fans stilled, the air was turning fetid. Chilling. And thinning, with escaping pressure, rarifying so that I could feel the grasp of it in my lungs and the pin-pricks of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... it were from beneath our feet. Soon the court-house was reached, and hustled into a common cell, I found myself amongst a crowd of boys and men, all bound for the 'dock.' One by one the names are called, and the crowd is gradually thinning down, when the announcement of my own name fell on my startled ear, and I found myself stumbling up the stairs, and finding myself in daylight and the 'dock.' What a terrible ordeal it was. The ceremony was ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... of years had touched Steve lightly enough. Time might almost have stood still altogether. A few grey hairs about the temples. A thinning of his dark hair perhaps. Then the lines of his face had perhaps deepened. But in the fourteen years that had elapsed since his return to Unaga the raw muscle and the powerful frame of his youthful body had only gained in mass and left him the more capable ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... their numbers were thinning rapidly; and at length Lieutenant Saumarez himself, being hit in three places, reluctantly, but very properly, gave the signal for return. The remainder of the day was spent in throwing shot and shell, as circumstances required, so as to prevent ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... the changed quality of Gower's tone. The amused expression had vanished. Gower leaned forward a little. There was something very like appeal in his expression. MacRae was suddenly conscious of facing a still different man,—an oldish, fat man with thinning hair ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... destructive as the poison of snakes, belong, O Virata's son, to Arjuna. When shooting them in battle against foes, these swift arrows blaze forth more brilliantly and become inexhaustible. And these long and thick shafts resembling the lunar crescent in shape, keen-edged and capable of thinning the enemy's ranks, belong to Bhima. And this quiver bearing five images of tigers, full of yellowish shafts whetted on stone and furnished with golden wings belong to Nakula. This is the quiver of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... cultivation of turnips was well understood, for the Complete Farmer, s.v. Turnips (ed. 3), says that about 1750 Norfolk farmers boasted that turnips had doubled the value of their holdings, and Norfolk men were famous for understanding hoeing and thinning, which were little practised elsewhere. Further, Young, Southern Tour, p. 273, says: 'the extensive use of turnips is known but little of except in Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex. I found no farmers but in these counties that understood anything of fatting cattle with them; feeding lean ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... Long ago a great number of young beeches had been planted so thickly that as they grew they shot up straight and branchless in their struggle for the light. Not till they had reached a considerable altitude had they been thinned; and then the thinning had been so effected that, as the high branches began to shoot out in the freer space, they met in time and interlaced so closely that they made in many places a perfect screen of leafy shade. Here and ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... American function. It was some time ere the groups thinned. This latter fact usually would have ended the reception, since it is not etiquette to suppose that the president can lack an audience; but to-day Mr. Tyler lingered. As last through the thinning throng he caught sight of the distinctive figure of Mr. Calhoun. For the first time his own face assumed a natural expression. He stopped the line for an instant, and with a raised ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... relieved of some great anxiety about the time when, ten days before, he had told her to invite her friends to Mardykes Hall. This morning he had gone out for a walk with Trevor, his under-steward, to talk over some plans about thinning the woods at this side; and also to discuss practically a proposal, lately made by a wealthy merchant, to take a very long lease, on advantageous terms to Sir Bale as he thought, of the old park and chase of Cloostedd, with the intention of building there, and making ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... numerous as to be all very small. Of late years, however, they have gradually improved so much in flavour, as to become a remarkably spirited, juicy apple, attaining a good size, which has probably been promoted by thinning them, though a full crop has always been left upon the tree; and they are now greatly esteemed by ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... were making their way up the staircase, that Hilary and her father could only move forward a step at the time, but after they had shaken hands with a stout lady and a thin gentleman at the head of the stairs, there was a sudden thinning off, for a suite of reception rooms opened out of the hall, and the guests floated away ...
— Sisters Three • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... distinctly disappointing to the government. The exemptions were numerous and the number who preferred and were able to pay $300 rather than serve exceeded all expectations. Volunteering, it is true, was stimulated, but even that resource could hardly keep the thinning ranks of the army filled. With reluctance Congress struck out the $300 exemption clause, but still favored the well-to-do by allowing them to hire substitutes if they could find them. With all this power ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... shrunken depressions, or they lose their shapes from partial resorption. A large plaque may flatten in the center until an annular disk is left to show its former location. Coincident symptoms are disturbance in the functions of the sweat and sebaceous secretion, thinning and loss of hair in the regions involved, especially the eyebrows, and disorders of sensibility. Later results, are a nasal catarrh, atrophy of the sexual organs in both sexes, with impairment or loss of procreative ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... thought of marrying. Not that there was anything austere or saturnine about Hugo. He made you think, somehow, of a cherubic, jovial monk. It may have been his rosy rotundity, or, perhaps, the way in which his thinning hair vanished altogether at the top of his head, so as to form a tonsure. Hugo Mandle, kindly, generous, shrewd, spoiled his old mother in the way in which women of seventy, whose middle life has been hard, like to be spoiled. First of all, of course, she reigned unchecked ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... have in addition a scooping power, so that if similarly a d b in Fig. 47 represent the course of a glacier, starting at a and gradually thinning out to e, it may scoop out the rock to a certain extent at d; in that case if it subsequently retires say to c, there would be a lake lying in the basin thus ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... thinning white hair, very bad teeth but fairly active physically and her mind is ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... no room for uncertainty or argument, and the boy did not attempt to argue or even to answer. He stood looking uncertainly down at the Judge, as if for the moment he could not see anything in the room quite distinctly, the Judge's face, with its near-sighted blue eyes and red-gold beard and thinning hair, or ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... beverage dreamily, while the absinthe, in return for this thoughtful consideration, spread over them its benign influence, gradually lifting from their minds all care and worry, dispersing the mental clouds that hover over all men at times, thinning the fog until it disappeared, rather than rolling the vapour away, as the warm sun dissipates into invisibility the opaque morning mists, leaving nothing but clear air, all round, and a ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr |
