"Quicksilver" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it is, quicksilver, or mercury. Now mercury, you ought to know, can transmit an electric current, so that if an electrically charged pin comes down into the cup of mercury, the cup itself being attached to an electric current, a circuit ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... "mercury," the father and mother of the metals; gold was supposed to have attained to the perfection of its nature by passing in succession through the forms of lead, brass and silver; gold and silver were held to contain very pure red sulphur and white quicksilver, whereas in the other metals these materials were coarser and of a different colour. From an analogy instituted between the healthy human being and gold, the most perfect of the metals, silver, mercury, copper, iron, lead and tin, were regarded ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... a touch of vexation in his voice, but Theos heeded it not. His heart gave a great bound against his ribs as though pricked by a fire-tipped arrow,—something swift and ardent stirred in his blood like the flowing of quicksilver, . . the picture of the dusky-eyed, witchingly beautiful woman he had seen that morning in her gold-adorned ship, seemed to float between him and the light,—her face shone out like a growing glory-flower in the tangled wilderness of his thoughts, and his lips trembled ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... and I left my table and followed up the sound. Physically, I merely walked around the bungalow and approached the edge of the jungle at a point where we had erected a small outhouse a day or two before. But this two hundred feet might just as well have been a single step through quicksilver, hand in hand with Alice, for it took me from a world of hyoids and syrinxes, of vials and lenses and clean-smelling xylol, to the home of ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... stock-raising. Dairying is a profitable industry. Poultry farming a little uncertain. If interested in mining there is much to explore. Just in this county are found gold, silver, copper, asphaltum, bituminous rock, gypsum, quicksilver, natural gas, ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... St. Anthony's fire burn you, Mahoom's disease whirl you, the squinance with a stitch in your side, and the wolf in your stomach truss you, the bloody flux seize upon you, the cursed sharp inflammations of wild fire, as slender and thin as cow's hair strengthened with quicksilver, enter into you,... and, like those of Sodom and Gomorrha, may you fall into sulphur, fire, and bottomless pits, in case you do not firmly believe all that I shall relate unto you in ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... he made tended to whet his inventive faculties, and to call forth his dormant powers. He went so far as to construct the model of a machine for the purpose. It consisted of a wooden wheel, the periphery of which was furnished with glass tubes filled with quicksilver; as the wheel rotated, the quicksilver poured itself down into the lower tubes, and thus a sort of self-acting motion was kept up in the apparatus, which, however, did not prove to be perpetual. Where he had first obtained the idea of this machine—whether from conversation or ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... canvas and quested on over the sea in the hope of wind-ruffles on the water. But all was glassy calm, each great sea, of all the orderly procession of great seas, heaving up, round-topped and mountainous, like so much quicksilver. ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... said he, "you're too inquisitive. I once asked the doctor o' a ship that question, and says he to me, 'Tom,' says he, 'a barometer is a glass tube filled with quicksilver or mercury, which is a metal in a soft or fluid state, like water, you know, and it's meant for tellin' the ...
— Fighting the Whales • R. M. Ballantyne
... the swift message ready to leap out toward him. He seemed to be drawing her soul to his unconsciously. Tingling in every nerve, athrob with an emotion new and inexplicable, she drew a long slow breath and turned her head away. A hot shame ran like quicksilver through her veins. She whipped herself with her own scorn. Was she the kind of girl that gave her love to a man who ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... key of copper, something like the ivory key of a pianoforte; it is elastic, and provided on the interior side with a protuberance of about a quarter of an inch long. Immediately beneath this protuberance is a little cup, also of copper, filled with quicksilver. At the instant when the orchestral conductor, desiring to mark any particular beat of a bar, presses the copper key with the forefinger of his left hand (his right being occupied in holding, as usual, the conducting-stick) ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... magic, the enthusiasm of the English; how one fortune after another has been swallowed up in the dark, deep gulf of speculation; how expectations have been disappointed; and how the great cause of this is the scarcity of quicksilver, which has been paid at the rate of one hundred and fifty dollars per quintal in real cash, when the same quantity was given at credit by the Spanish government for fifty dollars; how heaps of silver lie abandoned, because the expense of acquiring quicksilver renders it wholly unprofitable ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... was ther with us in that place, That hadde a fire-red cherubinnes face, For sausefleme he was, with eyen narwe, As hote he was, and likerous as a sparwe, With scalled browes blake, and pilled berd: Of his visage children were sore aferd. Ther n'as quicksilver, litarge, ne brimston, Boras, ceruse, ne oile of tartre non, Ne oinement that wolde clense or bite, That him might helpen of his whelkes white, Ne of the knobbes sitting on his chekes. Wel loved he garlike, onions, and lekes, And ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... detest, Abhor, condemn, abjure the mortal made Of such quicksilver clay that in his breast No permanent foundation can be laid; Love, constant love, has been my constant guest, And yet last night, being at a masquerade, I saw the prettiest creature, fresh from Milan, Which gave me ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... some of us in our youth must have drunk from some poisoned cup, something which turned our blood into quicksilver. I must live, or I must die. I must have excitement every hour, every second, or break down. There are others too—many others. No wonder that that idiot of a man in Harley Street talked to me gravely about my heart. No excitement. A quiet life! ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of Indian summer trembled over the purple hills. Below, the river quivered like quicksilver. In the air was the nutty odor of dried grasses, the clear tang of coming frosts crystal to the taste as water; and if one listened, almost listened to the silence, one could hear above the lapping of the tide the far echo of the cataract. To Cartier the scene might have been the airy ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... have far more quicksilver in their feet than their English cousins. Perhaps the very best waltzers I have ever danced with were English girls, who understood the poetry of the art and knew how to reflect not merely the time of the music, but its nuances of rhythm and tone. But dancers such as these are like fairies' ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... with me like shape, like garments wore, And dived with me in that quicksilver stream, Such mind, to my remembrance, then I bore, As when on vain and foolish things men dream; At last our shade it pleased her to restore, Then full of wonder and of fear we seem, And with an ireful look the angry maid Thus threatened us, and ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... previously hinted, this omnitooled, open-and-shut carpenter, was, after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have a common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously did its duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksilver, or a few drops of hartshorn, there is no telling. But there it was; and there it had abided for now some sixty years or more. And this it was, this same unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him; this it was, that kept him a great part of the time soliloquizing; but only like an unreasoning ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... with capillary forces that quicksilver is indeed very resistant to the waves which produce molecular action, and this developed a new theory of the depression of the mercury in capillary tubes. This would tend to confirm Maiorana's claim that a basin of mercury beneath a suspended mass of lead may decrease the gravitation of ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... presumably prove to be a general law, and not an isolated fact. If bismuth turned into mercury, what would mercury turn into? There would be no rest for me until I had solved the question. I renewed the exhausted batteries and passed the current through the bowl of quicksilver. For sixteen hours I sat watching the metal, marking how it slowly seemed to curdle, to grow firmer, to lose its silvery glitter and to take a dull yellow hue. When I at last picked it up in a forceps, and threw it upon the table, it had lost every characteristic of mercury, ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... exhausted in her efforts to control such animals. On the other hand, many small horses which play up are most difficult to sit, for, although they may not take their rider's breath away by their display of physical power, they are like quicksilver on a frying-pan, and highly test our agility in the matter ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... Jinny out of her stall he went into the harness-room and hunted about on a shelf until, behind a rusty currycomb and two empty oil-bottles, he found a small mirror. It was misty and flecked with clear spots where the quicksilver had dropped away, but when he propped it against the cobwebbed window he could see himself fairly well. Staring into its dim depths he retied his necktie; then he backed the buggy out of the carriage-house. But after he had put his mare between the shafts he hesitated.... The buggy was very shabby; ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... of authors—thought-creditors and borrowing expressionists—are as mutually necessary to each other to bring out idea in its most perfect shape, as glass and mercury to mirror objects. Dim, indeed, is the reflection of the glass without its coating of quicksilver; and amalgam, without a plate on which to spread it, can never form a mirror. The metal and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... keepers were obtained, for the sake of expedition, from single altitudes of the sun's upper and lower limbs, taken from a quicksilver horizon with a sextant fixed on a stand; the time being noted from Arnold's watch, compared with Earnshaw's time keepers before going on shore and immediately after returning. From the altitudes of the 3rd, 4th, and 6th, in the morning, the rates of the two time keepers ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... of "seeing people," quite as a matter of course. It used to give me a sharp pain at my heart; but I begin to take his way for granted now. "There's something about O'Farrell that eludes me—slips away like quicksilver. One is charmed with his voice ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... entrapped by agents in China and India, enter into perfidious contracts which commit them to hopeless slavery and send them to wear out their lives in despairing toil amid the pungent and murderous ammoniacal fumes of the guano islands of Chili and Peru. The Rothschilds, too, own the Almaden quicksilver mine ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... foot by stamping on