"Tropical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... quote from "The Polar and Tropical Worlds," written by two scientists, one apparently a German, the other designated "Scientific Editor of the American Cyclopedia." The book was published in 1877, eleven years or more after the ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... through the serene tranquillities of the tropical seas, among waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wretched hideousness of ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... it with the hand, then cooked it on a hot stone before an open fire. It is still made in that manner in the heart of Mexico, and we could tell a story of how we saw this done one night in the midst of a dense tropical forest, while muleteers and mozas of a great caravan sat around their little campfires, whose fitful light served to intensify the weird appearance of the shadows of the Indians as they passed to and fro among ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... neither case has the race possessed the land, nor have the national characteristics been transmitted to the dwellers therein as a whole. They have realized, rather, the idea recently formulated by Mr. Benjamin Kidd for the development of tropical regions,—administration from without. ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... is nothing to be frightened at. This is a manly world we live in. Our reverence is good for nothing if it does not begin with self-respect. Occidental manhood springs from that as its basis; Oriental manhood finds the greatest satisfaction in self-abasement. There is no use in trying to graft the tropical palm upon the Northern pine. The same divine forces underlie the growth of both, but leaf and flower and fruit must follow the law of race, of soil, of climate. Whether the questions which assail my young friend have risen in my reader's mind or not, he knows perfectly well that nobody ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... and tramped the streets by lamplight, as if there were no such thing as sun—-recalled vaguely a world in which it used to be— woods with the leaves turning, New York on a bright autumn morning, enchanted tropical dawns. ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... and tight clothes which are donned all the year round, irrespective of the weather, must be very uncomfortable. Men wear nearly the same kind of clothing at all seasons of the year. That might be tolerated in the frigid or temperate zones, but should not the style be changed in the tropical heat of summer common to the Eastern countries? I did not notice that men made much difference in their dress in summer; I have seen them, when the thermometer was ranging between 80 and 90, wearing a singlet shirt, waistcoat and coat. The coat may not have been as thick ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... suddenly plunged me into a reverie. And I had a vision of trees, of strange fruits, and of forests filled with marvelously colored birds. Ah! how much those magical but disturbing words, "the colonies" conveyed to me in my childhood. To me they meant at that time all tropical and distant countries, which I invariably thought of as filled with giant palms, exquisite flowers, strange black people and great animals. Although my ideas were so confused I had an almost true conception, amounting to an intuition, of ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... Assyrian stone; they hold with reverential touch the yellow parchment-roll whose dim, defaced characters record the meagre learning of a buried nationality; and the announcement, that for centuries the tropical forests of Central America have hidden within their tangled growth the ruined homes and temples of a past race, stirs the civilized world ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... the New York Sun said in a brilliant description: "The dining-room was a splendid scene, long to be remembered. The American flag was everywhere and, with tropical flowers and foliage, made bright decorations.... It was a notable gathering of women world-wide in fame, and of distinguished men. The lady with a birthday—seventy of them indeed—was of course the star on which all others gazed. She never looked better, never happier, and never so much ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... its conductor made amends for the decay which critics did not fail to notice in his faculties. Schubart's sufferings had in fact permanently injured him; his mind was warped and weakened by theosophy and solitude; bleak northern vapours often flitted over it, and chilled its tropical luxuriance. Yet he wrote and rhymed; discoursed on the corruption of the times, and on the means of their improvement. He published the first portion of his Life, and often talked amazingly about ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... explanations could be the true one, even as he thus sat upright on his blanket to listen. The ominous, growling, grumbling noise was more in the nature of approaching thunder, just as though one of those furious summer storms, tropical in their nature, and often encountered in this country where plains and mountains sharply meet, had crept upon ...
— The Saddle Boys of the Rockies - Lost on Thunder Mountain • James Carson
... bringing home and cooking of the game, the building of houses, etc., is not altogether pleasant. It is uninteresting, and the heat and the humidity of the climate render it almost insupportable in certain seasons and hours of the day. The repugnance to labor of tropical people, whether natives or white immigrants, is proverbial. Every one in the banana zone, therefore, seeks to shift his burden upon another. As a first resort, he unloads it upon his wife, and she, finding it grievous, cries out, and he then relieves her by procuring additional wives. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... a costly wood, Bearing the strange perfume Of the gorgeous solitude, Where it grew in tropical gloom; And the odorous scent, the spicy balm Of its isle it will bear to me, As I stand on the shore, in the magic calm. And my ship come in ...
