"Brittle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... another substituted for it by one of the Ramessides, and the mask upon it has but a distant resemblance to the face of the victorious Pharaoh. The mummy is thin, much shrunken, and light; the bones are brittle, and the muscles atrophied, as one would expect in the case of a man who had attained the age of a hundred; but the figure is still ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... zealous body-servant brought from the house a calabash of poee-poee, half a dozen young cocoanuts—stripped of their husks—three pipes, as many yams, and me on his back a part of the way. Something of a load; but Kory-Kory was a very strong man for his size, and by no means brittle in the spine. We had a very pleasant day; my trusty valet plied the paddle and swept us gently along the margin of the water, beneath the shades of the overhanging thickets. Fayaway and I reclined in the stern of the canoe, on the very best terms possible ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... points and the fire rose from the center of it. This is the only portion of it that is in a blaze, for the outside parts of the mountain remain even now unkindled. Consequently, as the latter are never burned, while the interior is constantly growing brittle and being reduced to ashes, the surrounding peaks retain their original height to this day, but the whole section that is on fire, as it is consumed in the course of time, has grown hollow from continual collapse. Thus the entire mountain, if we may compare ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... and Pee-wee Harris, and some buildings and a couple of valleys and a hill and some pie, and a forest and some ice cream cones and a big tree and a back yard and a woman and a ghost and a couple of girls and ten cents' worth of peanut brittle. It's about a college, too. Maybe you think we're not very smart on account of being kind of crazy, but anyway we went through college in ten minutes. So you can see from that how bright we are. That's why we call ourselves the ...
— Roy Blakeley's Bee-line Hike • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... haste, they betook themselves to their swords, each guarding the opposite attack warily with his shield. That of Sir Tarquin was framed of a bull's hide, stoutly held together with thongs, and, in truth, seemed well-nigh impenetrable; whilst the shield of his opponent, being of more brittle stuff, did seem as though it would have cloven asunder with the desperate strokes of Sir Tarquin's sword. Nothing daunted, Sir Lancelot brake ofttimes through his adversary's guard, and smote him once until the blood trickled down ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... seemed the night before, to casual examination, to differ from other cloth, had begun to crumble away in a very curious manner. The texture seemed strangely brittle and strengthless. It fell apart at a touch, and was reduced to a fine powder under the pressure of the fingers. She could not possibly have ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... plans, exhaustive and painstaking as had been the preparations, the bridge-builders met with unpreventable delays, disappointments, and disasters; for man is but a feeble creature whose brain tires and whose dreams are brittle. It is with these hindrances and accidents and with their effect upon the outcome that ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... latter has none. The joints are oblong-ovate, glaucous-green, the cushions few and scattered; spines white, flattened, of various lengths. Flowers tawny yellow, small for the size of the plant. A native of Cuba, and requiring stove treatment. Being very brittle, this plant should ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... passions of the multitude, the subterranean lavas which simmer beneath a brittle crust of good order and regular administration, all the latent possibilities of volcanoes which this inward fire betokens, are, on the contrary, always present to the mind of the visionary; rumblings are heard, and they herald the earthquake. The ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... the division to which they all belong: they are Radiates. The idea of radiation lies at the foundation of all these animals, whatever be their form or substance. Whether stony, like the Corals, or soft, like the Sea-Anemone, or gelatinous and transparent, like the Jelly-Fish, or hard and brittle, like the Sea-Urchins,—whether round or oblong or cylindrical or stellate, in all, the internal structure obeys ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... home she flew to the little box upstairs where she kept her treasures, and brought therefrom the dry and brittle wishbone. ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... to the old man, harkening, it seemed that her words fell sharp and brittle like breaking icicles. One thing, though, might be said for her—she sought no roundabout course. She did not quibble or seek to enwrap the main issue in specious excuses or apologies ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... dressing[15], neat's-foot oil or tallow are the best substitutes; either will soften the leather and preserve its pliability. Leather requires oil to preserve its pliability, and if not supplied will become brittle, crack, and break easily under strain. Inferior dressings are always harmful, and no dressing should be used which contains acid or varnish. Acid burns the leather as it would the skin, and polish containing varnish forms a false skin which soon peels off, spoiling the appearance of the shoe and ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... cheeks Leslie sat, and spread out the crushed, brittle spikes, so fondly won, so dearly held. She was sure Hector had not one leaf, riband, or ring which she had given him. Once when he was gayer than his wont, and plagued her with his jesting petting, she took up the scissors and cut off a lock of his hair. He did not notice ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... thereon produces verdigris, and provokes vomiting. But no one is to presume to sing mass with a chalice of wood or of glass," because as the wood is porous, the consecrated blood would remain in it; while glass is brittle and there might arise danger of breakage; and the same applies to stone. Consequently, out of reverence for the sacrament, it was enacted that the chalice should be made of ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... accompanied me to my house, and would salute me with some rounds fired before my door, which shook down and broke several glasses of my electrical apparatus. And my new honour proved not much less brittle; for all our commissions were soon after broken by a repeal of the ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... you with a funeral or a christening," Filmer felt his way gingerly, "I wouldn't care a durn. You can't hurt the dead and the kid might outgrow it; but when it comes to tying folks together tight, it's a blamed lot like trusting something brittle in a baby's hand. It mustn't be broke, you see, or there'll be ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... a 1500-pound 3-year-old colt with small brittle feet that has side bone coming on left front foot caused by driving him barefoot on the road ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... of the tree's thin shell, which was so brittle that a big piece came off in each of his hands. But then he clapped his hands with ...
— The Old Willow Tree and Other Stories • Carl Ewald
... to keep the patterns in condition during the process of casting, and it was well that he did so, because the extreme cold had frozen the plaster casts before they were dry, rendering them so brittle that many of them were broken in handling, and the head itself was crumbled into a hundred pieces and had ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... dry brittle grass the man on horseback followed Dingwell to the scant pines where his cowpony was tethered. Fox dismounted and stood over his captive while the latter transferred the gunnysack and its contents to the other saddle. Never for an instant did the little ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... crosswise, making, also of canvas strips, a sort of stirrup for each foot. The last of the weak daylight passed and died gloomily and he was still at his task, bending now by his fire, working on with infinite care. The sticks, brittle with the cold weather, broke under his strong fingers; patiently he inserted others or strengthened the cracking pieces with string. His face, ruddy in the firelight, was impassive; Gloria, looking at him, saw no mere man ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... make unleavened bread the flour is moistened and worked into a stiff dough, which is then rolled thin, cut into various shapes, and baked, forming a brittle ...