the floor. For eight days did he pursue the cat everywhere: up and down the palace he was after it from morning till night, but with no better success; the tail seemed made of quicksilver, so very lively was it. At last the king had the good fortune to catch Minon sleeping, when tramp! tramp! he trod on the tail ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... which ran down from a valley that divided two of the hills aforesaid and falling over cliffs of live rock, made a murmur very delectable to hear, what while it showed from afar, as it broke over the stones, like so much quicksilver jetting out, under pressure of somewhat, into fine spray. As it came down into the little plain, it was there received into a fair channel and ran very swiftly into the middest thereof, where it formed ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... through Creation's veins Running Quicksilver-like eludes your pains; Taking all shapes from Mah to Mahi and They change ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... cleaning away the crumbled fragments of the furnace to get ready for breakfast, and had disclosed a shining pool of QUICKSILVER! ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... a far more genial sun and fertile soil, and capable of yielding more than double the amount of agricultural products and of sustaining more than twice the number of inhabitants. We have a greater extent of mines than all Europe, especially of coal, iron, gold, silver, and quicksilver. Our coal alone, as stated by Sir William Armstrong (the highest British authority), is 32 times as great as that of the United Kingdom, and our iron ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... up the crazy stairs with a beating heart. I was all on fire with excitement at the thought of offering her a gift; my blood seemed to be turned to quicksilver, and to race through its ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Karens are a dirty people. They never use soap, and their skins are enamelled with dirt. When water is thrown on them, it rolls off their backs like globules of quicksilver on a marble slab. To them bathing has a ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the love affairs contained in the letters which were broken open. The plan they pursued, as I have heard, was very simple. Six or seven clerks of the post-office picked out the letters they were ordered to break open, and took the impression of the seals with a ball of quicksilver. Then they put each letter, with the seal downwards, over a glass of hot water, which melted the wax without injuring the paper. It was then opened, the desired matter extracted, and it was sealed again, by means of the impression. This is the account of the matter ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... gold, and they departed. That gold was the first discovered in the Sierra Nevada, which soon revolutionized the whole country, and actually moved the whole civilized world. About this time (May and June, 1848), far more importance was attached to quicksilver. One mine, the New Almaden, twelve miles south of San Jose, was well known, and was in possession of the agent of a Scotch gentleman named Forties, who at the time was British consul at Tepic, Mexico. Mr. Forties came up from San Blas in a small brig, which proved to be a Mexican vessel; ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... hour thy uncle stole, With juice of cursed Hebenon in a vial, And in the porches of my ear did pour The leperous distilment; whose effect Holds such an enmity with blood of man That swift as quicksilver it courses through The natural gates and alleys of the body, And with a sudden vigour it doth posset And curd, like eager droppings into milk, The thin and wholesome blood; so did it mine; And a most instant tetter bark'd about, Most lazar-like, ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... of care I must trust in your hands—don't forget that I do so trust it. How would you like to cross Quapaw creek on this piece of quicksilver?" ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... platina and gold; it readily combines with nearly all other metals, and is used in the manufacture of looking-glasses, barometers, thermometers, &c.; in some of the arts, and in the preparation of several powerful medicines. It is found in California, Hungary, Sweden, Spain, China, and Peru. The quicksilver mine of Guanca Velica, in Peru, is one hundred and seventy fathoms in circumference, and four hundred and eighty deep. In this profound abyss are seen streets, squares, and a chapel, where religious worship is performed. The quicksilver mines of Idria, ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... there whilst I am here is really mine. I do not own it if it is possible that I shall lose it. And so with profound meaning our Lord speaks about 'that which is another's' in comparison with 'that which is your own.' It is another's because it passes, like quicksilver under pressure, from hand to hand, and no man really holds it, but it leaps away from his grasp. And if a man retains it all his days, still, according to the grim old proverb, 'shrouds have no pockets,' and when he dies his hands open, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... creeps in to a community. You cannot embody an idea in a form or in an external association without immediately dragging it down, and running the risk of degradation. It is just like a drop of quicksilver which you cannot expose to the air but instantaneously its brightness is dimmed by the scum that forms on its surface. A church as an outward institution is exposed to all the dangers to which other institutions are exposed. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... He stared with resentful eyes at the beauty round about him. "See! The Yumuri!" Don Esteban flung a long arm outward. "Do you think there is a sight like that in heaven? And yonder—" He turned to the harbor far below, with its fleet of sailing-ships resting like a flock of gulls upon a sea of quicksilver. Beyond the bay, twenty miles distant, a range of hazy mountains hid the horizon. Facing to the south, Esteban looked up the full length of the valley of the San Juan, clear to the majestic Pan de Matanzas, a wonderful sight indeed; then his eyes returned, as they always did, to the Yumuri, Valley ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... mercury; with this difference, that the atmosphere formed in the receiver by alkohol only supports the attached barometer about one inch in winter, and about four or five inches in summer; that formed by water, in the same situation, raises the mercury only a few lines, and that by quicksilver but a few fractions of a line. There is therefore less fluid evaporated from alkohol than from ether, less from water than from alkohol, and still less from mercury than from either; consequently there is less caloric employed, and less cold produced, ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... apparent notice of the icy sidewalks than if they had been strewn with cotton wool. If he followed close to pick her up, Wych Hazel took no notice and gave him no chance. In like manner she did her work with an executive force and gravity which made the clerks into quicksilver and drove one or two old admirers whom she met nearly frantic. They hailed her by her old name; and Hazel got rid of them she hardly knew how, except that it was in a blaze of discomfort for herself. And after that she kept furtive watch; quitting counters and ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... pocket-miner demanded with unutterable scorn, wiping his face. "Quicksilver's been solid for hours, and it's been gittin' colder an' colder ever since. Fifty? I'll bet my new mittens against your old moccasins that it ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... overcast in a few hours; then the clouds broke and let a little sunshine through, to close again before the dim evening thickened over the waters. Sometimes the moon looked through the ragged curtain of vapors; one night it seemed to shine till morning, and shook a path of quicksilver from the horizon to the ship. Through every change, after she had left the fog behind, the steamer drove on with the pulse of her engines (that stopped no more than a man's heart stops) in a course which had nothing to mark it but the spread of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... meanness; how he whipped the little boys, but was a perfect coward when a tussle ensued between him and white boys of his own size. On such occasions he always took to his legs. William had other charges to make against him. One was his rubbing up pennies with quicksilver, and passing them off for quarters of a dollar on an old man who kept a fruit stall. William was often sent to buy fruit, and he earnestly inquired of me what he ought to do under such circumstances. I told ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... he not have deceived us? Did you suspect him sufficiently to observe him? Did you examine the ball before it was put into the pistol? May it not have been one of quicksilver or clay? Did you take notice whether the Russian officer really put it into the barrel, or dropped it into his other hand? But supposing that he actually loaded the pistols, what is to convince ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... have a hurricane, I fear, Captain. Just see how the quicksilver has dropped in the barometer, and we are right upon this accursed island with its coral reefs. God have mercy on us or we are lost," ...
— The Shipwreck - A Story for the Young • Joseph Spillman
... bay was blazing like quicksilver. Some white clouds cooled the sky a little, but everything around was sweltering with hotness. On we went, fleet and cheerful, sending up the water in sparkles, and flying toward the ocean, with green banks on each side of us, and that gloriously hot sun heating up the air like ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... reckon perhaps he likely was, for he was splendidly educated, with rows on rows of books in his cabin, and a cyclopediar six feet long. The mate said he knew everything in it up to R, not to speak of working lunars in a saucer of quicksilver, and reckonizing squid ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... and labour in the world. Still as the oarsmen rowed the deer came down feeding by the water's side, as if they had been used to a keeper's call. On an excursion off the route they were following they overtook two canoes laden with bread. Among the bushes they found a refiner's basket. In it were quicksilver and saltpetre, prepared for assay, and the dust of ore which had been refined. It belonged to some Spaniards who escaped; but the natives, their companions, were caught. One of them, called Martino, proved a better ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... and his companions were at Tobolsk, on the 12th of September, whence they travelled on sledges, the cold being at 40 degrees Reamur, so that frozen quicksilver could ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 398, November 14, 1829 • Various
... animals very thin and full of wind, and, by blowing into them, made them fly through the air, but when the wind ceased they fell to the ground. On the back of a most bizarre lizard, found by the vine-dresser of the Belvedere, he fixed, with a mixture of quicksilver, wings composed of scales stripped from other lizards, which, as it walked, quivered with the motion; and having given it eyes, horns, and beard, taming it, and keeping it in a box, he made all his friends, to whom he showed it, fly for ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... you might be tempted to say that really it is not so much that there is a veil on the mirror as that there is no quicksilver at all behind. You meet in life characters so thin, so shallow, that every good thought seems to go through and out of them at the other side; they hear with one ear, and it goes out at the other. You can make no impression upon ...