— Poems • Marietta Holley
... attracted his particular attention. She was a native of Spain, and the wife of an opulent merchant, whose business had some time before called him to Peru. According to the historians of that day, she was still in the bloom of youth; 'Her cheeks, naturally ruddy, were heightened by a tropical sun into a warmer glow; and her fine black eyes, dazzling with uncommon lustre, gave animation to the noblest countenance that ever the hand of nature delineated, or poet's fancy conceived. The interest which her unhappy ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of these Provinces and possessions, seemingly less indulgent than those of tropical regions, are precisely those by which the skill, energy, and virtues of the human race are best developed. Nature there demands thought and labour from man as conditions of his existence, and yields abundant rewards ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... League of Free Nations must necessarily be the creation of an authority that may legitimately call existing empires to give an account of their stewardship. For an unchecked fragmentary control of tropical and chaotic regions, it substitutes the possibility of a general authority. And this must necessarily alter the problems not only of the politically immature nations and the control of the tropics, but also of the regulation of the ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... and glycerine to give smoothness. Gum varies much in thickness and color. The first three cent stamp of the Danish West Indies furnishes an instance of this. The stamps were sent from Denmark without gum, as is frequently done with stamps for tropical countries. When they reached the islands the stamps were given to two druggists to be gummed. One used gum of good quality and, light color, while the other used poor material and of so dark color as to stain the paper and even darken the ink of the stamps. In Hanover rose-colored gum was ...
— What Philately Teaches • John N. Luff
... makes such a drain upon the heat-producing power of the body that only food containing the largest proportion of carbon is capable of making up for the loss. In tropical countries, on the other hand, the natives crave and subsist mainly ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... with that and our allowance of spirits, I hope that we shan't, as Morrison says, have half the ship's company down with the fever. It is all in our favor that we have only just come out, for they say that newcomers can resist the effects of these tropical rivers much better than those whose constitution has been weakened by a residence in the country. As to the sport, I have no desire to kill any animal that does not meddle with me. My business is all the other way, and if any of you get mauled, I will do my best to help ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... by a great nurseryman in Bristol ... contained a number of tropical orchids, of whose wonderful variety and beauty I had obtained some idea from the woodcuts in Loudon's 'Encyclopedia.' The first epiphytal orchid I ever saw was at a flower show in Swansea ... which caused in me a thrill of enjoyment which no ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... from that land of frost and snow to the beautiful island of Porto Rico, washed by tropical seas, through the streets of whose capital there passes every day the carriage of the Governor, with its white-covered upholstery and its livery of white. But I add this word: The missionary sent to Porto Rico, be he Catholic or Protestant, must ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... upon an irrigation channel. A pair of cotton drawers, loose and ragged, clothed him from waist to knee; above and below he was naked, save for a broad hat of plaited straw that sheltered his unkempt golden head from the rays of the tropical sun. At sight of him Nuttall returned thanks aloud to his Maker. Pitt stared at him, and the shipwright poured out his dismal news in a dismal tone. The sum of it was that he must have ten pounds ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... have fancies and wilfulnesses, flowers that would people the dark with faces; or the lily-houses and the superb Victoria regia that would cradle a water-baby; or the great palm houses, where you may walk in a gallery among enormous leaves and tropical creepers as if you were back again with your grandfathers in the tree tops? That is an attraction, but it is not all of it. Nor is it the achievement of the gardens in the separate spheres of gardening. The sheets of crocuses ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... actual term in Norfolk Island may have been fourteen years; it certainly came to an end in the early forties. But he must have been there at the time of the above incident, as it happened circa 1836-37. The powers of the sea-girt tropical Paradise to sterilise every Divine impulse must have been at their best in his time, and he seems to have been a favourable subject for the virus of diabolism, which was got by Good Intentions out of Expediency. The latter ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... translates it "Querida esposa mia." Quetzalpetlatl means "the Beautiful Carpet," petlatl being the rug or mat used on floors, etc. This would be a most appropriate figure of speech to describe a rich tropical landscape, "carpeted with flowers," as we say; and as the earth is, in primitive cosmogony, older than the sun, I suspect that this story of Quetzalcoatl and his sister refers to the sun sinking from heaven, seemingly, into the earth. "Los Nahoas," remarks Chavero, "figuraban la tierra en ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... bitter in their barrenness. Already the devastation of the summer was beginning to be apparent. All tenderness had gone from the higher slopes of the mountains which, jocund in spring and in autumn with growing crops, were now bare and brown, and seamed like the hide of a tropical reptile gleaming with metallic hues. The lower slopes were still panoplied with the green of vines and of trees, but the ground beneath the trees was arid. The sun was coming into his dominion with pride and cruelty, like a conqueror who loots the land he ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... sometimes does, to the outskirts of one of these strange hamlets of new frame-houses, and is confronted with a placard inscribed in enormous letters, 'Watch Us Grow.' He can always imagine that he sees the timbers swelling before his eyes like pumpkins in some super-tropical summer. But he may have formed the conviction that no such proclamation could be found outside Shakespeare's town. And indeed there is a serious criticism here, to any one who knows history; since the things that grow ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... kisses and remembrances for Jack, Tom, and the baby. Often, moreover, did they abound with glowing descriptions of the scenery of those sunny West India climes, through which he had strolled when occasionally on shore. It was summer, and the tropical sun was reigning in his full glory. But his mind was enthusiastic and poetical, and the nights, so transcendantly beautiful in those regions, were his delight. After the sun, which had been blazing with irresistible fierceness in an unclouded sky, through the day, had sunk to rest, ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... of extreme tropical heat, and is inhabited by a nation of red men varying but little in manners, customs, and appearance from the balance of the red men ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... would be Hastings of Daylesford. This purpose, formed in infancy and poverty, grew stronger as his intellect expanded and as his fortune rose. He pursued his plan with that calm but indomitable force of will which was the most striking peculiarity of his character. When, under a tropical sun, he ruled fifty millions of Asiatics, his hopes, amidst all the cares of war, finance, and legislation, still pointed to Daylesford. And when his long public life, so singularly checkered with good and evil, with glory and ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... I, "it's in the West Indies, and it's semi-tropical, and they have cocoa-nuts and pineapples and bananas there; and there are lots of darkeys, and the weather is ...
— A Jolly Fellowship • Frank R. Stockton
... scattered over the tropical ocean, especially, to which might well be given Herman Melville's name, "Las Encantadas," the Enchanted Islands. These islands, usually volcanic, have no vegetation but cactuses or wiry bushes with strange names; no inhabitants but insects and reptiles—lizards, ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... called serried ranks of human beings, who looked like immense banks of many-coloured shingle, and who, as they raised a million pairs of field-glasses to two million eyes, scintillated in the distance like a bank of shingle after a wave has broken on it on a tropical noon—it was certainly an amazing medley of spectacle ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... render into them the idea which fills a clod with beauty. In one such dismal pit—not here—I remember there grew a great quantity of bulrushes. Another was surrounded with such masses of swamp-foliage that it reminded those who saw it of the creeks in semi-tropical countries. But somehow they do not seem to see these things, but go on the old mill-round of scenery, exhausted many a year since. They do not see them, perhaps, because most of those who have educated themselves in the technique of painting are city-bred, and can never have the feeling ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... of the year and in tropical countries the best time for taking air and sun baths is the early ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... gradually all their ramifications, till one end of the animal seems crowned with feathery, crimson sea-weeds of the most delicate tracery. It is much to be regretted that these lower marine animals are not better known. The plumage of the tropical birds, the down on the most brilliant butterfly's wing, are not more beautiful in coloring than the hues of many Radiates, and there is no grace of motion surpassing the movements of some of them in their native element. The habit of keeping marine ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... unpleasant days, as we were not sure whether we should be released or not. We had occasion during that time to witness three Zeppelin raids over Bucharest, which, seen in the wonderful moonlight, cloudless nights under the tropical sky, made an unforgettable impression ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... a little patch of land, with palm trees and tropical vegetation waving in the gusts and green in the sunshine. Captain Nat ordered the boats to be lowered. Much as he hated the thought, he saw that the Sea Mist had made her last voyage and must be abandoned. He went to the cabin, ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... vegetable world. Ages ago they inhabited our northern states. Their family has come down practically unchanged from the steaming days of the Carboniferous period, when ferns grew one hundred feet high, and thronged with other rank tropical growths in matted masses to form the coal measures. The fossil remains of cycads in the rocks of that period prove that they once flourished in the tropic swamps where now are the hills of Wyoming ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... are first struck by the aspect of the soil, everywhere having huge masses of dark rock protruded above its surface. The country is said to be poor: of this I cannot judge, but I know it to be beautiful. It is everywhere undulating, and often broken in the wildest and most tropical manner. Like the interior of Herefordshire, it is cut up in all directions by rural lanes, bordered by stone walls and high hedges, and dotted thickly with handsome houses, whose verandahs of bright green, and whitened ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... of that gigantic world. Down and down the projection plunged, through mile after mile of reeking, steaming fog, impenetrable to earthly eyes. Finally it came to rest upon the surface, hundreds of feet deep in a lush, dank, tropical jungle, and Brandon plugged into ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... sultry, tropical day when the keen senses of the three warned them of the proximity of the Arab camp. Stealthily they approached, keeping to the dense tangle of growing things which made concealment easy to their ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Jack called; "but there's a trifle of haze hanging out just at present, so you can't quite see the tropical shores, with the black natives dancing around some missionary. But joking aside, boys, I think we're going to make the riffle without any trouble. Already we must be well on the way there, and no ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel
... said Dick, raising a tin cup of hot coffee, "here's to food. You may sleep without beds, and, in tropical climates, you may go without clothes, but in whatever part of the world you may be, you must have food. And it's best when you've ridden hard all day, and, in the cool of an October evening, to sit down by a ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... indifference, or cordiality—at the wrong moment—meant mortal offense to some important dignitary, caste, or interest; the physical trial of innumerable functions to a man clad in European costumes in a tropical climate; the infinite variety of his duties, the peculiar character of the hours maintained, the lack of sleep and the continuous round of banquets; must have tried the mind and heart and body about equally. In the end the experience ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... Neapolitan, from behind lonely locked doors, in cracked female voices, quaking with fear; could hear of no such Englishman or any Englishman. By-and-by I came upon a Polenta-shop in the clouds, where an old Frenchman, with an umbrella like a faded tropical leaf (it had not rained for six weeks) was staring at nothing at all, with a snuff-box in his hand. To him I appealed concerning the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... all eager and with beaming countenances, asking to see the author and the interpreter, and to be presented to them, that they might congratulate them with an enthusiastic word and a shake of the hand. Yes! it was a success, an instantaneous one. It was certainly that rare tropical flower of the Parisian greenhouse which blossoms out so ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... food, books, and a choice of dwelling beyond the command of the princes of former times—every climate was subject to my selection, while he was obliged to toil in the acquirement of every necessary, and was the inhabitant of a tropical island, against whose heats and storms he could obtain small shelter.—Viewing the question thus, who would not have preferred the Sybarite enjoyments I could command, the philosophic leisure, and ample intellectual resources, to his life of labour and peril? Yet he was far happier than ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... personality of Wynyard Marion, as she knew it in her one interview, had become very shadowy and faint in the months that passed, yet when the days were heavy she sometimes saw herself standing by his side in some vague tropical surroundings, and hailed by the multitude as the faithful wife and consort of the great Leader, President, Emperor—she knew not what! Exactly how this was to be managed, and the manner of Zephas' ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... place at Bethany, or Bethabara, on the eastern bank of the Jordan. The river there is one hundred feet in width, and, except in flood, some five to seven feet deep. It lies in a tropical valley, the verdure of which is in striking contrast to the ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... got them started with Danbury and the guide leading, Wilson, on the right side, and himself on the left and well to the rear where he could watch for possible desertions until the hill men took their place behind them. It was a new world for them all; the strange tropical foliage silhouetted against the vivid night sky, the piercing perfume of new flowers, and the shadow jungle either side made it seem almost unreal. At the junction of this forest path and the main road the hill men fell in behind ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... I chanced to be in a semi-tropical island of the Pacific supplied with fruit, especially grapes, from the mainland, and a dusky market woman always presented a large bunch of grapes to the little English stranger. But a day came when the proffered bunch was firmly refused; the superabundance of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Everybody in the vicinity was weeping or sternly frowning. In the pauses of the first verse could be heard the rattle of horses' bits, or a whistle of a tug on the river. The refrain, signalled by a proud challenging toss of Gueymard's head, leapt up like a tropical tempest, formidable, overpowering. Sophia, who had had no warning of the emotion gathering within her, sobbed violently. At the close of the hymn Gueymard's carriage was assaulted by worshippers. All around, in the tumult of shouting, men were kissing and embracing each other; and hats went up ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... Chestnut-like bark, while the terminal bud, from its large size, as if all the energy of the plant was concentrated in the tip, imparts a curious and somewhat ungainly appearance to the tree. From its curious tropical appearance this species is well worthy of a place in the shrubbery. It is unmindful of soil, if that is of at all fair quality, and may be said to be perfectly hardy over the greater part of ...
— Hardy Ornamental Flowering Trees and Shrubs • A. D. Webster
... and yellow on Sunday; the gardens of the small houses to left and right were rank with ivy and tall grass and lilac bushes; the tropical South London verdure was dusty above and mouldy below; the tepid air swarmed with flies. Eeldrop, at the window, welcomed the smoky smell of lilac, the gramaphones, the choir of the Baptist chapel, and the sight of three small girls playing cards ...
— Eeldrop and Appleplex • T.S. Eliot
... driblet of population which at this juncture flowed toward the Lower Mississippi was due to the anxiety of Spain to get a home-supply of wheat, hemp and such-like indispensables of temperate extraction for her broad tropical empire. A newspaper of August 20, 1773 gives news from New York of the arrival at that port of "the sloop Mississippi, Capt. Goodrich, with the Connecticut Military Adventurers from the Mississippi, but last from Pensacola, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... free hand with the architecture of this remarkable specimen of eastern religiosity. They are nothing, you may be sure, to the gigantic idols inside, out of the reach of the sacrilegious camera. To the right is a tropical thatched hut. The thatched roof is really that nice ribbed paper that comes round bottles—a priceless boon to these games. All that comes into the house is saved for us. The owner of the hut lounges outside the door. He is a dismounted cavalry-corps man, and he owns one cow. His fence, I may ...