— Human Foods and Their Nutritive Value • Harry Snyder
... purpose of long storage in warehouses in the tropics, when the "claying" may protect the bean from mildew and preserve the aroma. In Ceylon it is usual to thoroughly wash the beans after the process of fermentation, thus removing all remains of the pulp, and rendering the shell more tender and brittle. Such beans arrive on the market in a more or less broken state, and it seems probable that they are more subject to contamination owing to the thinness of the shell. The best "estate" cocoa from Ceylon has a very bright, clear appearance, and commands a high price on the London ...
— The Food of the Gods - A Popular Account of Cocoa • Brandon Head
... position that enforces publishing Beautiful women in her position provoke an intemperateness Beauty is rare; luckily is it rare Between love grown old and indifference ageing to love Beware the silent one of an assembly! Brittle is foredoomed But they were a hopeless couple, they were so friendly By resisting, I made him a tyrant Capacity for thinking should precede the act of writing Capricious potentate whom they worship Carry explosives and must particularly guard against ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... breathing of the sleepers, and the monotonous rocking of Madame Filomel's chair broke the silence. Solon stooped down and put his eye to the keyhole, through which a red bar of light streamed into the entry. As he did so, his foot crushed some brittle substance that lay just outside the door; at the same moment a howl of agony was heard to issue from the room within. Solon started; nor did he know that at that instant he had crushed into dust Monsieur Kerplonne's supernumerary eye, and the owner, though wrapt ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... tusks for fighting and also to dig up the food upon which they live. I frequently found new pine cones which they had torn apart to get at the soft centers. During the winter they develop an exceedingly long, thick coat of hair which, however, is so brittle that it breaks almost like dry pine needles; consequently, the skins have but ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... shedding a new joint or ring is added to the rattle. How often the shedding takes place depends on various circumstances and may occur an uncertain number of times each year. Such a rattle, loose-jointed as it is, is rather brittle and the tip of the sounding instrument is easily broken and lost. It will therefore be easily understood that the common notion that a rattlesnake's age can be told by the number of the rings in its rattle is absolutely erroneous. Another equally common and equally ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... perfidiously and inhumanly towards the Queen of Hungary. That her resentment was strong she had given ample proof; and of her respect for treaties he judged by his own. Guarantees, he said, were mere filigree, pretty to look at, but too brittle to bear the slightest pressure. He thought it his safest course to ally himself closely to France, and again to attack the Empress Queen. Accordingly, in the autumn of 1744, without notice, without any decent pretext, he recommenced hostilities, marched through the electorate ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... we traveled at a cup-racing clip along a road that first wound like a coiling snake and then straightened like a striking snake, and that always we traveled through dust so thick it made a fog. In this chalky land of northern France the brittle soil dries out after a rain very quickly, and turns into a white powder where there are wheels to churn it up and grit it fine. Here surely there was an abundance of wheels. We passed many marching men and many lumbering supply trains which were going our way, and we met many motor ambulances ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... the servant, and, in a sense, the creature of man, the drudge of kitchen and factory, the humble slave of the lamp, engaged in his most servile employment, appearing as a little point of flame, or perhaps a feeble spark, suddenly snaps his brittle chain, breaks from his prison, and leaps with destructive fury, as if from the very bosom of Hell, upon the doomed dwellings of fifty thousand human beings, each of whom, but a moment before, conceived himself ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... or even to touch a squirrel, a buffalo, a cat, or any animal which "humps" itself. In the same way a scrofulous patient must not eat turkey, as that bird seems to have a scrofulous eruption on its head, while ball players must abstain from eating frogs, because the bones of that animal are brittle and easily broken. ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... when I checked my hands, and as I could make no impression with my teeth, had a mind to try what my knife would do. Accordingly I began at the edge of the quarter, for I had boiled but a quarter of it, but the rind was grown so hard and brittle that my knife slipping and raking along the cut edge of it, scratched off some powder as white as possible; I then scraped it backward and forward some time, till I found it would all scrape away in this powder, except the rind, upon which I ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... British iron-plate committee fired with 68-pounders at many varieties of iron, cast-steel and puddled-steel plates, and combinations of hard and soft metals. The steel was too brittle, and crumbled, and the targets were injured in proportion to their hardness. An obvious conclusion from all subsequent firing at thick iron plates was, that, to avoid cracking on the one hand, and punching on the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... not always matter so much whether you use a square, pointed, or a round-nosed bit, provided it is properly ground and set in the tool holder. As a rule, the more brittle the metal the less the top rake or angle ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... all know, gentlemen, the pawpaw—not the pawpaw (Carica papaya), but a small tree of the anonas or custard apple tribe, common in the woods of western America—is one of the softest and most brittle of our trees, and the hog seemed to have discovered this, for he suddenly changed his tactics, and instead of shaking at the sapling, commenced grinding it between his powerful jaws. The others assisted him, and the tree fell in a few seconds. As soon as the top branches touched ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... epigrammatic, incisive, authoritative, sometimes quaint, never obscure, except when he is handling nebulous subjects. His paragraphs are full of brittle sentences that break apart and are independent units, like the fragments of a coral colony. His imagery is frequently daring, leaping from the concrete to the abstract, from the special to the general and universal, and vice versa, with a bound that is like a flight. Here are a few ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... covered with numerous white, delicate floccose scales, which give it a beautiful appearance, as in Fig. 26, from specimens (No. 3185 C. U. herbarium), collected on the campus of Cornell University among grass. The entire plant is very brittle, and easily broken. It is tender and excellent for food. I often ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... flank, 35 As down on her haunches she shuddered and sank. So we were left galloping, Joris and I, Past Looz and past Tongres, no cloud in the sky; The broad sun above laughed a pitiless laugh, 'Neath our feet broke the brittle bright stubble like chaff; 40 Till over by Dalhem a dome-spire sprang white, And "Gallop," gasped Joris, "for Aix is ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... the jungle productions is the "morra." This is a berry about the size of a small nutmeg, which grows in clusters upon a large tree of rich dark foliage. The exterior of the berry is brown and slightly rough; the skin, or rather the case, is brittle and of the consistence of an egg-shell; this, when broken and peeled off, exposes a semi-transparent pulp, like a skinned grape in appearance and in flavor. It is extremely juicy but, unfortunately, a large black ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... needs the chuckling twitter of the grown-up robins and the squeaky interruptions of the baby birds asking questions. When they get terrifically excited, they jig up and down on the holly-branches and the frozen snow falls with a brittle clatter. Then the mother and father birds say, "Hush!" quite suddenly. No one speaks for a full five seconds. They huddle closer, listening and holding their breath. That's how the story ought to be heard, after night-fall on Christmas Eve, when behind darkened windows ...