— How to become like Christ • Marcus Dods
... with stones as precious to my eye as if fewer or rarer. Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky water. It needs no fence. Nations come and go without defiling it. It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms, no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh—a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun's hazy brush—this the light dust-cloth—which retains no breath that is breathed on ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... in California, I visited the principal gold, copper, and quicksilver mines in the state, not omitting the famous or infamous Mariposa tract. In company with Mr. Burlingame and General Van Valkenburg, our ministers to China and Japan, I made an excursion to the Yosemite Valley, and the Big Tree Grove. With the same gentlemen ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... type—artistic, emotional, elusive—could attract a man like Roger Trenby. The fact remained, however, that Nan had succeeded where hitherto she herself had failed, and Isobel's dreams of a secure future had come tumbling about her ears. She realised bitterly that love is like quicksilver, running this way or that at its own sweet will—and rarely into the channel we ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... This summer the King sent him to Karlsbad. When would that have occurred to his dear Emperor Joseph? They had but just returned when I arrived. He is fairly radiant with health and good spirits, as sound and solid and lively as quicksilver, with happiness and comfort beaming from ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... remind you that it was once clothed and mitred with flame. That is past by. I was once a volume of gold leaf, rising and riding on every breath of Fancy, but I have beaten myself back into weight and density, and now I sink in quicksilver and remain squat and square on the earth amid the hurricane that makes oaks and straws join in one dance, fifty yards high ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... weaver, would bring half the chivalry in England round us, to break lances, vow vows, display love-liveries, and I know not what follies besides.—Think you such gallants, with the blood flying through their veins like quicksilver, would much ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... Spanish Arabs. Their streets were lighted and solidly paved. The houses were frescoed and carpeted; they were warmed in winter by furnaces, and cooled in summer with perfumed air brought by underground pipes from flower-beds. They had baths, and libraries, and dining-halls, fountains of quicksilver and water. City and country were full of conviviality, and of dancing to the lute and mandolin. Instead of the drunken and gluttonous wassail orgies of their Northern neighbors, the feasts of the Saracens were marked ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... powder compressed hard down by the wad. Next a little cylindrical shovel full of shot was extracted from the belt, whose spring closed as the measure was drawn out, and the shot trickled gently into the barrel, glistening in the moonlight like globules of quicksilver. Another wad was rammed down; the pan opened and found full of the black grains, and the ramrod replaced in its loops behind the barrel, the gun being stood in the corner beside the bed ready for ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... ship, with a small squadron, stormed the fort of St. Fernando de Omoa, on the south side of the Bay of Honduras, and captured some register ships which were lying under its guns. Two hundred and fifty quintals of quicksilver and three millions of piastres were the reward of this enterprise; and it is characteristic of Nelson that the chance by which he missed a share in such a prize is never mentioned in any of his letters; ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... observed distinctly how one of the fellows, taking Marianna in his arms (for she had fainted), made off to the gate, whilst Signor Pasquale ran after him with incredible swiftness, as if he had got quicksilver in his legs. At the same time, by the light of the torches, he caught a glimpse of something gleaming, clinging to his mantle and whimpering; no ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... *summoner That had a fire-red cherubinnes face, For sausefleme* he was, with eyen narrow. *red or pimply As hot he was and lecherous as a sparrow, With scalled browes black, and pilled* beard: *scanty Of his visage children were sore afeard. There n'as quicksilver, litharge, nor brimstone, Boras, ceruse, nor oil of tartar none, Nor ointement that woulde cleanse or bite, That him might helpen of his whelkes* white, *pustules Nor of the knobbes* sitting on his cheeks. *buttons Well lov'd he garlic, onions, and leeks, And for to drink strong wine as ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... under his breath. For the half-dispersed thousands were flowing together again like quicksilver. The whole Hira Mundi region was packed with a seething dangerous mob, completely out of hand, amenable to ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... he would dash against and push out of their places; others he would burn up and consume to ashes: and others again he would split into fritters, and their fragments would instantly take a globular form, like spilled quicksilver, and become satellites to whatever other worlds they should happen to meet with in their career. In short, the whole seemed an epitome of the creation, past, present, and future; and all that passes among the stars during one thousand years was here generally ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... There is a great deal of quicksilver in this glass ball, and we can play with it. I'll show you how." And away they went downstairs ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... Terrestrials stared spell-bound into the plate; watching while the insensately vicious intelligences within the sphere brought its every force to bear upon another and larger sphere which was now so close as to be plainly visible. Like a gigantic drop of quicksilver this second globe appeared—its smooth and highly-polished surface one enormous, perfect, spherical mirror. Watching tensely, they saw flash out that frightful plane of seething energy, with the effects of which they were all ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... old book I read that to enable one to thrust one's hands into the fire all you had to do was to anoint them with a mixture of bol armenian, quicksilver, camphor and spirits of wine. I should prefer to leave that mixture alone, though in the book it is said that if one puts that mixture on his hands he may handle ...
— Joe Strong The Boy Fire-Eater - The Most Dangerous Performance on Record • Vance Barnum
... are wealthy enough to support themselves without borrowing money. In Europe most loans are arranged by the wealthy bankers, who demand security in return. We explained this matter to you in speaking of the quicksilver mines and the Rothschilds, ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 48, October 7, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... get his distance, ran upon the others like a bull, roaring as he went. They broke before him like water, turning, and running, and falling one against another in their haste. The sword in his hands flashed like quicksilver into the huddle of our fleeing enemies; and at every flash there came the scream of a man hurt. I was still thinking we were lost, when lo! they were all gone, and Alan was driving them along the deck as a sheep-dog ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tortured the air—crackling, snapping, spitting sounds like the laughter of animals with steel throats. Never was ill work better done than when, on that radiant veld, the sky one vast turquoise vault, beneath which quivered a shimmer of quicksilver light, the pom-poms, the maulers, and the shrapnel of Kruger's men mowed down Stafford and his battery, showered them, drowned them ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... stayed behind; for when it is a question of beauty, no scullion-wench will acknowledge herself surpassed; every one piques herself on being the handsomest; and if the looking-glass tells her the truth she blames the glass for being untrue, and the quicksilver ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... were it for me perhaps," he exclaims, "had I never relapsed into the same mental disease; if I had continued to pluck the flowers and reap the harvest from the cultivated surface instead of delving in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic depths." And he goes on to add, in a passage full of the peculiar melancholy beauty of his prose, and full too of instruction for the biographer, "But if, in after-time, I have sought a refuge from bodily pain and mismanaged sensibility in abstruse researches, ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... Mr. Merryweather. "You all have quicksilver in your heels, I believe. Seven and Twelve! Come ...