— Floor Games; a companion volume to "Little Wars" • H. G. Wells
... lamp in the days before his unfortunate misunderstanding with the Geni and demanded the most beautiful of gardens, the fulfilment of his wish could have taken no fairer form than this. Strange, tropical flowers, vivid as flame, burned in green recesses; water-sprites upset their caskets of pearls over rock-shelves into translucent pools where lilies lay asleep, dreaming of their own pale beauty. Long, green pergolas, starred with flowers, framed blue-veiled pictures ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... had been sufficient light the battle might have continued in spite of the tropical downpour, but darkness became so intense that friend and foe were alike disguised from each other. At this crisis, Scoville's horse was shot and fell, dragging his rider down also. A flash of lightning revealed the mishap to Mad Whately, who secured the ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... uniform a type that they were more like each other than brother is commonly to brother. The rules of the service insured that every face should be clean-shaven, every head powdered, and every neck covered by the little queue of natural hair tied with a black silk ribbon. Biting winds and tropical suns had combined to darken them, whilst the habit of command and the menace of ever-recurring dangers had stamped them all with the same expression of authority and of alertness. There were some jovial faces amongst them, but the older officers, with their deep-lined cheeks and their ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in the usual legal tender of the country, would have been looked upon as counterfeit, delivered here in a foreign accent, with a slightly tropical warmth, was accepted by the Senator as genuine. These children of the Sun are so impulsive! We, of course, feel a little pity for the person who thus transcends our standard of good taste and violates our conventional canon,—but they ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... volcanic regions. The region surrounding Naples is abrupt, picturesque, with the same irregular outline of hills that characterizes the elevations in the Tonto basin in Arizona. The vegetation is of the tropical type. The cactus is common, although it grows to no such monstrous heights as in Arizona. Orange and lemon groves prevail as far as the eye can see. On every height towns and villages crown the crests and sweep in winding terraces around the hillsides. Olive orchards abound. Castles and ruins ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... They spake of the land they had visited as an earthly paradise; its seas were tranquil and gemmed with green islands, on which the eye delighted to rest; its trees were lofty, and many of them would rival the odoriferous products of tropical soil; its fruits were so lavishly supplied by nature that art needed to do little more than gather them in summer and autumn, for the wants of the winter; its people were children of another age when virtue triumphed, and vice ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... the lens. Operations then commenced forthwith, and so, too, did the "special wonder" of the readers. It is a matter of congratulation to mankind that the writer of the hoax, with an apology (Heaven save the mark!) spared us Herschel's notes of "the Moon's tropical, sidereal, and synodic revolutions," and the "phenomena of the syzygies," and proceeded at once to the pith of the subject. Here came in his grand stroke, informing the world of complete success in obtaining a distinct view of objects in the moon "fully equal to that which ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... to Lady Kelsey, whenever an explorer comes home there's someone to tell nasty stories about him. People forget that kid gloves are not much use in a tropical forest, and they grow very indignant when they hear that a man has used a little brute force ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... lack of endeavor to make the house look well. People will sacrifice almost anything to that. They will strive their chambers into the roof,—they will have windows where they do not want them, or leave them out where they do,—in our tropical summers they will endure the glare and heat of the sun, rather than that blinds should interfere with the moulded window-caps, or with the style generally,—they will break up the outline with useless and expensive irregularity,—they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... to satisfy this demand and also to bring to the notice of those unacquainted with the beauties of these semi-tropical islands that the writer has been led to issue this work, which is the first illustrated guide-book and history of Bermuda yet published. The book contains two hundred pages, and is embellished with sixteen photo-mechanical prints made by a new process from negatives (taken by the author during ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... side. You creatures of to-day, approaching it in one of your clumsy new-fashioned fire-driven canoes that you call steamers, must admire immensely its conical peak, as it stands out silhouetted against the glowing horizon in the deep red glare of a sub-tropical ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... Printing-House Square, Bowery, and Nassau street, are the great centres for all kinds of patterers. Here women sell ice cream, lemonade, doughnuts, buns, tropical fruits, and sweetmeats. Bananas and pineapples are favorite fruits and all forms of chocolate candies are in great demand. Most of the women who attend stalls grow very stout, as they get little or no exercise. It is noticed that very few of them ever partake of the fruits or other ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... 1916, the Battalion, having been recently made up with untrained recruits, moved to Parkhouse Camp on Salisbury Plain to complete its training with the rest of the Division. We arrived in frost and snow and left, three months later, in almost tropical heat—remarkable contrasts within so short a period. The Division was speedily completed for foreign service; new rifles were issued, with which a musketry course was successfully fired, though snow showers did not favour high scoring. We were made up to strength with drafts from the Liverpool, ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... with hotel and tropical palms against an unbelievable blue sky. Professor Emil Losch loomed on the screen; he was in swimming trunks, a small gray man who seemed hard as nails, his lean tanned ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... the assistant teacher, received word that her father was quite sick, and immediately set out for Honolulu on horseback. Miss G——and I carried on the work of the school as well as we could. A day or two after Miss P—— left a tropical storm burst upon us. It seemed as if the very heavens were opened. The rain fell in torrents and the air was filled with the flying branches of trees. This continued a day and a night. The next day, Sunday, the rain and wind ceased, but sullen clouds still hung overhead, and there was an oppressive ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... approaching, and the donkey transport pulls into the bushes to let the Juggernaut of the road go by. Swaying and plunging over the rough ground, lurches one of our huge motor lorries. Perched high up upon the seat, face and arms burnt dark brown by the tropical sun, is the driver. Stern faced and intent upon the road, he slews his big ship into a better bit of road by hauling at the steering wheel. Beside him on the seat the second driver. Ready to their hands the rifles that may save their precious cargo from the marauding German ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... elevation. Some of the comparisons that he chooses to illustrate scenes in Hell are taken from the incidents of simple rustic life, and by their contrast with the lurid creatures of his imagination come like a draught of cold water to a traveller in a tropical waste of sand and thorns. It is almost as if the poet himself were oppressed by the suffocation of the atmosphere that he has created, and, gasping for breath, sought relief by summoning up to remembrance the sweet security of pastoral life. So, when the devils are shrunk to enter Pandemonium, ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... guessed right, at any rate," he went on, settling down in his seat once more, after boxing his snake, but this time face to face with her. "I'm working at a beautiful bit of fern and foliage—quite tropical in its way—in a wood hereabout; and I've introduced Sardanapalus, coiled up in the foreground, just to give life to the scene, don't you know, and an excuse for a title. I mean to call it 'The Rajah's Rest.' Behind, great ferns and a mossy bank; ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... seemed to sweep from end to end of a liquefying universe, by a downpour which threatened to beat their sodden bodies to pulp, by all the connotation of terror that lay in the darkness and in their unguarded condition on a barbarous, semi-tropical coast. ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... do not come up with it or find other game. We were now high up on the range of hills behind Mokoangai and the view was magnificent. The great river could be seen winding its way between the hills covered with the vivid greens only to be found in damp tropical countries. Otherwise the picture somewhat recalled central Wales with a Wye magnified a hundred times. Chikaia had walked a long way carrying a heavy rifle, and now showed signs of fatigue so he was encouraged by being allowed to shoot a monkey on ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... millions of years ago, the cell life had won a partial victory over the crystal. In the great sub-tropical sea which once covered this spot, corals lived and flourished as they do now in similar seas. Myriads of brachiopods lived, moved, and had their being. Gigantic fish sported in the waters. Meanwhile older rocks were being denuded and disintegrated. ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... less cruel than the spiders, deceives the flies who come to his arms under the false pretence of being a quiet leaf, upon which they may light in safety for rest and refreshment. Yet another abandoned member of the same family, relying boldly upon the resources of tropical nature, gets itself up as a complete orchid, the head and fangs being moulded in the exact image of the beautiful blossom, and the arms folding treacherously around the unhappy insect which ventures to seek for ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... recklessly. "But we'll take Tira. And we'll build her a temple in a jungle and put her up on a pedestal and feed her with tropical fruits and sit cross-legged before her so many hours a day and meditate on ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... affected languor, always well kept under by the laws of good-breeding,—but still it loves abundant life, opulent and showy organizations,—the spherical rather than the plane trigonometry of female architecture,—plenty of red blood, flashing eyes, tropical voices, and forms that bear the splendors of dress without growing pale beneath their lustre. Among these you will find the most delicious women you will ever meet,—women whom dress and flattery and the round of city gayeties cannot spoil,—talking with whom, you forget ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... in front of Blackbeard's knees, the top showing above the curve of the gunwales. It was a sea-chest, uncommonly large, built of some dark tropical wood and strapped with iron. Old Trimble Rogers' fierce eyes glittered and he licked his lips. He leaned over to whisper in Bill Saxby's ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... career of the major; indeed, even the somewhat unusual appearance of an iceberg, has been turned to account as suggestive of the intense suffering undergone by the major during the period of his wound, owing to the scarcity of the article ice in tropical countries. Then on deck we have the inevitable old sailor who is perpetually engaged in scraping the vestiges of paint from your favourite seat, and who, having arrived at the completion of his monotonous task after four days incessant ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... the labor of the Southern States is notably different from the labor of Lowell or Lawrence, Massachusetts, or even Cambridge; while on the Panama Canal or in most tropical countries the ordinary laborer likes to pretend that he is working eighteen hours a day, although most of the time is spent in eating or sleeping. Nevertheless, under the Federal law, all employees at Panama ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... was more engrossed with thoughts of his parents and Jenny at home than with the calm grandeur of a tropical sea, and he was wondering how many months must pass before he should be able to meet her, when the sound of a cat-like step behind him ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood
... trees as 'things created for the use of man.' Furthermore, there exist several odd superstitions about particular trees, not unlike certain West Indian beliefs which have had a good influence in checking the destruction of valuable timber. Japan, like the tropical world, has its goblin trees. Of these, the enoki (Celtis Willdenowiana) and the yanagi (drooping willow) are deemed especially ghostly, and are rarely now to be found in old Japanese gardens. Both are believed to have the power of haunting. 'Enoki ga bakeru,' the izumo saying is. You will ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... the orchid sanctum of Professor Benson. It was all that the girls had proclaimed it, gorgeous, heavenly and wonderful! The variegated tones of lavendar, known only as orchid, were as elusive as the subtle scent of this tropical bloom. The whole diffusing into something so indescribable that even the spontaneous girls failed for once to rally immediately to a sense of reality. It seemed like a dream, like a picture book, or even ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... she learns to love it, and this feeling seems to be often strongest when the surroundings are the bleakest, the rudest, and the most comfortless. The Highlander and the Switzer pine amid the luxuriant scenes of tropical life, when their thoughts revert to the smoky shieling or to the rock-encompassed chalet of their far-off mountains. Such, too, doubtless, was the clinging fondness with which, the women regarded their rude cabins on the frontier of the Atlantic States. They had toiled and fought to make these ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... in the Polar regions is ice, and this is generally found in almost tropical profusion and rankness, growing sometimes to the height of several hundred feet, none of which wear boots. Polar bears and Esquimos are also found there, but in scattered and inconsiderable quantities. These two races spend most of their time chasing each other ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... not reach it too soon. The little band had met with nothing but disaster. Instead of being able to reach the open country of which they had heard, they had been lost in dense forests of gigantic tropical vegetation. Hill rose behind hill, barring their progress, alternating with ravines of frightful depth. Monkeys chattered above their heads, hideous snakes and alligators infested the swamps. Many of the Spaniards were miserably killed by them, while others were ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... laborer. The industrial reconstruction of the South is building upon the same foundation. No one doubts that the Negro is able to resist certain miasmatic and febrific diseases which are so destructive to the white race in the tropical regions of the earth. Science and wise hygienic appliances have improved the condition of the white race in this respect, it is true, but will not the same appliances benefit the Negro ...