— Christmas Outside of Eden • Coningsby Dawson
... spin well and they do not dye well. On examination under the microscope it is seen that these fibres have not the flattened, twisted appearance of the ripe fibres, but are flatter, and the central canal is almost obliterated and the fibres are but little twisted. Dead fibres are thin, brittle ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... came bitter cold; the rain hardened to hail; the clouds, changed to brittle nets of frost, and shaken to shreds by the rough wind, fell hissing in a scatter of snow. Next morning when Allen opened his door the wind was gone, the sky clear. Brier Pond, lately covered with clear ice, lay under a blanket ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... descended from the same common Father, and art heir of the same common dust! Thy life is no less precarious, if it be less wretched, than that which animates a meaner clay, and breathes in a less decorated exterior! If the one be porcelain, and the other earthen ware, both are brittle! "God hath made of one blood all nations of men." Sometimes a cottage furnishes an impressive lesson respecting the independence of happiness upon external circumstances. It teaches the salutary truth, that it is in the power of religion to impart substantial ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... down, and full twenty feet were between his heels and the ground, when he arrived at a point where he could find no resting-place for his feet. He had found one upon a knob of rock; but unfortunately it proved brittle and gave way, leaving him without any thing broad enough to rest even his toe upon. He had already shifted his hold with the hands; and was, therefore, compelled to support the whole weight of his body by the strength ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... bay horse On the Withy Farm. I broke the bay horse, He broke my arm. Don't blame the bay horse, Blame the brittle bone, I bred him and I've fed him, And he's all ...
— Songs Of The Road • Arthur Conan Doyle
... miracle if she stood such an attempter, such attempts, and such snares, as I see will be laid for her. And, after all, I see not when men are so frail without importunity, that so much should be expected from women, daughters of the same fathers and mothers, and made up of the same brittle compounds, (education all the difference,) nor where the triumph is in ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... and the movement on the stage, were like a rich mist tempering the radiance that shot on her from every side, and giving her time to subside, draw breath, adjust herself to this new clear medium which made her feel so oddly brittle and transparent. ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... of no avail unless it be plucked from his beard while he is alive, and twitched out with wooden tweezers. While he lives he will not suffer this to be done to him, and the leash will be of no use should he be dead, because it will be brittle." ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... Nonpareil and other almonds are not considered sufficiently good for such men as Lowney to use in the manufacture of their almond candies was a surprise to me. And the reason? In the first place the skin of the kernel itself is too thick, the nut is too brittle and it has not the flavor of the imported nut. I was shocked the other day to read from cover to cover a bulletin on the subject of Almonds, and to find that not one word was said of flavor. It had to be a good cracker; but the marketable ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... when the evening grew glorious, are now rented to a feather and ostrich plume factory. But the old basement is still there, much the same in essentials, by which we mean the pickled beet appetizers, the minestrone soup, the delicious soft bread with its brittle crust, and the thick slices of rather pale roast beef swimming in thin, pinkish gravy. And the three old French waiters, hardened in long experience of the frailties of mortality, smile to see a former friend. One, grinning upon us rather ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... do see that no one handles that one carelessly; you know that Samian[D] ware, how precious brittle it is. ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... panes are not made of a brittle substance like glass, but resemble mica, except that they are more tough and durable. These Moonites are wiser than we in roofing their houses. They have discovered a mineral composition which in its plastic state is daubed over the roof. This, upon hardening, ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... the hill, and presently stepped on to the pavement; but at the edge of the asphalt, where tufted grass should grow, something crackled and hissed under my feet. Under the torchlight the unnatural grass was white and brittle with rime, fanciful as a stage fairy scene, and the railings beyond it ...
— A Diary Without Dates • Enid Bagnold
... most splendid in the world, all made of priceless porcelain, but so brittle and delicate that you had to take great care how you touched it. In the garden were the most beautiful flowers, and on the loveliest of them were tied silver bells which tinkled, so that if you passed you could not help looking at the flowers. Everything in the ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang
... in terror. Kathlyn ran for her rifle, but the trumpeting of the elephants was sufficient to send the striped cat to other hunting-grounds. Wild ape and pig abounded, and occasionally a caha wriggled out of the sun into the brittle grasses. Very few beasts or reptiles are aggressive; it is only when they feel cornered that they turn. Even the black panther, the most savage of all cats, will rarely offer ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... skin and mucous membranes; it sometimes causes decay of the bones; it may cause disease of the internal organs, such as the liver and lungs; it affects the walls of the blood vessels, causing them to become hard and brittle (atheroma); it causes disease of the eyes, especially of the iris and retina, tumors (or gummata) in the brain, paralysis etc. In fact, it spares none of the organs of ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... my brother's daughter, Or else my kingdom stands on brittle glass:— Murder her brothers, and then marry her! Uncertain way of gain! But I am in So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin: Tear-falling pity dwells not ...
— The Life and Death of King Richard III • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... penetrating critical intellect—caused her to leave the reviews unread. No one else living had understood Pleydon; and when descriptions of his life spoke of the austerity in his later years, his fanatical aversion to women, Linda thought of the brittle ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... worshipping it. For delicacy and melody of colour these pictures are beyond praise, nor can anything exceed the idyllic loveliness of Aphrodite waking the statue into sensuous life: the world above her head like a brittle globe of glass, her feet resting on a drift of the blue sky, and a choir of doves fluttering around her like a fall of white snow. Following in the same school of ideal and imaginative painting is ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... I was a-comin' by," said the man, grinning. "There: don't scold the youngster, missus. It was all an accident, wasn't it, squire? But, I say, next time you climb a tree don't you trust them poplars, for they're as brittle as sere-wood. There: you're ...
— Brave and True - Short stories for children by G. M. Fenn and Others • George Manville Fenn
... {ant. 327} brittleness &c. adj.; fragility, friability, frangibility, fissibility[obs3]; house of cards, house of glass. V. be brittle &c. adj.; live in a glass house. break, crack, snap, split, shiver, splinter, crumble, break short, burst, fly, give way; fall to pieces; crumble to, crumble into dust. Adj. brittle, brash [U.S.], breakable, weak, frangible, fragile, frail, gimcrack|, shivery, fissile; splitting &c. v.; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... ran across the fields not far from the house. It lay deep among tall grasses and the withered brittle stalks of last autumn's goldenrod, and here Gissing rambled in the green hush of twilight, after the puppies were in bed. In less responsible days he would have lain down on his back, with all four legs upward, and cheerily shrugged and rolled ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... the highest ground, the eminentest hills, are kings; and have they line and lead enough to fathom this sea, and say, My misery is but this deep? Scarce any misery equal to sickness, and they are subject to that equally with their lowest subject. A glass is not the less brittle, because a king's face is represented in it; nor a king the less brittle, because God is represented in him. They have physicians continually about them, and therefore sickness, or the worst of ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... were. Remember, Merle. Think. Be honest with yourself." Blanche put her nervous, blue-veined hand on his arm. A detached part of his brain noted how bony and brittle her hand was. ...