— The Merryweathers • Laura E. Richards
... Cupid, leave to speak improperly; since we are turn'd cracks, let's study to be like cracks; practise their language, and behaviours, and not with a dead imitation: Act freely, carelessly, and capriciously, as if our veins ran with quicksilver, and not utter a phrase, but what shall come forth steep'd in the very brine of conceit, and sparkle ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... for the manifold products of the East, Europe had only rough woolen cloth, arsenic, antimony, quicksilver, tin, copper, lead, and coral to give; and a balance, therefore, always existed for the European merchant to pay in gold and silver, with the result that gold and silver coins grew scarce in the West. It is hard to say what would have happened had ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... it derives its name, 136 m. E. of the town of Ekaterinoslav. It owed its origin in the latter half of the 17th century to the discovery of salt-springs, and now produces coal, salt, alabaster and quicksilver, and manufactures ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... to go, and the breeze fell from fresh to light, until at last, shrouded in a thick fog, one Sunday morning, when there was no air at all, only a flat calm, the sea as smooth as a glass mirror with the quicksilver clouded. ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... a frightful scene burst upon their sight. They beheld a great belching pit of fire and flames. The sky from the earth to the zenith was a vast expanse of illuminated smoke, and the black landscape round about was cut by rivulets of molten lava rolling on and on like restless streams of quicksilver. ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... threatening sky lay the glittering lake. Its surface of quicksilver was streaked here and there with black shadows—the track of the wind-gusts racing across it. The trees were rustling in the wind, making a ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... give you one chance more, and only one. It's quicksilver, kill or cure, and a stiff dose at that. I've just been talking with Spurling and his two friends. They're to spend the summer fishing from an island off the Maine coast, to earn money to start their college course. ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... past, That like a feasted Mammoth, leisured and slow, Turned its back on their warped bones. Even thus, Momentous with reproach, her grave regard Made me feel mean, cashiered of rank and right, My limbs that twelve good years had nursed were numbed And all their fidgety quicksilver grew stiff, Novel and fevering hallucinations Invaded my attention. So daylight When shutters are thrown back spreads through a house; As then the dreams and terrors of the night Decamp, so from my mind were driven All its own thoughts and feelings. Close she leant Propped on a ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... ended; the fluent movement of the dancers subsided with a curious effect of eddying—like confetti settling to rest; and P. Sybarite left his station by the wall, slipping like quicksilver through the heart of the throng to the far side of the room, where, near a great high window wide to the night, the breathless shopgirl had dropped into ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... affirm that quicksilver is the common seed of all metals. They do not bear in mind that nature raises substances according to the diversity of things which she wishes to produce in ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... good of these things, and saw moreover that the girl had grown to be a beauty, she offered to adopt her; but Judith, with the pitiful heroism of youth that understands little of what it is renouncing, thought herself strong enough to hold together a family, uncertain of purpose as quicksilver. ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... sir," said Gluck at length, after watching the water spreading in long, quicksilver-like streams over the floor for a quarter of an hour; "mayn't I ...
— The King of the Golden River - A Short Fairy Tale • John Ruskin.
... "Quicksilver? I should think it was quick! See it run back, now the tube is cool. But father called it something else the other night. ...
— Classic Myths • Retold by Mary Catherine Judd
... one thing another with merc'ry in't, and he walked out down to the Post-Office and back, and when he come home he kind o' felt somethin' hard in his boots. Come to pull 'em off, they found a lump o' quicksilver in both on 'em."—"Sho!"—"Fact; it had shrunk clean down through him with the cold." This rapid power of dramatizing a dry fact, of putting it into flesh and blood, and the instantaneous conception of Joe as a human thermometer, seem ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... company were all sorry to separate so soon, though a great part of the evening was already spent; and stood awhile looking back on the water, upon which the moonbeams played, and made it appear like floating quicksilver. At last they went up through a crowd of French people, who were merrily dancing in the open air, and nothing concerned for the noise of guns which had alarmed the town that afternoon. Walking three together ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... (Botrychium lunaria), often confounded with the common "honesty" (Lunaria biennis) of our gardens, so called from the semi-lunar shape of the segments of its frond, was credited with the most curious properties, the old alchemists affirming that it was good among other things for converting quicksilver into pure silver, and unshoeing such horses as trod upon it. A similar virtue was ascribed to the horse-shoe vetch (Hippocrepis comosa), so called from the shape of the legumes, hence another of its mystic nicknames was "unshoe ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... said:—"They talk of gold and silver mines, and lead and copper mines, and iron and quicksilver mines, but mining in Ireland cannot, as a rule, be made to pay. Everything exists in Ireland, but in such small quantities. The seams and veins are so small. Mr. Ritchie, of Belfast, spent several fortunes in mining for coal, iron, ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... across the valley, a wonderful panorama of vine-clad slopes and meadows, starred with many-coloured wild flowers, through which the river wound its way, now hidden, now visible, a thin line of gleaming quicksilver. Tall poplars fringed its banks, and there were white cottages and farmhouses, mostly built in the shelter of the vine-covered cliffs. To the left a rolling mass of woods was pierced by one long green avenue, at the summit of which stretched ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and rice are raised abundantly. There are mines of gold, silver, quicksilver, copper, lead, ...