— A Review of Hoffman's Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 1 • Kelly Miller
... consideration of the subject of the liability of the uncircumcised races dwelling in the temperate and semi-tropical countries to cancer, gangrene, and elephantiasis might well lead one to ask: Why are we afflicted with a prepuce? We can understand how a man may become gouty, and become a subject in the end for a gangrene ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... awning and flags to make this latter scene remotely approach an Australian encampment; and we three lay together on the bare planks covered with overcoats. We were all gradually dozing off when a perfectly tropical rain fell, and in a moment drowned the whole ship. The rest of the night was passed upon the stairs, with an immense jumble of men and women. When anybody came up for any purpose we all fell down; and when anybody came down we all fell up again. Still, the good-humour in the English part of the ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... the use of fire, and thereby introduced a new era in the advancement of man. Practically infinite was the increase of man's new mastery over Nature. Into temperate and even icy regions he could now penetrate and, as it were, create around him a little temporary zone of tropical warmth. With speech had come social unity; with fire at man's disposal came mastery over matter. But the unity thereby suffered a change. With the invention of means of creating artificial warmth the ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... regarding it. The harbour is formed by the long low strip of land to the north called the Bullam shore, and to the south by the peninsula terminating in Cape Sierra Leone, a sandy promontory at the end of which is situated a lighthouse of irregular habits. Low hills covered with tropical forest growth rise from the sandy shores of the Cape, and along its face are three creeks or bays, deep inlets showing through their narrow entrances smooth beaches of yellow sand, fenced inland by the forest of cotton-woods and palms, with here and ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... and causing great annoyance to the traveller. They occur chiefly in connection with a change of wind, and are no doubt consequent on the meeting of two opposite currents. Their violence, however, is moderate, compared with that of tropical tornadoes, and it is not often that they do any considerable damage to the crops ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... the Union were at no loss for the right name of these rodents. They were maras, a sort of agouti, a little larger than their congeners of tropical countries, regular American rabbits, with long ears, jaws armed on each side with five molars, which distinguish ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... remembered, is unknown, at least at present, in the tropics, and peculiar to the races of those temperate climes, into which the song-birds come in spring. It is hard to say why. Exquisite songsters, and those, strangely, of an European type, may be heard anywhere in tropical American forests: but native races whose hearts their song can touch, are either extinct or yet to come. Some of the old German Minnelieder, on the other hand, seem actually copied from the songs of birds. 'Tanderadei' does not merely ask the nightingale to tell no tales; it repeats, ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... rose before me. I saw the long shadows of the leafy boughs flung thick upon the sward and the wild tropical vines hanging rope-like from the intertwisted stems. A golden moon looked warmly in between the giant branches, flooding the darkness of the scene with rippling radiance, and within its light two human beings walked,—a man and woman—their ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... Capronian night—that is, all but von Schoenvorts. There was less to see than to hear. From the great inland lake behind us came the hissing and the screaming of countless saurians. Above us we heard the flap of giant wings, while from the shore rose the multitudinous voices of a tropical jungle—of a warm, damp atmosphere such as must have enveloped the entire earth during the Palezoic and Mesozoic eras. But here were intermingled the voices of later eras—the scream of the panther, the roar of the lion, the baying of ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and sounds followed suspiciously like the splash of spirits and the steady stream from a siphon. Never before or since did I experience such a thirst as assailed me at that moment, nor do I believe that many tropical explorers have known its equal. But I had Raffles with me, and his hand was as steady and as cool as the hand of a trained nurse. That I know because he turned up the collar of my overcoat for me, for some reason, and buttoned it ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... when she did the dinner-tables, set out so often for twenty, she felt that a single step more would transform her whole social position. On its being asked of her then if she circulated only in a sort of tropical solitude, with the upper servants for picturesque natives, and on her having to assent to this glance at her limitations, she had found a reply to the girl's invidious question. "You've no imagination, my dear!"—that ...
— In the Cage • Henry James
... him; and when it came to trial he was gradually pictured before me, by undeniable probation, in the light of so gross, so cold-blooded, and so black-hearted a villain, that I had a mind to have cast my brief upon the table. I was then boiling against the man with even a more tropical temperature than I had been boiling for him. But I said to myself: 'No, you have taken up his case; and because you have changed your mind it must not be suffered to let drop. All that rich tide of eloquence that you prepared last night with so much enthusiasm is out of place, and yet ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and those of French, German, and Portuguese travellers served to bring nearly the whole of Africa within the ken of the civilised world, and revealed the fact that nearly all parts of tropical Africa had a ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... that a knowledge of dyes is widespread and ancient. Until recently, the vegetable world was the source of practically all coloring matter, the pulverized root of the madder plant yielding the reds, the leaves and stems of the indigo plant the blues, the heartwood of the tropical logwood tree the blacks and grays, and the fruit of certain palm and locust trees yielding the soft browns. So great was the commercial demand for dyestuffs that large areas of land were given over to the exclusive cultivation ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... ever tame its beautiful wildness. And in spirit they were what they seemed: such a wild, joyous, frolicsome spirit, with such grace and fleetness, one does not look for in human beings, but only in birds or in some small bird-like volatile mammal—a squirrel or a spider-monkey of the tropical forest, or the chinchilla of the desolate mountain slopes; the swiftest, wildest, loveliest, most airy, and most vocal of small beauties." Or this, as the quintessence of a sly remark: "After that Mantel got on to his horse and rode away. It was black and ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... entirely covered with a forest of fruit trees, and during the season hundreds of men and women, boys and girls, go up every day to bring down the ripe fruit. Durians and Mangoes, two of the very finest tropical fruits, are in greater abundance at Ternate than I have ever seen them, and some of the latter are of a quality not inferior to any in the world. Lansats and Mangustans are also abundant, but these do not ripen till a little later. ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... silvery stream, it displays ever and anon beauties made all its own by borrowing from the heavens, in an atmosphere of passing transparency, reflections of magical splendours and of weird shadows proper to tropical skies. No rose-hue pinker than the virginal blush and dewy flush of dawn in contrast with the shivering reek of flaming noon-tide, when all brightness of colour seems burnt out of the world by the white heat of sun-glow. No brilliancy more gorgeous or more ravishing than the play of light and shade, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... moved Fulton as he had never been moved before. He once told me that even as a little boy he had never in all his life known one pang of jealousy. He will never be able to make that boast again. And like some damned insidious tropical malaria, the passion has taken root in his system, so that only death ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... renown than to a stripling. He is minstrel and warrior, "cunning in playing, and a mighty valiant man," and "skilled in speech (already eloquent), and fair in form, and the Lord is with him." (1 Sam. xvi. 18.) So quickly had the new circumstances and the energy of the Spirit of God, like tropical sunshine, ripened his soul. ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... in the dark of a tropical morning with Senor Joao, to the coffee factory where they browned the berry and saw him buy a pound, smoking hot, for which he paid twenty-five cents, or quite as much as it would cost in New York. In ten minutes the coffee was at the hotel and ground. ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... many thousands of careless eyes, but not the sad, yearning eyes to which it would have come like the message of angels,—"Glad tidings of great joy." Those eyes were then gazing on strange tropical scenes, on orange-groves and jessamine bowers, and on the purple sea that washes ...
— Stories of Many Lands • Grace Greenwood
... houses and gardens rising higher and higher as they recede from the sea, tended somewhat to reassure the explorer, who had been wondering that human stupidity should have been equal to selecting in a tropical country, and in one of the best-watered islands of the world, such a situation for its capital. Wells are of little account, for the water thus obtained is at the level of the sea, and always salt. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... School's sprawling five-mile complex of buildings and tropical parks, the second student shift was headed for breakfast, while a larger part of the fourth shift moved at a more leisurely rate toward their bunks. The school's organized activities were not much affected by the hour, but the big exercise quadrangle ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... root of Janipha Manihot, or Manioc-plant, contains a poisonous substance, supposed to be hydrocyanic acid, along with which there is a considerable proportion of starch. The poisonous matter is removed by roasting and washing, and the starch thus obtained is formed into the cassava-bread of tropical countries, and is also occasionally imported into Europe as ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... can be spent on the deck of a splendid steamer, as it cleaves its way through a sapphire tropical sea, bound for some lovely West Indian islet; with a good cigar and the dearest companion in the world, watching the dolphins and the flying-fish, and mildly interesting one's self in one's fellow-passengers, the captain, the crew. And then, the hour spent and the cigar smoked ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al |