— Second Sight • Basil Eugene Wells
... this appears: "The Theatre of this Town was opened by Mr. McGrath's Company of Comedians, with the celebrated comedy The Miser. This Company is by far the best that ever visited this town." Then on August 12 there was "The Beggars Opera and A Comedy of two acts, Barnaby Brittle or a Wife at her Wits End. Also in August Mr. McGrath's Company of Comedians gave The Tragedy of Douglas and Garrick's Comedy of Two Acts called ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... Duchesse du Maine are abroad; some say she has beaten her husband and broken the glasses and everything brittle in her room. Others say she has not spoken a word, and has done nothing but weep. The Duc de Bourbon has undertaken the King's education. He said that, not being himself of age, he did not demand this office before, but that ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... their canister shot made long furrows in the sod with a noise like the cutting of a melon rind, and the shells which skimmed the crest and burst in the tree-tops at the lower side of the fields made a sound like the crashing and falling of some brittle substance, instead of the tough fibre of oak and pine. We had time to notice these things as we paced the lines waiting for the ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... equestrian statue of Peter the Great, from the bogs of the Neva to St. Petersburg, a distance of about fourteen miles. He also cites it as an instance of extraordinary ingenuity and skill in mechanics. It is, however, a much easier task to move a ponderous mass of rough, unhewn rock, than a brittle obelisk, an hundred feet or so in length, requiring the greatest care to preserve it from injury. It is also worthy of mention, that in widening streets in New York, it is no uncommon thing to see a three-story brick house set back ten or fifteen feet, and even ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... bubble of glass into so intricate a shape, and timing the process so that the brittle material should harden only when it had reached the desired form, struck Miselle's mind as very incredible; and she followed Cicerone with much curiosity to another furnace, where one man, blow-pipe in hand, was dipping up a small quantity of the liquid glass, and, having blown into it just long ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... the month of the last, failing fight against the clutch of grim, all-destroying winter. And Fairchild was sagging in defeat just as the leaves were falling from the shaking aspens, as the moss tendrils were curling into brittle, brown things of ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... found an out-cropping of brittle, igneous rock. By dint of much labour he managed to chip off a narrow sliver some twelve inches long by a quarter of an inch thick. One edge was quite thin for a few inches near the tip. It was the rudiment of ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... lost through latches[13] of himself. And thus it falleth,' quod the friar, 'by folk here on earth, The water is lik'ned to the world, that waneth and waxeth, The goods of this world are likened to the great waves That as winds and weathers, walken about, The boat is liken'd to our body, that brittle is of kind, That through the flesh, and the fraile world Sinneth the sadde man, a day seven times, And deadly sin doeth he not, for Dowell him keepeth, And that is Charity the champion, chief help against sin, For he strengtheth man to stand, and stirreth man's soul, And though thy body ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... was formerly called Ariosto by Titian. And, most suggestive of all, there are the Mycenaean bay leaves of beaten gold, so incredibly thin one might imagine them to be the withered crown of a nameless singer in a forgotten tongue, grown brittle through three ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... like a polished skeleton—very clean, but very brittle: a little breeze, and whole houses would tumble to bits. I started painting, one day, a little picture from the hall of the College for Young Ladies. When I went the next day I found my point of view had been raised several ...
— An Onlooker in France 1917-1919 • William Orpen
... a job in the weavin' room of his mill. Do you know what that's like, Henry?" Henry shook his head. He had never been inside a linen-mill. "The linen has to be woven in a moist atmosphere, or else it'd become brittle an' so it wouldn't be fine," Mr. Quinn went on; "an' the atmosphere is kept moist by lettin' steam escape from pipes into the room where the linen is bein' woven—a damp, muggy, steamy atmosphere, Henry ... an' Lizzie McCamley left this village ... left work in the fields there to go ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... mended, and—hearts or plates—what cannot be mended had best be hidden away. Hearts and plates are brittle things, but the last can be bought in iron, as I wish the first could be also. Yes, husband, we will ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... 'Brittle, the member for Stoney-Muckford, was in the next carriage to me yesterday; and he's a slow coach, too,' I threw in. 'It does look as if the division was nearer than ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... there did appear to be some danger; for the wind that had loved Seth from the first was apparently jealous of Celia. It tore at her as though to toss her to unreachable distances in the way it ripped the tumbleweeds from their small brittle stems and tossed ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... divine revelation, made accessible to all by the incarnation of the Logos, and purified from any connection with Greek mythology and gross polytheism.[4] A motley multitude of primitive Christian ideas and hopes, derived from both Testaments, and too brittle to be completely recast, as yet enclosed the kernel. But the majority of these were successfully manipulated by theological art, and the traditional rule of faith was transformed into a system of doctrine, in which, to some extent, ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... the mountain which buried Goldau was composed of a hard but brittle conglomerate, called nagelflue, resting on unctuous clay, and inclining rapidly towards the village. Much earth remained upon the rock, in irregular masses, but the woods had been felled, and the water had free access to the surface, and to the crevices which sun and frost had already produced ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... presence, seated opposite to him during the long drowsy years; and he felt her kindness, her equanimity, where formerly he had only ached at her obtuseness. And from the chair he glanced up at the large discolored photograph on the wall above, with a brittle brown wreath suspended on a corner of the frame. The photograph represented a young man with a poetic necktie and untrammelled hair, leaning negligently against a Gothic chair-back, a roll of music in his hand; and beneath was scrawled a bar of ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... the rock on which we stand, that the magnanimous Emperor of Russia, the gallantry of whose troops, and the skill of whose great generals, place them above all the troops and generals in Europe, is all we have to rest on? Is it to be endured, I say, that this rock should prove as brittle as sand, and that those who held this language should come down in a week after, and say, give us two millions and a half to subsidize Germany, and then we shall have a better army than we had with Russia? After such unqualified praise ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... the words infer, 70 But, by the practice of the age, Are to be judg'd how far th' engage; And, where the sense by custom's checkt, Are found void, and of none effect. For no man takes or keeps a vow 75 But just as he sees others do; Nor are th' oblig'd to be so brittle, As not to yield and bow a little: For as best-temper'd blades are found, Before they break, to bend quite round, 80 So truest oaths are still most tough, And though they bow, are breaking proof. Then wherefore should they not b' allow'd In love a greater latitude? For as the law of arms ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... disposition. He was altogether too good-tempered, for he was always trying to play practical jokes on the other Freaks. He did this without any notion of annoying them, but it was injudicious; he being, like all other Giants, weak and brittle. ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... pound of lint. When a boll was wide open a deft picker could empty all of its compartments by one snatch of the fingers; and a specially skilled one could keep both hands flying independently, and still exercise the small degree of care necessary to keep the lint fairly free from the trash of the brittle dead calyxes. As to the day's work, a Georgia planter wrote in 1830: "A hand will pick or gather sixty to a hundred pounds of cotton in the seed, with ease, per day. I have heard of some hands gathering a hundred and twenty pounds in a day. The hands on a plantation ought ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... beautiful in form as well, and as a background for the dark spruces is wonderfully effective. We found it growing luxuriantly almost everywhere, except in the burned districts, and in places it is six inches in height. When dry, it is brittle, and may be crumbled to powder in the hands, but when wet is very much the consistency of jelly, and just as slippery. Through the wooded land the soil appeared to be simply a tangle of fallen and decayed tree-trunks grown over with thick moss of another variety, in which you sank ankle deep, ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... still, my soul, be still; the arms you bear are brittle, Earth and high heaven are fixt of old and founded strong. Think rather,-call to thought, if now you grieve a little, The days when we had rest, O soul, for they ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... Grant had an eye for horse-flesh, and the four dapple-greys which pressed their fine shoulders into the harness of his breaking plow might have delighted the heart of any teamster. As he sat on his steel seat and watched the colter cut the firm sod with brittle cracking sound as it snapped the tough roots of the wild roses, or looking back saw the regular terraces of shiny black mould which marked his progress, he felt that he was engaged in a rite of almost ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... articulated breath; of consonants that resist with the firmness of a maid of honor, or half or wholly yield to the wooing lips; of vowels that flow and murmur, each after its kind; the peremptory b and p, the brittle k, the vibrating r, the insinuating s, the feathery f, the velvety v, the bell-voiced m, the tranquil broad a, the penetrating e, the cooing u, the emotional o, and the beautiful combinations of alternate rock and stream, as it were, that they give to the rippling flow of speech,—there is ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... dim blue of the distant hills. As at a signal, a bird in a thicket somewhere over beyond them began a long throaty warble. Another answered over to the left. Faint, liquid trip-hammerings, they were, upon brittle anvils. ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... its being fed directly into the stamps battery. The reason for this separation not being effected by those mechanical appliances so common in most ore dressing establishments, such as stone breakers or crushing rolls, is simply because the ores are so rich in silver, and frequently of such a brittle nature, that any undue pulverization would certainly result in a great loss of silver, as a large amount would be carried away in the form of fine dust. So much attention is indeed required in this department that it is found requisite to institute strict ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... has for twenty years stood the Test, and found to be the best one made for breaking all kinds of hard and brittle substances, such as Ores, Quartz, Emery, etc., etc. Mr. S. L. Marsden, for the past twenty years connected with the manufacture of ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... sandwich man between two signboards that labelled his past career and explained his path that was to be; he had been unaddressed to any destination. The only remark on his vague and undistinguished label had perhaps been of the nature of "Brittle. This side up with care." He had no fame at any game; he did not row; he was neither a sporting nor, in any marked degree, a reading man. He did a little work, but he was not very fond of it or very good. The only things one could say of him were that he seemed to have ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... a sudden gust of wind arise, The brittle forest into atoms flies: The crackling wood beneath the tempest bends, And in a spangled show'r the prospect ends. Or, if a southern gale the region warm, And by degrees unbind the wintry charm, The traveller, a miry country sees, And journeys ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... jury, I must explain to you that a prima facie case is a case that is very good in front, but may be very bad in the rear." So of our so much lauded and really lovely calf bindings: they develop qualities in use which give us pause. Calf is the most brittle of the leathers—hence it is always breaking at the hinges; it is a very smooth leather—hence it shows every scratch instantly; it is a light and delicate leather—hence it shows soils and stains more quickly than any other. Out of every hundred calf-bound ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... made of shoots of the sarvis berry wood, which was straight, very heavy, and not brittle. They were smoothed and straightened by a stone implement. The grooves were made by pushing the shafts through a rib or other flat bone in which had been made a hole, circular except for one or two projections on the inside. These projections worked out the groove. The ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... coloured rag tied to the, but it will hardly commend itself to any archaeologist. The lines which cross the side of the axe-head represent string or strips of leather, and indicate that it was made of stone which, being brittle, was liable to crack; the picture characters which delineate the object in the latter dynasties shew that metal took the place of the stone axe-head, and being tough the new substance needed no support. The mightiest man in the prehistoric days was he who had the best ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... and honour are besides A very brittle glass; And Time, in his unresting tides, Makes all things change and pass; Turns riches to a beggar's dole; Sets glory's ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... the Mishkat al- Masabih (Lane 2, 54) Mohammed said, 'The best horses are black (dark brown?) with white blazes (Arab. "Ghurrah") and upper lips; next, black with blaze and three white legs (bad, because white- hoofs are brittle):next, bay with white blaze and white fore and hind legs." He also said, "Prosperity is with sorrel horses;" and praised a sorrel with white forehead and legs; but he dispraised the "Shikal," which has white stockings (Arab. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... the brazier are a few coals of soft white pine, which when burnt look exactly like charcoal. These will not burn the mouth as charcoal will. They should be picked up with a fork which will penetrate the pine coals, but not the charcoal, the latter being brittle. ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... forward. The elder trees grew from ten to twelve feet in height and so close together that to squeeze between them was impossible. Payne went ahead at first, walking sidewise, throwing his shoulder against the brittle stems and crashing a path through. Higgins soon stepped to the fore and did likewise. At the end of an hour, when they had covered ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... completely housed from the elements, or protected from their natural enemies, the jays, hawks, and owls. A tree with a natural cavity is never selected, but one which has been dead just long enough to have become soft and brittle throughout. The bird goes in horizontally for a few inches, making a hole perfectly round and smooth and adapted to his size, then turns downward, gradually enlarging the hole, as he proceeds to the ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... fell naturally, cousin. See; here it parted from the stalk, clean as a poplar twig, leaving the shiny cup unbruised. And nothing has passed here—this spider's web tells that, with a dead moth dangling from it, dead these three days, from its brittle shell." ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... they grew uneasy about him. Perhaps he might have been ambushed, they reasoned; or more likely fallen into one of the caverns formed by ancient lava flows and which are often treacherously concealed by a thin, brittle crust that a man of Kamehameha's bulk might easily break through. Much as they feared for the king's safety, the servants dared not leave the canoe unguarded. They were in ...