— The Philippine Islands 1493-1898, Vol. 4 of 55 - 1576-1582 • Edited by E. H. Blair and J. A. Robertson
... ditches: nothing is so likely to attract a shock of lightning as a prong carried on the shoulder with the bright steel points upwards. In the farmhouses the old folk would cover up the looking-glasses lest the quicksilver should draw the electric fluid. The haymakers will tell you that sometimes when they have been standing under a hedge out of a storm a flash of lightning has gone by with a distinct sound like 'swish,' and immediately afterwards the wet ground has sent forth ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... dreamt that Miss Monk saw he was in love with the subject of their discourse. While they were talking, the merry hostess entered; and the last words the captain uttered fell upon her ear, and then followed a reply from Growling, saying that Irishmen were as hard to catch as quicksilver. "Ay, and as hard to keep as any other silver," said the widow; "don't believe what these wild Irish fellows tell you of themselves, they are all mad divils alike—you steady Englishmen are the safe men—and the girls know it. And 'faith, if you try them," added she, laughing, "I don't know any one ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... already said we shall be better able to understand Lionardo's love of the bizarre and grotesque. One day a vine-dresser brought him a very curious lizard. The master fitted it with wings injected with quicksilver to give them motion as the creature crawled. Eyes, horns, and a beard, a marvellous dragon's mask, were placed upon its head. This strange beast lived in a cage, where Lionardo tamed it; but no one, says Vasari, dared ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... door stood the chimney and fireplace, with a high buffet of dark wood on each side. The floor of the room was not dirty, although about its upper parts spiders had run their cobwebs in every direction. In the centre of the ceiling hung a quicksilver globe, a common ornament in those days, but the major part of it had lost its brilliancy, the spiders' webs enclosing it like a shroud. Over the chimney-piece were hung two or three drawings, framed and glazed, but a dusty mildew ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... claims and the subordinate claims; I know all about lodes, ledges, outcroppings, dips, spurs, angles, shafts, drifts, inclines, levels, tunnels, air-shafts, "horses," clay casings, granite casings; quartz mills and their batteries; arastras, and how to charge them with quicksilver and sulphate of copper; and how to clean them up, and how to reduce the resulting amalgam in the retorts, and how to cast the bullion into pigs; and finally I know how to screen tailings, and also how to hunt ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... case to forget that the Hunter is still a quantity to reckon withal. Where, then, does he hide, the Shaker of the Spear? Why, here, my brother, and here; deep in the breasts of each and all of us! And for this drop of primal quicksilver in the blood what poppy or mandragora ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... about my little girl, King, go as easy as if you was carryin' quicksilver in a dish. You told me she was all right a little while ago, and I tell you I ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... his bed and crown. That as he was sleeping in his garden, his custom always in the afternoon, his treasonous brother stole upon him in his sleep, and poured the juice of poisonous henbane into his ears, which has such an antipathy to the life of man, that swift as quicksilver it courses through all the veins of the body, baking up the blood, and spreading a crustlike leprosy all over the skin: thus sleeping, by a brother's hand he was cut off at once from his crown, his queen, and ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... turned to look at the army. Never had I seen them so joyous. It would be impossible to convey any idea of the afflatus which buoyed them up. Every man's veins seemed to run with quicksilver, instead of blood. Every cheek was glowing. Every eye flashed with superb joy and defiance. You would have supposed, indeed, that the troops were under the effect of champagne or laughing gas. "I never even imagined such courage," ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... brought into Port Royal, Jamaica, two Spanish prizes, one the Maria of Seville, a royal azogue carrying 1,000 quintals of quicksilver for the King of Spain's mines in Mexico, besides oil, wine, and olives. Also a number of prisoners were taken, including several friars on their way to Campeachy and Vera Cruz. The buccaneers always ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... gold in California, in 1848, with its other mineral resources, including the Alamada quicksilver mine at San Jose, which is an article of first necessity in working gold or silver ore; and the great silver mines of Nevada, in 1860, the Comstock lode, in which, in ten years, from five to eight hundred millions of gold ...
— The Adventures of a Forty-niner • Daniel Knower
... gaily to the bosom of the Bocardon family and remained there, its Cousin Quicksilver and its entirely happy and idolized hero, until the indignation of the eminent M. ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke |
