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More "Crackle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... until late. He then went down to the beach, and brought up a vast collection of driftwood, and throwing a plenteous supply upon the fire, he lay down beside it, and looked out over the water, trying, as usual, to see something through the thick mist. The flames shot up with a crackle and a great blaze, and the bright light shone brilliantly upon the water. The tide was now up, and the boat was full before him. Tom fixed his eyes upon this boat, and was mournfully recalling his unsuccessful experiment at making ...
— Lost in the Fog • James De Mille
... excellence as a mind not yet called forth to action can display. He knew how to distinguish, and how to commend, the qualities of his companion; but, when he wishes to make us weep, he forgets to weep himself, and diverts his sorrow by imagining how his crown of bays, if he had it, would crackle in the fire. It is the odd fate of this thought to be the worse for being true. The bay-leaf crackles remarkably as it burns; as, therefore, this property was not assigned it by chance, the mind must be thought sufficiently at ease that could attend ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... battery of small guns in action down in the depths below us. A few hundred yards to the west of the camp there were a number of small hummocks, which might indicate the presence of crevasses, but otherwise the surface looked safe enough. The small guns kept up a lively crackle all through the night, and combined with a good deal of uproar among the dogs to shorten our sleep. But the first night of a sledge journey is almost always a bad one. Stubberud declared that he could not close his eyes on account of "that filthy row." He ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... never even stopped to notice whether the season was flavored with frost or thunder. But now, unexplainably, just at the end of it all, sitting innocently there at her own prim little bed-room window, staring innocently out across indomitable roof-tops,—with the crackle of glory and diplomas already ringing in her ears,—she heard, instead, for the first time in her life, the gaily dare-devil voice of the spring, a hoydenish challenge flung back at her, leaf-green, from the crest of ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... the sea, and immediately a great cloud of steam arose, and the hissing as of a thousand serpents. We felt the strong suction under our keel, and staggered under the jerk of the ship's cable as she swung toward the beach. The paint was beginning to crackle along the rail. We could see nothing for the scalding white veil that enveloped us; we could hear nothing for the roar of steam, the bombardment of explosions, and the crash of thunder; but our nostrils were assaulted by a most unearthly medley ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... huge chimney, saying to himself as he did so, "Good Santa Claus, be kind to me while I am sleeping peacefully." Next morning, bright and early, just as a great Christmas log had begun to blaze and crackle on the hearth, he jumped spryly from his bed, and, without stopping to put on his clothes, ran to his stockings to see what good old Santa Claus had brought him while he slept. I leave you to picture to your minds his delight upon finding therein a little Indian ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... once hire a horse and carriage of a friend and took Alice for a drive! More than thirty-five years have passed since that adventure and yet I can see every turn in that road! I can hear the crackle of my starched shirt and the creak of my suspender buckles as ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... wood and threw it in the heater, opening the draughts wide, and watching to see if it caught. Soon it began to crackle and blaze cheerily, and, despite her loneliness and her suffering, ...
— Polly of Lady Gay Cottage • Emma C. Dowd
... burns; Like the garden of Eden is the land before them, And after them it is a desolate desert, Yea, nothing escapes them. Their appearance is as the appearance of horses, And like horsemen they run. Like the sound of chariots on the tops of the mountains they leap, Like the crackle of flames devouring stubble, Like a mighty people preparing for battle. Peoples are in anguish before them, ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... began to be worried. Just then the light went out. Ah! The man was going away at last! She waited a long, nervous half hour. But there was no sound. She dared not move, for even when she shifted her position against the tree the oppressive silence seemed to crackle with ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... the crackle of the flames, whenever the night wind happens to blow this way," Babe Adams asserted; and they all agreed with him, for the same sound had come ...
— Boy Scouts on a Long Hike - Or, To the Rescue in the Black Water Swamps • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... of the storm without, the thresh of the rain upon the lattice casement, and the irregular whipping gusts which shook the house, the soft wheeze of the engrossing quill could be heard, the crackle of the burning logs and the heavy regular breathing of the couchant she-wolf being the only other sounds ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... waltzing from one end of the room to the other. "And we're off to Ab-yss-in-ia in the morn-ing," he sang. "There's plenty in my money belt," he cried, slapping his sides, "you can hear the ten-pound notes crackle whenever I breathe, and it's all yours, my dear boy, and welcome. And I'll prove to you that the ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... and proceeded to kindle a fire with a tinder-box lent her by Mrs. Chivers. It amused the babe to watch the sparks as they flew about, and when the pile of turves and sticks and heather was in combustion, to listen to the crackle, and watch the play and leap of ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... to Duggan and obeyed. The cabin door was open, and he entered. One look assured him that Duggan had good reason to be "sot up." The first big room reminded him of the Shack. Beyond that was another room in which he heard someone moving and the crackle of a fire in a stove. Outside Duggan was whistling. He broke off whistling to sing, and as Keith listened to the river-man's bellowing voice chanting the words of the song he had sung at McCoffin's Bend for twenty years, he grinned. And then he heard the humming of ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... Pudneys, who had taken him to Birmingham, had already got rid of him, and we had a horrible consciousness of his wandering roofless, in dishonour, about the smoky Midlands, almost as the injured Lear wandered on the storm-lashed heath. His room, upstairs, had been lately done up (I could hear the crackle of the new chintz) and the difference only made his smirches and bruises, his splendid tainted genius, the more tragic. If he wasn't barefoot in the mire he was sure to be unconventionally shod. These were the things Adelaide and I, who were ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... contention, which had been constantly flattered by triumph, brought, his whole nature into play with the prospect of the morrow: not much liking it either. There is a nerve, in brave warriors that does not like the battle before, the crackle of musketry is ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... fully confirmed. Magua had clearly led the party into a trap for purposes of his own, and Hawk-eye at once took steps to secure his capture. While Heyward held the runner in conversation, the scout and the two Mohicans crept silently through the undergrowth to surround him, but the slight crackle of a breaking stick aroused Magua's suspicion, and, even as the ambush closed on him, he dodged under Heyward's arms and vanished into the ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Mararin or Gondin who has cast the evil eye, may her eyes crack and fall out.' And at the same time they throw the mustard, chillies and salt on the fire so that the eyes of her who cast the evil eye may crack and fall out as these things crackle ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... his body still more forward. In the instant of meeting, with almost the blindness of instinct, he dropped the point of his spear against the single red flower-de-luce in the middle of the on-coming shield. There was a thunderous crash that seemed to rack every joint, he heard the crackle of splintered wood, he felt the momentary trembling recoil of the horse beneath him, and in the next instant had passed by. As he checked the onward rush of his horse at the far end of the course, he heard faintly in the dim hollow ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... "We have, indeed, met with good fortune." Again we heard the brushwood crackle, and a second man, resembling the first in appearance and dress, came forward, and together they held a conversation, interspersed largely with the gestures which play so prominent a part in the language ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... then it was all gone—the face, the night, the Moon, the magic—and she was back in the grubby, stale little hole, facing an angry, stale little man. It was then that the eternal thud of the air-conditioning fans and the crackle of the electrostatic precipitators that sieved out the dust reached her consciousness again like the bite of ...
— The Moon is Green • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... The crackle of the sinking fire in the grate, The far train, the slow echo in the coombe, The ear that hears fire, ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... line of blue smoke-puffs broke out along the edge of the wood in front, succeeded by a crackle of rifles. There were keen, sharp hissings in the air, terminating abruptly with a thump near by. The man at Captain Graffenreid's side dropped his rifle; his knees gave way and he pitched awkwardly forward, falling upon his face. Somebody shouted ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... his burdens. The girl was light; he did not mind her weight; but he felt this place uncanny, and now and then would start on a little spurt of haste, to get into a better way. He liked the high mountain trails, where he could step firmly and hear the twigs crackle under his feet, not this muffled, velvet way where one made so little progress and had ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... region which seemed crowded with dug-outs and piles of stores, we gained the crest where we had been urged to extend. It was pitch dark, with a steadily increasing drizzle of rain and an occasional rumble of thunder. In front there were as yet no indications of shell-fire, only an intermittent crackle of ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... sleep of the night had worked wonders for Claude. In the morning, when the crackle of the fire told him that Marguerite was up before him, he rose, and to his surprise found his limbs strong and his brain clear. He looked upon the dead bear, and all that had passed came back to him. He stepped over its gaunt form, and ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... A balmy med'cine for my troubled mind? Or whose discourse with innocent delight Shall fill me now, and cheat the wint'ry night, While hisses on my hearth the pulpy pear, And black'ning chesnuts start and crackle there, While storms abroad the dreary meadows whelm, And the wind thunders thro' the neighb'ring elm? 70 Go, seek your home, my lambs; my thoughts are due To other cares than those of feeding you. Or who, when summer suns their summit reach, And Pan sleeps hidden by the shelt'ring beech, When shepherds ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton
... time there was a sound of cannon only, then came a crackle of musketry telling that the advance had begun. The battery on the commanding position of St. Maur opened in earnest, and was aided by several batteries of field artillery, the din being now incessant. Gradually the rattle of musketry became fainter, showing that the French were ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... breeze is rising, the blue sky is fading a little below; in the nearest Paris suburb the windows are shining in the oblique rays of the setting sun. It will soon be night, and upon this carpet of dead leaves, which crackle under the poet's tread, other leaves will fall. They fall rarely, slowly, but continually. The frost of the night before has blighted them all. Dried up and rusty, they barely hang to the trees, so that the slightest wind that passes over them gathers them ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... was lost in the song of the pines a few score yards from Alton's camp. He knew where to find the resinous knots with their sticky exudations, and was a master of the axe, while it was noticeable that when the fire commenced to crackle he stood still and listened again before he went down to the river with the kettle. Nor did he at once return into the light, but slipped for a moment behind a wide-girthed trunk. It was only a deer he heard moving along the hillside above him, and there was nothing ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... the pointer frantically here and there, swung it to one side and another; then found at last a point on the outside of the strange design beneath his hand where the pointer could rest while the crashing crackle ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... shivering as a rule, beside the stove in an almost empty log-walled room, reading a book you have probably read three or four times before. Outside, the frost is Arctic; you can hear the roofing shingles crackle now and then; and you wake up when the fire burns low. There's no life, no company, rarely a new face, and if you go to a dance or a supper somewhere, perhaps once a month, you ride back on a bob-sled and are frozen almost ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... street. Clippety, lip, lip, lip, clippety, lip, lip, lip! comes the bread horse down the street. He stops in front of Ruth's house. Ruth hears him. Then she hears the driver jump out and pat, pat, pat, she hears his feet coming to the door. Rattle, crackle, goes the paper as he puts down the loaves of bread all wrapped up to keep them clean. Then fast she hears his feet, pat, pat, pat, pat, pat, pat, pat. "Go on, Bill!" she hears him call and clippety, lip, lip, lip, clippety, ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... a few seconds the air was filled with the thumping of Archie and the distant crackle ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... having found us, was quite determined that we should never escape them alive. When presently we again began to move, it seemed impossible to take a single step without tripping over a land-crab's hole, or treading upon one of the creatures and hearing and feeling it crackle and writhe underfoot. ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... sap, put more wood on the fire and came and pulled off his boots and lay down beside me under the robe. And, hearing the boil of the sap and the crackle of the burning logs in the arch, I ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... ditch-bank against the reddened sky supplied the usual landmark. Its crest was black with shovelers, and up and down in lurid light climbed the scraper-teams; climbed and dumped, and dropped over the bank to climb again, like figures in a stage procession. There was a bedlam roar and crackle of pitchy fires, rattle of harness, clank of scraper-pans, shouts of men to the cattle, oaths and words of command; and this would go forward unceasingly till the banks held water. And what was the ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... draught from the open windows finally stimulated the lazy chimney to greater exertions, and just as Peggy crossed the threshold, a brave little flame leaped up from the smoking, smouldering mass, and a cheery crackle made music plainly audible ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... and looked all around, cautiously, yet resolutely. The interior, however, was always a dark place; and now the fumes of blue smoke made it yet darker. But though his eyes saw nothing of the fierce beast, his ears could detect the rustle and the crackle which were produced by the motion of something among the fagots. This noise showed him plainly where ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... part of the fort were minute by minute becoming more brightly illuminated; every detail around the blazing vessels could be distinctly seen; and mingled with the myriad noises from the shore was now the crackle of the flames, and the hiss of burning spars and rigging as they fell ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... great tree on shore!" quoth little Love Winslow, clapping her hands. "Dost hear, mother? I've been counting the strokes—fifteen— and then crackle! crackle! crackle! and down ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... entreated Mr. Tredgold. "As a matter of fact, I'm dying with curiosity myself. Bring it out and make it crackle, captain; it's a bank-note for half ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... undefended tyrant. One shot, one blow of a stone, one stroke of a knife—to the end of a shameless pillage. But no hand was raised to do the deed. The roar of voices subsided—he waited for it—and silence was broken only by the crackle of the burning building, the tramp of Montcalm's soldiers in Mountain Street, and the tolling of the cathedral bell. I thought it strange that almost as Bigot came out the wild clanging gave place to a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Swirroo! Crackle! He was gliding over the tops of the trees, ploughing through them, tumbling into a cloud of green sharp leaves and black twigs. There was a sudden snapping, and he fell off the saddle forward, ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... that I heard a noise in my sleep, something like a thing moving, very faint, however, far away; then it died, and then it came again upon my ear as I slept, and now it appeared almost as if I heard crackle, crackle; then it died again, or I became yet more dead asleep than before, I know not which, but I certainly lay some time without hearing it. All of a sudden I became awake, and there was I, on the ridge of the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... a standard which Death plants on his conquests. He clutched in one hand his pen, his poor last pen, inky and ragged, in the other a crust of his last piece of bread. His legs knocked together, so as to make the crazy bed crackle. I listened carefully to his hard breathing; I heard the rattle with its hollow husk; and I recognised Death in the room as a practised sailor recognises the tempest in the whistle of the wind ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... and elk which abound, "Their tameness is shocking to me." It is the world of "big game." Just now a heavy-headed elk, with much-branched horns fully three feet long, stood and looked at me, and then quietly trotted away. He was so near that I heard the grass, crisp with hoar frost, crackle under his feet. Bears stripped the cherry bushes within a few yards of us last night. Now two lovely blue birds, with crests on their heads, are picking about within a stone's-throw. This is "The Great Lone Land," until lately the hunting ground of the Indians, and not yet settled or ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... circumstances! Soft speeches will not serve; hard grape-shot is questionable; but hovering between the two is unquestionable. Ever wilder swells the tide of men; their infinite hum waxing ever louder, into imprecations, perhaps into crackle of stray musketry,—which latter, on walls nine feet thick, cannot do execution. The Outer Drawbridge has been lowered for Thuriot; new deputation of citizens (it is the third, and noisiest of all) penetrates that way into the Outer ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... line we ward A crackle of skirmishing goes on. Our lads creep round on hand and knee, They fight from behind each trunk and stone; And sometimes, flying for refuge, one Finds 'tis an enemy shares the tree. Some scores are maimed by ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... despatches are written small and, at your first halt, it will be well if you sew them in the lining of your boot. They will escape observation there, however closely you may be searched; for they are but of little bulk, and I have written them on the softest paper I could obtain, so that it will not crackle to the touch. ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty
... crouched down, and gazed into the gloom, till her eyes swam, and a hundred fantastic figures, and sparks of fire, seemed to dance between her and the rock. Sparks of fire!—yes; but that last one was no fancy. An actual flash; the crackle and sputter of a match! What could it mean? Another match was lighted; and a moment after, the glare of a lanthorn showed her mother entering beneath the polished arch of rock which glared lurid overhead, like the gateway ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... saved him, for he had the sense to obey. After a few minutes of breathless racing, with a roar as of breakers in his ears and the crackle of clashing horns and the gleaming of rolling eyeballs close upon his horse's heels, he found himself washed high and dry, as it were, while the tumult swept by. Presently he was galloping along behind and wondering dully how ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... yelling figures clothed in uniform. Screaming the battle-cry, the warriors charged, led by Zalu Zako, Bakahenzie, and Kawa Kendi, who in the excitement had dashed from the enclosure. Howls and yells were drowned in the spiteful crackle and cough. Warriors were mown like weeds under a sickle. Scarce a hundred scrambled inside the enclosure at the ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... sent them back to the camp. Piute and Peon were skinning coyotes by the blaze of the fire. The night wind had not yet risen; the sheep were quiet; there was no sound save the crackle of burning cedar sticks. Jack began to talk; he had to talk, so, addressing Piute and the dumb peon, he struck at random into speech, and words flowed with a rush. Piute approved, for he said "damn" whenever his intelligence ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... put 1 lb. of birdlime and half a pint of the drying oil into an iron or copper vessel, whose capacity should equal about a gallon, and let it boil very gently over a slow charcoal fire, till the birdlime ceases to crackle, which will be in about half or three-quarters of an hour; then pour upon it 2-1/2 pints more of the drying oil, and let it boil about an hour longer, stirring it frequently with an iron or wooden spatula. As the varnish, whilst boiling, and especially when nearly ready, swells ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... "Moses' seat," on the other side, and thus, in a minute, the great broad bed was peopled with the whole family, as jolly, if as absurd, a sight as the rising sun looked upon. And then! Flossy and Beverly were deputed to go to the fender, and to bring the crowded, stiff stockings, whose crackle was so delicate and exquisite; and so, youngest by youngest, they brought forth their treasures, not indeed gold, frankincense, and myrrh, but what answered the immediate purposes better, barley cats, dogs, elephants and locomotives, figs, ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... whatever, led across to the road, my liers-in-wait were certainly guarding it and would rush to the road by that way as soon as they found I was flanking them. And so I strove on at the best speed I could make, and burst into the road with a crackle and crash that might have been heard a hundred yards away. One glance up the embowered alley, one glance down it, and I whirled to the right, drove in the spur, and flew for the bridge. A wild minute so—a turn in the road—no one ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... to make out anything, and he struck a match. The crackle was followed by another sound from the thicket, as though a man had moved suddenly and violently. McNally started and dropped the match, glancing suspiciously toward the ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... eyes of Tom and Ned, the fire seemed to die out as a picture melts away on a moving picture screen. The smoke rolled away in a ball-like cloud, and the flames ceased to crackle and roar. ...
— Tom Swift among the Fire Fighters - or, Battling with Flames from the Air • Victor Appleton
... the road they heard the crackle of a dozen rifle shots. The Southern advance undoubtedly had come into contact with the Union sentinels and skirmishers. After the first shots there was a moment's breathless silence, and then came a scattered ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... now upon the steps, watching and listening. In a minute or two I heard the crackle of withered sticks trod upon, and, looking in the direction, I saw a figure approaching among the ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... replied, "but it would also be decidedly stiff and inconvenient. Just imagine how one's aluminium knees would crackle and bend going up and down-stairs, and what an awful job one would have conforming one's aluminum spinal column to the ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... Now crouching against the place from which the hottest fire belched forth, he blew upon this brand till a tongue of flame darted forth, and in a moment more the brushwood around the house had begun to crackle with a sound like that made by a hissing snake before ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... off their hinges, and a bare board on tressels for a table, at which thirty people might dine easily, and a fireplace large enough in itself for a breakfast-parlour, where, as the faggots blaze and crackle, they illuminate the ugliest and grimmest of faces, drawn in charcoal on the whitewashed chimney- sides by previous travellers. There is a flaring country lamp on the table; and, hovering about it, scratching her thick black hair continually, a yellow dwarf of ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... him, with evident pride, that it was "goin' to be one of the biggest funerals ever given in Ostable." Mr. Sharon nodded. Then, after waiting a moment or two, he tiptoed along the front hall and took up his stand by the parlor door. There was a final rustle of gowns, a final crackle of Sunday shirtfronts, and then a ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... hesitated, knowing that only the unwritten law of Western hospitality compelled that speech; it was the crackle and flare of the bright fire ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... through the woods fearlessly. At the first suspicious crack the moose whirled, hesitated, started nervously across the stream, twitching her nostrils and wigwagging her big ears to find out what the crackle meant, and hurrying more and more as the sounds grated harshly upon her sensitive nerves. Next moment the river was clear and our canoe was breasting the rippling shallows, while the moose watched us curiously, half hidden ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... widened out, and showed us a scene as I have since beheld such things appear upon the stage. Within the round changing frame of wispy vapor two men sat by a fire of logs and branches. We could smell wood smoke, and hear the branches crackle, convincing us the vision was real. Behind them stood a cabin almost as rude as my ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... swear, gamble, and love light loves with his fellows; to take ship and know the sea once more, and by her beget pictures; to talk to Binat among the sands of Port Said while Yellow 'Tina mixed the drinks; to hear the crackle of musketry, and see the smoke roll outward, thin and thicken again till the shining black faces came through, and in that hell every man was strictly responsible for his own head, and his own alone, and struck with an unfettered arm. It was ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... wind behind him Le Beau made his ISKOO of birch-bark and dry wood at the far end of the windfall. The seasoned logs and tree-tops caught the fire like tinder, and within a few minutes the flames began to crackle and roar in a manner that made Miki wonder what was happening. For a space the smoke did not reach him. Le Beau, watching, with his rifle in his bare hands, did not for an instant let his eyes leave the spot where the wild dog must ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... delicately upon the ear. It seemed to waken all the room into new vibrations of life. The clock ticked with an assured peace, as if knowing it marked eternal hours. The flames waved softly upward without their former crackle and sheen; and the moving shadows were gentle and rhythmic ones come to keep the soul company. Amelia felt ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... silent night, I screamed with horrible delight, And in my brain an awful light Did seem to crackle, Rosaline! It is my curse! sweet memories fall From me like snow, and only all Of that one night, like cold worms, crawl My doomed ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... were sitting on the porch of Mr. Caldwell's house preparing some bird skins, there came a sharp crackle of rifle fire and then a roar of shots. Bullets began to whistle over us and we could see puffs of smoke as the deep bang of a black powder gun punctuated the vicious snapping of the high-power rifles. The firing gradually ceased after half an hour and we decided ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... the side of the cot lacing his shoes, he glanced about and saw that daylight had made the room comparatively commonplace and uninteresting. The men, whose faces seemed stolid, serene or absent, were engaged in dressing, while a great crackle of bantering ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... resemble one of the sanguinary idols of barbarous times. Little by little, however, in spite of himself, his eyes were weighed down by sleep, and an invincible drowsiness took possession of his spirit. Before long his sleep became so profound, that he did not hear the dry branches crackle under a moccasin, as an Indian of his tribe ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... Tom Swift to miss, nor did he on this occasion. There was a slight report from the electric rifle—a report not unlike the crackle of the wireless—and the powerful projectile sped true to ...
— Tom Swift in the Land of Wonders - or, The Underground Search for the Idol of Gold • Victor Appleton
... close and knew that the cook had gone to make the cakes ready as she said. And as he looked down he saw that the boy was bending over the bundle of fagots, blowing the spark that he had brought in upon the punk into a flame. The dry fagots began to crackle and blaze. "Now is my time," said Hans to himself. Bracing his elbows against each side of the chimney, he straightened his legs so that he might fall clear His motions loosened little shower of soot that fell rattling upon the fagots that were ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle
... dreary, dreary funereal business of dinner, when we all talk vapid nonsense, with an ever-present consciousness of the parlourmaid. I am tired of the dull dinners, and of mamma's peevish complaints about Ann Woolper's ascendancy downstairs; and of Mr. Sheldon's perpetual newspapers, that crackle, crackle, crackle all the evening through; and such papers!—Money Market Monitor, Stockholder's Vade-Mecum, and all sorts of dreadful things of that kind, with not so much as an interesting advertisement in one of them. I used never to feel these things an annoyance, you know, dear, till ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... too long in the bath, or are not thoroughly cleansed from the bleach before they are re-sized, the certain seeds of decay are planted in the paper, and although for a time the leaves may look bright to the eye, and even crackle under the hand like the soundest paper, yet in the course of a few years the enemy will appear, the fibre will decay, and the existence of the books will terminate in a state ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... occupied by Bulgarian soldiery Greek troops had been introduced into neighboring houses, machine guns had been installed on rooftops, companies of infantry were picketed at street corners. Suddenly throughout the town all this hell was let loose. The streets gave back the echo a thousandfold. The crackle of musketry and din of machine guns was positively infernal. As evening came and darkened into night, one after another of the Bulgarian forts Chabrol surrendered, sometimes persuaded thereto by the deadly effect of a field-gun at thirty ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... his shoulder, and his had half-passed, roughly, about her, when the sharp crackle of a match startled him to himself. Winapie, alien to the scene, was lighting the slow wick of the slush lamp. She appeared to start out against a background of utter black, and the flame, flaring suddenly up, lighted her bronze beauty to ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... sliced in triangles, fresh, unsalted butter, and Scotch bitter marmalade. Let there be without fail a platter of hot bacon, curly, juicy, fried to the debatable point where softness is overlaid with the faintest crepitation of crackle, of crispyness. If hot Virginia corn pone is handy, so much the better. And coffee, two-thirds hot milk, also with brown sugar. It must be permissible to call for a second serving of the scrambled eggs; or, if this is beyond the budget, let there be a round ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... of outraged wrath that seemed to crackle in the young clansman's eyes stilled themselves and altered into something like tenderness as he moved with catlike softness of footfall to where the elder man sat, and let a hand fall ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... above the crackle of flames, could be heard the clanging of the alarm bell, set ringing by Koku, who had pulled the signal in the airship shed. From there it had gone to every building in the plant, being relayed by the telephone operator, whose duty it was ...
— Tom Swift and his Aerial Warship - or, The Naval Terror of the Seas • Victor Appleton
... head firmly against the wood, he drew it downward vigorously and long. There was a faint crackle, a little splutter, and—glory of glories!—a tiny flame ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... shone out brightly, tinting rosily the distant hills, and spreading a carpet of light under our feet upon the ice-covered surface of the bay. The clear, cold air we breathed was fairly exhilarating, sparkling like diamonds in the sun-beams, and causing the feathery snowflakes under our feet to crackle ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... fine thing to talk about the perfumed and restful bed of balsam boughs, and the crackle of the campfire at dusk, and the dip in the mirrored bosom of the pellucid lake at dawn—old Emerson Hough does all that to perfection; but these things assume a different aspect when it rains. There are three conditions in life when any latent selfishness in a man's being, ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... of utter mystification; his second was more corporeal: the consciousness of physical misery, of consuming fever, of aches that ran over his whole body, converging to a dreadful climax in his head, of a throat so immoderately partched it seemed to crackle, and a thirst so avid it was a passion. His eye fell upon a carafe of water on a chair at his bedside; he seized upon it with a shaking hand and drank half its contents before he set it down. The action attracted his ...
— His Own People • Booth Tarkington
... roses; but what about the dreams that come after, when he seems falling from great heights, or is prostrated by other fancied disasters, and the perspiration stands on the forehead, the night dew of everlasting darkness, and he is ground under the horrible hoof of nightmares shrieking with lips that crackle with all-consuming torture? "Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth, and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth; but know thou, that for all these things God will ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... will be very angry, but he'll have to put up with it. If you explained to him, Aunt Rose, he'd understand. And I'd really rather sit with you. I shall be able to look at people and if I crackle my programme you won't glare. Of course, I shall try not to. Will you explain to him? And I did promise to go to a ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... with ambulances, stragglers, and wounded men. I soon had to leave my horse, and then toiled upwards, finding everywhere streams of men winding about the almost precipitous sides of the mountain, and an intermittent crackle of musketry at the top. Only one solid battalion remained—the Dorsets. All the others were intermingled. Officers had collected little parties, companies and half-companies; here and there larger bodies had formed, but there was no possibility, in the darkness, of ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... flung from his bed to the floor, and he felt the house rocking as if an earthquake had passed under Paris. He got on his hands and knees in a dazed condition, with a roar as of thunder in his ears, mingled with the sharp crackle of breaking glass. He made his way to the window, wondering whether he was asleep or awake, and found the window shattered. The moonlight poured into the deserted street, and he noticed a cloud of dust and smoke rising from the front of the shop. He groped his way ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... noticed her presence; she was too rapt in the providential happenings described to her by the garrulous pen of her stepmother. The very crackle of the paper between her fingers gave her fresh courage as she read. And yet it was a very simple letter, coming as it did from the simple woman who she so often said had ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... ink, or a knife, or dagger. We like to picture this small room, fitted with solid, rude furniture, monastic in its austerity of appearance; full of students working eagerly in their quest for knowledge— making extracts in pencil, or with styles on their tablets, amid a silence broken only by the crackle of vellum leaves, and the rattle ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... stimulated, gladdened, and, as I lay on my bunk listening to the merry crackle of the wood fire, I was in a purring lethargy of content. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... soldiers in a row, he was aware of something that made him sharply pause and raise his head. He was, for the moment, alone in the room that was glowing and quivering now in the firelight. The faint stir and crackle of the fire, the rich flaming colour that rose and fell against the white ceiling might have been enough to make him wonder. But there was also the scent of a clump of blue hyacinths standing in shadow by the darkened ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... saved me for the moment: for while I stared at her, utterly at a loss, a crackle of twigs warned us, and we turned together as, by the pathway leading from the high-road, the bushes parted and the face of Marc'antonio ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... there was something left in the horse which responded; not strength, certainly that was gone long ago, but there was an indomitable spirit bred into it with its fine blood by gentle care for generations. The going was heavier among the trees, and yet the bay increased its pace. The crackle of the rifles grew more and more distinct. A fallen trunk blocked ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... the floor open beneath like a bridge. Passing under it, he set the lamp against the heap of kindling there, and the smell of scorching wood spread abroad, followed by smoke and the crackle and snap of wood ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... are you getting on?" said the manager to the young actress, Constance, as he helped himself to the crackle. "Have you everything ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... enthralling, with its two stoves, each as big as the dining room table at home, its shelves and barrels of supplies, its rows of pies and loaves of bread, and all the crackle and bustle and aroma of its preparations. Time passed on wings. At length Corrigan glanced up at the square wooden clock and uttered some command to his two subordinates. The latter immediately began to dish into large receptacles of tin the hot food from the ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... and all, America is a trying place of sojourn for the aforesaid canny Scot—the man who without being stingy (oh, dear, no!) has "all his generous impulses under perfect control." The sixpences do not "bang" in this country: they crepitate, they crackle, as though shot from a Maxim quick-firer. For instance, the lowest electric-trolley fare is twopence-halfpenny. It is true that for five cents you can, if you wish it, ride fifteen or twenty miles; but that advantage becomes inappreciable when you don't want to ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... With a crackle and a snap the grapevine swing sagged down on one side. Janet tried to hold Trouble in her arms, but he slipped from her lap, just as she slipped off the piece of carpet which Ted had folded for the seat of the swing. Then Janet toppled down as the vine broke, and she and ...
— The Curlytops on Star Island - or Camping out with Grandpa • Howard R. Garis
... odd volumes. The hall was spacious, and lighted by two large windows opening on the garden; the floor was of oak, and there was a great fireplace where the largest logs used in a country in which the wood costs nothing could find ample room to blaze and crackle. It took the young man several days to make the necessary changes, and during that time he enjoyed a respite from the petty annoyances worked by the steady hostility of Manette Sejournant and her son. To the great indignation ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... of striking significance that old, wise poets have on occasion written of hell so vividly that we hear the fire crackle and see the bodies of the lost sizzling; but not one of them, burning the candle of genius at both ends, has ever been able to line out a heaven that a man would live in if he were ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... attached to the engine and the rest piled up on one another or rolled down into the gulley, as fate willed. There was crash upon crash and thunder upon thunder as the heavy cars piled in a frightful heap. There was the groan of iron and steel being bent and broken, and the crash and creak and crackle ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... go his way, ruffling out his cravat with a crackle of starch, like a turkey when ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the same factory," continued he, selecting a second specimen from the cabinet. "This is a copy of the Chinese 'conventional dog,' made of blue 'crackle-ware.' You see, the glaze is cracked all ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... and make even the servants and page-boys wear a look of boredom and propriety. The best clothes which every one put on helped the general effect; it seemed that no lady could sit down without bending a clean starched petticoat, and no gentleman could breathe without a sudden crackle from a stiff shirt-front. As the hands of the clock neared eleven, on this particular Sunday, various people tended to draw together in the hall, clasping little red-leaved books in their hands. The clock marked a few minutes to the hour ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... state the long stems are not only pretty of themselves when placed in old vases or crackle ware, but they have a remarkably good effect. They, however, should not be crowded or swamped by more showy foliage or flowers—in fact, they should ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood
... to such majestic beauty in France; and Jack was environed by the mysteries of nature,—nature in the springtime of the year, when one can almost hear the grass grow, the buds expand, and the earth crackle as the tender herbage shoots forth. All these faint, vague noises bewildered little Jack, who began to sing a nursery rhyme with which his mother formerly rocked him ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... disapprove, so the two sisters went downstairs to make some slight changes in their dress. As they passed the parlor door Miranda thought she heard a crackle and looked in. The shades were up, there was a cheerful blaze in the open stove in the front parlor, and a fire laid on the hearth in the back room. Rebecca's own lamp, her second Christmas present from Mr. Aladdin, stood on a marble-topped table in the corner, the light that ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... listening with his ear to the ground, like an Indian, for the last rustle of fern and crackle of underbrush, and then emerged, stiff and cramped from his concealment. But he no longer thought of flight; curiosity and ambition burned in his small veins. He quickly climbed up the outcrop, picked up the fallen stone, and in spite of its weight lifted it ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... to help them. Only to send a message," was the reply, as the wireless spark began to crackle again. "We are telling the Government about her plight and a revenue cutter will be sent out to tow the schooner into some near port. She has drifted a good way off shore, but the weather is settled and there is nothing ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Mammy June's • Laura Lee Hope
... innocent gift from some of the young men who had asked in the past to be allowed to paint Joan and received a curt negative from Gray Michael. But the other discovery meant more. Pushing her hand about the drawer she found a pile of paper, felt the crackle of it, and pulled it eagerly to the light. Then, and before she learned the grandeur of the sum, she was seized with a sudden palpitation and sat down on Joan's bed. Her mouth grew full as a hungry man's before a feast, her ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... that little spark, the Megarian decree,[312] set the city aflame, and blew up the conflagration with a hurricane of war, so that the smoke drew tears from all Greeks both here and over there. At the very outset of this fire our vines were a-crackle, our casks knocked together;[313] it was beyond the power of any man to stop the ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... her little daughter so that she must go alone. She rides with her mother to the railroad and sees her little one walking directly upon the tracks, so that she cannot avoid being run over. She hears the bones crackle. (From this she experiences a feeling of discomfort but no real horror.) She then looks out through the car window to see whether the parts cannot be seen behind. She then reproaches her mother for allowing the little ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... said, as I listened to the noise he made rolling himself in his blanket, and making the fir-boughs crackle as he turned about. "I was horribly scared at first, but I don't ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... beside it, its laughter so outrivaled every other sound that she had difficulty in discerning the Howes' approaching tread, and it was not until the distinct crackle of underbrush reached her ear that she became aware they were approaching. She ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... Aunt Olivia with her. Rebecca Mary could hear the crackle of their starched skirts; Aunt Olivia's crackled loudest. Rebecca Mary had always had a queer feeling that Aunt Olivia herself was starched. There had never been a time when she could not remember her carrying her ...
— Rebecca Mary • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... of the wood, the rustle of the leaves under his wheels changed from the soft murmurs in the moist hollows to the crisp crackle in the open places. In the west Venus hung silver white over the new moon, and below the star and the crescent a single pine tree stood as clearly defined as if it were pasted on a grey background ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... board with cups and spoons is crowned, The berries crackle, and the mill turns round; On shining altars of Japan they raise The silver lamp; the fiery spirits blaze; From silver spouts the grateful liquors glide, While China's earth receives the smoking tide: At once they gratify their scent ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... be long now. When the boughs of the cherry trees are an inch deep with ice, and the logs crackle in the fire-place—then he will come. Let us go to sleep, and dream ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the noise outside. The crackle of musketry was more noticeable, and every now and then there seemed to be heavy strokes as if directed against the palace, sounding as if the people were attempting to force the iron gate of the ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... fire burst out of the woods at three different points. All worked with a will to stop it by cutting traces. But the wind was wild; burning masses from the tree-tops were hurled far among the canes, and all was lost. The canes burnt like shavings, exploding with a perpetual crackle at each joint. In a few hours the whole estate—works, coolie barracks, negro huts—was black ash; and the house only, by extreme exertion, saved. But the ground had scarcely cooled when replanting and rebuilding commenced; and now the canes were from ten to twelve feet ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... though of a stiller sort than that with which the world has been hitherto acquainted. Our friend from the backwoods thought there was no fire in the coal-furnace, because he could not hear it roar and crackle, and was afterwards amazed at its steady intensity of heat. Our misguided Southern brethren had the same opinion of Northern character, and burned their hands most deplorably when they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... tapped several times with his stick on the brick floor of the King's Head kitchen, and had not heard a sound in answer. The clock ticked to and fro, and the tabby cat purred softly as she sat before the fire, and the wood now and then gave a little crackle as it burned gently away, and those were all the signs of life to be ...
— The King's Daughters • Emily Sarah Holt
... forest. The child's lightest cry generally broke the spell of a nightmare; but the din of terrified searchers rushing through the woods and of echoes rolling eerily back from the white hills convinced him this was no dream-land. Then, the distinct crackle of trampled brushwood and the scratch of spines across his face called him back to ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... slender saplings for these same buds. The moose returned from the blizzardy tops of the great ridges, where for good reasons they had passed the winter, followed by the wolves who fed upon their weak and sick. Everywhere were the rushing torrents of melting snow, the crackle of crumbling ice, the dying frost-cries of rock and earth and tree; and each night the pale glow of the aurora borealis crept farther and farther toward the ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... in quest of camel-thorn, bread, eggs, and pomegranates, thinking thus to obtain the luxury of a bit of fire and something to eat in comparative seclusion. This vain hope proves that I have not even yet become thoroughly acquainted with the Persians. No sooner does my camel-thorn blaze begin to crackle and the smoke to betray the whereabouts of a fire, than shivering, blue-nosed villagers begin to put in their appearance, their backs humped up and their bare ankles and slip-shod feet adding not a little ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... red seed of the red vervain weed, burn, crackle in the fire, burn, crackle for my need! Laurel leaf, O fruited branch of bay, burn, burn away thought, memory ...
— Hymen • Hilda Doolittle
... rock to rock echoed guttural voices, but, foot by foot, unnoted by the keen eyes, the two crept steadily on through the midnight of that sheltering ravine, dismounted, hands clasping the nostrils of their ponies, feeling through the darkness for each step, halting breathless at every crackle of a twig, every crunch of snow under foot. Again and again they paused, silent, motionless, as some apparition of savagery outlined itself between them and the sky, yet slowly, steadily, every instinct of the plains exercised, ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... Wendovers had shown Ida everything. They had opened cabinets, peered into secret drawers, sniffed at the stale pot-pourri in old crackle vases; they had dragged their willing victim through all the long slippery passages, by all the mysterious stairs and by-ways; they had obliged her to look at the interior of ghostly closets, where the ladies of old had stored their house linen or hung their mantuas and farthingales; they ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... came to one where the ledge was higher and wider. I put down the camera, wedged it level with scraps of stone, and then sat down myself to recharge the flashlight machine. But the moment my weight got on that ledge, there was a sharp crackle, and down I went ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... were by that time) and went forward three days' march. Then we camped again, much closer to the Germans this time, in fact, almost within shouting distance; and they again set up their machine, causing sparks to crackle from the wires of a telescopic tower they raised, to the very great concern of the Afghans who were in and out of both camps all day long. One message that an Afghan told me the Germans had received, ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... answered. "Thunder is caused by the electric discharge. You've heard Bob's big wireless outfit crackle, when he sends out a ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... which had to last for two more days, was very welcome. The damp had not reached the biscuits, and for several minutes it could be heard cracking under the solid teeth of Dick Sand and his companions. Between Hercules's jaws it was like grain under the miller's grindstone. It did not crackle, ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust.—The way of Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake and spider, the snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda,—these are in the system, and our habits are like theirs. You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity,—expensive races,—race ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... was frank and elemental. It had the crisp crackle that goes with free, unfettered youth. In a parlor some of it would have been offensive, but under the stars of the open desert it was as natural as the life itself. They spoke of the spring rains, of the Crawford-Steelman ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... the door, and the camp stopped to listen. Above the swaying and moaning of the pines, the swift rush of the river, and the crackling of the fire rose a sharp, querulous cry,—a cry unlike anything heard before in the camp. The pines stopped moaning, the river ceased to rush, and the fire to crackle. It seemed as if Nature ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... feet, and the thick, dusk-green branches of the fir and pine! The gloomy background seemed to invite him further into the heart of its shade and silence. No bird whistled through the glaucous green of this silent, majestic wood; nor was there any treacherous bramble to crackle beneath his feet. For upon this chill, grey carpet no flood of sunshine ever came to coax tiny sprays out of the ground; and the layers of fine needles, or tufts of dank, sunless moss were soft ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... luxury when, at the close of a toilsome day, a few pieces of bark could be so piled as to protect from wind and rain, and a roaring fire could blaze and crackle before the little camp. Then the appetite which hunger gives would enable him to feast upon the tender cuts of venison broiled upon the coals, with more satisfaction than the gourmand takes in the choicest viands of the restaurant. Having feasted ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... right and jolted over what seemed to be a shallow ditch. The road that followed was of the roughest character. If it was a road at all it was a wood-track; Evan heard the twigs crackle under the tires. They lurched and bumped alarmingly. Once they had to stop to allow the chauffeur to drag some obstruction out of the way. Evidently they had not had the car that way before, for ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... large windows opening on the garden; the floor was of oak, and there was a great fireplace where the largest logs used in a country in which the wood costs nothing could find ample room to blaze and crackle. It took the young man several days to make the necessary changes, and during that time he enjoyed a respite from the petty annoyances worked by the steady hostility of Manette Sejournant and her son. To the great indignation of the inhabitants of the chateau, he packed off the massive billiard-table, ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... had picked up the billet looked from one to the other of the faces, then he turned and gazed behind him into the darkness. The floor of the clearing was dotted with the embers of dying fires, but now and again he would hear the crackle of a branch and see a little flame spirt up and shine upon the barrels of rifles and the black bodies of the sleeping troops. Round the edge of the clearing the trees rose massed and dark like a cliff's face. ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... the house fell in on the three young men above, and immediately buried them for ever in its destructive flames. The assailing crowds set up a terrific shout of triumph. The floor above now began to crackle, and so dense was the smoke below, that the old man and the woman were in a state little short of suffocation. At last the Proctor became desperate, and opening one of the ground windows, and taking his poor wife by the hand, he attempted to throw himself and her out ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... increasing about the streets, for now the Bank Holiday people began to wander back from places that were not distant, and to them it had all to be explained anew. Free movement was possible everywhere in the City, but the constant crackle of rifles restricted somewhat that freedom. Up to one o'clock at night belated travellers were straggling into the City, and curious people were wandering from group to group still ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... the end further from the main building, was a small hobbed grate. By this the woman with the flaxen hair had set her coals, and was now lighting a fire, of which the paper was flaming high and the wood began already to crackle. ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... roused, listening. The crackle of the flames was all I heard; the cannon were silent. A few moments later a clock in the hallway struck nine times. At the same instant a deadened cannon-shot echoed the clamor of the clock. It was the last shot of the battle. ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... that prospect she had through Susan's eyes more than one glimpse of the way in which Revolutions are prepared. To listen to Susan was to gather that the spark applied to the inflammables and already causing them to crackle would prove to have been the circumstance of one's being called a horrid low thief for refusing to part with one's own. The redeeming point of this tension was, on the fifth day, that it actually appeared to have had to do with a breathless perception in our heroine's ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... are in a sweat, it will be best not to move them for fear of burning, slacken the fire, when the hops are to be turned, and increase it afterwards. Hops are sufficiently dried, when their inner stalks break short, and their leaves become crisp, and fall off easily. They will crackle a little when their seed is bursting, and then they should be removed from the kiln. Hops that are dried in the sun lose their rich flavour, and, if under cover, they are apt to ferment and change with the weather, ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger
... reeds on the end of a spear was thrust into the flickering glow, and at once took fire and burned with the utmost fury. Fresh bundles were pushed forward beside it, and these, too, flared up with a shrill crackle of snapping canes and the roar of a fire fanned by a strong draught. Inch by inch the flames moved forward, themselves a terrible enemy, and behind them crept up and up a ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... dew sent them back to the camp. Piute and Peon were skinning coyotes by the blaze of the fire. The night wind had not yet risen; the sheep were quiet; there was no sound save the crackle of burning cedar sticks. Jack began to talk; he had to talk, so, addressing Piute and the dumb peon, he struck at random into speech, and words flowed with a rush. Piute approved, for he said "damn" whenever his intelligence grasped a meaning, and the peon twisted ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... stood beside the unconscious man. Then he looked cautiously around. The figure of his companion was lost in the shadow of the rocks above; only a slight crackle of brush betrayed his whereabouts. Suddenly Pedro flung his serape over the sleeper's head, and then threw his powerful frame and tremendous weight full upon Concho's upturned face, while his strong arms clasped the blanket-pinioned ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... now dark and dismal; its occupants were hurried up a stairway and into a room filled with law-books, where a sleepy Justice of the Peace was nodding in a cloud of cigar smoke. There followed a noisy shuffling of chairs, some mumbled questions and answers, the crackle of papers, a deal of unintelligible rigamarole, then a man's heavy seal-ring was slipped upon Lorelei's finger, and she knew herself to be Mrs. Robert Wharton. It was all confused, unimpressive, unreal. She was never able fully to recall the picture of ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... unreason became formidable. There she sat with her striking forehead and her quite unimportant nose, in the large austere drawing-room of the Spatts, which was so pervaded by artistic chintz that the slightest movement in it produced a crackle—and wondered why she was so much queerer than other girls ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... kneeling on the floor before the fire, arranging shining soldiers in a row, he was aware of something that made him sharply pause and raise his head. He was, for the moment, alone in the room that was glowing and quivering now in the firelight. The faint stir and crackle of the fire, the rich flaming colour that rose and fell against the white ceiling might have been enough to make him wonder. But there was also the scent of a clump of blue hyacinths standing in shadow by the darkened window, and this scent caught him, even as the fountain ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... tree stood on a slope nearly a mile away. The ground was hard, and the grass seemed to crackle under the galloping hoofs. The horse she rode carried her with superb ease. He was the finest animal she had ever ridden, and from the first she believed ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... speeches will not serve; hard grape-shot is questionable; but hovering between the two is unquestionable. Ever wilder swells the tide of men; their infinite hum waxing ever louder, into imprecations, perhaps into crackle of stray musketry,—which latter, on walls nine feet thick, cannot do execution. The Outer Drawbridge has been lowered for Thuriot; new deputation of citizens (it is the third, and noisiest of all) penetrates ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... him from different points of the island. These sorrowful cries, almost uninterrupted, afterwards approach, and are repeated with increasing strength. He awakes, he listens; the bushes around him crackle and rustle; even the earth emits a dull sound, as beneath the bounding of a goat; the cries are renewed and become more and more distinct, like the sobs of a child. Selkirk puts his hand to his forehead. These plaints, these ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine
... ox with a pointed stick, the two beasts settled their massive shoulders to the collar, and with a soft greasy swish and a crackle of half-burnt stubble the moldboard rolled aside the loam. I too felt that this was a great occasion. At last I was working my own land; with the plowshare I was opening the gate of an unknown future; and my fingers tingled as I jerked the lines. Then while the coulter sheared its guiding line, ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... forms while his father ran off the edition. This was better fun than typesetting. Before you was a long roller on two other long rollers, and at your right hand was a small roller with which you picked up ink from a stone, rolling it across and across with a spirited crackle; then you ran the small roller the length of the long roller; then you turned a crank that revolved the two lower rollers, thus distributing the ink evenly over the upper one. After that you ran the upper roller out over the two forms of ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... at this task Riggs was up in the scuttle, and from time to time we could hear the crackle of flames, and then the hissing of the water as he extinguished the burning planks. The thick smoke came down the companion and burned our eyes and nostrils as it escaped ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... all one could tell, nothing was now frozen; there was not so much as an icicle anywhere visible about her. The decks were dry, and on my kicking a coil of rope that was near my feet the stuff did not crackle, as one could have expected, as though frosted to ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... other day I came to a place where the only sounds that could be heard were the intermittent crackle of rifle-fire mingling with the shrill tones of a woman haggling over the price of bread with an old chap who had driven out with his pony and cart from an adjacent town to sell his goods. The roof of the woman's house had mostly vanished and ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... little grand sometimes, and in hopes of having a fine Yule log, both brothers strove with all their might till, between pulling and pushing, the great old root was safe on the hearth, and soon began to crackle and blaze with the red embers. In high glee, the cobblers sat down to their beer and bacon. The door was shut, for there was nothing but cold moonlight and snow outside. But the hut, strewn with fir branches, and decked ...
— Granny's Wonderful Chair • Frances Browne
... for the big bucket of water, which they always kept in a certain spot. She flung the water on the flames, but water will not quench the flames made from oil. The rail began to crackle, the sparks to fly. The "Merry Maid" was afire, with only one, feeble ...
— Madge Morton, Captain of the Merry Maid • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... caused fires to be lighted here and there where the gaps were widest, so that we forged onwards not only to the accompaniment of the shrill cries of the mahouts and the noise of plunging and overwhelming elephants, but to the fierce roar and crackle ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... on the sofa watching Smith, who stood before me. He had not changed countenance and seemed neither troubled nor surprised; but two drops of sweat trickled down his forehead, and I heard an ivory counter crackle between his fingers, the pieces falling to the floor. He held out both ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... was heard to reply, in his deep tones—there was a crackle of dead brush, a sound as of a man tripping and falling heavily, then oaths in a voice that made the ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... it so for the same reason that Jeekie answered questions, for the sake of cheerfulness. At least it gave light in the darkness, leaping up in red tongues of flame twenty or thirty feet high, and its roar and crackle were welcome in ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... to a point on the lake nearest the fawns' hiding-place, and wait in my canoe for the mother to come out and show me where she had left her little ones. As they grew, and the drain upon her increased from their feeding, she seemed always half starved. Waiting in my canoe I would hear the crackle of brush, as she trotted straight down to the lake almost heedlessly, and see her plunge through the fringe of bushes that bordered the water. With scarcely a look or a sniff to be sure the coast was clear, she ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... time when you feel the strain most is in the winter. Then you sit at night, shivering, as a rule, beside the stove in an almost empty log-walled room, reading a book you have probably read three or four times before. Outside, the frost is Arctic; you can hear the roofing shingles crackle now and then; and you wake up when the fire burns low. There's no life, no company, rarely a new face, and if you go to a dance or supper somewhere, perhaps once a month, you ride back on a bob-sled frozen almost stiff beneath ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... moments could hardly hold my pen, so extreme was my nervousness; but when I once fairly began, my ideas crowded upon me almost faster than I could write them. And so we all sat, nothing heard but the scratching of the pens and the occasional crackle of the examiner's "Times" as he quietly looked over the news of ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... her lamp, took up the furnace, and, though it was still hot from recent use, placed one hand over the draft, that the fire might not ignite too rapidly, and crept out of the cellar. Any person awake in the house, might have traced the dark progress of this woman by a faint crackle, and the sparks that shot now and then up through the black mass of coal, which was kindling so fast, that the hand which she still kept upon the draft was ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... populace had sought their homes, and a profound quiet wrapped the streets, save where, from the fires committed in the late tumult, was yet heard the crash of roofs or the crackle of the light and fragrant timber employed in those pavilions of the summer. The manner in which the mansions of Granada were built, each separated from the other by extensive gardens, fortunately prevented ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book V. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... parade runs swift the psychic cackle Like thorns beneath a boiling pot that crackle. And the angels say to Yahveh looking down From the alabaster railing, on the town, O, cackle, cackle, cackle, crack and crack We wish we had our ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... beside a more definite sound—the crackle of dry leaves and the snapping of twigs beneath a heavier footfall than that of any marauding Tom, and through a clearing in the woods slouched the figure of a man, gun on shoulder, the secret of his bulging side-pockets betrayed by ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... aided me greatly, nor were there many trees along the way to drop twigs in the path to crackle under foot; yet I found the ground uneven and deceptive, rifted with small gullies, and more or less bestrewn with stones, against which I stumbled in the darkness. I was too thoroughly trained in the stern and careful school of ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... torch. But in vain she tried to light the wick, which always spluttered and went out again. So seeing her disappointment Young Gerard hung the lantern up, saying, "Firelight is prettier." And he set her by the fire and filled her lap with cones and dry leaves and dead bracken to burn and make crackle and turn into fiery ferns. And she ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... is; but don't bother trying to deny it, Hugh. The only bad thing about it in my mind is that we'll miss those jolly fires. It's always been so fine to skate up and stand before one, to get warm, and hear the flames crackle, while the girl you're skating with sits on a log, or something like that, to warm ...
— The Chums of Scranton High at Ice Hockey • Donald Ferguson
... to crackle from the Prussian trenches, and to his amazement, after firing a few rounds in reply, the French infantrymen ran for the cover of the brush. He saw the reason for this a moment later when a big troop of German cavalry topped the rise of ground and swept on toward the French, ...
— The Children of France • Ruth Royce
... steps, watching and listening. In a minute or two I heard the crackle of withered sticks trod upon, and, looking in the direction, I saw a figure approaching among the trees, wrapped in ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... were stationed on a little bushy hillock just outside a village. But occasionally, it was difficult to say from which direction, came the sharp crackle of rifle-fire, and beyond, the far-off thud of cannon. The ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... the shadows of the valley at the mouth of Kingdom Come. Before he was done, the old mother knocked the ashes from her clay pipe and quietly went into the kitchen, and Jack, for all his good manners, could not restrain a whine of eagerness when he heard the crackle of bacon in a frying-pan and the delicious smell of it struck his quivering nostrils. After dark, old Joel, the father of the house, came in—a giant in size and a mighty hunter—and he slapped his big thighs and roared until the rafters seemed to shake when Tall Tom told him about ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... thousand dollars. Blake had never seen so much money in a single lump in his life before; and for many months of privation and discomfort he had not known the "feel" of a twenty-dollar note, much less of a hundred-dollar one. He heard them crackle under the man's fingers, and it was like crisp laughter in his ears. The bills were evidently ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... It is the world of "big game." Just now a heavy-headed elk, with much-branched horns fully three feet long, stood and looked at me, and then quietly trotted away. He was so near that I heard the grass, crisp with hoar frost, crackle under his feet. Bears stripped the cherry bushes within a few yards of us last night. Now two lovely blue birds, with crests on their heads, are picking about within a stone's-throw. This is "The Great ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... me the floating vessel came, so close to the ground that I could hear the silk crackle and the ropes creak, till, directly, a man leaned over ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... air, and although it was three o'clock in the afternoon the light was fading, when Charnock opened the door of the caboose. A bitter wind rushed past him and eddied about the car, making the stove crackle. The iron was red-hot in places and a fierce twinkle shone out beneath the rattling door. Half-seen men lay in the bunks along the shadowy wall, tools jingled upon the throbbing boards, but the motion was gentler than usual and ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... had shot up through the floor in a crackle of blue flame, I don't think it could have had a more striking effect on my late partner. With his mouth open and his face the colour of freshly mixed putty, he stood perfectly still in the centre of the room, gazing at me like a man in a trance. For a second—a whole ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... Knutsford ladies (for "Cranford" was "Knutsford"), the "Boz"—loving Captain Brown and Mr. Holbrook, Peter and his father, and even Martha the maid, with their mise en scene of card-tables and crackle-china, and pattens and reticules, are part of the memories of our childhood. The same may be said of Our Village, except that the breath of Nature blows more freely through it than through the quiet Cheshire ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... gleeman is called Floyting Will. He comes from the north country, but for many years he hath gone the round of the forest from Southampton to Christchurch. He drinks much and pays little but it would make your ribs crackle to hear him sing the 'Jest of Hendy Tobias.' Mayhap he will sing it when the ale ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... floors, a sense of height, absolute silence, a dry, aromatic smell—this was Kirk's impression as he crossed the threshold, walking carefully and softly, that he might not break the spellbound stillness of the house. Then came the familiar crackle of an open fire, and Kirk was piloted into the delicious cozy depths of a big chair beside the hearth. Creakings, as of another chair being pulled up, then a contented sigh, indicated that his host had sat down ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... landmarks and isolates the little camp in a sea of night, with the mutual wish for nearer companionship, we gather around the camp-fire, the one light in all the great darkness. We are grateful for its warmth, as the evenings are chill, and its cheery blaze and crackle bring a feeling of hominess and comfort welcome to every one. If there are men in the party they light their pipes and then begin the stories of past experiences on the trail, which are of the keenest interest to all campers. These stories, told while ...
— On the Trail - An Outdoor Book for Girls • Lina Beard and Adelia Belle Beard
... visit indications of a runaway match. But they don't want to be married—'Only,' says the gentleman, 'to walk round the church.' And as he slips a genteel compliment into the palm of Mrs Miff, her vinegary face relaxes, and her mortified bonnet and her spare dry figure dip and crackle. ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... malkuragxeco. Cowherd bovgardisto. Cow shed bovinejo. Cowl kapucxo. Cowslip verprimolo. Coxcomb dando. Coy rezerva. Coyness rezerveco. Cozen trompi. Crab kankro. Crack (split) fendi. Crack (noise) kraki. Crackle kraketi. Cradle lulilo. Craft ruzo. Craft (vessel) sxipeto. Crafty, to be ruzi. Crafty ruza. Cram (of food) supersatigi. Cram plenegigi. Cramp (metal) krampo. Crane (bird) gruo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... join them in a week or two,—not yet, because I had wished to send home the screens painted on white velvet, and they wanted yet a sennight's work, and I knew Mrs. Strathsay would be proud of them before the crackle of the autumn fires. The maids ran hither and yon, and the bells pealed, and the knocker clashed, and the coaches rolled away over the stone pave of the court-yard, and there was embracing and jesting and crying, when suddenly all the pleasant ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... go," said the timekeeper. A sigh of indrawn breaths ran round the circle, and then tense silence. Outside the trench they were in the roar of the guns boomed unceasingly, the shells whooped and screwed overhead, and from oat in front came the crackle and roar of rifle-fire; and yet, despite the noise, the trench appeared still and silent. Macalister noted that, as he had noted it over there in the ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... and we do not hear many. We do not everywhere find great flocks of birds as we see swarms of insects. And we do not find the forest resounding with the songs of birds as it does with the hum and crackle of insects. In this ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... Weitzel's brigade attacked, and after a severe fight, drove the Rebels out of the woods. While this was going on our right, we could hear the yells, hurrahs and the crackle of musketry, roar of artillery and many other concomitants of the fight, but could see but little. Consequently we stood and fidgeted round not knowing when ...
— The Twenty-fifth Regiment Connecticut Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion • George P. Bissell
... was coming out, Aunt Olivia with her. Rebecca Mary could hear the crackle of their starched skirts; Aunt Olivia's crackled loudest. Rebecca Mary had always had a queer feeling that Aunt Olivia herself was starched. There had never been a time when she could not remember her carrying her head very stiffly ...
— Rebecca Mary • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... be very angry, but he'll have to put up with it. If you explained to him, Aunt Rose, he'd understand. And I'd really rather sit with you. I shall be able to look at people and if I crackle my programme you won't glare. Of course, I shall try not to. Will you explain to him? And I did promise to go to a concert ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... inarticulate voice. A groping hand came up, clutching for deliverance. There came the slip and crackle of broken wood beneath which some living object ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... was dawning! We children poked one another, and fairly giggled with unreproved delight as we listened to the crackle of the slowly unfolding document. That great sheet of paper impressed us as something supernatural, by reason of its mighty size and by the broad seal of the State affixed thereto; and when the minister read therefrom, "By his Excellency, the Governor of the ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... other loaded beasts, and he could not get past in time, for the half-seen trooper was closing with him fast, and another still rode between him and the edge of the bluff, cutting off his road to the prairie. It was evident he could not go on, while the crackle of twigs, roar of hoofs, and jingle of steel behind him, made it plain that to turn was to ride back upon the carbines of men who would be quite willing to use them. There alone remained the river. It ran fast below ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... the blanket when you're in bed to-night, Mrs. Pittis. 'Well, your highness,' said I, 'how about the pain?' 'Pah!' says the king, 'where's your philosophy? Did you never see a fly jump into a lamp-flame?' 'Yes, sure,' I answered. 'And what happened then? A moment's crackle, and an end of it. You've no time to feel pain.' 'Well, then,' said I, 'if your majesty will make a hole for me as near the middle as is convenient to yourself, I will jump into the bed straightway.' ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... band had stopped, and there was the distant hum of voices and the crackle of plates. Waiters were coming and going from the dining-room, and the butler stood at the door giving instructions. At one moment there was a glimpse within of ladies in gorgeous dresses, and a table laden with silver and bright with fairy-lamps. When the door opened the voices grew ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... great green earth to roam, Where sights of awe the soul inspire; But oh, it's best, the coming home, The crackle of one's own hearth-fire! You've hob-nobbed with the solemn Past; You've seen the pageantry of kings; Yet oh, how sweet to gain at last The peace and ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... who had taken him to Birmingham, had already got rid of him, and we had a horrible consciousness of his wandering roofless, in dishonour, about the smoky Midlands, almost as the injured Lear wandered on the storm-lashed heath. His room, upstairs, had been lately done up (I could hear the crackle of the new chintz) and the difference only made his smirches and bruises, his splendid tainted genius, the more tragic. If he wasn't barefoot in the mire he was sure to be unconventionally shod. These were the things Adelaide and I, who were old enough friends to stare at each other in silence, ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... while Briggs and his fellows were to sleep on their arms within the post. It now lacked but a few minutes of sunset. No further demonstration had occurred. Not an Indian had been seen within a radius of six miles, when, all on a sudden, there came a shot—then two, almost together, then a quick crackle and sputter of small-arms afar down the stream. "By Jove!" cried Bonner, from a perch by the lookout at the office. "They've ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... nothing so lovable as a coin. He is content sometimes with the dead crackle of notes; but far more often with the mere repetition of noughts in a ledger, all as like each other as eggs to eggs. And as for comfort, the old miser could be comfortable, as many tramps and savages are, when he was once used to being ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... clearly. As he crept tremblingly up the stairs everything assumed gigantic and menacing shapes—the clock, the pot-pourri bowls, the window-curtains, and the brass rods on the stairs. In the room there was that grey half-light that seemed so terrible, and the spurt and crackle of the fire seemed to fill the place with sounds. He scarcely saw his grandfather. In the centre of the bed, something was lying; the eyes gleamed for a moment in the light of the fire, the lips seemed to move. But he did not realise that those things were his grandfather whom he had ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... captors, but his mouth was too dry for speech. He could only glare dumbly into their evil faces, and they glared back at him in fiendish triumph. Nearer to the red glow they came, nearer yet. He could hear the crackle of the licking flames. They ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... remark no sort of answer was vouchsafed. Nancy sat with her feet on the fender, and Tarrant kept up a great blaze with chips, which sputtered out their moisture before they began to crackle. He and she both seemed intent on this process ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... lofty woods are thrown On diff'rent sides, and both by winds are blown; The laurels crackle in the sputt'ring fire; The frighted sylvans from their shades retire: Or as two neighb'ring torrents fall from high; Rapid they run; the foamy waters fry; They roll to sea with unresisted force, And down the rocks precipitate their course: Not with less ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... the winter snow-drifts some sixty years ago, because he dared to open the Country of the Gods to the contemptible foreigners; and in the cry of the tofu-seller echoes the voice of old Japan, a long-drawn wail, drowned at last by the grinding of the tram wheels and the lash and crackle of the connecting-rods against the ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... a fine thing to talk about the perfumed and restful bed of balsam boughs, and the crackle of the campfire at dusk, and the dip in the mirrored bosom of the pellucid lake at dawn—old Emerson Hough does all that to perfection; but these things assume a different aspect when it rains. There are three conditions in life when any latent selfishness in a man's being, however far down ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... Lowestoft and porcelain from China. Then, again, in the society of a real enthusiast one is apt to be bored by a recapitulation of his or her full accumulations of knowledge. You are shown a bit of "crackle." You look at it admiringly and express your pleasure. Is that enough? Can the subject be dismissed so easily? Far from it. "This is real crackle," the collector insists, with more than a suspicion that you under-value the worth of his specimen; and then and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... daylight. We could see the flicker of rifle-fire, and the crackle sounded first on one part of the bay, and then another. Among the dark rocks and bushes it looked as if people ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... the mortar-boards, and the steady replenishing by the hod-men; Spar-makers in the spar-yard, the swarming row of well-grown apprentices, The swing of their axes on the square-hew'd log shaping it toward the shape of a mast, The brisk short crackle of the steel driven slantingly into the pine, The butter-color'd chips flying off in great flakes and slivers, The limber motion of brawny young arms and hips in easy costumes, The constructor of wharves, bridges, piers, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... bugle to rouse one; it blows first. Seeing the embers of our great fire still glowing in the dusk, I went there to warm myself, and stood there listening to the sounds from the still sleepy camp. Drowsy voices, a footfall here and there, the crackle of fire and the tinkle of pots at the cook tents. Even when reveille had blown there was still for several moments this sleep-drugged quiet, in ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... found that it had burned through, and by three or four strokes with the tongs, he broke it up into large fragments of coal, of a dark-reddish color. The air being thus admitted, they soon began to brighten and crackle, until, in a few minutes, there was before him a large heap of glowing and burning coals. He put a log on behind, then placed the andirons up to the log, and a great forestick upon the andirons. He placed the forestick so far out as ...
— Jonas on a Farm in Winter • Jacob Abbott
... can be," I replied. "The wind has dropped—and even the fire doesn't crackle. Perfect stillness ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... tea-table, and take notes from the Philosophical Journal at a soiree; we invite our friends that we may thrust a book into their hands, and presuppose an exclusive desire in the "ladies" to discuss their own matters, "that we may crackle the Times" at our ease. In fact, the evident tendency of things to contract personal communication within the narrowest limits makes us tremble lest some further development of the electric telegraph should reduce us to a society of mutes, or ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... made quite another creature of his cousin. The wires were down and no one from any quarter gave a response to her frantic ringing. Through the receiver she could hear only the sweep of the rain and the harsh crackle of the wind. Sometimes praying, sometimes fainting, and sometimes despairing, she stood clinging to the instrument, ringing and pounding upon it like one frenzied. Lance looked at her in amazement. "Why, God a'mighty, ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... bellows, he knelt down and blew the reluctant embers into a faint glow; when a hesitant flicker of flame caught the half-burned logs he got on his feet and stood, his fingers on the mantelpiece, his forehead on the back of his hand, watching the fire catch and crackle into cheerful warmth. He stood there for a long time. Suddenly his cheek grew rigid: some man, some beast, had—my God! wronged Materna! It was the first really clear thought; instantly some other thought must have sprung up to meet it, ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... feral light of the super-mongoose's eyes seemed to lance at Sowles, like an infra-red flash. Then there was a puff where the would-be messiah had stood—a crackle, and a smell of scorched air; ...
— Telempathy • Vance Simonds
... tree on shore!" quoth little Love Winslow, clapping her hands. "Dost hear, mother? I've been counting the strokes—fifteen— and then crackle! crackle! ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... wrought to an equality, and made subject to exact law,—as in this universe all irregularities are sure to be in the end. Thus, the thunder, which near at hand is a wild crash, or nearer yet a crazy crackle, is by distance deepened and refined into that marvellous bass which we all know. And doubtless the jars, the discords, and moral contradictions of time, however harsh and crazy at the outset, flow into exact undulation along the ether of eternity, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... throats, the men fighting each other like animals; trees were cut down by the bullets which tore through them from every direction; bursting shells set fire to the woods, suffocating the wounded or burning them to death; wild charges were made, ending in wilder stampedes or bloody repulses; the crackle of flames rose high above the pandemonium of battle and dense smoke-clouds drifted chokingly above this hideous carnival of death. Thus for two days the armies staggered backward and forward with no result save a horrible loss of life. Once the Union forces almost succeeded in gaining ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill
... personal superintendence of the slaughter of a spring-lamb in green-pea time, when the scent is in the julep and the bloom is on the mint; or possibly, now and then, the removal from the pasture to the pantry of a bit of lowing roast-beef, when I feel an inner craving for the crackle ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... papa strike a light and then the wood began to crackle. Then, by jinks! it began to get hot and smoky ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... "the First Aid book says that if a lung is punctured the air gets into the tissues, and they crackle on pressure." ...
— More Tish • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... I, "I saw a figure as plainly as I see that fire, and I heard the steps as clearly as I hear the crackle of the fagots. Besides, we ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... was all gone—the face, the night, the Moon, the magic—and she was back in the grubby, stale little hole, facing an angry, stale little man. It was then that the eternal thud of the air-conditioning fans and the crackle of the electrostatic precipitators that sieved out the dust reached her consciousness again like the bite of a ...
— The Moon is Green • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... who saw all, and knew all, who had sounded all the depths of secret, helpless, and jealous love, down in the furnace of human suffering, where the heart seems to crackle like flesh over hot coals, stood in the back of the box looking at them with eyes ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... his slow advance, but now he was glad the bushes were soaked with water, as they did not crackle or snap with the passage of his body, and the luminous glow in front of him broadened and deepened steadily. Near the bottom of a deep valley he stopped and from his covert saw where great fires had driven the fog away. Around the fires were many warriors, some ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... page-boys wear a look of boredom and propriety. The best clothes which every one put on helped the general effect; it seemed that no lady could sit down without bending a clean starched petticoat, and no gentleman could breathe without a sudden crackle from a stiff shirt-front. As the hands of the clock neared eleven, on this particular Sunday, various people tended to draw together in the hall, clasping little red-leaved books in their hands. The clock ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... Wessex hunt. His conversation seemed exactly the right accompaniment to the meal; his stories brought glimpses of wet hedgerows, stiff ploughlands, leafy spinneys and muddy brooks in among the rich old Worcester and Georgian silver of the dinner service, the glow and crackle of the wood fire, the pleasant succession of well-cooked dishes and mellow wines. The world narrowed itself down again to a warm, drowsy- scented dining-room, with a productive hinterland of kitchen and cellar beyond it, and beyond ...
— When William Came • Saki
... curiosity was not satisfied immediately by Frank. Instead his face became set in concentration once more. After some moments of silence, broken only by the slight noise of the receiver, he pressed his hand on the sending apparatus and the Southern Cross's wireless began to crackle and spit and emit a ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... noise? After a time it came again—the dry swish of dead leaves and the sharp crackle of dead ...
— Don Strong, Patrol Leader • William Heyliger
... up yet, and at first I could hardly see my hand before my face. I never saw such ugly shadows, and once I had to stop and get breath before I could make up my mind to pass a clump of old mulberry bushes. Once in a while I heard a crackle behind me like a footstep, but I didn't look back. I knew my only chance was to plod ahead, no matter how my heart thumped or my knees shook. I thought of everything I could to bolster me up—of dear old Aunt Pam and poor little Maggie. But the sound of the ...
— Harper's Young People, January 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... and immediately a great cloud of steam arose, and the hissing as of a thousand serpents. We felt the strong suction under our keel, and staggered under the jerk of the ship's cable as she swung toward the beach. The paint was beginning to crackle along the rail. We could see nothing for the scalding white veil that enveloped us; we could hear nothing for the roar of steam, the bombardment of explosions, and the crash of thunder; but our nostrils were assaulted by a most unearthly ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Pasha heard about his ears the whistle and clash of sabres, the spiteful crackle of small arms, the snorting of horses, and the cries of men. For an instant he was wedged tightly in the frenzied mass, and then, by one desperate leap, such as he had learned on the hunting field, ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... us to help them. Only to send a message," was the reply, as the wireless spark began to crackle again. "We are telling the Government about her plight and a revenue cutter will be sent out to tow the schooner into some near port. She has drifted a good way off shore, but the weather is settled and there ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Mammy June's • Laura Lee Hope
... My dreams that crackle under your breath... You have the dust of the world to blow on... Do not tag me and dance away, looking back... I am too old to play with ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... five minutes more, and then set to work quietly, after the fashion of English mastiffs, though they waxed right mad before three rounds were fired, and the white splinters began to crackle and fly. ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... Fracasse's trench and yet not to neglect the fair targets of the reserves advancing by rushes to the support of the 128th. Reinforced, the gray streak at the bottom of the slope poured in a heavier fire. Above the steady crackle of bullets sent and the whistle of bullets received rose the cry of "Doctor! Doctor!" which meant each time that another Brown rifle had been silenced. The litter bearers, hard pressed to remove the wounded, left the dead. Already death was a familiar sight—an article of exchange ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... in front of us stretched the dark border of the wood, from which the fusillade was coming. To our right, at the edge of the water, on the road leading to Marcilly, F. must have been able to see the enemy, for we could distinctly hear the crackle of his carbines. ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... the eyes of Tom and Ned, the fire seemed to die out as a picture melts away on a moving picture screen. The smoke rolled away in a ball-like cloud, and the flames ceased to crackle and roar. ...
— Tom Swift among the Fire Fighters - or, Battling with Flames from the Air • Victor Appleton
... and you on the crest were first, And the last foe left was I, In the crackle of rifles I dropped and cursed, Lightning-struck as the cheer outburst And ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... learned a lot from you, too. I never knew what your game was here. I only know that the Saadat saved your life, and got you started again with Kaid. I only know that you called yourself a Christian, and worked on him till he believed in you, and Hell might crackle round you, but he'd believe, till he saw your contract signed with the Devil—and then he'd think the signature forged. But he's got to know now. We are not going out of Egypt, though you may be going to the Nile; but we are going to the Soudan, and with Kaid's blessing, too. You've put up the bluff, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... There was an occasional crackle as a rotten twig or branch snapped beneath the hoofs. Slender trees slid athwart the moonlight, closed on one another, and opened out, and still, though the snow was scanty and in places swept away, Grant and a big Michigan bushman rode straight on. Breckenridge, ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... a spectacled human magneto. His speech and his movements fairly crackle with energy; his enthusiasm is as communicable as a jump spark. A young man in years, yet mature in the knowledge of men and the psychology of service, he never wastes a minute dilating upon the philosophy of farm management; ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... swollen eyelids, the marks beneath her eyes; and listlessly she tidied herself. Then, sitting down on the brown tin trunk, she picked the bundle of notes off the floor. They gave forth a dry peculiar crackle. Fifteen ten-pound notes—all Hilary's travelling money. Her eyes opened wider and wider as she counted; and tears, quite suddenly, rolled down on to those ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... slowly and shook his head. "That does it, gov'nor. It ain't honest, treating us this way. If the crackle comes from the people, and these gees give everybody a skull cracking, then they're crooks. It ain't honest, and I'm too sick to work. And if that bloody ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey
... hands, I pray, or she will kill me. The trees were so full of yellow birds that it sounded as if a mighty wind passed over them, and the birds lit on Goody Corey's head. And black beasts ran alongside through the bushes, which did break and crackle, and they were at Goody Corey and me to go to the witch dance on the hill. And they said to bring Olive Corey and Paul Bayley. And Goody Corey told them how she and Olive would presently come, but not Paul, for he never would sign the book, not even though Olive ...
— Giles Corey, Yeoman - A Play • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... terrible than the screams of the parrots, or the shrieks of the howling monkeys—it was the cry of the jaguar! It came from a piece of wood close to the juvia-trees, and the branches were heard to crackle as the dreaded ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... my only relief consists in going over and over again in my mind the tale of my miseries. This time I will write it, writing only to tear up, to throw the manuscript unread into the fire. And yet, who knows? As the last charred pages shall crackle and slowly sink into the red embers, perhaps the spell may be broken, and I may possess once more my ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... and then came to one where the ledge was higher and wider. I put down the camera, wedged it level with scraps of stone, and then sat down myself to recharge the flashlight machine. But the moment my weight got on that ledge, there was a sharp crackle, and down I went half ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... the roar and crackle of the fire and the crashing of walls; but even more formidable was that tramping of thousands of feet, the scraping of trunks and furniture on the tracks and stones. * * * It was a well and a carefully dressed crowd, for by this time nearly everyone had ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... balance. It struck a candelabrum, a giant relic of ancient wood as tall as himself. It toppled and fell with its candled branches in the fire. Where the log broke a flame shot forth, lapping the dark wood with avid tongue. With a crackle the ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... from the floor open beneath like a bridge. Passing under it, he set the lamp against the heap of kindling there, and the smell of scorching wood spread abroad, followed by smoke and the crackle and snap of ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... for the same reason that Jeekie answered questions, for the sake of cheerfulness. At least it gave light in the darkness, leaping up in red tongues of flame twenty or thirty feet high, and its roar and crackle were ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... golden particles through the still atmosphere; and then everything became warm—the snowy statues amid the shiny green stuff, the soft lawns parted by the yellow sand of the pathways, the rich dresses with their glossy satin and bright beads, even the very voices, whose hilarious murmur seemed to crackle like a bright fire of vine shoots. Some gardeners, completing the arrangements of the flower-beds, turned on the taps of the stand-pipes and promenaded about with their pots, the showers squirting from which came forth ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... possessed of esper, cried out as soon as she read this new menace in my mind. I rode the brakes easily and came to a stop long before we hit it. In back sounded a crackle of rifle fire; in front, three men came out waving ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... already saw through the forest arcades the clearing which he must cross to reach the spot where he was expected. The angry barks of the wolves had increased during the last quarter of an hour, and the sound of their paws making the snow crackle inspired the old man with an indescribable terror. The number of animals seemed momentarily to be augmented; it resembled an ant-heap seen through the magnifying-glass ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... are dry as tinder and they crackle with the heat, And the sparks, like merry children, come a-dancing round my feet, In the cold, long nights of autumn I can sit before the blaze And watch a panorama born of all my yesterdays. I can leave the present burdens and the moment's bit of ...
— When Day is Done • Edgar A. Guest
... his own, and Hawk-eye at once took steps to secure his capture. While Heyward held the runner in conversation, the scout and the two Mohicans crept silently through the undergrowth to surround him, but the slight crackle of a breaking stick aroused Magua's suspicion, and, even as the ambush closed on him, he dodged under Heyward's arms and vanished into the ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... crackle, as though scorning his weakness, the flames ran up a climbing vine and the next moment wrapped a tall ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... leaped up at once and the bonfire began to smoke and roar and crackle just as the great army of wooden Gargoyles arrived. The creatures drew back at once, being filled with fear and horror; for such as dreadful thing as a fire they had never before known in all the history of their ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... Buried in baby finery, this unsuspecting new-comer slumbered contentedly in a dainty cot. The room was silent and darkened, the bright morning sunshine being shut out by the heavy curtains which were carefully drawn across the window: there was a ring of rare contentment in the crackle and purr of the wood-stove, that filled a remote corner of the room with its comfortable presence: and the sustaining spirit of wedded love, was as pronouncedly omnipresent as ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... palm-leaves and reeds, had begun to crackle when Antinous rushed into the tower only a few paces off crying: "Fire—fire!" and up the stairs which led to the observatory ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... hear the crackle of the flames, whenever the night wind happens to blow this way," Babe Adams asserted; and they all agreed with him, for the same sound had come ...
— Boy Scouts on a Long Hike - Or, To the Rescue in the Black Water Swamps • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... the fir and pine! The gloomy background seemed to invite him further into the heart of its shade and silence. No bird whistled through the glaucous green of this silent, majestic wood; nor was there any treacherous bramble to crackle beneath his feet. For upon this chill, grey carpet no flood of sunshine ever came to coax tiny sprays out of the ground; and the layers of fine needles, or tufts of dank, sunless moss were soft and noiseless as down under his tread. The stately trees grew far enough apart to allow him to move ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... were monstrous dragons' mouths, from which the darting forks came to play over golden stony lips, and lick the mullions and buttresses around. Then came a fresh explosion, as pent-up gases, generated by heat, burst forth to augment the fire with hiss, crackle, and flutter, as it seemed to gain its climax, and then sank down with a low ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... the open space of twenty yards. Three or four shots came zipping from aloft, but the instant ring of Winchesters back of them told that watchful eyes had noted every head that appeared, and the swift crackle of fire from the shop put instant stop to the fun up the slope. Into the store-room the manager led them, and unlocked a heavy little trap-door within; then, one by one, the ominous-looking cases ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... of night, with the mutual wish for nearer companionship, we gather around the camp-fire, the one light in all the great darkness. We are grateful for its warmth, as the evenings are chill, and its cheery blaze and crackle bring a feeling of hominess and comfort welcome to every one. If there are men in the party they light their pipes and then begin the stories of past experiences on the trail, which are of the keenest interest to all campers. ...
— On the Trail - An Outdoor Book for Girls • Lina Beard and Adelia Belle Beard
... In the roar and crackle of the flames and the crash of falling timber, the approach of the motor had not been heard by the excited and interested crowd who were watching ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin
... state of suspense, the burning roof of the house fell in on the three young men above, and immediately buried them for ever in its destructive flames. The assailing crowds set up a terrific shout of triumph. The floor above now began to crackle, and so dense was the smoke below, that the old man and the woman were in a state little short of suffocation. At last the Proctor became desperate, and opening one of the ground windows, and taking his poor wife by the hand, he attempted to ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... he crossed the diminutive hall and went into the sitting-room, where the cheerful crackle of a small wood fire gave an air of ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... rush of the river, and the crackling of the fire rose a sharp, querulous cry,—a cry unlike anything heard before in the camp. The pines stopped moaning, the river ceased to rush, and the fire to crackle. It seemed as if Nature had ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... together in the sickroom reading the newspapers, which came out from town each day. On one such occasion, when Santry had twisted his mouth awry in a determined effort to fold the paper he was reading without permitting a single crackle, she ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... and elemental. It had the crisp crackle that goes with free, unfettered youth. In a parlor some of it would have been offensive, but under the stars of the open desert it was as natural as the life itself. They spoke of the spring rains, of the Crawford-Steelman feud, of how they ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... higher rose the smoke, ascending pyramidically up the chimney-like gorge; and, the quick-darting tongues of flame could be seen spreading through the hazy veil, while the crackle and roar of the fire sounded fiercer and fiercer. Presently, growing bolder in its strength, the fire advanced outwards from the cleft in the rock where it was first kindled, spreading to the right and left of the gully. Next, it began to clamber up the face of the cliff, burning ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... off the slow-passing minutes. Dellarme aimed to keep down the fusillade from Fracasse's trench and yet not to neglect the fair targets of the reserves advancing by rushes to the support of the 128th. Reinforced, the gray streak at the bottom of the slope poured in a heavier fire. Above the steady crackle of bullets sent and the whistle of bullets received rose the cry of "Doctor! Doctor!" which meant each time that another Brown rifle had been silenced. The litter bearers, hard pressed to remove the ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... began to crackle in the darkness, running in long, irregular lines, and the young soldiers crowded in groups about them. At the same time they ate the scanty rations they carried in their knapsacks, and wondered what had become of the wagons. Jackson sent detachments to seek his supply trains, ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler
... them, he looked straight ahead, that he might not see. He could hear them crackle as she unfolded them—could hear her ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... Hassan, quietly. "We have, indeed, met with good fortune." Again we heard the brushwood crackle, and a second man, resembling the first in appearance and dress, came forward, and together they held a conversation, interspersed largely with the gestures which play so prominent a part in the language ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... as Albert touched the match to some pine shavings which were to form the kindling wood. The shavings caught, a light blaze leaped up, there came a warning crackle, and smoke, too, arose. Which way would it go? The little column wavered a moment and then shot straight up the chimney. It grew larger, but still shot straight up the chimney. The flames roared and were drawn in the ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... laughter at sight of Lapoulle's face, who swallowed everything and was licking his chops in anticipation of the feast. That funny dog, Loubet, he was the man to cure one of the dumps if anybody could! And when the fire began to crackle in the sunlight, and the kettle commenced to hum and bubble, they ranged themselves reverently about it in a circle with an expression of cheerful satisfaction on their faces, watching the meat as it danced up and down and sniffing the appetizing odor that ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... diminished head firmly against the wood, he drew it downward vigorously and long. There was a faint crackle, a little splutter, and—glory of glories!—a tiny flame faltered out ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... of the King's Head kitchen, and had not heard a sound in answer. The clock ticked to and fro, and the tabby cat purred softly as she sat before the fire, and the wood now and then gave a little crackle as it burned gently away, and those were all the signs of life to be seen on ...
— The King's Daughters • Emily Sarah Holt
... very evident from the increased smoke that rolled out and the crackle of fire that now could be heard above the puffing of the engines and the shouts of ...
— Joe Strong The Boy Fire-Eater - The Most Dangerous Performance on Record • Vance Barnum
... the ripening grain field not a single ear of wheat moves; when in the beaming heat the corn seems to crackle; when the poppy languishes and bends down under the feeble ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... distance, since the most irregular undulations are, in a long journey through the air, wrought to an equality, and made subject to exact law,—as in this universe all irregularities are sure to be in the end. Thus, the thunder, which near at hand is a wild crash, or nearer yet a crazy crackle, is by distance deepened and refined into that marvellous bass which we all know. And doubtless the jars, the discords, and moral contradictions of time, however harsh and crazy at the outset, flow into exact undulation along the ether of eternity, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... moment she lay as if exhausted; then she covered her head with her hands as if fearing and trembling: "Now curse me," she whispered, "Curse me! I hear the flames now beginning to crackle!" ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... opposite of what one ought to be," she laughed, "and it almost makes me feel not legally married. But don't—don't, please, if you love me, use that awful word 'parson' again. I can't stand it. Don't you think it sounds just like the crackle of cold, overdone toast?" ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... to the commander of the column, and soon the trumpets were calling the men to battle. The crackle of rifle shots ahead increased rapidly. The skirmishers were already pulling trigger, and, as Dick galloped back to Hertford he saw many puffs of white smoke down the road and in the fields and woods on either side. The Union men ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... quick!" commanded Mac Strann, and they started hastily down the barn towards the door. The fire behind them, after the puff of flame from the hay, had died away to a ghastly and irregular glow with the crackle of the slowly catching wood. It gave small light to guide them; only enough, indeed, to deceive the eye. The posts of the stalls grew into vast, shadowy images; the irregularities of the floor became high places and ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... of birdlime and half a pint of the drying oil into an iron or copper vessel, whose capacity should equal about a gallon, and let it boil very gently over a slow charcoal fire, till the birdlime ceases to crackle, which will be in about half or three-quarters of an hour; then pour upon it 2-1/2 pints more of the drying oil, and let it boil about an hour longer, stirring it frequently with an iron or wooden spatula. As the varnish, whilst boiling, and especially ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... and we smuggled them into my room. The unwrapping of the tissue paper folds was a ceremony. We reveled in the very crackle of it. I had scuttled home from the office as early as decency would permit, in order to have plenty of time for the dressing. It must be quite finished before Herr Nirlanger should arrive. Frau Nirlanger had purchased three tickets for ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... little daughter so that she must go alone. She rides with her mother to the railroad and sees her little one walking directly upon the tracks, so that she cannot avoid being run over. She hears the bones crackle. (From this she experiences a feeling of discomfort but no real horror.) She then looks out through the car window to see whether the parts cannot be seen behind. She then reproaches her mother for allowing the little one ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... caloric: caloric we possess in abundance, though of a stiller sort than that with which the world has been hitherto acquainted. Our friend from the backwoods thought there was no fire in the coal-furnace, because he could not hear it roar and crackle, and was afterwards amazed at its steady intensity of heat. Our misguided Southern brethren had the same opinion of Northern character, and burned their hands most deplorably when ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... slept like a weary child, and neither the next day nor the next, nor the next, was so awful as this first had been; they lacked the crackle and glare, and the crash, of ...
— Bylow Hill • George Washington Cable
... said; "and it seems such a treat to get away from the Lawn—of course I am sorry to leave mamma, you know," she added, parenthetically—"and the stiff breakfasts, and Mr. Sheldon's newspapers that crackle, crackle, crackle so shockingly all breakfast-time; and the stiff dinners, with a prim parlor-maid staring at one all the time, and bringing one vegetables that one doesn't want if one only ventures to breathe a little louder than usual. Here it ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... purifying, but also transforming and assimilating energy. For every lump of coal in your scuttles may be a parable; black and heavy, it is cast into the fire, and there it is turned into the likeness of the flame which it catches and itself begins to glow, and redden, and crackle, and break into a blaze. That is like what you and I may experience if we will. The incense rises in smoke to the heavens when it is heated: and our souls aspire and ascend, an odour of a sweet smell, acceptable to God, when the fire of that Divine Spirit has loosed them ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... few moments, which I occupied in making a list of the gear I wished to take with me. Then there was a hiss and a crackle, and in the receiver of the desk a book appeared. I unzipped the case, took it out, and opened it to the pages marked on the ...
— The Day of the Boomer Dukes • Frederik Pohl
... found us, was quite determined that we should never escape them alive. When presently we again began to move, it seemed impossible to take a single step without tripping over a land-crab's hole, or treading upon one of the creatures and hearing and feeling it crackle and writhe underfoot. Ugh! ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... into hiding. He was arrested, tried and condemned, and sentence suspended. He was again tried, this time by the Emperor and the Electors, and again condemned. The formal sentence of death only awaited, and then for him the fagots would flare and the flames crackle. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... miller drove out of the wood, the rustle of the leaves under his wheels changed from the soft murmurs in the moist hollows to the crisp crackle in the open places. In the west Venus hung silver white over the new moon, and below the star and the crescent a single pine tree stood as clearly defined as if it were pasted on a grey background ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... there with a leaping of faint flashes along the edge of the further ways. By their light Graham saw the heads and bodies of a number of men, armed with weapons like those of his guards, leap into an instant's dim visibility. The whole area began to crackle, to flash with little instantaneous streaks of light, and abruptly the darkness ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... snorting with terror out of the smoke and gloom, ready to welcome a master's hand and voice. He caught it, left the good roan by the roadside, and hastened on. He met and passed people on the road fleeing from burning houses and wrecked homes; in his ears were the crackle of flames and the wailing of women who mourned their dead. From small hamlets scattered in the country, folk were seeking refuge in the larger towns. Yet when he had passed these heedless, scattered groups, he rode ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... that swirling tower of scarlet flame hurled its illumination. For miles on every hand it could be seen. The sound of its crackle and hiss and roar was deafening. The twigs, dry and dead, caught fire from the surrounding blaze of moss, and communicated their flame to the thicker branches and to ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... taste the old hot, unregenerate life again,—to scuffle, swear, gamble, and love light loves with his fellows; to take ship and know the sea once more, and by her beget pictures; to talk to Binat among the sands of Port Said while Yellow Tina mixed the drinks; to hear the crackle of musketry, and see the smoke roll outward, thin and thicken again till the shining black faces came through, and in that hell every man was strictly responsible for his own head, and his own alone, and struck ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... early, the crackle of burning wood in the kitchen fireplace awoke me. Then I heard the sea roaring; then Tony's bare feet on the stairs. "Wind's backed an' come on to blow," he said. "They've a-had to hard up an' urn for it. Two on 'em's ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... stamping by, Squeak of wheel on the evening air, Stars and planets race through the sky, Here are darkness and silence rare; Only the flames in the open grate Crackle and flare as they burn up hate, Malice and envy and greed for gold, Dancing, laughing my cares away; I've forgotten that I am old, Once again I'm ...
— Just Folks • Edgar A. Guest
... where the soil, soaked as it had been by a week of September drizzle, was already baked hard by the hot sun. They rode for an hour cautiously up the ravine. Suddenly, as they passed the mouth of a side coulee, there was a plunge and crackle through the bushes at its head, and a shabby-looking old bull bison galloped out of it and plunged over a steep bank into a patch of broken ground which led around the base of a high butte. The bison was out of sight before they had time to fire. At the risk of their necks they sped their horses ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... borders Burroughs has built a rustic house, sheathed outside with slabs, and smacking in all its arrangements of the woodlands and of the days of pioneering. It has an open fireplace, where the flames crackle cheerfully on chilly evenings, and over the fireplace coals most of the cooking is done; but in really hot weather ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... firing came from the distance, on the other side of the house. For some seconds, there was an uninterrupted crackle of musketry; then it came at rarer intervals; and, presently, there was no sound ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... the lake nearest the fawns' hiding-place, and wait in my canoe for the mother to come out and show me where she had left her little ones. As they grew, and the drain upon her increased from their feeding, she seemed always half starved. Waiting in my canoe I would hear the crackle of brush, as she trotted straight down to the lake almost heedlessly, and see her plunge through the fringe of bushes that bordered the water. With scarcely a look or a sniff to be sure the coast ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... shout of rage, and made the boat leap through the water as now, in addition to the sharp crackle of the Winchesters, they heard the heavier report of a Snider, and Harvey, jumping up on the after whaleback, and steadying himself with one hand on Atkins's shoulder, saw that only two or three of Oliver's crew were now paddling—the rest had ...
— Tessa - 1901 • Louis Becke
... and put Red Chief between us. We weren't afraid he'd run away. He kept us awake for three hours, jumping up and reaching for his rifle and screeching: "Hist! pard," in mine and Bill's ears, as the fancied crackle of a twig or the rustle of a leaf revealed to his young imagination the stealthy approach of the outlaw band. At last, I fell into a troubled sleep, and dreamed that I had been kidnapped and chained to a tree by a ferocious pirate ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... You listen. You can hear me crackle with the salt and dust caked over me. I'm afraid to laugh, for fear I should crack ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... out and beckoned me to follow, which I obediently did, and together we crawled through the jungle, with the bandar-log chattering above us and—for all I know to the contrary—snakes hissing beneath our feet. If I stepped, which I could hardly avoid doing sometimes, on a fallen branch, making it crackle, the man turned on me a glance so malignant I positively quailed. Breathlessly we crept to the water-side and the unsuspecting ducks, and then Major Griffiths fired into the brown,—is that the proper expression?—killing I don't know how many. I don't think it was at all a nice thing to ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... leaves, shaken free from niches where the winds had gathered them, showered fitfully into the valley. He began drawing himself along by shrubs and young trees that covered a long outward curve in the face of the cliff. Those below heard the crackle of frozen twigs, and the swish of released boughs that marked his progress. Phil stood watching him with an absorbed interest in which fear became dominant. Better than the others Phil knew the perils of the cliff, the scant footholds offered by even ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... hung for a sheep as for a lamb," hiccuped Blinkey, as he rushed through the yard with a lighted brand. I tried to stop him, but fell on my face in the deep straw, and got round the barns to the rick-yard just in time to here a crackle—there was no mistaking it; the windward stack was in a ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... on a little bushy hillock just outside a village. But occasionally, it was difficult to say from which direction, came the sharp crackle of rifle-fire, and beyond, the far-off thud of cannon. The afternoon was ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... of mist. The gardener was busy with a wooden rake and wheelbarrow in which he carted away dead leaves for burning. The fire was back of the low fence, in the rear, and Linda, at the dining-room window, could hear the fierce small crackle of flames; the drifting pungent smoke was like a faint breath of ammonia. Arnaud had left for the day, Lowrie was at the university, while Vigne and her husband—moving toward their ultimate colonial threshold—had taken a small house. She ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... faint crackle of a branch to his left, and one hand instantly closed over his pipe bowl, the other grasping the heavy revolver at his hip. Crouching like a startled tiger, with not a muscle moving, he peered anxiously into the darkness, his arm half extended, ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... the men in the speeding automobile were close enough to hear the sputtering crackle ...
— The Young Engineers in Arizona - Laying Tracks on the Man-killer Quicksand • H. Irving Hancock
... a great tree on shore!" quoth little Love Winslow, clapping her hands. "Dost hear, mother? I've been counting the strokes—fifteen— and then crackle! crackle! crackle! and ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... breeze of evening sucked up the river. Over near the cook-camp a big fire commenced to crackle by the drying frames. At dusk the rivermen straggled in from ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... Street. Frenzy of speculations in land, cities undertaken and built by sheer force of millions, trains launched at full speed over bridges built on a Babel-like sweep of arch, the creaking of cable cars, the quivering of electric cars, sliding along their wires with a crackle and a spark, the dizzy ascent of elevators, in buildings twenty stories high, immense wheat-fields of the West, its ranches, mines, colossal slaughter-houses,—all the formidable traffic of this ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... knotty glass in them, and all the doors that open from it (a dozen or two) off their hinges, and a bare board on tressels for a table, at which thirty people might dine easily, and a fireplace large enough in itself for a breakfast-parlour, where, as the faggots blaze and crackle, they illuminate the ugliest and grimmest of faces, drawn in charcoal on the whitewashed chimney- sides by previous travellers. There is a flaring country lamp on the table; and, hovering about it, scratching her thick black hair continually, a yellow dwarf of a woman, who ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... and looked straight at the officer, standing erect and waiting, as if he expected a quick answer, and only the kind of answer, too, that he wished. Meanwhile there was silence, save for an occasional crackle ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... the tent in the evergreen thicket, and after supper they sat in its mouth in the glow of the fire. Its crackle drowned out the voices of the wilderness about them,—such accusations as the Red Gods pour out upon the unworthy. And for all their shelter they were wretched and terrified, crushed by the might of the wilderness about them,—futile ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... spat and roared deafeningly. The thud of its paws shook the ground. It lashed out with monstrous claws that sliced his skin. Half-stunned, Jerry kept lunging toward it, till finally his cross touched its coarse hide. There was a crackle of blue flame, a shriek that split the night, and the thing disintegrated in roiling ...
— The Invaders • Benjamin Ferris
... didn't carry herself so well as you do, and that he was a lucky man to have got you when so many other men wanted you, and he loved you, good-bye—would have fairly made your heart turn over with joy and made you kiss the hurried lines and thrust the letter in your belt, where you could crackle it now and then just to make ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... fragile and transparent of which we now get from Japan; and a porcelain decorated with a fine, open-work design cut through the ware, and styled 'grains-of-rice pattern.' Moreover they manufactured a variety which in firing took on a crackled effect and has for that reason been christened Chinese Crackle. You see how many kinds of thing they ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... at last this was shattered, it was with a crash to wake the dead. The girl marvelled that one man could fire so rapidly, and so often. The night seemed to crackle with rifle and revolver shots. To judge from the sound, there might be a ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... both very smiling and scrupulously polite, but the air of the room seemed to crackle with stored electricity. The Dutchman was given a chair by the writing table and cigarettes were placed at his elbow. Indeed, every social amenity was observed before Hilbert Torrington fired the ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... March 4, 1899, too late to land. Firebugs were abroad. We watched a number of houses burn, and heard the occasional crackle of rifle fire along the line of the defences around the city. The next morning there was artillery fire for a time at San Pedro Macati. Everywhere were abundant evidences that the ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... ship; and after that several of the fellows did not know a single thing until they were rudely aroused, perhaps some hours later on. The last thing Steve remembered hearing as he rolled himself up in his blanket was the crackle of the fire, the mournful sighing of the wind through the tops of the whispering pines, and then the distant call of an owl ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... to the effects of rifle fire and imagined that we only possessed two or three guns in all, stopped their advance as though paralyzed. For a few seconds there was silence, except for the intermittent crackle of the rifles as my men loaded and fired. Next came the cries of the smitten men and horses that were falling everywhere, and then—the unmistakable sound ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... trying to deny it, Hugh. The only bad thing about it in my mind is that we'll miss those jolly fires. It's always been so fine to skate up and stand before one, to get warm, and hear the flames crackle, while the girl you're skating with sits on a log, or something like that, to warm ...
— The Chums of Scranton High at Ice Hockey • Donald Ferguson
... with frost, and the leaves of the maples, fallen upon the ground, covered the earth with patches of yellow and red. By the side of the road, piles of leaves, raked together by Mr. Tomkins, were set on fire; they burned with a crackle and a roar, and gave off an odor at once pungent and regretful, which mingled in the fresh autumn air with the fragrance of grapes and cider, as the last apples of the season, too old and ripe to keep, went to the ...
— Autumn • Robert Nathan
... to have a number of lesser faces within his own big one of sunburned brown, tumbled by them somewhat heavily and left a smell of earth and leaves and potting-sheds about the trees behind him. 'Won't my flowers just shine and dazzle 'em? And won't the dead leaves crackle as I burn 'em up!' he chuckled as he disappeared from view. There was a rush of light as an eddy of the star-stream caught him, and something certainly went up in flame. A faint odour reached the children that was like the odour of ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... through the treble roof of oak and hawthorn and fern. Under the arched branches the lightning plays along, swiftly to and fro, or seems to, like the swish of a whip, a yellowish-red against the green; a boom! a crackle as if a tree fell from the sky. The thick grasses are bowed, the white florets of the wild parsley are beaten down, the rain hurls itself, and suddenly a fierce blast tears the green oak leaves and whirls them out into ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... jewelled zone swept between the mighty forests on its banks. And yet all was still. The cold seemed to have frozen tree, and air, and water, and every living thing that moved. Even the ringing of my skates on the ice echoed back from the Moccason Hill with a startling clearness, and the crackle of the ice as I passed over it in my course seemed to follow the tide of ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... our little old ship was finished and had sailed at last and for once our wireless plant up there began to get messages from the sea. I dreamed I was sitting up there with the operator. It was a dark, stormy night. The wireless began to crackle. He jumped up to see what was coming. He was getting messages from our own ship, away out there on the ocean. She was calling for help. 'Sinking fast,—sinking fast,—sinking fast.' Over and over again,—just those two words. 'Gad,—it was so real, so terribly real, that the first thing ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... changed. Only the ditch-bank against the reddened sky supplied the usual landmark. Its crest was black with shovelers, and up and down in lurid light climbed the scraper-teams; climbed and dumped, and dropped over the bank to climb again, like figures in a stage procession. There was a bedlam roar and crackle of pitchy fires, rattle of harness, clank of scraper-pans, shouts of men to the cattle, oaths and words of command; and this would go forward unceasingly till the banks held water. And what was ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... like boors, two or three of the most distinguished men of the day, with the very toast in their mouths, afraid to bite. It was curious to see Lawrence in this predicament, to hear him bite by degrees, and then stop, for fear of making too much crackle, his eyes full of water from the constraint; and at the same time to hear Mrs. Siddons' 'eye of newt and toe of frog,' and to see Lawrence give a sly bite, and then look awed, and ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... danger and the excitement that was promised. For days they had had no fighting worthy the name. Amigos everywhere, villages peopled only by women and children, treacherous peacefulness on every side; this had been their encounter: an occasional rifle shot from the rice fields, a crackle of guns far ahead, a prisoner or two who had not been quick enough in transforming himself from combatant to friend, that was all. Now, there seemed to be real ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... much more picturesquely. They rode in coats of scarlet, in the crisp, clear morning, to the winding of horns and the baying of hounds, to the thud-thud of hoofs, and the crackle of underbrush. Across fresh-plowed fields they went, crashing through forest paths, leaping ditches, taking fences, scrambling up the inclines, pelting down the hillside, helter-skelter, until, panting, wide-eyed, ...
— Personality Plus - Some Experiences of Emma McChesney and Her Son, Jock • Edna Ferber
... fallen. At first, only the outline of a man of large stature and proportions could be seen lying in a cramped position, as if produced by some strong convulsive agony, and then when the fire began to kindle and crackle, the dress could be distinguished, and then as the light grew brighter, the scalpless head, and then the marked and distorted features of the murdered master of the house, who lay in a pool of blood that slowly trickled along the crevices of the ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... changed and their ears were filled with the hollow boom of cannon. And now, nearer than they could have believed, the crash of volley firing mingled with the whirring crackle of gatlings and the spattering rattle of Montigny mitrailleuses from ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... was such a funny story, with its cheery snap and crackle, And Sally always told it with so much dramatic art, That the chickens in the door-yard would begin to "cackle-cackle," As if in such a frolic they were ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... to the conclusion that the service had really been rendered to Sylvia, as the original statement had said, and that for some obscure reason it was to be charged against Runyon. But even now it was not a light that he saw. Rather, he was enveloped in darkness. He heard the envelope crackle in his clinched hand. He turned and climbed the stairs heavily, so that he need not encounter Sylvia until he had had time to think, until he ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... feel the strain most is in the winter. Then you sit at night, shivering, as a rule, beside the stove in an almost empty log-walled room, reading a book you have probably read three or four times before. Outside, the frost is Arctic; you can hear the roofing shingles crackle now and then; and you wake up when the fire burns low. There's no life, no company, rarely a new face, and if you go to a dance or supper somewhere, perhaps once a month, you ride back on a bob-sled frozen almost stiff beneath ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... the night was come, and the stars hung cold in the sky. It seemed that the air would snap and crackle were some little resolving element to be dropped into its suspended hush. Not a sound was to be heard except a slow drip of water from ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... these bright pictures, but you wouldn't have had these 'ere gloomy ideas. I don't say as how I don't hold with Gawd," he explained, with uplifted forefinger and cocked head; "but if ever I thinks of Him, I like to feel that He's in the wind or in the crickle-crackle of the earth, just near and friendly like, but not a-worrying of a chap, listening for every cuss-word as he uses to his old horse, and measuring every half-pint he pours down his dusty throat. No. That ain't my idea of Gawd. But then ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... the cry, "Ship afire!" caught up by a hundred throats, And over the roar the captain shouting to lower the boats; Then cry upon cry, and curses, and the crackle of burning wood, And the place grew hot as a furnace, I could feel ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... you get so much—so much fun out of your food. I've heard about gourmands. I think I can guess now what they are and act like. Hark! What's that noise? Kind of a crackle, as if a cat or something was overhead among those vines. I hope it isn't. Cats love fish. I always have to shut up Lady Rosalind when Mother Martha has it for dinner. Isn't 'finnan ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... fierce shouts, was leading a strong attack in the center. The firing was now rapid and much heavier than it had been at any time before. Flashes of flame appeared everywhere in the thicket. Above the crackle of rifles and muskets swelled the long thrilling war cry of the Mohawks, and back in fierce defiance came the yells of ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... blizzardy tops of the great ridges, where for good reasons they had passed the winter, followed by the wolves who fed upon their weak and sick. Everywhere were the rushing torrents of melting snow, the crackle of crumbling ice, the dying frost-cries of rock and earth and tree; and each night the pale glow of the aurora borealis crept farther and farther toward the pole ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... upon faces which were set with anxiety. The man who had picked up the billet looked from one to the other of the faces, then he turned and gazed behind him into the darkness. The floor of the clearing was dotted with the embers of dying fires, but now and again he would hear the crackle of a branch and see a little flame spirt up and shine upon the barrels of rifles and the black bodies of the sleeping troops. Round the edge of the clearing the trees rose massed and dark like a cliff's face. He turned ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... It glowed on the windward side, rising and falling in intensity, like the coal of a cigar. Then a superincumbent bundle rolled down, with a whisking noise; flames elongated, and bent themselves about with a quiet roar, but no crackle. Banks of smoke went off horizontally at the back like passing clouds, and behind these burned hidden pyres, illuminating the semi-transparent sheet of smoke to a lustrous yellow uniformity. Individual straws in the foreground were consumed in a creeping movement of ruddy heat, as if they were ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... Rifle, uttering fierce shouts, was leading a strong attack in the center. The firing was now rapid and much heavier than it had been at any time before. Flashes of flame appeared everywhere in the thicket. Above the crackle of rifles and muskets swelled the long thrilling war cry of the Mohawks, and back in fierce defiance came the yells of the ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... frequently in his own water-colours, the colour had run down to the horizon and flamed intensest crimson in the Nick of Benarick. Broader and broader mounted the scarlet flame, till he seemed in that still place to hear the sun's corona crackle, as observers think they do when watching a great eclipse. The set of the sun affected him like a still morning—that most mysterious thing in nature. He missed, indeed, the diffused elation of the dawn; but it was infinitely ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... and the steady replenishing by the hod-men; Spar-makers in the spar-yard, the swarming row of well-grown apprentices, The swing of their axes on the square-hew'd log shaping it toward the shape of a mast, The brisk short crackle of the steel driven slantingly into the pine, The butter-color'd chips flying off in great flakes and slivers, The limber motion of brawny young arms and hips in easy costumes, The constructor of wharves, bridges, piers, bulk-heads, floats, stays against ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... thought to find the ould wee house, Wid the moss along the wall! And I thought to hear the crackle-grouse, And the brae-birds call! ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... upon the last section of his two hours, when Kennedy distinctly heard footsteps in the wood. He had heard so many mysterious sounds since his patrol began at eleven o'clock that at first he was inclined to attribute this to imagination. But a crackle of dead branches and the sound of soft breathing convinced him that this was the real thing for once, and that, as a sentry of the Public Schools' Camp on duty, it behoved ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... But the thought had scarcely crossed his mind before it seemed to him that a blinding crackle of sparks burst out along the whole slope below the wall, a characteristic yell which he knew too well rang in his ears, and an undulating line of dusty figures came leaping like gray wolves out of ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... turned to the right and jolted over what seemed to be a shallow ditch. The road that followed was of the roughest character. If it was a road at all it was a wood-track; Evan heard the twigs crackle under the tires. They lurched and bumped alarmingly. Once they had to stop to allow the chauffeur to drag some obstruction out of the way. Evidently they had not had the car that way before, for ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... over a month before when it was smothered deep in snow. On the day they returned to it the sun was shining warmly in the first glorious days of spring warmth. Everywhere, big and small, there were the rushing torrents of melting snows and the crackle of crumbling ice, the dying cries of thawing rock and earth and tree, and each night for many nights past the cold pale glow of the aurora borealis had crept farther and farther toward the Pole in fading glory. So early as this the poplar buds had ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... Division; then between the poplars along the Armentieres road, until we turned to the left at Rabot, and soon arrived at our destination, a small village called Romarin. It lies just within the Belgian frontier, a bare 3 miles behind the firing line, whence the crackle of rifle fire was plainly audible, whilst from the coppiced slopes of Neuve Eglise, which bounded the northward view, intermittent flashes denoted the presence of the field batteries. The battalion was now attached to the 10th Brigade of the 4th Division, who were ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... pushed into a drawer lock, the drawer pulled out, the chink of coin and the crackle of bank-notes. Then he heard ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... An irregular crackle of shots, the smashing of window glass in the back of the mansion, with two or three hurrahs, put some courage into them. On the whole it seemed less dangerous to get close in under the great vaulted ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... he was aroused by a startled cry from the girl at his side. Her fascinated gaze was fixed on the summit of the ridge above them. There was a warning crackle. The overhanging comb snapped, slid slowly down, and broke off. With gathering momentum it descended, sweeping into its heart rocks, trees, and debris. A terrific roar filled the air as the great white cloud came tearing ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... all the sense was beaten out of me, I was alive enough to hear the savage yells of disappointed rage behind us; these and the spitting crackle of a dozen rifles fired at random in the darkness. But afterward all sounds, save the rhythmic dip and drip of Jennifer's paddle, faded on the sense of hearing till, as it would seem, this gentle monody of dipping blade and tinkling drops became a crooning lullaby ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... shall I confide? Whose counsel find A balmy med'cine for my troubled mind? Or whose discourse with innocent delight Shall fill me now, and cheat the wint'ry night, While hisses on my hearth the pulpy pear, And black'ning chesnuts start and crackle there, While storms abroad the dreary meadows whelm, And the wind thunders thro' the neighb'ring elm? 70 Go, seek your home, my lambs; my thoughts are due To other cares than those of feeding you. Or who, when summer suns their summit reach, And Pan sleeps hidden by the shelt'ring beech, When shepherds ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton
... at the kitchen stove. There was the clink of iron lids, the smell of wood smoke, the pleasant crackle of the fire. Presently she came in ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... and reeds, had begun to crackle when Antinous rushed into the tower only a few paces off crying: "Fire—fire!" and up the stairs which led to the observatory of the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... they were startled and affrighted by the thunderous rumblings and cracking of the breaking floe—a sound that an experienced Arctic explorer says is the most terrifying ever heard by man, having in it something of the hoarse rumble of heavy artillery, the sharp and murderous crackle of machine guns, and a kind of titanic grinding, for which there is no counterpart in the world of tumult. Living thus in constant dread of death, the little company drifted on, seemingly miraculously preserved. Their floe was at last reduced from a great sheet ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... ache to rest and to uncurl of nervousness. All the thousand thousand little pores of her body, screaming each one to be placated. They hurt the entire surface of her. That great storm at sea in her head; the crackle ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... heavy fur, and leaning against the most sheltered wall of the porch, steeled his nerves to face the devil and all his works. No sound of voices came from within; the most distinct sound was the crackle and ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... to disapprove, so the two sisters went downstairs to make some slight changes in their dress. As they passed the parlor door Miranda thought she heard a crackle and looked in. The shades were up, there was a cheerful blaze in the open stove in the front parlor, and a fire laid on the hearth in the back room. Rebecca's own lamp, her second Christmas present from Mr. Aladdin, stood on a marble-topped table in the corner, the ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... ardent battle of Wall Street. Frenzy of speculations in land, cities undertaken and built by sheer force of millions, trains launched at full speed over bridges built on a Babel-like sweep of arch, the creaking of cable cars, the quivering of electric cars, sliding along their wires with a crackle and a spark, the dizzy ascent of elevators, in buildings twenty stories high, immense wheat-fields of the West, its ranches, mines, colossal slaughter-houses,—all the formidable traffic of this country of effort and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... it, its laughter so outrivaled every other sound that she had difficulty in discerning the Howes' approaching tread, and it was not until the distinct crackle of underbrush reached her ear that she became aware they were approaching. She peered ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... choked with the smoke; he could hear the sticks beginning to crackle and burn in the fireplace down below. He made up his mind to climb right to the top, and get out on the slates, ...
— The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter • Beatrix Potter
... what your game was here. I only know that the Saadat saved your life, and got you started again with Kaid. I only know that you called yourself a Christian, and worked on him till he believed in you, and Hell might crackle round you, but he'd believe, till he saw your contract signed with the Devil—and then he'd think the signature forged. But he's got to know now. We are not going out of Egypt, though you may be going to the Nile; ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... rattled intermittently around the two men. And even that gunfire was only a part of the cacophony. The tortured molecules of the air in the room were so besieged by the beat of drums, the blare of trumpets, the crackle of lightning, the rumble of heavy machinery, the squawks and shrieks of horns and whistles, the rustle of autumn leaves, the machine-gun snap of popping popcorn, the clink and jingle of falling coins, and the yelps, bellows, howls, roars, snarls, grunts, bleats, moos, ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... was very quiet; he could hear nothing but the crackle of the fire. Now and then a blaze leaped up and pierced the shadows among the pine trunks. A few yards away, the trees got blurred and melted into the encircling gloom. In one place, however, there was an opening, and when he turned his back to the light, he saw a ...
— The Lure of the North • Harold Bindloss
... that hears the crackle of a twig behind it. Here in the deep brazen voice of the marriage bells ringing out in the belfry above him he thought he heard the answer his incantation had forced from the white man's Okee. But the voice was so terrible, so loud, that, forgetting ...
— The Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson
... had fled, and he carried in his hand a smouldering firebrand. Now crouching against the place from which the hottest fire belched forth, he blew upon this brand till a tongue of flame darted forth, and in a moment more the brushwood around the house had begun to crackle with a sound like that made by a hissing snake before it makes the ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... only the crackle of the loudspeaker. The set was tuned in on the Wallops Island command frequency, Rick realized. That was how Camillion and company knew when to release the balloon, and ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin
... of the house fell in on the three young men above, and immediately buried them for ever in its destructive flames. The assailing crowds set up a terrific shout of triumph. The floor above now began to crackle, and so dense was the smoke below, that the old man and the woman were in a state little short of suffocation. At last the Proctor became desperate, and opening one of the ground windows, and taking his poor wife by the hand, he attempted ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... who mistook it for a general flight of the fugitives. They rushed forward with a shout. They had a rugged and barren hill to ascend. Half way up the slope they saw flashes of fire burst from the rocks above, heard the rapid "crack—crackle—crack!" of a dozen pieces, and retreated in confusion down ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... and we sleep wherever we happen to find ourselves lying. That is something. But there are certain military accomplishments which can only be taught us by the enemy. Taking cover, for instance. When the thin, intermittent crackle of blank ammunition shall have been replaced by the whistle of real bullets, we shall get over our predilection for sitting up and taking notice. The conversation of our neighbour, or the deplorable antics of B Company on the neighbouring skyline, will interest us not at all. We shall ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... his shoes and hat. As he sat on the side of the cot lacing his shoes, he glanced about and saw that daylight had made the room comparatively commonplace and uninteresting. The men, whose faces seemed stolid, serene or absent, were engaged in dressing, while a great crackle of bantering ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... mankind, some races have well-developed tendencies toward polygamy. In the warmer regions of the United States there dwells a great, splendid, glossy Blackbird, the Boat-tailed Crackle. The nest of this bird is a wonderfully woven structure of water plants and grasses and is usually built in a bush growing in the {55} water. When you find one nest of the Crackle you are pretty certain ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... from the north down the valley of the Rhone, and everything is so cold that I have been obliged to indulge in a fire. There is a fine crackle and roar of burning wood in the chimney which is very homely and companionable, though it does seem to postulate a town ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... under a wild growth of brush and outreaching trees. The forest was stirring with the rustle and call of birds, with the breath of the leaves and the far-away crackle and plunge of larger animals through the undergrowth. A chipmunk, with inquisitive eyes, sat on the root of a knotted oak, but he whisked away when Menard and the canoemen stepped into the shallow water. Overhead, showing little fear of ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... and waited, and in a few minutes the Southern horsemen came in sight, opening fire at once. Their infantry, too, soon appeared in the woods and fields and the dark hours before the dawn were filled with the crackle of ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... when the crackle of the wheels had nearly died away. 'This is a fit finish to your adventure. I am truly thankful that you have got off without suspicion, and the loss only of the liquor. Will you sit down and let me talk ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... a slight stealthy crackle made itself heard amid the increasing moans of the night wind; the heap glowed brighter still, and burst into a flame; the flame sank, another breeze entered it, sustained it, and it grew to be first continuous and weak, then ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... Swish! crackle! crash!—it was an eventful moment in the career of the young fireman. There was a blinding glow, a rain of fire swayed through the locomotive cab, then, just as they cleared the bridge, the structure went ...
— Ralph on the Engine - The Young Fireman of the Limited Mail • Allen Chapman
... leaves of the maples, fallen upon the ground, covered the earth with patches of yellow and red. By the side of the road, piles of leaves, raked together by Mr. Tomkins, were set on fire; they burned with a crackle and a roar, and gave off an odor at once pungent and regretful, which mingled in the fresh autumn air with the fragrance of grapes and cider, as the last apples of the season, too old and ripe to keep, went to the press back of ...
— Autumn • Robert Nathan
... valued most—things that had been Aunt Margaret's in the past, that spoke of their old happy life in France. He spread an embroidered cloth on the floor and pitched his treasure trove into it—working feverishly, choking and gasping, until the flames began to crackle through the wall, and the ceiling above him split across. Then he plunged through the window, and staggered across the lawn with his burden—falling beside it at last, spent and breathless, his throat parched ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... thou canst not, taking some one firm decision, rule circumstances! Soft speeches will not serve, hard grape-shot is questionable; but hovering between the two is unquestionable. Ever wilder swells the tide of men; their infinite hum waxing even louder into imprecations, perhaps into crackle of stray musketry—which latter, on walls nine feet thick, cannot do execution. The outer drawbridge has been lowered for Thuriot; new deputation of citizens (it is the third and noisiest of all) penetrates that way into the outer court: soft speeches producing no clearance of these, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... she said; "and it seems such a treat to get away from the Lawn—of course I am sorry to leave mamma, you know," she added, parenthetically—"and the stiff breakfasts, and Mr. Sheldon's newspapers that crackle, crackle, crackle so shockingly all breakfast-time; and the stiff dinners, with a prim parlor-maid staring at one all the time, and bringing one vegetables that one doesn't want if one only ventures to ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... an hour. Then put 1 lb. of birdlime and half a pint of the drying oil into an iron or copper vessel, whose capacity should equal about a gallon, and let it boil very gently over a slow charcoal fire, till the birdlime ceases to crackle, which will be in about half or three-quarters of an hour; then pour upon it 2-1/2 pints more of the drying oil, and let it boil about an hour longer, stirring it frequently with an iron or wooden spatula. As the varnish, ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... many sorts of Paste made, and among them, are some which are made with Eggs, according to the old fashion; but these are always hard, when they are baked, though they will fly and crackle in the Mouth, but they taste like Sticks: while, on the other side, leave out your Eggs, and use Butter and Water only, as in the following Receipts, and your Paste will melt in the Mouth, and ...
— The Country Housewife and Lady's Director - In the Management of a House, and the Delights and Profits of a Farm • Richard Bradley
... "I think though, the wireless one has a crackle the hospital brand lacks. Kitty's nurse ...
— The Girl Scouts at Sea Crest - The Wig Wag Rescue • Lillian Garis
... winds had gathered them, showered fitfully into the valley. He began drawing himself along by shrubs and young trees that covered a long outward curve in the face of the cliff. Those below heard the crackle of frozen twigs, and the swish of released boughs that marked his progress. Phil stood watching him with an absorbed interest in which fear became dominant. Better than the others Phil knew the perils of the cliff, the scant footholds offered by ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... have a fire in the fireplace, then we can have a crackle of our own." He had noticed how nervous Mrs. Reece grew, and that the little girls were watching her. He could not help thinking that it was foolish, even wicked, to waste strength in fear of something which no one of them could stop. ...
— Little Busybodies - The Life of Crickets, Ants, Bees, Beetles, and Other Busybodies • Jeanette Augustus Marks and Julia Moody
... to go on, he spat speculatively. There was a sharp, explosive crackle that startled him. He spat again. And again, in the air, before it could fall to the snow, the spittle crackled. He knew that at fifty below spittle crackled on the snow, but this spittle had crackled in the air. Undoubtedly it was colder ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... that he started to fall asleep. The lighted punk fell lower and lower until it touched one of the fire-cracker-packs. The silk paper began to curl and grow black, then it burst into flames. There was a sputter, then a crackle like the firing of many rifles, and then a great roar. My! but those were powerful fire-crackers. One pack exploded—and he was blown through the palace. Another—and over the Peppermint Pagoda he flew. Still another went off, and he was tossed ...
— Half-Past Seven Stories • Robert Gordon Anderson
... grandpapa," said Phoebe, with a slight emphasis which startled him, though he did not know why; and she kissed him before she went to her grandmother, which she did with a perfectly composed and tranquil mind. It was astonishing how the crackle of that bit of paper in her handkerchief calmed and soothed her. She recovered her breath, her colour, and her spirits. She ran up to her room and changed her dress, which was silk, for a soft merino one, which made no rustling; and then she folded ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... struck the log, throwing full weight upon it. There was a snapping crackle, then a ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... A cool breeze of evening sucked up the river. Over near the cook-camp a big fire commenced to crackle by the drying frames. At dusk the rivermen straggled in from the ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... me. Grotesquely distorted, blurred with tube-hum and interference crackle, they roared in my ear-grids so loudly that I saw the nearby guard turn his head as though ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... thousand yards, took this defence in the rear. Bullets fell among the men, and smacked up against the stone breastwork. The two companies were withdrawn, and lost heavily in the open as they crossed it. An incessant rattle and crackle of rifle fire came from all round, drawing very slowly but steadily nearer. Now and then the whisk of a dark figure from one boulder to another was all that ever was seen of the attackers. The British fired ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... known exactly where our usual camp was, and crept up overnight to cut us off. It wasn't by much that they missed. Three or four loiterers, as it was, had a warm minute or two. The first single shots grew to a sudden fierce crackle, like the crackle of a dry thorn branch on the fire, as they came through the bush. But they came on nevertheless, one horse hit only, and joined us, and we formed up and started at a steady gallop for the hills beyond the plain, ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... There was only the crackle of an open mike and the sound of breathing. "That is your decision," he said finally. "I'll have a ship standing by. But won't you let us take ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... out of the wood, the rustle of the leaves under his wheels changed from the soft murmurs in the moist hollows to the crisp crackle in the open places. In the west Venus hung silver white over the new moon, and below the star and the crescent a single pine tree stood as clearly defined as if it were pasted on a grey ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... chair crackle as he moved to look at Webster. It was the weight of the detective's gaze, however, that drew the lawyer's attention; when he looked up, his eyes were half-closed, as if the light had suddenly become ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... puff of smoke arose into the air above the tops of the scrub-trees, and Chloe knew that the storehouse was burning. The smoke increased in volume and rolled heavily skyward upon the light breeze. She could hear the crackle of flames, and the smell of burning spruce was in ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... it is," rejoined Bessie coolly. "And if you will not bedizen me with artificial flowers, and will exonerate me from wearing dresses that crackle, I shall be happy. Did you not promise to give me simplicity ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... them. But ought he not to turn back? He resolved not to be frightened from his object. After lying still awhile, he went back along the road, then turned aside, walked softly from tree to tree, careful not to crackle a twig beneath his feet, crept on his hands and knees through the thick underbrush, and gained the road in the rear of the picket. Being inside of the enemy's lines, he knew that he could move more freely, for if any of the sentinels heard him they would think it one of their own number. He walked ...
— Winning His Way • Charles Carleton Coffin
... the shawl she spread over the bracken, and proceeded to kindle a fire with a tinder-box lent her by Mrs. Chivers. It amused the babe to watch the sparks as they flew about, and when the pile of turves and sticks and heather was in combustion, to listen to the crackle, and watch the play and ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... choosing two of us to guide him, the dauntless and discerning commander went on, on foot, with an orderly. He chose Dicky and Oswald as guides. So we led him to the ambush, and we went through it as quietly as we could. But twigs do crackle and snap so when you are reconnoitring, or anxious to ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... the dense October air with a softened and muffled sound. The evenings, however, were growing cool, and before long they lighted the first fire of the season in Mrs. Vivian's heavily draped little chimney-piece. On this occasion Bernard sat there with Angela, watching the bright crackle of the wood and feeling that the charm of winter nights had begun. These two young persons were alone together in the gathering dusk; it was the hour before dinner, before ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... snow-drifts some sixty years ago, because he dared to open the Country of the Gods to the contemptible foreigners; and in the cry of the tofu-seller echoes the voice of old Japan, a long-drawn wail, drowned at last by the grinding of the tram wheels and the lash and crackle of the connecting-rods against ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... motives of personal safety, is devoured with anxiety concerning the too imminent fate of her hostess' china. There is a little Lowestoft tea-service that was picked up only last week at Christie and Manson's, a turquoise blue crackle jar that is supposed to be priceless, and a pair of "Long Eliza" vases, which her hostess loves as much as she does her toy terrier, and far better than ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... turn at once and begin walking homewards, but all the time I know I have stayed out too long. I walk faster, then run; Asop understands there is something the matter, and pulls at the leash, drags me along, sniffs at the ground, and is all haste. The dry leaves crackle ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... indications of a runaway match. But they don't want to be married—'Only,' says the gentleman, 'to walk round the church.' And as he slips a genteel compliment into the palm of Mrs Miff, her vinegary face relaxes, and her mortified bonnet and her spare dry figure dip and crackle. ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... and wells turn brackish. It wanders far inland through winding straits. The wayfarer, stepping across what seems to be a ditch at the end of a field far from the sea wonders to hear brown wrack crackle under his feet. ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... which had been leading me slowly but very surely to this minute, or whether it was nothing more than a mental association between a khaki coat worn by Eagle's enemy on that disastrous night and a faint crackle of paper jarring tensely on strung nerves. I know which I like to think; but in either case ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... tasks, but the time when you feel the strain most is in the winter. Then you sit at night, shivering, as a rule, beside the stove in an almost empty log-walled room, reading a book you have probably read three or four times before. Outside, the frost is Arctic; you can hear the roofing shingles crackle now and then; and you wake up when the fire burns low. There's no life, no company, rarely a new face, and if you go to a dance or supper somewhere, perhaps once a month, you ride back on a bob-sled frozen almost stiff beneath ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... hear the sputter and crackle of road-surfacing machines—the cheap Western type which fuse stone and rubbish into lava-like ribbed glass for their rough country roads. Three or four surfacers worked on each side of a square of ruins. The brick and stone wreckage crumbled, slid forward, ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... airs came down from the heights above, and now and then an elfin sighing fell from the ragged summits of the firs. When it died away, the silence was broken only by the pounding of a heavy hammer and the crackle of a fire. ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... in the air, and the resultant crackle was so immediate and loud that he shook his head. "I give it up," he said. "I've ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... carry herself so well as you do, and that he was a lucky man to have got you when so many other men wanted you, and he loved you, good-bye—would have fairly made your heart turn over with joy and made you kiss the hurried lines and thrust the letter in your belt, where you could crackle it now and then just to ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... the valley at the mouth of Kingdom Come. Before he was done, the old mother knocked the ashes from her clay pipe and quietly went into the kitchen, and Jack, for all his good manners, could not restrain a whine of eagerness when he heard the crackle of bacon in a frying-pan and the delicious smell of it struck his quivering nostrils. After dark, old Joel, the father of the house, came in—a giant in size and a mighty hunter—and he slapped his big thighs and roared until the rafters seemed ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... and went forward three days' march. Then we camped again, much closer to the Germans this time, in fact, almost within shouting distance; and they again set up their machine, causing sparks to crackle from the wires of a telescopic tower they raised, to the very great concern of the Afghans who were in and out of both camps all day long. One message that an Afghan told me the Germans had received, was that the British fleet was all sunk and Paris taken. But that sort of message ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... light line of blue smoke-puffs broke out along the edge of the wood in front, succeeded by a crackle of rifles. There were keen, sharp hissings in the air, terminating abruptly with a thump near by. The man at Captain Graffenreid's side dropped his rifle; his knees gave way and he pitched awkwardly forward, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... anxiously grouped around the spot where Philips had fallen. At first, only the outline of a man of large stature and proportions could be seen lying in a cramped position, as if produced by some strong convulsive agony, and then when the fire began to kindle and crackle, the dress could be distinguished, and then as the light grew brighter, the scalpless head, and then the marked and distorted features of the murdered master of the house, who lay in a pool of blood that slowly trickled along the crevices ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... layer of the bundles was missing. Nearing the other side, I made out a factory building of some sort, with a high chimney, a little way from the end of the bridge, and heard the occasional bark of a watch-dog. Try as I would, I could not move an inch without causing a number of sticks to crackle loudly—it was almost as bad as crawling under the heap of sticks the morning before. Fortunately the wind must have drowned any noise made, or carried the sound away, for, though the dog continued to bark intermittently, it cannot have ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight
... to make themselves heard on the floors above. Roused by the merry crackle of occasional china, the house party was bestirring itself to investigate. Voices sounded, ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... red-gold woods, and presently along a bridle-path that curled mysteriously into a great sunlit shoulder of forest, where the driven leaves fussed over their footsteps, and the miniature roar of a toy waterfall strove to make itself heard above the swish and crackle of the carpet the ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... undulations are, in a long journey through the air, wrought to an equality, and made subject to exact law,—as in this universe all irregularities are sure to be in the end. Thus, the thunder, which near at hand is a wild crash, or nearer yet a crazy crackle, is by distance deepened and refined into that marvellous bass which we all know. And doubtless the jars, the discords, and moral contradictions of time, however harsh and crazy at the outset, flow into ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... substances] gunpowder, dynamite, gun cotton, nitroglycerine, nitrocellulose, plastic explosive, plastique, TNT, cordite, trinitrotoluene, picric acid, picrates, mercury fulminate (arms) 727. whack, wham, pow. V. rap, snap, tap, knock, ping; click; clash; crack, crackle; crash; pop; slam, bang, blast, boom, clap, clang, clack, whack, wham; brustle^; burst on the ear; crepitate, rump. blow up, blow; detonate. Adj. rapping &c v.. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... flicker gets through," he announced when he returned. "A man would have to come close enough to hear the wood crackle or smell the smoke to ever guess we had a fire going. And even the smoke is taken care of." They tilted back their heads to see how it crept lazing up and up until it was dissipated among the lofty shadows. "If we can manage water and food," he went on, "I think we would ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... was "goin' to be one of the biggest funerals ever given in Ostable." Mr. Sharon nodded. Then, after waiting a moment or two, he tiptoed along the front hall and took up his stand by the parlor door. There was a final rustle of gowns, a final crackle of Sunday shirtfronts, ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... himself comfortable when from the direction of the big packing-case came the muffled sound of a screw-driver. Soon there followed a noise as of a board being softly shoved aside, then a step on the floor. Simultaneously there was the crackle of a match, and peering forth Jack momentarily made out a thin, clean-shaven face bending over a dark-lantern. But quickly he drew back with a start of fright as the man turned and came directly ...
— The Young Railroaders - Tales of Adventure and Ingenuity • Francis Lovell Coombs
... several centuries of devilishly fine history by running—positively running—from ill-armed footpads who had never worn breeches. She would frown, her bosom would swell till her bodice would appear to crackle at the armpits, the seven hairs on her upper lip would bristle all the worse against her purpling face as she cried it was the little Lyons shopkeeper in his mother's grandfather that was in his craven legs. Doubt it who will, an imminent danger will not wholly dispel the sense ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... climbers. Soon the crest was reached, and the main body began to descend gradually, when the dominie slipped and his piece went off, the trigger having caught in his red window cord, startling the echoes. Then came the diffusive boom and crackle of the blunderbuss, and the doctor, inwardly anathematizing Wilkinson, hurried his men on. They heard axes at work, as if trees were being felled; it was the Captain and the Richards at the barrier. No enemy appeared ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... had not reached the biscuits, and for several minutes it could be heard cracking under the solid teeth of Dick Sand and his companions. Between Hercules's jaws it was like grain under the miller's grindstone. It did not crackle, it powdered. ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... the door was all ablaze and escape that way was impossible, so I picked up a chair and slammed it through the window over the table, and climbed out taking a loose set of instruments with me. The wires were still working, and above the crackle of the flames I heard "DS" still calling me. I reached in through ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... the chimney-back,— The oaken log, green, huge, and thick, And on its top the stout back-stick; The knotty forestick laid apart, And filled between with curious art The ragged brush; then, hovering near, We watched the first red blaze appear, Heard the sharp crackle, caught the gleam On whitewashed wall and sagging beam, Until the old, rude-furnished room Burst, flower-like, into rosy bloom; While radiant with a mimic flame Outside the sparkling drift became ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... Only the ditch-bank against the reddened sky supplied the usual landmark. Its crest was black with shovelers, and up and down in lurid light climbed the scraper-teams; climbed and dumped, and dropped over the bank to climb again, like figures in a stage procession. There was a bedlam roar and crackle of pitchy fires, rattle of harness, clank of scraper-pans, shouts of men to the cattle, oaths and words of command; and this would go forward unceasingly till the banks held water. And what was ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... Hornigold meant to keep faith with his old captain. He was sick and tired of assumed respectability, of honest piloting of ships to the harbor, of drinking with worthy merchantmen or the King's sailors. The itch for the old buccaneering game was hard upon him. To hear the fire crackle and roar through a doomed ship, to lord it over shiploads of terrified men and screaming women, to be sated with carnage and drunk with liquor, to dress in satins and velvets and laces, to let the ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... left the room, a crackle of voices arose, some resonant, others short and hoarse, for astonishment still held these agitated minds in check. Presently, here and there, the intense excitement burst forth, and spread in every direction. Exclamations of admiration broke ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... after the landing, in the darkness, sipping our first tot of rum. Our hearts were merry, for had we not just heard that Achi Baba had fallen, that Bulgaria and Roumania had declared war on Turkey, and that the crackle of musketry to the north-east was due to certain Boers who were swarming up the heights overhanging the Kishlar Rocks? She must be a woman of temperament, Rumour, for when she smiles she is so charming; but when she frowns, ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... growling rose from the plain beneath, like the snarling of a sullen wild beast, and a little knot of tribesmen fell into a struggling heap, caught in the blast of lead from a Gardner. Their comrades pressed on over them, and sprang down into the ravine. From all along the crest burst the hard, sharp crackle of Remington fire. ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Eve heard nothing, but Grey Dick's ears were sharper than theirs, quick as these might be. About half a minute later, however, they caught the sound of horses' hoofs ringing on the hard earth, followed by that of voices and the crackle of breaking reeds. ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... be it remembered, were totally unaccustomed to the effects of rifle fire and imagined that we only possessed two or three guns in all, stopped their advance as though paralyzed. For a few seconds there was silence, except for the intermittent crackle of the rifles as my men loaded and fired. Next came the cries of the smitten men and horses that were falling everywhere, and then—the ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... I heard the crackle of parchment. The certificate was being unfolded. (It occurred to me that while she was about it the princess might just as well have forged the rascal's name and wholly dispensed with his services. The whole affair struck me as being ineffective; ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath
... us and returned to the farm we doubled back, and round to the other side. Soon we heard the crackle of wireless. Expecting that the door would be fast bolted, we smashed-in a window, almost knocking over the old woman as she barred our way. Looking up the chimney, I found there as neat a small set of wireless as was ever "made in Germany." The motor was in ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... out by their comrades. Scarcely able to breathe in the hot, stagnant air, caked with foul mud to the waist, we attained the higher ground, and dropped helpless. Even from here the enemy were invisible, although we could see the smoke of their guns, and hear distant crackle of musketry. I sat up, staring through the heat waves toward the eminence on the left where Wayne's men remained, showing dimly against the trees. A group of horsemen were riding down the slope, heading toward our line. As they came ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... lengthen the meals, and make even the servants and page-boys wear a look of boredom and propriety. The best clothes which every one put on helped the general effect; it seemed that no lady could sit down without bending a clean starched petticoat, and no gentleman could breathe without a sudden crackle from a stiff shirt-front. As the hands of the clock neared eleven, on this particular Sunday, various people tended to draw together in the hall, clasping little red-leaved books in their hands. The clock marked a few minutes to the hour when a stout ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... paid the cabman and went up his stairs, he could not shake off his dreaminess; he saw the flames catching the village, and the forest beginning to crackle and smoke. A huge, wild bear frantic with terror rushed through the village. . . . And the girl tied to the ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... of the pines a few score yards from Alton's camp. He knew where to find the resinous knots with their sticky exudations, and was a master of the axe, while it was noticeable that when the fire commenced to crackle he stood still and listened again before he went down to the river with the kettle. Nor did he at once return into the light, but slipped for a moment behind a wide-girthed trunk. It was only a deer he heard ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... than Silverbridge, saw as much as did our young friend, but they were more complaisant and more reasonable. They, too, heard the crackle of the buckram, and were aware that the last touch of awe had come upon that brow just as its owner was emerging from the shadow of the Speaker's chair;—but to them it was a thing of course. A real Caesar is not to be found every day, nor can we always have a Pitt to control ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... not yet daylight. We could see the flicker of rifle-fire, and the crackle sounded first on one part of the bay, and then another. Among the dark rocks and bushes it looked as if people ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... half the heavens. The hawks and the crows fled before it, swooping down on the vermin that were forced to leave the shelter of log and bush. The great silence that had reigned for so long was broken by the roar, and crash, and crackle of a sea of flames; and beneath this fiery blast every vestige of the lost explorers ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... flame broke out. It seemed to sizzle and crackle. With bated breath we waited and, as best we could, shielding our eyes from the ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... hear the roar and crackle of the fire and the crashing of walls; but even more formidable was that tramping of thousands of feet, the scraping of trunks and furniture on the tracks and stones. * * * It was a well and a carefully dressed crowd, for by this time nearly everyone had recovered from the shock of ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... turned out of a pail. With every puff of the wind the trees in the orchard were all lit up and the flames yelled as if they were a thousand men far away and shouting together. Between the gusts you could hear the gentle snap and crackle and the splitting of sap in wood and a body's own coughing when it tried to breathe in the solid mass of smoke. There were shouts of people outside, too, and the squeaking and scampering of rats through the walls. Out of my window I could see one great cloud of red sparks. They had ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... body still more forward. In the instant of meeting, with almost the blindness of instinct, he dropped the point of his spear against the single red flower-de-luce in the middle of the on-coming shield. There was a thunderous crash that seemed to rack every joint, he heard the crackle of splintered wood, he felt the momentary trembling recoil of the horse beneath him, and in the next instant had passed by. As he checked the onward rush of his horse at the far end of the course, he heard faintly in the dim hollow recess of the helm the loud shout ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... Violet. Violet looked smilingly at James. The morning was just as ripping as it had been a moment before. James was still twenty-two. And the editor's letter had not ceased to crackle in his breast-pocket. ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... the excitement that was promised. For days they had had no fighting worthy the name. Amigos everywhere, villages peopled only by women and children, treacherous peacefulness on every side; this had been their encounter: an occasional rifle shot from the rice fields, a crackle of guns far ahead, a prisoner or two who had not been quick enough in transforming himself from combatant to friend, that was all. Now, there seemed to be real ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... so he crammed the maps hastily into his haversack and the chocolate into his pocket and regained the Battalion as soon as he could on the exhausted animal. Even as he was pressing forward, he heard the crackle of musketry somewhere out of sight on ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... the bed for an instant, but the effort was too much for him, and he sank back upon his pillow, helpless. He felt that his hour had come, for he could not live in this dreadful atmosphere, and he was left alone. He could hear the crackle of fire as the flame crept along from one partition to another. It was a cruel fate to be left to perish in that way,—the fate that many a martyr had had to face,—to be first strangled and then burned. Death had not the terror for him that ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... might be burned thereon: these men thought they were doing a good deed in helping to execute justice; and who can say how painful it was to their hearts, when they were forced to think: To morrow, on this wood which now you carry, will shriek, and crackle, and gasp, a human being like yourself? Who can tell what black spirits settled on the necks of those who bore the wood to make the funeral-pile? How very different was it to-day ...
— Christian Gellert's Last Christmas - From "German Tales" Published by the American Publishers' Corporation • Berthold Auerbach
... could do more," said Mrs. Bradford, comfortably turning her page with a rustling crackle. "But my legs have given way ever since I was married. I don't know why, I'm sure; but marriage does seem to affect ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... I heard an almost forgotten noise: the blithe, incessant crackle of a typewriting machine. Never have I heard one rattle so rapidly or ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... other like animals; trees were cut down by the bullets which tore through them from every direction; bursting shells set fire to the woods, suffocating the wounded or burning them to death; wild charges were made, ending in wilder stampedes or bloody repulses; the crackle of flames rose high above the pandemonium of battle and dense smoke-clouds drifted chokingly above this hideous carnival of death. Thus for two days the armies staggered backward and forward with no result save a horrible loss of life. Once the Union forces almost succeeded in gaining a position ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill
... here, but he plodded on with his burdens. The girl was light; he did not mind her weight; but he felt this place uncanny, and now and then would start on a little spurt of haste, to get into a better way. He liked the high mountain trails, where he could step firmly and hear the twigs crackle under his feet, not this muffled, velvet way where one made so little progress and had to work ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... it was a possible contingency, we filed out of the treacherous light and squatted in the edge of a quaking-asp grove where we couldn't be seen, and where a coyote, much less a man, couldn't steal up on us without the crackle of dry brush ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... in front of us together, a terrible crackle bursts forth and makes somber captives of us in the depth of a valley of flames, and flames which illuminate the plain of men marching over the plain. They reveal them afar, in incalculable number, with the first ranks detaching themselves, ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... England, Bade blow the horns of war, And fling the Golden Dragon out, With crackle and acclaim and shout, Scrolled and aflame ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... reassuring room, originally intended for an office and now turned into a combination of office and living-apartment. A big reading-lamp with an amber shade, standing on a flat writing-desk, made a pleasant point of illumination. Real logs, large and well seasoned, burned with an agreeable crackle in the old-fashioned fireplace. Before this stood two easy-chairs, comfortably shabby; and at the arm of one of them a small table held a decanter, glasses, a siphon, and a box ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... ripping the sleeve from the neck. According to Mrs. Webb's ideas, it had been basted in. According to Mrs. Tate's, it had been sewed, but as there was no argument, and the needle was indeed gone, Mrs. Tate got up and went over to the fire. Punching it, she made the coals crackle and blaze cheerily, and, pulling up her skirt, she leaned against the mantel and looked happily around ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... and taste the old hot, unregenerate life again,—to scuffle, swear, gamble, and love light loves with his fellows; to take ship and know the sea once more, and by her beget pictures; to talk to Binat among the sands of Port Said while Yellow 'Tina mixed the drinks; to hear the crackle of musketry, and see the smoke roll outward, thin and thicken again till the shining black faces came through, and in that hell every man was strictly responsible for his own head, and his own alone, and struck with an unfettered arm. It ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... never seen so much money in a single lump in his life before; and for many months of privation and discomfort he had not known the "feel" of a twenty-dollar note, much less of a hundred-dollar one. He heard them crackle under the man's fingers, and it was like crisp laughter in his ears. The bills were evidently new ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... been lighted Mombi ordered him to build a fire in the hearth, and while Tip was thus engaged the old woman ate her supper. When the flames began to crackle the boy came to her and asked a share of the bread and cheese; but Mombi ...
— The Marvelous Land of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... fireplace. I want the heat to go up the chimney, instead of stopping in the room and giving me a headache, and making everything go round. When I come in out of the snow I want to see a fire—something that says to me with a cheerful crackle, "Hallo, old man, cold outside, isn't it? Come and sit down. Come quite close and warm your hands. That's right, put your foot under him and persuade him to move a yard or two. That's all he's been doing for the last hour, lying there roasting himself, lazy ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... camel-thorn, bread, eggs, and pomegranates, thinking thus to obtain the luxury of a bit of fire and something to eat in comparative seclusion. This vain hope proves that I have not even yet become thoroughly acquainted with the Persians. No sooner does my camel-thorn blaze begin to crackle and the smoke to betray the whereabouts of a fire, than shivering, blue-nosed villagers begin to put in their appearance, their backs humped up and their bare ankles and slip-shod feet adding not a little to the ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... chrysalist and waiting for the right time, When—I thought—they'd bust to wings and Bill would rise and fly, Tick, tack, tick, tack, as if it came in answer, Sweeping o'er my head again the tide o' dreams went by,— I must get to Piddinghoe to-morrow if I can, sir, Tick, tack, a crackle in my chrysalist, a cry! Then the warm blue sky Bust the shell, and ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... the homely but true words seemed to rebuke the three listeners for wasted lives, and for a moment there was no sound but the crackle of the fire, the brisk click of the old lady's knitting needles, and Ruth's voice singing overhead as she made ready to join ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... or a knife, or dagger. We like to picture this small room, fitted with solid, rude furniture, monastic in its austerity of appearance; full of students working eagerly in their quest for knowledge— making extracts in pencil, or with styles on their tablets, amid a silence broken only by the crackle of vellum leaves, and the rattle ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... now, as if to cap his fantastic performances, had dismounted and was descending the river-bank to a place where a large washing had been spread upon the stones to dry. He was quite exposed, and a spiteful crackle from the nearest blockhouse showed that the Spaniards were determined to bring him down. Mauser bullets ricocheted among the rocks—even from this distance their sharp explosions were audible—others broke the surface of ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... his paper, which he turned with a vicious crackle; but when June came up to kiss him, he said: "Good-night, my darling," in a tone so tremulous and unexpected, that it was all the girl could do to get out of the room without breaking into the fit of sobbing which lasted her well on ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... this pile the guardian of the Sunrise Camp Fire took from her pocket a bit of flint and a piece of steel, striking them sharply together. Tiny sparks flew forth but no answering crackle resounded from the wood and paper, although the sparks darted in and out among them like miniature fireflies. Once more Miss McMurtry tried her flint and steel according to the prescribed rules, but again ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook
... The bush reached all the way to his house. As he watched the rapid manner in which the fire extended, he saw that no time was to be lost. Fast as his horse galloped, the flames went faster, leaping as it were from tree to tree with a loud roar and crackle, the thick smoke forming a black cloud overhead, while kangaroos and other animals rushed out of the bush to find safety in the open country. Had Joseph been able to venture through the forest he would soon have reached his hut, but he had to make a ...
— Taking Tales - Instructive and Entertaining Reading • W.H.G. Kingston
... commands, giving her a shake till her old bones crackle at every joint. "A cry, a word from you above a whisper, and I'll close your windpipe so that you'll never grunt through it again. Come, muchachos! Let's to the other side! One of you ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... brick floor of the King's Head kitchen, and had not heard a sound in answer. The clock ticked to and fro, and the tabby cat purred softly as she sat before the fire, and the wood now and then gave a little crackle as it burned gently away, and those were all the signs of life to be seen on ...
— The King's Daughters • Emily Sarah Holt
... on pokeberry ink and boiled coffee yourself and note the reaction. Your veins will be dry; your stomach will crackle as it grinds the food. The water in that bottle, a quart bottle, evaporated. They brought another. It disappeared. They brought a third. The waiters in the hotel were attracted by the sight. No Frenchman ever drinks water with his meals, and the spectacle ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... diagnosis from blackleg may be made by noting the subcutaneous swellings which appear upon the patient. Those of blackleg are found to crackle under pressure with the finger, owing to the presence of gas within the tissues, while the tumors of anthrax, being caused by the pressure of serum, are entirely free from this quality and have a ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... if the Eyes should be there! He bore the ever-increasing horror as long as he could, then—better starve and have done with it than die like a dog from sheer fright!—he stepped cautiously, softly, starting at the crackle of the ice under his tread, off the curbstone into the street. So far he was safe. He kept his head low, and walked carelessly towards Third Avenue. When nearing the corner he determined he would look up. He took the middle of the street. It cost him a supreme effort to ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... the top exactly at daylight (7th June) in accordance with our orders, taking the gun and limber up separately, with all my oxen and 100 men pulling. We found the position was held by the 10th Brigade, and very heavy sniping going on down the N.W. slopes—a regular crackle ...
— With the Naval Brigade in Natal (1899-1900) - Journal of Active Service • Charles Richard Newdigate Burne
... responded; not strength, certainly that was gone long ago, but there was an indomitable spirit bred into it with its fine blood by gentle care for generations. The going was heavier among the trees, and yet the bay increased its pace. The crackle of the rifles grew more and more distinct. A fallen ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... some races have well-developed tendencies toward polygamy. In the warmer regions of the United States there dwells a great, splendid, glossy Blackbird, the Boat-tailed Crackle. The nest of this bird is a wonderfully woven structure of water plants and grasses and is usually built in a bush growing in the {55} water. When you find one nest of the Crackle you are pretty certain to find several ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... fearful grew the noise outside. The crackle of musketry was more noticeable, and every now and then there seemed to be heavy strokes as if directed against the palace, sounding as if the people were attempting to force the iron ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... picked up the billet looked from one to the other of the faces, then he turned and gazed behind him into the darkness. The floor of the clearing was dotted with the embers of dying fires, but now and again he would hear the crackle of a branch and see a little flame spirt up and shine upon the barrels of rifles and the black bodies of the sleeping troops. Round the edge of the clearing the trees rose massed and dark like a cliff's face. He turned ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... fled, and he carried in his hand a smouldering firebrand. Now crouching against the place from which the hottest fire belched forth, he blew upon this brand till a tongue of flame darted forth, and in a moment more the brushwood around the house had begun to crackle with a sound like that made by a hissing snake before it ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... evilly, and his victim's shoulder blades lifted under the tight skin of his back as they took the strain. Shriek followed shriek, until the guard on the platform glanced furtively out into the central well. There came a dry, tearing crackle as the bones of the arms were drawn out of their sockets, and then the shrieks ceased as merciful unconsciousness came. Gore tossed the limp body ...
— In the Orbit of Saturn • Roman Frederick Starzl
... the mists behind them rose the shapes of war canoes not far away, and the fierce triumphant yell that swept far over the river sent a chill to Paul's very marrow. Once again rose the rifle fire, and it was now a rapid and steady crackle, but the bullets thudded in vain on the thick sides ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... of an eye the whole house rose and shuddered. There was a sharp crack-crackle, followed by smoke, and forked tongues of flame licked the imitation forest, and with a swish all the chorus fled from the stage. Far away up in the gallery somebody was roaring "Fire!" A rush to the doors was already ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... to talk about the perfumed and restful bed of balsam boughs, and the crackle of the campfire at dusk, and the dip in the mirrored bosom of the pellucid lake at dawn—old Emerson Hough does all that to perfection; but these things assume a different aspect when it rains. There are three conditions in life ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... Brown had repeated it to him. He stopped on a ledge and stared wildly, in a sudden panic, lest he should somehow miss her. He called again, even while reason told him that his voice could not carry any distance, with all that crackle and roar. He forced himself to stand there for a minute to get his breath and to see just how far the fire had already swept, and how fast ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... a little grandeur, and, in hopes of having a fine yule log, both brothers strained and strove with all their might till, between pulling and pushing, the great old root was safe on the hearth, and beginning to crackle and blaze ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... rejoined Bessie coolly. "And if you will not bedizen me with artificial flowers, and will exonerate me from wearing dresses that crackle, I shall be happy. Did you not promise to give me simplicity and ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... of course, that, in the end of ends, nothing but the right conquers; the prevalent thorns of wrong, at last, crackle away in indiscriminate flame: and of the good seed sown, one grain in a thousand some day comes up—and somebody lives by it; but most of our great teachers, not excepting Carlyle and Emerson themselves, are a little too encouraging ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... clump of elms—those lovely old elms which grow to such majestic beauty in France; and Jack was environed by the mysteries of nature,—nature in the springtime of the year, when one can almost hear the grass grow, the buds expand, and the earth crackle as the tender herbage shoots forth. All these faint, vague noises bewildered little Jack, who began to sing a nursery rhyme with which his mother formerly rocked him ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... saw Mr. Home take this coal from the fire, moving his hands freely among the coals. It was about the size of a coffee cup, blazing at the top, and red-hot at the bottom. While I held it in my hand the actual flame died down, but it continued to crackle, and to be partially red-hot. I felt it like an ordinary stone, neither hot nor cold. Mr. Home then pushed it off my hand with one finger on to a double sheet of cartridge paper, which it at once set on fire. ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... at Violet. Violet looked smilingly at James. The morning was just as ripping as it had been a moment before. James was still twenty-two. And the editor's letter had not ceased to crackle in his breast-pocket. ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... gunfire that rattled intermittently around the two men. And even that gunfire was only a part of the cacophony. The tortured molecules of the air in the room were so besieged by the beat of drums, the blare of trumpets, the crackle of lightning, the rumble of heavy machinery, the squawks and shrieks of horns and whistles, the rustle of autumn leaves, the machine-gun snap of popping popcorn, the clink and jingle of falling coins, and the yelps, bellows, howls, roars, ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... season was flavored with frost or thunder. But now, unexplainably, just at the end of it all, sitting innocently there at her own prim little bed-room window, staring innocently out across indomitable roof-tops,—with the crackle of glory and diplomas already ringing in her ears,—she heard, instead, for the first time in her life, the gaily dare-devil voice of the spring, a hoydenish challenge flung back at her, leaf-green, from the crest of a ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... darkness, close inshore, North-west, South-west, and ever Westward strained The little ships of England. All night long, As down the coast the reddening beacons leapt, The crackle and lapping splash of tacking keels, The bo'suns' low sharp whistles and the whine Of ropes, mixing with many a sea-bird's cry Disturbed the darkness, waking vague swift fears Among the mighty hulks of Spain that lay Nearest, then fading through the mists inshore North-west, then growing ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... the log, throwing full weight upon it. There was a snapping crackle, then a shriek ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... it echoed, gaily, defiantly; again and again; ringing out above the obscene hiss and crackle and roar of the forest-fire. And at every repetition, it was nearer and nearer the dumfounded listeners at ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... boat would ring, then the church bells of the city would answer it; the shadow would pass and the moon would rise, deep gold, and lie hard and sharp against the thick, impending air; the shadow would pass and the stars come out, breaking with an almost audible crackle through the stuff of the sky... and only five minutes away the shop-lights were glittering, the Isvostchicks crying to clear the road, the tram-bells clanging, the boys shouting the news. Around and about ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... silence. Very soon the wilderness was uttering all its familiar sounds. Jeff, lying flat on his back, could hear the rabbits scurrying through the chaparral. After an interminable delay his ears caught the crackle of dry twigs ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... still raging. I crept through the store to the front. The reflection from the sky of vast conflagrations made the street almost as light as day. One could have read the finest print with ease. From several blocks away came the crackle of small hand-bombs and the churning of machine-guns, and from a long way off came a long series of heavy explosions. I crept back to my horse blankets ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... that things certainly did take on a rosier hue, once that fire began to crackle and send ...
— The, Boy Scouts on Sturgeon Island - or Marooned Among the Game-fish Poachers • Herbert Carter
... how long, all dead asleep. At last it seemed to me that I heard a noise in my sleep, something like a thing moving, very faint, however, far away; then it died, and then it came again upon my ear as I slept, and now it appeared almost as if I heard crackle, crackle; then it died again, or I became yet more dead asleep than before, I know not which, but I certainly lay some time without hearing it. All of a sudden I became awake, and there was I, on the ridge of the hill, with ...
— The Pocket George Borrow • George Borrow
... up a howling, And the poodle-dog a yowling, And the cocks began a crowing, And the old cow raised a lowing, As she heard the tempest blowing; And fowls and geese did cackle, And the cordage and the tackle Began to shriek and crackle; And the spray dashed o'er the funnels, And down the deck in runnels; And the rushing water soaks all, From the seamen in the fo'ksal To the stokers, whose black faces Peer out of their bed-places; And the captain ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... one end of the room to the other. "And we're off to Ab-yss-in-ia in the morn-ing," he sang. "There's plenty in my money belt," he cried, slapping his side; "you can hear the ten-pound notes crackle whenever I breathe, and it's all yours, my dear boy, and welcome. And I'll prove to you that the Winchester is the ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... I heard the crash away off here, even with all that thunder from Big Berthas and the crackle of hundreds ...
— Air Service Boys Flying for Victory - or, Bombing the Last German Stronghold • Charles Amory Beach
... hold my pen, so extreme was my nervousness; but when I once fairly began, my ideas crowded upon me almost faster than I could write them. And so we all sat, nothing heard but the scratching of the pens and the occasional crackle of the examiner's "Times" as he quietly looked over ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... Forsythe, Rosa held her head high and went about the school as if she were a princess royal and Margaret were the dust under her feet. Triumph sat upon her like a crown and looked forth regally from her eyes. She laid her hand upon her heart and felt the crackle of his letter inside her blouse. She dreamed with her eyes upon the distant mountain and thought of the tender names he had called her: "Little wild Rose of his heart," "No rose in all the world ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... that we had every night was very cheerful. Just before the men came out of the field, a large faggot was flung on the fire; the wood used to crackle and blaze, and smell delightfully: and then the crickets, for they loved the fire, they used to sing, and old Spot, the shepherd, who loved the fire as well as the crickets did, he used to take his place ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... came snorting with terror out of the smoke and gloom, ready to welcome a master's hand and voice. He caught it, left the good roan by the roadside, and hastened on. He met and passed people on the road fleeing from burning houses and wrecked homes; in his ears were the crackle of flames and the wailing of women who mourned their dead. From small hamlets scattered in the country, folk were seeking refuge in the larger towns. Yet when he had passed these heedless, scattered groups, he ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... bucket of water, which they always kept in a certain spot. She flung the water on the flames, but water will not quench the flames made from oil. The rail began to crackle, the sparks to fly. The "Merry Maid" was afire, with only one, feeble ...
— Madge Morton, Captain of the Merry Maid • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... dauntless and discerning commander went on, on foot, with an orderly. He chose Dicky and Oswald as guides. So we led him to the ambush, and we went through it as quietly as we could. But twigs do crackle and snap so when you are reconnoitring, or anxious to ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... minutes of sunset. No further demonstration had occurred. Not an Indian had been seen within a radius of six miles, when, all on a sudden, there came a shot—then two, almost together, then a quick crackle and sputter of small-arms afar down the stream. "By Jove!" cried Bonner, from a perch by the lookout at the office. "They've opened on Case ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... to me. Grotesquely distorted, blurred with tube-hum and interference crackle, they roared in my ear-grids so loudly that I saw the nearby guard turn his head ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... men who had asked in the past to be allowed to paint Joan and received a curt negative from Gray Michael. But the other discovery meant more. Pushing her hand about the drawer she found a pile of paper, felt the crackle of it, and pulled it eagerly to the light. Then, and before she learned the grandeur of the sum, she was seized with a sudden palpitation and sat down on Joan's bed. Her mouth grew full as a hungry man's before a feast, ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... Colorado his train was stopped by a slight fire on a bridge. He urged the conductor to go across, and was so insistent that the man yielded, and the train got over just before the flames leaped up and the structure began to crackle. ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... down with noiseless tread; but I have never seen such a combination of instincts, brute and human, as Louis and Little Fellow displayed. The Indian felt the ground for tracks and pitfalls and sticks, that might crackle. Louis, with his whole face pricked forward, trusted more to his eyes and ears and that sense of "feel," which is—contradictory as it may seem—utterly intangible. Once the Indian picked up a stick freshly broken. This was examined ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... was just quietly passing one of those storage buildings when I saw a flicker of light beneath the doorsill. It was too soon to hear the crackle of burning wood or smell any smoke, but I knew what was up. I pushed open the door. That was when I saw the two oil-tins lying on their sides and the whole floor flooded with the stuff. There was smoke enough, then, sir! That's why I could only get a poor look through ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... grew cold, and soon they went indoors to a friendship fire in the stone fire-place. They watched the flames roar up the chimney, then crackle cheerily, and at last flicker away to little blue tongues, which died almost as soon as they were born. There was no other light in the cabin. Virginia had said that none was needed, and she did not notice the apprehensive ...
— Virginia of Elk Creek Valley • Mary Ellen Chase
... more terrible than the screams of the parrots, or the shrieks of the howling monkeys—it was the cry of the jaguar! It came from a piece of wood close to the juvia-trees, and the branches were heard to crackle as ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... aboard ship; and after that several of the fellows did not know a single thing until they were rudely aroused, perhaps some hours later on. The last thing Steve remembered hearing as he rolled himself up in his blanket was the crackle of the fire, the mournful sighing of the wind through the tops of the whispering pines, and then the distant call of an owl ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... bears, deer, and elk which abound, "Their tameness is shocking to me." It is the world of "big game." Just now a heavy-headed elk, with much-branched horns fully three feet long, stood and looked at me, and then quietly trotted away. He was so near that I heard the grass, crisp with hoar frost, crackle under his feet. Bears stripped the cherry bushes within a few yards of us last night. Now two lovely blue birds, with crests on their heads, are picking about within a stone's-throw. This is "The Great Lone Land," until lately the hunting ground ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... flashed up and the steady crackle of flames began. From the debris below came the scream ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... in the sickroom reading the newspapers, which came out from town each day. On one such occasion, when Santry had twisted his mouth awry in a determined effort to fold the paper he was reading without permitting a single crackle, she ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... earth seemed to explode directly ahead. A blinding flare swept the ground, a hissing crackle was drowned in an overwhelming roar of thunder. Bob dodged, and his horse whirled. When he had mastered both his animal and himself he spurred back. California John had reined in his mount. Not twenty feet ahead of him the bolt had struck. California John glanced quizzically over his ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... feet, breathing in sobbing gasps. Except for the crackle of the fire and the beat of the rain, there was no sound in the cave but this,—those anguished sobs from ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... familiar landmarks and isolates the little camp in a sea of night, with the mutual wish for nearer companionship, we gather around the camp-fire, the one light in all the great darkness. We are grateful for its warmth, as the evenings are chill, and its cheery blaze and crackle bring a feeling of hominess and comfort welcome to every one. If there are men in the party they light their pipes and then begin the stories of past experiences on the trail, which are of the keenest interest ...
— On the Trail - An Outdoor Book for Girls • Lina Beard and Adelia Belle Beard
... key being pushed into a drawer lock, the drawer pulled out, the chink of coin and the crackle of bank-notes. Then he heard the ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... did not appear particularly interested in these domestic reminiscences, and seemed as if he wanted to be left alone, Mrs. Sampson, with a final crackle, went down stairs and talked with a neighbour in the kitchen, as to the desirability of drawing her money out of the Savings Bank, in case the Russians should surprise and capture Melbourne. Brian, left alone, stared out of the window ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... with astonishment even as he spoke, for, indeed, the grey men were falling by the thousands. The English could hear the guttural scream of the German officers, the crackle of their revolvers as they shot the reluctant; and still line after ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen
... moved slowly, keeping pace with the climbers. Soon the crest was reached, and the main body began to descend gradually, when the dominie slipped and his piece went off, the trigger having caught in his red window cord, startling the echoes. Then came the diffusive boom and crackle of the blunderbuss, and the doctor, inwardly anathematizing Wilkinson, hurried his men on. They heard axes at work, as if trees were being felled; it was the Captain and the Richards at the barrier. No enemy appeared ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... fancy, he could feel the twitch at the end of the line, then the run, then the steady pull, growing weaker and weaker as the strength of the fish was exhausted. Suddenly into the idler's lotus-eating Paradise came a rushing sound. A sharp swerve of the horse was followed by an exasperating crackle, and, lo! the beloved fishing-rod was broken,—yes, broken, and that delicate, quivering, responsive, tapering end lay trailing in the dust which whirled in eddies around ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... long stems are not only pretty of themselves when placed in old vases or crackle ware, but they have a remarkably good effect. They, however, should not be crowded or swamped by more showy foliage or flowers—in fact, they ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood
... by the side of the fire, and pulled forward the log. He found that it had burned through, and by three or four strokes with the tongs, he broke it up into large fragments of coal, of a dark-reddish color. The air being thus admitted, they soon began to brighten and crackle, until, in a few minutes, there was before him a large heap of glowing and burning coals. He put a log on behind, then placed the andirons up to the log, and a great forestick upon the andirons. He placed the forestick so far out as to leave ...
— Jonas on a Farm in Winter • Jacob Abbott
... pleasure which for the moment overshadowed his more excited sensations. Jean was already on his knees before a fireplace touching a match to a pile of birch, and as the inflammable bark spurted into flame and the small logs began to crackle he rose to his feet and faced Philip. Both were soaked to the skin. Jean's hair hung lank and wet about his face, and his hollow cheeks were cadaverous. In spite of the hour and the place, Philip ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... The Prussians, in regular force, appear on the Kaninchen Berg (Cony Hill, so called from its rabbits), south of the River, evidently taking post there. Roth fires a signal shot; the Southern Suburbs of Neisse, as preappointed, go up in flame; crackle high and far; in a lamentable manner (ERBARMLICH), through the grim winter air." This is the day Friedrich came over to Ottmachau, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... startling," I said, as I listened to the noise he made rolling himself in his blanket, and making the fir-boughs crackle as he turned about. "I was horribly scared at first, but I don't think ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... little, however, in spite of himself, his eyes were weighed down by sleep, and an invincible drowsiness took possession of his spirit. Before long his sleep became so profound, that he did not hear the dry branches crackle under a moccasin, as an Indian of ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... a shout of rage, and made the boat leap through the water as now, in addition to the sharp crackle of the Winchesters, they heard the heavier report of a Snider, and Harvey, jumping up on the after whaleback, and steadying himself with one hand on Atkins's shoulder, saw that only two or three of Oliver's crew were now paddling—the ...
— Tessa - 1901 • Louis Becke
... close body and passed the center of the room; the white glare became more blinding, the roar and crackle more deafening; they were surrounded, cut off, in the midst of destruction; they were bewildered; they stopped again; there was no use in going back; they must get forward through the furnace at any cost; they made a new ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... the faint crackle of a branch to his left, and one hand instantly closed over his pipe bowl, the other grasping the heavy revolver at his hip. Crouching like a startled tiger, with not a muscle moving, he peered anxiously into ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... The hum and crackle from the stove, the grinding of the gray dog's teeth, the bumping and hissing of the gale outside, the boom of the cascades at the precipices, made up most of the sounds for that evening. Of chat there was a paucity. My knowledge of Norsk extends to few parts of speech ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... No, no; you ain't waiting," mimicked Miss Krakow, and her voice was like autumn leaves that crackle underfoot. "Well, then, if you ain't waiting here he comes now. I dare you to come on home with me now, like you ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... sends away her little daughter so that she must go alone. She rides with her mother to the railroad and sees her little one walking directly upon the tracks, so that she cannot avoid being run over. She hears the bones crackle. (From this she experiences a feeling of discomfort but no real horror.) She then looks out through the car window to see whether the parts cannot be seen behind. She then reproaches her mother for allowing the little one to go out alone." ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... not escape Pierre Radisson gave small heed, and so did we. Jean took the river side and I the inland thicket, feeling our way blindly through the blackness of forest and storm and night. Then the rain broke—broke in lashing whip-cords with the crackle of fire. Jean whistled and I signalled back; but there was soon such a pounding of rains it drowned every sound. For all the help one could give the other we might have been a thousand miles apart. I looked back. M. Radisson's fire threw a dull glare into the cavernous upper ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... nearer! Down in the canoe a paddle blade touches the water noiselessly from the stern; and over the bow there is the glint of moonlight on a rifle barrel. The roar is now continuous on the summit of the last low ridge. Twigs crackle, and branches snap. There is the thrashing of mighty antlers among the underbrush, the pounding of heavy hoofs upon the earth; and straight down the great bull rushes like a tempest, nearer, nearer, till he bursts with tremendous crash through the last fringe ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... Clippety, lip, lip, lip, clippety, lip, lip, lip! comes the bread horse down the street. He stops in front of Ruth's house. Ruth hears him. Then she hears the driver jump out and pat, pat, pat, she hears his feet coming to the door. Rattle, crackle, goes the paper as he puts down the loaves of bread all wrapped up to keep them clean. Then fast she hears his feet, pat, pat, pat, pat, pat, pat, pat. "Go on, Bill!" she hears him call and clippety, lip, lip, lip, clippety, lip, ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... her the name of the ocean-going tug was sufficient introduction. Throwing ahead of her a solid shell, she raced in pursuit, and as The Three Friends leaped to full speed there came from the gun-boat the sharp dry crackle of Mausers. ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... coughed and choked with the smoke; he could hear the sticks beginning to crackle and burn in the fireplace down below. He made up his mind to climb right to the top, and get out on the slates, and try to ...
— The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter • Beatrix Potter
... signal," added he; and he immediately applied the burning brand to the wainscoting. Now, this cabaret of the Image-de-Notre-Dame was not a very newly-built house, and therefore did not require much entreating to take fire. In a second the boards began to crackle, and the flames arose sparkling to the ceiling. A howling from without replied to the shouts of the incendiaries. D'Artagnan, who had not seen what passed, from being engaged at the window, felt, at the same time, the smoke which choked him and the fire that scorched him. "Hola!" ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... behind him. He had walked half the distance, and already saw through the forest arcades the clearing which he must cross to reach the spot where he was expected. The angry barks of the wolves had increased during the last quarter of an hour, and the sound of their paws making the snow crackle inspired the old man with an indescribable terror. The number of animals seemed momentarily to be augmented; it resembled an ant-heap seen through the magnifying-glass of a ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... but, as their stems grew thickly together, the horse, with his strange rider, could make but slow way among them; and every now and then the former, half blind with affright, dashed his sides against the trunks, causing them to crackle and ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... promote that prospect she had through Susan's eyes more than one glimpse of the way in which Revolutions are prepared. To listen to Susan was to gather that the spark applied to the inflammables and already causing them to crackle would prove to have been the circumstance of one's being called a horrid low thief for refusing to part with one's own. The redeeming point of this tension was, on the fifth day, that it actually appeared to ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... by the arm, just as any man might have done, and led her to the fire that was beginning to crackle cheerfully. He set her down on the side where the smoke would be least likely to blow her way and proceeded to dress the grouse, stripping off skin and feathers together. He unrolled the slicker and laid out a piece of bacon, a package of coffee, a small coffeepot, ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower
... to do it much more picturesquely. They rode in coats of scarlet, in the crisp, clear morning, to the winding of horns and the baying of hounds, to the thud-thud of hoofs, and the crackle of underbrush. Across fresh-plowed fields they went, crashing through forest paths, leaping ditches, taking fences, scrambling up the inclines, pelting down the hillside, helter-skelter, until, panting, wide-eyed, eager, blood-hungry, the hunt ...
— Personality Plus - Some Experiences of Emma McChesney and Her Son, Jock • Edna Ferber
... complete without reference to that far domain of the North, where the hunter roams in loneliness, and the night lights whip unearthly through still frosty air, and no sound breaks leagueless silence but the rifle shot, crackle of frost or the call of the wolf pack. It will be recalled that Canada's first settlers came in two main currents from two idealistic motives. The French came to convert the Indians, not to found empire, and the English Loyalists came from the promptings of their convictions. ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... old ship was finished and had sailed at last and for once our wireless plant up there began to get messages from the sea. I dreamed I was sitting up there with the operator. It was a dark, stormy night. The wireless began to crackle. He jumped up to see what was coming. He was getting messages from our own ship, away out there on the ocean. She was calling for help. 'Sinking fast,—sinking fast,—sinking fast.' Over and over again,—just those two words. ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... oaken log, green, huge, and thick, And on its top the stout back-stick; The knotty fore-stick laid apart, And filled between with curious art The ragged brush; then, hovering near, We watched the first red blaze appear, Heard the sharp crackle, caught the gleam On whitewashed wall and sagging beam, Until the old, rude-furnished room Burst, ...
— Graded Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... began to hum and crackle from coil to coil again. The invisible weight that pressed down was released as once more the giant planet's gravity was nullified. The Rogans got eagerly to their feet and began to race toward Brand ...
— The Red Hell of Jupiter • Paul Ernst
... neighboring houses, machine guns had been installed on rooftops, companies of infantry were picketed at street corners. Suddenly throughout the town all this hell was let loose. The streets gave back the echo a thousandfold. The crackle of musketry and din of machine guns was positively infernal. As evening came and darkened into night, one after another of the Bulgarian forts Chabrol surrendered, sometimes persuaded thereto by the deadly effect of a field-gun at thirty yards' range, but the sun had risen ere the chief stronghold ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... following he inquired, "How long does it take before a book gets started?" Dejected was his mien. It took "Predestined" some time. Then it went very well. We sold a joyous-looking Stephen French Whitman, an embodiment of gusto—there was a positive crackle to his fine black eyes—a pile of books concerning themselves with Europe, and did not see him again for some time. Then he flashed upon us a ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... down below me on the coast; nearer hand not a leaf stirred; I might have been the only living creature this side of Cape Horn. Well, as I stood there thinking, it seemed the bush woke and became full of little noises. Little noises they were, and nothing to hurt—a bit of a crackle, a bit of a rush—but the breath jumped right out of me and my throat went as dry as a biscuit. It wasn't Case I was afraid of, which would have been common-sense; I never thought of Case; what took me, as sharp as the colic, was the old wives' tales, the devil-women and the man-pigs. It was the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gulch," Gale was heard to reply, in his deep tones—there was a crackle of dead brush, a sound as of a man tripping and falling heavily, then oaths in a voice that made ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... ridden long when fortunately, as it seemed to Hale, the character of the storm changed. The snow no longer fell in such large flakes, nor as heavily. A bitter wind succeeded; the soft snow began to stiffen and crackle under the horses' hoofs; they were no longer weighted and encumbered by the drifts upon their bodies; the smaller flakes now rustled and rasped against them like sand, or bounded from them like hail. They seemed ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... philology suggest a rule which will often be found useful. In comparing, the vocabularies of different languages, those words which directly imitate natural sounds—such as whiz, crash, crackle—are not admitted as evidence of kinship between the languages in which they occur. Resemblances between such words are obviously no proof of a common ancestry; and they are often met with in languages which have demonstrably had no connection ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... and lighted by two large windows opening on the garden; the floor was of oak, and there was a great fireplace where the largest logs used in a country in which the wood costs nothing could find ample room to blaze and crackle. It took the young man several days to make the necessary changes, and during that time he enjoyed a respite from the petty annoyances worked by the steady hostility of Manette Sejournant and her son. To the great indignation of the inhabitants of the chateau, ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... damp had not reached the biscuits, and for several minutes it could be heard cracking under the solid teeth of Dick Sand and his companions. Between Hercules's jaws it was like grain under the miller's grindstone. It did not crackle, it powdered. ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... the day was a space of pale gold foliage wreathed in blue garlands of mist. The gardener was busy with a wooden rake and wheelbarrow in which he carted away dead leaves for burning. The fire was back of the low fence, in the rear, and Linda, at the dining-room window, could hear the fierce small crackle of flames; the drifting pungent smoke was like a faint breath of ammonia. Arnaud had left for the day, Lowrie was at the university, while Vigne and her husband—moving toward their ultimate colonial threshold—had taken a small house. ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... above and around them. A string of signal-flags broke out from our masthead and was answered in like fashion by the flag-ship of the flotilla, after which formal exchange of greetings our wireless began to crackle and splutter in an animated explanation of our unexpected appearance. Our hawsers had scarcely been made fast before a launch left the flag-ship and came plowing toward us, a knot of white-uniformed officers in the stern. ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... blushing furiously as he did so. Then he would lay it on the seat when the train stopped at a station, and jump out with an air of relief; but he invariably forgot, and sat down upon it when he returned, and sprang up with a look of horror at the loud crackle it made; after which he would tuck it into the baggage-rack overhead, from which it would presently descend, generally into the lap of one of the staid English ladies, who would hand it back to him with an air of deep offence, remarking ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... the winter, like a grouse. Right over against the girl the last red embers of the sunset burned under horizontal clouds; the night fell clear and still and frosty, and the track in low and marshy passages began to crackle under ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... returned, and again worked over Jean, so that, when the fire had begun to crackle and give out heat, he saw the upturned eyes swim down, and the blessed look of consciousness take the place of terrible blankness. Then, with a sob of joy, he gathered her in his arms, and laid her down in the zone of life-giving heat. Forthwith, he hurried ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... the Rhodesian past the alert sentries; then, with Wilmshurst's good wishes for the best of luck, MacGregor vanished into the night. In vain the young officer strained his ears to catch the faint noise of the Rhodesian's footsteps or the crackle of a dry twig under the pressure of his boot, but not a sound did the ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... chap is; but don't bother trying to deny it, Hugh. The only bad thing about it in my mind is that we'll miss those jolly fires. It's always been so fine to skate up and stand before one, to get warm, and hear the flames crackle, while the girl you're skating with sits on a log, or something like that, ...
— The Chums of Scranton High at Ice Hockey • Donald Ferguson
... brighten up a little, and at length they broke out into a little flame. He stood and watched it a few minutes. It blazed up higher and higher. He then put on some more wood which was near. The flame crept up between these sticks, and soon began to snap and crackle among the brush in the tree. Caleb stepped back, and watched the flame a moment as it flashed up higher and higher, and then clapped his hands, jumped up on a ...
— Caleb in the Country • Jacob Abbott
... fetched wood and threw it in the heater, opening the draughts wide, and watching to see if it caught. Soon it began to crackle and blaze cheerily, and, despite her loneliness and her suffering, hope leaped in ...
— Polly of Lady Gay Cottage • Emma C. Dowd
... have been safe enough if the limb had been a good one, but it wasn't, and when Mr. Possum ran along it, before he could even get ready to swing, "crackle, snap," went the limb and down went Mr. Possum into a barrel of whitewash Mrs. Rabbit had ready to use ...
— Sandman's Goodnight Stories • Abbie Phillips Walker
... one had brought a box of sandwiches, a pail of coffee and tin cups. They gulped the coffee and munched the food and stretched themselves on the soft moss. Through an opening they could see a fiery glow topped by wavering sheets of flame. They could hear the crackle and ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... negroes were pulling the yule-log from its long bath and across the snowy fields; and when, at dusk, the mother brought her two sons and her two daughters and the Pages and Stantons to her own roof, the big log, hidden by sticks of pine and hickory, was sputtering Christmas cheer with a blaze and crackle that warmed body and heart and home. That night the friends came from afar and near; and that night Bob, the faithful, valiant Bob, in a dress-suit that was his own and new, and Mrs. Crittenden's own gift, led the saucy Molly, robed as no other dusky bride at Canewood was ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... from the increased smoke that rolled out and the crackle of fire that now could be heard above the puffing of the engines and ...
— Joe Strong The Boy Fire-Eater - The Most Dangerous Performance on Record • Vance Barnum
... of glass were starred with little round holes, mortar fell from the ceiling, and the crackle of shots below showed that revolvers were popular in Delgratz. But Felix had seen enough to set his ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... smothered inarticulate voice. A groping hand came up, clutching for deliverance. There came the slip and crackle of broken wood beneath which some living object struggled ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... lips. He believes that the King is coming, that His coming is to be an awful thing. Judgment is to go before Him, He bears 'His fan in His hand,' and kindles 'unquenchable fire,' into which the leafy trees that have no fruit upon them are to be flung, there to shrivel and crackle and disappear. This is what he expects at the worst, and at the best a baptism in the Holy Ghost, from Messiah's hands, which, however, is likewise to be fiery even whilst it quickens, and searching ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... as quiet can be," I replied. "The wind has dropped—and even the fire doesn't crackle. ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... slaggy sides, and found when we reached the top that the sound of the machine guns had died away, excepting on the extreme left in front of B——, where the ordinary tap of ones and twos had developed into a sharp crackle of tens and twenties. By listening carefully one could feel, rather than hear, the more intermittent ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... remember your grandmother's floor, of snowy boards sanded with whitest sand; you remember the ancient fireplace stretching quite across one end,—a vast cavern, in each corner of which a cozy seat might be found, distant enough to enjoy the crackle of the great jolly wood-fire; across the room ran a dresser, on which was displayed great store of shining pewter dishes and plates, which always shone with the same mysterious brightness; and by the side of the fire, a commodious wooden "settee," or settle, offered repose to people too little ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
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