— Legends of Wailuku • Charlotte Hapai
... various plastic cement materials are used for modeling mouths, of which papier mache is probably the best; plaster paris is often used in an emergency but is brittle and heavy. For modeling use finely ground paper pulp mixed with glue and plaster or whiting. Only practice and experiment will determine just the precise ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... matter, and in living beings the force gradually decreases in power as the years pass, causing loss of health and strength. The chemical composition of bones and tissue alters, joints become stiff, muscles atrophied, and bones brittle. By recharging, as it were, with the vital force, the gland action is intensified, youth and strength is renewed. By repeating the process every ten or fifteen years the same degree of vigor can be maintained indefinitely. Mankind ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... straining ears, all sounds, confused but loud, began to beat on his hearing, losing all sense of distance. He heard the steps of Stepan Arkadyevitch, mistaking them for the tramp of the horses in the distance; he heard the brittle sound of the twigs on which he had trodden, taking this sound for the flying of a grouse. He heard too, not far behind him, a splashing in the water, which he could not ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... all the works of man afford nothing so artfully and curiously wrought. It would be too stiff, and too frangible or brittle, if it were made of one single bone: and in such a case man could never bend or stoop. The author of this machine has prevented that inconveniency by forming vertebrae, which jointing one with another make up a whole, consisting ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... started to fall; but instead of coming down on our side of the gully it fell diagonally across it and crashed into the top of a great hemlock that stood near the stream below. The impact was so tremendous that many of the brittle branches of both trees were broken off. At first we thought that the basswood was going to break clear, but it finally hung precariously against the hemlock at a height of thirty feet or more above the bed of the ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... blowin' down, breakin' all to pieces right on to your grass-land. They'd spile pretty near an acre fallin' in some o' them spring gales. Them old trees is awful brittle. If you're ever calc'latin' to sell 'em, now's your time; the sprangly one's goin' back a'ready. They take the goodness all out o' that part o' your field, anyway," said Ferris, casting a ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett
... a curious, brittle hissing. The ends of the rods began to dissolve into dazzling, diamond rain, atomically minute, that passing through the egg-shaped lights poured upon the periphery of the pedestal. Rapidly the bars melted. Heat there must be in these lights, terrific heat—yet the Keeper's workers ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... first-born roundly, told him he was "a very naughty boy," and ended by taking from behind the clock a small and brittle switch—an auxiliary that she had made haste to provide herself with before she had been on the premises an hour, and without which she felt that her family government would be but sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal—and striking "Dodd" one or two ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... this pottery, look down to the ground, Where bottle and mug, jug and pottle abound; From the plebeian throng see the graded array; There is shelf above shelf of brittle display, As rank above rank the poor mortals arise, From menial purpose to ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Risingh, collecting all his forces, aimed a mighty blow full at the hero's crest. In vain did his fierce little cocked hat oppose its course. The biting steel clove through the stubborn ram beaver, and would have cracked the crown of any one not endowed with supernatural hardness of head; but the brittle weapon shivered in pieces on the skull of Hardkoppig Piet, shedding a thousand sparks, like beams of glory, round ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... graveyard on the hill, and thought of going there, then shook his head and pressed his lips together. He was old, and now, when he could, he evaded woe. The young had fibre and nerve to squander; brittle folk must walk lightly. The Major stared at the feathery trees that marked the place. The green became a blur; he stamped his foot upon the floor with violence, said something between his teeth, and turned ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... of the hunter's footsteps, though the soles of his shoes are covered with fur, is carried on the wind and can be distinctly heard more than a mile away. I have frequently heard the crunching of the sled runners on the brittle snow—a ringing sound like striking bars of steel—a distance of over two miles. It was one advantage in travelling against a head wind, to counterbalance the discomfort, that it carried the sound of the sleds away ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... mingle blame of his impetuosity with pity for his sad overthrows, we did not for many weeks quite realize to ourselves the stern fact that here at length had the peculiar fall come upon us,—the last of all these falls! This brittle life, which had so often held together and victoriously rallied under pressures and collisions, could not rally always, and must one time be shivered. It was not till the summer came and no improvement; and not even ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... rock are not unfrequently found embedded in the midst of masses of scoriae. Lieutenant Evans, to whose kindness I am indebted for much information, gave me several specimens, and I found others myself. They nearly all have a granitic structure, are brittle, harsh to the touch, and apparently of ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... so that it should shine brightly and be smooth when Mikolai came. As Rosa did not wish to be outdone by [Pg 179] her, she had put her head into a basin of water. But she could not make up her mind to use the greasy pomade, so her dry hair—brittle like that of all anaemic people—was twice as dry as usual, and stood out like a reddish, curly mane round her head. Her blue ribbon could hardly keep the plait together, and the dry, curly mass emitted hundreds of sparks as soon as a sunbeam ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... a Shrub very crooked, and full of Knots, its Wood is tender and brittle, and the Branches are easily broke off into Slips: There are several and different Colours, some more forward and fruitful than others. Commonly they are pluck'd up in a Year or thereabouts; and there ...
— The Natural History of Chocolate • D. de Quelus
... at approximately that which he had hastily figured out on the envelope. Then he took a cylinder about twelve inches long, and almost half as much in diameter, a huge thing, constructed, it seemed, of a substance that was almost as brittle as an eggshell. Into the large hemispherical cavity in the breech of the gun he shoved it. He took another quick look at the light gleaming from the house in the darkness ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... degrees. They are often altered into a kind of chert. At Muara there is an outcrop of coal seams twenty, twenty-five and twenty-six feet thick. The coal is of excellent quality, quite bitumenised, and not brittle. The beds are being worked by private enterprise. I saw no fossils, but the beds and the coal reminded me much of the older Australian coals along the Hunter river. The mines are of great value. They are rented for a few thousand dollars by ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... is firm, elastic, rigid and, to a certain point, brittle. I do not hesitate to look upon it as consisting of a silken tissue which the larva, towards the end of its task, has steeped thoroughly in a sort of varnish prepared not by the silk-glands but by the stomach. The cocoons of the Sphex ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... lay at the roadside on the other side of the railing, where the snow was clean, brittle and untrampled and glistened cheerfully in the bright atmosphere. There were three dead bodies, two men and a boy. The boy lay with his long soft neck stretched on the snow. The face of the man next to the boy was invisible. He had fallen face downward in a pool of blood. The third ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... one, who had had his day of being the fashion and had broken many a fine lady's brittle heart, and, living to be no longer the mode, had seen the fragile trifles cemented together again, to be almost as good as new. When he was gone he was forgot quickly and, indeed, but talked about because her ladyship of Dunstanwolde had last beheld him, and on the afternoon had been entertaining ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Again, if you wish to kill a snake, it is no use hitting and trying to crush his head. The bones of the head are composed of the densest material, affording effectual protection to the brain underneath: a wise provision for the animal's preservation; for were his skull brittle, his habit of crawling on the ground would render it very liable to be fractured. The spinal cord runs down the entire length of the body; this being wounded, the animal is disabled or killed instanter. Strike therefore his tail, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... Chamberlain was blunt and true, and sturdily said he— 'Abide, my lord, and rule your own, and take this rede from me, That woman's faith's a brittle trust. Seven twelve- months didst thou say? I'll pledge me for no lady's truth beyond the seventh day.'" ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... so many traces of volcanic action, the rocks of the lower levels cannot fail to bear marks of their origin. Hasselquist relates, that the Hill of Tiberias, out of which issues the fountain whence the baths are supplied, consists of a black and brittle sulphurous stone, which is only to be found in large masses in the neighborhood, though it is commonly met with in rolled specimens on the shores of the Dead Sea, and in other parts of the valley. The sediment deposited ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... contents, and make some corrections with a pencil. "This," said he, turning to his companion, "is an amusement with which I sometimes pass idle hours at an inn. These are quotations from those humble poets, who trust their fame to the brittle tenure of windows and drinking-glasses." "From our inn," returned the gentleman, "a stranger might imagine that we were a nation of poets; machines, at least, containing poetry, which the motion of a journey emptied of their ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... of these condensation products are derivatives of diphenylamine or hydroxybenzyl alcohols. When the latter are heated, either by themselves or in presence of acids, anhydrides and polymerisation products are formed producing hard, brittle, fusible substances, insoluble in water but fairly soluble in organic solvents. The same substances are formed when phenols are condensed with formaldehyde, especially in the presence of acid contact substances and excess of phenol ...
— Synthetic Tannins • Georg Grasser
... this had ever before visited our country. Houses that stood unmoved through many fierce convulsions went down like brittle reeds, and old Corporations which were thought to be as immovable as the hills tottered and fell, crushing hundreds amid ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... the fact that something more than scholarship is needed for penetrating the mysteries of current folk-speech. Brash—often bresh—in the sense of refuse boughs of trees, is only another form of brush; the two are used as one word by the people. Brash in the sense of brittle has no conscious connection with the noun in popular usage, but it is accounted by the people the same word as brash in the sense of rash or impetuous. The suggestion in the Century Dictionary that the words spelled brash are of modern formation violates the soundest ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... healthy, dark green foliage, is more important than vigor as indicated by the length of current season's growth. In Morgantown this has been one of the driest seasons on record. Cuttings from trees with pale or brown foliage, or with foliage tending to be brittle from lack of water soon lost their leaves. Whether this was caused by the condition of the parent tree or of the individual cutting is not apparent. It is too early to determine whether or not the drought will cause a general lowering of ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... could not procure even proper wood for alpenstocks. Willow branches, two inches thick, very dry and brittle, were the best we could obtain. Light as this wood is, the alpenstocks weighed at least seven pounds apiece when the iron hooks and points were riveted on at the ends by the native blacksmith, for whom we cut paper patterns, ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... image of the Enemy of Man—made of some sort of brittle paste—which had been placed at the foot of one of the masts. This they broke in pieces and scattered, and the oldest men among the spectators, rising from their places, picked up the fragments which they handed ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... who knows he is the victim of a terrible disease and understands his helplessness. He again stared over the breastwork at the forest, and then turning went slowly rearward. He held his right wrist tenderly in his left hand as if the wounded arm was made of very brittle glass. ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... solidifying outside in slight projections which the insect does not remove, being unable to get at them, and polished on the inside surface, which is within the worm's reach. What can be the nature of that singular lid whereof the Cerambyx furnishes me with the first specimen? It is as hard and brittle as a flake of lime-stone. It can be dissolved cold in nitric acid, discharging little gaseous bubbles. The process of solution is a slow one, requiring several hours for a tiny fragment. Everything ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... half mile through a stretch of uncultivated land, dotted with the forms of huge live-oaks. The grass beneath them was burnt gray and was brittle and slippery. The massive trees, some round and compact and so densely leaved that they were impervious to rain as an umbrella, others throwing out long, gnarled arms as if spellbound in some giant throe ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... leeching and washing of the rains, are poorest in those substances that go to the making of the osseous framework of man and of the animals. Wheat does not grow well there, and the men born and reared there are apt to have brittle bones. An important part of those men went downstream ages before they were born. The water of such sections is now soft and free from mineral substances, but not ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... notes, Is not round the planet's waist, like the shingles; but is a globe of crystal that encloses the whole orb, as You may have seen an enamelled watch in a case of glass. If you do not perceive what infinitely pretty things may be said, either in poetry or romance. on a brittle heaven of crystal, and what furbelowed rainbows they must have in that country, you are neither the Ovid nor natural philosopher I take you for. Pray send me an eclogue directly upon this plan—and I give you leave to adopt my idea of Saturnian ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... The world behold; Unceasingly roll'd, It riseth and falleth ever; It ringeth like glass! How brittle, alas! 'Tis hollow, and resteth never. How bright the sphere, Still brighter here! Now living am I! Dear son, beware! Nor venture there! Thou too must die! It is of clay; 'Twill crumble ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... naturally hard and brittle, can be made soft by the application of a little warmth, so that it will take any shape you please. In the same way, by being polite and friendly, you can make people pliable and obliging, even though they are apt to be crabbed and malevolent. Hence politeness is to human nature what warmth ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... no less than seven of them within sight of the house. When one starts out to hunt birds it is well to bear in mind a few simple rules. The first of these is to go quietly. One's good sense would of course tell him not to rush headlong through the woods, talking loudly to a companion, stepping upon brittle twigs, and crashing through the underbrush. Go quietly, stopping to listen every few steps. Make no violent motions, as such actions often frighten a bird more than a noise. Do not wear brightly coloured clothing, but garments of neutral tones which blend well with the surroundings ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... of the row and tacking lath on, leaving spaces of an inch or more for the light to enter; or each head may be wrapped in paper, or a tile drain pipe may be set over the plant. In fact, any material that will exclude the light will render the stalks white and brittle. ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... unaided on her way to the end of the sand stretch. Miss Drexel and Juanita joined Charley in spreading the coats and robes on the sand and in gathering and spreading small branches, brush, and armfuls of a dry, brittle shrub. But all three ceased from their exertions to watch Wemple as he shot the car backward down the V and up. The car seemed first to stand on one end, then on the other, and to reel drunkenly and to threaten to turn over into the sump-hole when its right front wheel fell into ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... of stability and freedom. Slowly but surely, the free world gathers strength. Meanwhile, from behind the iron curtain, there are signs that tyranny is in trouble and reminders that its structure is as brittle as its surface ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... which we have spoken as being close to the sycamore walk, at the foot of a wall against which it flowed, forming a rather deep excavation, the current had found a vein of soft, brittle stone which, by its incessant force, it had ended in wearing away. It was a natural grotto formed by water, but which earth, in its turn, had undertaken to embellish. An enormous willow had taken root in a few inches of soil in a fissure of the rock, and ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... fact, for the oxydasion of the iron it contains gives it that appearance, and colors the soil a reddish hue in its immediate vicinity. Wherever this rock abounds, the soil is durable and the crops are usually heavy. It is sometimes met with having a fine grain, and so very hard as to be almost brittle, though generally very difficult to break, and when broken strongly resembling cast-iron, and will sometimes ring, on being struck, almost as clearly. It was used very much formerly for making journals to run mill-gudgeons ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... age, the bones grow harder, by the gradual deposition of the phosphate of lime, which is supplied by the food, and carried to the bones by the blood. In old age, the hardest material preponderates; malting the bones more brittle than ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... wonder; and everyone said, if the Devil had not assisted him, it was impossible the thing could have been done; for, in general, these ropes are so brittle, being made of green hay, that they will scarcely bear to be bound over the rick. And, the more to horrify the good people of this neighbourhood, the driver said, when he first came in view, he could almost give his oath that he saw two people busily engaged at the hay-rick going ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... boiler" ages ago learned by experience how to make the proper "heat" to boil the impurities out of pig-iron, or forge iron, and change it into that finer product, wrought iron. Pig-iron contains silicon, sulphur and phosphorus, and these impurities make it brittle so that a cast iron teakettle will break at a blow, like a china cup. Armor of this kind would have been no good for our iron-clad ancestors. When a knight in iron clothes tried to whip a leather-clad peasant, the peasant could have cracked him with a stone and his clothes would have fallen off ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... in his tastes, or in his politics. In his mind he is quicker, more universally intelligent, more ambitious of general knowledge, less indulgent of stupidity and ignorance in others, harder, sharper, brighter with the surface brightness of steel, than is an Englishman; but he is more brittle, less enduring, less malleable, and, I think, less capable of impressions. The mind of the Englishman has more imagination, but that of the American more incision. The American is a great observer; but he observes things material rather than things ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... The faultlessness of his dress and the perfection of style in his carriage abashed her. But she presently reached her emaciated hand to him, while tears stood in her eyes. Millard trembled as he took the semi-translucent fingers in his hand: they looked brittle, and he could feel the joints through his gloves as though it were a skeleton that thus ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... fell in January, 1686, is described as "a mass of black leaves, having the appearance of burnt paper, but harder, and cohering, and brittle." ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... told her to stuff it with chestnuts, but Ollie thought chestnuts too much of an old joke, so she stuffed it with peanut brittle. ...
— Skiddoo! • Hugh McHugh
... small masses, of a light yellow color and fibrous structure, between layers of serpentine. When they are separated by a small interspace, as it frequently is, the fibers are very large, coarse, and brittle, and thus do not resemble asbestos, although in some instances they might be mistaken for picolite, but, distinguished from it by effervescing on contact with a drop of acid, as it is a carbonate of lime, and also containing ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... cross me speed, and Saint Nicholas! Thereof had I need, it is worse than it was. Whoso could take heed, and let the world pass, It is ever in dread and brittle as glass, And slithers,[100] This world fared never so, With marvels mo and mo,[101] Now in weal, now in woe, And all things withers. Was never since Noah's flood such floods seen, Winds and rains so rude, and storms so keen, Some stammered, some stood in ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... read your Vergil, you would certainly have known that very different things are sought for this purpose. He, as far as I recollect, mentions 'soft garlands' and 'rich herbs and 'male incense' and 'threads of diverse hues', and, in addition to these, 'brittle laurel,' 'clay to be hardened,' and 'wax to be melted in the fire'. There are also the objects mentioned by him in a more ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... adulterants. Like smalt, it is known in the washtub as well as in the studio; and in the cheaper varieties, alumina, starch, chalk, oxide of iron, &c., are often largely present. A good unsophisticated sample in the dry state is intense blue, almost black, hard and brittle, much resembling in appearance the best indigo, and having a similar copper-red fracture. It does not effervesce with acids, as when adulterated with chalk; nor become pasty with boiling water, as when sophisticated with starch. Further, it feels light in the hand, adheres to the tongue, is inodorous, ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... varieties, both striped, and of different colours in the leaf. Birdlime is made from the inner bark of this tree, by beating it in a running stream and leaving it to ferment in a close vessel. If iron be heated with charcoal made of holly with the bark on, the iron will be rendered brittle; but if the bark be taken off, this effect will not be produced. Ray's Works and Travels ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... pay for this house!" flashed Rachel indignantly. Then she turned to Hazelton, her slight form drawn to its greatest height, and her hands crushing the flowers, she held till the brittle stems snapped, releasing a fluttering shower of scarlet and gold. "Mr. Hazelton, to carry out certain wishes very near to our hearts, we need money. We will show you the place, and—and we will consider your offer," she finished faintly. It was a dreary journey the sisters ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter
... often when the brown leaves Were brittle on the ground, And the wind in the chimney ...
— Renascence and Other Poems • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... wood is soft, brittle, and coarse-grained, and is therefore used mainly for coarse lumber. Its bark is so rich in tannin that it forms one of the chief commercial products of ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison
... got none of your poor brittle chaney-ladle kind o' bones; but my head's cut and the bark's all off my right leg in the front. Left leg arn't got no bark at all, and I'm reg'larly shaken in all my seams, and stove in on my starboard quarter, sir. So if you'll have me got ...
— Syd Belton - The Boy who would not go to Sea • George Manville Fenn
... shrubs that grew near them, they felt comparatively safe from the dangers of the storm, which now burst in terrific violence above the valley. Cloud answered to cloud, and the echoes of the hills prolonged the sound, while shattered trunks and brittle branches filled the air, and shrieked and groaned in ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... thy bullet hurts me not a little, Thy Shiah blood might serve to salve the ill. Maybe some Afghan Promises are brittle; Never a Promise to oneself, ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... trees in the pine wood ahead of me were parted, as brittle reeds are parted by a man thrusting through them; they were snapped off and driven headlong, and a second huge tripod appeared, rushing, as it seemed, headlong towards me. And I was galloping hard to meet it! ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells |
